And the parachute guy got out the dice and says to her ‘Do you want to catch these?’ and she said ‘Roll them’ and the dice come out and Shumann rolled high, and that afternoon they fetched the J.P. out on the gasoline truck and so hers and the kid’s name is Shumann.
And they told me how it wasn’t them that started saying ‘Who’s your old man?” to the kid; it was her, and the kid flailing away at her and her stooping that hard boy’s face that looks like any one of the four of them might cut her hair for her with a pocket knife when it needs it, down to where he can reach it and saying ‘Hit me. Hit me hard. Harder. Harder.’ And what do you think of that?”
He stopped again. The editor sat back in the swivel chair and drew a deep, full, deliberate breath while the reporter leaned above the desk like a dissolute and eager skeleton, with that air of worn and dreamy fury which Don Quixote must have had.
“I think you ought to write it,” the editor said. The reporter looked at him for almost half a minute without moving.
“Ought to write—” He murmured. “Ought to write…”
His voice died away in ecstasy; he glared down at the editor in bone-light exultation while the editor watched him in turn with cold and vindictive waiting.
“Yes. Go home and write it.”
“Go home and… Home, where I won’t be dis — where I can… O pal, o pal, o pal! Chief, where have I been all your life or where have you been all mine?”
“Yes,” the editor said. He had not moved. “Go home and lock yourself in and throw the key out the window and write it.” He watched the gaunt ecstatic face before him in the dim corpse glare of the green shade. “And then set fire to the room.” The reporter’s face sank slowly back, like a Halloween mask on a boy’s stick being slowly withdrawn.
Then for a long time he too did not move save for a faint working of the lips as if he were tasting something either very good or very bad. Then he rose slowly, the editor watching him; he seemed to collect and visibly reassemble himself bone by bone and socket by socket.
On the desk lay a pack of cigarettes. He reached his hand towards it; as quickly as when he had flung back the hat and without removing his gaze from the reporter’s face, the editor snatched the pack away. The reporter lifted from the floor his disreputable hat and stood gazing into it with musing attention, as though about to draw a lot from it.
“Listen,” the editor said; he spoke patiently, almost kindly: “The people who own this paper or who direct its policies or anyway who pay the salaries, fortunately or unfortunately I shan’t attempt to say, have no Lewises or Hemingways or even Tchekovs on the staff: one very good reason doubtless being that they do not want them, since what they want is not fiction, not even Nobel Prize fiction, but news.
“You mean you don’t believe this?” the reporter said. “About h — these guys?”
“I’ll go you better than that: I don’t even care. Why should I find news in this woman’s supposed bed habits as long as her legal (so you tell me) husband does not?”
“I thought that women’s bed habits were always news,” the reporter said.
“You thought? You thought?. You listen to me a minute. If one of them takes his aeroplane or his parachute and murders her and the child in front of the grand-stand, then it will be news.
But until they do, what I am paying you to bring back here is not what you think about somebody out there nor what you heard about somebody out there nor even what you saw: I expect you to come in here to-morrow night with an accurate account of everything that occurs out there to-morrow that creates any reaction excitement or irritation on any human retina; if you have to be twins or triplets or even a regiment to do this, be so.
Now you go on home and go to bed. And remember. Remember. There will be someone out there to report to me personally at my home the exact moment at which you enter the gates. And if that report comes to me one minute after ten o’clock, you will need a racing aeroplane to catch your job Monday morning. Go home. Do you hear me?”
The reporter looked at him, without heat, perfectly blank, as if he had ceased several moments ago not alone to listen but even to hear, as though he were now watching the editor’s lips courteously to tell when he had finished.
“O.K., chief,” he said. “If that’s the way you feel about it.”
“That’s exactly the way I feel about it. Do you understand?”
“Yair; sure. Good night.”
“Good night,” the editor said. The reporter turned away; he turned away quietly, putting the hat on his head exactly as he had laid it on the editor’s desk before the editor flung it off, and took from the pocket containing the folded newspaper a crumpled cigarette pack. The editor watched him put the cigarette into his mouth and then tug the incredible hat to a raked dissolute angle as he passed out the door, raking the match across the frame as he disappeared.
But the first match broke; the second one he struck on the bell-plate while the elevator was rising. The door opened and clashed behind him; already his hand was reaching into his pocket while with the other he lifted the top paper from the shallow stack on the second stool beside the one on which the elevator man sat, sliding the face-down dollar watch which weighted it on to the next one, the same, the identical: black harsh and restrained:
FIRST FATALITY OF AIR MEET PILOT BURNED ALIVE
Lieut. Frank Burnham in Crash of Rocket Plane
He held the paper off, his face tilted aside, his eyes squinted against the smoke. “‘Shumann surprises spectators by beating Bullitt for second place,’” he read. “What do you think of that, now?”
“I think they are all crazy,” the elevator man said. He had not looked at the reporter again. He received the coin into the same hand which clutched a dead stained cob pipe, not looking at the other. “Them that do it and them that pay money to see it.” Neither did the reporter look at him.
“Yair; surprised,” the reporter said, looking at the paper. Then he folded it and tried to thrust it into the pocket with the other folded one just like it. “Yair. And in one more lap he would have surprised them still more by beating Myers for first place.” The cage stopped. “Yair; surprised…. What time is it?” With the hand which now held both the coin and the pipe the elevator man lifted the face-down watch and held it out.
He said nothing, he didn’t even look at the reporter; he just sat there, waiting, holding the watch out with a kind of weary patience like a house guest showing his watch to the last of several children. “Two minutes past ten?” the reporter said. “Just two minutes past ten? Hell.”
“Get out of the door,” the elevator man said. “There’s a draught in here.” It clashed behind the reporter again; as he crossed the lobby he tried again to thrust the paper into the pocket with the other one.
Antic, repetitive, his reflection in the glass street doors glared and flicked away. The street was empty, though even here, fourteen minutes afoot from Grandlieu Street, the February darkness was murmurous with faint uproar, with faint and ordered pandemonium.
Overhead, beyond the palm tufts, the overcast sky reflected that interdict and light-glared canyon now adrift with serpentine and confetti, through which the floats, bearing grimacing and antic mimes dwarfed chalk white and forlorn and contemplated by static kerb mass of amazed confetti faces, passed as though through steady rain.
He walked, not fast exactly but with a kind of loose and purposeless celerity, as though it were not exactly faces that he sought but solitude that he was escaping, or even as if he actually were going home like the editor had told him, thinking already of Grandlieu Street which he would have to cross somehow in order to do so. “Yah,” he thought, “he should have sent me home by air mail.” As he passed from light to light his shadow in midstride resolved, pacing him, on pavement and wall.
In a dark plate window, sidelooking, he walked beside himself; stopping and turning so that for the moment shadow and reflection superposed, he stared full at himself as though he still saw the actual shoulder sagging beneath the dead afternoon’s phantom burden, and saw reflected beside him yet the sweater and the skirt and the harsh pallid hair as, bearing upon his shoulder the arch-fathered, he walked beside the oblivious and arch-adulteress.
“Yah,” he thought, “the damn little yellow-headed bastard.
.. Yair, going to bed, now, to sleep; the three of them in one bed or maybe they take it night about or maybe you just put your hat down on it first like in a barber shop.” He faced himself in the dark glass, long and light and untidy as a bundle of laths dressed in human garments.
“Yah,” he thought, “the poor little tow-headed son of a bitch.” When
