The reporter held in his hand the slip of paper which had been clipped to the money the jumper gave him. He did not blink, himself: he just stared at Jiggs with that desperate urgency.
“The tickets,” he said. “Where—”
“Oh,” Jiggs said. “Myron, Ohio. Yair, that’s it on the paper.
Roger’s old man. They’re going to leave the kid there. I thought you knew. You said you saw Jack at the — Here, doc! What is this?” He opened the door wider and put out his hand, but the reporter had already caught the door-jamb. “You come on in and set down a—”
“Myron, Ohio,” the reporter said. His face wore again that faint wrung quiet grimace as with the other hand he continued to try to put Jiggs’ hand aside even after Jiggs was no longer offering to touch him. He began to apologize to Jiggs for having disturbed him, talking through that thin wash over his wasted gaunt face which would have been called smiling for lack of anything better.
“It’s all right, doc,” Jiggs said, watching him, blinking still with a sort of brutal concern. “Jesus, ain’t you been to bed yet? Here; you better come in here; me and Art can make room—”
“Yes, I’ll be getting on.”
He pushed himself carefully back from the door as though he were balancing himself before turning the door loose, feeling Jiggs watching him. “I just happened to drop in. To say good-bye.” He looked at Jiggs with that thin fixed grimace while Jiggs blinked at him.
“Good-bye, doc. Only you better—”
“And good luck to you. Or do you say happy landings to a parachute jumper?”
“Jesus,” Jiggs said. “I hope so.”
“Then happy landings too.”
“Yair. Thanks. The same to you, doc.” The reporter turned away. Jiggs watched him go down the corridor, walking with that curious light stiff care, and turn the corner and vanish.
The light was even dimmer on the stairs than it had been in the corridor, though the brass strips which bound the rubber tread to each step glinted bright and still in the centre where the heels had kept it polished.
The negro was already asleep again in the chair beside the desk; he did not stir as the reporter passed him and went on and got into the cab, stumbling a little on the step.
“Back to the airport,” he said. “You needn’t hurry. We got until daylight.” He was back on the beach before daylight, though it was dawn before the other four saw him again, before they came out of the dark lunch-stand and passed again through another barricade of parked cars (though not so many this time since it was now Monday), and descended to the beach.
They saw him then. The smooth water was a pale rose colour from the waxing east, so that the reporter in silhouette against it resembled a tatting Christmas gift made by a little girl and supposed to represent a sleeping crane.
“Good Lord,” the third said. “You suppose he has been down here by himself all the time?” But they did not have much time to wonder about it; they were barely on time themselves; they heard the aeroplane taking off before they reached the beach and then they watched it circling; it came over into what they thought was position and the sound of the engine died for a time and then began again and the aeroplane went on, though nothing else happened.
They saw nothing fall from it at all, they just saw three gulls converge suddenly from nowhere and begin to slant and tilt and scream above a spot on the water some distance away, making a sound like rusty shutters in a wind. “So that’s that,” the third said. “Let’s go to town.” Again the fourth one spoke the reporter’s name.
“Are we going to wait for him?” he said. They looked back, but the reporter was gone.
“He must have got a ride with somebody,” the third said. “Come on. Let’s go.”
When the reporter got out of the car at the Saint Jules Avenue corner the clock beyond the restaurant’s window said eight o’clock. He did not look at the clock; he was looking at nothing for the time, shaking slowly and steadily.
It was going to be another bright vivid day; the sunlight, the streets and walls themselves emanated that brisk up-and-doing sobriety of Monday morning.
But he was not looking at that either; he was not looking at anything. When he began to see it was as if the letters were beginning to emerge from the back of his skull — the broad page under a rusting horseshoe, the quality of grateful astonishment which Monday headlines have like when you learn that the uncle whom you believed to have perished two years ago in a poor-house fire died yesterday in Tucson, Arizona and left you five hundred dollars:
AVIATOR’S BODY RESIGNED TO LAKE GRAVE
Then he quit seeing it. He had not moved; his pupils would still have repeated the page in inverted miniature, but he was not seeing it at all, shaking quietly and steadily in the bright warm sun until he turned and looked into the window with an expression of quiet and bemused despair — the not-flies or were-flies, the two grape-fruit halves, the printed names of food like the printed stations in a train schedule and set on an easel like a family portrait — and experienced not only that profound and unshakable reluctance but actual absolute refusal of his entire organism.
“All right,” he said. “If I won’t eat, then I am going to take a drink. If I won’t go in here then I am going to Joe’s.” It was not far: just down an alley and through a barred door — one of the places where for fifteen years the United States had tried to keep them from selling whiskey and where for one year now it had been trying to make them sell it.
The porter let him in and poured him a drink in the empty bar while starting the cork in another bottle. “Yair,” the reporter said. “I was on the wagon for an entire day. Would you believe that?”
“Not about you,” the porter said.
“Neither would I. It surprised me. It surprised the hell out of me until I found out it was two other guys. See?” He laughed too; it wasn’t loud; it still didn’t seem loud even after the porter was holding him up, calling him by name too, mister too, like Leonora, saying:
“Come on, now; try to quit now.”
“All right,” the reporter said. “I’ve quit now. If you ever saw any man quitter than me right now I will buy you an aeroplane.”
“O.K.,” the porter said. “Only make it a taxi-cab and you go on home.”
“Home? I just come from home. I’m going to work now. I’m O.K. now. Give me another shot and just point me towards the door and I will be all right. All right, see? Then I learned by mistake that it was two other guys—” But he stopped himself, this time; he held himself fine while the porter poured the other drink and brought it to him.
He had himself in hand fine now; he did not feel at all: just the liquor flowing slowly down him, fiery, dead, and cold.
Soon he would even quit shaking, soon he did quit; walking now with the bright unsoiled morning falling upon him he did not have anything to shake with. “So I feel better,” he said.
Then he began to say it fast: “Oh God, I feel better! I feel better! I feel! I feel!” until he quit that too and said quietly, with tragic and passive clairvoyance, looking at the familiar wall, the familiar twin door through which he was about to pass: “Something is going to happen to me. I have got myself stretched out too far and too thin and something is going to bust.”
He mounted the quiet stairs; in the empty corridor he drank from the bottle, though this time it was merely cold and felt like water. But when he entered the deserted city room he remembered that he could have drunk here just as well, and so he did.
“I see so little of it,” he said. “I don’t know the family’s habits yet.” But it was empty, or comparatively so, because he kept on making that vertical reverse without any rudder or flippers and looking down on the close-peopled land and the empty lake and deciding, and the dredge-boat hanging over him for twenty hours and then having to lie there too and look up at the wreath dissolving, faintly rocking and stared at by gulls, away and trying to explain that he did not know.
“I didn’t think of that!” he cried. “I just thought they were all going. I don’t know where, but I thought that all three of them, that maybe the hundred and seventy-five would be enough until Homes could… and that then he would be big enough and I would be there; I would maybe see her first and she would not look different even though he was out there around the pylon, and so I wouldn’t either even if I was forty-two instead of twenty-eight, and he would come on in off the pylons and we would go up and she maybe holding my arm and him looking at us over the cockpit and she would say, ‘This is the one back in New Valois that time. That used to buy you the ice-cream.’”
Then he had to hurry, saying, “Wait. Stop now. Stop,” until he did stop, tall, humped a little, moving
