“They’ll fit, all right. There are two garments that will fit anybody: a handkerchief when your nose is running and a pair of shoes when your feet are on the ground.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “That was the same ship that he and Laverne——”
“Yair. Jesus, they were a pair. She was glad to see him when he come into town that day in it. One day she told me something about it. She was a orphan, see; her older sister that was married sent for her to come live with them when her folks died. The sister was about twenty years older than Laverne and the sister’s husband was about six or eight years younger than the sister and Laverne was about fourteen or fifteen; she hadn’t had much fun at home with a couple of old people like her father and mother, and she never had much with her sister neither, being that much younger; yair, I dont guess the sister had a whole lot of fun either with the kind of guy the husband seemed to be. So when the husband started teaching Laverne how to slip out and meet him and they would drive to some town forty or fifty miles away when the husband was supposed to be at work or something and he would buy her a glass of soda water or maybe stop at a dive where the husband was sure nobody he knowed would see them and dance, I guess she thought that was all the fun there was in the world and that since he would tell her it was all right to twotime the sister that way, that it was all right for her to do the rest of it he wanted. Because he was the big guy, see, the one that paid for what she wore and what she ate. Or maybe she didn’t think it was all right so much as she just thought that that was the way it was—that you was either married and wore down with housework to where your husband was just the guy that twotimed you and you knew it and all you could do about it was nag at him while he was awake and go through his clothes while he was asleep to see if you found any hairpins or letters or rubbers in his pockets, and then cry and moan about him to your younger sister while he was gone; or you were the one that somebody else’s husband was easing out with and that all the choice you had was the dirty dishes to wash against the nickel sodas and a half an hour of dancing to a backalley orchestra in a dive where nobody give his right name and then being wallowed around on the back seat of a car and then go home and slip in and lie to your sister and when it got too close, having the guy jump on you too to save his own face and then make it up by buying you two sodas next time. Or maybe at fifteen she just never saw any way of doing better because for a while she never even knowed that the guy was holding her down himself, see, that he was hiding her out at the cheap dives not so they would not be recognised but so he would not have any competition from anybody but guys like himself; no young guys for her to see or to see her. Only the competition come; somehow she found out there was sodas that cost more than even a dime and that all the music never had to be played in a back room with the shades down. Or maybe it was just him, because one night she had used him for a stalking horse and he hunted her down and the guy she was with this time finally had to beat him up and so he went back home and told the sister on her——” The reporter rose, quickly. Jiggs watched him go to the table and pour into the glass, splashing the liquor onto the table. “That’s right,” Jiggs said. “Take a good one.” The reporter lifted the glass, gulping, his throat filled with swallowing and the liquor cascading down his chin; Jiggs sprang up quickly too but the other passed him, running toward the window and onto the balcony where Jiggs, following, caught him by the arms as he lunged outward as the liquor, hardly warmed, burst from his mouth. The cathedral clock struck the half hour; the sound followed them back into the room and seemed to die away too, like the light, into the harsh bright savage zigzags of color on the blankethung walls. “Let me get you some water,” Jiggs said. “You sit down now, and I will——”
“I’m all right now,” the reporter said. “You put on your shoes. That was half past seven then.”
“Yair. But you better——”
“No. Sit down; I’ll pull your leggings for you.”
“You sure you feel like it?”
“Yes. I’m all right now.” They sat facing one another on the floor again as they had sat the first night, while the reporter took hold of the rivetted strap of the right bootleg. Then he began to laugh. “You see, it got all mixed up,” he said, laughing, not loud yet. “It started out to be a tragedy. A good orthodox Italian tragedy. You know: one Florentine falls in love with another Florentine’s wife and he spends three acts fixing it up to put the bee on the second Florentine and so just as the curtain falls on the third act the Florentine and the wife crawl down the fire escape and you know that the second Florentine’s brother wont catch them until daylight and they will be asleep in the monk’s bed in the monastery? But it went wrong. When he come climbing up to the window to tell her the horses was ready, she refused to speak to him. It turned into a comedy, see?” He looked at Jiggs, laughing, not laughing louder yet but just faster.
“Here, fellow!” Jiggs said. “Here now! Quit it!”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “It’s not that funny. I’m trying to quit it. I’m trying to. But I cant quit. See? See how I cant quit?” he said, still holding to the strap, his face twisted with laughing, which as Jiggs looked, burst suddenly with drops of moisture running down the cadaverous grimace which for an instant Jiggs thought was sweat until he saw the reporter’s eyes.
It was after half past seven; they would have to hurry now. But they found a cab at once and they got the green light at once at Grandlieu Street even before the cab began to slow, shooting athwart the glare of neon, the pulse and glitter of electrics which bathed the idle slow Sunday pavementthrong as it drifted from window to window beyond which the immaculate, the unbelievable wax men and women gazed back at them with expressions inscrutable and delphic. Then the palms in Saint Jules Avenue began to swim and flee past—the scabby picket posts, the sage dusters out of the old Southern country thought; the lighted clock in the station façade said six minutes to eight.
“They are probably already on the train,” Jiggs said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “They’ll let you through the gate, though.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, taking up the toy aeroplane and the package which he had rewrapped. “Dont you want to come inside?”
“I’ll just wait here,” the reporter said. He watched Jiggs enter the waitingroom and vanish. He could hear the announcer calling another train; moving toward the doors he could see passengers begin to rise and take up bags and bundles and move toward the numbered gates, though quite a few still remained for other trains. “But not long,” the reporter thought. “Because they can go home now”; thinking of all the names of places which railroads go to, fanning out from the River’s mouth to all of America; of the cold February names:
Minnesota and Dakota and Michigan, the high iceclad river-reaches and the long dependable snow; “yair, home now, knowing that they have got almost a whole year before they will have to get drunk and celebrate the fact that they will have more than eleven months before they will have to wear masks and get drunk and blow horns again.” Now the clock said two minutes to eight; they had probably got off the car to talk to Jiggs, perhaps standing now on the platform, smoking maybe; he could cross the waitingroom and doubtless even see them, standing beside the hissing train while the other passengers and the redcaps hurried past; she would carry the bundle and the magazines and the little boy would have the aeroplane already, probably performing wingovers or vertical turns by hand. “Maybe I will go and look,” he thought, waiting to see if he were until suddenly he realised that now, opposite from when he had stood in the bedroom before turning on the light, it was himself who was the nebulous and quiet ragtag and bobend of touching and breath and experience without visible scars, the waiting incurious unbreathing and without impatience, and another save him this time to make the move. There was a second hand on the clock too—a thin spidery splash; he watched it now as it moved too fast to follow save between the intervals of motion when it became instantaneously immobile as though drawn across
the clock’s face by a pen and a ruler—9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. and done; it was now the twenty-first hour, and that was all. No sound, as though it had not been a steam train which quitted the station two seconds ago but rather the shadow of one on a magic lantern screen until the child’s vagrant and restless hand came and removed the slide.
“Well,” Jiggs said, “I guess you’ll be wanting to get home and catch some shuteye.”
“Yair,” the reporter said, “we might as well be moving.” They got into the cab, though this time Jiggs lifted the canvas sack from the floor and sat with it on his lap.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “He’ll find it. He already dropped it a couple of times trying to make it spin on the platform.—You told him to stop at Main Street, didn’t you?”
“I’ll take you on to the hotel,” the reporter said.
“No, I’ll get out at Main. Jesus, it’s a good thing I dont live here; I never would get back home unless somebody took me; I couldn’t even remember the name of the street I lived on even if I could pronounce it to ask where it was.”
“Grandlieu,” the reporter said. “I will take you——” The cab slowed into the corner and stopped; Jiggs gathered up the canvas bag and opened the door.
“This’ll be fine. It aint but eight-fifteen; I aint to meet Art until nine. I’ll just walk up the street a ways and get a little air.”
“I wish you’d let me——Or if you’d like to come on back home and——”
“No; you get on home and go to bed; we have kept you up enough, I guess.” He leaned into the cab, the cap raked above his hard blue face and the violent plumcolored eye; suddenly the light changed to green and the bell clanged and shrilled. Jiggs stuck out his hand; for an instant the hot hard limp rough palm sweated against the reporter’s as if the reporter had touched a piece of machinery belting. “Much obliged. And thanks for the drinks. I’ll be seeing you.” The cab moved; Jiggs banged the door; his face fled backward past the window; the green and red and white electrics waned and pulsed and flicked away too as through the rear window the reporter watched Jiggs swing the now limp dirty sack over his shoulder and turn on into the crowd. The reporter leaned forward and tapped on the glass.
“Out to the airport,” he said.
“Airport?” the driver said. “I thought the other fellow said you wanted to go to Noyades street.”
“No; airport,” the reporter said. The driver looked forward again; he seemed to settle himself, to shape his limbs for comfort for the long haul even while the one-way arrows of the old constricted city flicked past. But presently the old quarter gave way to outraveling and shabby purlieus, mostly lightless now, and the cab went faster; presently the street straightened and became the ribbonstraight road running across the terraqueous plain and the cab was going quite fast, and now the illusion began, the sense of being suspended in a small airtight glass box clinging by two puny fingers of light in the silent and rushing immensity of space. By looking back he could still see the city, the glare of it, no further away; if he were moving, regardless at what terrific speed and in what loneliness, so was it, parallelling him. He was not escaping it; symbolic and encompassing, it outlay all gasolinespanned distances and all clock- or sunstipulated destinations. It would be there—the eternal smell of the coffee the sugar the hemp sweating slow iron plates above the forked deliberate brown water and lost lost lost all ultimate blue of latitude and horizon; the hot rain gutterfull plaiting the eaten heads of shrimp; the ten thousand inescapable mornings wherein ten thousand airplants swinging stippleprop the soft scrofulous soaring of sweating brick and ten thousand pairs of splayed brown hired Leonorafeet tigerbarred by jaloused armistice with the invincible sun: the thin black coffee, the myriad fish stewed in a myriad oil—tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow; not only not to hope, not even to wait: just to endure.
The Scavengers
At midnight—one of the group of newspapermen on the beach claimed to have watched the mate of the dredge-boat and the sergeant of the police launch holding flashlights on their watches for fifteen minutes—the dredge upped anchor and stood offshore and steamed away while the police launch, faster, had taken its white bone beyond the seawall almost before the dredge had got enough offing to turn. Then the five newspapermen—four in overcoats with upturned collars—turned too and mounted the beach toward where the ranked glaring cars were beginning to disperse while the policemen—there were not so many of them now—tried to forestall the inevitable jam. There was no wind tonight, neither was there any overcast. The necklace of lights along the lakeshore curved away faint and clear, with that illusion of tremulous wavering which distance and clarity gave them, like bright not-quite-settled roosting birds, as did the boundary lights along the seawall; and now the steady and measured rake of the beacon seemed not to travel so much as to murmur like a moving forefoot of wind across water, among the thick faint stars. They mounted the beach to where a policeman, hands on hips, stood as though silhouetted not against the crisscrossing of headlights but against the blatting and honking uproar as well, as though contemplating without any emotion whatever the consummation of that which he had been waiting on for twenty hours now. “Aint you talking to us too, sergeant?” the first newspaperman said. The policeman looked back over his shoulder, squinting down at the group from under his raked cap.
“Who are you?” he said.
“We are the press,” the other said in a smirking affected voice.
“Get on, get on,” a second said behind him. “Let’s get indoors somewhere.” The policeman had already turned back to the cars, the racing engines, the honking and blatting.
“Come, come, sergeant,” the first said. “Come come come come. Aint you going to send us back to town too?” The policeman did not even look back. “Well, wont you at least call my wife and tell her you wont make me come home, since you wear the dark blue of honor integrity and purity——” The policeman spoke without turning his head.
“Do you want to finish this wake out here or do you really want to finish it in the wagon?”
“Ex-actly. You have got the idea at last. Boys, he’s even com——”
“Get on, get on,” the second said. “Let him buy a paper and read it.” They went on, the reporter (he was the one without an overcoat) last, threading their way between the blatting and honking, the whining and clashing of gears, the glare of backbouncing and crossing headlight beams and reached the boulevard and crossed it toward the lunchstand. The first led the way in, his hatbrim crumpled on one side and his overcoat caught one button awry and a bottleneck protruding from one pocket. The proprietor looked up at them with no especial pleasure; he was about to close up.
“That fellow out there kept me up all last night and I am about wore out,” he said.
“You would think we were from the District Attorney’s office and trying to padlock him instead of a press delegation trying to persuade him to stay open and accept our pittances,” the first said. “You are going to miss the big show at daylight, let alone all the country trade that never heard about it until the noon train got in with the papers.”
“How about coming to the back room and letting me lock the door and turn out the lights up here, then?” the proprietor said.
“Sure,” they told him. So he locked up and turned off the lights and led them to the back, to the kitchen—a stove, a zinc table encrusted with weekend after weekend of slain meat and fish—and supplied them with glasses and bottles of coca cola and a deck of cards and beercases to sit on and a barrelhead for table, and prepared to retire.
“If anybody knocks, just sit quiet,” he said. “And you can beat on that wall there when they get ready to begin; I’ll wake up.”
“Sure,” they told him. He went out. The first opened the bottle and began to pour into the five glasses. The reporter stopped him.
“None for me. I’m not drinking.”
“What?” the first said. He set the bottle carefully down and took out his handkerchief and went t
hrough the pantomime of removing his glasses and polishing them and replacing them and staring at the reporter, though before he had finished the fourth took up the bottle and finished pouring the drinks. “You what?” the first said. “Did I hear my ears, or was it just blind hope I heard?”
“Yes,” the reporter said; his face wore that faint, spent, aching expression which a man might wear toward the end of a private babyshow. “I’ve quit for a while.”
“Thank God for that,” the first breathed, then he turned and began to scream at the one who now held the bottle, with that burlesque outrage and despair of the spontaneous amateur buffoon. But he ceased at once and then the four of them (again the reporter declined) sat about the barrel and began to deal blackjack. The reporter did not join them. He drew his beercase aside, whereupon the first, the habitual opportunist who must depend upon all unrehearsed blundering and recalcitrant circumstance to be his stooge, noticed at once that he had set his beercase beside the now cold stove. “If you aint going to take the drink yourself maybe you better give the stove one,” he said.
“I’ll begin to warm up in a minute,” the reporter said. They played; the fourth had the deal; their voices came quiet and brisk and impersonal above the faint slapping of the cards.
“That’s what I call a guy putting himself away for keeps,” he said.
“What do you suppose he was thinking about while he was sitting up there waiting for that water to smack him?” the first said.
“Nothing,” the second said shortly. “If he had been a man that thought, he would not have been up there in the first place.”
“Meaning he would have had a good job on a newspaper, huh?” the first said.
“Yes,” the second said. “That’s what I mean.” The reporter rose quietly. He lit a cigarette, his back turned a little to them, and dropped the match carefully into the cold stove and sat down again. None of the others appeared to have noticed him.