The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [188]
It was all a goddamn pipe-dream. He was just filling himself full of the stuff, only if the thing had turned out different! He’d missed his chance. He thought of her in her green and red dress, and her cold aloof face and expression. Haughty jane. And he wanted her. He thought of going with her until finally she’d say yes and no one would be home, and he’d kiss her, and they’d... All a goddamn pipe-dream!
“Jesus Christ, here comes the Fifty-eighth Street Alky Squad,” he said with a laugh as he met Slug, Mickey, Barney, Tommy Doyle, Les, and Shrimp at the corner of Fifty-eighth and Indiana.
“We need another recruit,” Slug said.
Studs chipped in with them. They bought paregoric in the drug store and drank it. They formed a drugged and stupefied line against the side of the drug store building. Studs was so helpless that Red Kelly had to take him home.
XVII
Martin Husk Lonigan poked Crabby Konetchy’s books out of his arms.
“Pick ‘em up!” Crabby commanded.
“What? Huh! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, you will know, if you don’t pick up the books you knocked out of my arm.”
“What’s he sayin’?” Husk Lonigan said to his pal, Pete McFarland.
“What you say, Koney?” kidded McFarland.
“1 said pick ‘em up!”
“He said to pick something up,” Pete said.
Husk Lonigan looked up and down the street.
“There ain’t no girls around to pick up.”
Pete laughed.
“Gonna pick ‘em up?”
“Who was your servant last year?” asked Husk Lonigan.
“You knocked ‘em out of my arm.”
“What?”
“You did.”
“You’re a liar,” Husk Lonigan said, sneering and looking quite like his brother Studs.
“Who’s a liar?”
“You, if you said 1 knocked your books down.”
“Aw, smack him, Husk,” said Pete McFarland.
“Try it!”
“Oh, you want to fight?” said Husk, again sneering.
Crabby punched Husk’s nose. They fought, and Crabby gave Husk a bloody nose and a shiner. Husk picked up the books.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I
“I’ll get you a girl if you want me to,” Fran said, taking the three bucks from Studs for the ticket he was buying to her sorority’s dance.
“I’ll get a girl.”
“All right. Only if you want me to, I’ll arrange a nice date for you,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the piano bench.
“Yeah, I suppose with some fishface.”
“Why, William Lonigan!” she exclaimed, and he smiled so she wouldn’t get sore.
“You’ll have a good time. And if you don’t think you can dance well enough, you can practice with me.”
“No, thanks.”
He left and went over towards the poolroom.
Christ, now he’d let himself in for it and where would he get a girl. Lucy? Hell with her. The girl from the parish. How could he? He didn’t want her. Let the punks have her. If she wanted punks and guys like Larkin, let them have the bitch. To hell with her! To hell with them all! He didn’t have to go because he gave Fran the three bucks for a ticket. He could get out of it by just not going.
But he could see himself at the dance, togged out in new raiment, knocking them all dead, with a broad as keen as that blond. Everybody would wonder who he was, and every-body who knew him would be cockeyed with surprise, realizing that they had been totally wrong when they thought that Studs Lonigan was just one of the hoods in the Fifty-eighth Street Alky Squad. He could see himself at the dance, getting blind and tough, asking all the goddamn boy scouts and sweet boys in the place if they thought they were tough, and then laying one on them. Walking up to some bastard who had a Joe College handshake, messing the dope’s manly vaseline locks, twisting his nose, and if he batted wise, giving him the works. Himself cleaning out the goddamn dance, with the blond seeing it. Lucy seeing it, and the blond and Lucy walking up to him, protesting.
And he would look at both of them with his lips curling into a sneer, and say:
“That for you, sister!”
Fran would be sore, and go up, Jesus, like a balloon. But it would be funny. He saw Phil coming along, singing.
Oh, I loved her in the morning,
And