Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [401]
“Look out or I might be ducking you.”
“William Lonigan, don’t you dare,” she said in mock-challenge.
“Is that a threat?” he asked, liking it as she tousled his hair.
He watched a girl, her skin tanned almost the color of chocolate, posing her athletic figure on the diving board.
“Mama, what a broad!” he heard a fellow nearby on the rocks exclaim just after she had dived neatly.
Them’s my sentiments, he told himself, trying to single her out in the water. He feared, though, that Catherine might have caught him watching her.
“Nice here. I’m glad I came.”
“So am I, darling,” Catherine said.
He couldn’t single her out in the water.
“I’ll bet you can’t make the grade with her, Joe,” a fellow said.
“Well, if I do, won’t I laugh at you. Here goes.”
Studs watched the fellow, a curly-haired, hairy-bodied chap, dive quickly. He thought of how he couldn’t do the same thing, and there was nothing that could drive home to him more forcibly the fact that Studs Lonigan was hooked.
“Let’s go back and sit in the sand,” he said, getting nervous.
He watched Catherine slip off the rocks into the water, and swim awkwardly toward the beach. Walking to the edge of the diving board, he saw the girl who had just gone off swim past Catherine like a fish. He gritted his teeth. He dove, went under water for several feet, and hit for shore with steady strokes. He snorted, speedily overtaking Catherine, and stood waiting for her in shallow water, all pooped out. She clutched his hand, and as they waded onto the sand he stared with quick anxiety about him. No faces that he knew.
A girl, chased by a fellow, scooted past him, tumbled, and the fellow purposely fell on top of her, both of them laughing.
Were these people, he wondered, trying to shutter troubles out of their minds, the same as he was? He caught a dark girl in a blue one-piece swimming suit and green rubber swimming cap standing alone like a young tree, fresh, virginal, untouched. If she was his girl! He remembered how Catherine had changed in these last months, a change that had seemed to come over her since she had given in, and that was so hard for him to put his finger on. To have such a girl, she couldn’t be over seventeen, see her changing under a fellow’s hand, growing to like what he gave, and all the rest of it. Already he was wishing to have over again those first weeks after Catherine had let him, and they were gone. But he couldn’t give Catherine the idea he was looking around this way at girls. He looked at her, and saw, almost in pain, how plain she was without makeup, her chubby face framed by her white bathing cap. Suddenly, she seemed to him like a total stranger. He could not make himself believe that she was his girl, his woman who would be his wife in a few weeks, and who would, in about eight months, have a baby of his. Christ, for a lucky miracle! Have to make her exercise.
“Come on, I’ll race you around the beach.”
“I’m too tired, and I couldn’t beat you anyway.”
“Come on. I’ll give you a head start.”
“Please, no, Bill.”
He became gloomy. He didn’t want all these things to happen. He did not even seem to know her. . . . And did she really understand him?
“Where did we leave our things?”
“Around here some place. I know that much,” he said, thinking that he was a bastard to be having thoughts so unfair to her.
He felt himself trapped like a rat in a cage. All this life around him, the sky, everything, were bars, and here he was, and here she was in this cage.
“Here we are,” Studs said, finding the rolled-up bundle of their clothing.
He dug through it and found a package of cigarettes in his trouser pockets. Lighting one, he sat beside Catherine. He looked around the beach, as if looking through the bars of a cage, and he saw all these people in swimming suits, so many girls, so many fellows, and he wondered how many of them were trapped as he was, or would be trapped in the same way? He leaned back, supporting himself