“Of him?” the parachute jumper said, carrying one of the bags, his other hand under her elbow. “A guy would no more hit him than he would a glass barber pole. Or a paper sack of empty beer bottles in the street.”
“He might fall down, though, and cut the kid all to pieces,” Jiggs said. Then he said (it was still good, it pleased him no less even though this was the third time): “When he gets to the other side he might find out that they have opened the cemetery, too, and that would not be so good for Jack.”
He handed the sack to Shumann and passed the woman and the jumper, stepping quick on his short bouncing legs, the boots twinkling in the aligned tense immobility of the head-lights and overtook the reporter and reached up for the boy. “Gimme,” he said. The reporter glared down at him without stopping, with a curious glazed expression like that of one who has not slept much lately.
“I got him,” he said. “He ain’t heavy.”
“Yair; sure,” Jiggs said, dragging the still sleeping boy down from the other’s shoulder like a bolt of wing fabric from a shelf as they stepped together on to the other kerb. “But you want to have your mind free to find the way home.”
“Yair,” the reporter cried. They paused, turning, waiting for the others; the reporter glared down with that curious dazed look at Jiggs who carried the boy now with no more apparent effort than he had carried the aeroplane’s tail, half-turned also, balanced like a short pair of tailor’s shears stuck lightly upright into the table-top, leaning a little forward like a dropped bowie-knife.
The other three still walked in the street — the woman who somehow even contrived to wear the skirt beneath the sexless trench-coat as any one of the three men would; the tall parachute jumper with his handsome face now wearing an expression of sullen speculation; and Shumann behind them, in the neat serge suit and the new hat which even yet had the appearance of resting, exactly as the machine had stamped and moulded it, on the hat-block in the store — the three of them with that same air which in Jiggs was merely oblivious and lightly worn insolvency but which in them was that irrevocable homelessness of three immigrants walking down the steerage gang-plank of a ship.
As the woman and the parachute jumper stepped on to the kerb, light and bell clanged again and merged into the rising gear-whine as the traffic moved; Shumann sprang forward and on to the kerb with a stiff light movement of unbelievable and rigid celerity, without a hair’s abatement of expression or hat-angle.
Again, behind them now, the light harried spindrift of tortured confetti and serpentine rose from the gutter in sucking gusts. The reporter glared at them all now with his dazed, strained and urgent face. “The bastards!” he cried. “The son of a bitches!”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Which way now?” For an instant longer the reporter glared at them. Then he turned, as though put into motion not by any spoken word but by the sheer solid weight of their patient and homeless passivity, into the dark mouth of the street now so narrow of kerb that they followed in single file, walking beneath a shallow overhang of iron-grilled balconies.
The street was empty, unlighted save by the reflection from Grandlieu Street behind them, smelling of mud and of something else richly anonymous somewhere between coffee grounds and bananas. Looking back Jiggs tried to spell out the name, the letters inletted into the kerb edge in tile-blurred mosaic, unable to discern at once that it was not only a word, a name which he had neither seen nor heard in his life, but that he was looking at it upside down. “Jesus,” he thought, “it must have took a Frenchman to be polite enough to call this a street, let alone name it.”
Carrying the sleeping boy on his shoulder he was followed in turn by the three others, the four of them hurrying quietly after the hurrying reporter as though Grandlieu Street and its light and movement were Lethe itself just behind them and they four shades this moment out of the living world and being hurried, grave, quiet and unalarmed, on towards complete oblivion by one not only apparently long enough in residence to have become a citizen of the shadows, but one who from all outward appearances had been born there, too.
The reporter was still talking, but they did not appeal to hear him, as though they had arrived too recently to have yet unclogged their ears of human speech in order to even hear the tongue in which the guide spoke. Now he stopped again, turning upon them again his wild, urgent face.
It was another intersection — two narrow roofless tunnels like exposed mine galleries marked by two pale one-way arrows which seemed to have drawn to themselves and to hold in faint suspension what light there was. Then Jiggs saw that to the left the street ran into something of light and life — a line of cars along the kerb beneath an electric sign, a name, against which the shallow dark grill-work of the eternal balconies hung in weightless and lace-like silhouette.
This time Jiggs stepped from the kerb and spelled out the street’s name. “Toulouse,” he spelled. “Too loose,” he thought. “Yair. Swell. Our house last night must have got lost on the way home.” So at first he was not listening to the reporter, who now held them immobile in a tableau reminiscent (save for his hat) of the cartoon pictures of city anarchists; Jiggs looked up only to see him rushing away towards the lighted sign. They all looked, watching the thin, long, bat-like shape as it fled on.
“I don’t want anything to drink,” Shumann said. “I want to go to bed.” The parachute jumper put his hand into the pocket of the woman’s trench-coat and drew out a pack of cigarettes, the third of those which the reporter had bought before they left the hotel the first time. He lit one and jetted smoke viciously from his nostrils.
“I heard you tell him that,” he said.
“Booze?” Jiggs said. “Jesus, is that what he was trying to tell us?” They watched the reporter, the gangling figure in the flapping suit running loosely towards the parked cars. They saw the newsboy emerge from somewhere, the paper already extended and then surrendered, the reporter scarcely pausing to take it and pay.
“That’s the second one he has bought to-night since we met him,” Shumann said. “I thought he worked on one.” The parachute jumper inhaled and jetted the vicious smoke again.
“Maybe he can’t read his own writing,” he said. The woman moved abruptly; she came to Jiggs and reached for the little boy.
“I’ll take him awhile,” she said. “You and whatever his name is have carried him all evening.” But before Jiggs could even release the boy the parachute jumper came and took hold of the boy, too. The woman looked at him. “Get away, Jack,” she said.
“Get away yourself,” the jumper said. He lifted the boy from both of them, not gentle and not rough. “I’ll take him. I can do this much for my board and keep.” He and the woman looked at one another across the sleeping boy.
“Laverne,” Shumann said, “give me one of the cigarettes.” The woman and the jumper looked at one another.
“What do you want?” she said. “Do you want to walk the streets to-night? Do you want Roger to sit in the railroad station to night and then expect to win a race to-morrow? Do you want Jack to..
“Did I say anything?” the jumper said. “I don’t like his face. But all right about that. That’s my business. But did I say anything? Did I?”
“Laverne,” Shumann said, “give me that cigarette.” But it was Jiggs who moved; he went to the jumper and took the child from him.
“Jesus, gimme,” he said. “You never have learned how to carry him.” From somewhere among the dark, dead, narrow streets there came a sudden burst of sound, of revelry: shrill, turgid, wall-muted, as though emerging from beyond a low doorway or from a cave — some place airless and filled with smoke.
Then they saw the reporter. He appeared from beneath the electric sign, emerging from a tile-floored and walled cavern containing nothing, like an incomplete gymnasium shower-room, and lined with two rows of discreet and curtained booths, from one of which a faun-faced waiter with a few stumps of rotting teeth had emerged and recognized him.
“Listen,” the reporter had said. “I want a gallon of absinth. You know what kind. I want it for some friends, but I am going to drink it, too, and besides they ain’t Mardi Gras tourists. You tell Pete that. You know what I mean?”
“Sure, mike,” the waiter said. He turned and went on to the rear and so into a kitchen, where at a zinc-covered table a man in a silk shirt, with a shock of black curls, eating from a single huge dish, looked up at the waiter with a pair of eyes like two topazes while the waiter repeated the reporter’s name. “He says he wants it good,” the waiter said in Italian. “He has friends with him. I guess I will have to give him gin.”
“Absinth?” the other said, also in Italian. “Fix him up. Why not?”
“He said he wanted the good.”
“Sure. Fix him up. Call mamma.” He went back to eating. The
