a fox’s tail is the only…” He stared at Jiggs, who stared back at him with blinking a«d one-eyed attention. “Wait. No. It’s the horse’s bone. Not the fox; the horse’s shin-bone. That’s what we need.”
“A horse’s shin-bone?”
“For the boots. That’s what you use.”
“All right. But where—”
“I know where. We can pick it up on the way out to see Hagood. We can rent a car.” They had to walk up to Grandlieu Street to rent the car.
“Want me to drive?” Jiggs said.
“Can you?”
“Sure.”
“Then I guess you will have to,” the reporter said. “I can’t.” It was a bright, soft, sunny day, quite warm, the air filled, breathing, with a faint suspiration which made the reporter think of organs and bells — of mortification and peace and shadowy kneeling — though he heard neither. The streets were crowded, though the throngs were quiet, not only with ordinary Sunday decorum but with a certain slow tranquillity as though the very brick and stone had just recovered from fever. Now and then, in the lees of walls and gutters as they left down town behind them, the reporter saw little drifts of the spent confetti but soiled and stained now until it resembled more dingy sawdust or even dead leaves. Once or twice he saw tattered loops of the purple-and-gold bunting and once at a corner a little boy darted almost beneath the wheels with a tattered streamer of it whipping behind him. Then the city dissolved into swamp and marsh again; presently the road ran into a broad expanse of saltmarsh broken by the dazzling sun-blanched dyke of a canal; presently a rutted lane turned off into the saltgrass. “Here we are,” the reporter said. The car turned into the lane and they began to pass the débris, the silent imperishable monument tranquil in the bright sun — the old car-bodies without engines or wheels, the old engines and wheels without bodies; the rusted scraps and sections of iron machinery and standpipes and culverts rising half-buried out of the blanched sand and shell-dust which was so white itself that for a time Jiggs saw no bones at all. “Can you tell a horse from a cow?” the reporter said.
“I don’t know,” Jiggs said. “I ain’t very certain whether I can even tell a shin-bone or not.”
“We’ll get some of everything and try them all,” the reporter said. So they did; moving about, stooping (the reporter was blinking again now between the fierce quiet glare of the pigmentless sand and the ineffable and cloudless blue), they gathered up about thirty pounds of bones. They had two complete forelegs, both of which were horses’ though they did not know it, a set of shoulder-blades from a mule, and Jiggs came up with a full set of ribs which he insisted belonged to a colt but which were actually those of a big dog, and the reporter had one object which turned out not to be bone at all but the forearm from a piece of statuary. “We ought to have something in here that will do,” he said.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Now which way?” They did not need to return through the city. They skirted it, leaving the saltmarsh behind and now, crossing no actual boundary or demarcation and challenged by no sentry, they entered a region where even the sunlight seemed different, where it filtered among the ordered live oaks and fell suavely upon parked expanses and vistas beyond which the homes of the rich, oblivious and secure, presided above clipped lawns and terraces, with a quality of having itself been passed by appointment through a walled gate by a watchman. Presently they ran along a picket-line of palm-trunks beyond which a clipped fairway stretched, broken only by sedate groups of apparently armed men and boys all moving in one direction like a kind of decorously embattled skirmish advance.
“It ain’t four yet,” the reporter said. “We can wait for him right here, at number fifteen.” So after a time Hagood, preparing to drive with his foursome, his ball teed and addressed, looked up and saw them standing quietly just inside the club’s grounds, the car waiting in the road behind them, watching him — the indefatigable and now ubiquitous cadaver and the other, the vicious half-metamorphosis between thug and horse — the tough, hard, blunt face to which the blue swollen eye lent no quality of pity or suffering, made it look not at all like a victim or one deserving compassion, but merely like a pirate. Hagood stepped down from the tee.
“A message from the office,” he said quietly. “You fellows drive and play on; I’ll catch you.” He approached Jiggs and the reporter. “How much do you want this time?” he said.
“Whatever you will let me have,” the reporter said.
“So,” Hagood said quietly. “It’s that bad this time, is it?” The reporter said nothing; they watched Hagood take his wallet from his hip-pocket and open it. “This is the last, this time, I suppose?” he said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “They’re leaving to-night.” From the wallet Hagood took a thin sheaf of cheque blanks, “So you won’t suggest a sum yourself,” Hagood said. “You are using psychology on me.”
“Whatever you can. Will. I know I have borrowed more from you than I have paid back. But this time maybe I can…” He drew something from his coat now and extended it — a postcard, a coloured lithograph; Hagood read the legend: Hotel Vista del Mar, Santa Monica, California, the plump arrow drawn by a hotel pen and pointing to a window.
“What?” Hagood said.
“Read it,” the reporter said. “It’s from mamma. Where they are spending their honeymoon, her and Mr. Hurtz. She said how she has told him about me and he seems to like me all right and that maybe when my birthday comes on the first of April…”
“Ah,” Hagood said. “That will be very nice, won’t it?” He took a short fountain-pen from his shirt and glanced about; now the second man, the cartoon comedy centaur who had been watching him quietly and steadily with the one bright hot eye, spoke for the first time.
“Write on my back if you want to, mister,” he said, turning and stooping, presenting a broad skin-tight expanse of soiled shirt, apparently as hard as a section of concrete, to Hagood.
“And get the hell kicked out of me and serve me right,” Hagood thought viciously. He spread the blank on Jiggs’ back and wrote the cheque and waved it dry and folded it and handed it to the reporter.
“Do you want me to sign anyth—” the reporter began.
“No. But will you let me ask a favour of you?”
“Yes, chief. Of course.”
“Go to town and look in the book and find where Doctor Legendre lives and go out there. Don’t telephone; go out there; tell him I sent you, tell him I said to give you some pills that will put you to sleep for about twenty-four hours, and go home and take them. Will you?”
“Yes, chief,” the reporter said. “To-morrow when you fix the note for me to sign you can pin the postcard to it. It won’t be legal, but it will be…”
“Yes,” Hagood said. “Go on, now. Please go on.”
“Yes, chief,” the reporter said. They went on. When they reached home it was almost five o’clock. They unloaded the bones and now they both worked, each with a boot, fast. It seemed to be slow work, nevertheless the boots were taking on a patina deeper and less brilliant than wax or polish.
“Jesus,” Jiggs said. “If I just hadn’t creased the ankles, and if I just had kept the box and paper when I unwrapped them—”
Because he had forgotten that it was Sunday. He knew it; he and the reporter had known it was Sunday all day but they had both forgotten it; they did not remember it until, at half-past five, Jiggs halted the car before the window into which he had looked four days ago — the window from which now both boots and photographs were missing. They looked at the locked door quietly for a good while. “So we didn’t need to hurry after all,” he said. “Well, maybe I couldn’t have fooled them, anyway. Maybe I’d a had to went to the pawnshop just the same anyway…. We might as well take the car back.”
“Let’s go to the paper and cash the cheque first,” the reporter said. He had not yet looked at it; while Jiggs waited in the car he went in and returned. “It was for a hundred,” he said. “He’s a good guy. He’s been white to me, Jesus.” He got into the car.
“Now where?” Jiggs said.
“Now we got to decide now. We might as well take the car back while we are deciding.” The lights were on now; when they emerged from the garage, walking, they moved in red-green-and-white glare and flicker, crossing the outfall from the theatre entrances and the eating-places, passing athwart the hour’s rich resurgence of fish and coffee. “You can’t give it to her yourself,” the reporter said. “They would know you never had that much.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “All I could risk would have been that twenty bucks. But I’ll have room for some of it, though. If I get as much as ten from Uncle Isaac I will want to pinch myself.”
“And if we slipped it to the kid, it would be the — Wait,” he said: he stopped and looked at Jiggs. “I got it. Yair. Come on.” Now he was almost running, weaving on through the slow Sunday-evening throng, Jiggs