His whole face was swollen and puffed now; he chewed slowly and gingerly, looking up at Shumann with that dog-like quality, abject, sad, and at peace. “Go on,” Shumann said. “Get settled. I’m going to turn out the light.”
Without ceasing to chew Jiggs disengaged one hand and dragged the canvas sack over and lay down, his head upon it. Shumann could still hear him chewing as he groped in the darkness towards the curtain and lifted it and passed beyond it. Groping on to the lamp beside the bed, moving quietly now, he snapped it on and found the woman, the boy asleep beside her, watching him. She lay in the middle of the bed with the boy between her and the wall.
Her clothes were laid neatly too on a chair and then Shumann saw the nightgown, the only silk one she had, lying across the chair too. Stooping to set the jug beneath the bed he paused and then lifted from the floor the cotton shorts which she wore, or had worn, from where they had either been dropped or flung, and put them on the chair too. He removed his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt while she watched him, the bedclothes huddled to her chin.
“So you got the ship,” she said.
“I don’t know. We’re going to try.” He removed the watch from his wrist and wound it carefully and put it on the table; when the faint clicking ceased he could hear again from beyond the curtain the sound of Jiggs chewing. He set his feet in turn on the corner of the chair and unlaced his shoes, feeling her watching him.
“I can take at least third in the five-seventy-five without passing the pylons close enough for anybody on them to read the ship’s number. And that’s fifteen per cent, of eight-ninety. Or there’s two thousand in the Trophy and I don’t believe Ord will—”
“Yes. I heard you through the curtain. But why?” He set the shoes neatly side by side and stepping out of his trousers shook them into crease by the cuffs, folded them, and put them on the chest of drawers beside the celluloid comb and brush and the cravat, and stood in shorts. “And the ship is all right except you won’t know until you are in the air whether or not you can take it off and you won’t know until you are back on the ground and standing up again whether or not you can land it.”
“I guess I can land it, all right.” He lit? cigarette and then stood with his hand on the light-switch, looking at her. She had not moved, lying with the covers drawn smooth and nun-like up to her chin. Again from beyond the curtain he could hear Jiggs chewing, mouthing at the bard sandwich with that painful patience.
“You’re lying,” she said. “We got along before.”
“Because we had to. This time we don’t have to.”
“But it’s seven months yet.”
“Yair. Just seven months. And one more meet, and the only ship we have with a shot engine and two wrenched longerons.” He looked at her a moment longer; at last she opened the covers; as he snapped off the light his retina carried into the darkness the imprint of one bare shoulder and breast down to the waist. Want to move Jack to the middle?” he said.
She did not answer, though it was not until he drew the covers up himself discovered that she was lying rigid, her flank tense and hard with rigid muscles where his own touched it as he settled himself. He withdrew the cigarette and held it suspended above his mouth, hearing Jiggs chewing beyond the curtain and then the jumpers voice: “Jesus God, stop eating that! You sound just like a dog.”
“You bastard,” she said in a tense rigid whisper. “You rotten pilot, you bastard rotten pilot. Hanging off there with a dead stick so you wouldn’t interfere in their damn race and then mushing in over that sea-wall and you wouldn’t even hold its head up! you wouldn’t even hold—” Her hand shot out and snatched the cigarette from him; he felt his own fingers wrench and bend and then saw the red coal twinkle and arc across the dark and strike the invisible floor.
“Here,” he whispered. “Let me pick it up off the…” But now the hard hand struck his cheek, clutching and scrabbling about his jaw and throat and shoulder until he caught it and held it, wrenching and jerking.
“You bastard rotten, you rotten—” she panted.
“All right,” he said. “Steady, now.” She ceased, breathing hard and fast. But he still held the wrist, wary and without gentleness too. “All right, now….You want to take your pants off?”
“They’re already off.”
“Oh yair,” he said. “I forgot.”
When she made her first parachute jump they had not been together very long. She was the one who suggested that he teach her to jump, and he already had a parachute, the exhibition kind; when he used it he either flew the aeroplane or made the jump, depending on whether the casual partner with whom he would join forces for a day or a week or a season were a pilot himself or not.
She made the suggestion herself and he showed her, drilled her in the simple mechanics of climbing out on to the wing with the parachute harness buckled on and then dropping off and letting her own weight pull the parachute from the case attached to the wing.
The act was billed for a Saturday afternoon in a small Kansas town and he did not know that she was frightened until they were in the air, the money collected and the crowd waiting, and she had begun to climb out along the wing.
She wore skirts; they had decided that her exposed legs would notdrawing card but that in the skirt no one would doubt that she was a woman; and now she was clinging to the inner bay strut and looking back at him with an expression that he was later to realize was not at all fear of death but on the contrary a wild and now mindless repudiation of bereavement as if it were he who was the one about to die and not her.
He sat in the back cockpit with the aeroplane in position, holding the wing up under her weight, gesturing her on out towards the wing-tip, almost angrily, when he saw her leave the strut and with that blind and completely irrational expression of protest and wild denial on her face, the hem of the skirt, whipping out of the parachute harness about her loins, climb, not back into the front seat which she had left but on towards the one in which he sat holding the aeroplane level, scrambling and sprawling into the cock-pit (he saw her knuckles perfectly white where she gripped the cockpit’s edge) and then facing him.
She told him later that she had not planned or thought at all until she looked back at him from the strut and realized that she might have to die before she touched him again. So he tried to fight her off for awhile but he had to fly the aeroplane, keep it in position over the field.
It was some blind instinct that made him remember to roll the aeroplane towards the wing to which the parachute-case was attached because the next that he remembered was the belt catching him across the legs as, looking out, he saw the parachute floating between him and the ground.
He had to land the aeroplane, the rest he learned later: how she had come down, with the dress, pulled or blown free of the parachute harness, up about her armpits, and had been dragged along the ground until overtaken by a yelling mob of men and youths, in the centre of which she now lay dressed from the waist down in dirt and parachute straps and stockings.
When he fought through the mob to where she was she had been arrested by three village officers one of whose faces Shumann remarked even then with a violent foreboding — a youngish man with a hard handsome face sadistic rather than vicious, who was using the butt of a pistol to keep the mob back and who struck at Shumann with it with the same blind fury.
They carried her to jail, the younger one threatening her with the pistol now; already Shumann realized that in the two other officers he had only bigotry and greed to contend with.
It was the younger one that he had to fear — a man besotted and satiated by his triumphs over abased human flesh which his corrupt and picayune office supplied him, seeing now and without forewarning the ultimate shape of his jaded desires fall upon him out of the sky, not merely naked but clothed in the very traditional symbology — the ruined dress with which she was trying wildly to cover her loins, and the parachute harness — of female bondage.
They would neither arrest Shumann too nor allow him access to her. After he was driven back along with the mob from the jail door by the younger officer’s pistol — it was a square building of fierce new brick into which he saw her forced, struggling still — he had a single glimpse of her indomitable and terrified face
