The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [249]
Yes, he felt pretty damn low. He heard the voices of the fellows, and he looked emptily through the dusty train window. The moon was riding high now across the sky, a half moon that seemed almost like a fire of whiteness and silver, and the growing early darkness seemed itself to be sorrowing, to be carrying through it an unseen and awful sadness, and it made all the world seem to Studs like a graveyard. He wished that he could see his old pals, Paulie and Shrimp, Arnold Sheehan, Slug Mason, Tommy Doyle, Hink Weber, talk to them. If he could, it would make him feel less the fact that he, too, would one day be dead. He tried to tell himself that they were still alive, but only living in some other town, and that some day they would all come back and have a regular reunion. The train whistle cut in upon him, a deep puncture of sadness into his thoughts. He could not shake this sadness or shutter it from his mind, and it put its fingerprint upon every thought that popped up. He didn’t want to talk to the fellows while he felt like this. He wanted just to sit and think. Suddenly, he saw himself as a lonely and unhappy adventurer riding upon this train, to some dangerous and unknown end. Another farm-house light stabbed the darkening obscurity, and to Studs, for the moment that he saw it, it was like some supernatural and all-seeing eye. The train rumbled over a crossroad, spanned by the track, and he saw the headlights of an automobile coming forward. He turned from the window, fearing to look out now and continue thinking, because if he did, they would be convinced for sure that he had become a mope.
“Les, I agree with you. We’ll never have the old days back again. But, as I was saying, what’s gone is gone, and a guy can’t always be thinking of it. He must be thinking of what’s ahead for himself, where he’s going,” Red said.
“I know this, too,” Studs said, cutting in on a defensively apologetic remark of Les’, “I know that my old man and old woman have never felt the same about our new neighborhood as they did about the one down at Fifty-eighth Street.”
“And my aunt, Tommy Doyle’s mother, she seems to feel just the same way, Studs. All she does, these days, is to sit at home and brood. She keeps saying, every time I see her, how there were such good people around Fifty-eighth Street, and she will hardly even leave the house, except to go to church. She just mopes around all day. And my brother Joe, who collects rent on her buildings on South Park, he can’t hardly get a red cent out of the niggers living in it. Half of the time he doesn’t even try because what’s the use?”
“Damn it, you know, I can’t get over seeing poor Shrimp, Lord have mercy on his soul. I can’t get over the snaky feeling I got looking at his corpse,” Stan Simonsky interrupted.
“When I die, I want to go out like a light,” Studs said, trying, by speaking of death, to rid himself of the clinging fear of it.
“Me, too, Studs, only I want to have the priest first.”
“All the boys from our gang who were Catholic had the priest. They were lucky at least in that,” Les said.
“Me, now, all I wish is that this damn train ride was over,” McCarthy said.
Studs, again not listening closely, had a sudden vision of a screeching collision, the cars smashing, turning over and dumping off the tracks and down the siding, the passengers, himself included, being pinned under the steel, moaning, crying and begging for help, gritting their teeth to be brave and bear their injuries, or crying forth in misery and cowardice, many of them dying before they could be rescued, or before, anyway, those who were Catholic had a priest. He saw himself dying without the last rites, his insides smashed and hanging out, his skull fractured. He went pale, and looked aside so they wouldn