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“Arnold was a prince, though. That’s why I’m going to the funeral, even if his family did act that way, and not ask even one of his best friends to stand by him in his last journey,” Red said.

“I’ll miss him. He was white, all right,” Studs said.

“Say, Studs, sure you won’t change your mind and have a drink?”

“No, Red, I’m really starting to put myself into decent shape.”

“What the hell, you’re in good shape, aren’t you?”

“But what I mean is get hard, and get this little bit of belly I got off, and then next season we can get the old team together and play football again.”

“That’s not a bad idea. Remember that fight with the Monitors?”

“Say, that reminds me, remember that kike they had who was so fast and who nearly got killed? I forget his name, but you remember him?”

“I think it was Schwartz.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned if I wasn’t out to a game in the park last fall and he was playing, and just as fast as ever.”

“But we stopped him,” Red said.

“Yeah, we did,” Studs said, hoping Red would mention one or two of those tackles.

“But come on, Studs,” Red said; Studs shook his head no.

“I was thinking I’d join the Y, and go swimming there and fool around the gym a couple of nights a week. What do you think of it?”

“I might too.”

“I’m going over this week, want to come along?”

“Maybe. Pick me up at the poolroom.”

They had coffee an’ in the Greek restaurant. Studs went home, and turned in early. Lying in bed he felt as if he had again conquered himself, and was already started on the road to making himself as healthy as the guys whose pictures he saw in the physical culture ads in magazines. He thought that every day in every way he was going to get harder and healthier. But he couldn’t get Arnold from his mind, and the words of a song the guys sang kept running through his head.

Did you ever think, when a hearse goes by,

That some day you and I will go rolling by.. .

XV

I hate to see the evening sun go down...

Mickey Flannagan’s head fell onto the table, and a glass, half full of gin and ginger ale, almost toppled. Slug Mason looked at the high-brown singer; she was dressed in a shimmery blue gown with a slit down the side, and she rolled her abdomen with agonizing slowness as she sang in the center of the glassy dance floor. Slug whispered that he’d take a baby like that on, even if her skin was purple. Red Kelly countered that he personally had too much self-respect to go monkeying around with low niggers. Barney Keefe sneered that Red was BS, and that it was always the same, a guy wanted a woman, and everything else was crap.

Feeling tomorrow just like I feel today.

Stan Simonsky said he had to laugh when he thought that Studs and Les had gone tonight to the Y.M.C.A. Slug said he couldn’t understand what had happened to Studs. Stan added that he hoped Studs wasn’t losing his guts.

Barney told them to shut up while they heard the song. The black girl repeated the chorus, her voice throbbing with a mixture of despair and innuendoed sex. The house applauded.

A six-piece Negro jazz band went into action, producing an evil orgiastic jazz. The dance floor of the Sunrise Cafe on Thirty-fifth Street quickly crowded, and it became like a revolving wheel of lust, the dancers swaying and turning, every corner and floor edge filled with dancers who moved sidewise, inch by inch, socking their bellies together in quick rhythm and with increasing frenzy. The fellows watched. Their faces went tight with hostility every time a white girl went by with a Negro. They saw one beautiful blond girl with a coal-black, sweating nigger, and they said nothing, only because there were too many shines in the place. Slug said what the hell he was going to dance too. He left, and soon he was socking with a black girl. The others followed Slug’s example, and Red Kelly sat boiling sore, alone with Mickey Flannagan, who slept peacefully, with his head on the table. Red looked about at the empty tables. Then at the dancers. He saw Stan socking with a skinny yellow bitch. He thought the jazz would drive him nuts; the thick-lipped singing