And, say” — he looked at Jiggs— “don’t bother about trying to put the micrometer on them yourself. I’ll do that when I get back. You can clean out the super-charger; that ought to hold you until we get back.” He looked at Jiggs. “You ought to be hungry now.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He had not stopped; he did not watch them go out. He just squatted beneath the engine with the spraddled tenseness of an umbrella rib, feeling the woman looking at the back of his head.
He spoke now without fury, without triumph, without sound: “Yair, beat it. You can’t stop me. You couldn’t stop me but for a minute even if you tried to hold me.” He was not thinking of the woman as Laverne, as anyone: she was just the last and now swiftly fading residuum of the it, the they, watching the back of his head as he removed the super-charger without even knowing that she was all ready defeated.
“Do you want to eat now?” she said. He didn’t answer. “Do you want me to bring you a sandwich?” He didn’t answer. “Jiggs,” she said. He looked up and back, his eyebrows rising and vanishing beyond the cap’s peak, the hot bright eyes blank, interrogatory, arrested.
“What? How was that?” he said: “Did you call me?”
“Yes. Do you want to go and eat now or do you want me to bring you something?”
“No. I ain’t hungry yet. I want to get done with this supercharger before I wash my hands. You go on.” But she didn’t move yet; she stood looking at him.
“I’ll leave you some money and you can go when you are ready, then.” touching the coin in his pocket through the cloth, though he did not need to since he had never ceased to feel it. He was not thinking about her, not talking to her; he spoke without triumph or exultation, quietly: “Good-bye, you snooping bitch,” he said.
But they had not been able to tell if the reporter had seen them or not, though he probably could neither see nor hear; certainly the thin youngish light-coloured negress who came up the alley about half-past nine, in a modish though not new hat and coat and carrying a wicker market-basket covered neatly with a clean napkin, decided almost immediately that he could not.
She looked down at him for perhaps ten seconds with complete and impersonal speculation, then she waggled one hand before his face and called him by name: and when she reached into his pockets she did not move or shift his body at all; her hand reached in and drew out the two folded bills where Jiggs had put them with a single motion limber and boneless and softly rapacious as that of an octopus, then the hand made a second limber swift motion, inside her coat now, and emerged empty.
It was her racial and sex nature to have taken but one of the bills, no matter how many there might have been — either the five or the one, depending upon her own need or desire of the moment or upon the situation itself — but now she took them both and stood again, looking down at the man in the doorway with a kind of grim though still impersonal sanctimoniousness.
“If he found any of hit left hit wouldn’t learn him no lesson,” she said, aloud. “Laying out here in the street, drunk. Ain’t no telling where he been at, but hit couldn’t a been much for them to let him git back out and that much money in his pocket.”
She took a key from somewhere beneath the coat and unlocked the door and caught him back in her turn as he began to tumble slowly and deliberately into the corridor, and entered herself. She was not gone long and now she carried the dish-pan of dirty water, which she flung suddenly into his face and caught him again as he gasped and started. “I hopes you had sense enough to left your pocket-book in the house for you decided to take a nap out here,” she cried, shaking him. “If you didn’t, I bound all you got left now is the pocket-book.” She carried him “Money?” he said.
“What do I need with money up to my elbows in this engine?” She turned away then. He watched her pause and call the little boy, who came out of a group across the hangar and joined her; they went on towards the apron and disappeared. Then Jiggs rose; he laid the tool down carefully, up the cramped stairs almost bodily, like that much firehose, and left him apparently unconscious again on the cot and went beyond the curtain and looked once with a perfectly inscrutable face at the neat bed which but one glance told her was not her handiwork.
From the basket she took an apron and a bright handkerchief; when she returned to the reporter she wore the apron and the handkerchief about her head in place of the hat and coat, and she carried the dish-pan filled now with fresh water, and soap and towels.
She had done this before too, apparently, stripping the fouled shirt from the man who was her employer for this half-hour of the six weekdays, and both washing him off and slapping him awake during the process until he could see and hear again. “It’s past ten o’clock,” she said. “I done lit the gas so you can shave.”
“Shave?” he said. “Didn’t you know? I don’t have to ever shave again. I’m fired.”
“The more reason for you to git up from here and try to look like something.” His hair, soaked, was plastered to his skull, yet it fitted no closer to the bones and ridges and joints than the flesh of his face did, and now his eyes did indeed look like holes burned with a poker in a parchment diploma, some post-graduate certificate of excess.
Naked from the waist up, it seemed as if you not only saw his ribs front and side and rear, but that you also saw the entire rib-cage complete from any angle like you can see both warp and woof of screen wire from either side. He swayed laxly beneath her limber soft and ungentle hands, articulate and even collected though moving for a while yet in the twilight between the delusion of drunkenness and the delusion of sobriety.
“Are they gone?” he said. The negress’s face and manner did not change at all.
“Is who gone?” she said.
“Yair,” he said drowsily. “She was here last night. She slept yonder in the bed last night. There was just one of them slept with her and there could have been both of them. But she was here.
And it was him himself that wouldn’t let her drink, that took the glass out of her hand. Yair. I could hear all the long soft waiting sound of all woman-meat in bed beyond the curtain.”
At first, for the moment, the negress did not even realize what it was touching her thigh until she looked down and saw the stick-like arm, the brittle light and apparently senseless hand like a bundle of dried twigs too, blundering and fumbling stiffly at her while in the gaunt eye-sockets the eyes looked like two spots of dying daylight caught by water at the bottom of abandoned wells.
The negress did not become coy or outraged; she avoided the apparently blind or possibly just still insensible hand with a single supple shift of her hips, speaking to him, calling him by name, pronouncing the in i s t e r in full, in the flat lingering way of negroes, like it had two sets of two or three syllables each.
“Now then,” she said, “if you feel like doing something yourself, take a holt of this towel. Or see how much of whatever money you think you had folks is left you, besides leaving you asleep on the street.”
“Money?” he said. He waked completely now, his mind did, though even yet his hands fumbled for awhile before finding the pocket while the negress watched him, standing now with her hands on her hips.
She said nothing else, she just watched his quiet bemused and intent face as he plumbed his empty pockets one by one. She did not mention company again; it was he who cried, “I was out there, asleep in the alley. You know that, you found me.
I left here, I was out there asleep because I forgot the key and I couldn’t get in again; I was out there a long time even before daylight. You know I was.” Still she said nothing, watching him. “I remember just when I quit remembering!”
“How much did you have when you quit remembering?”
“Nothing!” he said. “Nothing. I spent it all. See?” When he got up she offered to help him back to the bedroom, but he refused. He walked unsteadily still, but well enough, and when after a time she followed him she could hear him through the beaver-board wall of the alcove somewhat larger than a clothes closet which she entered too and set water to heat on the gas plate beside which he was shaving, and prepared to make coffee.
She gave the undisturbed bedroom another cold inscrutable look and returned to the front room and restored the tumbled cot, spreading the
