Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [453]
“Well, why don’t you go back home to Russia if it’s like that?” the younger fellow sneered, looking at the older man as if the latter were insane.
“I’ll stay here and we’ll make America like Russia,” the man in the brown suit said. Cheers greeted him as he joined the demonstration.
FREE TOM MOONEY
“Nuts, all right, thinking they can overthrow the government. Wait till Hoover hears of this. It’ll give him apoplexy,” the young fellow with the briefcase remarked to Lonigan.
“I don’t see why the police permit this,” Lonigan said, shaking his head sagely.
“It’s just as well. They got to get off steam some way, and if they do it in the open, they won’t be conspiring.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Lonigan said.
The last column passed, filling the street, singing with raised right fists.
Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place,
The International Soviet
Shall be the human race.
He watched the moving backs, turned, walked back slowly to his automobile. Home now, the home the bankers would be getting soon. And Bill? Was he dead? Oh, but Paddy Lonigan was an unhappy man, and those people in the parade, they were happy, happier than he was.
V
Lonigan stepped out of the police station, still cursing. Those goddamn kids. Stealing his spare tire. There wasn’t any chance, hardly, of getting it back, either. The sergeant had said that the neighborhood was full of thieving kids. What was going to become of them when they grew up?
He drove off. Thieving little bastards, stealing a man’s spare tire right off the car! When they grew up, a man’s life and property wouldn’t be safe. What was Chicago coming to, what with the kids like the ones who’d snatched his tire, the Reds and the niggers? He shook his head sadly, thinking of how the shines had already ruined so much of the south side. Had it been so good to free the slaves? Of course, all men should be free, but a nigger was a nigger. You couldn’t trust them and they didn’t know their place as it was. And now the Reds were agitating them. Dangerous stuff. Maybe if old Abe Lincoln had lived, he might have settled the black problem by giving them a place of their own to stay in, the same as the Indians had been put on reservations.
All these south-bound automobiles on Michigan. People in them going home. Were the men and women in all these automobiles happy? What did they have on their minds? For-rent signs in these fine buildings on Michigan. Property ruined by the niggers. And a closed bank at Thirty-ninth Street. God, how long could it all go on? And Bill? He had a feeling that Bill was dead. He didn’t want to go home to the house where his son had died. Unthinkingly, he drove his car more slowly.
Near White City he stopped in front of a speakeasy, deciding that one good, stiff shot would jack him up. Several men were lined up at the bar of the small saloon when he entered.
“Shot of whisky,” he told the ruddy-faced bartender.
Lonigan gulped it down, convincing himself that a man in his shoes had to brace himself up with something, and this one would make him feel better about going home.
“And, Pat, I suppose you think I’m only a toothless old drunkard, headed for an alcoholic grave?” a stunted old man said, hanging over the bar.
Catching Lonigan’s eye, the bartender winked. Lonigan, smiling in response, drank half of the whisky before him and gulped down a chaser of water.
“Pat, don’t tell me I’m no good. Because I swear to God on it, and to the memory of my saintly old mother in Heaven, that there’s no Irishman alive who hasn’t some good in him. Pat, we belong to a race blessed by God. But we have been oppressed for centuries by John Bull, the curse of the human race. And by God, I’m proud to proclaim that my name is McGuire.”
The drunkard laughed repulsively, staggered from the bar, jigged clumsily, fell forward, toward Lonigan, and looked at him sternly, slouching against the