The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [437]
“Get back,” a policeman said to a ragged kid who ran toward the furniture.
“This can’t go on forever,” a small, nervous man in overalls and a blue shirt said, too loudly, and a ruddy-faced policeman walked quickly toward him.
“What did you say?”
“Come on, break it up. Break it up,” a second cop called, quickly joining the first.
Lonigan stepped off the curb and aside.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Break it up.”
“Move on. Don’t block the sidewalk.”
Their faces surly, the crowd was edged down the sidewalk. Lonigan walked around the sidewalk, toward the corner. Might be trouble, and he didn’t want to be mixed up in any riots or trouble. There had been riots, started by the Reds, in the Black Belt when niggers had been evicted. But that poor family. Losing their home, four children, too. Poor fellow, must be out of work. He remembered the remark of the small, nervous man. Could these hard times go on forever? His own building, they were taking it away from him, the building into which he had put all the money earned by the sweat of his own brow. Yes, it was earned by the sweat of his own brow. They couldn’t take it away from him. They couldn’t.
He passed a box-like, red-brick factory, sooty, with smokeless cylindrical chimneys. The windows were dirty, many of them broken. He guessed kids had done that. Closed factory. That meant men out of work, machinery rusting, people with money invested in it getting no return. Ah, hard times were hard, and we needed a new man of the people in the White House, to end all these hard times and unemployment.
Two short blocks ahead he saw a crowd gathered on a corner. He hastened forward on tired feet, breathing asthmatically, to see what was up.
IV
Strange music filling the street, the shouts and cries of an approaching throng headed by an overalled white man and a Negro carrying an American and a red flag, policemen stretched along the curbs in both directions, shabby people behind the line of bluecoats, a crowd constantly augmenting in front of the corner speakeasy saloon, children scampering and dodging through the group; all this befogged and confused Lonigan, and he puzzled with himself trying to figure out what it was. He heard a snickering voice beside him, and his face livened with the discovery that it was a Red parade. Goddamn Reds. They shouldn’t be permitted to march in the street. Wouldn’t if he had any say about it.
The noise and music swelled in volume, and he told himself, as if in an argument with someone else, that with things as bad, why couldn’t the Reds let well enough alone, put their shoulders to the wheel, try to help things along back to prosperity instead of making conditions worse by parading to foment all this trouble and agitation. Kicking was all right, he continued with himself, and the Lord knew that he had as much reason to kick as any man. But that was no cause to want to tear down everything and have anarchy like in Russia. Why did these Jews and foreigners and Reds want to go on disrupting the way they did?
An explosion of shouts burst against his eardrums, and he stiffened with fear and surprise. He saw the head of the parade, half a block down, moving toward him like a howling mob. He remembered Scaramouche, a movie about the French Revolution that he and Mary had seen a long time ago in the old neighborhood. Were these Reds going to burn, and kill, and destroy the way the mob had in that picture? He looked at the broad back of a bull-necked policeman a few feet in front of him, and he guessed that the cops would be able to take care of any trouble if it started.
The shouts of the paraders broke upon him, the flag-bearers passed, several feet in advance of the parade, and he saw a swarm of faces, poster signs, banners, for blocks and blocks back. A tall, solid blond man in an unpressed blue suit, with frank features, followed