Studs Lonigan (86 page)

 

“I'm glad that's over,” Studs said.

“Now we'll get the real stuff,” Pat said.

 

 

 

 

Studs yawned without reading the credit list or cast of characters, and slumped in his seat ready to let the picture afford him an interesting good time.

Two shabby boys walked nonchalantly along a street in a poor district, the boy on the outside carrying a beer can with the handle resting over his right wrist. His companion, his cap back on his curly head, stuck his hands in his pocket and whistled. A beer wagon passed with a crunching of wheels and a rattling of barrels. They paused to stare at a drunk lying in the gutter, and the boy with the beer can looked up from the intoxicated man to an advertising sign across the street.

“Holy Moses!” the curly-haired boy exclaimed.

The boy with the beer can gestured knowingly, handed him the can, bent over, and forked two bills from the drunk's pocket.

“This is for you, Spike, and this is for Joey Gallagher,” he said, handing Spike one of the bills and taking back his beer can.

“Gee, Joey.”

Whistling, they walked slowly along, past a row of wooden tenement houses.

“Joey Gallagher and Spike Malone, what are you rascals up to now?”

“Nothing, Mr. Kennedy. Just running an errand for the old man,” Joey Gallagher replied, looking up into the face of the benign policeman.

“You little divvils keep out of mischief or I'll be running ye in.”

“Kennedy's an old fool,” Joey Gallagher said, and they walked around a corner building with the sign above it:

Inside the saloon toughs and eccentrics lined the bar, some in caps and jerseys, others wearing plug hats, and sporty gray suits with narrow trouser cuffs. Full-rounded women with wide hats were scattered among the men at the tables. Waiters moved about with trays, and a thin-faced fellow tickled the piano keys.

The boys crept in by the side door, timidly walked to the edge of the bar, attracted the attention of the bartender with the florid mustaches, handed the can up to him. With the can filled, they turned to the door, and just before going out Joey Gallagher cast an admiring and wistfully boyish glance at the toughs lining the bar.

“So you're tough! You're tough!” a boy, huskier than Joey Gallagher, said, meeting them on the street, toying with Joey, like a cat playing with a mouse, by pushing him, pulling out his shirt, and jamming his cap half over his eyes.

Joey quickly shoved the can of beer to Spike and rushed into the bully, the two boys mauling back and forth. The bully plunked Joey's eye, and Studs, watching Joey rush in again with flailing arms, remembered how he at Joey's age had beaten up Weary Reilley, who was just like this bigger kid in the picture. He knew he was going to like this picture. It was going to be more like his own life than almost any picture he'd ever seen, he felt. He hoped, too, that Joey would have a sweetheart, who would be just like Lucy Scanlan.

“Yes, I'm tough, you big mutt,” Joey said, his eye swollen, standing over the bully who cowered at the edge of the dusty curb.

“And so am I,” Spike added, dousing the bully with beer, and Studs laughed with others in the audience.

Handsome, with marcelled hair, Joey Gallagher sauntered into a poolroom, strolled by the talkers and pool players, and Studs wished that the old poolroom on Fifty-eighth Street had been like this one in the picture.

“What's wrong, Joey. Today a holiday?”

“Oh, no, Spike,” Joey replied to a thin youth with greased-down hair.

“Canned again? I suppose it was another fight.”

Joey shook his head negatively.

“Then what's the big idea?” Spike said, registering an expression of puzzlement, scratching his poll.

“Only saps like my brother work . . . Say, is the King back there,” Joey said, gesturing toward a closed door in the rear.

While Spike followed in surprise, Joey Gallagher boldly pushed into the room, ignored the gorillas scattered about it and stepped up to a broad-shouldered, thick-lipped, bull-necked gangster.

“Hello, King,” Joey said with familiarity, and the King drew his cigar stub from his mouth, winked at two of the gorillas.

“I got a little business I want to discuss with you.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Sure. I just quit my job and I want to hitch up with you. I'm a useful guy.”

 

Studs laughed at the close-up of Spike's face.

 

“Look, boys, it wants to join up with me,” the King said, and his mob erupted into stage laughter. “Kindergarten classes is on Sunday. Ho! Ho! Come on, keep it up, sonny, I haven't laughed so much since my aunt died,” the King continued, again drawing the raw laughter of his mob.

“Which one of you muggs wants to be the chief attraction at his own funeral?” Joey hissed, glaring from face to face, his fists itchy for action.

“Listen, punk, scram!” a beefy gorilla snapped, towering over Joey.

“Keep those mitts of yours in women's pocketbooks where they belong and you won't get your puss marked up like a cross-word puzzle.”

“What?”

“You heard me!”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Maybe we can use the kid,” the King said in a measured voice.

That was nerve! If he could have busted into something big that way, he'd be much better off today. But Studs Lonigan wasn't Joey Gallagher. The picture was too interesting for him to sit brooding, and it carried him along. His mind became like a double exposure, with two reels running through it. He saw Joey Gallagher as the hero, and he saw himself in Joey Gallagher's boots, and Studs Lonigan and Joey Gallagher together leaped up the career of gangdom's adventurous ladder to fame. They hijacked. They spoke with crisp hard words, and with barking gats and tattooing machine guns, bumping off friends and foes, letting nothing get in their way. Ah, that was the kind of a guy Studs Lonigan wanted to be, really hard and tough, afraid of no goddamn thing in this man's world, giving cold lead as his answer to every rat who stepped in his way. Getting clothes, too, like Joey Gallagher, riding in the same doggy automobile, turning comers on two wheels, and the hell with traffic cops, giving the heat to another mugg who got soft with cold feet. This was a picture. Why hadn't Studs Lonigan lived like this? And the blonde, tall, with those swaying hips. Joey was laying her, too, and he would be, if he was Joey, laying a tall blonde in a satin dress with hips on fire, if he, if he was only Joey Gallagher. And again going out, with the gat on his hip, a man's business. Would he get it himself this time? How did a guy get the guts that a gangster like Joey in this picture had? But gangsters did have it. That was what was wrong with Studs Lonigan. No guts. But Joey had it. And now here in this show, Joey Gallagher and Studs Lonigan were together, the two of them were one, racing across the screen, and the dough was rolling in, and the blonde she was sweet, and she was his, laying only for him, and oh, goddamn it, this was the real ticket.

Wearing a gray suit, a gray fedora tilted over the left side of his face, Joey Gallagher strode confidently down the same street where he had appeared as a boy. He stopped, looked across the street at a sign board.

He smiled, tossed away the cigarette. His face took on an expression of recognition, and a policeman rheumatically stepped up to him.

“Getting along these days, aren't ye, lad?” Mr. Kennedy said.

“Oh, so-so.”

“Better watch your step, me lad.”

“Nobody's got nothin' on me.”

“Son, now take it aisy. Aisy, lad! I see ye with the King and his boys. Now, take the advice of one that's in this game longer than yourself, and take it aisy, me lad. I'm tellin' ye for your own good.”

The policeman wagged a sad head as Joey confidently passed along. The scene dissolved, and Joey entered the modest home where his mother sat knitting, and his shirt-sleeved brother read a newspaper.

“Mother, you old skate, I have a present for you,” Joey said, bending down to kiss her and dropping a fat roll of bills in her lap.

“No, son, I can't,” she said in the choking voice of a mother's sadness.

“Mother doesn't need tainted blood money,” the brother curtly said, arising. “Look! Tell me you don't know anything about it!” the brother challenged, handing Joey the newspaper.

Joey read the newspaper disinterestedly.

“They probably didn't keep their noses clean,” Joey said.

 

“That's a good crack,” Pat said to Studs, Studs shaking his head.

 

“Get out!” the brother said, in a quavering voice.

“Why, you dirty . . .”

A surprise punch from the brother somersaulted Joey into a chair. He leaped to his feet, but his mother faced him, in tears, pointing at the door. He picked up the roll of bills from the carpet, shrugged his shoulders, walked out.

“Swell acting,” Pat muttered.

 

The blonde lounged in pyjamas on a cot in a large room filled with modernistic furniture.

“Joey, come here,” she called in a cooing, asking voice, and Joey sat in a comer, his head sunken in his hands.

She walked toward him with her abdomen jutting out prominently, and he gazed up at her with disgust when she patted his head.

 

Studs hoped that it wouldn't turn into a scrap, because, after all, with a dame like that wanting something, and he wished like hell he was Joey Gallagher folding her into his arms, kissing her in that long, close way, and knew that the next step was to pick her up, carry her to the couch and. . . .

 

Joey shoved her away from him angrily.

“Say, Joey, what's the matter?”

“I don't know. Just let me alone for a while,” he said absently.

“What's eating you, Joey. Getting a swelled head?”

“Never mind taking any tailspins there, baby,” Joey said in his curt, tough manner.

“Losing your nerve. Gettin' yellow,” she sneered.

“Why, you dirty. . . .”

He hit her in the chin with the heel of his left hand.

“Keep your hands off me. Why, you, you're nothing but a small-time gorilla,” she cried, stumbling against a table.

“Look!” he said, pointing behind her.

She turned.

“Just a present from a small-time gorilla,” he said, planting his foot into her buttocks and propelling her into the table, smashing a lamp.

“Small-time, am I,” he soliloquized, getting into his roadster. He cut around a corner at breakneck speed.

 

Studs wondered why Joey couldn't have let well enough alone with the blonde. But still, that kick in the slats had been funny. The way to treat a high-hat broad like that.

 

“Come on, Spike, get your coat on,” Joey said, entering a room where Spike sat in shirt sleeves with a baby-faced girl in negligee on his knee.

“Every time I get set, somebody tips the glass on me,” Spike complained, knotting his necktie before a mirror.

“Say, what's the idea?” Spike said, perplexed, entering the roadster.

“Got to see the King. I got a hunch he'd like a more comfortable life.”

“Say, what's this? We can't muscle the King out.”

“Keep your shirt on and your head cool and you'll always land on your toes,” Joey said, turning his wheels quickly to avoid a crash.

“Hi, boys!” Joey said, entering a room full of gorillas.

 

Studs was getting tense, wondering what was going to happen, thinking would he have the guts to pull the stunt Joey was pulling. Studs Lonigan walking in on Al Capone. Maybe this was his funeral though.

 

“Well, King, you're living well, and look at that,” Joey said ambiguously, pointing at the King's paunch. “I was just sort of reflecting, you know, and I sort of figured out that you might like a nice little house in the country with nothing to disturb your sleep but the cows and chickens.”

Guts. Gallagher had guts, and Studs sat thinking how he wasn't so much, set up against a guy like Gallagher, and there they were, Gallagher and the King glaring at each other, and that meant trouble. He wanted to see Joey come through it all, and would he. A rap on the door, everybody turning, Detective Sloane sauntering in. He'd seen this fellow act a detective role in some other picture, and he tried to recall it. Would they all get caught with Sloane just dropping them the hint about the shooting of Greasy Jones and Lefty Loomis? Would the picture end with Joey going to the hot seat? He hoped not.

A gorilla rushing in after the dick's departure. Butch McKee and his northside mob were coming. Studs sat forward in his seat as if he was tied up in knots. Big touring cars careering through streets. The rat-tat-tat of machine guns, the clash of breaking glass, the King's mob following on the floor with drawn gats. Silence. The King jumping up, telling his gorillas to come on. Joey Gallagher stepping in front of him, breathlessly urging him to wait. The King, unconvinced, rushing out to the street, the mob following. Another car, bullets flaming out of it, Joey wounded in the arm, shooting left-handed.

Studs asked himself could he face guns, and fight like a gangster, and he felt that Studs Lonigan was yellow, and couldn't be a Joey Gallagher. He sat breathless as the King's mob rushed in cars to follow up the northside mob. The picture was getting close to the end. He wanted to see how it would turn out. And still he didn't want it to end. He wanted it to go on for hours. Best picture he'd seen in a hell of a while. Butch McKee's headquarters in a gambling house. Butch bragging that he was the King now. The entrance of Gallagher, the King, and their gorillas, Joey speaking his piece, telling Butch to get out of town in twenty-four hours.