“I didn’t plan to. If you want any satisfaction——”
“It’s all right,” the reporter said. They didn’t shake hands; the jumper just turned after a moment and dragged his leg back to where he had been standing, leaving the reporter as before, in that attitude of peaceful waiting. The woman looked at Shumann again.
“Then if the ship’s all right, why wont Ord fly it himself, race it himself?” she said.
“Maybe he dont have to,” Shumann said. “If I had his Ninety-Two I wouldn’t need this ship either. I guess Ord would do the same. Besides, I—we haven’t got it yet. So there aint anything to worry about. Because if it is a bum, Ord wont let us have it. Yair, you see? if we can get it, that’s proof that it’s o.k. because Ord wouldn’t——” She was looking down now, motionless save for her hands, with the heel of one of which she was striking lightly the other’s palm. Her voice was flat, hard, and low, not carrying three feet:
“We. We. He has boarded and fed us for a day and night now, and now he is even going to get us another ship to fly. And all I want is just a house, a room; a cabin will do, a coal-shed where I can know that next Monday and the Monday after that and the Monday after that——.……Do you suppose he would have something like that he could give to me?” She turned; she said, “We better get on and get that stuff for Jack’s leg.” The reporter had not heard her, he had not been listening; now he found that he had not even been watching; his first intimation was when he saw her walking toward him. “We’re going on to your house,” she said. “I guess we’ll see you and Roger when we see you. You have changed your plan about leaving town, I imagine?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I mean no. I’m going home with a guy on the paper to sleep. Dont you bother about me.” He looked at her, his face gaunt, serene, peaceful. “Dont you worry. I’ll be o.k.”
“Yes,” she said. “About that money. That was the truth. You can ask Roger and Jack.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I would believe you even if I knew you had lied.”
And Tomorrow
So you see how it is,” the reporter said. He looked down at Ord too, as he seemed doomed to look down at everyone with whom he seemed perennially and perpetually compelled either to plead or just to endure: perhaps enduring and passing the time until that day when time and age would have thinned still more what blood he had and so permit him to see himself actually as the friendly and lonely ghost peering timidly down from the hayloft at the other children playing below. “The valves went bad and then he and Holmes had to go to that meeting so they could tell them that thirty percent. exceeded the code or something: and then Jiggs went and then they didn’t have time to check the valvestems and take out the bad ones and then the whole engine went and the rudderpost and a couple of longerons and tomorrow’s the last day. That’s tough luck, aint it?”
“Yes,” Ord said. They all three still stood. Ord had probably invited them to sit out of habit, courtesy, when they first came in though probably he did not remember now doing so any more than the reporter and Shumann could remember declining if they had declined. But probably neither invitation nor refusal had passed at all, that the reporter had brought into the house, the room, with him that atmosphere of a fifteenth century Florentine stage scene—an evening call with formal courteous words in the mouth and naked rapiers under the cloaks. In the impregnably new glow of two roseshaded lamps which looked like the ones that burn for three hours each night in a livingroom suite in the storewindows dressed by a junior manclerk, they all stood now as they had come from the airport, the reporter in that single suit which apparently composed his wardrobe, and Shumann and Ord in greasestained suede jackets which a third person could not have told apart, standing in the livingroom of Ord’s new neat little flowercluttered house built with the compact economy of an aeroplane itself, with the new matched divan and chairs and tables and lamps arranged about it with the myriad compactness of the dials and knobs of an instrument panel. From somewhere toward the rear they could hear a dinnertable being set, and a woman’s voice singing obviously to a small child. “All right,” Ord said. He did not move; his eyes seemed to watch them both without looking at either, as though they actually were armed invaders. “What do you want me to do?”
“Listen,” the reporter said. “It’s not the money, the prize; I dont have to tell you that. You were one too, not so long ago, before you met Atkinson and got a break. Hell, look at you now, even when you got Atkinson and all you have to do is just build them without even seeing a pylon closer to it than the grandstand, without ever taking your other foot off the ground except to get into bed. But do you? Yair; maybe it was somebody else pulling that Ninety-Two around those pylons at Chicago last summer that day; maybe that wasn’t Matt Ord at all. So you know it aint the money, the damn cash: Jesus Christ, he aint got the jack he won yesterday yet. Because if it was just the money, if he just had to have it and he come to you and told you, you would lend it to him. Yair, I know. I dont have to tell you. Jesus, I dont have to tell anybody that after today, after up there in that office at noon. Yair; listen. Suppose instead of them up there on those damn hard chairs today it had been a gang of men hired to go down into a mine say, not to do anything special down there but just to see if the mine would cave in on top of them, and five minutes before they went down the bigbellied guys that own the mine would tell them that everybody’s pay had been cut two and a half percent. to print a notice how the elevator or something had fell on one of them the night before: would they go down? Naw. But did these guys refuse to fly that race? Maybe it was not a valve that Shumann’s ship swallowed but a peanut somebody in the grandstand threw down on the apron. Yair; they could have kept back the ninety-seven and a half and give them the two and a half and it would——”
“No,” Ord said. He spoke with complete and utter finality. “I wouldn’t even let Shumann make a field hop in it. I wouldn’t let any man, let alone fly it around a closed course. Even if it was qualified.” Now it was as though with a word Ord had cut through the circumlocution like through a light net and that the reporter, without breaking stride, had followed him onto new ground as bleak and forthright as a prize ring.
“But you have flown it. I dont mean that Shumann can fly as good as you can; I dont believe anybody can do that even though I know mine aint even an opinion: it’s just that hour’s dual you give me talking. But Shumann can fly anything that will fly. I believe that. And we will get it qualified; the license is still o.k.”
“Yes. The license is o.k. But the reason it hasn’t been revoked yet is the Department knows I aint going to let it off the ground again. Only to revoke it would not be enough: it ought to be broken up and then burned, like you would kill a maddog. Hell, no. I wont do it. I feel sorry for Shumann but not as sorry as I would feel tomorrow night if that ship was over at Feinman Airport tomorrow afternoon.”
“But listen, Matt,” the reporter said. Then he stopped. He did not speak loud, and with no especial urgency, yet he emanated the illusion still of having longsince collapsed yet being still intact of his own weightlessness like a dandelion burr moving where there is no wind; in the soft pink glow his face appeared gaunter than ever, as though following the excess of the past night, his vital spark now fed on the inner side of the actual skin itself, paring it steadily thinner and more and more transparent, as parchment is made. Now his face was completely inscrutable. “So even if we could get it qualified, you wouldn’t let Shumann fly it.”
“Right,” Ord said. “It’s tough on him. I know that. But he dont want to commit suicide.”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “He aint quite got to where wont nothing else content him. Well, I guess we better get on back to town.”
“Stay and eat some dinner,” Ord said. “I told Mrs Ord you fellows——”
“I reckon we better get on back,” the reporter said. “It looks like we will have all day tomorrow with nothing to do but eat.”
“We could eat an
d then drive over to the hangar and I will show you the ship and try to explain——”
“Yair,” the reporter said pleasantly. “But what we want is one that Shumann can look at from inside the cockpit three oclock tomorrow afternoon. Well, sorry we troubled you.” The station was not far; they followed a quiet graveled village street in the darkness, the Franciana February darkness already heavy with spring—the Franciana spring which emerges out of the Indian summer of fall almost, like a mistimed stage resurrection which takes the curtain even before rigor mortis has made its bow, where the decade’s phenomenon of ice occurs simultaneous with bloomed stalk and budded leaf. They walked quietly; even the reporter was not talking now—the two of them who could have had nothing in common save the silence which for the moment the reporter permitted them—the one volatile, irrational, with his ghostlike quality of being beyond all mere restrictions of flesh and time, of possessing no intrinsic weight or bulk himself and hence being everywhere to supply that final straw’s modicum of surprise and even disaster to the otherwise calculable doings of calculable people; the other singlepurposed, fatally and grimly without any trace of introversion or any ability to objectivate or ratiocinate as though like the engine, the machine for which he apparently existed, he functioned, moved, only in the vapor of gasoline and the filmslick of oil—the two of them taken in conjunction and because of this dissimilarity capable of almost anything; walking, they seemed to communicate by some means or agency of the purpose, the disaster, toward which without yet being conscious of it apparently, they moved. “Well,” the reporter said. “That’s about what we expected.”
“Yair,” Shumann said. They walked on in silence again; it was as though the silence were the dialogue and the actual speech the soliloquy, the marshalling of thought:
“Are you afraid of it?” the reporter said. “Let’s get that settled; we can do that right now.”
“Tell me about it again,” Shumann said.
“Yes. The guy brought it down here from Saint Louis for Matt to rebuild it; it wouldn’t go fast enough for him. He had it all doped out, about how they would pull the engine and change the body a little and put in a big engine and Matt told him he didn’t think that was so good, that the ship had all the engine then it had any business with and the guy asked Matt whose ship it was and Matt said it was the guy’s and the guy asked Matt whose money it was and so Matt said o.k. Only Matt thought they ought to change the body more than the guy thought they ought to and at last Matt refused to have anything to do with it unless the guy compromised with him and even then Matt didn’t think so much of it, he didn’t want to butcher it up because it was a good ship, even I can tell that by looking at it. And so they compromised because Matt told him he would not test it otherwise, besides getting the license back on it and the guy saying how he seemed to have been misinformed in what he had heard about Matt and so Matt told him o.k., if he wanted to take the ship to somebody else he would put it back together and not even charge the guy storage space on it. So finally the guy agreed to let Matt make the changes he absolutely insisted on and then he wanted Matt to guarantee the ship and Matt told the guy his guarantee would be when Matt got into the cockpit and took it off and the guy said he meant to turn a pylon with it and Matt told the guy maybe he had been misinformed about him and maybe he had better take the ship to somebody else and so the guy cooled down and Matt made the changes and put in the big engine and he brought Sales, the inspector, out there and they stressed it and Sales o.k.’d the job and then Matt told the guy he was ready to test it. The guy had been kind of quiet for some time now, he said o.k., he would go into town and get the money while Matt was testing it, flying it in, and so Matt took it off.” They didn’t stop walking, the reporter talking quietly: “Because I dont know much; I just had an hour’s dual with Matt because he gave it to me one day: I dont know why he did it and I reckon he dont either. So I dont know: only what I could understand about what Matt said, that it flew o.k. because Sales passed it; it flew o.k. and it stalled o.k. and did everything it was supposed to do up in the air, because Matt wasn’t even expecting it when it happened: he was coming in to land, he said how he was getting the stick back and the ship coming in fine and then all of a sudden his belt caught him and he saw the ground up in front of his nose instead of down under it where it ought to been, and how he never took time to think, he just jammed the stick forward like he was trying to dive it into the ground and sure enough the nose came up just in time; he said the slipstream on the tailgroup made a—a——”
“Burble,” Shumann said.
“Yair. Burble. He dont know if it was going slow to land or being close to the ground that changed the slipstream, he just levelled it off with the stick jammed against the firewall until it lost speed and the burble went away and he got the stick back and blasted the nose up with the gun and he managed to stay inside the field by groundlooping it. And so they waited a while for the guy to get back from town with the money and after a while Matt put the ship back in the hangar and it’s still there. So you say now if you think you better not.”
“Yair,” Shumann said. “Maybe it’s weight distribution.”
“Yair. That may be it. Maybe we will find out right away it’s just that, maybe as soon as you see the ship you will know.” They came to the quiet little station lighted by a single bulb, almost hidden in a mass of oleander and vines and palmettos. In either direction the steady green eye of a switchlamp gleamed faintly on the rails where they ran, sparsely strung with the lighted windows of houses, through a dark canyon of mosshung liveoaks. To the south, on the low night overcast, lay the glare of the city itself. They had about ten minutes to wait.
“Where you going to sleep tonight?” Shumann said.
“I got to go to the office for a while. I’ll go home with one of the guys there.”
“You better come on home. You got enough rugs and things for us all to sleep. It wouldn’t be the first time Jiggs and Jack and me have slept on the floor.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. He looked down at the other; they were little better than blurs to one another; the reporter said in a tone of hushed quiet amazement: “You see, it dont matter where I would be. I could be ten miles away or just on the other side of that curtain, and it would be the same. Jesus, it’s funny: Holmes is the one that aint married to her and if I said anything like that to him I would have to dodge—if I had time. And you are married to her, and I can.……Yair. You can go on and hit me too. Because maybe if I was to even sleep with her, it would be the same. Sometimes I think about how it’s you and him and how maybe sometimes she dont even know the difference, one from another, and I would think how maybe if it was me too she wouldn’t even know I was there at all.”
“Here, for Christ’s sake,” Shumann said. “You’ll have me thinking you are ribbing me up in this crate of Ord’s so you can marry her maybe.”
“Yair,” the reporter said; “all right. I’d be the one. Yair. Because listen. I dont want anything. Maybe it’s because I just want what I am going to get, only I dont think it’s just that. Yair, I’d just be the name, my name, you see: the house and the beds and what we would need to eat. Because, Jesus, I’d just be walking: it would still be the same: you and him, and I’d just be walking, on the ground; I would maybe keep up with Jiggs and that’s all. Because it’s thinking about the day after tomorrow and the day after that and after that and me smelling the same burnt coffee and dead shrimp and oysters and waiting for the same light to change like me and the red light worked on the same clock so I could cross and get home and go to bed so I could get up and start smelling the coffee and fish and waiting for the light to change again; yair, smelling the paper and the ink too where it says how among those who beat or got beat at Omaha or Miami or Cleveland or Los Angeles was Roger Shumann and family. Yes. I would be the name; I could anyway buy her the pants and the nightgowns and it would be my sheets on the bed and even my towels.—Well, come on. Aint you going to sock me?” Now t
he far end of the canyon of liveoaks sprang into more profound impenetrability yet as the headlight of the train fell upon it and then swept down the canyon itself. Now Shumann could see the other’s face.
“Does this guy you are going to stay with tonight expect you?” he said.
“Yes. I’ll be all right. And listen. We better catch the eight-twenty back here.”
“All right,” Shumann said. “Listen. About that money—”
“It’s all right,” the reporter said. “It was all there.”
“We put a five and a one back into your pocket. But if it was gone, I’ll make it good Saturday, along with the other. It was our fault for leaving it there. But we couldn’t get in; the door had locked when it shut.”
“It dont matter,” the reporter said. “It’s just money. It dont matter if you dont ever pay it back.” The train came up, slowing, the lighted windows jarred to a halt. The car was full, since it was not yet eight oclock, but they found two seats at last, in tandem, so they could not talk anymore until they got out in the station. The reporter still had a dollar of the borrowed five; they took a cab. “We’ll go by the paper first,” he said. “Jiggs ought to be almost sober now.” The cab, even at the station, ran at once into confetti, emerging beneath dingy gouts of the purple-and-gold bunting three days old now dropped across the smokegrimed façade of the station like flotsam left by a spent and falling tide and murmuring even yet of the chalkwhite, the forlorn, the glare and pulse of Grandlieu Street miles away. Now the cab began to run between loops of it from post to post of lamps; the cab ran now between the lofty and urbane palms and turned slowing and then drew up at the twin glass doors. “I wont be but a minute,” the reporter said. “You can stay here in the cab.”
“We can walk from here,” Shumann said. “The police station aint far.”