The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [300]
“Maybe you’re right, Mort,” Studs said reflectively, looking again at the clock: ten to one.
“It takes money to make money, of course, but I don’t know. If I had anything, I’d rather hang on to it. But I’m a poor man. I tried to save, but it was no use, and my wife sick for so many years, and then the funeral expenses when she died, and the kids I had to raise and educate. And now one of my boys had to move in on me with his wife and two babies because he was evicted.”
“I know how it is,” Studs said.
As they rose, Studs laid a dime tip under his plate. He lit a cigarette and paid the check.
“Christ, I wish the day’s work was done,” he said.
“We’ll get it done, all right. I never fell down on a job for Paddy Lonigan yet, and I’m too old a dog to be learning new tricks. I told him we’d finish today and by God, we will.”
Studs noticed that Mort was a little stooped, and had about him the manner of a man weakening with age. Christ, would he become like that some day? Or like his father? Or wouldn’t he even live long enough for that? The doctor turning him down for the insurance company.. Thinking of that, he hastily shot the butt of his half-smoked cigarette. His body was heavy, sluggish.
“Say, what’s the crowd?” he said in sudden surprise, pointing at a crowd around the corner ahead, seeing a policeman whose car caught and reflected glints of sunlight.
“Must be the bank or else an accident.”
“Let’s step on it and see,” Studs said, a sense of eagerness and curiosity tingling him into an energetic state.
“I don’t see that it’s worth hurrying about. We’ll come to it.”
“It’s something funny, all right. Cops there, too,” Studs said, walking a pace ahead of Mort.
Approaching, he saw that the crowd was milling about a bank, and that a line of people cut out from the bank entrance onto the sidewalk. He felt the same as if he were running to a fire. Excitement. He saw that there were a number of policemen and that people in the crowd were talking and gesticulating.
“Watch out,” Mort called, pulling him back from the cartrack.
He heard the dinging gong of the street car and saw one sweep past him. His heart beat rapidly. He held his breath in an after-fear.
“Got to watch yourself, lad.”
He looked ahead and to his side for traffic.
“Close,” he said, sighing, the terror of being run over clinging.
“Robbers,” a thin and wizened man of about forty-five said loudly as they stepped onto the curb.
Studs edged through the crowd, squeezing close to the line of people, crushed together, waiting to go forward, held in order by police who swung and twirled their menacing nightsticks in the air. His eye ran up and down the faces, anxious men and women. He saw a Jewish woman, frantically biting her fingernails, and beside her a powerful man in his prime with a pale face, nervous eyes, almost trembling lips. Almost crapping in their pants, all right, he reflected. Maybe his dough was, after all, just as safe in stock as the banks? Hell, if it went on like this where would a guy’s dough be safe? If he kept it home he might be robbed. If he socked it in a bank, the bank might go under. If he bought stock, the market might crash. Christ, what a goofy world it was becoming.
“Oh, God! And my mother home sick. Oh, God, what will I do if I don’t get my money?” a middle-aged woman said, her eyes watery, her hair dishevelled under her black felt hat.
I guess it’s a bank going on the fritz, all right,” Studs said to Mort, who had edged in beside him.
“There’s no trouble. People just get excited. Irresponsible people, like the Reds, spread these rumors around, to cause trouble,” a fellow near Studs said.
“You work all your life and put your money in the bank and dese robbers, dese robbers, take it. You work all your life, eh, and then you say no, maybe it’s nothin’ just excitement. Yah,” a tall dour-faced, red-mustached foreigner in overalls exclaimed.
The fellow gave the foreigner a look of contempt and turned away.