The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [128]
He’d never realized that he was growing up and changing. There had been signs on his body, but they, too, had come gradually. Each day he had grown stronger, bigger more hair on him. He had changed, though, slowly day by day and gotten to hanging around the poolroom, worked with his old man, and then, well, he wasn’t doing the things he’d done as a kid. Now he was a man. Well, he was! He felt a little goofy, remembering how, before coming out, he’d looked at himself in the mirror, and assured himself that he was a man. But he was. And there were many years ahead of him, drinking, jazzing, poker-games, plenty of things. And he had dough. With the birthday present from his old man, he now had four hundred bucks in his own name in the bank. He was pretty goddamn well off.
A girl came toward him. He liked her looks. He had confidence in his walk. He was well dressed too: gray Stetson, conservative gray topcoat, well-fitting sixty-five-dollar Oxford gray suit, good cut, the trousers wide enough so that he didn’t look like a hick, but not ringing bell bottoms. The girl passed him. He passed her, and turned over Fifty-eighth Street.
But the evening was all wasted, because he had made his decision and would stick to it.
He walked towards the poolroom thinking about a lot of things. He saw young Cooley, and motioned him over, calling him a dope.
“Droopy, when you gonna let it alone?” he asked, not knowing why he did it, and laughing to see the hurt, shocked look on the kid’s face.
He walked along. He had let himself get into the wrong attitude. Well, he didn’t have to go tonight. But he did. He didn’t like to admit it to himself, but he was afraid. Well, it wasn’t yellow. It was a different kind of fear. It was fear for his soul if something did happen to him.
He just felt all off kilter. Maybe afterwards, he would feel different.
II
Studs had what Father Gilhooley always called a feeling of gratification. Red, Tommy, and the guys had kept trying to talk him into going with them, and he had resisted all temptation.
He walked up towards the church, taking his time. There wouldn’t be a crowd there. He thought of himself as having already gone to confession. He saw himself saying his penance, saw himself kneeling in the confessional, talking through the screen to Father Doneggan, running through the catalogue of his sins, commandment by commandment. He tried to put himself into a contrite mood. He wanted his act of contrition after confession tonight to be a perfect act of contrition, as if it were his last confession.
Studs walked slowly; nervous, he lit a cigarette.
The thought of Paulie dead out there in the cemetery still hung on him. The thought of another, a waiting grave out in Calvary Cemetery, hung more heavily.
Already this football season, he had read of five or six different fellows being killed in football games. When he had been a kid, he remembered having read about how a fellow named Albert at the U of C had been killed. In Thursday’s paper there had been something about a fifteen-year-old kid who’d had his skull fractured.
A voice within Studs, as if it were his conscience, kept assuring him that he was yellow.
He seemed to keep seeing that kid he had read about in Thursday’s paper, before him, prostrate, moaning, blood from his cracked head dropping to mix in the dirt, moaning, death-moans persisting, ringing out as if in prophecy of his death, and of the death of everyone