“Nice race you flew in there today,” the reporter said.
“Yair?” Shumann said. Then he looked at the woman. The reporter looked at her too. She had not moved, yet she now stood in a more complete and somehow terrific immobility, in the stained trenchcoat, a cigarette burning in the grained and blackrimmed fingers of one hand, looking at Shumann with naked and urgent concentration. “Come on,” Shumann said. “Let’s go.” But she did not move.
“You didn’t get it,” she said. “You couldn’t—”
“No. They dont pay off until Saturday night,” Shumann said. (“Yah,” the reporter thought, clashing the tight hermetic door behind him as the automatic domelight came on; “ranked coffincubicles of dead tail; the Great American in one billion printings slavepostchained and scribble-scrawled: annotations of eternal electrodeitch and bottomhope.”)
“Deposit five cents for three minutes please,” the bland machinevoice chanted. The metal stalk sweatclutched, the guttapercha bloom cupping his breathing back at him, he listened, fumbled, counting as the discreet click and cling died into wirehum.
“That’s five,” he bawled. “Hear them? Five nickels. Now dont cut me off in three hundred and eighty-one seconds and tell me to——Hello,” he bawled, crouching, clutching the metal stalk as if he hung by it from the edge of a swimmingpool; “listen. Get this——Yair. At the Terrebonne——Yair, after midnight; I know. Listen. Chance for the goddamn paper to do something at last beside run our ass ragged between what Grandlieu Street kikes tell us to print in their half of the paper and tell you what you cant print in our half and still find something to fill the blank spaces under Connotator of the World’s Doings and Moulder of the Peoples’ Thought ha ha ha ha——”
“What?” the editor cried. “Terrebonne Hotel? I told you when you left here three hours ago to——”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “Almost three hours, that’s all. Just a taxi ride to get to the other side of Grandlieu Street first, and then out to the airport and back because they dont have but a hundred beds for visiting pilots out there and General Behindman needs all of them for his reception and so we come on back to the hotel because this is where they all are to tell him to come back Saturday night provided the bastard dont kill him tomorrow or Saturday. And you can thank whatever tutelary assscratcher you consider presides over the fate destiny and blunders of that office that me or somebody happened to come in here despite the fact that this is the logical place to find what we laughingly call news at ten oclock at night, what with half the airmeet proprietors getting drunk here and all of Mardi Gras done already got drunk here. And him that ought to been in bed three hours ago because he’s got to race again tomorrow only he cant race tomorrow because he cant go to bed yet because he hasn’t got any bed to go to bed in because they haven’t got any money to hire a place with a floor in it with because he only won thirty percent. of three hundred and twenty-five dollars this afternoon and to the guys that own an airmeet that aint no more than a borrowed umbrella and the parachute guy cant do them any good now because Jiggs collected his twenty bucks and——”
“What? What? Are you drunk?”
“No. Listen. Just stop talking a minute and listen. When I saw her out at the airport today they were all fixed up for the night like I tried to tell you but you said it was not news; yair, like you said, whether a man sleeps or not or why he cant sleep aint news but only what he does while he aint asleep, provided of course that what he does is what the guys that are ordained to pick and choose it consider news; yair, I tried to tell you but I’m just a poor bastard of an ambulancechaser: I aint supposed to know news when I see it at thirty-five bucks a week or I’d be getting more—Where was I? O yair.——had a room for tonight because they have been here since Wednesday and so they must have had somewhere that they could lock the door and take off some of their clothes or at least put the trenchcoat down and lay down themselves, because they had shaved somewhere: Jiggs has got a slash on his jaw that even at a barber college you dont get one like it; so they were all fixed up, only I never asked them what hotel because I knew it would not have a name, just a sign on the gallery post that the old man made on Saturday when his sciatica felt good enough for him to go down town only she wouldn’t let him leave until he made the sign and nailed it up: and so what was the use in me having to say ‘What street did you say? Where is that?’ because I aint a racing pilot, I am a reporter ha ha ha and so I would not know where these places are, Yair, all fixed up, and so he come in on the money this afternoon and I was standing there holding the kid and she says, ‘There.’ just like that: ‘There.’ and then I know that she has not moved during the whole six and a half minutes or maybe six and forty-nine-fifty-two ten thousandths or whatever the time was; she just says ‘There.’ like that and so it was o.k. even when he come in from the field with the ship and we couldn’t find Jiggs to help roll the ship into the hangar and he just says ‘Chasing a skirt, I guess’ and we put the ship away and he went to the office to get his one-O-seven-fifty and we stayed there waiting for the parachute guy to come down and he did and wiped the flour out of his eyes and says, ‘Where’s Jiggs?’ ‘Why?’ she says. ‘Why?’ he says. ‘He went to collect my money.’ and she says, ‘My God’——”
“Listen! Listen to me!” the editor cried. “Listen!”
“Yair, the mechanic. In a pair of britches that must have zippers so he can take them off at night like you would peel two bananas, and the tops of a pair of boots this afternoon, because tonight I dont get it, even when I see them;—rivetted under the insteps of a pair of tennis shoes. He collected the parachute guy’s twenty-five bucks for him while the parachute guy was still on the way back from work because the parachute guy gets twenty-five berries for the few seconds it takes except for the five bucks he has to pay the transport pilot to take him to the office you might say, and the eight cents a pound for the flour only today the flour was already paid for and so the whole twenty bucks was velvet. And Jiggs collected it and beat it because they owed him some jack and he thought that since Shumann had won the race that he would win the actual money too like the program said and not only be able to pay last night’s bill at the whore house where they——”
“Will you listen to me? Will you? Will you?”
“Yair; sure. I’m listening. So I come on to Grandlieu Street thinking about how you had told me to go home and wr—go home, and wondering how in hell you expected me to get across Grandlieu between then and midnight and all of a sudden I hear this excitement and cursing and it is Jiggs where some guy has stepped on his foot and put a scratch on one of them new boots, only I dont get it then. He just tells me he saw her and Shumann going into the Terrebonne because that was all he knew himself; I dont reckon he stayed to hear much when he beat it back to town with the parachute guy’s jack and bought the boots and then walked in with them on where they had just got in from the field where Shumann had tried to collect his one-O-seven-fifty and they wouldn’t pay him. So I couldn’t cross Grandlieu and so we walked on to the Terrebonne even though this is the last place in town a reporter’s got any business being at halfpast ten at night, what with all the airmeet getting drunk here, and half of Mardi Gras already—but never mind; I already told you that. So we come on over and Jiggs wont come in and still I dont get it, even though I had noticed the boots. So I come in and there she is, standing by this greaser chamberpot and the lobby full of drunk guys with ribbon badges and these kind of coats that look like they need a shave bad, and the guys all congratulating one another about how the airport cost a million dollars and how maybe in the three days more they could find out how to spend another million and make it balance; and he come up, Shumann come up, and her stiller than the pot even and looking at him and he says they dont pay off until Saturday and she says ‘Did you try? Did you try?’ Yair, trying to collect an installment on the hundred and seven bucks so they can go to bed, with the kid already asleep on the sofa in the madam’s room and the parachute guy w
aiting with him if he happened to wake up, and so they walked up to the hotel from Amboise Street because it aint far, they are both inside the city limits, to collect something on the money he was under the delusion he had won and I said ‘Amboise Street?’ because in the afternoon she just said they had a room down in French Town and she said ‘Amboise Street’ looking at me without batting an eye and if you dont know what kind of beddinghouses they have on Amboise Street your son or somebody ought to tell you: yair, you rent the bed and the two towels and furnish your own cover. So they went to Amboise Street and got a room; they always do that because in the Amboise Streets you can sleep tonight and pay tomorrow because a whore will leave a kid sleep on credit. Only they hadn’t paid for last night yet and so tonight they dont want to take up the bed again for nothing, what with the airmeet in town, let alone the natural course of Mardi Gras. So they left the kid asleep on the madam’s sofa and they come on to the hotel and Shumann said they dont pay off until Saturday and I said ‘Never mind; I got Jiggs outside’ and they never even looked at me. Because I hadn’t got it then that Jiggs had spent the money, you see: and so we went out to the taxi and Jiggs was still standing there against the wall and Shumann looked at him and says ‘You can come on too. If I could eat them I would have done it at dinnertime’ and Jiggs comes and gets in too, kind of sidling over and then ducking into the cab like it was a henhouse and hunkering down on the little seat with his feet under him and I still dont get it even yet, not even when Shumann says to him ‘You better find a manhole to stand in until Jack gets into the cab.’ So we got in and Shumann says ‘We can walk’ and I says ‘Where? Out to Lanier Avenue to get across Grandlieu?’ and so that was the first dollar-eighty and we eased up as soon as the door got unclogged a little; yair, they were having a rush; and we went in and there the kid was, awake now and eating a sandwich the madam had sent out for him, and the madam and a little young whore and the whore’s fat guy in his shirtsleeves and his galluses down, playing with the kid and the fat guy wanting to buy the kid a beer and the kid setting there and telling them how his old man flew the best pylon in America and Jiggs hanging back in the hall and jerking at my elbow until I could hear what he was whispering: ‘Say, listen. Find my bag and open it and you will find a pair of tennis shoes and a paper package that feels like it’s got a—a—well, a bootjack in it and hand them out to me, will you?’ and I says ‘What? A what in it?’ and then the parachute guy in the room says ‘Who’s that out there? Jiggs?’ and nobody answered and the parachute guy says ‘Come in here’ and Jiggs kind of edged into the door where the parachute guy could just see his face and the guy says ‘Come on’ and Jiggs edges a little further in and the guy says ‘Come on’ and Jiggs edges into the light then, with his chin between his shirt pockets and his head turned to one side and the guy looking him slow from feet to his head and then back again and says ‘The son of a bitch’ and the madam says ‘I think so myself. The idea of them dirty bastard kikes holding him up on a purchase of that size for just forty cents’ and the parachute guy says ‘Forty cents?’ Yair, it was like this. The boots was twenty-two-fifty. Jiggs paid down two dollars and a dime on them and he had to pay the parachute guy’s pilot five bucks and so he never had but twenty bucks left even when he beat the bus, and so he borrowed the forty cents from the madam; yair, he left the airport at five-thirty and did all that before the store closed at six; he got there just in time to stick one of the tennis shoes into the door before it shut. So we paid the madam and that was the next five-forty because the room for last night she just charged them three bucks for it because they set in her room so she could use the other one for business until midnight when the rush slacked up and so she just charged them three bucks just to use the room to sleep in and the other two bucks was busfare. And we had the kid and the parachute guy too now but the driver said it would be o.k. because it would be a long haul out to the airport, because the program said there was accommodations for a hundred visiting pilots out there and if there was more than two or three missing from the lobby of the Terrebonne it was because they was just lost and hadn’t come in yet, and besides you had told me you would fire me if I wasn’t out there at daylight tomorrow morning—no; today now—and it was eleven then, almost tomorrow then, and besides it would save the paper the cabfare for me back to town. Yair, that’s how I figured too because it seems like I aint used to airmeets either and so we took all the baggage, both of them and Jiggs’ mealsack too, and went out there and that was the next two dollars and thirty-five cents, only the kid was asleep again by that time and so maybe one of the dollars was Pullman extra fare. And there was a big crowd still there, standing around and looking at the air where this guy Burnham had flew in it and at the scorched hole in the field where he had flew in that too, and we couldn’t stay out there because they aint only got beds for a hundred visiting pilots and Colonel Feinman is using all of them for his reception. Yair, reception. You build the airport and you get some receptive women and some booze and you lock the entrances and the information and ticket windows and if they dont put any money into the tops of their stockings, it’s a reception. So they cant sleep out there and so we come on back to town and that’s the next two dollars and sixty-five cents because we left the first cab go and we had to telephone for another one and the telephone was a dime and the extra twenty cents was because we didn’t stop at Amboise Street, we come on to the hotel because they are still here and he can still ask them for his jack, still believing that air racing is a kind of sport or something run by men that have got time to stop at almost one oclock in the morning and count up what thirty percent. of three hundred and twenty-five dollars is and give it to him for no other reason than that they told him they would if he would do something first. And so now is the chance for this connotator of the world’s doings and molder of the people’s thought to——”
“Deposit five cents for three minutes please,” the bland machinevoice said. In the airless cuddy the reporter coin-fumbled, sweatclutching the telephone; again the discreet click and cling died into dead wirehum.
“Hello! Hello!” he bawled. “You cut me off; gimme my——” But now the buzzing on the editor’s desk had sounded again; now the interval out of outraged and apoplectic waiting: the wirehum clicked fullvoiced before the avalanched, the undammed:
“Fired! Fired! Fired! Fired!” the editor screamed. He leaned halfway across the desk beneath the greenshaded light, telephone and receiver clutched to him like a tackled halfback lying half across the goalline, as he had caught the instrument up; as, sitting bolt upright in the chair, his knuckles white on the arms and his teeth glinting under his lip while he glared at the telephone in fixed and waiting fury, he had sat during the five minutes since putting the receiver carefully back and waiting for the buzzer to sound again. “Do you hear me?” he screamed.
“Yair,” the reporter said. “Listen. I wouldn’t even bother with that son of a bitch Feinman at all; you can have the right guy paged right here in the lobby. Or listen. You dont even need to do that. All they need is just a few dollars to eat and sleep on until tomorrow; just call the desk and tell them to let me draw on the paper; I will just add the eleven-eighty I had to spend to——”
“WILL you listen to me?” the editor said. “Please! Will you?”
“—to ride out there and—.……Huh? Sure. Sure, chief. Shoot.”
The editor gathered himself again; he seemed to extend and lie a little further and flatter across the desk even as the back with the goal safe, tries for an extra inch while already downed; now he even ceased to tremble. “No,” he said; he said it slowly and distinctly. “No. Do you understand? NO.” Now he too heard only dead wirehum, as if the other end of it extended beyond atmosphere, into cold space; as though he listened now to the profound sound of infinity, of void itself filled with the cold unceasing murmur of aeonweary and unflagging stars. Into the round target of light a hand slid the first tomorrow’s galley: the stilldamp neat row of boxes which in the
paper’s natural order had no scarehead, containing, since there was nothing new in them since time began, likewise no alarm: —that crosssection out of timespace as though of a lightray caught by a speed lens for a second’s fraction between infinity and furious and trivial dust:
FARMERS REFUSE BANKERS DENY
STRIKERS DEMAND PRESIDENT’S YACHT
ACREAGE REDUCTION QUINTUPLETS GAIN
EX-SENATOR RENAUD CELEBRATES TENTH
ANNIVERSARY AS RESTAURATEUR
Now the wirehum came to life.
“You mean you wont——” the reporter said. “You aint going to——”
“No. No. I wont even attempt to explain to you why I will not or cannot. Now listen. Listen carefully. You are fired. Do you understand? You dont work for this paper. You dont work for anyone this paper knows. If I should learn tomorrow that you do, so help me God I will tear their advertisement out with my own hands. Have you a telephone at home?”
“No. But there’s one at the corner; I co——”
“Then go home. And if you call this office or this building again tonight I will have you arrested for vagrancy. Go home.”
“All right, chief. If that’s how you feel about it, O.K. We’ll go home; we got a race to fly tomorrow, see?—Chief! Chief!”
“Yes?”
“What about my eleven-eighty? I was still working for you when I sp——”
Night in the Vieux Carré
Now they could cross Grandlieu Street; there was traffic in it now; to clash and clang of light and bell trolley and automobile crashed and glared across the intersection, rushing in a light curbchanneled spindrift of tortured and draggled serpentine and trodden confetti pending the dawn’s whitewings—spent tinseldung of Momus’ Nilebarge clatterfalque; ordered and marked by light and bell and carrying the two imitationleather bags and the drill mealsack they could now cross, the four others watching the reporter who, the little boy still asleep on his shoulder, stood at the extreme of the curbedge’s channelbrim, in poised and swooping immobility like a scarecrow weathered gradually out of the earth which had supported it erect and intact and now poised for the first light vagrant air to blow it into utter dissolution. He translated himself into a kind of flapping gallop, gaining fifteen or twenty feet on the others before they could move, passing athwart the confronting glares of automobiles apparently without contact with earth like one of those apocryphal nighttime batcreatures whose nest or home no man ever saw, which are seen only in midswoop caught for a second in a lightbeam between nothing and nowhere. “Somebody take Jack from him,” the woman said. “I am afr——”