“How in hell would I get the strap on the outside of the shoes if I didn’t?” Jiggs said. “You ought to know what become of him; you wasn’t drunk last night, were you? I told his boss I would—”
“Yair,” Shumann said. “Go back and wash.” With his legs drawn under him to rise Jiggs paused and glanced at his hands for an instant.
“I washed good at the hotel last night,” he said. He began to rise, then he stopped and took from the floor a half-smoked cigarette and bounced up, already reaching into his shirt pocket as he came up facing the table. With the stub in his mouth and the match in his hand, he paused.
On the table, amid the stained litter of glasses and matches burnt and not burnt and ashes which surrounded the jug and the dish-pan, lay a pack of cigarettes, another of those which the reporter had bought last night. Jiggs put the stub in his shirt pocket and reached for the pack. “Jesus,” he said, “during the last couple months I have got to where a whole cigarette ain’t got any kick to it.”
Then his hand paused again, but for less than a watch-tick, and Shumann watched it go on to the jug’s neck while the other hand broke free from the table’s sticky top the glass from which the reporter had drunk in the darkness.
“Leave that stuff alone,” Shumann said. He looked at the blunt watch on his naked wrist. “It’s twenty to nine. Let’s get out of here.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, pouring into the glass. “Get your clothes on; let’s go check them valves. Jesus, I told the guy’s boss I would…. Say, I found out last night what his name is. Jesus, you wouldn’t never guess in—” He stopped; he and Shumann looked at one another.
“Off again, huh?” Shumannn said.
“I’m going to take one drink that I saved out from last night to take this morning. Didn’t you just say let’s get out to the field? How in hell am I going to get anything to drink out there, even if I wanted it, when for Christ’s sake the only money I have had in three months I was accused of stealing? When the only guy that’s offered me a drink in three months we took both his beds away from him and left him the floor to sleep on and now we never even kept up with him enough to deliver a message from his boss where he is to go to work—”
“One drink, huh?” Shumann said. “There’s a slop jar back there; why not get it and empty the jug into it and take a good bath?” He turned away. Jiggs watched him lift the curtain aside and pass beyond it. Then Jiggs began to raise the glass, making already the preliminary grimace and shudder, when he paused again.
This time it was the key, where the reporter had carefully placed it and beside which Shumann had set the broken lamp which he had raised from the floor. Touching the key, Jiggs found it, too, vulcanized lightly to the table’s top by spilt liquor.
“He must be here, then,” he said. “But for Christ’s sake where?” He looked about the room again; suddenly he went to the couch and lifted the tumbled blanket and looked under the cot. “He must be somewheres though,” he thought. “Maybe behind the baseboard.
Jesus, he wouldn’t make no more bulge behind it than a snake would.” He went back to the table and raised the glass again; this time it was the woman and the little boy. She was dressed, the trench-coat belted; she gave the room a single pale comprehensive glance, then she looked at him, brief, instantaneous, blank. “Drinking a little breakfast,” he said.
“You mean supper,” she said. “You’ll be asleep in two hours.”
“Did Roger tell you we have mislaid the guy?” he said.
“Go on and drink it,” she said. “It’s almost nine o’clock. We have got to pull all those valves to-day.” But again he did not get the glass to his mouth. Shumann was also dressed now. Across the arrested glass Jiggs watched the jumper go to the bags and jerk them and then the boots out into the floor and then turn upon Jiggs, snarling:
“Go on. Drink it.”
“Don’t either of them know where he went?” the woman said. “I don’t know,” Shumann said. “They say they don’t.”
“I told you No,” the jumper said. “I didn’t do anything to him. He flopped down there on the floor and I put the light out and went to bed and Roger woke me up and he was gone and it’s damned high time we were doing the same thing if we are going to get those valves miked and back in the engine before three o’clock.”
“Yair,” Shumann said, “he can find us if he wants us. We are easier, for him to find than he is for us to find.” He took one of the bags; the jumper already had the other. “Go on,” he said, without looking at Jiggs. “Drink it and come on.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Let’s get started.” He drank now and set the glass down while the others moved towards the stairs and began to descend. Then he looked at his hands; he looked at them as if he had just discovered he had them and had not yet puzzled out what they were for. “Jesus, I had better wash,” he said. “You all go ahead; I’ll catch you before you get to the bus stop.”
“Sure; to-morrow,” the jumper said. “Take the jug too. No; leave it. If he’s going to lay around drunk all day long too, better here than out there in the way.” He was last; he kicked the boots savagely out of his path. “What are you going to do with these — carry them in your hands?”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Until I get them paid for.”
“Paid for? I thought you did that yesterday, with my—”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “So I did.”
“Come on, come on,” Shumann said from the stairs. “Go on, Laverne.” The jumper went on to the stairs, Shumann now herded them all before him. Then he paused and looked back at Jiggs, dressed, neat, profoundly serious beneath the new hat which Jiggs might still have been looking at through plate glass. “Listen,” he said. “Are you starting out on a bat to-day? I ain’t trying to stop you because I know I can’t, I have tried that before. I just want you to tell me so I can get somebody else to help Jack and me pull those valves.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” Jiggs said. “Jesus, don’t I know we are in a jam as well as you do? You all go on; I’ll wash up and catch you before you get to Main Street.” They went on; Shumann’s bat sank from sight.
Then Jiggs moved with rubber-soled and light celerity. He caught up the boots and passed on beyond the curtain and into a cramped alcove hung with still more blankets and pieces of frayed and faded dyed or painted cloth enigmatic of significance and inscrutable of purpose, and containing a chair, a table, a washstand, a chest of drawers bearing a celluloid comb and two ties such as might be salvaged from a trashbin but for the fact that anyone who would have salvaged them would not wear ties, and a bed neatly made up, so neatly restored that it shouted the fact that it had been recently occupied by a woman who did not live there.
Jiggs went to the washstand but it was not his hands and face that he bathed. It was the boots, examining with grim concern a long scratch across the instep of the right one where he believed that he could even discern the reversed trademark of the assaulting heel-tap, scrubbing at the mark with the damp towel. “Maybe it won’t show through a shine,” he thought. “Anyway I can be glad the bastard wasn’t a football player.”
It did not improve any now, however, so he wiped both the boots, upper and sole, and hung the now filthy towel carefully and neatly back and returned to the other room. He may have looked at the jug in passing, but first he put the boots carefully into the canvas sack before going to the table.
He could have heard sounds, even voices, from the alley beneath the window if he had been listening. But he was not.
All he heard now was that thunderous silence and solitude in which man’s spirit crosses the eternal repetitive rubicon of his vice in the instant after the terror and before the triumph becomes dismay — the moral and spiritual waif shrieking his feeble I-am-I into the desert of chance and disaster.
He raised the jug; his hot bright eyes watched the sticky glass run almost half full; he gulped it, raw, scooping blindly the stale and trashladen water from the dish-pan and gulping that too; for one fierce and immolated instant he thought about hunting and finding a bottle which he could fill and carry with him in the bag along with the boots, the soiled shirt, the sweater, the cigar box containing a cake of laundry soap and a cheap straight razor and a pair of pliers and a spool of safety wire, but he did not.
“Be damned if I will,” he cried silently,
