“Yair,” he said. “So I’ll beat it. You can say good-bye to the others for me.”
“Yes. But are you sure it won’t…”
“Sure. It’s all right. You make yourselves at home.” He turned; he began to walk fast, thinking fast, “Now if I only can just… “He heard her call him twice; he thought of trying to run on his boneless legs and knew that he would fall, hearing her feet just behind him now, thinking, “No. No. Don’t.
That’s all I ask. No. No.” Then she was beside him; he stopped and turned, looking down at her.
“Listen,” she said. “We took some money out of your…”
“Yes. I knew. It’s O.K. You can hand it back. Put it in the envelope with the…”
“I intended to tell you as soon as I saw you to-day. It was…”
“Yair; sure.” He spoke loudly now, turning again, fleeing before yet beginning to move. “Any time. Good-bye now.”
“We took six-seventy. We left…” Her voice died away; she stared at him, at the thin rigid grimace which could hardly have been called smiling but which could have been called nothing else. “How much did you find in your pocket this morning?”
“It was all there,” he said. “Just the six-seventy was missing. It was all right.” He began to walk. The aeroplanes came in and turned the field pylon again as he was passing through the gate and into the rotunda. When he entered the bar the first face he saw was that of the photographer whom he had called Jug.
“I ain’t going to offer you a drink,” the photographer said, “because I never buy them for nobody. I wouldn’t even buy Hagood one.” —
“I don’t want a drink,” the reporter said. “I just want a dime.”
“A dime? Hell, that’s damn near the same as a drink.”
“It’s to call Hagood with. That will look better on your expense account than a drink would.” There was a booth in the corner; he called the number from the slip which the substitute had given him. After awhile Hagood answered. “Yair, I’m out here,” the reporter said. “Yair, I feel O.K…. Yair, I want to come in. Take something else, another assignment…. Yair, out of town if you got anything, for a day or so if you… Yair. Thanks, chief. I’ll come right on in.”
He had to walk through the voice again to pass through the rotunda, and again it met him outside though for the moment he did not listen to it for listening to himself: “It’s all the same! I did the same thing myself! I don’t intend to pay Hagood either! I lied to him about money too!” and the answer, loud too: “You lie, you bastard. You’re lying, you son of a bitch.”
So he was hearing the amplifier before he knew that he was listening, just as he had stopped and half turned before he knew that he had stopped, in the bright thin sunlight filled with mirage shapes which pulsed against his painful eyelids: so that when two uniformed policemen appeared suddenly from beyond the hangar with Jiggs struggling between them, his cap in one hand and one eye completely closed now and a long smear of blood on his jaw, the reporter did not even recognize him; he was now staring at the amplifier above the door as though he were actually seeing in it what he merely heard:
“ — Shumann’s in trouble; he’s out of the race; he’s turning out to — He’s cut his switch and he’s going to land; I don’t know what it is, but he’s swinging wide; he’s trying to keep clear of the other ships and he’s pretty wide and that lake’s pretty wet to be out there without any motor.
— Come on, Roger; get back into the airport, guy! — He’s in now; he’s trying to get back on to the runway to land and it looks like he’ll make it all right, but the sun is right in his eyes and he swung mighty wide to keep clear of — I don’t know about this — I don’t — Hold her head up, Roger! Hold her head up! Hold—”
The reporter began to run; it was not the crash that he heard: it was a single long exhalation of human breath as though the microphone had reached out and caught that too out of all the air which people had ever breathed.
He ran back through the rotunda and through the suddenly clamorous mob at the gate, already tugging out his police card; it was as though all the faces, all the past twenty-four hours’ victories and defeats and hopes and renunciations and despairs, had been blasted completely out of his life as if they had actually been the random sheets of that organ to which he dedicated his days, caught momentarily upon one senseless member of the scarecrow which he resembled, and then blown away.
A moment later, above the beads streaming up the apron and beyond the ambulance and the fire truck and the motor-cycle squad rushing across the field, he saw the aeroplane lying on its back, the under-carriage projecting into the air rigid and delicate and motionless as the legs of a dead bird.
Two hours later, at the bus stop on the Grandlieu Street corner, from where she and Shumann stood a few feet away, the woman could see the reporter standing quietly as he had emerged from the bus and surrendered the four tickets for which he had paid.
She could not tell who or what he was looking at: his face was just peaceful, waiting, apparently inattentive even when the parachute jumper limped over to him, dragging savagely the leg which even through the cloth of the trousers appeared thick, stiff and ungainly with the emergency dressing from the airport’s surgery, result of having been drifted by an unforeseen wind-gust over the stands and then slammed into one of the jerry-built refreshment booths when landing his parachute.
“Look here,” he said. “This afternoon, I was mad at Jiggs. I never meant to sock you. I was worried and mad. I even thought it was still Jiggs’ face until too late.”
“It’s all right,” the reporter said. He was not smiling: he was just peaceful and serene. “I guess I just got in the way.”
“I didn’t plan to. If you want any satisfaction—”
“It’s all right,” the reporter said. They didn’t shake hands; the jumper just turned after a moment and dragged his leg back to where he had been standing, leaving the reporter as before, in that attitude of peaceful waiting. The woman looked at Shumann again.
“Then if the ship’s all right, why won’t Ord fly it himself, race it himself?” she said.
“Maybe he don’t have to,” Shumann said. “If I had his Ninety-Two I wouldn’t need this ship either. I guess Ord would do the same. Besides, I — we haven’t got it yet. So there ain’t anything to worry about. Because if it is a burn, Ord won’t let us have it. Yair, you see? if we can get it, that’s proof that it’s O.K. because Ord wouldn’t…” She was looking down now, motionless save for her hands, with the heel of one of which she was striking lightly the other’s palm.
Her voice was flat, hard, and low, not carrying three feet:
“We. We. He has boarded and lodged us for a day and night now, and now he is even going to get us another ship to fly.
And all I want is just a house, a room; a cabin will do, a coal-shed where I can know that next Monday and the Monday after that and the Monday after that…. Do you suppose he would have something like that he could give to me?” She turned; she said, “We better get on and get that stuff for Jack’s leg.”
The reporter had not heard her, he had not been listening; now he found that he had not even been watching; his first intimation was when he saw her walking towards him. “We’re going on to your house,” she said. “I guess we’ll see you and Roger when we see you. You have changed your plan about leaving town, I imagine?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I mean no. I’m going home with a guy on the paper to sleep. Don’t you bother about me.” He looked at her, his face gaunt, serene, peaceful. “Don’t you worry. I’ll be O.K.”
“Yes,” she said. “About that money. That was the truth. You can ask Roger and Jack.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I would believe you even if I knew you had lied.”
And To-morrow
SO YOU SEE how it is,” the reporter said. He looked down at Ord too, as he seemed doomed to look down at everyone with whom he seemed perennially and perpetually compelled either to plead or just to endure: perhaps enduring and passing the time until that day when time and age would have thinned still more what blood he had and so permit him to see himself actually as the friendly and lonely ghost peering timidly down from the hayloft at the other children playing below.
“The valves went bad and then he and Holmes had to go to that meeting so they could tell them that thirty per cent, exceeded the code or something: and then Jiggs went and then they didn’t have time to check the valve stems and take out the bad ones and then the whole engine went and the rudder post and a couple of longerons and to-morrow’s the last day. That’s tough luck, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” Ord said. They all three still stood. Ord had probably
