Unbonneted, its spare entrails revealed as serrated top-and-bottom lines of delicate rocker arms and rods, inferential in their very myriad delicacy of a weightless and terrific speed any momentary faltering of which would be the irreparable difference between motion and mere matter, it appeared more profoundly derelict than the half-eaten carcass of a deer come suddenly upon in a forest.
Jiggs paused, still fastening the coverall’s throat, and looked across the hangar at the three people busy about it — two of a size and one taller, all in dungarees although one of the two shorter ones was topped by a blob of savage meal-coloured hair which even from here did not look like man’s hair.
He did not approach at once; still fastening the coverall he looked on and saw, in another clump of dungarees beside another aeroplane, a small tow-headed boy in khaki miniature of the men, even to the grease. “Jesus Christ,” Jiggs thought. “He’s done smeared oil on them already. Laverne will give him hell.” He approached on his short bouncing legs; already he could hear the boy talking in the loud assured carrying voice of a spoiled middle-western child. He came up and put out his blunt hard grease-grained hand and scoured the boy’s head.
“Look out,” the boy said. Then he said, “Where you been?
Laverne and Roger—” Jiggs scoured the boy’s head again and then crouched, his fists up, his head drawn down into his shoulders in burlesque pantomime. But the boy just looked at him. “Laverne and Roger—” he said again.
“Who’s your old man to-day, kid?” Jiggs said. Now the boy moved. With absolutely no change of expression he lowered his head and rushed at Jiggs, his fists flailing at the man. Jiggs ducked, taking the blows while the boy hammered at him with puny and deadly purpose; now the other men had all turned to watch, with wrenches and tools and engine parts in their suspended hands.
“Who’s your old man, huh?” Jiggs said, holding the boy off and then lifting and holding him away while he still hammered at Jiggs’ head with that grim and puny purpose. “All right!” Jiggs cried. He set the boy down and held him off, still ducking and dodging and now blind since the peaked cap was jammed over his face and the boy’s hard light little fists hammering upon the cap. “Oke! Oke!” Jiggs cried.
“I quit! I take it back!” He stood back and tugged the cap off his face and then he found why the boy had ceased: that he and the men too with their arrested tools and safety wire and engine parts were now looking at something which had apparently crept from a doctor’s cupboard and, in the snatched garments of an etherized patient in a charity ward, escaped into the living world.
He saw a creature which, erect, would be better than six feet tall and which would weigh about ninety-five pounds, in a suit of no age or colour, as though made of air and doped like an aeroplane wing with the incrusted excretion of all articulate life’s contact with the passing earth, which ballooned light and impedimentless about a skeleton frame as though suit and wearer both hung from a flapping clothes line; a creature with the leashed, eager loose-jointed air of a half-grown high-bred setter puppy, crouched facing the boy with its hands up too in more profound burlesque than Jiggs’ because it was obviously not intended to be burlesque.
“Come on, Dempsey,” the man said. “How about taking me on for an ice-cream cone? Hey?” The boy did not move. He was not more than six, yet he looked at the apparition before him with the amazed quiet immobility of the grown men. “How about it, huh?” the man said.
Still the boy did not move. “Ask him who’s his old man,” Jiggs said.
The man looked at Jiggs. “So’s his old man?”
“No. Who’s his old man.”
Now it was the apparition who looked at Jiggs in a kind of shocked immobility. “Who’s his old man?” he repeated. He was still looking at Jiggs when the boy rushed upon him with his fists flailing again and his small face grimly and soberly homicidal.
The man was still stooping, looking at Jiggs; it seemed to Jiggs and the other men that the boy’s fists made a light wooden-sounding tattoo as though the man’s skin and the suit too hung on a chair while the man ducked and dodged, trying to guard his face while still glaring at Jiggs with that skull-like amazement, repeating, “Who’s his old man? Who’s his old man?”
When Jiggs at last reached the unbonneted aeroplane the two men had the super-charger already off and dismantled. “Been to your grandmother’s funeral or something?” the taller one said.
“I been over there playing with Jack,” Jiggs said. “You just never saw me because there ain’t any women around here to be looking at yet.”
“Yair?” the other said.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Where’s that crescent wrench we bought in Kansas City?” The woman had it in her hand; she gave it to him and drew the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a smudge of grease up and into the meal-coloured, the strong pallid Iowa-com-coloured hair.
So he was busy then, though he looked back once and saw the apparition with the boy now riding on his shoulder, leaning into the heads and greasy backs busy again about the other aeroplane, and when he and Shumann lifted the super-charger back on to the engine he looked again and saw them, the boy still riding on the man’s shoulder, going out the hangar door and towards the apron.
Then they put the cowling back on and Shumann set the propeller horizontal and Jiggs raised the aeroplane’s tail, easily, already swinging it to pass through the door, the woman stepping back to let the wing pass her, looking back herself into the hangar now.
“Where did Jack go?” she said.
“Out towards the apron,” Jiggs said. “With that guy.”
“With what guy?”
“Tall guy. Says he is a reporter. That looks like they locked the graveyard up before he got in last night.” The aeroplane passed her, swinging again into the thin sunshine, the tail high and apparently without weight on Jiggs’ shoulder, his thick legs beneath it moving with tense stout piston-like thrusts, Shumann and the taller man pushing the wings.
“Wait a minute,” the woman said. But they did not pause and she overtook and passed the moving tail group and reached down past the uptilted cockpit hatch and stepped clear, holding a bundle wrapped tightly in a dark sweater.
The aeroplane went on; already the guards in the purple-and-gold porter caps were lowering the barrier cable on to the apron; and now the band had begun to play, heard twice: once the faint light almost airy thump-thump-thump from where the sun glinted on the actual horn mouths on the platform facing the reserved section of the stands, and once where the disembodied noise blared brazen, metallic, and loud from the amplifier which faced the barrier.
She turned and re-entered the hangar, stepping aside to let another aeroplane and its crew pass; she spoke to one of the men: “Who was that Jack went out with, Art?”
“The skeleton?” the man said. “They went to get an icecream cone. He says he is a reporter.” She went on, across the hangar and through the chicken-wire door and into the tool room with its row of hooks from which depended the coats and shirts and now one stiff linen collar and tie such as might be seen on a barber-shop hook where a preacher was being shaved and which she recognized as belonging to the circuit-rider-looking man in steel spectacles who won the Graves Trophy race at Miami two months ago.
There was neither lock nor hook on this door, and the other, the one through which Jiggs had entered, hung perfectly blank too save for the grease-prints of hands. For less than a second she stood perfectly still, looking at the second door while her hand made a single quick stroking movement about the doorjamb where hook or lock would have been.
It was less than a second, then she went on to the corner where the lavatory was — the grease-streaked bowl, the cake of what looked like lava, the metal case for paper towels — and laid the bundle carefully on the floor next the wall where the floor was cleanest, and rose and looked at the door again for a pause that was less than a second — a woman not tall and not thin, looking almost like a man in the greasy coverall, with the pale strong rough ragged hair actually darker where it was sunburned, a tanned heavy-jawed face in which the eyes looked like pieces of china.
It was hardly a pause; she rolled her sleeves back, shaking the folds free and loose, and opened the coverall at the throat and freed it about her shoulders too like she had the sleeves, obviously and apparently arranging it so she would not need to touch the foul garment any more than necessary.
Then she scrubbed face neck and forearms with the harsh soap and rinsed and dried herself and, stooping, keeping her arms well away from the
