“It’s because even if I am a burn there is some muck I will not eat,” he cried out of the still white glare of honour and even pride, jerking the door open and then leaping up and outward as the reporter, the last night’s missing host, tumbled slowly into the corridor at Jigg’s feet as he had at the feet of the others when the parachute jumper opened the door five minutes before.
Shumann had dragged the reporter up and the door of its own weight swung to behind them; the reporter half lay again in the frame of it, his nondescript hair broken down about his brow and his eyes closed and peaceful, his shirt and awry tie stiff and sour with vomit.
When Jiggs in turn jerked open the door once more the reporter tumbled slowly sideways into the corridor as Shumann caught him and Jiggs hurdled them both as the door swung to with its own weight and locked itself.
Whereupon something curious and unpresaged happened to Jiggs. It was not that his purpose had flagged or intention and resolution had reversed, switched back on him. It was as though the entire stable world across which he hurried from temptation, victorious and in good faith and unwarned, had reversed ends while he was in mid-air above the two men in the doorway; as though his own body had become corrupt too and without consulting him at all had made that catlike turn in mid-air and presented to him the blank and now irrevocable panel upon which like on the screen he saw the jug sitting on the table in the empty room above plain enough to have touched it.
“Catch that door!” he cried; he seemed to bounce back to it before even touching the flags, scrabbling at its blank surface with his hands. “Why didn’t somebody catch it?” he cried. “Why in hell didn’t you holler?” But they were not even looking at him; now the parachute jumper stooped with Shumann over the reporter. “What?” Jiggs said. “Breakfast, huh?” They did not even look at him.
“Go on,” the jumper said. “See what he’s got or get away and let me do it.”
“Wait,” Jiggs said. “Let’s find some way to get him back into the house first.” He leaned across them and tried the door again. He could even see the key now, still on the table beside the jug — an object trivial in size, that a man could almost swallow without it hurting him much probably and which now, even more than the jug, symbolized taunting and fierce regret since it postulated frustration not in miles but in inches; the gambit itself had refused, confounding him and leaving him hung up on a son of a bitch who couldn’t even get into his own house.
“Come on,” the jumper said to Shumann. “See what he’s got — unless somebody has already beat us to him.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, putting his hand on the reporter’s flank. “But if we could just find some way to get him back into the house—” The jumper caught him by the shoulder and jerked him backwards; again Jiggs caught balance, bouncing back, and saw the woman catch the jumper’s arm as the jumper reached toward’s the reporter’s pocket.
“Get away yourself,” she said. The jumper rose; he and the woman glared at one another — the one cold, hard, calm; the other tense, furious, restrained. Shumann had risen too; Jiggs looked quietly and intently from him to the others and back again.
“So you’re going to do it yourself,” the jumper said.
“Yes. I’m going to do it myself.” They stared at one another for an instant longer, then they began to curse each other in short, hard, staccato syllables that sounded like slaps while Jiggs, his hands on his hips and leaning a little forward on his light-poised rubber soles, looked from them to Shumann and back again.
“All right,” Shumann said. “That’ll do now.” He stepped between them, shoving the jumper a little. Then the woman stooped and while Jiggs turned the reporter’s inert body from thigh to thigh she took from his pockets a few crumpled bills and a handful of silver.
“There’s a five and four ones,” Jiggs said. “Let me count that change.”
“Three will pay the bus,” Shumann said. “Just take three more.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Seven or eight will be plenty. Look. Leave him the five and one of the ones for change.” He took the five and one of the ones from the woman’s hand, folded them and thrust them into the reporter’s fob pocket, and was about to rise when he saw the reporter looking at him, lying sprawled in the door with his eyes open and quiet and profoundly empty — that vision without contact yet with mind or thought, like two dead electric bulbs set into his skull.
“Look,” Jiggs said, “he’s—” He sprang up, then he saw the jumper’s face for the second before the jumper caught the woman’s wrist and wrenched the money from her hand and flung it like a handful of gravel against the reporter’s peaceful and open-eyed and sightless face and said in a tone of thin and despairing fury:
“I will eat and sleep on Roger and I will eat and sleep on you.
But I won’t eat and sleep on your ass, see?” He took up his bag and turned; he walked fast; Jiggs and the little boy watched him turn the alley mouth and vanish. Then Jiggs looked back at the woman who had not moved and at Shumann kneeling and gathering up the scattered coins and bills from about the reporter’s motionless legs.
“Now we got to find some way to get him into the house,” Jiggs said. They did not answer. But then he did not seem to expect or desire any answer. He knelt too and began to pick up the scattered coins. “Jesus,” he said. “Jack sure threw them away. We’ll be lucky to find half of them.” But still they seemed to pay him no heed.
“How much was it?” Shumann said to the woman, extending his palm towards Jiggs.
“Six dollars and seventy cents,” the woman said. Jiggs put the coins into Shumann’s hand; as motionless as Shumann, Jiggs’ hot eyes watched Shumann count the coins by sight.
“All right,” Shumann said. “That other half.”
“I’ll just pick up some cigarettes with it,” Jiggs said. Now Shumann didn’t say anything at all; he just knelt with his hand out. After a moment Jiggs put the last coin into it. “O.K.,” Jiggs said. His hot bright eyes were now completely unreadable; he did not even watch Shumann put the money into his pocket, he just took up his canvas bag. “Too bad we ain’t got any way to get him off the street,” he said.
“Yair,” Shumann said, taking up the other bag. “We ain’t, though. So let’s go.” He went on; he didn’t even look back. It’s a valve stem has stretched,” he said. “I’ll bet a quarter. That must be why she ran hot yesterday. We’ll have to pull them all.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He walked behind the others, carrying the canvas bag. He didn’t look back either yet; he stared at the back of Shumann’s head with intent secret speculation, blank and even tranquil; he spoke to himself out of a sardonic reserve almost of humour: “Yair.
I knew I would be sorry. Jesus, you would think I would have learned by now to save being honest for Sunday. Because I was all right until… and now to be hung up on a bastard that…”
He looked back. The reporter still lay propped in the doorway; the quiet, thoughtful, empty eyes seemed still to watch them gravely, without either surprise or reproach. “Jesus,” Jiggs said aloud, “I told that guy last night it wasn’t paregoric: it was laudanum or something…” because for a little while now he had forgot the jug, he was thinking about the reporter and not about the jug, until now.
“And it won’t be long now,” he thought, with a sort of desperate outrage, his face perfectly calm, the boots striking through the canvas sack against his legs at each step as he walked behind the other three, his eyes hot, blank and dead as if they had been reversed in his skull and only the blank backsides showed while sight contemplated the hot wild secret coiling of drink netted and snared by the fragile web of flesh and nerves in which he lived, resided.
“I will call the paper and tell them he is sick,” he said out of that specious delusion of need and desire which even in this inviolable privacy brushed ruthlessly aside all admission of or awareness of lying or truth: “Maybe some of them will know some way to get in. I will tell him and Laverne that they asked me to wait and show them where…”
They reached the alley’s
