“You bastards,” the second said. “You dirty-mouthed bastards. Why don’t you let the guy rest? Let them all rest. They were trying to do what they had to do, with what they had to do it with, the same as all of us only maybe a little better than us. At least without squealing and belly-aching.”
“Sure,” the first said. “You get the point exactly. What they could do, with what they had to do it with: that’s just what we were talking about when you called us dirty-minded bastards.”
“Yes,” the third said. “Grady’s right. Let him rest; that’s what she seems to have done herself. But what the hell: probably nowhere to send him, even if she had him out of there. So it would be the same whether she stayed any longer or not, besides the cost. Where do you suppose they are going?”
“Where do people like that go?” the second said. “Where do mules and vaudeville acts go? You see a wagon broken down in the ditch or you see one of those trick bicycles with one wheel and the seat fourteen feet from the earth in a pawnshop. But do you wonder whatever became of whatever it was that used to make them move?”
“Do you mean you think she cleared out just to keep from having to pay out some jack to bury him if they get him up?” the fourth said.
“Why not?” the second said. “People like that don’t have money to spend on corpses because they don’t use money. It don’t take money especially to live; it’s only when you die that you or somebody has got to have something put away in the sock. A man can eat and sleep and keep the purity squad off of him for six months on what the undertaker will make you believe you can’t possibly be planted for a cent less and preserve your self-respect. So what would they have to bury him with even if they had him to bury?”
“You talk like he didn’t kill himself taking a chance to win two thousand dollars,” the third said.
“That’s correct. Oh, he would have taken the money, all right. But that wasn’t why he was flying that ship up there. He would have entered it if he hadn’t had anything but a bicycle, just so it would have got off the ground. But it ain’t for money.
It’s because they have got to do it, like some women have got to be whores. They can’t help themselves. Ord knew that the ship was dangerous, and Shumann must have known it as well as Ord did — don’t you remember how for the first lap he stayed so far away he didn’t even look like he was in the same race, until he forgot and came in and tried to catch Ord?
If it had just been the money, do you think he could have thought about money hard enough to have decided to risk his life to get it in a machine that he knew was unsafe, and then have forgot about the money for a whole lap of the race while he hung back there not half as close to the pylons as the judges were, just riding around? Don’t kid yourself.”
“And don’t kid yourself,” the first said. “It was the money. Those guys like money as well as you and me. What would he have done with it? Hell, what would any other three people do with two thousand bucks?
She would have bought herself a batch of new clothes and they would have moved to the hotel from wherever it was they were staying, and they would have taken a couple of days and blowed it out good. That’s what they would have done. But they didn’t get it and so you are right, by God: what she did was the sensible thing: when a game blows up in your face you don’t sit down on the pocket-book that used to make a bump on your ass and cry about it, you get out and hustle up another roll and go on and find another game that maybe you can beat.
Yes. They want money, all right. But it ain’t to sweat just to have something in the sock when the snow flies, or to be buried with either. So I don’t know any more than you guys do, but if somebody told me that Shumann had some folks somewhere and then they told me the name of the town she bought hers and the kid’s tickets to, I would tell you where Shumann used to live.
And then I would bet a quarter maybe that the next time you see them, the kid won’t be there. Because why? Because that’s what I would do if I were her. And so would you guys.”
“No,” the second said.
“You mean you wouldn’t or she wouldn’t?” the first said. The reporter satmotionless the cigarette’s windless upstream breaking upon his face. “Yes,” the first said. “Before, they might not have known whose the kid was, but it was Shumann’s name he went under and so in comparison to the whole mess they must have lived in, who had actually fathered the kid didn’t matter. But now Shumann’s gone; you asked a while ago what she was thinking about while he was sitting up there waiting for the water to hit him.
I’ll tell you what she and the other guy were both thinking about: that now that Shumann was gone, they would never get rid of him. Maybe they took it night about: I don’t know. But now they couldn’t even get him out of the room; even turning off the light won’t do any good, and all the time they would be awake and moving there he will be, watching them right out of the mixed-up name, Jack Shumann, that the kid has.
It used to be the guy had one competitor; now he will have to compete with every breath the kid draws and be cuckolded by every ghost that walks and refuses to give his name. So if you will tell me that Shumann has some folks in a certain town, I will tell you where she and the kid—”
The reporter did not move. He sat quite still while the voice ceased on that note of abrupt transition, hearing out of the altered silence the voices talking at him and the eyes talking at him while he held himself rigid, watching the calculated hand flick the ash carefully from the cigarette. “You hung around them a lot,” the first said. “Did you ever hear any of them mention any kin that Shumann or she had?”
The reporter did not move; he let the voice repeat the question; he even raised the cigarette again and flicked the ash off, or what would have been ash if he had not flicked it only a second ago. Then he started; he sat up, looking at them with an expression of startled interrogation.
“What?” he said. “What was that? I wasn’t listening.”
“Did you ever hear any mention of Shumann having any kinsfolks, mother and father and such?” the first said. The reporter’s face did not alter.
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe I did. I believe his mechanic told me that he was an orphan.”
It was two o’clock then but the cab went fast, so it was just past two-thirty when the cab reached the Terrebonne and the reporter entered and leaned his gaunt desperate face across the desk while he spoke to the clerk.
“Don’t you call yourselves the headquarters of the American Aeronautical Association?” he said. “You mean you didn’t keep any registration of contestants and such? that the committee just let them scatter to hell and gone over New Valois without—”
“Who is it you want to find?” the clerk said.
“Art Jackson. A stunt flyer.”
“I’ll see if there is any record. The meet was over yesterday.” The clerk left the window. The reporter leaned in it, not panting, just completely motionless until the clerk returned.
“There is an Arthur Jackson registered as staying at the Bienville hotel yesterday. But whether or not he is—” But the reporter was gone, not running, but walking fast, back towards the entrance; a porter with a long-handled brush sweeping the floor jerked it back just before the reporter was about to walk through the brush-handle as if it were a spiderweb.
The taxi-driver did not know exactly where the Bienville was, but at last they found it — a side street, a sign reading mostly Turkish Bath, then a narrow entrance, a corridor dimly lighted and containing a few chairs, a few palms, more spittoons than either, and a desk beside which a negro in no uniform slept — a place ambiguous, redolent of hard Saturday nights, whose customers seldom had any baggage and beyond the turnings of whose dim and threadbare corridors there seemed to whisk for ever bright tawdry kimonos in a kind of hopeful nostalgic convocation of all the bought female flesh which ever breathed and perished.
The negro waked; there was no elevator; the reporter was directed to the room from his description of Jiggs and knocked beneath the ghost of two numbers attached to the door’s surface by the ghost of four tacks until the door opened and Jiggs blinked at him with the good eye and the injured one, wearing now only
