FIRST FATALITY OF AIR
MEET: PILOT BURNED ALIVE
Lieut. Frank Burnham in
Crash of Rocket Plane
He held the paper off, his face tilted aside, his eyes squinted against the smoke. “ ‘Shumann surprises spectators by beating Bullitt for second place’,” he read. “What do you think of that, now?”
“I think they are all crazy,” the elevator man said. He had not looked at the reporter again. He received the coin into the same hand which clutched a dead stained cob pipe, not looking at the other. “Them that do it and them that pay money to see it.” Neither did the reporter look at him.
“Yair; surprised,” the reporter said, looking at the paper. Then he folded it and tried to thrust it into the pocket with the other folded one just like it. “Yair. And in one more lap he would have surprised them still more by beating Myers for first place.” The cage stopped. “Yair; surprised.……What time is it?” With the hand which now held both the coin and the pipe the elevator man lifted the facedown watch and held it out. He said nothing, he didn’t even look at the reporter; he just sat there, waiting, holding the watch out with a kind of weary patience like a houseguest showing his watch to the last of several children. “Two minutes past ten?” the reporter said. “Just two minutes past ten? Hell.”
“Get out of the door,” the elevator man said. “There’s a draft in here.” It clashed behind the reporter again; as he crossed the lobby he tried again to thrust the paper into the pocket with the other one; antic, repetitive, his reflection in the glass street doors glared and flicked away. The street was empty, though even here, fourteen minutes afoot from Grandlieu Street, the February darkness was murmurous with faint uproar, with faint and ordered pandemonium; overhead, beyond the palmtufts, the overcast sky reflected that interdict and lightglared canyon now adrift with serpentine and confetti, through which the floats, bearing grimacing and antic mimes dwarfed chalkwhite and forlorn and contemplated by static curbmass of amazed confettifaces, passed as though through steady rain. He walked, not fast exactly but with a kind of loose and purposeless celerity, as though it were not exactly faces that he sought but solitude that he was escaping, or even as if he actually were going home like the editor had told him, thinking already of Grandlieu Street which he would have to cross somehow in order to do so. “Yah,” he thought, “he should have sent me home by airmail.” As he passed from light to light his shadow in midstride resolved, pacing him, on pavement and wall. In a dark plate window, sidelooking, he walked beside himself; stopping and turning so that for the moment shadow and reflection superposed he stared full at himself as though he still saw the actual shoulder sagging beneath the dead afternoon’s phantom burden, and saw reflected beside him yet the sweater and the skirt and the harsh pallid hair as, bearing upon his shoulder the archfathered, he walked beside the oblivious and archadultress.
“Yah,” he thought, “the damn little yellowheaded bastard.……Yair, going to bed now, to sleep; the three of them in one bed or maybe they take it night about or maybe you just put your hat down on it first like in a barbershop.” He faced himself in the dark glass, long and light and untidy as a bundle of laths dressed in human garments. “Yah,” he thought, “the poor little towheaded son of a bitch.” When he moved it was to recoil from an old man almost overwalked—a face, a stick, a suit filthier even than his own. He extended the two folded papers along with the coin. “Here, pop,” he said. “Maybe you can get another dime for these. You can buy a big beer then.”
When he reached Grandlieu Street he discovered that by air would be the only way he could cross it, though even now he had not actually paused to decide whether he were really going home or not. And this not alone because of police regulations but because of the physical curbmass of heads and shoulders in moiling silhouette against the light-glare, the serpentine and confettidrift, the antic passing floats. But even before he reached the corner he was assailed by a gust of screaming newsboys apparently as oblivious to the moment’s significance as birds are aware yet oblivious to the human doings which their wings brush and their droppings fall upon. They swirled about him, screaming: in the reflected light of the passing torches the familiar black thick type and the raucous cries seemed to glare and merge faster than the mind could distinguish the sense through which each had been received: “Boinum boins!” FIRST FATALITY OF AIR “Read about it! Foist Moidigror foitality!” LIEUT. BURNHAM KILLED IN AIR CRASH “Boinum boins!”
“Naw!” the reporter cried. “Beat it! Should I throw away a nickel like it was into the ocean because another lunatic has fried himself?—Yah,” he thought, vicious, savage, “even they will have to sleep some of the time just to pass that much of the dark half of being alive. Not to rest because they have to race again tomorrow, but because like now air and space aint passing them fast enough and time is passing them too fast to rest in except during the six and a half minutes it takes to go the twenty-five miles, and the rest of them standing there on the apron like that many window dummies because the rest of them aint even there, like in the girls’ school where one of them is gone off first with all the fine clothes. Yair, alive only for six and a half minutes a day in one aeroplane. And so every night they sleep in one bed and why shouldn’t the either of them or the both of them at once come drowsing unawake in one womandrowsing and none of the three of them know which one nor care?—Yah,” he thought, “maybe I was going home, after all.” Then he saw Jiggs, the pony man, the manpony of the afternoon, recoiled now into the center of a small violent backwater of motionless backturned faces.
“Why dont you use your own feet to walk on?” Jiggs snarled.
“Excuse me,” one of the faces said. “I didn’t mean——”
“Well, watch yourself,” Jiggs cried. “Mine have got to last me to the end of my life. And likely even then I will have to walk a ways before I can catch a ride.” The reporter watched him stand on alternate legs and scrub at his feet in turn with his cap, presenting to the smoky glare of the passing torches a bald spot neat as a tonsure and the color of saddleleather. As they stood side by side and looked at one another they resembled the tall and the short man of the orthodox and unfailing comic team—the one looking like a cadaver out of a medical school vat and dressed for the moment in garments out of a floodrefugee warehouse; the other filling his clothing without any fraction of surplus cloth which might be pinched between two fingers, with that trim vicious economy of wrestlers’ tights; again Jiggs thought, since it had been good the first time, “Jesus. Dont they open the graveyards until midnight either?” About the two of them now the newsboys hovered and screamed:
“Globe Stoytsman! Boinum boins!”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Burn to death on Thursday night or starve to death on Friday morning. So this is Moddy Graw. Why aint I where I have been all my life.” But the reporter continued to glare down at him in bright amazement.
“At the Terrebonne?” he said. “She told me this afternoon you all had some rooms down in French town. You mean to tell me that just because he won a little money this afternoon he has got to pick up and move over to the hotel this time of night when he ought to been in bed an hour ago so he can fly tomorrow?”
“I dont mean nothing, mister,” Jiggs said. “I just said I saw Roger and Laverne go into that hotel up the street a minute ago. I never asked them what for.—How about that cigarette?” The reporter gave it to him from the crumpled pack. Beyond the barricade of heads and shoulders, in the ceaseless rain of confetti, the floats moved past with an air esoteric, almost apocryphal, without inference of motion, like an inhabited archipelago putting out to sea on a floodtide. And now another newsboy, a new face, young, ageless, the teeth gaped raggedly as though he had found them one by one over a period of years about the streets, shrieked at them a new sentence like a kind of desperate ace:
“Laughing Boy in fit at Woishndon Poik!”
“Yair!” the reporter cried, glaring down at Jiggs. “Because you guys do
nt need to sleep. You aint human. I reckon the way he trains for a meet is to stay out on the town all the night before. Besides that—what was it?—thirty percent. of three hundred and twenty-five dollars he won this afternoon.—Come on,” he said. “We wont have to cross the street.”
“I thought you were going home so fast,” Jiggs said.
“Yair,” the reporter cried back over his shoulder, seeming not to penetrate the static human mass but to filter through it like a phantom, without alteration or diminution of bulk; now, turned sideways to cry back at Jiggs, passing between the individual bodies like a playingcard, he cried, “I have to sleep at night. I aint a racing pilot; I aint got an airplane to sleep in; I cant concentrate twenty-five miles of space at three miles an hour into six and a half minutes. Come on.” The hotel was not far and the side, the carriage, entrance was comparatively clear in the outfalling of light beneath a suave canopy with its lettered frieze: Hotel Terrebonne. Above this from a jackstaff hung an oilcloth painted tabard: Headquarters, American Aeronautical Association. Dedication Meet, Feinman Airport. “Yair,” the reporter cried, “they’ll be here. Here’s where to find guys that dont aim to sleep at the hotel. Yair; tiered identical cubicles of one thousand rented sleepings. And if you just got jack enough to last out the night you dont even have to go to bed.”
“Did what?” Jiggs said, already working over toward the wall beside the entrance. “Oh. Teared Q pickles. Yair; teared Q pickles of one thousand rented cunts if you got the jack too. I got the Q pickle all right. I got enough Q pickle for one thousand. And if I just had the jack too it wouldn’t be teared. How about another cigarette?” The reporter gave him another one from the crumpled pack. Jiggs now stood against the wall. “I’ll wait here,” he said.
“Come on in,” the reporter said. “They are bound to be here. It will be after midnight before they even find out that Grandlieu Street has been closed.……That’s a snappy pair of boots you got on there.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He looked down at his right foot again. “At least he wasn’t a football player or maybe driving a truck.—I’ll wait here. You can give me a call if Roger wants me.” The reporter went on; Jiggs stood again on his left leg and scrubbed at his right instep with his cap. “What a town,” he thought. “Where you got to wear a street closed sign on your back to walk around in it.”
“Because at least I am a reporter until one minute past ten tomorrow,” the reporter thought, mounting the shallow steps toward the lobby; “he said so himself. I reckon I will have to keep on being one until then. Because even if I am fired now, at this minute while I walk here, there wont be anybody for him to tell to take my name off the payroll until noon tomorrow. So I can tell him it was my conscience. I can call him from the hotel here and tell him my conscience would not let me go home and go to sleep.” He recoiled, avoiding here also the paperplumage, the parrotmask, a mixed party, whiskey-and-ginreeking, and then gone, leaving behind them the draggled cumulant hillocks of trampled confetti minching across the tile floor before the minching pans and brooms of paid monkeymen who for three nights now will do little else; they vanished, leaving the reporter for the instant marooned beside the same easelplat with which the town bloomed—the photographs of man and machine each above its neat legend:
Matt Ord, New Valois. Holder, World’s Land Plane Speed Record
Al Myers. Calexco Jimmy
Ott. Calexco
R.Q. Bullitt. Winner Graves Trophy, Miami, Fla
Lieut. Frank Burnham
And here also the cryptic shieldcaught (i n r i) loops of bunting giving an appearance temporary and tentlike to the interminable long corridor of machine plush and gilded synthetic plaster running between anonymous and rentable spaces or alcoves from sunrise to sunset across America, between the nameless faience womanface behind the phallic ranks of cigars and the stuffed chairs sentineled each by its spittoon and potted palm;—the congruous stripe of Turkeyred beneath the recentgleamed and homeless shoes running, on into an interval of implacable circumspection: a silent and discreet inference of lysol and a bath—billboard stage and vehicle for what in the old lusty days called themselves drummers: among the brass spittoons of elegance and the potted palms of decorum, legion homeless and symbolic: the immemorial flying buttresses of ten million American Saturday nights, with shrewd heads filled with tomorrow’s cosmic alterations in the form of pricelists and the telephone numbers of discontented wives and highschool girls. “Until time to take the elevator up and telephone the bellhop for gals,” the reporter thought. “Yair,” he thought, “tiered Q pickles of one thousand worn oftcarried phoenixbastions of rented cunts.” But the lobby tonight was crowded with more than these; already he saw them fallen definitely into two distinct categories: the one in Madison Avenue jackets, who perhaps once held transport ratings and perhaps still hold them, like the manufacturer who once wrote himself mechanic or clerk retains in the new chromiumGeddes sanctuary the ancient primary die or mimeograph machine with which he started out, and perhaps have now only the modest Q.B. wings which clip to the odorous lapel the temperate silk ribbon stencilled Judge or Official without the transport rating and perhaps the ribbon and the tweed but not even the wings; and the other with faces both sober and silent because they cannot drink tonight and fly tomorrow and have never learned to talk at any time, in blue serge cut apparently not only from the same bolt but folded at the same crease on the same shelf, who hold the severe transport rating and are here tonight by virtue of painfullydrummed chartertrips from a hundred little nameless bases known only to the Federal Department of Commerce, about the land and whose equipment consists of themselves and a mechanic and one aeroplane which is not new. The reporter thrust on among them, with that semblance of filtering rather than passing. “Yair,” he thought, “you dont need to look. It’s the smell, you can tell the bastards because they smell like pressingclubs instead of Harris tweed.” Then he saw her, standing beside a Spanish jar filled with sand pocked by chewinggum and cigarettes and burnt matches, in a brown worn hat and a stained trenchcoat from whose pocket protruded a folded newspaper. “Yah,” he thought, “because a trenchcoat will fit anybody and so they can have two of them and then somebody can always stay at home with the kid.” When he approached her she looked full at him for a moment, with pale blank complete unrecognition, so that while he crossed the crowded lobby toward her and during the subsequent three hours while at first he and she and Shumann and Jiggs, and later the little boy and the parachute jumper too, sat crowded in the taxicab while he watched the implacable meterfigures compound, he seemed to walk solitary and chill and without progress down a steel corridor like a fly in a gunbarrel, thinking “Yah, Hagood told me to go home and I never did know whether I intended to go or not. But Jiggs told me she would be at the hotel but I didn’t believe that at all”; thinking (while the irrevocable figures clicked and clicked beneath the dim insistent bulb and the child slept on his bony lap and the other four smoked the cigarettes which he had bought for them and the cab spun along the dark swampsmelling shell road out to the airport and then back to town again)—thinking how he had not expected to see her again because tomorrow and tomorrow do not count because that will be at the field, with air and earth full of snarling and they not even alive out there because they are not human. But not like this, in clad decorous attitudes that the police will not even look once at, in the human nightworld of halfpast ten oclock and then eleven and then twelve: and then behind a million separate secret closed doors we will slack ourselves profoundly defenseless on our backs, opened for the profound unsleeping, the inescapable and compelling flesh. Standing there beside the Pyrenæan chamberpot at twenty-two minutes past ten because one of her husbands flew this afternoon in a crate that three years ago was all right, that three years ago was so all right that ever since all the others have had to conjoin as one in order to keep it so that the word ‘race’ would still apply, so that now they cannot quit because if they once slow down they will be overreached and de
stroyed by their own spawning, like the Bornean whatsitsname that has to spawn running to keep from being devoured by its own litter. “Yah,” he thought, “standing there waiting so he can circulate in his blue serge suit and the other trenchcoat among the whiskey and the tweed when he ought to be at what they call home in bed except they aint human and dont have to sleep”; thinking how it seems that he can bear either of them, either one of them alone. “Yair,” he thought, “teared Q pickles of one thousand cuntless nights. They will have to hurry before anybody can go to bed with her,” walking straight into the pale cold blank gaze which waked only when he reached his hand and drew the folded paper from the trenchcoat’s pocket.
“Dempsey asleep, huh?” he said, opening the paper, the page which he could have recited offhand before he even looked at it:
BURNHAM BURNS
VALOISIAN CLAIMS LOVENEST FRAMEUP
Myers Easy Winner in Opener at Feinman Airport
Laughing Boy in Fifth at Washington Park
“No news is good newspaper news,” he said, folding the paper again. “Dempsey in bed, huh?”
“Yes,” she said. “Keep it. I’ve seen it.” Perhaps it was his face. “Oh, I remember. You work on a paper yourself. Is it this one? or did you tell me?”
“Yair,” he said. “I told you. No, it aint this one.” Then he turned too, though she had already spoken.
“This is the one that bought Jack the icecream today,” she said. Shumann wore the blue serge, but there was no trenchcoat. He wore a new gray homburg hat, not raked like in the department store cuts but set square on the back of his head so that (not tall, with blue eyes in a square thin profoundly sober face) he looked out not from beneath it but from within it with open and fatal humorlessness, like an early Briton who has been assured that the Roman governor will not receive him without he wear the borrowed centurion’s helmet; he looked at the reporter for a single unwinking moment even blanker than the woman’s had been.