Studs Lonigan (78 page)

Mickey Flannagan lay in a corner, still out.

“I got mine from that broad,” said Mahoney.

“I thought she was a virgin,” said Fluke.

“She was!”

“Well, how did you do it?”

“I got her blind. She's out.”

“Where is she?”

“She's in the second bedroom. She passed out, and I carried her there. She's out like a light.”

“Mind if I try my luck?”

“Go to it, Fluke,” said Mahoney.

“Come here, bitch!” Studs said to one of the pigs.

“After a while,” she said.

“Come on, bitch!” said Studs.

He pawed at her. She gave him a shove, and he was so drunk that he stumbled backwards. Taite laughed at him. The girl ran into the bathroom. Studs staggered to the door, and tried to open it. It was locked. He pounded the door.

“Listen, Irene is my broad. Don't you be monkeying around her,” Weary said to Dapper Dan O'Doul.

“I was only dancing with her.”

“Listen, rat, you're all together. If you want to stay that way, don't monkey around her,” said Weary.

“I'm sorry.”

“You heard me!”

Barney crawled on his hands and knees looking for his false teeth. Slug gave him a slight boot in the tail. They laughed. Barney cursed. Everybody laughed again.

“Let's drink this one for poor Shrimp Haggerty,” said Les.

“Yeah!” said Studs.

“Poor Shrimp is dying in Fort Wayne. I'll be dead, too, maybe by next year,” said Les.

“Yeah!”

Les raised the bottle. Tommy Doyle grabbed it, and told Les he'd better lay off.

“All right, Tommy, but will you and Studs drink to poor Shrimp, our dying buddy?”

“To our buddy Shrimp, may he be guzzling with us next year,” said Tommy, drinking.

“Yeah,” muttered Studs, taking the bottle.

He raised the bottle and drank, most of the gin pouring down his chin and shirt.

“Studs is so drunk we'll have to hold his head while he drinks,” said Tommy: he laughed.

“Jesus, Joe, let's get some of these guys out of here. This is getting to be too much of a goddamn mess. If we don't, something's going to happen,” said Red.

“Yeah,” said Joe.

“Hey, punk,” Joe said.

“What's the matter?” O'Doul asked.

“See the door? Blow!”

“But I ain't doing nothing!”

Red told some other punks to blow.

“Some goddamn thing is gonna happen if we don't get some of these drunks out,” Red said.

“Tommy, can you get Les out? He's sick and needs air, and we want to cut it down. Then you and him come back,” said Joe.

“Sure. Les is my cousin. I stick by my cousin Les.”

“All right, do it, Tommy.”

Three of the girls staggered away drunk.

Studs floundered over to Irene like a listing ship.

“Come on, bitch!” he muttered, clutching her arm.

“All right, Lonigan, hands off!” Weary commanded.

“Aw, gimme the bitch!” Studs said.

Weary socked Studs in the eye with a right. Studs went back against the wall, and bounced off, his eye swelling. Weary caught him in the nose as he rebounded. He grabbed Studs by the coat lapel with his left, smacked him in the eye with his right, and then gave him a last one on the button. Studs sagged to the floor, and lay there, his nose bleeding profusely.

“Please let's go. Everybody else is gone,” Irene said.

“He's here,” Weary said, pointing at unconscious Mickey Flannagan.

“Please?”

“Have another drink!”

“Then will we go?”

“Sure!”

“Promise me?”

He nodded. She sipped from his bottle.

“Now get my coat,” she said, shrinking, as she saw the expression on his face.

“Oh, please! Please! Please! I'll scream. . . .”

“Commere, goddamn you! And shut up!”

She cowered with fright. He tried to kiss her. She fought off his thrusting mouth with her hand. He knocked it aside, and pressed his lips against her shaking forehead. He encircled her with his arms, and dragged her towards the bed where Mickey lay. He flung her towards the wall, and rolled Mickey off. She ran to the door. He tackled her.

“OOOH, my ankle!” she sobbed.

“Will you come across now,” he said, towering over her, while she sat on the floor, holding her ankle.

She screamed. He grabbed for a pillow slip, and tore a strip off it. She hobbled out of the room on her sprained ankle, screaming. He caught her from behind, and as she twisted and tore, he got the pillow slip tied around her mouth. She raised her hand to tear it off, and he twisted her arm. He could see the pain on her face:

“Will you come across?”

She nodded.

He released her. She tore the rag off her mouth. He smothered her scream with his hand, and she hit and scratched. He gave her an uppercut, and she toppled to the floor. She started to rise unsteadily, and he was on her, holding her mouth, using his other hand to ward off her scratching hands. She slumped back limp, breathing heavily. Her hair was down. Her dress was torn.

“Please. I never done it before. Please, lemme go. Please!”

“I won't hurt you. For Christ sake, cut out the stalling.”

“Honest to God, please, I never did this. Please. . . .”

“Can that! You're comin' across if I have to kill you!”

“Please . . . you might act like a . . . gentleman.”

“Come on, for Christ sake!”

He half smothered her scream. He stuck his knee in her stomach, and slapped her viciously with his left hand.

“Oh, you will, will you!” he said, punching her jaw after she again flashed her teeth.

He carried her unconscious to the bed.

Her face was black and blue, and her coat thrown over her torn dress. She winced with each step, sobbed hysterically, shook all over.

“Now don' try that game on a guy again!” he said, shoving her out the door of the suite.

He left the bloody sheets soaking in the bathtub. Coming from the bathroom, he saw Mickey Flannagan stagger out and he smiled.

He was awakened by the cops, who had been let into the suite by the night clerk.

“This is gonna be a tough rap to beat for you, fellow!”

“You ain't got nothin' on me.”

“No! She's beat up pretty bad!”

“She was drunk and fell down!”

“Maybe you can prove that alibi.”

The other cop came from the bathroom with the dripping, bloody sheets and asked what about them.

“I don't know nothin' about them.”

“Where did you get your puss scratched?”

“I had a fight.”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah!” said Weary, challengingly.

“Listen, everybody isn't a helpless girl. Watch the way you talk.”

“Listen, they sent you to get me. Here I am. Call a cab, and I'll pay the bill. But don't try pullin' nothin' on me!” Weary said with clenched fists.

“Shall I let him have it, Joe?” asked the other cop.

“Don't soil your mitts on him.”

Weary sneered. He walked out with them. As they went through the door, he made a gesture and said:

“She ain't got no kick. She only got that much!”

The dirty gray dawn of the New Year came slowly. It was snowing. There was a drunken figure, huddled by the curb near the fireplug at Fifty-eighth and Prairie. A passing Negro reveler studied it. He saw that the fellow wasn't dead. He rolled it over, and saw it was a young man with a broad face, the eyes puffed black, the nose swollen and bent. He saw that the suit and coat were bloody, dirty, odorous with vomit. He laughed, the drunk stirred as the Negro said:

“Boy, you all has been celebratin' a-plenty.”

He searched the unconscious drunk and pocketed eight dollars. He walked on.

The gray dawn spread, lightened. Snow fell more rapidly from the muggy sky of the New Year.

It was Studs Lonigan, who had once, as a boy, stood before Charlie Bathcellar's poolroom thinking that some day, he would grow up to be strong, and tough, and the real stuff.

THERE
was an inward, self-absorbed expression upon the black face of woolly-headed, fourteen-year-old Stephen Lewis, as he walked along Fifty-eighth Street. He thought of an awkward black girl named Eliza May Smith. He spotted a tin can on the sidewalk, and kicked it, thinking that he was the hero of a high school soccer game, and that Eliza May Smith, pretty as a picture, was watching him. Suddenly he paused, fearful. He couldn't remember now, gosh darn it, whether his mother had told him to get butter or sugar. He stood as if petrified, with his eyes popped open, the whites showing. He scratched his head. He proceeded slowly, racking his brain.

 

“RED, I tell you, when I saw poor Shrimp Haggerty laid out in the coffin, I got a damn snaky feeling,” Stan Simonsky, riding backward by the window, morosely said, turning to Red Kelly beside him.

“I used to tell Shrimp, Lord have mercy on his soul, I used to warn him that with his health and condition, he shouldn't do as much carousing and drinking as he did,” Red Kelly oracularly said, and he and Stan glanced unobtrusively at Studs opposite Stan.

Twisted partially sidewise, Studs Lonigan captured quick-appearing and -disappearing glimpses of flat Indiana plains and isolated farm houses, in the early drizzling twilight. Buildings, tumbling shacks, barns, dotting the landscape, heralded the approach to a small town, and he commenced to see thin puffs of smoke snaking from occasional chimneys. The train clattered over a wetted road where, beyond the closed train-gates, an impassive, overalled man leaned on the handlebars of a bicycle, waiting next to a Ford automobile. With decreasing speed, they were carried down the center of a small-town street that was set against a background of sooty clapboard buildings. Among the dribbling of people on the narrow sidewalk, Studs singled out a schoolboy, who was staring dreamily at the train with open-mouth wonder, his strapped books flung over his shoulder. Whisked along, the train swept by a paved street, flanked with stucco bungalows, and Studs thought that the hick villagers, stopping to gape at the train, might have caught a load of him from the window, wondering who he was, and where he was going. If they had, he was a mystery to them, and being a mystery to others when he knew himself so well, stuffed him with the feeling of being important.

The train crawled through a station and a mustached man, lazily pushing a station truck containing a few mail sacks, reminded him of many such characters from movies. He did not catch the town name lettered above the station window, and as the engine picked up speed, he saw scattered wooden houses standing at the other end of the town like so many lonely sentinels. And then again, the altering picture of flat farmlands, dreary and patched with dirty snow at the end of February, houses, barns, silos, telephone posts, steel towers connecting lines of strung wire, with a row of wintry trees in the distance, bare like death, and appearing to speed as swiftly as the train travelled.

The car clattered over a small stone bridge, affording him a momentary sight of a thin stream of steely-colored water. The engine emitted a piercing and desolate whistle that seemed to puncture the countryside with echoing loneliness, and he was reminded of how, as a young kid, he had heard train whistles at night, even ducking his head under the covers because of them.

“Say what you like, our gang from the old neighborhood was the best damn gang of lads you'd want to see anywhere on Christ's green earth,” Muggsy McCarthy, sitting beside Studs, exclaimed with gusto.

Hearing McCarthy, Studs wondered where the guy got that we stuff. In grammar school, he had been TB McCarthy, the goof, and often they used to hold his arms behind his back, and let the punks sock him. And around the Greek's poolroom, he had been a mooching clown with only about fifty cards in his deck. Now he was trying to spread out the bull and act like he had been a big shot among the boys back in the old neighborhood. But then, what the hell, all that was past, and Muggsy had turned out better than anybody thought he would, and he was just another guy getting along with a small-time political job, and everybody tossed out a little crap now and then to make himself feel better.