He went back into the hangar, walking fast now and already unfastening his coverall before he pushed through the chickenwire door. He removed the coverall and hung it up and only for a second glanced at his hands. “I’ll wash them when I get to town,” he said. Now the first port lights came on; he crossed the plaza, passing the bloomed bloodless grapes on their cast stalks on the quadrate bases of which the four Fs were discernible even in twilight. The bus was lighted too. It had its quota of passengers though they were not inside. Including the driver they stood beside it, looking up, while the voice of the amplifyer, apocryphal, sourceless, inhuman, ubiquitous and beyond weariness or fatigue, went on:
“——in position now; it will be any time now—There. There. There goes the wing down; he has throttled back now now Now——There he is, folks; the flour, the flour—” The flour was a faint stain unrolling ribbonlike, light, lazy, against the sky, and then they could see the falling dot at the head of it which, puny, increasing, became the tiny figure of a man plunging without movement toward a single long suspiration of human breath, until at last the parachute bloomed. It unfolded swaying against the accomplished and ineradicable evening; beneath it the jumper oscillated slowly, settling slowly now toward the field. The boundary and obstruction lights were on too now; he floated down as though out of a soundless and breathless void, toward the bright necklace of field lights and the electrified name on each hangarroof; at the moment the green light above the beacon on the signal tower began to wink and flash too: dot-dot-dash-dot. dot-dot-dash-dot. dot-dot-dash-dot. across the nightbound lake. Jiggs touched the driver’s arm.
“Come on, Jack,” he said. “I got to be at Grandlieu Street before six oclock.”
An Evening in New Valois
The downfunnelled light from the desklamp struck the reporter across the hips; to the city editor sitting behind the desk the reporter loomed from the hips upward for an incredible distance to where the cadaverface hung against the dusty gloom of the city room’s upper spaces, in a green corpseglare as appropriate as water to fish—the raked disreputable hat, the suit that looked as if someone else had just finished sleeping in it and with one coat pocket sagging with yellow copy paper and from the other protruding, folded, the cold violent stilldamp black
ALITY OF BURNED
—the entire air and appearance of a last and cheerful stage of what old people call galloping consumption—the man whom the editor believed (certainly hoped) to be unmarried, though not through any knowledge or report but because of something which the man’s living being emanated—a creature who apparently never had any parents either and who will not be old and never was a child, who apparently sprang fullgrown and irrevocably mature out of some violent and instantaneous transition like the stories of dead steamboatmen and mules: if it were learned that he had a brother for instance it would create neither warmth nor surprise anymore than finding the mate to a discarded shoe in a trashbin—of whom the editor had heard how a girl in a Barricade Street crib said that it would be like assessing the invoked spirit at a seance held in a rented restaurant room with a covercharge.
Upon the desk, in the full target of the lamp’s glare, it lay too: the black bold stilldamp FIRST FATALITY OF AIR MEET. PILOT BURNED ALIVE. beyond it, backflung, shirtsleeved, his bald head above the green eyeshade corpseglared too, the city editor looked at the reporter fretfully. “You have an instinct for events,” he said. “If you were turned into a room with a hundred people you never saw before and two of them were destined to enact a homicide, you would go straight to them as crow to carrion; you would be there from the very first: you would be the one to run out and borrow a pistol from the nearest policeman for them to use. Yet you never seem to bring back anything but information. Oh you have that, all right, because we seem to get everything that the other papers do and we haven’t been sued yet and so doubtless it’s all that anyone should expect for five cents and doubtless more than they deserve. But it’s not the living breath of news. It’s just information. It’s dead before you even get back here with it.” Immobile beyond the lamp’s hard radius the reporter stood, watching the editor with an air leashed, attentive, and alert. “It’s like trying to read something in a foreign language. You know it ought to be there; maybe you know by God it is there. But that’s all. Can it be by some horrible mischance that without knowing it you listen and see in one language and then do what you call writing in another? How does it sound to you when you read it yourself?”
“When I read what?” the reporter said. Then he sat down in the opposite chair while the editor cursed him. He collapsed upon the chair with a loose dry scarecrowlike clatter as though of his own skeleton and the wooden chair’s in contact, and leaned forward across the desk, eager, apparently not only on the verge of the grave itself but in actual sight of the other side of Styx: of the saloons which have never sounded with cashregister or till; of that golden District where gleam with frankincense and scented oils the celestial anonymous bosoms of eternal and subsidised delight. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he cried. “Why didn’t you tell me before that this is what you want? Here I have been running my ass ragged eight days a week trying to find something worth telling and then telling it so it wont make eight thousand different advertisers and subscribers.……But no matter now. Because listen.” He jerked off his hat and flung it onto the desk; as quickly the editor snatched it up as if it had been a crust of antladen bread on a picnic tablecloth and jerked it back into the reporter’s lap. “Listen,” the reporter said. “She’s out there at the airport. She’s got a little boy, only it’s two of them, that fly those little ships that look like mosquitoes. No: just one of them flies the ship; the other makes the delayed parachute jump—you know, with the fifty pound sack of flour and coming down like the haunt of Yuletide or something. Yair; they’ve got a little boy, about the size of this telephone, in dungarees like they w——”
“What?” the editor cried. “Who have a little boy?”
“Yair. They dont know.——in dungarees like they wear; when I come into the hangar this morning they were clean, maybe because the first day of a meet is the one they call Monday, and he had a stick and he was swabbing grease up off the floor and smearing it onto himself so he would look like they look.——Yair, two of them: this guy Shumann that took second money this afternoon, that come up from fourth in a crate that all the guys out there that are supposed to know said couldn’t even show. She’s his wife, that is her name’s Shumann and the kid’s is Shumann too: out there in the hangar this morning in dungarees like the rest of them, with her hands full of wrenches and machinery and a gob of cotter keys in her mouth like they tell how women used to do with the pins and needles before General Motors begun to make their clothes for them, with this Harlowcolored hair that they would pay her money for it in Hollywood and a smear of grease where she had swiped it back with her wrist; she’s his wife: they have been married almost ever since the kid was born six years ago in a hangar in California; yair, this day Shumann comes down at whatever town it was in Iowa or Indiana or wherever it was that she was a sophomore in the highschool back before they had the airmail for farmers to quit plowing and look up at; in the highschool at recess, and so maybe that was why she come out without a hat even and got into the front seat of one of those Jennies the army used to sell them for cancelled stamps or whatever it was. And maybe she sent a postcard back from the next cow-pasture to the aunt or whoever it was that was expecting her to come home to dinner, granted that they have kinfolks or are descended from human beings, and he taught her to jump parachutes. Because they aint human like us; they couldn’t turn those pylons like they do if they had human blood and senses and they wouldn’t want to or dare to if they just had human brains. Burn them like this one tonight and they dont even holler in the fire; crash one and it aint even blood when you haul him out: it’s cylinder oil the same as in the crankcase. And listen: it’s both of them; this morning I walk into the hangar where they are getting the ships ready and
I see the kid and a guy that looks like a little horse squared off with their fists up and the rest of them watching with wrenches and things in their hands and the kid rushes in flailing his arms and the guy holding him off and the others watching and the guy put the kid down and I come up and square off too with my fists up too and I says ‘Come on, Dempsey; how about taking me on next’ and the kid dont move, he just looks at me and then the guy says ‘Ask him who’s his old man’ only I thought he said ‘So’s his old man’ and I said ‘So’s his old man?’ and the guy says ‘No. Who’s his old man’ and I said it, and here the kid comes with his fists flailing, and if he had just been half as big as he wanted to be right then he would have beat hell out of me. And so I asked them and they told me.” He stopped; he ran out of speech or perhaps out of breath not as a vessel runs empty but with the instantaneous cessation of some weightless winddriven toy, say a celluloid pinwheel. Behind the desk, still backflung, clutching the chairarms, the editor glared at him with outraged amazement.
“What?” he cried. “Two men, with one wife and child between them?”
“Yair. The third guy, the horse one, is just the mechanic; he aint even a husband, let alone a flyer. Yair. Shumann and the airplane landing at Iowa or Indiana or wherever it is, and her coming out of the schoolhouse without even arranging to have her books took home, and they went off maybe with a canopener and a blanket to sleep on under the wing of the airplane when it rained hard, and then the other guy, the parachute guy, dropping in, falling the couple or three miles with his sack of flour before pulling the ripcord. They aint human, you see. No ties; no place where you were born and have to go back to it now and then even if it’s just only to hate the damn place good and comfortable for a day or two. From coast to coast and Canada in summer and Mexico in winter, with one suitcase and the same canopener because three can live on one canopener as easy as one or twelve,—wherever they can find enough folks in one place to advance them enough money to get there and pay for the gasoline afterward. Because they dont need money; it aint money they are after anymore than it’s glory because the glory cant only last until the next race and so maybe it aint even until tomorrow. And they dont need money except only now and then when they come in contact with the human race like in a hotel to sleep or eat now and then or maybe to buy a pair of pants or a skirt to keep the police off of them. Because money aint that hard to make: it aint up there fourteen and a half feet off the ground in a vertical bank around a steel post at two or three hundred miles an hour in a damn gnat built like a Swiss watch that the top speed of it aint a number on a little dial but it’s where you burn the engine up or fly out from between the wings and the undercarriage. Around the home pylon on one wingtip and the fabric trembling like a bride and the crate cost four thousand dollars and good for maybe fifty hours if one ever lasted that long and five of them in the race and the top money at least two-hundred-thirtyeight-fiftytwo less fines fees commissions and gratuities. And the rest of them, the wives and children and mechanics, standing on the apron and watching like they might have been stole out of a department store window and dressed in greasy khaki coveralls and not even thinking about the hotel bill over in town or where we are going to eat if we dont win and how we are going to get to the next meet if the engine melts and runs backward out of the exhaust pipe. And Shumann dont even own a ship; she told me about how they want Vic Chance to build one for them and how Vic Chance wants to build one for Shumann to fly only neither Vic Chance nor them have managed to save up enough jack yet. So he just flies whatever he can get that they will qualify. This one he copped with today he is flying on a commission; it was next to the slowest one in the race and they all said he never had a chance with it and he beat them on the pylons. So when he dont cop they eat on the parachute guy, which is O.K. because the parachute guy makes almost as much as the guy at the microphone does, besides the mike guy having to work all afternoon for his while it dont only take the parachute guy a few seconds to fall the ten or twelve thousand feet with the flour blowing back in his face before pulling the ripcord. And so the kid was born on an unrolled parachute in a hangar in California; he got dropped already running like a colt or a calf from the fuselage of an airplane, onto something because it happened to be big enough to land on and then takeoff again. And I thought about him having ancestors and hell and heaven like we have, and birthpangs to rise up out of and walk the earth with your arm crooked over your head to dodge until you finally get the old blackjack at last and can lay back down again;—all of a sudden I thought about him with a couple or three sets of grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins somewhere, and I like to died. I had to stop and lean against the hangarwall and laugh. Talk about your immaculate conceptions: born on a unrolled parachute in a California hangar and the doc went to the door and called Shumann and the parachute guy. And the parachute guy got out the dice and says to her ‘Do you want to catch these?’ and she said ‘Roll them’ and the dice come out and Shumann rolled high, and that afternoon they fetched the J.P. out on the gasoline truck and so hers and the kid’s name is Shumann. And they told me how it wasn’t them that started saying Who’s your old man? to the kid; it was her, and the kid flailing away at her and her stooping that hard boy’s face that looks like any one of the four of them might cut her hair for her with a pocket knife when it needs it, down to where he can reach it and saying ‘Hit me. Hit me hard. Harder. Harder.’ And what do you think of that?” He stopped again. The editor sat back in the swivel chair and drew a deep, full, deliberate breath while the reporter leaned above the desk like a dissolute and eager skeleton, with that air of worn and dreamy fury which Don Quixote must have had.
“I think you ought to write it,” the editor said. The reporter looked at him for almost half a minute without moving.
“Ought to write.……” He murmured. “Ought to write.……” His voice died away in ecstasy; he glared down at the editor in bonelight exultation while the editor watched him in turn with cold and vindictive waiting.
“Yes. Go home and write it.”
“Go home and.……Home, where I wont be dis — where I can——O pal o pal o pal! Chief, where have I been all your life or where have you been all mine?”
“Yes,” the editor said. He had not moved. “Go home and lock yourself in and throw the key out the window and write it.” He watched the gaunt ecstatic face before him in the dim corpseglare of the green shade. “And then set fire to the room.” The reporter’s face sank slowly back, like a Halloween mask on a boy’s stick being slowly withdrawn. Then for a long time he too did not move save for a faint working of the lips as if he were tasting something either very good or very bad. Then he rose slowly, the editor watching him; he seemed to collect and visibly reassemble himself bone by bone and socket by socket. On the desk lay a pack of cigarettes. He reached his hand toward it; as quickly as when he had flung back the hat and without removing his gaze from the reporter’s face, the editor snatched the pack away. The reporter lifted from the floor his disreputable hat and stood gazing into it with musing attention, as though about to draw a lot from it. “Listen,” the editor said; he spoke patiently, almost kindly: “The people who own this paper or who direct its policies or anyway who pay the salaries, fortunately or unfortunately I shant attempt to say, have no Lewises or Hemingways or even Tchekovs on the staff: one very good reason doubtless being that they do not want them, since what they want is not fiction, not even Nobel Prize fiction, but news.”
“You mean you dont believe this?” the reporter said. “About h—these guys?”
“I’ll go you better than that: I dont even care. Why should I find news in this woman’s supposed bedhabits as long as her legal (so you tell me) husband does not?”
“I thought that women’s bedhabits were always news,” the reporter said.
“You thought? You thought? You listen to me a minute. If one of them takes his airplane or his parachute and murders her and the child in front of the grandstand, then it will be ne
ws. But until they do, what I am paying you to bring back here is not what you think about somebody out there nor what you heard about somebody out there nor even what you saw: I expect you to come in here tomorrow night with an accurate account of everything that occurs out there tomorrow that creates any reaction excitement or irritation on any human retina; if you have to be twins or triplets or even a regiment to do this, be so. Now you go on home and go to bed. And remember. Remember. There will be someone out there to report to me personally at my home the exact moment at which you enter the gates. And if that report comes to me one minute after ten oclock, you will need a racing airplane to catch your job Monday morning. Go home. Do you hear me?” The reporter looked at him, without heat, perfectly blank, as if he had ceased several moments ago not alone to listen but even to hear, as though he were now watching the editor’s lips courteously to tell when he had finished.
“O.K., chief,” he said. “If that’s the way you feel about it.”
“That’s exactly the way I feel about it. Do you understand?”
“Yair; sure. Good night.”
“Good night,” the editor said. The reporter turned away; he turned away quietly, putting the hat on his head exactly as he had laid it on the editor’s desk before the editor flung it off, and took from the pocket containing the folded newspaper a crumpled cigarettepack; the editor watched him put the cigarette into his mouth and then tug the incredible hat to a raked dissolute angle as he passed out the door, raking the match across the frame as he disappeared. But the first match broke; the second one he struck on the bellplate while the elevator was rising. The door opened and clashed behind him; already his hand was reaching into his pocket while with the other he lifted the top paper from the shallow stack on the second stool beside the one on which the elevator man sat, sliding the facedown dollar watch which weighted it onto the next one, the same, the identical: black harsh and restrained: