Studs Lonigan (66 page)

“There's all the difference in the world between sparring with gloves on and fighting with your fists. If I was using my fists and really trying, I'd have massacred that snotty little punk, O'Neill,” Red said.

Studs agreed. Hated O'Neill for having taken the gloves home. Still he felt that he couldn't have gone another round.

“The punks took you guys,” Barney said.

“So says you! You toothless, dried-up Irish bastard!” Red said with venom.

“That Morgan kid is clever. He could make a monkey out of punks like O'Neill,” Red said.

“He slugged, too,” Doyle said.

“He gave me a good workout. He's clever. I think I'll put the gloves on with him again. With a little coaching, he'll be a sweet young fighter,” Studs said.

He waited for them to say he'd outpointed the kid. Well, he had, Studs thought, trying to lie to himself. One of his punches was worth six of the kid's. Their non-committal remarks hurt him.

“I'm not in the best condition, and I think a few more workouts like that will do me good,” Studs said.

“Yeah, he is good. He got in some nice lefts,” Red said. He continued: “But I still say it's totally different, just boxing good-naturedly with gloves, and going to it with fists. That's why I told that snotty O'Neill so. I don't want him to think he can get tough now, because if he does, I'll slough him,” Red said.

Studs agreed. Doyle said that if he had ridden a bicycle, he could have caught O'Neill. Barney sneered at them. Studs was glad when Tommy suggested they sit on a bench on the short walk near the boathouse. He brooded, and the whole thing about Lucy came back on him.

“You know, boys, the goddamn shines are getting too frisky coming around here,” Red said.

“You Irish oughtn't to kick. You and the niggers can both look up to a snake,” Keefe said.

“I came around the boathouse last Sunday, and it stunk with niggers. You know, it's so bad, that a decent girl can't walk alone here any more for fear a nigger might rape her. They ruin the park. When they come over here, you need a gas-mask if you want to stick around.... Why, you can tell they are inferior to the white race by the clothes they wear. Those goddamn loud clothes, wearing pearls in their bell bottoms, purple suits, pink shirts. They're worse than the Polacks. You know, you can tell an inferior race by the way they dress. The Polacks and Dagoes, and niggers are the same, only the niggers are the lowest. That's why I say we ought to get the boys together some night and clean every nigger out of the park. They're all yellow and if we do it once, they won't come back. We can get a few billies and clubs, and if they try to use razors, make them just wish they hadn't.”

Barney told Red to hire a hall. Shrimp agreed with Red, and Barney kidded him, saying he'd run if he saw a mammy coming after him. Doyle said that it always turned out the same way. If you give a nigger an inch, he always took a mile. Studs wished there was something distracting to do, wished he could get Lucy out of his mind. He was pooped and felt that he was slipping because of what Morgan had done to him. The cuts inside his face hurt. Finally they walked over to the Bug Club.

They saw a crowd at the Bug Club near the hills by the Cottage Grove side of the park. There was one large circle, many smaller groups and numbers milling about.

“Well, I say that the world is coming to an end,” Studs said, pleased when people from various groups frowned at him.

“The Bug Club will save the world, and drive everybody to drink or hell,” Red shouted.

Smirking, they edged into a group, and saw, in the center, a well-fed, hefty, elderly, Jewish man shaking an Eversharp pencil at malcontent debaters.

“I should believe that. Rosenblatt here should tell me that I should think that. I should believe that Rosenblatt knows more than Einstein. I should think he can explain the theory of relativity in one sentence. Yah!” a sloppy fellow bellowed at the well-fed Hebrew.

“Friend, I shall explain the basic principle of relativity in one sentence that even you can understand.”

“And I tell you I'm the traveling salesman that made Mary heavy with Christ. Yah.”

“Relativity is a theory which assumes that, on a high basis of probability, there is no hitching-post in the universe.”

Red lip-farted, and Slug said it all gave him a sharp pain in his royal rump. Studs said they were over his head. Red added that they were over the head of the human race.

“Friend, look at Orion up there in the sky . . .”

“I should think maybe they got a hitching-post for mules like Rosenblatt up there.”

‟Finklestein, you're impossible!”

“Rosenblatt, get some monkey glands.”

Jim Doyle brought them to hear Bishop Boyle in another noisy group. Bishop was a witty little Irishman, always kidding, and all right; he had a son a priest, and he was smart.

“Sure, Bishop, Jesus Christ was a bum. A hobo, with no place to lay his head. Why shouldn't he have been one when he wouldn't work and produce?”

‟Arkwright, you're wrong there. Jesus Christ was the first communist.”

“That guy talks like an atheist,” Studs said, as Red emitted more lipnoises.

“He doesn't know whether Christ was crucified or killed with a second-hand book,” Barney said.

“Sure, he's one of those liberal-minded fellows with no faith, who wants God to prove his existence by hiding behind every tree,” Bishop Boyle said with a brogue.

“If I could see God behind a tree, I'd believe him.”

“God made the tree; isn't that, my friend, sufficient proof? Or is the incomprehensibility in your anthropoid skull too dense to perceive that one fact of experience?” Bishop Boyle said.

“I'd like to see God. I'd like to tell him a few things. I'd like to say, ‘God, why do you create men and make them suffer and fight in vain, and live brief unhappy lives like pigs, and make them die disgustingly, and rot? God, why do the beautiful girls you create become whores, grow old and toothless, die and have their corpses rot so that they are a stench to human nostrils? God, why do you permit thousands and millions of your creatures, made in your own image and likeness, to live like crowded dogs in slums and tenements, while an exploiting few profit from the sweat of their toil, produce nothing, and live in kingly mansions? God, why do you permit men to starve, hunger, die from syphilis, cancer, consumption? God, why do you not raise one little finger to save man from all the turmoil, want, sorrow, suffering on this human planet?' That's what I'd say to God if I could find him hiding behind a tree. But God is a wise guy. He keeps in hiding.”

“You could make a better world, couldn't you, fellow?” Red Kelly yelled.

“Red, hell with him. He's a crazy radical,” Studs said.

“Friend, if I had the powers attributed to Bishop Boyle's God, I certainly would not have created as botched a world.”

Bishop Boyle tried to explain that the ways and purposes of God were mysterious, and that man suffered because of the fall of Adam. The atheist, a starved-looking little man, said it was disgusting, and walked out of the crowd. Red grabbed his arm.

“Fellow, are you healthy?” Red asked.

‟I do not understand you, friend.”

“If you want to preserve that health, lay off the Catholic Church.”

“Yeah, keep your trap padlocked while you're all together,” Studs said.

“You hoodlums cannot abrogate my rights of free speech.”

“See this!” Red said, showing a closed fist.

“I'll have you arrested if you dare touch me!”

“It would be worth going to jail to punch in your filthy blaspheming mouth.”

“Yeah, blow!” Doyle said.

The atheist slunk off. Red said it was the only way to talk with fellows like that. They had no brains, were ignorant and filthy-minded, and you couldn't argue with them. The whole human race should treat them the same way.

“I don't see why they let these radicals congregate here and speak like that,” Shrimp said.

“The cops used to clean them out, but they got an injunction. I'd like to have been the judge. I'd have made them all go to work,” Red said.

They listened in on a political argument. A Single Taxer was defending Davis, declaring that the Republican Party was corrupt, that La Follette was trying to destroy the Supreme Court, and that also, when the last war had been declared, La Follette had proven himself to be a traitor to his country. A six-foot-four giant was defending La Follette's progressiveness. A communist was saying, in a foreign accent, that La Follette was a class betrayer. Red got into the argument and spoke for Davis, but he didn't get tough because the communist and La Follette man both looked pretty big.

They wandered to another group. Jim Doyle said there was Father Kroke, who thought he was God. He pointed to a skeleton of a man over six feet, not weighing more than one hundred and twenty pounds, whose hollow eyes and face contrasted with a full Jesus beard and seemed ghostly.

“I suppose, Father Kroke, that you're the second coming of Christ?”

“Say, this guy's belly must have the same feeling for a meal that mine has for gin,” Shrimp said.

“Hell, if he got a meal, he'd die of indigestion,” Red said.

Father Kroke tried to say something, but stuttered so badly that no one understood him. Red told him to say it in Greek. Jim Doyle said the nut had taught himself Greek and nine other languages. Red countered that he'd never taught himself how to earn an honest dollar.

“I ask you to believe me because it is a revelation. I was an atheist, too, and talked as you do now. I did, until one night when the Blessed Virgin came to me in a vision, and her spirit flew through my whole body....” Father Kroke said, stuttering on almost every word.

“She must have been pretty hard up, huh, Father Kroke?”

Father Kroke explained that mankind had been led away from the true Christianity by Anti-Christ, the Pope of Rome, and he had been called by God to guide it back to the simplicity of the early Christians, and to reestablish the Church of God on democratic principles. He has established the true church, calling it the American Church, because America was founded on democratic principles. The American Church was, in basic doctrine, the same as the Catholic, only priests were elected by the congregations, and the doctrine of papal infallibility was branded a lie. It had only a small membership but it was growing. Next Sunday, he would say mass in the park by a nearby tree, if one member of the church was able to procure the wine for sacramental purposes, as she had promised.

Slug remarked that the guy had plenty of marbles missing. A fellow at Slug's side said he was a paranoiac and also thought himself descended from Robert Bruce. Slug gave the guy a queer look. The fellow said, last Easter, Father Kroke had tried to say mass by a tree in the park, and that lightning had struck the tree. Red said it was an act of God. Studs said that nut thought he was the Pope and laughed. Jim Doyle said he was a real nut. Came from a good family, and his father would give him anything if he would work, and cut out all this insanity. But he was too far gone, and had let himself be disinherited. He lived by begging, and picking things out of garbage cans, and had no place to sleep. Sometimes, when he could get an extra dime, he walked downtown and slept in an all-night movie.

Studs goosed Father Kroke. He jumped and quivered. The mere touch of his bony body disgusted Studs.

“Father Kroke, the Holy Spook did that to you!”

“If the person who did that to me will step up, I shall be perfectly within my rights as an American citizen in slapping him,” Father Kroke excitedly stuttered.

“Satan has his eyes on you, Father Kroke!”

“Yes, Satan tried to put obstacles in my path all the time, but God is behind me.”

Father Kroke took up a collection, and four slugs and two pennies were dropped in his filthy straw hat. Father Kroke limped away from the Bug Club, a hunched living corpse in ill-fitting, hand-me-down clothes.

They went to the big circle. Jim Doyle told them about the chairman, Pat Gilroy. He was a corpulent, medium-sized, bald-headed man in white flannels and blue coat, and he had been running for Congress in the district east of the park ever since Noah put the Ark in slow speed. The Democrats let him run on their ticket because they didn't want to waste time and money on a certain failure. He'd pull off a hundred votes anyway, at the next election. Jim said he was also another crazy radical.

Gilroy declared that he was not trying to use the chairmanship of the Bug Club for personal aggrandizement by trying to get votes. He then told the crowd that the next speaker was a man they had been waiting to hear all evening, a man whose talks were always a delight and benefit, a man of solid intellectual integrity and conviction, who would have many interesting and original words to say on the question of race prejudice which they had been discussing and listening to all evening-John Connolly. Jim told them to listen because he was a brilliant fellow, and King of the Soap Boxers. Red sarcastically described it an honor. Studs suggested shouting him down. Jim said Connolly was tough.

Connolly stood in the center of the circle, a tall, handsome, physically impressive man with dark hair. He spoke in a deep, convincing voice remarking that the previous speakers all seemed to have been debating whether a Yiddish junk-man, a Pullman porter, or a flat-footed guardian of a hundred million city ordinances were the lowest example of the human ape. He did not propose to continue such inane blather. On the contrary, he would present certain aspects of urban growth which were relevant to the question of race prejudice in Chicago. These factors also were not mere hearsay, but plausible ideas presented by members of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and developed from the work they had already done on a community research programme. He explained that the City of Chicago could be divided into three concentric circles. The innermost of these circles was the business or downtown district, the Loop, where the principal stores, offices, and commercial houses were located, and where most of the high-class legal gypping went on. The second circle housed manufacturing and wholesale houses, slums, tenements, can houses and other haunts of vice. The outer circle made up the residential districts and it could boast of the most fog houses because the sky pilots and camouflage artists always found sweet pickings amongst the well-to-do whose gypping was high-class and within the law. When the city expanded, it expanded from the center. In Chicago, thus, expansion spread out from the Loop. The inner circle was pushed outwards causing corresponding changes in the other concentric circles. The Negroes coming into the situation as an economically inferior race, had naturally found their habitation in the second circle. Since they had located in the slums of the black belt, the city had been growing into bigger and better Chicago. The pressure of growth was forcing them into newer areas. Furthermore, some of the Negro booboisie had gotten into the big gypping process, and like their white brothers, they did not like to live in stench, and sandwiched in between a whore house and the junk shop of Isadore Goldberg. With their economic rise, the Negroes sought more satisfactory housing conditions. Besides, the black boys were happiest when engaged in the horizontals. That meant an increasing birth-rate amongst them, and another factor necessitating improved and more extensive domiciles. All these factors produced a pressure stronger than individual wills, and resulted in a minor racial migration of Negroes into the white residential districts of the south side. Blather couldn't halt the process. Neither could violence and race riots. It was an inevitable outgrowth of social and economic forces.