to your younger sister while he was gone; or you were the one that somebody else’s husband was easing out with and that all the choice you had was the dirty dishes to wash against the nickel sodas and a half an hour of dancing to a back-alley orchestra in a dive where nobody give his right name and then being wallowed around on the back seat of a car and then go home and slip in and lie to your sister and when it got too close, having the guy jump on you too to save his own face and then make it up by buying you two sodas next time. Or maybe at fifteen she just never saw any way of doing better because for awhile she never even knowed that the guy was holding her down himself, see, that he was hiding her out at the cheapdives not so they would not be recognized but so he would not have any competition from anybody but guys like himself; no young guys for her to see or to see her. Only the competition come; somehow she found out there was sodas that cost more than a dime and that all the music never had to be played in a back room with the shades down. Or maybe it was just him, because one night she had used him for a stalking horse and he hunted her down and the guy she was with this time finally had to beat him up and so he went back home and told the sister on her — —”
The reporter rose, quickly. Jiggs watched him go to the table and pour into the glass, splashing the liquor on to the table. “That’s right,” Jiggs said. “Take a good one.” The reporter lifted the glass, gulping, his throat filled with swallowing and the liquor cascading down his chin; Jiggs sprang up quickly too but the other passed him, running towards the window and on to the balcony where Jiggs, following, caught him by the arms as he lunged outwards and the liquor, hardly warmed, burst from his mouth. The cathedral clock struck the half-hour; the sound followed them back into the room and seemed to die away too, like the light, into the harsh, bright, savage zigzags of colour on the blanket-hung walls. “Let me get you some water,” Jiggs said. “You sit down now, and I will—”
“I’m all right now,” the reporter said. “You put on your shoes. That was half-past seven then.”
“Yair. But you better—”
“No. Sit down; I’ll pull your leggings for you.”
“You sure you feel like it?”
“Yes. I’m all right now.” They sat facing one another on the floor again as they had sat the first night, while the reporter took hold of the riveted strap of the right boot leg. Then he began to laugh. “You see, it got all mixed up,” he said, laughing, not loud yet. “It started out to be a tragedy. A good orthodox Italian tragedy. You know: one Florentine falls in love with another Florentine’s wife and he spends three acts fixing it up to put the bee on the second Florentine and so just as the curtain falls on the third act the Florentine and the wife crawl down the fire escape and you know that the second Florentine’s brother won’t catch them until daylight and they will be asleep in the monk’s bed in the monastery? But it went wrong. When he come climbing up to the window to tell her the horses was ready, she refused to speak to him. It turned into a comedy, see?” He looked at Jiggs, laughing, not laughing louder but just faster. “Here, fellow!” Jiggs said. “Here now! Quit it!”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “It’s not that funny. I’m trying to quit it. I’m trying to. But I can’t quit. See? See how I can’t quit?” he said, still holding to the strap, his face twisted with laughing, which as Jiggs looked, burst suddenly with drops of moisture running down the cadaverous grimace which for an instant Jiggs thought was sweat until he saw the reporter’s eyes.
It was after half-past seven; they would have to hurry now.
But they found a cab at once and they got the green light at once at Grandlieu Street even before the cab began to slow, shooting athwart the glare of neon, the pulse and glitter of electrics which bathed the idle slow Sunday pavement throng as it drifted from window to window beyond which the immaculate, the unbelievable wax men and women gazed back at them with expressions inscrutable and delphic. Then the palms in Saint Jules Avenue began to swim and flee past — the scabby picket posts, the sage dusters out of the old Southern country thought; the lighted clock in the station façade said six minutes to eight.
“They are probably already on the train,” Jiggs said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “They’ll let you through the gate, though.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, taking up the toy aeroplane and the package which he had rewrapped. “Don’t you want to come inside?”
“I’ll just wait here,” the reporter said. He watched Jiggs enter the waiting-room and vanish. He could hear the announcer calling another train; moving towards the doors he could see passengers begin to rise and take up bags and bundles and move towards the numbered gates, though quite a few still remained for other trains. “But not long,” the reporter thought. “Because they can go home now”; thinking of all the names of places which railroads go to, fanning out from the River’s mouth to all of America; of the cold February names: Minnesota and Dakota and Michigan, the high ice-clad river reaches and the long dependable snow; “yair, home now, knowing that they have got almost a whole year before they will have to get drunk and celebrate the fact that they will have more than eleven months before they will have to wear masks and get drunk and blow horns again.”
Now the clock said two minutes to eight; they had probably got off the car to talk to Jiggs, perhaps standing now on the platform, smoking maybe; he could cross the waiting-room and doubtless even see them, standing beside the hissing train while the other passengers and the redcaps hurried past; she would carry the bundle and the magazines and the little boy would have the aeroplane already, probably performing wing-overs or vertical turns by hand. “Maybe I will go and look,” he thought, waiting to see if he would, until suddenly he realized that now it was different from when he had stood in the bedroom before turning on the light. It was himself now who was the nebulous and quiet ragtag and bobend of touching and breath and experience without visible scars, the waiting incurious unbreathing and without impatience, and there was another save him this time to make the move. There was a second hand on the clock too — a thin spidery splash; he watched it now as it moved too fast to follow save between the intervals of motion when it became instantaneously immobile as though drawn across the clock’s face by a pen and a ruler — 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. and done; it was now the twenty-first hour, and that was all. No sound, as though it had not been a steam train which quitted the station two seconds ago but rather the shadow of one on a magic-lantern screen until the child’s vagrant and restless hand came and removed the slide.
“Well,” Jiggs said, “I guess you’ll be wanting to get home and catch some shuteye.”
“Yair,” the reporter said, “we might as well be moving.” They got into the cab, though this time Jiggs lifted the canvas sack from the floor and sat with it on his lap.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “He’ll find it. He already dropped it a couple of times trying to make it spin on the platform. — You told him to stop at Main Street, didn’t you?”
“I’ll take you on to the hotel,” the reporter said.
“No, I’ll get out at Main. Jesus, it’s a good thing I don’t live here; I never would get back home unless somebody took me; I couldn’t even remember the name of the street I lived on even if I could pronounce it to ask where it was.”
“Grandlieu,” the reporter said. “I will take you—” The cab slowed into the corner and stopped; Jiggs gathered up the canvas bag and opened the door.
“This’ll be fine. It ain’t but eight-fifteen; I ain’t to meet Art until nine. I’ll just walk up the street a ways and get a little air.”
“I wish you’d let me — Or if you’d like to come on back home and—”
“No; you get on home and go to bed; we have kept you up enough, I guess.” He leaned into the cab, the cap raked above his hard blue face and the violent plum-coloured eye; suddenly the light changed to green and the bell clanged and shrilled. Jiggs stuck out his hand; for an instant the hot hard limp rough palm sweated against the reporter’s as if the reporter had touched a piece of machinery belting. “Much obliged. And thanks for the drinks. I’ll be seeing you.” The cab moved; Jiggs banged the door; his face fled backward past the window; the green and red and white electrics waned and pulsed and flicked away too as through the rear window the reporter watched Jiggs swing the now limp dirty sack over his shoulder and turn on into the crowd.