Studs Lonigan (136 page)

“Say, got a cigarette?”

“Sorry, but I don't smoke 'em,” Lonigan said, uneasy in the pimply fellow's presence.

Lonigan was attracted by a marcher in a light gray expensive suit. The lad looked refined, like he came from a good home. He looked as refined as his own son-in-law, Carroll Dowson. What was such a boy doing here?

“All right, get back! Get back!” barked a husky cop with a beefsteak face.

Lonigan was slow in obeying the command.

“You're wise, huh?” the policeman said, shoving out his jaw at Lonigan. “Maybe you'd like to take a little ride and have a talk with the judge, huh?”

“You'd just better figure out who you're fooling with,” Lonigan said, while people crowded close to gape at them.

 

HANDS OFF HAITI

 

“You're resisting arrest and inciting to riot. I've a good mind to run you in.”

“Go ahead. I'll be right out, and you might find out you made a mistake,” Lonigan said, determined to show this cop.

“Who are you? What's your name?”

“Lonigan.”

The cop eyed Lonigan with an apparent and growing indecision.

“Well, I got to keep people back, you know, Mr. Lonigan. No hard feelings. Only try and keep on the curb. These bastards around here are tough to handle, and it's no soft job for us. This is all extra duty. We got orders to prevent trouble today and I'm only following my orders. But if I had my way,” the cop raised his club slowly, winked. “It isn't no picnic for us.”

“Have a cigar.”

“Thanks, I will. My name's Roonan,” the policeman said, inserting the cigar in an inside pocket.

 

 

“I suppose that makes Hoover afraid,” a young fellow with Semitic features said, and Lonigan turned, noticing that he was well dressed and carried a briefcase.

“Hoover is a tool of the capitalists just like the Czar was,” a wellbuilt, middle-aged Jewish man in a brown suit said with a slight Yiddish accent.

“Yes, but I suppose that makes his knees quake.”

 

 

“Young fellow,” the older Jewish man said, “in Russia they say I will never see the revolution. So I will never live to see it, hanh? So we couldn't make the Czar afraid, hanh? Vell, I heard all that before.”

 

 

“Back in the old country they told me I will never live to see the Czar overthrown and the Ochrana kicked out. And the Cossacks and peasants, they told me, they will murder you, not follow you. That was in 1905. My sainted mother, she cried, ‘They will find you, kill you, send you to Siberia, my darling.' And they did. They chase us, they beat us because we are Socialist, they hunt us like wild animals.”

 

 

“Twelve years later, I see it all. I see it. We kick the Czar out on his
tuchas,
the Ochrana, and the Generals, too. Now Cossack and Jew are friends, work together to build Socialism. Tomorrow? Hoover is not afraid?” The older man spit contemptuously and the younger one smirked. “Tomorrow, here we will see. Tomorrow we will throw out broker and banker, and Pershing and Hoover on their
tuchases,
and white and black, Jew and Gentile, we will build Socialism in America.”

“Well, why don't you go back home to Russia if it's like that?” the younger fellow sneered, looking at the older man as if the latter were insane.

“I'll stay here and we'll make America like Russia,” the man in the brown suit said. Cheers greeted him as he joined the demonstration.

 

FREE TOM MOONEY

 

“Nuts, all right, thinking they can overthrow the government. Wait till Hoover hears of this. It'll give him apoplexy,” the young fellow with the briefcase remarked to Lonigan.

“I don't see why the police permit this,” Lonigan said, shaking his head sagely.

“It's just as well. They got to get off steam some way, and if they do it in the open, they won't be conspiring.”

“Maybe you're right,” Lonigan said.

The last column passed, filling the street, singing with raised right fists.

He watched the moving backs, turned, walked back slowly to his automobile. Home now, the home the bankers would be getting soon. And Bill? Was he dead? Oh, but Paddy Lonigan was an unhappy man, and those people in the parade, they were happy, happier than he was.

Lonigan stepped out of the police station, still cursing. Those goddamn kids. Stealing his spare tire. There wasn't any chance, hardly, of getting it back, either. The sergeant had said that the neighborhood was full of thieving kids. What was going to become of them when they grew up?

He drove off. Thieving little bastards, stealing a man's spare tire right off the car! When they grew up, a man's life and property wouldn't be safe. What was Chicago coming to, what with the kids like the ones who'd snatched his tire, the Reds and the niggers? He shook his head sadly, thinking of how the shines had already ruined so much of the south side. Had it been so good to free the slaves? Of course, all men should be free, but a nigger was a nigger. You couldn't trust them and they didn't know their place as it was. And now the Reds were agitating them. Dangerous stuff. Maybe if old Abe Lincoln had lived, he might have settled the black problem by giving them a place of their own to stay in, the same as the Indians had been put on reservations.

All these south-bound automobiles on Michigan. People in them going home. Were the men and women in all these automobiles happy? What did they have on their minds? For-rent signs in these fine buildings on Michigan. Property ruined by the niggers. And a closed bank at Thirty-ninth Street. God, how long could it all go on? And Bill? He had a feeling that Bill was dead. He didn't want to go home to the house where his son had died. Unthinkingly, he drove his car more slowly.

Near White City he stopped in front of a speakeasy, deciding that one good, stiff shot would jack him up. Several men were lined up at the bar of the small saloon when he entered.

“Shot of whisky,” he told the ruddy-faced bartender.

Lonigan gulped it down, convincing himself that a man in his shoes had to brace himself up with something, and this one would make him feel better about going home.

“And, Pat, I suppose you think I'm only a toothless old drunkard, headed for an alcoholic grave?” a stunted old man said, hanging over the bar.

Catching Lonigan's eye, the bartender winked. Lonigan, smiling in response, drank half of the whisky before him and gulped down a chaser of water.

“Pat, don't tell me I'm no good. Because I swear to God on it, and to the memory of my saintly old mother in Heaven, that there's no Irishman alive who hasn't some good in him. Pat, we belong to a race blessed by God. But we have been oppressed for centuries by John Bull, the curse of the human race. And by God, I'm proud to proclaim that my name is McGuire.”

The drunkard laughed repulsively, staggered from the bar, jigged clumsily, fell forward, toward Lonigan, and looked at him sternly, slouching against the bar.

“Sir, doesn't God love the Irish?”

“You're right, dad,” Lonigan said with a smile, finishing off his drink.

“Dad, bejesus no. I want the likes of all you to know that Timothy McGuire is a granddaddy,” he said shaking with laughter that sounded ribald.

Two lads in their early twenties, one wearing a nicely pressed blue suit, the other in splotched working clothes, entered and strolled up to the bar smiling. They reminded Lonigan of his son, and he saw Bill in other days, stopping off after work for a drink, stepping up to a bar the same as these lads, talking, kidding with a drunk as these two were with McGuire, maybe thinking the same kind of thoughts as they were. Martin, too, was like these lads. And once he himself had been. He wanted almost to cry, and he sipped his third glass of whisky.

“Boys, I'm just a no-good Irishman,” McGuire said, staggering up to the newcomers.

“You're no good, and we're no good. That's what we got to brag about. Ha, ha,” the lad in the blue suit said.

“By Jesus, I'll shake on that profundity. No good. Was there ever an Irishman that was good for anything but the bottle and a song and the ankle of a pretty lass? Ha, ha,” McGuire drooled, shaking hands with both of them.

“Come on, Pop, have one on us,” the lad in the blue business suit said.

“By gosh, you're gentlemen, even if I do say so,” McGuire said, supporting himself against the bar.

“Join us, stranger,” the lad in working clothes said, and Lonigan raised his fourth drink in response, feeling warm with a sense of companionship.

“Well, spittin' in your eye,” McGuire said, gulping a thimble-glass of moonshine.

McGuire staggered to a thin man who sat slumped at a table over a cocktail.

“Why so pale and dour, fond friend?” he said, unsteady before the man.

The stranger frowned. McGuire made a face and returned to fall over the bar.

Lonigan looked into his fifth drink with melancholy, feeling like he wanted to hear songs, to sing sad old songs himself, like
The River Shannon,
and
Dear Old Girl,
and
When I First Met Mary,
and
Silver Threads Among the Gold,
and
After the Ball Is Over
. With a gesture of despair, he downed his whisky. His head began to feel light, and he did not think that he could control himself any longer. And he ought to go home, but he didn't want to. Those two young lads, talking of girls and whorehouses, forced Bill's image back into his mind. What should he do, just sit down here and cry? He frowned. Goddamn it, he cursed, thinking how he had done nothing to merit these sorrows. He didn't care now. He was beyond caring, and he was going to drown his sorrows in drink.

“Another.”

“Friend, you look glum. Why look glum? Why look glum and sour? Why so glum and dour? Sing, friend, sing. I always sing, and sing again, and sing. Listen!” McGuire babbled.

McGuire, exposing his gums in a grin, acknowledged the applause he received.

“Have one on me,” Lonigan called to McGuire.

“Oh, 'tis a pleasure to drink with a gentleman. Sir, what is your name? You are speaking with Timothy McGuire.”

“Lonigan.”

“Irish, too. Well, friend, drink to the dear old sod,” McGuire said, Lonigan smiling, proud to be Irish, trying to drag through his foggy brain remembrances of old days in saloons, when Paddy Lonigan was young, and free, and light-hearted.

“I'm a Kilkenney Irishman,” McGuire said, touching glasses with Lonigan.

“Let's sit down,” Lonigan said, beginning to tire.

He walked unevenly to a vacant chair, and McGuire crashed into a chair opposite him. His eyes grew misty, and he looked at the figures at the bar in a semi-daze. The insides of his head spun like a top. He told himself that he was drunk and he didn't give a good goddamn.

“My friend, these are hard times, and the world, oh, the world exists in a dreadful state of confusion. So smile, my friend, smile, smile,” McGuire slobbered, and Lonigan grinned foolishly. “Me now, I lost everything, I lost every red copper in this vale of tears. So what do I do? I drink, and I smile, and I sing, and I say,” his head tumbled forward, “I say, my friend, whisky is an Irishman's best friend.”

“I've lost plenty, plenty,” Lonigan said, his chin sagging. He silently warned himself to hold his tongue. “I lost everything. Money. My building. And now my oldest son lies home, dead.”

“Condolences, friend, condolences,” McGuire muttered, extending a wrinkled and dirty hand.

“I don't mind the money,” Lonigan said, weakly sighing. “But my boy. My oldest son, the best damn son a man ever had. He died today of pneumonia.”

“Friends,” McGuire called, arising, supporting himself against the table. “Friends, Romans, lend me your ears. My friend here, an Irish gentleman, they took all his money, and now his son is dead. Friends, Romans, lend him your sympathies.”

McGuire fell back into his chair. Lonigan slumped, his face puffed, his expression saddening, the fat bulging around his jowls. He arose and floundered blear-eyed toward the two young lads at the bar.

“Pardon me if I bother you, boys. You make me think of my own son lying home, dead. I've been a good father, and he's been a good son to me and my old lady, and he's dead. Dead! A good son, know him, Bill Lonigan? Everybody calls him Studs. Did you know my boy?”

“Where's he from?”

“I raised him near here, down at Fifty-eighth Street.”

“No, sir, I don't. How about you, Jack?” the lad in the blue suit said.

“Friend,” McGuire said, pawing at Lonigan's coat sleeve.

“Boys, you'll excuse me for troubling you, but you don't know what it means to a father in his old age to lose his son.”