The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [240]
“Say, Schmaltz, who won the ball game?” asked Studs.
“Studs!”
“You’re still around, I see.”
“Yes, I’m always here.”
“How’s business?”
Sammy shrugged his shoulders, and said he sold some papers.
“All the old people are gone, huh?”
“Doyle, he still lives around here. Oh, one or two.”
“They hang around?”
Sammy had to turn and sell a racing sheet to a nigger. Studs walked towards Prairie Avenue. In the cigar store on the right-hand side of the elevated station, he saw a group of niggers hanging around, talking with a sweaty brown-looking, sporty bastard who leaned forwards on the counter. He saw pearly white teeth flash in a coal black smile.
Niggers passed him on the sidewalk. They nearly all looked alike, as if they were the same person. The corner, their old corner, looked like Thirty-fifth and State. A gang of young niggers were gathered around the fireplug talking, kidding, laughing. He tried to frown. Suppose they should get snotty or try to mob him? He suddenly thought of himself fighting ten or twelve niggers, standing with his back to the wall, swinging, laying them down one after the other with a punch, as guys sometimes did in the movies.
He went into the drug store. There was a pretty, white girl at the cashier’s desk. He walked over to the soda fountain to get a coke. But the niggers used the same glasses. His stomach almost turned as he thought of himself using the same glass as a nigger did. He bought a package of cigarettes, and stepped outside.
A loud, irritating Negro laugh struck him, rubbed him up the back. He turned to see a dude, with baboon lips, twisting and bending forwards as he laughed.
“Hi, there, Mistah Morgan!” a loose-jointed, middle-aged Negro said to another passing Negro.
“Hi! Brother Jones,” the second replied.
A handsome, light brown, well-built girl passed. Studs looked at her. So did the Negro lads on the corner. He wondered if she was a whore. He’d like to have her. He remembered how a couple of times he’d been to nigger can houses, but the girls he’d had had been too black and bony. One like that was nice, even if she was black.
He felt uncomfortable on the corner, and walked west towards Indiana Avenue. The street was changed. There was another chain store in the block. The garage was still at the corner of the alley. There was still a dry goods store where the old Palm Theater had been. He remembered how they’d used to sneak in the side doors, years ago when he’d been still in grammar school. He tried to remember some of the pictures he’d seen, with Maurice Costello, Fatty Arbuckle, John Drew, Broncho Billy, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford. He couldn’t remember them well, except for Charlie Chaplin.
He lit a cigarette. Hell, it hardly seemed that they had moved five months ago. Now, too, there was no place to hang out. Sometimes he went to Sixty-third and Cottage Grove, and sometimes to Sixty-third or Sixty-seventh and Stony Island. No other corner would ever be the same. Christ, and what wouldn’t he give to have just one more night, with all the guys back again, and Arnold Sheehan too?
There was a greasy-looking Jew in the drug store at Fifty-eighth and Indiana where Levin had been, and where once, on the day he’d licked Weary Reilley, Helen Shires had treated him to a chocolate soda. He looked north down Indiana Avenue, and slowly crossed the street and walked down, past the vacant lot, past the three-story building where Red O’Connell had lived. Red was a skunk, a no-do, no-work, crapping sonofabitch. He’d used to hang out down at the poolroom around Fifty-fifth the last Studs had heard of him, and he and a bunch of guys like him would be there, shooting their mouths off, selling the buildings around there and even real estate out in the lake with their line. He passed the wooden house, set back from the sidewalk, where the O’Callaghans had lived. On past the apartment where the Donoghues had lived. He stopped at the gray stone brick, Lucy’s old house.
He had stood there that summer night, and she had blown him a kiss,