Maggie Cassidy Read Online Free Page A

people were passing throwing remarks across the snow. Billy Artaud was striding by at his tremendous pace, short, long-legged, arms swinging, bright teeth shining; he was the second baseman on the team; in the past few months had matured suddenly and was already rushing off to see his steady girl for the New Year’s parties in downtown movies.
    â€œThere’s Billy Artaud! Hooray for the Dracut Tigers!” yelled Vinny but Billy flowed right along, he was late, he saw them.
    â€œAh you guys whattaya doin?—here it is almost ten o’clock and you’re still fiddlin and faddlin down the road when you gonna grow up, me I’ve got a girl so long you suckers”—Billy Artaud was known also as “Whattaguy”—“Whattaguy with snow all over his coat that Gus Rigopoulos!” he cried, waving his hand contemptuously. “Throw him to the hot night bird!” he cried, disappearing down the long street alongside Textile Institute and fields of snow to Moody Street Bridge and the downtown lights of town, toward which a lot of other people walked and many cars rolled with their chains crunching softly, their red taillights making beautiful Christmas glows in the snow.
    â€œAnd here comes Iddyboy!” they all yelled with glee as out of the gloom appeared the great figure of Joe Bissonnette who the moment he saw them turned his shoulders into huge bulking phantoms around his sunken and outthrust chin and came forward on padding cat feet. “Here comes the big Marine!”
    â€œOO!” greeted Joe, still holding himself rigidly inside his “Marine” pose, copied off the hulks and bulks of big sea dogs in Charles Bickford films of the Thirties, the cartoons of big Fagans with bull shoulders, the enormous beast who used to chase Charlie Chaplin with a morphine needle, but modern, with a pea cap down over the eye and the fists clenched, the lips curled puffy to show great crooked-bit teeth fleering to fight and maul.
    Out of the gang stepped Jacky Duluoz in the identical pose, hunched to bull and his face twisted and eyes popping, fists clenched; they came up against each other’s noses breathing hard to hold the act, almost teeth to teeth; they’d spent countless freezing winter nights walking back from the fights and wrestling matches and movies of boyhood like this, side by side, below zero weather their mouths blowing balloons, so that people saw them with a sense of disbelief that in the dark they couldnt check, Iddyboy Joe and Zagg the two big Marines coming up the street to throw saloons to the wind. Some Melvillean dream of whaling-town streets in the New England night . . . Once Gus Rigopoulos had held complete sway and power over the soul of Iddyboy, who was a big-hearted simple stud with the power of two grown men; would dance like a witch doctor in front of him, eyes popping, in summer parks, Iddyboy in his good nature pretending to slaver at the mouth unless he actually did and do his bidding completely like a zombie, and turn on Zagg, at Gus’s orders, and chase him howling like a rhinoceros bull through the jungles of the adolescent screamers in afterdark lots; a long-standing joke in the gang that Mighty Ibbyboy’d murder at G.J.’s bidding. But now they had subsided a little; Iddyboy had a girl, was on his way to see her, “Rita’s her name,” he told them, “you dont know her she is a nice girl, up there,” pointing, telling them in his simple way, a big red-cheeked robust French Canadian paisan son of a large raucous family two blocks away. On his head too the snow had piled in a little hosanna’d crown . . . his well-combed, sleek hair, his big self-satisfied healthy face full and rich above the dark scarf and great warm coat of New England winter. “Eeedyboy!” he repeated, looking at everybody significantly, and starting off. “I see you—”
    â€œLookat him go, fuggen