The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [213]
After the applause, he continued speaking.
“Slug, I’d like to see you tangle with that louse,” Kelly whispered.
Slug said he had nothing against him, and liked a fellow who took nobody’s sass. Red said he couldn’t understand an Irishman being a nigger-lover. Studs supposed that the guy would let a nigger jazz his sister. The next speaker, a small, untidy Jew, monotonously said that according to anthropology, which was a new science they were studying at the University of Chicago, they had proven as a scientific truth that no one race is superior to any other race. Studs asked Red what he was trying to say. Red said he was trying to prove that a Jew was a white man. The audience called for time.
Excitement started outside the circle. The gang rushed to it. They found a cop arguing with a kid. The cop pulled a gun. Connolly, by a quick twist of the policeman’s wrist, took the gun and warned him not to try shooting off more than his mouth. The cop barked loudly. Connolly told him to keep cool. He sent the kid away, handed the gun back to the cop, and told him to be careful or it would go off. He walked away, followed by an adulatory crowd.
IV
“He’s a real guy,” Slug said as they walked towards Fifty-eighth Street.
“He’ll get his. Those wise radicals always do. You can’t go against the human race,” Kelly said.
“He’s got guts,” Slug said.
“He was in jail during the war for being a pacifist. And a few years back he went out to agitate at a coal strike in Colorado, and the police kicked out a couple of his front teeth. But even though I know he’s wrong, he’s a smart man,” Jim Doyle said.
“If I’d been that cop, I’d have plugged him,” Red said.
“He’s just over the heads of you hoods,” Jim Doyle said.
“Sure, he thinks he’s too good for the human race,” Red said.
“He isn’t yellow,” Studs said, thinking how big and tough Connolly was, and how small he himself was. He thought of how Morgan had baffled him. He admired and envied and hated the big fellow.
“All those guys read too much. When you do that you get lop-sided. Now I was reading some stories by a Frenchman named Balzac...”
Haggerty punned the word.
“He was an atheist, and because he was, he wrote stories that are so filthy they make you want to puke,” Kelly continued.
“Dirty stories?” asked Shrimp.
“And how,” Red replied.
“Maybe I’ll read them,” said Shrimp.
“But, anyway, I suppose the French are a pretty filthy race, and that’s why this guy wrote such stuff,” Red said.
“Look at all the American soldiers who got the syph,” Shrimp said.
“Me for Paris,” Slug said.
“Boy, I’ll bet that with a little dough you could get all you wanted there,” Red said.
Tommy wondered how long it would take Slug to know as many whores in Paris as he did in Chicago. Shrimp said they needed some liquor. Studs wanted some. He couldn’t get things off his mind, the humiliation he had suffered, Lucy. He wished he’d been a hero in the war or even killed.
When they got tired of hanging around Fifty-eighth Street with nothing to do, they got drunk on Jamaica ginger. Their drunken attention was caught by a passing Negro hot-tamaleman. They slugged him and took the wagon. Red wheeled it and they marched down the street towards the park. They each had a hot tamale and debated what to do with the rest. Red caught a passing shine. They tossed him into the fountain by the curve in the boathouse path. He struggled to get out of the slippery fountain, and was shoved back, and pelted as long as they had hot tamales. Studs passed out. He was carried home, and they left him to sleep all night on the back porch.
SECTION FOUR
1926-1929
XX
St. Patrick’s new church was a half block long, and several hundred yards wide. It was cruciform in shape, a squat box of dull red brick with a dome rounding out of the center. The nave was expansive, giving an illusion