The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [61]
“Drowning ain’t my specialty. That’s not my trick!” Kenny yelled back.
They swam slowly in.
When they got on the beach, they gazed about and ran all around, looking for Iris and eyeing all the women to get some good squints. Kenny said it would be swell, like heaven, if all women wore the same kinds of swimming suits that Annette Kellerman did. Studs said it would be better if they didn’t wear anything. Kenny said women sometimes did go swimming without anything on. Studs said he’d give his ear to see them.
Finally, they sprawled face downward in the sand, the sun fine and warm on their backs, evaporating all the wet. They didn’t talk. They just sprawled there. It was too good to talk. Studs forgot everything, and felt almost as good as when he had been by himself way out in the deep water. He just lay there and pretended that he wasn’t Studs or anybody at all and he let his thoughts take care of themselves. He was far away from himself, and the slap of the waves on the shore, the splash of people in the water, all the noise and shouts of the beach were not in the same world with him. They were like echoes in the night coming from a long wav off. He was snapped out of it by Kenny cursing the goddamn flies and the kids who ran scuffing sand all over everybody. Studs looked up. Then he looked out over the lake where the water and sky seemed to meet and become just nothing. He thought of swimming far, far out, farther than he and Kenny had, swimming out into the nothingness, and just floating, floating with nothing there, and no noises, no fights, no old men, no girls, no thinking of Lucy, no nothing but floating, floating. Kenny broke off his thoughts. He talked about swimming across the lake, arguing that a good life guard could swim all the way to Michigan City or Benton Harbor. Studs said that Kenny was nuts, but then he couldn’t talk as fast as Kilarney, so he lost the argument. Kenny just talked anyway, and it didn’t matter what he talked about or make him less funny.
At six they went home, and moving along Hyde Park Boulevard, trying to bum rides and cursing everybody who passed them by, Kenny said:
“It was swell today.”
“Yeh! It was swell,” Studs said.
“Only I wish Iris had been there,” said Kenny.
“Yeh,” said Studs.
“I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse,” said Kenny.
“Wouldn’t it have been nice to have had her there and have had let us lay our heads in her lap, and have a feel-day, or go out with her way out, or swim around to the breakwater, where nobody was, and out there get our ashes hauled,” said Studs.
“Almost as nice as eating a steak would be this very minute,” said Kenny.
“Sure,” said Studs.
They walked on. When Studs had been lying in the sand, he had been at peace, almost like some happy guy in a story, and he hadn’t thought that way about girls, and it hadn’t bothered him like it did other times, or made him do things he was ashamed of way deep down inside himself. Now his peace was all gone like a scrap of burned-up paper. He was nervous again, and girls kept coming into his mind, bothering all hell out of him. And that made him feel queer, and he got ashamed of the thoughts he had... because of Lucy. And he couldn’t think of anything else.
At home they had steak, and Studs, like a healthy boy, forgot everything but the steak put before him.
II
The July night leaked heat all over Fifty-eighth Street, and the fitful death of the sun shed softening colors that spread gauze-like and glamorous over the street, stilling those harshnesses and commercial uglinesses that were emphasized by the brighter revelations of day. About the street there seemed to be a supervening beauty of reflected life. The dust, the scraps of paper, the piled-up store windows, the first electric lights sizzling into brightness, Sammie Schmaltz, the paper man, yelling his final box-score editions, a boy