Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [382]
“Well, they earn it,” Studs said, watching the blonde girl of team number eight fight and strain to keep her partner from crashing to the floor.
“Look,” Catherine said excitedly.
The blonde girl had tripped, and her partner smashed to the floor on his face. A buzz of conversation rose from the stands. Other dancers crowded around him. The judge emerged from his small box beside the orchestra dais, and two male attendants in soiled white clothing rushed forward.
“Oh, I hope poor Albert isn’t hurt,” the woman with the Slavic features in front of them sighed.
“Gee, he got a shiner,” Studs exclaimed, attentively watching the male attendants lift number eight.
Number eight shook his head in stupor and walked beside his partner. He received cheers, and coins were flung to him.
“What’s that?” Studs asked a fellow next to him when male and female attendants assisted number eight and three other couples from the floor, following the resounding of a siren.
“Rest period. They all get ten minutes every hour, and they go off the floor in batches.”
“What do they do, sleep?” Studs asked.
Three teams which had appeared unnoticed to Studs arose from benches along the side of the dance floor and joined the straggling procession, which wound around and around and around.
“How long will this go on?” Studs asked Catherine.
“They’ll still be here in another month. They all got guts and they can take it,” the fellow next to him said.
“It’s beyond me,” Studs said, puzzled.
“They do look like physical wrecks. And I can’t understand why all the girls are so swollen out,” she said.
“Uh huh,” Studs muttered, watching the girl of team number three holding up the dead weight of her sleep-doped partner, and then he glanced from girl to girl, noticing how their buttocks were like pumped-up balloons.
“Let ’em hang, Jackie,” someone called out as the male of number nineteen kept pulling up his falling knickers; the marathoner grinned sillily, marched with his knickers draping below his knees.
Studs watched a contestant in a brown sweater reading a newspaper as he walked. He thought, too, that the guys, poor bastards, must be pretty hard up. There they were, for twenty-four hours a day, so close to girls, touching against them, hanging onto them, holding them up, and not being able to get anything. And the girls didn’t look so decent or hard, and probably wouldn’t mind a little. That made it all the tougher.
“I wonder when something is going to happen?” he said to Catherine.
“I guess this is what happens,” she said.
He watched number two, a little fellow with thinning light hair walk with a steadily more pronounced limp. Then he turned his attention to number seven, a solid, broad young lad of almost six feet who was without a partner. He walked, asleep, wagging his head, floundered. His head and shoulders lurched forward. He swerved sidewise. His head jerked back. He staggered like a man hopelessly drunk. He fell against the box seats below Studs. Two contestants turned him around, shoved him slightly. He reeled to the center of the floor, swayed precariously, stumbled to his right, and stood listing. He crumpled, his body hitting the floor with a thud.
“I suppose that guy is finished,” Studs said to Catherine.
“He’s been that way for four days since his partner was forced out with swollen feet,” the fellow beside Studs said.
“The winners will earn their dough,” Studs said.
Amid cheers number seven arose, shaking his head, grinning. He marched in the dragging procession. The orchestra played a snappy tune. The contestants dragged themselves around and around and around.
III
A medium-sized slick, light-haired announcer swayed his girlish hips before the microphone in the center of the floor, and the contestants clustered around him.
“Well, folks, we’re now in our three hundred and thirty-seventh hour of the World’s Championship Super-Marathon contest at the Silver Eagle Ballroom, and as I look around at the boys and girls, I can see that there are no signs of let-up. Game to the core, fighters