“Listen,” the reporter said. “She’s out there at the airport. She’s got a little boy, only it’s two of them, that fly those little ships that look like mosquitoes. No: just one of them flies the ship; the other makes the delayed parachute jump — you know, with the fifty-pound sack of flour and coming down like the haunt of Yuletide or something. Yair; they’ve got a little boy, about the size of this telephone, in dungarees like they w — —”
“What?” the editor cried. “Who have a little boy?”
“Yair. They don’t know. — In dungarees like they wear; when I come into the hangar this morning they were clean, maybe because the first day of a meet is the one they call Monday, and he had a stick and he was swabbing grease up off the floor and smearing it on to himself so he would look like they look….
Yair, two of them: this guy Shumann that took second money this afternoon, that come up from fourth in a crate that all the guys out there that are supposed to know said couldn’t even show.
She’s his wife, that is her name’s Shumann and the kid’s is Shumann too: out there in the hangar this morning in dungarees like the rest of them, with her hands full of wrenches and machinery and a gob of cotter keys in her mouth like they tell how women used to do with the pins and needles before General Motors begun to make their clothes for them, with this Harlow-coloured hair that they would pay her money for in Hollywood and a smear of grease where she had swiped it back with her wrist.
She’s his wife: they have been married almost ever since the kid was born six years ago in a hangar in California. Yair, this day Shumann comes down at whatever town it was in Iowa or Indiana or wherever it was she was a sophomore in the high school back before they had the air mail for farmers to quit ploughing and look up at; in the high school at recess, and so maybe that was why she come out without a hat even and got into the front seat of one of those Jennies the army used to sell them for cancelled stamps or whatever it was.
And maybe she sent a postcard back from the next cow pasture to the aunt or whoever it was that was expecting her to come home to dinner, granted that they have kin-folks or are descended from human beings, and he taught her to jump parachutes.
Because they ain’t human like us; they couldn’t turn those pylons like they do if they had human blood and senses and they wouldn’t want to or dare to if they just had human brains. Burn them like this one to-night and they don’t even holler in the fire; crash one and it ain’t even blood when you haul him out: it’s cylinder oil the same as in the crank-case.
“And listen: it’s both of them; this morning I walk into the hangar where they are getting the ships ready and I see the kid and a guy that looks like a little horse squared off with their fists up and the rest of them watching with wrenches and things in their hands and the kid rushes in flailing his arms and the guy holding him off and the others watching and the guy put the kid down and I come up and square off too with my fists up too and I says, ‘Come on, Dempsey.
How about taking me on next?’ and the kid don’t move, he just looks at me and then the guy says, ‘Ask him who’s his old man,’ only I thought he said, ‘So’s his old man,’ and I said, ‘So’s his old man?’ and the guy says, ‘No. Who’s his old man,’ and I said it, and here the kid comes with his fists flailing, and if he had just been half as big as he wanted to be right then he would have beat hell out of me.
And so I asked them and they told me.” He stopped; he ran out of speech or perhaps out of breath not as a vessel runs empty but with the instantaneous cessation of some weightless wind-driven toy, say a celluloid pinwheel. Behind the desk, still back-flung, clutching the chair arms, the editor glared at him with outraged amazement.
“What?” he cried. “Two men, with one wife and child between them?”
“Yair. The third guy, the horse one, is just the mechanic; he ain’t even a husband, let alone a flyer. Yair. Shumann and the aeroplane landing at Iowa or Indiana or wherever it is, and her coming out of the schoolhouse without even arranging to have her books took home, and they went off maybe with a can opener and a blanket to sleep on under the wing of the aeroplane when it rained hard; and then the other guy, the parachute guy, dropping in, falling the couple or three miles with his sack of flour before pulling the ripcord.
They ain’t human, you see. No ties; no place where you were born and have to go back to it now and then even if it’s just only to hate the damn place good and comfortable for a day or two. From coast to coast and Canada in summer and Mexico in winter, with one suitcase and the same can opener because three can live on one can opener as easy as one or twelve. — Wherever they can find enough folks in one place to advance them enough money to get there and pay for the gasoline afterward.
Because they don’t need money; it ain’t money they are after any more than it’s glory because the glory can only last until the next race and so maybe it ain’t until to-morrow. And they don’t need money except only now and then when they come in contact with the human race like in a hotel to sleep or eat now and then or maybe to buy a pair of pants or a skirt to keep the police off of them.
Because money ain’t that hard to make: it ain’t up there, fourteen and a half feet off the ground in a vertical bank around a steel post at two or three hundred miles an hour in a damn gnat built like a Swiss watch that the top speed of ain’t just a number on a little dial but where you burn the engine up or fly out from between the wings and the under-carriage.
Around the home pylon on one wing-tip and the fabric trembling like a bride and the crate cost four thousand dollars and good for maybe fifty hours if one ever lasted that long and five of them in the race and the top money at least two-hundred-thirty-eight-fifty-two, less fines, fees, commissions and gratuities.
And the rest of them, the wives and children and mechanics, standing on the apron and watching like they might have been stole out of a department store window and dressed in greasy khaki coveralls and not even thinking about the hotel bill over in town or where we are going to eat if we don’t win and how we are going to get to the next meet if the engine melts and runs backward out of the exhaust pipe.
“And Shumann don’t even own a ship; she told me about how they want Vic Chance to build one for them and how Vic Chance wants to build one for Shumann to fly, only neither Vic Chance nor them have managed to save up enough jack yet.
So he just flies whatever he can get that they will qualify. This one he copped with to-day he is flying on a commission; it was next to the slowest one in the race and they all said he never had a chance with it and he beat them on the pylons.
So when he don’t cop they eat on the parachute guy, which is O.K. because the parachute guy makes almost as much as the guy at the microphone does, besides the mike guy having to work all afternoon for his while it don’t only take the parachute guy a few seconds to fall the ten or twelve thousand feet with the flour blowing back in his face before pulling the ripcord.
“And so the kid was born on an unrolled parachute in a hangar in California; he got dropped already running like a colt or a calf from the fuselage of an aeroplane, on to something because it happened to be big enough to land on and then take off again.
And I thought about him having ancestors and hell and heaven like we have, and birth-pangs to rise up out of and walk the earth with your arm crooked over your head to dodge until you finally get the old blackjack at last and can lay back down again — All of a sudden I thought about him with a couple or three sets of grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins somewhere, and I like to died.
I had to stop and lean against the hangar wall and laugh. Talk about your immaculate
