When he reached Grandlieu Street he discovered that the only way he could cross it would be by air, though even now he had not actually paused to decide whether he were really going home or not. And this, not alone because of police regulations but because of the physical kerb mass of heads and shoulders in moiling silhouette against the light glare, the serpentine and confetti-drift, the antic passing floats.
But even before he reached the corner he was assailed by a gust of screaming newsboys apparently as oblivious to the moment’s significance as birds are aware yet oblivious to the human doings which their wings brush and their droppings fall upon.
They swirled about him, screaming: in the reflected light of the passing torches the familiar black thick type and the raucous cries seemed to glare and merge faster than the mind could distinguish the sense through which each had been received: “Boinum Boins!” FIRST FATALITY OF AIR. “Read about it! Foist Moidigror foitality!” LIEUT. BURNHAM KILLED IN AIR CRASH. “Boinum Boins!”
“Naw!” the reporter cried. “Beat it! Should I throw away a nickel like it was into the ocean because another lunatic has fried himself? — Yah,” he thought, vicious, savage, “even they will have to sleep some of the time just to pass that much of the dark half of being alive.
Not to rest because they have to race again to-morrow, but because like now air and space ain’t passing them fast enough and time is passing them too fast to rest in except during the six and a half minutes it takes to go the twenty-five miles, and the rest of them standing there on the apron like that many window dummies because the rest of them ain’t even there, like in the girls’ school where one of them is gone off first with all the fine clothes. Yair, alive only for six and a half minutes a day in one aeroplane.
And so every night they sleep in one bed, and why shouldn’t either of them or both of them at once come drowsing unawake in one woman-drowsing and none of the three of them know which one nor care?… Yah,” he thought, “maybe I was going home, after all.” Then he saw Jiggs, the pony man, the man-pony of the afternoon, recoiled now into the centre of a small violent backwater of motionless back-turned faces.
“Why don’t you use your own feet to walk on?” Jiggs snarled.
“Excuse me,” one of the faces said. “I didn’t mean…”
“Well, watch yourself,” Jiggs cried. “Mine have got to last me to the end of my life. And likely even then I will have to walk a ways before I can catch a ride.” The reporter watched him stand on alternate legs and scrub at his feet in turn with his cap, presenting to the smoky glare of the passing torches a bald spot neat as a tonsure and the colour of saddle leather.
As they stood side by side and looked at one another they resembled the tall and the short man of the orthodox and unfailing comic team — the one looking like a cadaver out of a medical school vat and dressed for the moment in garments out of a flood refugee warehouse, the other filling his clothing without any fraction of surplus cloth which might be pinched between two fingers, with that trim vicious economy of wrestlers’ tights. Again Jiggs thought, since it had been good the first time, “Jesus. Don’t they open the graveyards until midnight either?” About the two of them now the newsboys hovered and screamed:
“Globe Stoytsman! Boinum boins!”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Burn to death on Thursday night or starve to death on Friday morning. So this is Moddy Graw. Why ain’t I where I have been all my life.” But the reporter continued to glare down at him in bright amazement.
“At the Terrebonne?” he said. “She told me this afternoon you all had some rooms down in French town. You mean to tell me that just because he won a little money this afternoon he has got to pick up and move over to the hotel this time of night when he ought to been in bed an hour ago so he can fly to-morrow?”
“I don’t mean nothing, mister,” Jiggs said. “I just said I saw Roger and Laverne go into that hotel up the street a minute ago. I never asked them what for…. How about that cigarette?” The reporter gave it to him from the crumpled pack.
Beyond the barricade of heads and shoulders, in the ceaseless rain of confetti, the floats moved past with an air esoteric, almost apocryphal, without inference of motion, like an inhabited archipelago putting out to sea on a flood tide. And now another newsboy, a new face, young, ageless, the teeth gaped raggedly as though he had found them one by one over a period of years about the streets, shrieked at them a new sentence like a kind of desperate ace:
“Laughing Boy in fit at Woishndon Poik!”
“Yair!” the reporter cried, glaring down at Jiggs. “Because you guys don’t need to sleep. You ain’t human. I reckon the way he trains for a meet is to stay out on the town all the night before. Besides that — what was it? — thirty per cent, of three hundred and twenty-five dollars he won this afternoon…. Come on,” he said. “We won’t have to cross the street.”
“I thought you were going home so fast,” Jiggs said.
“Yair,” the reporter cried back over his shoulder, seeming not to penetrate the static human mass but to filter through it like a phantom, without alteration or diminution of bulk; now, turned sideways to cry back at Jiggs, passing between the individual bodies like a playing card, he cried, “I have to sleep at night. I ain’t a racing pilot; I ain’t got an aeroplane to sleep in; I can’t concentrate twenty-five miles of space at three miles an hour into six and a half minutes.
Come on.” The hotel was not far and the side, the carriage, entrance was comparatively clear in the outfalling of light beneath a suave canopy with its lettered frieze: Hotel Terrebonne. Above this from a jack-staff hung an oilcloth painted tabard: Headquarters, American-Aeronautical Association.
Dedication Meet, Feinman Airport. “Yair,” the reporter cried, “they’ll be here. Here’s where to find guys that don’t aim to sleep at the hotel. Yair; tiered identical cubicles of one thousand rented sleepings. And if you just got jack enough to last out the night you don’t even have to go to bed.”
“Did what?” Jiggs said, already working over towards the wall beside the entrance. “Oh. Teared Q pickles. Yair; of one thousand rented… if you got the jack too. I got the Q pickle all right. I got enough for one thousand. And if I just had the jack too it wouldn’t be teared. How about another cigarette?”
The reporter gave him another one from the crumpled pack. Jiggs now stood against the wall. “I’ll wait here,” he said.
“Come on in,” the reporter said. “They are bound to be here. It will be after midnight before they even find out that Grandlieu Street has been closed…. That’s a snappy pair of boots you got on there.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He looked down at his right foot again. “At least he wasn’t a football player or maybe driving a truck.
.. I’ll wait here. You can give me a call if Roger wants me.” The reporter went on; Jiggs stood again on his left leg and scrubbed at his right instep with his cap. “What a town,” he thought. “Where you got to wear a street closed sign on your back to walk around in it.”
“Because at least I am a reporter until one minute past ten to-morrow,” the reporter thought, mounting the shallow steps towards the lobby; “he said so himself. I reckon I will have to keep on being one until then. Because even if I am fired now, at this minute while I walk here, there won’t be anybody for him to tell to take my name off the pay roll until noon to-morrow. So I can tell him it was my conscience. I can call him from the hotel here and tell him my conscience would not let me go home and go to sleep.”
He recoiled, avoiding here also the paper plumage, the parrot mask, a mixed party, whisky-and-gin reeking, and then gone, leaving behind them the draggled cumulant hillocks of trampled confetti minching across the tile floor before the minching pans and brooms of paid monkey-men who for three nights now will do little else; they vanished, leaving the reporter for the instant marooned beside the same easel-plat with which the town bloomed — the photographs of man and machine each above its neat legend:
MATT ORD, NEW VALOIS. HOLDER, WORLD’S LAND PLANE SPEED RECORD
AL MYERS. CALEXCO
JIMMY OTT. CALEXCO
R. Q. BULLITT. WINNER GRAVES TROPHY, MIAMI, FLA
LIEUT. FRANK BURNHAM
And here also the cryptic shield caught ( i n r i ) loops of bunting giving an appearance temporary and tentlike to interminable long corridors of machine plush and gilded synthetic plaster running between anonymous and rentable spaces or alcoves from sunrise to sunset across America, between the nameless faience woman-face behind the phallic ranks of cigars
