Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [105]
“Hurrah for us Americans!” yelled Andy, again jumping up and down, and laughing like an idiot.
“Hey, Le Gare, watch out for the squirrels,” Studs shouted.
No one heard him. The punks didn’t even seem to know that the great and tough Studs Lonigan was watching them.
Studs was keen to join in the battle. He couldn’t play punk games any more. He wished that Red and Paulie Haggerty and some of the guys would come along. Then they could all get in, and that would be different. It wouldn’t be just him, alone, playing. Or else the bunch of them could bust the game up, and that would be fun, all of them kicking in the trenches, and when the punks got loud-mouthed, booting their tails around the block.
O’Neill crawled out from the reserve trench, and yelled that he was wounded and couldn’t be hit. He went over by the side fence of the prairie, walked past the baby-buggy where Young Horn had left his baby brother, and came out on the sidewalk, as the battle continued.
“Hey, goof!” yelled Studs.
O’Neill came over to Studs like one in his sleep.
“Where you going?”
“Hospital,” said O’Neill, showing a hand bleeding slightly from a scratch.
Studs shook his head quizzically, as he watched O’Neill enter Levin’s drug store across the street. But he itched to get into it, or else break it up. He looked at his long pants. He stuck his hands in his pockets, and stood sneering.
Well, before the war was over, he’d be in it, and get the real stuff. And suppose he did get killed. All right, it would make him one of his country’s heroes, along with those who’d died in the other wars to make America the great land that it was. And it would only serve his old man right.
Screwy McGlynn, the laundry driver, hopped from his wagon and joined Studs.
“That’s why this country’s great. These kids exemplify the unconquerable American spirit. They show in their way why this country can lick the world, and why our boys aren’t going to stop, once they get started, until they march straight into Berlin,” philosophized Screwy.
Studs assumed a mature man-to-man attitude, and nodded.
“Pretty crazy, but it’s great to be a kid,” a needle-faced stranger said, ranging himself alongside of them.
Studs tried hard to convince himself in his thoughts that he was not envying the punks out there fighting, and, hell, he’d grown past all that kid stuff. But he knew that he couldn’t fool himself and tell himself lies, and that when he wanted something, he wanted it, and all the telling himself in the world that he didn’t want it couldn’t make him get rid of that wanting. The same way he tried to tell himself that he didn’t really love Lucy, and that loving a girl the way he loved Lucy was goofy, because a big tough guy should only want to jump a girl, and think that all the rest and the love was crap.
“Kids will be kids,” said Screwy.
“Yep, they will,” a bakery driver said.
“Yeah,” the needle-faced guy said.
“No time in life like when you’re a kid,” the bakery man meditated aloud.
“You should have seen them bellyaching before it started. They both wanted to be the Americans. I thought they’d end up in a free-for-all fist fight,” said Studs, a man in a man’s world.
They haw-hawed, Studs the most loudly. Not one punk noticed Studs Lonigan laughing, a man in a man’s world.
And smiling-eyed, curly-haired Lucy Scanlan, plump, pretty, flowering beautifully into young womanhood, came along. Studs saw her. She saw him. Studs took out a cigarette and lit it like an expert. He talked and laughed with the other men, as if Lucy might have been in Africa. She paused on the sidewalk, only a few yards away from Studs, watching the battle. She didn’t look at him. He tried not to look at her. He watched her out of the corner of his eye. She might be going to the store. He could go along, help her carry the groceries home, go to the park with her, like last summer on the day when they’d sat in the tree, and he’d kissed her, and seen her blue wash bloomers, and she’d sung In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,