“Here,” Shumann said. He put his hand on the glass and stopped it and tilted it; he could watch Jiggs swallowing now and the liquid trickling down his bluestubbled chin from each corner of his mouth and splotching dark on his shirt until Jiggs pushed the glass away, panting.
“Wait,” he said. “It’s wasting. Maybe if you wont look at me I can drink it.”
“And then get on the sandwich again,” Shumann said. He took the jug from the table and looked back at the jumper again. “Go on and take the bed tonight,” he said. “You’ll have that leg infected under a blanket. Are you going to put the bandage back on?”
“I’ll sleep in a cuckold’s bed but not in a pimp’s,” the jumper said. “Go on. Get yourself a piece to take to hell with you tomorrow.”
“I can take third in the five-seventy-five without even crossing the airport,” Shumann said. “Anyway, by the time it is qualified I’ll know whether I can land it or not.—How about putting that bandage back on?” But the jumper did not answer nor even look at him. The blanket was already turned back; with the injured leg swinging stiffly he turned on the ball of his buttocks and swung into the cot and drew the blanket up in one motion; for a while longer Shumann looked at him, the jug against his leg. Then he realised that for some time he had been hearing Jiggs chewing and he looked at him and saw Jiggs squatting on the floor beside the canvas bag, chewing, holding the sandwich in both hands. “You, too,” Shumann said. “You going to sleep there?” Jiggs looked up at him with the one eye. His whole face was swollen and puffed now; he chewed slowly and gingerly, looking up at Shumann with that doglike quality abject, sad, and at peace. “Go on,” Shumann said. “Get settled. I’m going to turn out the light.” Without ceasing to chew Jiggs disengaged one hand and dragged the canvas sack over and lay down, his head upon it. Shumann could still hear him chewing as he groped in the darkness toward the curtain and lifted it and passed beyond it and groped on to the lamp beside the bed, moving quietly now, and snapped it on and found the woman, the boy asleep beside her, watching him. She lay in the middle of the bed with the boy between her and the wall. Her clothes were laid neatly too on a chair and then Shumann saw the nightgown, the only silk one she had, lying across the chair too; and stooping to set the jug beneath the bed he paused and then lifted from the floor the cotton shorts which she wore, or had worn, from where they had either been dropped or flung, and put them on the chair too and removed his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt while she watched him, the bedclothes huddled to her chin. “So you got the ship,” she said.
“I dont know. We’re going to try.” He removed the watch from his wrist and wound it carefully and put it on the table; when the faint clicking ceased he could hear again from beyond the curtain the sound of Jiggs chewing. He set his feet in turn on the corner of the chair and unlaced his shoes, feeling her watching him. “I can take at least third in the five-seventy-five without passing the pylons close enough for anybody on them to read the ship’s number. And that’s fifteen percent. of eight-ninety. Or there’s two thousand in the Trophy and I dont believe Ord will——”
“Yes. I heard you through the curtain. But why?” He set the shoes neatly side by side and stepped out of his trousers and shook them into crease by the cuffs and folded them and put them on the chest of drawers beside the celluloid comb and brush and the cravat and stood also in shorts. “And the ship is all right except you wont know until you are in the air whether or not you can take it off and you wont know until you are back on the ground and standing up again whether or not you can land it.”
“I guess I can land it, all right.” He lit a cigarette and then stood with his hand on the light switch, looking at her. She had not moved, lying with the covers drawn smooth and nunlike up to her chin; again from beyond the curtain he could hear Jiggs chewing, mouthing at the hard sandwich with that painful patience.
“You’re lying,” she said. “We got along before.”
“Because we had to. This time we dont have to.”
“But it’s seven months yet.”
“Yair. Just seven months. And one more meet, and the only ship we have with a shot engine and two wrenched longerons.” He looked at her a moment longer; at last she opened the covers; as he snapped off the light his retina carried into the darkness the imprint of one bare shoulder and breast down to the waist. “Want to move Jack to the middle?” he said. She did not answer, though it was not until he drew the covers up himself that he discovered that she was lying rigid, her flank tense and hard with rigid muscles where his own touched it as he settled himself. He withdrew the cigarette and held it suspended above his mouth, hearing Jiggs chewing beyond the curtain and then the jumper’s voice: “Jesus God, stop eating that! You sound just like a dog!”
“Here, take it easy,” Shumann said. “I haven’t got it qualified yet, even.”
“You bastard,” she said in a tense rigid whisper. “You rotten pilot, you bastard rotten pilot. Hanging off there with a dead stick so you wouldn’t interfere in their damn race and then mushing in over that seawall and you wouldn’t even hold its head up! you wouldn’t even hold——” Her hand shot out and snatched the cigarette from him; he felt his own fingers wrench and bend and then saw the red coal twinkle and arc across the dark and strike the invisible floor.
“Here,” he whispered. “Let me pick it up off the——” But now the hard hand struck his cheek, clutching and scrabbling about his jaw and throat and shoulder until he caught it and held it, wrenching and jerking.
“You bastard rotten, you rotten——” she panted.
“All right,” he said. “Steady, now.” She ceased, breathing hard and fast. But he still held the wrist, wary and without gentleness too. “All right, now. —You want to take your pants off?”
“They’re already off.”
“Oh yair,” he said. “I forgot.” When she made her first parachute jump they had not been together very long. She was the one who suggested that he teach her to jump, and he already had a parachute, the exhibition kind; when he used it he either flew the aeroplane or made the jump, depending on whether the casual partner with whom he would join forces for a day or a week or a season were a pilot himself or not. She made the suggestion herself and he showed her, drilled her, in the simple mechanics of climbing out onto the wing with the parachute harness buckled on and then dropping off and letting her own weight pull the parachute from the case attached to the wing. The act was billed for a Saturday afternoon in a small Kansas town and he did not know that she was frightened until they were in the air and the money collected and the crowd waiting and she had begun to climb out along the wing. She wore skirts; they had decided that her exposed legs would not only be a drawing card but that in the skirt no one would doubt that she was a woman, and now she was clinging to the inner bay strut and looking back at him with an expression that he was later to realise was not at all fear of death but on the contrary a wild and now mindless repudiation of bereavement as if it were he who was the one about to die and not her. He sat in the back cockpit with the aeroplane in position, holding the wing up under her weight, gesturing her on out toward the wingtip, almost angrily, when he saw her leave the strut and with that blind and completely irrational expression of protest and wild denial on her face and the hem of the skirt whipping out of the parachute harness about her loins climb, not back into the front seat which she had left but on toward the one in which he sat holding the aeroplane level, scrambling and sprawling into the cockpit (he saw her knuckles perfectly white where she gripped the cockpit’s edge) astride his legs and facing him. In the same instant of realising (as with one hand she ripped her skirthem free of the safetywire with which they had fastened it bloomer-fashion between her legs) that she was clawing blindly and furiously not at the belt across his thighs but at the fly of his trousers he realised that she had on no undergarment, pants. She told him later that the reason was that she was afraid that from fear she might soil one of the few undergarments which she now
possessed. So he tried to fight her off for a while, but he had to fly the aeroplane, keep it in position over the field, and besides (they had been together only a few months then) soon he had two opponents; he was outnumbered, he now bore in his own lap, between himself and her wild and frenzied body, the perennially undefeated, the victorious; it was some blind instinct out of the long swoon while he waited for his backbone’s fluid marrow to congeal again that he remembered to roll the aeroplane toward the wing to which the parachute case was attached because the next that he remembered was the belt catching him across the legs as, looking up he saw the parachute floating between him and the ground, and looking down he saw the bereaved, the up-thrust, the stalk: the annealed rapacious heartshaped crimson bud. He had to land the aeroplane, the rest he learned later: how she had come down with the dress, pulled or blown free of the parachute harness, up about her armpits and had been dragged along the ground until overtaken by a yelling mob of men and youths, in the center of which she now lay dressed from the waist down in dirt and parachute straps and stockings. When he fought through the mob to where she was she had been arrested by three village officers one of whose faces Shumann remarked even then with a violent foreboding—a youngish man with a hard handsome face sadistic rather than vicious, who was using the butt of a pistol to keep the mob back and who struck at Shumann with it with the same blind fury. They carried her to jail, the younger one threatening her with the pistol now; already Shumann realised that in the two other officers he had only bigotry and greed to contend with, it was the younger one that he had to fear—a man besotted and satiated by his triumphs over abased human flesh which his corrupt and picayune office supplied him, seeing now and without forewarning the ultimate shape of his jaded desires fall upon him out of the sky, not merely naked but clothed in the very traditional symbology—the ruined dress with which she was trying wildly to cover her loins, and the parachute harness—of female bondage. They would neither arrest Shumann too nor allow him access to her. After he was driven back along with the mob by the younger officer’s pistol from the jail door—a square building of fierce new brick into which he saw her, struggling still, vanish—a single glimpse of her indomitable and terrified face beyond the younger officer’s shoulder as the now alarmed older officers hurried her in-side—for the time he became one of the mob though even then, mad with rage and terror, he knew that it was merely because his and the mob’s immediate object happened to be the same—to see, touch her, again. He knew too that the two older craven officers were at least neutral, pulled to his side by their own physical fear of the mob, and that actually the younger one had for support only his dispensation for impunitive violence with which the dingy cadaver of the law invested him. But it seemed to be enough. It was for the next hour anyway, during which, followed by his ragamuffin train of boys and youths and drunken men, he accomplished his nightmare’s orbit about the town, from mayor to lawyer to lawyer to lawyer and back again. They were at supper, or about to sit down to it or just finishing; he would have to tell his story with the round eyes of children and the grim implacable faces of wives and aunts watching him while the empowered men from whom he sought what he sincerely believed to be justice and no more forced him step by step to name what he feared, whereupon one of them threatened to have him arrested for criminal insinuations against the town’s civil structure. It was a minister (and two hours after dark) who finally telephoned to the mayor. Shumann learned only from the overheard conversation that the authorities were apparently seeking him now; five minutes later a car called for him, with one of the two older officers in it and two others whom he had not seen yet. “Am I under arrest too?” he said. “You can try to get out and run if you want to,” the officer said. That was all. The car stopped at the jail and the officer and one of the others got out. “Hold him,” the officer said. “I’ll hold him, all right,” the second deputy said. So Shumann sat in the car with the deputy’s shoulder jammed into his and watched the two others hurry up the bricked walk; the door of the jail opened for them and closed; then it opened again and he saw her. She wore a raincoat now; he saw her for an instant as the two men hurried her out and the door closed again; it was not until the next day that she showed him the dress now in shreds and the scratches and bruises on the insides of her legs and on her jaw and face and the cut in her lip. They thrust her into the car, beside him. The officer was about to follow when the second deputy shoved him roughly away. “Ride in front,” the deputy said. “I’ll ride back here.” There were now four in the back seat; Shumann sat rigid with the first deputy’s shoulder jammed into his and Laverne’s rigid flank and side jammed against him so that it seemed to him that he could feel through her rigidity the second deputy crowding and dragging his flank against Laverne’s other side. “All right,” the officer said. “Let’s get away from here while we can.”—“Where are we going?” Shumann asked. The officer did not answer. He leaned out, looking back at the jail as the car gathered speed, going fast now. “Go on,” he said. “Them boys may not can hold him and there’s been too much whore’s hell here already.” The car rushed on, out of the village; Shumann realised that they were going in the direction of the field, the airport. The car swung in from the road; its headlights fell upon the aeroplane standing as he had jumped out of it, already running, in the afternoon; as the car stopped the lights of a second one came into sight, coming fast down the road. The officer began to curse. “Durn him. Durn them boys. I knew they couldn’t——” He turned to Shumann. “There’s your airship. You and her get out of here.”—“What do you want us to do?” Shumann said. “You’re going to crank up that flying machine and get out of this town. And you do it quick; I was afraid them boys couldn’t hold him.”—“Tonight?” Shumann said. “I haven’t got any lights.”—“Aint nothing going to run into you up there, I guess,” the officer said. “You get her into it and get away from here and dont you never come back.” Now the second car slewed from the road, the lights swung full upon them; it rushed up, slewing again, with men already jumping out of it before it had stopped. “Hurry!” the officer cried. “We’ll try to hold him.”—“Get into the ship,” Shumann told her. At first he thought that the man was drunk. He watched Laverne, holding the raincoat about her, run down the long tunnel of the cars’ lights and climb into the aeroplane and vanish, then he turned and saw the man struggling while the others held him. But he was not drunk, he was mad, he was insane for the time; he struggled toward Shumann who saw in his face not rage, not even lust, but almost a counterpart of that terror and wild protest against bereavement and division which he had seen in Laverne’s face while she clung to the strut and looked back at him. “I’ll pay you!” the man screamed. “I’ll pay her! I’ll pay either of you! Name it! Let me fuck her once and you can cut me if you want!”—“Go on, I tell you!” the older officer panted at him. He ran too; for an instant the man ceased to struggle; perhaps for the instant he believed that Shumann had gone to fetch her back. Then he began to struggle and scream again, cursing now, screaming at Laverne, calling her whore and bitch and pervert in a tone wild with despair until the engine blotted it. But Shumann could still see him struggling with the men who held him, the group silhouetted by the lights of the two cars, while he sat and warmed the engine as long as he dared. But he had to take it off cold after all; he could hear the shouts now and against the headlights he saw the man running toward him, toward the aeroplane; he took it off from where it stood, with nothing to see ahead but the blue flames at the exhaust ports, into a night without moon; thirty minutes later, using a dimlyseen windmill to check his altitude and making a fast blind landing in an alfalfa field, he struck an object which he found the next morning, fifty feet from the overturned aeroplane, to be a cow.
It was now about nine-thirty. The reporter thought for a moment of walking on over to Grandlieu Street and its celluloid and confettirained uproar and down it to Saint Jules and so back to the paper that way, but he did not. When he moved it was to turn b
ack into the dark cross street out of which the cab had emerged a half hour before. There was no reason for him to do this anymore than there would have been any reason to return by Grandlieu Street: it was as though the grim Spectator himself had so ordained and arranged that when the reporter entered the twin glass doors and the elevator cage clashed behind him this time, stooping to lift the facedown watch alone and look at it he would contemplate unwitting and unawares peace’s ultimate moratorium in the exact second of the cycle’s completion—the inexplicable and fading fury of the past twenty-four hours circled back to itself and become whole and intact and objective and already vanishing slowly like the damp print of a lifted glass on a bar. Because he was not thinking about time, about any postulated angle of clockhands on a dial; he had even less reason to do that than he had to choose either of the two directions, since the one moment out of all the future which he could see where his body would need to coincide with time or dial would not occur for almost twelve hours yet; he was not even to recognise at once the cycle’s neat completion toward which he walked steadily, not fast, from block to block of the narrow cross street notched out of the blunt and now slumbering backends of commerce while at each intersection where he waited during the traffic-dammed moment or while there reached him, as in the cab previously, the faint rumor, the sound felt rather than heard, of Grandlieu Street: the tonight’s Nilebarge clatterfalque—the furious faint butterflyspawn, substanceless oblivious and doomed, against the choraldrop of the dawn’s biding white wings—and at last Saint Jules Avenue itself running broad and suave between the austere palms springing full immobile and monstrous like burlesqued bunches of country broomsedge set on scabby posts, and then the twin doors and the elevator cage where the elevator man, glancing up at him from beneath shaggy pepper-and-salt brows that looked like his moustache had had twins suddenly, said with grim and vindictive unction, “Well, I see how this afternoon another of them tried to make the front page, only he never quite——”