“Well, mister,” he said, “I guess you heard him about as plain as I did.”
“No matter,” Hagood said. “You come down.”
“Me?”
“Yes!” Hagood shouted. “You!” So he stood in the alley and watched the other go back into the room which he himself had never seen. He had never before been closer to what the reporter who had worked directly under him for twenty months now called home than the file form which the reporter had filled out on the day he joined the paper. That room, that apartment which the reporter called bohemian, he had hunted down in this section of New Valois’s vieux carré and then hunted down piece by piece the furniture which cluttered it, with the eager and deluded absorption of a child hunting colored easter eggs. It was a gaunt cavern roofed like a barn, with scuffed and worn and even rotted floorboards and scrofulous walls and cut into two uneven halves, bedroom and studio, by an old theatre curtain and cluttered with slovenlymended and useless tables draped with imitation batik bearing precarious lamps made of liquorbottles, and other objects of oxidised metal made for what original purpose no man knew, and hung with more batik and machinemade Indian blankets and indecipherable basrelief plaques vaguely religio-Italian primitive. It was filled with objects whose desiccated and fragile inutility bore a kinship to their owner’s own physical being as though he and they were all conceived in one womb and spawned in one litter—objects which possessed that quality of veteran prostitutes: of being overlaid by the ghosts of so many anonymous proprietors that even the present titleholder held merely rights but no actual possession—a room apparently exhumed from a theatrical morgue and rented intact from one month to the next.
One day, it was about two months after the reporter had joined the paper without credentials or any past, documentary or hearsay, at all, with his appearance of some creature evolved by forced draft in a laboratory and both beyond and incapable of any need for artificial sustenance, like a tumbleweed, with his eager doglike air and his child’s aptitude for being not so much where news happened exactly but for being wherever were the most people at any given time rushing about the vieux carré for his apartment and his furniture and the decorations—the blankets and batik and the objects which he would buy and fetch into the office and then listen with incorrigible shocked amazement while Hagood would prove to him patiently how he had paid two or three prices for them;—one day Hagood looked up and watched a woman whom he had never seen before enter the city room. “She looked like a locomotive,” he told the paper’s owner later with bitter outrage. “You know: when the board has been devilled and harried by the newsreels of Diesel trains and by the reporters that ask them about the future of railroading until at last the board takes the old engine, the one that set the record back in nineteen-two or nineteen-ten or somewhere and sends it to the shops and one day they unveil it (with the newsreels and the reporters all there, too) with horseshoe rose wreaths and congressmen and thirty-six high-school girls out of the beauty show in bathing suits, and it is a new engine on the outside only, because everyone is glad and proud that inside it is still the old fast one of nineteen-two or -ten. The same number is on the tender and the old fine, sound, timeproved workingparts, only the cab and the boiler are painted robin’segg blue and the rods and the bell look more like gold than gold does and even the supercharger dont look so very noticeable except in a hard light, and the number is in neon now: the first number in the world to be in neon?” He looked up from his desk and saw her enter on a blast of scent as arresting as mustard gas and followed by the reporter looking more than ever like a shadow whose projector had eluded it weeks and weeks ago—the fine big bosom like one of the walled impervious towns of the middleages whose origin antedates writing, which have been taken and retaken in uncountable fierce assaults which overran them in the brief fury of a moment and vanished, leaving no trace, the broad tomatocolored mouth, the eyes pleasant shrewd and beyond mere disillusion, the hair of that diamondhard and imperviously recent luster of a gilt service in a shopwindow, the goldstudded teeth square and white and big like those of a horse—all seen beneath a plump rich billowing of pink plumes so that Hagood thought of himself as looking at a canvas out of the vernal equinox of pigment when they could not always write to sign their names to them—a canvas conceived in and executed out of that fine innocence of sleep and open bowels capable of crowning the rich foul unchaste earth with rosy cloud where lurk and sport oblivious and incongruous cherubim. “I just dropped into town to see who he really works for,” she said. “May I—Thanks.” She took the cigarette from the pack on the desk before he could move, though she did wait for him to strike and hold the match. “And to ask you to sort of look out for him. Because he is a fool, you see. I dont know whether he is a newspaperman or not. Maybe you dont know yet, yourself. But he is the baby.” Then she was gone—the scent, the plumes; the room which had been full of pink vapor and golden teeth darkened again, became niggard—and Hagood thought, “Baby of what?” because the reporter had told him before and now assured him again that he had neither brothers nor sisters, that he had no ties at all save the woman who had passed through the city room and apparently through New Valois too without stopping, with something of that aura of dwarfed distances and selfsufficient bulk of a light cruiser passing through a canallock, and the incredible name. “Only the name is right,” the reporter told him. “Folks dont always believe it at first, but it’s correct as far as I know.”—“But I thought she said her name was —” and Hagood repeated the name the woman had given. “Yair,” the reporter said. “It is now.”—“You mean she has—” Hagood said. “Yair,” the reporter said. “She’s changed it twice since I can remember. They were both good guys, too.” So then Hagood believed that he saw the picture—the woman not voracious, not rapacious; just omnivorous like the locomotive’s maw of his late symbology; he told himself with savage disillusion, Yes. Come here to see just who he really worked for. What she meant was she came here to see that he really had a job and whether or not he was going to keep it. He believed now that he knew why the reporter cashed his paycheck before leaving the building each Saturday night; he could almost see the reporter, running now to reach the postoffice station before it closed—or perhaps the telegraph office; in the one case the flimsy blue strip of money order, in the other the yellow duplicate receipt—so that on that first midweek night when the reporter opened the subject diffidently, Hagood set a precedent out of his own pocket which he did not break for almost a year, cursing the big woman whom he had seen but once, who had passed across the horizon of his life without stopping yet forever after disarranging it, like the airblast of the oblivious locomotive crossing a remote and trashfilled suburban street. But he said nothing until the reporter came and requested a loan twice the size of an entire week’s pay, and even then he did not open the matter; it was his face which caused the reporter to explain; it was for a weddingpresent. “A wedding-present?” Hagood said. “Yair,” the reporter said. “She’s been good to me. I reckon I better send her something, even if she wont need it.”—“Wont need it?” Hagood cried. “No. She wont need what I could send her. She’s always been lucky that way.”—“Wait,” Hagood said. “Let me get this straight. You want to buy a weddingpresent. I thought you told me you didn’t have any sisters or br——”—“No,” the reporter said. “It’s for mamma.”—“Oh,” Hagood said after a time, though perhaps it did not seem very long to the reporter; perhaps it did not seem long before Hagood spoke again: “I see. Yes. Am I to congratulate you?”—“Thanks,” the reporter said. “I dont know the guy. But the two I did know were o.k.”—“I see,” Hagood said. “Yes. Well. Married. The two you did know. Was one of them your——But no matter. Dont tell me. Dont tell me!” he cried. “At least it is something. Anyway, she did what she could for you!” Now it was the reporter looking at Hagood with courteous interrogation. “It will change your life some now,” Hagood said. “Well, I hope not,” the reporter said. “I dont reckon she has done any worse
this time than she used to. You saw yourself she’s still a finelooking old gal and a good goer still, even if she aint any longer one of the ones you will find in the dance marathons at six a.m. So I guess it’s o.k. still. She always has been lucky that way.”—“You hope.……” Hagood said. “You.……Wait,” he said. He took a cigarette from the pack on the desk, though at last the reporter himself leaned and struck the match for him and held it. “Let me get this straight. You mean you haven’t been.……that that money you borrowed from me, that you send.……”—“Send what where?” the reporter said after a moment. “Oh, I see. No. I aint sent her money. She sends me money. And I dont reckon that just getting married again will——” Hagood did not even sit back in the chair. “Get out of here!” he screamed. “Get out! Out!” For a moment longer the reporter looked down at him with that startled interrogation, then he turned and retreated. But before he had cleared the railing around the desk Hagood was calling him back in a voice hoarse and restrained; he returned to the desk and watched the editor snatch from a drawer a pad of note forms and scrawl on the top one and thrust pad and pen toward him. “What’s this, chief?” the reporter said. “It’s a hundred and eighty dollars,” Hagood said in that tense careful voice, as though speaking to a child. “With interest at six percent. per annum and payable at sight. Not even on demand: on sight. Sign it.”—“Jesus,” the reporter said. “Is it that much already?”—“Sign it,” Hagood said. “Sure, chief,” the reporter said. “I never did mean to try to beat you out of it.”
“So that’s his name,” Jiggs said. “That what?”
“That nothing!” Hagood said. They stood side by side on the old uneven flags which the New Valoisians claim rang more than once to the feet of the pirate Lafitte, looking up toward the window and the loud drunken voice beyond it. “It’s his last name. Or the only name he has except the one initial as far as I or anyone else in this town knows. But it must be his; I never heard of anyone else named that and so no one intelligent enough to have anything to hide from would deliberately assume it. You see? Anyone, even a child, would know it is false.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Even a kid wouldn’t be fooled by it.” They looked up at the window.
“I know his mother,” Hagood said. “Oh, I know what you are thinking. I thought the same thing myself when I first saw him: what anyone would think if he were to begin to explain where and when and why he came into the world, like what you think about a bug or a worm: ‘All right! All right! For God’s sake, all right!’ And now he has doubtless been trying ever since, I think it was about half past twelve, to get drunk and I daresay successfully.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “You’re safe there. He’s telling Jack how to fly, about how Matt Ord gave him an hour’s dual once. About how when you takeoff and land on them concrete Fs out at the airport he says it’s like flying in and out of a, organization maybe; he said organization or organasm but maybe he never knew himself what he was trying to say; something about a couple of gnats hanging around a couple of married elephants in bed together like they say it takes them days and days and even weeks to get finished. Yair, him and Jack both, because Laverne and Roger have gone to bed in the bed with the kid and so maybe him and Jack are trying to get boiled enough to sleep on the floor, because Jesus, he spent enough on that taxi to have taken us all to the hotel. But nothing would do but we must come home with him; yair, he called it a house too; and on the way he rushes into this dive and rushes out with a gallon of something that he is hollering is absinth only I never drank any absinth but I could have made him all he wanted of it with a bathtub and enough grain alcohol and a bottle of paregoric or maybe it’s laudanum. But you can come up and try it yourself. Besides, I better get on back; I am kind of keeping an eye on him and Jack, see?”
“Watching them?” Hagood said.
“Yair. It wont be no fight though; like I told Jack, it would be like pushing over your grandmother. It happened that Jack kept on seeing him and Laverne this afternoon standing around on the apron or coming out of the——” Hagood turned upon Jiggs.
“Do I,” Hagood cried with thin outrage, “do I have to spend half my life listening to him telling me about you people and the other half listening to you telling me about him?” Jiggs’ mouth was still open; he closed it slowly; he looked at Hagood steadily with his hot bright regard, his hands on his hips, lightpoised on his bronco legs, leaning a little forward.
“You dont have to listen to anything I can tell you if you dont want to, mister,” he said. “You called me down here. I never called you. What is it you want with me or him?”
“Nothing!” Hagood said. “I only came here in the faint hope that he would be in bed, or at least sober enough to come to work tomorrow.”
“He says he dont work for you. He says you fired him.”
“He lied!” Hagood cried. “I told him to be there at ten oclock tomorrow morning. That’s what I told him.”
“Is that what you want me to tell him, then?”
“Yes! Not tonight. Dont try to tell him tonight. Wait until tomorrow, when he.……You can do that much for your night’s lodging, cant you?” Again Jiggs looked at him with that hot steady speculation.
“Yair. I’ll tell him. But it wont be just because I am trying to pay him back for what he done for us tonight. See what I mean?”
“I apologise,” Hagood said. “But tell him. Do it anyway you want to, but just tell him, see that he is told before he leaves here tomorrow. Will you?”
“O.K.,” Jiggs said. He watched the other turn and go back down the alley, then he turned too and entered the house, the corridor, and mounted the cramped dark treacherous stairs and into the drunken voice again. The parachute jumper sat on an iron cot disguised thinly by another Indian blanket and piled with bright faded pillows about which dust seemed to lurk in a thin nimbuscloud even at the end of the couch which the jumper had not disturbed. The reporter stood beside a slopped table on which the gallon jug sat and a dishpan containing now mostly dirty icewater, though a few fragments of the actual ice still floated in it. He was in his shirtsleeves, his collar open and the knot of his tie slipped downward and the ends of the tie darkly wet, as if he had leaned them downward into the dishpan; against the bright vivid even though machinedyed blanket on the wall behind him he resembled some slain curious trophy of a western vacation half finished by a taxidermist and then forgotten and then salvaged again.
“Who was it?” he said. “Did he look like if you would want to see him right after supper on Friday night you would have to go around to the church annex where the boy scouts are tripping one another up from behind?”
“What?” Jiggs said. “I guess so.” Then he said, “Yair. That’s him.” The reporter looked at him, holding in his hand a glass such as chainstore jam comes in.
“Did you tell him I was married? Did you tell him I got two husbands now?”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “How about going to bed?”
“Bed?” the reporter cried. “Bed? When I got a widowed guest in the house that the least thing I can do for him is to get drunk with him because I cant do anything else because I am in the same fix he is only I am in this fix all the time and not just tonight?”
“Sure,” Jiggs said. “Let’s go to bed.” The reporter leaned against the table and with his bright reckless face he watched Jiggs go to the bags in the corner and take from the stained canvas sack a paperwrapped parcel and open it and take out a brandnew bootjack; he watched Jiggs sit on one of the chairs and try to remove the right boot; then at the sound he turned and looked with that bright speculation at the parachute jumper completely relaxed on the cot, his long legs crossed and extended, laughing at Jiggs with vicious and humorless steadiness. Jiggs sat on the floor and extended his leg toward the reporter. “Give it a yank,” he said.
“Sure,” the jumper said. “We’ll give it a yank for you.” The reporter had already taken hold of the boot; the jumper struck him aside with a backhanded blow. Th
e reporter staggered back into the wall and watched the jumper, his handsome face tense and savage in the lamplight, his teeth showing beneath the slender moustache, take hold of the boot and then lift his foot suddenly toward Jiggs’ groin before Jiggs could move. The reporter half fell into the jumper, jolting him away so that the jumper’s foot only struck Jiggs’ turned flank.
“Here!” he cried. “You aint playing!”
“Playing?” the jumper said. “Sure I’m playing. That’s all I do—like this.” The reporter did not see Jiggs rise from the floor at all; he just saw Jiggs in midbounce, as though he had risen with no recourse to his legs at all, and Jiggs’ and the jumper’s hands flick and lock as with the other hand Jiggs now hurled the reporter back into the wall.
“Quit it, now,” Jiggs said. “Look at him. What’s the fun in that, huh?” He looked back over his shoulder at the reporter. “Go to bed,” he said. “Go on, now. You got to be at work at ten oclock. Go on.” The reporter did not move. He leaned back against the wall, his face fixed in a thin grimace of smiling as though glazed. Jiggs sat on the floor again, his right leg extended again, holding it extended between his hands. “Come on,” he said. “Give them a yank.” The reporter took hold of the boot and pulled; abruptly he too was sitting on the floor facing Jiggs, listening to himself laughing. “Hush,” Jiggs said. “Do you want to wake up Roger and Laverne and the kid? Hush now. Hush.”
“Yair,” the reporter whispered. “I’m trying to quit. But I cant. See? Just listen at me.”
“Sure you can quit,” Jiggs said. “Look. You done already quit. Aint you? See now?”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “But maybe it’s just freewheeling.” He began to laugh again, and then Jiggs was leaning forward, slapping his thigh with the flat of the bootjack until he stopped.