The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [257]
“That’s just what Father Moylan has been saying on the radio,” Muggsy said.
“There’s a man for you. Boy, what Father Moylan doesn’t say about the bankers, and the Reds, too,” Kelly said.
“Yes, boys, things have been happening these last few years that you’d never expect to happen,” Stan said.
“Well, all I know is that I wish I had a job,” Joe Thomas said.
“Look at me, fellows. After all the years I put in the service of the Continental Express Company, what am I doing? Working as an extra, getting a few hours work every week with Long Johnny Continental,” Les said whiningly.
“Say, Studs, by the way, how is your old man weathering the depression?” Red asked.
“Petty good,” Studs answered, figuring that there was no use in advertising about his old man’s business.
IV
“You know, I honestly got the creeps when I saw poor Shrimp in that coffin, looking so wasted, just like a bag of bones,” Stan said.
“Such are the mysterious ways of life,” Red pronounced.
Remembering the pallid yellow corpse of his old friend, Shrimp Haggerty, lying in the small parlor in a blue suit, the heavy odor of flowers, the gray-haired mother sobbing, the father like a broken man in a dazed fog, hardly seeing anybody, not hearing what was said to him, arising to walk to the casket and stare at his dead son, turning away to pat his mourning wife, Studs felt pretty damn low. He was afraid, afraid of death, of his friends dying, of the day when he would be stretched out in a coffin and people would be sitting at his own wake saying how sorry they were that Studs Lonigan was dead. He remembered back on a night just before his twenty-first birthday, when they had all gone to see Paulie Haggerty, trying to cheer him up and make him think he wasn’t dying. And Kenny Kilarney had pulled such a dumb stunt, kidding by saying that soon they would all be Paulie’s pall bearers. Without meaning it, he had made Paulie feel so damn much worse. Just like Kenny! And a few days later, on his twenty-first birthday, they had all been in the poolroom when Benny Taite had come in with the news that Paulie was dead.
Yes, he felt pretty damn low. He heard the voices of the fellows, and he looked emptily through the dusty train window. The moon was riding high now across the sky, a half moon that seemed almost like a fire of whiteness and silver, and the growing early darkness seemed itself to be sorrowing, to be carrying through it an unseen and awful sadness, and it made all the world seem to Studs like a graveyard. He wished that he could see his old pals, Paulie and Shrimp, Arnold Sheehan, Slug Mason, Tommy Doyle, Hink Weber, talk to them. If he could, it would make him feel less the fact that he, too, would one day be dead. He tried to tell himself that they were still alive, but only living in some other town, and that some day they would all come back and have a regular reunion. The train whistle cut in upon him, a deep puncture of sadness into his thoughts. He could not shake this sadness or shutter it from his mind, and it put its fingerprint upon every thought that popped up. He didn’t want to talk to the fellows while he felt like this. He wanted just to sit and think. Suddenly, he saw himself as a lonely and unhappy adventurer riding upon this train, to some dangerous and unknown end. Another farm-house light stabbed the darkening obscurity, and to Studs, for the moment that he saw it, it was like some supernatural and all-seeing eye. The train rumbled over a crossroad, spanned by the track, and he saw the headlights of an automobile coming forward. He turned from the window, fearing to look out now and continue thinking, because if he did, they would be convinced for sure that he had become a mope.
“Les, I agree with you. We’ll never have the old days back again. But, as I was saying, what’s gone is gone, and a guy can’t always be thinking of it. He must be thinking of what’s ahead for himself, where he’s going,” Red said.
“I know this, too,” Studs said, cutting in on a defensively apologetic remark of Les