“Thanks,” the reporter said. But he did not move. The other looked at him.
“Well, what do you want to do? You want to cover it or you want me to?”
“No. I mean, yes. You take it. It don’t matter. Jug knows better what Hagood wants than you or I either.”
“O.K.,” the other said. “Better call Hagood right away, though.”
“I will,” the reporter said. Now the food came; the heaped indestructible plate and the hand scrubbed, with vicious coral nails, the hand too looking as if it had been conceived formed and baked in the kitchen, or perhaps back in town and sent out by light and speedy truck along with the scrolled squares of pastry beneath the plate-glass counter. He looked at both the food and the hand from the crest of a wave of pure almost physical flight. “Jesus, sister,” he said, “I was joking with the wrong man, wasn’t I?”
But he drank the coffee and ate some of the food; he seemed to watch himself creeping slowly and terrifically across the plate like a mole, blind to all else and deaf now even to the amplifier; he ate a good deal of it, sweating, seeming to chew for ever and ever before getting each mouthful in position to be swallowed. “I guess that’ll be enough,” he said at last.
“Jesus, it will have to be,” he said. He was in the rotunda now and moving towards the gates into the stands before he remembered and turned and breasted the stream towards the entrance and so outside and into the bright soft hazy sunlight with its quality of having been recently taken out of water and not yet thoroughly dried and full of the people, the faces, the cars coming up and discharging and moving on.
Across the plaza the hangar wing seemed to sway and quiver like a grounded balloon. “But I feel better,” he thought. “I must. They would not have let me eat all that and not feel better because I can’t possibly feel as bad as I still think I do.” He could hear the voice again now from the amplifier above the entrance.
“… wish to announce that due to the tragic death of Lieutenant Frank Burnham last night, the airport race committee has discontinued the evening events…. The time is now one-forty-two. The first event on to-day’s programme will…” The reporter stopped.
“One-forty-two,” he thought. Now he could feel something which must have been the food he had just eaten beating slow and steady against his skull which up to this time had been empty, had hardly troubled him at all except for the sensation of being about to float off like one of the small balloons escaped from the hand of a child at a circus, trying to remember what hour the programme had allotted to the three hundred and seventy-five cubic inch race, thinking that perhaps when he got into the shade he could bear to look at the programme again.
“Since it seems I am bound to offer her the chance to tell me that they stole… not the money. It’s not the money. It’s not that.” Now the shade of the hangar fell upon him and he could see the programme again, the faint mimeographed letters beating and pulsing against his cringing eyeballs and steadying at last so that he could read his watch.
It would be an hour still before he could expect to find her alone.
He turned and followed the hangar wall and passed beyond it. Across the way the parking lot was almost full and there was another stream here, moving towards the bleachers. Though he stood on the edge of it while his eyeballs still throbbed and watched the other fringe, slowing and clotting before one of the temporary wooden refreshment booths which had sprung up about the borders of the airport property as the photographs of the pilots and machines had bloomed in the shop windows down town, it was some time before he began to realize that something beside the spectacle (still comparatively new) of outdoors drinking must be drawing them.
Then he thought he recognized the voice and then he did recognize the raked filthy swagger of the cap and moved, pressing, filtering, on and into the crowd and so came between Jiggs’ drunken belligerent face and the Italian face of the booth’s proprietor who was leaning across the counter and shouting, “Bastard, huh? You theenk bastard, hey?”
“What is it?” the reporter said. Jiggs turned and looked at him for a moment of hot blurred concentration without recognition; it was the Italian who answered.
“For me, nothing!” he shouted. “He come here, he have one drink two drink; he no need either one of them but O.K.; he pay; that O.K. for me. Then he say he wait for friend, that he have one more drink to surprise friend.
That not so good, but my wife she give it to him and that maka three drink he don’t need and I say, You pay and go, eh? Beat it. And he say, O.K., good-bye and I say Why you no pay, eh? and he say That drink to surprise friend; looka like it surprise you too, eh? and I grab to hold and call policaman because I don’t want for trouble with drunk and he say bastard to me before my wife….” Still Jiggs did not move.
Even while holding himself upright by the counter he gave that illusion of tautly sprung steel set delicately on a hair trigger.
“Yair,” he said. “Three drinks, and just look what they done to me!” on a rising note which stopped before it became idiotic laughter; whereupon he stared again at the reporter with that blurred gravity, watching while the reporter took the second of the two dollar bills which the negress had loaned him and gave it to the Italian.
“There you are, Columbus,” Jiggs said. “Yair. I told him. Jesus, I even tried to tell him your name, only I couldn’t remember it.” He looked at the reporter with hot intensity, like an astonished child. “Say, that guy last night told me your name. Is that it, sure enough? you swear to Christ, no kidding?”
“Yair,” the reporter said. He put his hand on Jiggs’ arm. “Come on. Let’s go.” The spectators had moved on now. Behind the counter the Italian and his wife seemed to pay them no more attention. “Come on,” the reporter said. “It must be after two. Let’s go help get the ship ready and then I’ll buy another drink.”
But Jiggs did not move, and then the reporter found Jiggs watching him with something curious, calculating and intent, behind the hot eyes; they were not blurred now at all, and suddenly Jiggs stood erect before the reporter could steady him.
“I was looking for you,” Jiggs said.
“I came along at the right time, didn’t I, for once in my life. Come on. Let’s go to the hangar. I imagine they are waiting for you there. Then I will buy a—”
“I don’t mean that,” Jiggs said. “I was kidding the guy. I had the quarter, all right. I’ve had all I want. Come on.” He led the way, walking a little carefully yet still with the light spring-like steps, bumping and butting through the gateward stream of people, the reporter following, until they were beyond it and clear; anyone who approached them now would have to do so deliberately and should have been visible a hundred yards away, though neither of them saw the parachute jumper who was doing just that.
“You mean the ship’s all ready?” the reporter said.
“Sure,” Jiggs said. “Roger and Jack ain’t even there. They have gone to the meeting.”
“Meeting?”
“Sure. Contestants’ meeting. To strike, see? But listen—”
“To strike?”
“Sure. For more jack. It ain’t the money: it’s the principle of the thing. Jesus, what do we need with money?” Jiggs began to laugh again on that harsh note which stopped just as it became laughter and started before it was mirth. “But that ain’t it.
I was looking for you.” Again the reporter looked at the hot unreadable eyes. “Laverne sent me. She said to give me five dollars for her.” The reporter’s face did not change at all. Neither did Jiggs’; the hot impenetrable eyes, the membrane and fibre netting and webbing the unrecking and the undismayed.
“Roger was in the money yesterday; you’ll get it back Saturday. Only if it was me, I wouldn’t even wait for that. Just let her underwrite you, see?”
“Underwrite me?”
“Sure. Then you wouldn’t even have to bother to put anything back into your pocket. All you would have to do would be to button up your pants.” Still the reporter’s face did not change, his voice did not change, not loud, without amazement.
“Do you reckon I could?”
“I don’t know,” Jiggs said. “Didn’t you ever try it? It’s done every night somewhere, so I hear. Probably done right here in New Valois, even. And if you can’t, she can show you how.” The reporter’s face did not change; he was just looking at Jiggs and then suddenly Jiggs moved, sudden and complete; the reporter saw the hot secret eyes come violently alive and, turning, the reporter
