“A bottle of wood alcohol and a can of that stuff you take grease out of clothes with,” he told her, giving her the bill; then to Jiggs: “What do you want to fix that scratch with?”
“I got something for that,” Jiggs said. “I brought that with me.” He took it from the bag—a coca cola bottle stoppered with paper and containing wingdope. The negress left the basket and went out and returned with the two bottles, and made a pot of coffee and set it with cups and sugar on the table and looked again about the untouched, unused rooms, and took up the basket and stood for a while and watched what they were doing with prim and grim inscrutability before departing for good. And the reporter too, sitting on the couch and blowing quietly into his cup to cool it, watched Jiggs squatting before the two gleaming boots, in the tight soiled clothes and the tennis shoes now upturned behind him, and he thought how never before had he ever heard of rubber soles wearing through. “Because what the hell do I need with a pair of new boots for Christ’s sake, when probably this time next month I wont even have on anything to stuff into the tops of them?” Jiggs said. That was toward eleven. By noon, still holding the cold stale cup between his hands, the reporter had watched Jiggs remove the polish from the boots, first with the alcohol, watching the cold dark flowing of the liquid move, already fading, up the length of each boot like the shadow of a cloud travelling along a road, and then by scraping them with the back of a knifeblade, so that at last the boots had returned to the mere shape of what they were like the blank gunstocks manufactured for sale to firearms amateurs. He watched Jiggs, sitting on the couch now and with the soiled shirt for padding and the inverted boot clamped between his knees, with sandpaper remove delicately from the sole all trace of contact with the earth; and last of all, intent, his blunt grained hands moving with minute and incredible lightness and care, with the wingdope begin to fill in the heelmark on the right boot’s instep so that presently it was invisible to the casual glance of anyone who did not know that it had been there. “Jesus,” Jiggs said, “if I only hadn’t walked in them. Just hadn’t creased them at the ankle. But maybe after I get them rubbed smooth again——” But when the cathedral clock struck one they had not accomplished that. Rubbing only smoothed them and left them without life; the reporter suggested floorwax and went out and got it, and it had to be removed.
“Wait,” he said, looking at Jiggs—the gaunt, the worn, the face worn with fatigue and lack of sleep and filled with a spent unflagging expression of quiet endurance like a hypnotised person. “Listen. That magazine with the pictures of what you wish you could get your white American servants to wear so you could think they were English butlers, and what if you wore yourself maybe the horse would think he was in England too unless the fox happened to run under a billboard or something.……About how a fox’s tail is the only.……” He stared at Jiggs, who stared back at him with blinking and oneeyed attention. “Wait. No. It’s the horse’s bone. Not the fox; the horse’s shin bone. That’s what we need.”
“A horse’s shinbone?”
“For the boots. That’s what you use.”
“All right. But where——”
“I know where. We can pick it up on the way out to see Hagood. We can rent a car.” They had to walk up to Grandlieu Street to rent the car.
“Want me to drive?” Jiggs said.
“Can you?”
“Sure.”
“Then I guess you will have to,” the reporter said. “I cant.” It was a bright soft sunny day, quite warm, the air filled, breathing, with a faint suspiration which made the reporter think of organs and bells—of mortification and peace and shadowy kneeling—though he heard neither. The streets were crowded though the throngs were quiet, not only with ordinary Sunday decorum but with a certain slow tranquillity as though the very brick and stone had just recovered from fever. Now and then, in the lees of walls and gutters as they left downtown behind them the reporter saw little drifts of the spent confetti but soiled and stained now until it resembled more dingy sawdust or even dead leaves. Once or twice he saw tattered loops of the purple-and-gold bunting and once at a corner a little boy darted almost beneath the wheels with a tattered streamer of it whipping behind him. Then the city dissolved into swamp and marsh again; presently the road ran into a broad expanse of saltmarsh broken by the dazzling sun-blanched dyke of a canal; presently a rutted lane turned off into the saltgrass. “Here we are,” the reporter said. The car turned into the lane and they began to pass the debris, the silent imperishable monument tranquil in the bright sun—the old carbodies without engines or wheels, the old engines and wheels without bodies; the rusted scraps and sections of iron machinery and standpipes and culverts rising halfburied out of the blanched sand and shelldust which was so white itself that for a time Jiggs saw no bones at all. “Can you tell a horse from a cow?” the reporter said.
“I dont know,” Jiggs said. “I aint very certain whether I can even tell a shinbone or not.”
“We’ll get some of everything and try them all,” the reporter said. So they did; moving about, stooping (the reporter was blinking again now between the fierce quiet glare of the pigmentless sand and the ineffable and cloudless blue) they gathered up about thirty pounds of bones. They had two complete forelegs both of which were horses’ though they did not know it, and a set of shoulderblades from a mule and Jiggs came up with a full set of ribs which he insisted belonged to a colt but which were actually those of a big dog, and the reporter had one object which turned out not to be bone at all but the forearm from a piece of statuary. “We ought to have something in here that will do,” he said.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Now which way?” They did not need to return through the city. They skirted it, leaving the salt-marsh behind and now, crossing no actual boundary or demarcation and challenged by no sentry, they entered a region where even the sunlight seemed different, where it filtered among the ordered liveoaks and fell suavely upon parked expanses and vistas beyond which the homes of the rich oblivious and secure presided above clipped lawns and terraces, with a quality of having itself been passed by appointment through a walled gate by a watchman. Presently they ran along a picketline of palmtrunks beyond which a clipped fairway stretched, broken only by sedate groups of apparently armed men and boys all moving in one direction like a kind of decorouslyembattled skirmish advance.
“It aint four yet,” the reporter said. “We can wait for him right here, at number fifteen.” So after a time Hagood, preparing to drive with his foursome, his ball teed and addressed, looked up and saw them standing quietly just inside the club’s grounds, the car waiting in the road behind them, watching him—the indefatiguable and now ubiquitous cadaver and the other, the vicious halfmetamorphosis between thug and horse—the tough hard blunt face to which the blue swollen eye lent no quality of pity or suffering, made it look not at all like a victim or one deserving compassion, but merely like a pirate. Hagood stepped down from the tee.
“A message from the office,” he said quietly. “You fellows drive and play on; I’ll catch you.” He approached Jiggs and the reporter. “How much do you want this time?” he said.
“Whatever you will let me have,” the reporter said.
“So,” Hagood said quietly. “It’s that bad this time, is it?” The reporter said nothing; they watched Hagood take his wallet from his hip pocket and open it. “This is the last, this time, I suppose?” he said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “They’re leaving tonight.” From the wallet Hagood took a thin sheaf of check blanks.
“So you wont suggest a sum yourself,” Hagood said. “You are using psychology on me.”
“Whatever you can. Will. I know I have borrowed more from you than I have paid back. But this time maybe I can.……” He drew something from his coat now and extended it—a postcard, a colored lithograph; Hagood read the legend: Hotel Vista del Mar, Santa Monica, California, the plump arrow drawn by a hotel pen and pointing to a window.
“What?” Hagood said.<
br />
“Read it,” the reporter said. “It’s from mamma. Where they are spending their honeymoon, her and Mr Hurtz. She said how she has told him about me and he seems to like me all right and that maybe when my birthday comes on the first of April.……”
“Ah,” Hagood said. “That will be very nice, wont it?” He took a short fountain pen from his shirt and glanced about; now the second man, the cartoon comedy centaur who had been watching him quietly and steadily with the one bright hot eye, spoke for the first time.
“Write on my back if you want to, mister,” he said, turning and stooping, presenting a broad skintight expanse of soiled shirt, apparently as hard as a section of concrete, to Hagood.
“And get the hell kicked out of me and serve me right,” Hagood thought viciously. He spread the blank on Jiggs’ back and wrote the check and waved it dry and folded it and handed it to the reporter.
“Do you want me to sign anyth——” the reporter began.
“No. But will you let me ask a favor of you?”
“Yes, chief. Of course.”
“Go to town and look in the book and find where Doctor Legendre lives and go out there. Dont telephone; go out there; tell him I sent you, tell him I said to give you some pills that will put you to sleep for about twenty-four hours, and go home and take them. Will you?”
“Yes, chief,” the reporter said. “Tomorrow when you fix the note for me to sign you can pin the postcard to it. It wont be legal, but it will be——”
“Yes,” Hagood said. “Go on, now. Please go on.”
“Yes, chief,” the reporter said. They went on. When they reached home it was almost five oclock. They unloaded the bones and now they both worked, each with a boot, fast. It seemed to be slow work, nevertheless the boots were taking on a patina deeper and less brilliant than wax or polish.
“Jesus,” Jiggs said. “If I just hadn’t creased the ankles, and if I just had kept the box and paper when I unwrapped them.……” Because he had forgot that it was Sunday. He knew it; he and the reporter had known it was Sunday all day but they had both forgotten it; they did not remember it until, at half past five, Jiggs halted the car before the window into which he had looked four days ago—the window from which now both boots and photographs were missing. They looked at the locked door quietly for a good while. “So we didn’t need to hurry after all,” he said. “Well, maybe I couldn’t have fooled them, anyway. Maybe I’d a had to went to the pawnshop just the same anyway.—We might as well take the car back.”
“Let’s go to the paper and cash the check first,” the reporter said. He had not yet looked at it; while Jiggs waited in the car he went in and returned. “It was for a hundred,” he said. “He’s a good guy. He’s been white to me, Jesus.” He got into the car.
“Now where?” Jiggs said.
“Now we got to decide how. We might as well take the car back while we are deciding.” The lights were on now; when they emerged from the garage, walking, they moved in red-green-and-white glare and flicker, crossing the outfall from the theatre entrances and the eating places, passing athwart the hour’s rich resurgence of fish and coffee. “You cant give it to her yourself,” the reporter said. “They would know you never had that much.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “All I could risk would have been that twenty bucks. But I’ll have room for some of it, though. If I get as much as ten from Uncle Isaac I will want to pinch myself.”
“And if we slipped it to the kid, it would be the.……Wait,” he said; he stopped and looked at Jiggs. “I got it. Yair. Come on.” Now he was almost running, weaving on through the slow Sunday evening throng, Jiggs following. They tried five drugstores before they found it—a blue-and-yellow toy hanging by a piece of cord before a rotary ventilator in similitude of flight. It had not been for sale; Jiggs and the reporter fetched the stepladder from the rear of the store in order to take it down. “You said the train leaves at eight,” the reporter said. “We got to hurry some.” It was half past six now as they left Grandlieu Street; when they reached the corner where Shumann and Jiggs had bought the sandwich two nights ago, they parted.
“I can see the balls from here,” Jiggs said. “Aint any need of you going with me; I guess I wont have any trouble carrying what they will give me for them. You get the sandwiches and leave the door unlocked for me.” He went on, the news-paperwrapped boots under his arm; even now as each foot flicked backward with that motion like a horse’s hock, the reporter believed that he could see the coinshaped patch of blackened flesh in each pale sole: so that when he entered the corridor and set the door ajar and mounted the stairs and turned on the light, he did not open the sandwiches at once. He put them and the toy aeroplane on the table and went beyond the curtain. When he emerged he carried in one hand the gallon jug (it contained now about three pints) and in the other a pair of shoes which looked as much like him as his hair or hands looked. He was sitting on the cot, smoking, when Jiggs entered, carrying now a biggish bundle, a bundle bigger even though shorter than the boots had been. “He gave me five bucks for them,” Jiggs said. “I give twenty-two and a half and wear them twice and he gives me five. Yair. He throws it away.” He laid the bundle on the couch. “So I decided that wasn’t even worth the trouble of handing to her. So I just got some presents for all of them.” He opened the parcel. It contained a box or chest of candy about the size of a suitcase and resembling a miniature bale of cotton and lettered heavily by some pyrographic process: Souvenir of New Valois. Come back again and three magazines—Boy’s Life, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and one of the pulp magazines of war stories in the air. Jiggs’ blunt grained hands riffled them and evened the edges again, his brutal battered face was curiously serene. “It will give them something to do on the train, see? Now let me get my pliers and we will fix that ship.” Then he saw the jug on the table as he turned. But he did not go to it; he just stopped, looking at it, and the reporter saw the good eye rush sudden and inarticulate and hot. But he did not move. It was the reporter who went and poured the first drink and gave it to him, and then the second one. “You need one too,” Jiggs said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I will in a minute.” But he didn’t for a while, though he took one of the sandwiches when Jiggs opened them and then watched Jiggs, his jaw bulged by a huge bite, stoop and take from the canvas sack the cigarbox and from the box produced a pair of pliers; not beginning yet to eat his own sandwich the reporter watched Jiggs raise the metal clamps which held the toy aeroplane’s tin body together and open it. The reporter produced the money—the seventy-five which the jumper had given him and the hundred from Hagood—and they wedged it into the toy and Jiggs clamped it to again.
“Yair, he’ll find it, all right,” Jiggs said. “Every toy he gets he plays with it a couple of days and then he takes it apart. To fix it, he says. But Jesus, he came by that natural; Roger’s old man is a doctor, see. A little country town where it’s mostly Swede farmers and the old man gets up at any hour of the night and rides twenty or thirty miles in a sleigh and borns the babies and cuts off arms and legs and a lot of them even pay him; sometimes it aint but a couple or three years before they will bring him in a ham or a bedspread or something on the installment. So the old man wanted Roger to be a doctor too, see, and he was hammering that at Roger all the time Roger was a kid and watching Roger’s grades in school and all: so that Roger would have to doctor up his report cards for the old man but the old man never found it out; he would see Roger start off for school every morning (they lived in a kind of big place, half farm, a little ways out of town that never nobody tried to farm much Roger said, but his old man kept it because it was where his old man, his father’s old man, had settled when he come into the country) over in town and he never found it out until one day he found out how Roger hadn’t even been inside the school in six months because he hadn’t never been off the place any further than out of sight down the road where he could turn and come back through the woods to an old mill his grandfather had
built and Roger had built him a motorcycle in it out of scraps saved up from mowing machines and clocks and such, and it run, see. That’s what saved him. When his old man saw that it would run he let Roger go then and quit worrying him to be a doctor; he bought Roger the first ship, the Hisso Standard, with the money he had been saving up to send Roger to the medical school, but when he saw that the motorcycle would run, I guess he knew he was whipped. And then one night Roger had to make a landing without any lights and he run over a cow and cracked it up and the old man paid for having it rebuilt; Roger told me once the old man must have borrowed the jack to do it with on the farm and that he aimed to pay his old man back the first thing as soon as he could but I guess it’s o.k. because a farm without a mortgage on it would probably be against the law or something. Or maybe the old man didn’t have to mortgage the farm but he just told Roger that so Roger would pick out a vacant field next time.” The cathedral clock had struck seven shortly after Jiggs came in with his bundle; it must be about half past seven now. Jiggs squatted now, holding one of the shoes in his hand. “Jesus,” he said. “I sure wont say I dont need them. But what about you?”
“I couldn’t wear but one pair of them, no matter how many I had,” the reporter said. “You better go ahead and try them on.”