The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [244]
“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.
His mind drifting from their talk, he thought of how this trip to Terre Haute had broken up the monotony of living in one place all the time. The world was full of places and things he had never seen and would probably never see. If only, when he’d been younger, he’d bummed around and seen some-thing of the world, gone through many towns and cities, and even villages, like the one they had just passed, seeing the stores and movie shows, and houses, listening to the people talk, meeting the girls. He might have made girls all over the country, and like a sailor leaving a girl in every port, he could have left a sweet little lay behind him in every town of the good old U. S. A. And one of them might have been prettier and keener than Catherine, and he might have liked her more than he did Catherine. She might have been an heiress for whom he would have cared more than he had once cared for Lucy. And if he had, the fellows would often say to each other, I see where Studs Lonigan copped off a bum whose old man is lousy with dough and is he up in the world now!
The train shot up an embankment and rattled along parallel to a cement road. Below, he saw a large and shiny automobile, probably a Cadillac, racing even with the smoking car, shooting ahead, slowing down and falling back at a right turn to a road that cut through the dreary fields, regaining its lost speed, darting forward until he could see only the back bumper and rear end. They whisked past a deserted and probably unused station platform, and he looked vacantly out at fields that were being covered with the lengthening shadows. It was funny that he should be riding home now from the funeral of Shrimp Haggerty, and so many things should have been changed from what they used to be, and from what he had expected them to become. But since his kid days, there had been many years, all piled on top of one another, and now, each year, each month, each week, each day, every hour, every minute and every second even, carried him further and further away from them, just as if he was on a moving express train which was shooting him forever away from some place where he very much wanted to be, and all the while carrying him nearer and nearer . to his own death. He was going on thirty now, almost a third of a century. If he was going to die when he reached sixty, it meant that half of his life was already gone. If he would be called before sixty, it meant more than half of it was already spent.
Outside, he watched the fields, bare, wet, slipping into the gathering darkness as if they were dropping off into emptiness. Night growing over them was like a coat of gloom being but-toned on, and it was like a coat of even heavier gloom being spread over, buttoned tightly down on, his own thoughts. And the sky seemed to be heavier, to be pressing down close to the earth as if from the force of tremendous tons of lead. Stan was right. Seeing Shrimp Haggerty so wasted, like a bag of old bones, would make anybody feel a little snaky.
The dim light of a solitary farm house whisked before him, and again he heard the long, piercing engine whistle. Winter had never seemed so dreary to him as it did now, not even on some of those sunless days, when, as a kid, he had walked alone through Washington Park with the ground hard and chunky, the snow dirty and crusty, the trees and bushes stark and bare. From the train, the land here looked harder, the patches of snow dirtier, an ugly sight. He wondered how the people in these parts, cut off from the rest of the world, could stand looking at the earth on such days as this one, hearing nothing but silence or the wind, except for the passing trains and automobiles. He thought of how his father and mother would so often sit home in the evening, and not have a word to say, and asked himself how the farmers and their wives ever had anything to say to each other. Living like they did out here, their minds must, he felt, always be on such things as death.