“Yair,” Shumann said. “I see…. Yes,” he thought, looking quietly at the queer empennage, the blunt short cylindrical body; “I guess Ord wasn’t so surprised, at that.” Then he heard the reporter speaking to someone and he turned and saw a squat man with a shrewd Cajun face above a scrupulously clean coverall.
“This is Mr. Shumann,” the reporter said, saying in a tone of bright amazement: “You mean Matt never told you? We have bought that ship.” Shumann did not wait. For a moment he watched Marchand, the note in both hands, looking at it with that baffled immobility behind which the mind flicks and darts like a terrier inside a fence.
“Yair,” Shumann thought, without grimness, “he can’t pass five thousand dollars any more than I could.
Not without warning, anyway.” He went on to the aeroplane, though once or twice he looked back and saw Marchand and the reporter, the Cajun still emanating that stubborn and slowly crystallizing bewilderment while the reporter talked, flapped, before him with an illusion of being held together only by the clothes he wore; once he even heard the reporter:
“Sure, you could telephone to Feinman and catch him.
But for God’s sake don’t let anybody overhear how Matt stuck us for five thousand bucks for the damn crate. He promised he wouldn’t tell.” But there was no telephoning done apparently, because almost at once (or so it seemed to Shumann) the reporter and Marchand were beside him, the reporter quiet now, watching him with that bright attention.
“Let’s get it out where we can look at it,” Shumann said. They rolled it out on to the apron, where it squatted again, seemed to. It had none of the wasp-waisted trimness of the ones at the airport. It was blunt, a little thick-bodied, almost sluggish looking; its lightness when moved by hand seemed curiously paradoxical. For a good minute the reporter and Marchand watched Shumann stand looking at it with thoughtful gravity. “All right,” he said at last.
“Let’s wind her up.” Now the reporter spoke, leaning lightly and slightly just off balance like a ragged penstaff dropped point first into the composition apron:
“Listen.
You said last night maybe it was the distribution of the weight; you said how maybe if we could shift the weight somehow while it was in the air that maybe you could find…” Later (almost as soon as Shumann was out of sight the reporter and Marchand were in Marchand’s car on the road to the village, where the reporter hired a cab, scrambling into it even before he had asked the price and yelling out of his gaunt and glare-fixed face, “Hell, no! Not New Valois! Feinmann Airport!”) he lived and relived the blind timeless period during which he lay on his stomach in the barrel, clutching the two body members, with nothing to see but Shumann’s feet on the rudder pedals and the movement of the aileron balance-rod and nothing to feel but terrific motion — not speed and not progress — just blind, furious motion like a sealed force trying to explode the monococque barrel in which he lay from the waist down on his stomach, leaving him clinging to the body members in space.
He was still thinking, “Jesus, maybe we are going to die and all it is is a taste like sour hot salt in your mouth,” even while looking out the car window at the speeding march and swamp through which they skirted the city, thinking with a fierce and triumphant conviction of immortality, “We flew it! We flew it!”
Now the airport; the forty miles accomplished before he knew it, what with his skull still cloudy with the light tag ends of velocity and speed like the drifting feathers from a shot bird so that he had never become conscious of the sheer inertia of dimension, space, distance, through which he had had to travel.
He was thrusting the five-dollar bill at the driver before the car began to turn into the plaza and he was out of it before it had stopped, running towards the hangar, probably not even aware that the first race was in progress.
Wild-faced, gaunt and sunken-eyed from lack of sleep and from strain, his clothes ballooning about him, he ran into the hangar and on to where Jiggs stood at the work-bench with a new bottle of polish and a new tin of paste open before him, shining the boots, working now with tedious and intent concern at the scar on the instep of the right one. “Did he—” the reporter cried.
“Yair, he landed it, all right,” Jiggs said. “He used all the field, though. Jesus, I thought for a while he was going to run out of airport before he even cut the gun; when he stopped you couldn’t have dropped a match between the prop and the sea wall. They are all upstairs now, holding the caucus.”
“It’ll qualify itself!” the reporter cried. “I told him that. I may not know aeroplanes but I know sewage Board Jews!”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Anyway, he won’t have to make but two landings with it. And he’s already made one of them.”
“Two?” the reporter cried; now he glared at Jiggs with more than exultation: with ecstasy. “He’s already made two! We made one before he left Ord’s!”
“We?” Jiggs said. With the boot and the rag poised he blinked painfully at the reporter with the one good hot bright eye. “We?”
“Yair; him and me! He said how it was the weight — that maybe if we could just shift the weight somehow while it was in the air — and he said, ‘Are you afraid?’ and I said, ‘Hell, yes. But not if you ain’t, because Matt gave me an hour once, or maybe if I had had more than an hour I wouldn’t have been.’ So Marchand helped us take the seat out and we rigged another one so there would be room under it for me and I slid back into the fuselage because it ain’t got any cross-bracing, it’s mon — mon—”
“Monococque,” Jiggs said. “Jesus Christ, do you mean—”
“Yair. And him and Marchand rigged the seat again and he showed me where to hold on and I could just see his heels and that was all; I couldn’t tell; yair, after a while I knew we were flying, but I couldn’t tell forward nor backward or anything because, Jesus, I just had one hour with Matt and then he cut the gun and then I could hear him — Jesus, we might have been standing on the ground — he said quiet, ‘Now slide back. Easy. But hold tight.”
And then I was hanging just by my hands; I wasn’t even touching the floor of it at all. Jesus, I was thinking, ‘Well, here it is then; it will be tough about that race this afternoon’; I didn’t even know we were on the ground again until I found out it was him and Marchand lifting the seat out and Marchand saying, ‘Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn,’ and him looking at me and the bastard crate standing there quiet as one of them photographs on Grandlieu Street, and then he says, ‘Would you go up again?’ and I said, ‘Yes. You want to go now?’ and he said, ‘Let’s get her on over to the field and qualify.’”
“Sweet Jesus Christ,” Jiggs said.
“Yair,” the reporter cried. “It was just weight distribution: him and Marchand rigged up a truck inner tube full of sand on a pulley so he can — And put the seat back and even if they see the end of the cable they wouldn’t — Because the only ship in it that can beat him is Ord’s and the purse ain’t but two thousand and Ord don’t need it, he is only in it so New Valois folks can see him fly the Ninety-Two once, and he ain’t going to beat that fifteen-thousand-dollar ship to death just to—”
“Here; here,” Jiggs said. “You’re going to blow all to pieces in a minute. Smoke a cigarette; ain’t you got some?” The reporter fumbled the cigarettes out at last, though it was Jiggs who took two from the pack and struck the match while the reporter stooped to it, trembling. The dazed, spent, wild look was still on his face, but he was quieter now.
“So they were all out to meet him, were they?”
“Jesus, did they,” Jiggs said. “And Ord out in front; he recognized the ship as soon as it come in sight; Jesus, I bet he recognized it before Roger even recognized the airport, and by the time he landed you would have thought he was Lindbergh.
And him sitting there in the cockpit and looking at them and Ord hollering at him and then they all come back up the apron like Roger was a kidnapper or something and went into the administration building and a minute later the microphone begun to holler for the inspector, what’s his—”
“Sales,” the reporter said. “It’s licensed; they can’t stop him.”
“Sales can ground it, though,” Jiggs said.
“Yair.” The reporter was already turning, moving. “But Sales ain’t nothing but a Federal officer; Feinman is a Jew and on the sewage board.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“What?” the reporter cried, glaring, gaunt, apparently having already rushed on and out of his precarious body so that only the shell glared back at Jiggs. “What? What’s he holding this meet for? What did he — do you think
