“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 o’clock. 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 can’t. See? Just listen to me.”
“Sure you can quit,” Jiggs said. “Look. You done already quit. Ain’t you? See now?”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “But maybe it’s just free-wheeling.” He began to laugh again, and then Jiggs was leaning forward, slapping his thigh with the flat of the bootjack until he stopped.
“Now,” Jiggs said. “Pull.” The boot loosened, since it had already been worked at; Jiggs slipped it off. But when the left one came it gave way so suddenly that the reporter went over on his back, though this time he did not laugh; he lay there saying, “It’s O.K. I ain’t going to laugh.”
Then he was looking up at Jiggs standing over him in a pair of cotton socks which, like the home-made putties of the morning, consisted of legs and insteps only.
“Get up,” Jiggs said, lifting the reporter.
“All right,” the reporter said. “Just make the room stop.” He began to struggle to stay down, but Jiggs hauled him up and he leaned outward against the arms which held him on his feet, towards the couch, the cot.
“Wait till it comes around again,” he cried; then he lunged violently, sprawling on to the cot and then he could feel someone tumbling on to the cot and he struggled again to be free, saying thickly through a sudden, hot, violent, liquid mass in his mouth, “Look out! Look out! I’m on now. Let go!” Then he was free, though he could not move yet.
Then he saw Jiggs lying on the floor next the wall, his back to the room and his head pillowed on the canvas sack, and the parachute jumper at the slopped table, pouring from the jug.
The reporter got up, unsteadily, though he spoke quite distinctly: “Yair. That’s the old idea. Little drink, hey?” He moved towards the table, walking carefully, his face wearing again the expression of bright and desperate recklessness, speaking apparently in soliloquy to an empty room: “But nobody to drink with now.
Jiggs gone to bed and Roger gone to bed and Laverne can’t drink to-night because Roger won’t let her drink. See?” Now he looked at the jumper across the table, above the jug, the jam glasses, the dish-pan, with that bright dissolute desperation though he still seemed to speak into an empty room: “Yair.
It was Roger, see. Roger was the one that wouldn’t let her have anything to drink to-night, that took the glass out of her hand after a friend gave it to her. And so she and Roger have gone to bed. See?” They looked at one another.
“Maybe you wanted to go to bed with her yourself?” the jumper said. For a moment longer they looked at one another. The reporter’s face had changed. The bright recklessness was still there, but now it was overlaid with that abject desperation which, lacking anything better, is courage.
“Yes!” he cried. “Yes!” flinging himself backward and crossing his arms before his face at the same time. At first he did not even realize that it was only the floor which had struck him until he lay prone again, his arms above his face and head and looking between them at the feet of the parachute jumper who had not moved.
He watched the jumper’s hand go out and strike the lamp from the table and then when the crash died he could see nothing and hear nothing, lying on the floor perfectly and completely passive and waiting. “Jesus,” he said quietly, “for a minute I thought you were trying to knock the jug off.”
But there was no reply, and again his insides had set up that fierce maelstrom to which there was no focal point, not even himself. He lay motionless and waiting and felt the quick faint airblast and then the foot, the shoe, striking him hard in the side, once, and then he heard the jumper’s voice from above him speaking apparently from somewhere within the thick instability of the room, the darkness, whirling and whirling away, in a tone of quiet detachment saying the same words and in the same tone in which he had spoken them to Jiggs in the brothel six hours ago.
They seemed to continue, to keep on speaking, clapping quietly down at him even after he knew by sound that the jumper had gone to the cot and stretched out on it; he could hear the quiet savage movements as the other arranged the dusty pillows and drew the blanket up.
“That must be at least twelve times,” the reporter thought. “He must have called me a son of a bitch at least eight times after he went to sleep…. Yair,” he thought, “I told you. I’ll go, all right. But you will have to give me time, until I can get up and move….
Yair,” he thought, while the long vertiginous darkness completed a swirl more profound than any yet; now he felt the thick cold oil start and spring from his pores which, when his dead hand found his dead face, did not sop up nor wipe away beneath the hand but merely doubled as though each drop were the atom which instantaneously divides not only into two equal parts but into two parts each of which is equal to the recent whole; “yesterday I talked myself out of a job, but to-night I seem to have talked myself out of my own house.”
But at last he began to see: it was the dim shape of the window abruptly against some outer light-coloured space or air; vision caught, snagged and clung desperately and blindly like the pinafore of a child falling from a fence or a tree. On his hands and knees and still holding to the window by vision he found the table and got to his feet.
He remembered exactly where he had put the key, carefully beneath the edge of the lamp, but now with the lamp gone his still nerveless hand did not feel the key at all when he knocked it from the table; it was hearing alone: the forlorn faint clink.
He got down and found it at last and rose again, carefully, and wiped the key on the end of his necktie and laid it in the centre of the table, putting it down with infinite care as though it were a dynamite cap, and found one of the sticky glasses and poured from the jug by sound and feel and raised the glass, gulping, while the icy almost pure alcohol channelled fiercely down his chin and seemed to blaze through his cold wet shirt and on to and into his flesh. It tried to come back at once; he groped to the stairs and down them, swallowing and swallowing the vomit which tried to fill his throat.
There was something else that he had intended to do which he remembered only when the door clicked irrevocably behind him and the cold thick pre-dawn breathed against his damp shirt which had no coat to cover it and warm it.
And now he could not recall at once what he had intended to do, where he had intended to go, as though destination and purpose were some theoretical point like latitude or time which he had passed in the hall, or something like a stamped and forgotten letter in the coat which he had failed to bring.
Then he remembered; he stood on the cold flags, shaking with slow and helpless violence inside his wet shirt, remembering that he had started for the newspaper to spend the rest of the night on the floor of the now empty city room (he had done it before), having for the time forgotten that he was now fired. If he had been sober he would have tried the door, as people will, out of that vague hope for, even though not belief in, miracles.
But, drunk, he did not. He just began to move carefully away, steadying himself along the wall until he should get into motion, waiting to begin again to try to keep the vomit swallowed, thinking quietly out of peaceful and profound and detached desolation and amazement: “Four hours ago they were out and I was in, and now it’s turned around exactly backward.
It’s like there was a kind of cosmic rule for poverty like there is for water-level, like there has to be a certain weight of burns on park benches or in railroad waiting-rooms waiting for morning to come or the world will tilt up and spill all of us wild and shrieking and grabbing like so many shooting stars, off into nothing.”
But it would have to be a station, walls, even though he had long since surrendered to the shaking and felt no cold at all any more. There were two stations, but he had never walked
