following. They tried five drugstores before they found it — a blue-and-yellow toy hanging by a piece of cord before a rotary ventilator in similitude of flight. It had not been for sale; Jiggs and the reporter fetched the step-ladder from the rear of the store in order to take it down. “You said the train leaves at eight,” the reporter said. “We got to hurry some.” It was half-past six now as they left Grandlieu Street; when they reached the corner where Shumann and Jiggs had bought the sandwich two nights ago, they parted.
“I can see the balls from here,” Jiggs said. “Ain’t any need of you going with me; I guess I won’t have any trouble carrying what they will give me for them. You get the sandwiches and leave the door unlocked for me.” He went on, the newspaper-wrapped boots under his arm; even now as each foot flicked backward with that motion like a horse’s hock, the reporter believed that he could see the coin-shaped patch of blackened flesh in each pale sole: so that when he entered the corridor and set the door ajar, and mounted the stairs and turned on the light, he did not open the sandwiches at once. He put them and the toy aeroplane on the table and went beyond the curtain. When he emerged he carried in one hand the gallon jug (it contained now about three pints) and in the other a pair of shoes which looked as much like him as his hair or hands looked. He was sitting on the cot, smoking, when Jiggs entered, carrying now a biggish bundle, a bundle bigger even though shorter than the boots had been. “He gave me five bucks for them,” Jiggs said. “I give twenty-two and a half and wear them twice and he gives me five. Yair. He throws it away.” He laid the bundle on the couch. “So I decided that wasn’t even worth the trouble of handing to her. So I just got some presents for all of them.” He opened the parcel. It contained a box or chest of candy about the size of a suitcase and resembling a miniature bale of cotton lettered heavily by some pyrographic process: Souvenir of New Valois. Come back again and three magazines — Boys’ Life, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and one of the pulp magazines of war stories in the air. Jiggs’ blunt grained hands rifled them and evened the edges again; his brutal battered face was curiously serene. “It will give them something to do on the train, see? Now let me get my pliers and we will fix that ship.” Then he saw the jug on the table as he turned. But he did not go to it; he just stopped, looking at it, and the reporter saw the good eye rush sudden and inarticulate and hot. But he did not move. It was the reporter who went and poured the first drink and gave it to him, and then the second one. “You need one too,” Jiggs said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I will in a minute.” But he didn’t for awhile, though he took one of the sandwiches when Jiggs opened them and then watched Jiggs, his jaw bulged by a huge bite, stoop and take from the canvas sack the cigar box and from the box produce a pair of pliers; not beginning yet to eat his own sandwich the reporter watched Jiggs raise the metal clamps which held the toy aeroplane’s tin body together and open it. The reporter produced the money — the seventy-five which the jumper had given him and the hundred from Hagood — and they wedged it into the toy and Jiggs clamped it to again.
“Yair, he’ll find it, all right,” Jiggs said. “Every toy he gets he plays with it a couple of days and then he takes it apart. To fix it, he says. But Jesus, he came by that natural; Roger’s old man is a doctor, see. A little country town where it’s mostly Swede farmers and the old man gets up at any hour of the night and rides twenty or thirty miles in a sleigh and borns the babies and cuts off arms and legs and a lot of them even pay him; sometimes it ain’t but a couple or three years before they will bring him in a ham or a bedspread or something on the instalment. So the old man wanted Roger to be a doctor too, see, and he was hammering that at Roger all the time Roger was a kid and watching Roger’s grades in school and all: so that Roger would have to doctor up his report cards for the old man but the old man never found it out; he would see Roger start off for school every morning over in town ( they lived in a kind of big place, half farm, a little ways out of town that never nobody tried to farm much, Roger said, but his old man kept it because it was where his old man, his father’s old man, had settled when he come into the country) and he never found it out until one day he found out how Roger hadn’t even been inside the school in six months because he hadn’t never been off the place any further than out of sight down the road where he could turn and come back through the woods to an old mill his grandfather had built; and Roger had built him a motor-cycle in it out of scraps saved up from mowing-machines and clocks and such, and it run, see? That’s what saved him. When his old man saw that it would run he let Roger go then and quit worrying him to be a doctor; he bought Roger the first ship, the Hisso Standard, with the money he had been saving up to send Roger to the medical school, but when he saw that the motor-cycle would run, I guess he knew he was whipped. And then one night Roger had to make a landing without any lights and he run over a cow and cracked it up and the old man paid for having it rebuilt; Roger told me once the old man must have borrowed the jack to do it with on the farm and that he aimed to pay his old man back the first thing as soon as he could but I guess it’s O.K. because a farm without a mortgage on it would probably be against the law or something. Or maybe the old man didn’t have to mortgage the farm but he just told Roger that so Roger would pick out a vacant field next time.” The cathedral clock had struck seven shortly after Jiggs came in with his bundle; it must be about half-past seven now. Jiggs squatted, holding one of the shoes in his hand. “Jesus,” he said. “I sure won’t say I don’t need them. But what about you?”
“I couldn’t wear but one pair of them, no matter how many I had,” the reporter said. “You better go ahead and try them on.”
“They’ll fit, all right. There are two garments that will fit anybody: a handkerchief when your nose is running and a pair of shoes when your feet are on the ground.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “That was the same ship that he and Laverne—”
“Yair. Jesus, they were a pair. She was glad to see him when he come into town that day in it. One day she told me something about it. She was an orphan, see; her older sister that was married sent for her to come live with them when her folks died. The sister was about twenty years older than Laverne and the sister’s husband was about six or eight years younger than the sister and Laverne was about fourteen or fifteen; she hadn’t had much fun at home with a couple of old people like her father and mother, and she never had much with her sister neither, being that much younger; yair, I don’t guess the sister had a whole lot of fun either with the kind of guy the husband seemed to be. So when the husband started teaching Laverne how to slip out and meet him and they would drive to some town forty or fifty miles away when the husband was supposed to be at work or something and he would buy her a glass of soda-water or maybe stop at a dive where the husband was sure nobody he knowed would see them and dance, I guess she thought that was all the fun there was in the world and that since he would tell her it was all right to twotime the sister that way, that it was all right for her to do the rest of it he wanted. Because he was the big guy, see, the one that paid for what she wore and what she ate. Or maybe she didn’t think it was all right so much as she just thought that that was the way it was — that you was either married and wore down with housework to where your husband was just the guy that twotimed you and you knew it and all you could do about it was nag at him while he was awake and go through his clothes while he was alseep to see if you found any hairpins or letters or rubbers in his pockets, and then cry and moan about him