FEINMAN AIRPORT
NEW VALOIS, FRANCIANA
DEDICATED TO
THE AVIATORS OF AMERICA
AND
COLONEL H. I. FEINMAN, CHAIRMAN,
SEWAGE BOARD
THROUGH WHOSE UNDEVIATING VISION AND
UNFLAGGING EFFORT THIS AIRPORT WAS RAISED UP
AND CREATED OUT OF THE WASTE LAND AT THE
BOTTOM OF LAKE RAMBAUD AT A COST OF
ONE MILLION DOLLARS
“This Feinman,” Jiggs said. “He must be a big son of a bitch.”
“He’s a son of a bitch all right,” the driver said. “I guess you’d call him big too.”
“He gave you guys a nice airport, anyway,” Jiggs said.
“Yair,” the driver said. “Somebody did.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “It must have been him. I notice he’s got his name on it here and there.”
“Here and there; yair,” the driver said. “In electric lights on both hangars and on the floor and the ceiling of the lobby and four times on each lamppost and a guy told me the beacon spells it too but I dont know about that because I dont know the Morse code.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Jiggs said. Now a fair crowd of men, in the overalls or the purple-and-gold caps, appeared suddenly and began to enter the bus, so that for the time the scene began to resemble that comic stage one where the entire army enters one taxicab and drives away. But there was room for all of them and then the door swung in and the bus moved away and Jiggs sat back, looking out; the bus swung immediately away from Grandlieu Street and Jiggs watched himself plunging between iron balconies, catching fleeting glimpses of dirty paved courts as the bus seemed to rush with tremendous clatter and speed through cobbled streets which did not look wide enough to admit it, between low brick walls which seemed to sweat a rich slow overfecund smell of fish and coffee and sugar, and another odor profound faint and distinctive as a musty priest’s robe: of some spartan effluvium of mediaeval convents.
Then the bus ran out of this and began to run, faster still, through a long avenue between palmbordered bearded liveoak groves and then suddenly Jiggs saw that the liveoaks stood not in earth but in water so motionless and thick as to make no reflection, as if it had been poured about the trunks and allowed to set; the bus ran suddenly past a row of flimsy cabins whose fronts rested upon the shell foundation of the road itself and whose rears rested upon stilts to which rowboats were tied and between which nets hung drying, and he saw that the roofs were thatched with the smokecolored growth which hung from the trees, before they flicked away and the bus ran again overarched by the oak boughs from which the moss hung straight and windless as the beards of old men sitting in the sun. “Jesus,” Jiggs said. “If a man dont own a boat here he cant even go to the can, can he?”
“Your first visit down here?” the driver said. “Where you from?”
“Anywhere,” Jiggs said. “The place I’m staying away from right now is Kansas.”
“Family there, huh?”
“Yair. I got two kids there; I guess I still got the wife too.”
“So you pulled out.”
“Yair. Jesus, I couldn’t even keep back enough to have my shoes halfsoled. Everytime I did a job her or the sheriff would catch the guy and get the money before I could tell him I was through; I would make a parachute jump and one of them would have the jack and be on the way back to town before I even pulled the ripcord.”
“For Christ’s sake,” the driver said.
“Yair,” Jiggs said, looking out at the backrushing trees. “This guy Feinman could spend some more of the money giving these trees a haircut, couldn’t he?” Now the bus, the road, ran out of the swamp though without mounting, with no hill to elevate it; it ran now upon a flat plain of sawgrass and of cypress and oak stumps—a pocked desolation of some terrific and apparently purposeless reclamation across which the shell road ran ribbonblanched toward something low and dead ahead of it—something low, unnatural: a chimaera quality which for the moment prevented one from comprehending that it had been built by man and for a purpose. The thick heavy air was full now of a smell thicker, heavier, though there was yet no water in sight: there was only the soft pale sharp chimaerashape above which pennons floated against a further drowsy immensity which the mind knew must be water, apparently separated from the flat earth by a mirageline so that, taking shape now as a doublewinged building, it seemed to float lightly like the apocryphal turreted and battlemented cities in the colored Sunday sections, where beneath sillless and floorless arches people with yellow and blue flesh pass and repass: myriad, purposeless, and free from gravity. Now the bus, swinging, presented in broadside the low broad main building with its two hangar-wings, modernistic, crenelated, with its façade faintly Moorish or Californian beneath the gold-and-purple pennons whipping in a breeze definitely from water and giving to it an air both aerial and aquatic like a mammoth terminal for some species of machine of a yet unvisioned tomorrow, to which air earth and water will be as one: and viewed from the bus across a plaza of beautiful and incredible grass labyrinthed by concrete driveways which Jiggs will not for two or three days yet recognise to be miniature replicas of the concrete runways on the field itself—a mathematic monogram of two capital Fs laid by compass to all the winds. The bus ran into one of these, slowing between the bloodless grapes of lampglobes on bronze poles; as Jiggs got out he stopped to look at the four Fs cast into the quadrants of the base before going on.
He went around the main building and followed a narrow alley like a gutter, ending in a blank and knobless door; he put his hand too among the handprints in oil or grease on the door and pushed through it and into a narrow alcove walled by neatly ranked and numbered tools from a sound, a faint and cavernous murmur. The alcove contained a lavatory, a row of hooks from which depended garments—civilian shirts and coats, one pair of trousers with dangling braces, the rest greasy dungarees, one of which Jiggs took down and stepped into and bounced them lightly up and around his shoulders all in one motion, already moving toward a second door built mostly of chickenwire and through which he could now see the hangar itself, the glass-and-steel cavern, the aeroplanes, the racers. Waspwaisted, wasplight, still, trim, vicious, small and immobile, they seemed to poise without weight, as though made of paper for the sole purpose of resting upon the shoulders of the dungareeclad men about them. With their soft bright paint tempered somewhat by the steelfiltered light of the hangar they rested for the most part complete and intact, with whatever it was that the mechanics were doing to them of such a subtle and technical nature as to be invisible to the lay eye, save for one. Unbonneted, its spare entrails revealed as serrated top-and-bottomlines of delicate rockerarms and rods inferential in their very myriad delicacy of a weightless and terrific speed any momentary faltering of which would be the irreparable difference between motion and mere matter, it appeared more profoundly derelict than the halfeaten carcass of a deer come suddenly upon in a forest. Jiggs paused, still fastening the coverall’s throat, and looked across the hangar at the three people busy about it—two of a size and one taller, all in dungarees although one of the two shorter ones was topped by a blob of savage mealcolored hair which even from here did not look like man’s hair. He did not approach at once; still fastening the coverall he looked on and saw, in another clump of dungarees beside another aeroplane, a small towheaded boy in khaki miniature of the men, even to the grease. “Jesus Christ,” Jiggs thought. “He’s done smeared oil on them already. Laverne will give him hell.” He approached on his short bouncing legs; already he could hear the boy talking in the loud assured carrying voice of a spoiled middlewestern child. He came up and put out his blunt hard greasegrained hand and scoured the boy’s head.
“Look out,” the boy said. Then he said, “Where you been? Laverne and Roger——” Jiggs scoured the boy’s head again and then crouched, his fists up, his head drawn down into his shoulders in burlesque pantomime. But the boy just looked at him. “Laverne and Roger
——” he said again.
“Who’s your old man today, kid?” Jiggs said. Now the boy moved. With absolutely no change of expression he lowered his head and rushed at Jiggs, his fists flailing at the man. Jiggs ducked, taking the blows while the boy hammered at him with puny and deadly purpose; now the other men had all turned to watch, with wrenches and tools and engineparts in their suspended hands. “Who’s your old man, huh?” Jiggs said, holding the boy off and then lifting and holding him away while he still hammered at Jiggs’ head with that grim and puny purpose. “All right!” Jiggs cried. He set the boy down and held him off, still ducking and dodging and now blind since the peaked cap was jammed over his face and the boy’s hard light little fists hammering upon the cap. “Oke! Oke!” Jiggs cried. “I quit! I take it back!” He stood back and tugged the cap off his face and then he found why the boy had ceased: that he and the men too with their arrested tools and safety wire and engineparts were now looking at something which had apparently crept from a doctor’s cupboard and, in the snatched garments of an etherised patient in a charity ward, escaped into the living world. He saw a creature which, erect, would be better than six feet tall and which would weigh about ninetyfive pounds, in a suit of no age nor color, as though made of air and doped like an aeroplane wing with the incrusted excretion of all articulate life’s contact with the passing earth, which ballooned light and impedimentless about a skeleton frame as though suit and wearer both hung from a flapping clothesline;—a creature with the leashed, eager loosejointed air of a halfgrown highbred setter puppy, crouched facing the boy with its hands up too in more profound burlesque than Jiggs’ because it was obviously not intended to be burlesque.
“Come on, Dempsey,” the man said. “How about taking me on for an icecream cone? Hey?” The boy did not move. He was not more than six, yet he looked at the apparition before him with the amazed quiet immobility of the grown men. “How about it, huh?” the man said.
Still the boy did not move. “Ask him who’s his old man,” Jiggs said.
The man looked at Jiggs. “So’s his old man?”
“No. Who’s his old man.”
Now it was the apparition who looked at Jiggs in a kind of shocked immobility. “Who’s his old man?” he repeated. He was still looking at Jiggs when the boy rushed upon him with his fists flailing again and his small face grimly and soberly homicidal; the man was still stooping, looking at Jiggs; it seemed to Jiggs and the other men that the boy’s fists made a light woodensounding tattoo as though the man’s skin and the suit too hung on a chair while the man ducked and dodged too, trying to guard his face while still glaring at Jiggs with that skulllike amazement, repeating, “Who’s his old man? Who’s his old man?”
When Jiggs at last reached the unbonneted aeroplane the two men had the supercharger already off and dismantled. “Been to your grandmother’s funeral or something?” the taller one said.
“I been over there playing with Jack,” Jiggs said. “You just never saw me because there aint any women around here to be looking at yet.”
“Yair?” the other said.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Where’s that crescent wrench we bought in Kansas City?” The woman had it in her hand; she gave it to him and drew the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a smudge of grease up and into the meal-colored, the strong pallid Iowacorncolored, hair. So he was busy then, though he looked back once and saw the apparition with the boy now riding on his shoulder, leaning into the heads and greasy backs busy again about the other aeroplane, and when he and Shumann lifted the supercharger back onto the engine he looked again and saw them, the boy still riding on the man’s shoulder, going out the hangar door and toward the apron. Then they put the cowling back on and Shumann set the propeller horizontal and Jiggs raised the aeroplane’s tail, easily, already swinging it to pass through the door, the woman stepping back to let the wing pass her, looking back herself into the hangar now.
“Where did Jack go?” she said.
“Out toward the apron,” Jiggs said. “With that guy.”
“With what guy?”
“Tall guy. Says he is a reporter. That looks like they locked the graveyard up before he got in last night.” The aeroplane passed her, swinging again into the thin sunshine, the tail high and apparently without weight on Jiggs’ shoulder, his thick legs beneath it moving with tense stout pistonlike thrusts, Shumann and the taller man pushing the wings.
“Wait a minute,” the woman said. But they did not pause and she overtook and passed the moving tailgroup and reached down past the uptilted cockpit hatch and stepped clear, holding a bundle wrapped tightly in a dark sweater. The aeroplane went on; already the guards in the purple-and-gold porter caps were lowering the barrier cable onto the apron; and now the band had begun to play, heard twice: once the faint light almost airy thump-thump-thump from where the sun glinted on the actual hornmouths on the platform facing the reserved section of the stands, and once where the disembodied noise blared brazen, metallic, and loud from the amplifyer which faced the barrier. She turned and reentered the hangar, stepping aside to let another aeroplane and its crew pass; she spoke to one of the men: “Who was that Jack went out with, Art?”
“The skeleton?” the man said. “They went to get an icecream cone. He says he is a reporter.” She went on, across the hangar and through the chickenwire door and into the toolroom with its row of hooks from which depended the coats and shirts and now one stiff linen collar and tie such as might be seen on a barbershop hook where a preacher was being shaved and which she recognised as belonging to the circuitriderlooking man in steel spectacles who won the Graves Trophy race at Miami two months ago. There was neither lock nor hook on this door, and the other, the one through which Jiggs had entered, hung perfectly blank too save for the greaseprints of hands; for less than a second she stood perfectly still, looking at the second door while her hand made a single quick stroking movement about the doorjamb where hook or lock would have been. It was less than a second, then she went on to the corner where the lavatory was—the greasestreaked bowl, the cake of what looked like lava, the metal case for paper towels—and laid the bundle carefully on the floor next the wall where the floor was cleanest and rose and looked at the door again for a pause that was less than a second—a woman not tall and not thin, looking almost like a man in the greasy coverall, with the pale strong rough ragged hair actually darker where it was sunburned, a tanned heavyjawed face in which the eyes looked like pieces of china. It was hardly a pause; she rolled her sleeves back, shaking the folds free and loose, and opened the coverall at the throat and freed it about her shoulders too like she had the sleeves, obviously and apparently arranging it so she would not need to touch the foul garment any more than necessary again. Then she scrubbed face neck and forearms with the harsh soap and rinsed and dried herself and, stooping, keeping her arms well away from the coverall, she opened the rolled sweater on the floor. It contained a comb, a cheap metal vanity and a pair of stockings rolled in turn into a man’s clean white shirt and a worn wool skirt. She used the comb and the vanity’s mirror, stopping to scrub again at the greasesmudge on her forehead. Then she unbuttoned the shirt and shook out the skirt and spread paper towels on the lavatory and laid the garments on them, openings upward and facing her and, holding the open edges of the coverall’s front between two more paper towels, she paused and looked again at the door: a single still cold glance empty of either hesitation, concern, or regret while even here the faint beat of the band came in mute thuds and blares. Then she turned her back slightly toward the door and in the same motion with which she reached for the skirt she stepped out of the coverall in a pair of brown walking shoes not new now and which had not cost very much when they had been, and a man’s thin cotton under-shorts and nothing else.
Now the first starting bomb went—a jarring thud followed by a vicious light repercussion as if the bomb had set off another smaller one in the now empty hangar and in the rotundra too. Within the domed steel va
cuum the single report became myriad, high and everywhere about the concave ceiling like invisible unearthly winged creatures of that yet unvisioned tomorrow, mechanical instead of blood bone and meat, speaking to one another in vicious highpitched ejaculations as though concerting an attack on something below. There was an amplifyer in the rotundra too and through it the sound of the aeroplanes turning the field pylon on each lap filled the rotundra and the restaurant where the woman and the reporter sat while the little boy finished the second dish of icecream. The amplifyer filled rotundra and restaurant even above the sound of feet as the crowd moiled and milled and trickled through the gates onto the field, with the announcer’s voice harsh masculine and disembodied; then at the end of each lap would come the mounting and then fading snarl and snore of engines as the aeroplanes came up and zoomed and banked away, leaving once more the scuffle and murmur of feet on tile and the voice of the announcer reverberant and sonorous within the domed shell of glass and steel in a running commentation to which apparently none listened, as if the voice were merely some unavoidable and inexplicable phenomenon of nature like the sound of wind or of erosion. Then the band would begin to play again, though faint and almost trivial behind and below the voice, as if the voice actually were that natural phenomenon against which all manmade sounds and noises blew and vanished like leaves. Then the bomb again, the faint fierce thwack-thwack-thwack, and the sound of engines again too and trivial and meaningless as the band, as though like the band mere insignificant properties which the voice used for emphasis as the magician uses his wand or handkerchief: “——ending the second event, the two hundred cubic inch class dash, the correct time of the winner of which will be given you as soon as the judges report. Meanwhile while we are waiting for it to come in I will run briefly over the afternoon’s program of events for the benefit of those who have come in late or have not purchased a program which by the way may be purchased for twenty-five cents from any of the attendants in the purple-and-gold Mardi Gras caps——”