“Send what where?” the reporter said after a moment. “Oh, I see. No. I ain’t sent her money. She sends me money. And I don’t 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 towards 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 per cent, 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.”
But that was eighteen months ago; now Hagood and Jiggs 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 towards the window and the loud drunken voice beyond it.
“So that’s his name,” Jiggs said. “That what?”
“That nothing!” Hagood said. “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 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 take off 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 organism 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 bath tub 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 won’t 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 hand on his hips, light poised on his bronco legs, leaning a little forward.
“You don’t have to listen to anything I can tell you if you don’t 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 to-morrow.”
“He says he don’t work for you. He says you fired him.”
“He lied!” Hagood cried. “I told him to be there at ten o’clock to-morrow morning. That’s what I told him.”
“Is that what you want me to tell him, then?”
“Yes! Not to-night. Don’t try to tell him to-night. Wait until to-morrow, when he…You can do that much for your night’s lodging, can’t you?” Again Jiggs looked at him with that hot steady speculation.
“Yair. I’ll tell him. But it won’t be just because I am trying to pay him back for what he done for us to-night. See what I mean?”
“I apologize,” Hagood said. “But tell him. Do it any way you want to, but just tell him, see that he is told before he leaves to-morrow. 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 nimbus cloud 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 dish-pan containing now mostly dirty ice-water, though a few fragments of the actual ice still floated in it. He was in his shirt sleeves, 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 dish-pan; against the bright, vivid even though machine-dyed 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 wanted 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 chain-store 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 and the least thing I can do for him is to get drunk with him because I can’t do anything else because I am in the same fix he is only I am in this fix all the time and not j just to-night?”
“Sure,” Jiggs said. “Let’s go to bed.” The reporter leaned against the table and with his bright reckless face he watched j Jiggs go to the bags in the corner and take from the stained canvas sack a paper-wrapped parcel and open it and take out a brand-new 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 humourless steadiness. Jiggs sat on the floor and extended his leg towards 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 back-handed blow. The 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 towards 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 ain’t 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 mid-bounce, 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
