Then she unbuttoned the shirt and shook out the skirt and spread paper towels on the lavatory and laid the garments on them, openings upward and facing her and, holding the open edges of the coverall’s front between two more paper towels, she paused and looked again at the door: a single still cold glance empty of either hesitation, concern, or regret while even here the faint beat of the band came in mute thuds and blares.
Then she turned her back slightly towards the door and in the same motion with which she reached for the skirt she stepped out of the coverall in a pair of brown walking shoes, not new now and which had not cost very much when they had been, and a man’s thin cotton undershorts and nothing else.
Now the first starting bomb went… a jarring thud followed by a vicious light repercussion as if the bomb had set off another smaller one in the now empty hangar and in the rotunda too. Within the domed steel vacuum the single report became myriad, high and everywhere about the concave ceiling like invisible unearthly winged creatures of that yet unvisioned tomorrow, mechanical instead of blood, bone and meat, speaking to one another in vicious high-pitched ejaculations as though concerting an attack on something below.
There was an amplifier in the rotunda too and through it the sound of the aeroplanes turning the field pylon on each lap filled the rotunda and the restaurant where the woman and the reporter sat while the little boy finished the second dish of ice-cream. The amplifier filled rotunda and restaurant even above the sound of feet as the crowd moiled and milled and trickled through the gates on to the field, with the announcer’s voice harsh masculine and disembodied.
At the end of each lap would come the mounting and then fading snarl and snore of engines as the aeroplanes came up and zoomed and banked away, leaving once more the scuffle and murmur of feet on tile and the voice of the announcer reverberant and sonorous within the domed shell of glass and steel in a running commentary to which apparently none listened, as if the voice were merely some unavoidable and inexplicable phenomenon of nature like the sound of wind or of erosion. Then the band would begin to play again, though faint and almost trivial behind and below the voice, as if the voice actually were that natural phenomenon against which all man-made sounds and noises blew and vanished like leaves.
Then the bomb again, the faint fierce thwack-thwack-thwack, and the sound of engines again trivial and meaningless as the band, as though like the band mere insignificant properties which the voice used for emphasis as the magician uses his wand or handkerchief:
“… ending the second event, the two hundred cubic inch class dash, the correct time of the winner of which will be given you as soon as the judges report.
Meanwhile while we are waiting for it to come in I will run briefly over the afternoon’s programme of events for the benefit of those who have come in late or have not purchased a programme which, by the way, may be purchased for twenty-five cents from any of the attendants in the purple-and-gold Mardi Gras caps….”
“I got one here,” the reporter said. He produced it, along with a mass of blank yellow copy and a folded newspaper of the morning, from the same pocket of his disreputable coat… a pamphlet already opened and creased back upon the faint mimeographed letters of the first page:
THURSDAY (DEDICATION DAY)
2.30 p m. Spot Parachute Jump. Purse $25.00.
3.00 p m. 200 cu in. Dash. Qualifying Speed 100 in p h. Purse $150.00 (1) 45%. (2) 30%. (3) 15%. (4) 10%.
3.30 p m. Aerial Acrobatics. Jules Despleins, France. Lieut.
Frank Burnham, United States.
4.30 p m. Scull Dash. 375 cu in. Qualifying Speed 160 in p h.
(1, 2, 3,4).
5.00 p m. Delayed Parachute Drop.
8.00 p m. Special Mardi Gras Evening Event. Rocket Plane
Lieut. Frank Burnham.
“Keep it,” the reporter said. “I don’t need it.”
“Thanks,” the woman said. “I know the setup.” She looked at the boy. “Hurry and finish it,” she said. “You have already eaten more than you can hold.” The reporter looked at the boy too, with that expression leashed, eager, cadaverous; sitting forward on the flimsy chair in that attitude at once inert yet precarious and light-poised as though for violent and complete departure like a scarecrow in a winter field. “All I can do for him is buy him something to eat,” he said.
“To take him to see an air race would be like taking a colt out to Washington Park for the day. You are from Iowa and Shumann was born in Ohio and he was born in California and he has been across the United States four times, let alone Canada and Mexico. Jesus. He could take me and show me, couldn’t he?” But the woman was looking at the boy; she did not seem to have heard at all.
“Go on,” she said. “Finish it or leave it.”
“And then we’ll eat some candy,” the reporter said. “Hey, Dempsey?”
“No,” the woman said. “He’s had enough.”
“But maybe for later?” the reporter said. She looked at him now: the pale stare without curiosity, perfectly grave, perfectly blank, as he rose, moved, dry loose weightless and sudden and longer than a lath, the disreputable suit ballooning even in this windless conditioned air as he went towards the candy counter.
Above the shuffle and murmur of feet in the lobby and above the clash and clatter of crockery in the restaurant the amplified voice still spoke, profound and effortless, as though it were the voice of the steel-and-chromium mausoleum itself, talking of creatures imbued with motion though not with life and incomprehensible to the puny crawling pain-webbed globe, incapable of suffering, wombed and born complete and instantaneous, cunning, intricate and deadly, from out some blind iron bat-cave of the earth’s prime foundation:
“… dedication meet, Feinman million-dollar airport, New Valois, Franciana, held under the official auspices of the American Aeronautical Association.
And here is the official clocking of the winners of the two hundred cubic inch race which you just witnessed… Now they had to breast the slow current; the gatemen (these wore tunics of purple-and-gold as well as caps) would not let them pass because the woman and the child had no tickets. So they had to go back and out and around through the hangar to reach the apron.
And here the voice met them again… or rather it had never ceased; they had merely walked in it without hearing or feeling it like in the sunshine; the voice too almost as sourceless as light.
Now, on the apron, the third bomb went off, and looking up the apron from where he stood among the other mechanics about the aeroplanes waiting for the next race, Jiggs saw the three of them… the woman in an attitude of inattentive hearing without listening, the scarecrow man who even from here Jiggs could discern to be talking steadily and even now and then gesticulating, the small khaki spot of the little boy’s dungarees riding high on his shoulder and the small hand holding a scarce-tasted chocolate bar in a kind of static surfeit.
They went on, though Jiggs saw them twice more, the second time the shadow of the man’s and the little boy’s heads falling for an incredible distance eastward along the apron. Then the taller man began to beckon him and already the five aeroplanes entered for the race were moving, the tails high on the shoulders of their crews, out towards the starting-line.
When he and the taller man returned to the apron the band was still playing. Faced by the bright stands with their whipping skyline of purple-and-gold pennons the amplifiers at regular intervals along the apron edge erupted snatched blares of ghostlike and ubiquitous sound which, as Jiggs and the other passed them, died each into the next without loss of beat or particular gain in sense or tune.
Beyond the amplifiers and the apron lay the flat triangle of reclaimed and tortured earth dragged with slow mechanical violence into air and alternations of light — the ceaseless surface of the outraged lake notched by the oyster-and-shrimp-fossil bed, upon which the immaculate concrete runways lay in the attitude of two stiffly embracing capital F’s, and on one of which the six aeroplanes rested like six motionless wasps, the slanting sun glinting on their soft bright paint and on the faint propeller blurs.
Now the band ceased; the bomb bloomed again on the pale sky and had already begun to fade even before the jarring thud, the thin vicious crack of reverberation; and now the voice again, amplified and ubiquitous, louder even than the spatter and snarl of the engines as the six aeroplanes rose raggedly and dissolved, converging, coveying, towards the scattering pylon out in the lake:
. fourth event, Scull Speed Dash, three hundred and seventy-five cubic inch, twenty-five miles, five times around, purse three hundred and twenty-five dollars.
I’ll give you the names of the contestants as the boys, the other pilots on the apron here, figure they will come in. First and second will be Al Myers and Bob Bullitt, in number thirty-two and number five. You can
