Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [389]
“It is kind of interesting, though. It gets you interested without you realizing it, once you get to know who they are.”
“Yeah. Exciting and funny things happen in it.”
“I wonder who’ll win.”
“Hurry, Al, I want to get in. And I do hope that Harold Morgan has not dropped out,” a girl said, passing them on the stairs.
“I didn’t like that Katy Jones. She’s awful,” Catherine said sleepily.
“Uh, huh,”Studs yawned, leading her to the street car.
Chapter Fourteen
I
STUDS drowsed in his B.V.D.’s while the drawn green window-shade waved a trifle from the hot and inconsequential August wind. Sunlight seeped around the edges of the curtain, and from somewhere outside kids could be heard whooping at play. He smiled wearily. Even if he was all pooped out, he could still look back on the last week and feel satisfied, and now that it was Saturday afternoon he could just take it easy and let himself feel good. But there was no use trying to kid himself. He just wasn’t the man that he used to be. Yesterday he’d come home from work with his fanny dragging damn near to the ground. He’d seen Catherine every night in the week, and then in the park on Thursday night twice with her had not been calculated to make him any more peppy and energetic. And now the week was over, and here he was just lying almost half asleep, letting his mind drift.
Yet even with the heat wave he was glad that he’d worked. He’d salted fifteen bucks in the bank. Now, if he could just do that every week, he’d have a little extra money in double quick time.
He heard radio jazz from a nearby flat. Nice, hearing music when he was taking it easy like this. All week now, he had kept getting the feeling that it was old times. Mixing and grinding paints, slapping it on after having washed the walls, calcimining ceilings—it had all been something to do that he knew how to do right. If this job wasn’t finished yet, or if only there was another one to do next week. Well, the old man had said he was going down to see Barney McCormack, the politician, and come to a showdown about getting some political contracts. Boy, if the old man got something, wouldn’t that be just too sweet and rosy?
He shaded his eyes, spread his legs out wide, and tried to think of a life with no worries on any side, nothing but working, himself and Mort, painting, seeing a dirty wall with the paint peeling, and turning it into a clean and nice and freshly painted wall that filled the room with its smell.
It seemed almost as if a rhythm pulsed in his head while he continued to see himself and Mort working. Just to have things like that, like they used to be, with no real griefs or worries.
But he’d been having heart pains all week, and Thursday night with Catherine he’d gotten one that was like a knife ripping through his chest. He had felt like a clown. And Jesus, think how awful to die from heart failure while you were jazzing your girl. He’d been afraid to look her in the eye after, because she might have thought he was weak and not much of a man. But she liked him. She had kissed him, and stroked his head, and talked that silly chatter to him that girls liked. He was beginning to understand more about girls, though. Once a girl was broken in, she wasn’t to be stopped. And Catherine was learning fast. Thursday night, he’d almost gotten afraid of her, and she had even bit him. He’d never thought he or any guy could make a decent girl like Catherine get so excited. He smiled slightly, and felt that he could hardly wait until tonight when he’d be seeing her again.
She was nuts about him, he thought with gratifying assurance. But she wanted to get married. Somehow it was not right, either, to go on this way. But how could he get married now? Christ, what a chump he had been, hanging on to his stock. Letting Ike Dugan make a chump out of him, that snaky rat. He could just see himself meeting with him, swinging, pounding that skinny, ratty face of his into jelly. And