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By Root 10461 0

and shouts of the niggers grated until he was ready to jump. And the place was like the stockyards; he thought they ought to use a little perfume anyway. He called over a nigger waiter, paid his share of the bill, and got up while the dance was still going hot. As he walked towards the exit, he noticed the snottily suspicious glances he got from niggers, and Christ, how he’d have loved to have gotten a couple of them out on Fifty-eighth Street. At the door, there were four dicks, their faces drawn, waiting, as if they were expecting trouble. As he left, two white girls entered, laughing, with loudly-dressed buck niggers. The doorman told him to come again. Yes, he thought, he’d like to come with a machine gun. He took a cab to a white can house.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I

Studs’ eyes were attracted by a framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, around which was written the verse:

Heart of Jesus, my true friend,

Make me faithful to the end.

He wanted to substitute the word healthy for faithful. He looked at his feet where he had just dropped the evening’s copy of the Chicago Evening Journal that he’d been reading. He’d come across a squib telling of how a thirty-seen-year-old man had dropped dead of heart trouble at the ball game. He thought that he had been having pains in his heart, and down around his stomach of late, and he was gloomy and worried, because maybe he’d be having heart trouble and dropping dead, or having to have an operation for appendicitis, or be suffering from ulcers of the stomach or something like that. Maybe his plan to condition himself was just too late, and it was too bad for him. Health was the greatest gift and wealth that any man could receive or have, and when health was gone, all was gone.

He might be dead any day. He might drop dead in the street. He might have already torn all the lining out of his stomach with rotgut gin.

He wanted to live to be a hundred. He could see himself celebrating his hundredth birthday, with everybody he now knew dead, and his great-grandchildren and his great-greatgrandchildren surrounding him. He could see himself at a hundred, hale and hearty, having his picture in the newspapers and telling the reporters, while they took his picture, that he attributed his health to careful living, and explaining how when he had been twenty-two he had laid out a plan of careful living and exercise for himself, and he’d followed it conscientiously for years. He could see himself a hundred years old, walking erect without a cane, not fat either like his father was, coming back to the old neighborhood, looking at all the old buildings where Lucy and Helen Shires and Dan Donoghue and Red Kelly had lived, going over to Washington Park and sitting by the lagoon, or in the boathouse, walking over to the wooded island, looking at the tree where he and Lucy had sat, or at the spot, if the tree was gone, going all around to see the old sights, thinking about all the things he’d done as a kid so long long long ago, and the things he was doing now, thinking about Lucy and Helen Shires, and the girl who sat next to him at Christmas mass and who maybe would be his wife. And maybe when he was a hundred and did that, he might still be having as much as ten years to go. He wanted to live longer than any man in the whole world had ever lived. And goddamn it, he would.

He wanted to be strong and healthy and never turn into a weak-kneed, unhealthy guy. And he would. He got up, and shadow-boxed clumsily around the room. He tensed his stomach and felt it to see if his exercises and training had hardened up his guts. He couldn’t tell. He still had something of an alderman. Well, that would go. And he would have a long time to live. He’d only worried unnecessarily about his heart and his stomach. He dressed, ate supper, and then left. He was going over to the Y tonight, and Red and some of the guys were coming along. He walked along, confident and happy, feeling, too, that he wouldn’t be hanging around, wondering every few minutes what time it was, and what they’d do.

II

“But it’s a pretty long