Studs Lonigan (117 page)

“Squirmy is still asleep after his rest period.”

“He's a clown,” Studs said.

“Yes, he's vulgar,” Catherine said.

A bell sounded and the contestants danced to radio jazz. Ted Delancy and Doris Davis performed a tango in the center of the floor. At the end of three minutes, the marching line re-formed and Ted and Doris picked up the money thrown to them. A stout man arose in a box and waved to Doris. She walked over to him and he handed her a dollar. Katy Jones and Honks Oliver passed him, and he handed Katy a bill. Many cheered.

“Well, I guess we better blow,” Studs said.

“Yes, we'll just wait a few more minutes and see if anything happens.”

They yawned.

“That fellow who just passed that dough out to Katy Jones, he's been here for six days straight,” somebody to Catherine's left said while Studs yawned.

“Ten after one,” Studs said.

“We must go now, Bill,” Catherine said.

“Yeah, Kid. It's a quarter to three.” They wormed to an aisle in the bleachers and walked downward. Studs watched Harold Morgan floundering.

“Poor Harold,” Catherine said behind him.

Harold catapulted forward. He straightened up and shook his head. He walked zigzag, lurched, lost his balance, and pitched face forward on a bench.

“Oh,” Catherine exclaimed, as the referee rushed to him.

Two male attendants appeared, Harold was lifted to his feet, his nose gushing blood. A woman fainted in the box. Nearly every spectator stood up, and there was a buzzing hum of conversation.

“Let's wait and see if he's seriously hurt. That was awful.”

“Yes, he looks badly cut up.”

Two ushers led past Studs the woman who had fainted. She was a stout greasy woman, and she was saying:

“That poor boy. Poor Harold. Poor Harold.”

Studs shook his head to stay awake, and Catherine leaned against him. The contestants trooped around, and Squirmy Stevens' partner struggled to hold him up.

“Let's sit there,” Catherine said, pointing at a vacant space near the bottom of the bleachers.

“Here he comes.”

They saw Harold Morgan step back onto the floor, grinning sheepishly, his face clean, and a plaster patch pasted above his left eye. The cheers were deafening, and without realizing what he was doing, Studs found himself cheering. Catherine tugged at his elbow. The cheers continued as he and Catherine walked out, and he wished he was Harold, standing out there and bringing so many people to their feet with roars of admiration. But then, he'd rather be famous some other way.

“It is kind of interesting, though. It gets you interested without you realizing it, once you get to know who they are.”

“Yeah. Exciting and funny things happen in it.”

“I wonder who'll win.”

“Hurry, Al, I want to get in. And I do hope that Harold Morgan has not dropped out,” a girl said, passing them on the stairs.

“I didn't like that Katy Jones. She's awful,” Catherine said sleepily.

“Uh, huh,”Studs yawned, leading her to the street car.

STUDS drowsed in his B.V.D.'s while the drawn green window-shade waved a trifle from the hot and inconsequential August wind. Sunlight seeped around the edges of the curtain, and from somewhere outside kids could be heard whooping at play. He smiled wearily. Even if he was all pooped out, he could still look back on the last week and feel satisfied, and now that it was Saturday afternoon he could just take it easy and let himself feel good. But there was no use trying to kid himself. He just wasn't the man that he used to be. Yesterday he'd come home from work with his fanny dragging damn near to the ground. He'd seen Catherine every night in the week, and then in the park on Thursday night twice with her had not been calculated to make him any more peppy and energetic. And now the week was over, and here he was just lying almost half asleep, letting his mind drift.

Yet even with the heat wave he was glad that he'd worked. He'd salted fifteen bucks in the bank. Now, if he could just do that every week, he'd have a little extra money in double quick time.

He heard radio jazz from a nearby flat. Nice, hearing music when he was taking it easy like this. All week now, he had kept getting the feeling that it was old times. Mixing and grinding paints, slapping it on after having washed the walls, calcimining ceilings—it had all been something to do that he knew how to do right. If this job wasn't finished yet, or if only there was another one to do next week. Well, the old man had said he was going down to see Barney McCormack, the politician, and come to a showdown about getting some political contracts. Boy, if the old man got something, wouldn't that be just too sweet and rosy?

He shaded his eyes, spread his legs out wide, and tried to think of a life with no worries on any side, nothing but working, himself and Mort, painting, seeing a dirty wall with the paint peeling, and turning it into a clean and nice and freshly painted wall that filled the room with its smell.

It seemed almost as if a rhythm pulsed in his head while he continued to see himself and Mort working. Just to have things like that, like they used to be, with no real griefs or worries.

But he'd been having heart pains all week, and Thursday night with Catherine he'd gotten one that was like a knife ripping through his chest. He had felt like a clown. And Jesus, think how awful to die from heart failure while you were jazzing your girl. He'd been afraid to look her in the eye after, because she might have thought he was weak and not much of a man. But she liked him. She had kissed him, and stroked his head, and talked that silly chatter to him that girls liked. He was beginning to understand more about girls, though. Once a girl was broken in, she wasn't to be stopped. And Catherine was learning fast. Thursday night, he'd almost gotten afraid of her, and she had even bit him. He'd never thought he or any guy could make a decent girl like Catherine get so excited. He smiled slightly, and felt that he could hardly wait until tonight when he'd be seeing her again.

She was nuts about him, he thought with gratifying assurance. But she wanted to get married. Somehow it was not right, either, to go on this way. But how could he get married now? Christ, what a chump he had been, hanging on to his stock. Letting Ike Dugan make a chump out of him, that snaky rat. He could just see himself meeting with him, swinging, pounding that skinny, ratty face of his into jelly. And then he'd just say, that puss of yours that I punched, it's only fluctuations, and you can go and get the brain of Solomon Imbray to fix it up for you and not let it hurt.

He had worked himself into a state of excitement, and he was breathing rapidly and could feel his heart knocking and going like a pump. He tried to relax and calm himself, and to smile about it and tell himself, what the hell, there was no use bawling over spilled milk. It was only that just when things looked like they could go so well for a guy, his luck just turned sour on him.

He listened to slow, sobbing radio music, and the indistinguishable cries of a peddler cut in upon the saccharine flow of music. He lay still on his back and stared up at the white ceiling, and a drowse seemed to lilt through his body, and suddenly he was hearing music again, feeling that a period had just been chunked out of his life. He had been lying looking at the ceiling, and suddenly he heard the radio.

 

 

The song made him think of French girls, of some excitable young French dame, with a thin body full of live hot wires who said oo-la-la, and ziss, and zat, and zose, and zese, and himself with her. Fun to think of it, but with a real French cherie he wouldn't maybe know what the hell to say or do. And Catherine. Maybe he had let himself in for something when he'd gotten engaged to her. But then, for years he was going to be getting something regular that he liked, and that, now, was something elegant, all right, and no matter what else happened, that, sister, was something he would get. And if he only had his money back so that he could marry her right off. But Jesus, though, suppose she got knocked up! But she couldn't. She couldn't, that was all, and he believed it was true that a person's luck couldn't be all bad, or all good, and his bad luck had all come. He couldn't get any more tough breaks. Goddamn it, there was a law of averages.

He was distracted by a telephone ringing somewhere, and he wondered what kind of people it was talking, and what they would have to say to each other. But suppose now that he still had his two thousand bucks. Suppose he had even cleaned up on the market a little, two hundred, five hundred, two thousand, five thousand, fifteen thousand. Getting married to Catherine, and having fifteen, twenty thousand bucks, and Red and everybody he knew saying, well, I never thought that Studs would be so well-heeled. He could just see himself with twenty-five thousand bucks to his name, and that only a starter. Bank accounts, checking accounts, buying anything he wanted to. Thinking of himself like this, too, it gave him a pleasant, sleepy, lulling feeling. His eyes grew heavy. A drowsing, dozeful sense of animal comfort caressed his limbs, his nerves, his muscles, his brain. Studs Lonigan, the big shot. He fell asleep.

Studs entered the parlor, wearing old trousers over his B.V.D.'s. He rubbed his hand over his drawn and sleepy face, yawned again, stood indecisive, with his arms, white and thin, hanging at his sides.

“Hello, Bill. How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good, dad. I took a nice nap.”

“That's good. I always like a little snooze myself on a Saturday afternoon after the week's work. But today I just couldn't come home and take one. I was down to see Barney McCormack today.”

“You saw Barney McCormack today, huh?”

“Yes, I saw him.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Like everybody else these days, Barney's crying.”

“That's funny. I should think Barney would be sitting in clover after the Democratic victory last spring. And that's nothing at all to the Democratic landslide we ought to have in the presidential elections next year if I know anything about it.”

“The way Barney was crying, he would have felt almost as good if the Republicans got a few jobs.”

“That's funny. How come?”

“Barney did nothing but cry all the time I saw him. He was crying about the Polacks and the Bohunks. He says that they just almost cleaned out the Irish. He kept saying to me, ‘Paddy, if you want to get anything down at the Hall, you better put a sky on your name before you go down there.' And he made one funny crack. He said that these days, down at the Hall, they only speak English from one to two in the afternoon.”

“That's funny.”

“Well, Bill, tell you, you know for years all these foreigners have been let into America, and now they've just about damn near taken the country over. Why, from the looks of things, pretty soon a white man won't feel at home here. What with the Jew international bankers holding all the money here, and the Polacks and Bohunks squeezing the Irish out of politics, it's getting to be no place for a white man to live,” Lonigan said sighing as he spoke.

“You didn't line up any contracts then?” Studs asked, and Lonigan answered with slow and emphatic negative words.

“Barney said that these days, before a dead horse can be taken off the streets, you got to see one of the Polacks or Bohunks and get his O.K. They've just closed out the Irish. He told me it was just hopeless to count on any school contracts or anything like that. We're just out of luck. He says he doubts if anything could be done, even if I put a sky on my name.”

“Gee, dad, that's tough. I'm sorry to hear it.”

“Bill, it's a fright. It's a fright.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What can a man do? I can hardly collect a cent. And every guy who owes me money seems to owe it to everybody else and his brother. If I did press some of these bastards, they'd go in bankruptcy, and their creditors would be over them like leeches, and I'd be lucky if I collected a nickel or a dime on the dollar. It wouldn't be worth it. I suppose I might just as well plug along and hope for the best. But it's fierce, fierce.”

“Gee, it's tough, all right.”

“And I got to tell the Trents to go. I can't let them stay on any longer as long as they can't pay their rent. I just can't. I know it's a bad blow, a disgrace to an honest man to be thrown out of his home into the streets like a pauper, and I hate to do it. But I got to. And I tell you we're lucky we're not following them. That mortgage payment on the building has got to be paid next month, and they won't be stalled off on it. I just about got enough money in the bank to cover it, too. I guess I better knock on wood. But if I didn't, well, we'd be on the street ourselves.”

Studs nodded.

“The city is busted. Why, Barney was telling me today there's plenty of people working for the city, besides the school teachers, who aren't getting their pay. Bailiffs and clerks and people like that.”

“Gee, Red Kelly won't like that.”

“No, I suppose Red isn't getting his pay, either.”

“I just know how he'll like it,” Studs said.

“Well, that's what we get for letting the Jew international bankers get control of our country. You know what we need? We need a man like Mussolini here in America. A strong man to take things out of the hands of the Jew international bankers and the gangsters. If we had a man like Mussolini over here for two months, he'd straighten out a lot of people and put them where they belong, behind the bars or against a wall.”