On the Waterfront (9 page)

“I know what’s eatin’ you, kid.” Johnny kept his arm around Terry and Terry wished Charley hadn’t brought this up. He didn’t need all this crap. What he needed was to get gassed somewhere and knock off a little piece. He’d be all right in the morning. But Johnny was hanging onto him. Maybe they should’ve spelled out the whole thing for the kid, Johnny was ready to admit. So it wouldn’t come as such a shock. But Rule One was: only tell each fella what he needs to know. One of these days maybe they could tie Terry in a little closer. But he always seemed like a kid, a natural fringer, a bum in his heart, and in this business as in any business you needed a little ambition. Just the same, Johnny remembered the Faralla fight and some favors in the ring that had paid off in thousand-dollar bills. So he took the trouble to explain to Terry. Hell, he liked the kid. And he was feeling good tonight. It was a relief to have Joey Doyle out of the way. Longshoremen were unpredictable. Johnny had been one of them, and he knew. They could lie smoldering for years, and all the time you think you’ve got them. Then all of a sudden something sets them off and whammo! it’s like snoozing on top of a volcano. Joey Doyle might have thrown the switch on him if he had had a chance. And there were rumblings of revolt in other parts of the harbor. And a new contract with the Shippers was coming up in a few months and that was always a touchy time.

“Look, kid, you know I got fifteen hundred dues payin’ members, that’s fifty-four thousand a year
legitimate.
And when each one of ’em is willin’ to put in a couple of bucks to make sure of gettin’ a day, and they’re good for a dollar every time we pass the cigar box for the welfare fund, and we got the numbers and the horses going, and some other stuff—well, you figure it out. We got a couple of the fattest piers in the fattest harbor in the world. Everything that moves in and out, we take our cut.”

“We had to work hard for it,” Charley said. “And there’s plenty of headaches and responsibilities. Believe me, whatever we make, we’re entitled to it.”

Terry was between them now and wishing he was on his roof, waving his long exercise pole at his pigeons. But Johnny was on top of him, talking close into his face.

“So now look, kid, you don’t think we could afford to be boxed out of a deal like this—a deal I sweated and bled for—on account of one lousy little cheese-eater, that Doyle bum, who goes around agitatin’ and squealin’ to that friggin’ Crime Commission. Do you?”

Terry was on the floor. He was crawling on his hands and knees and the referee was counting and what the hell was wrong with him so he couldn’t get up. Like the breath was knocked out of him …

“… Well?”

Terry frowned and said, “Sure, Johnny, sure. I know he had his nerve givin’ you all that trouble. I just figured if I was gonna be in it I shoulda been told what was goin’ t’ …” He faltered, feeling Johnny’s eyes on him, and Charley trying to signal him off. “I … just …” His voice trailed off. Why bother? They knew what he meant.

Charley was watching Johnny anxiously, but the boss was still in a soft mood where Terry was concerned. The kid had done his piece of it well and Specs and Sonny had taken care of the rest and everything was okay. Right now it was a hundred to one the coroner was handling it as a routine accident. The police would close it out ditto in a couple of days. There wouldn’t even be the bother of a few minor arrests. Sam Millinder, who was now riding a seventy-five-thousand-a-year retainer, wouldn’t even have a chance to show off his legal figure-skating. It was the kind of smooth operation that’s only possible when you’ve got everybody with you. Johnny reached into his pocket, drew out a fifty and tucked it into the neck of the sweater Terry was wearing for a shirt.

“Here, kid, here’s half a bill. Go get your load on.”

Dully, darkly, as in an overclouded dream, a bleary snapshot torn out of the frayed album of beer-sodden sleep, Terry remembered the fresh young face of the Doyle kid leaning out over the sill. The money would only remind him. “Naw, thanks, Johnny.” He tried to hold it off. “I don’ need it, I …”

Johnny didn’t like to be refused in anything, even handouts. He pushed the bill deeper into the neck of Terry’s sweater, with a laugh that was hard and generous. “Go on. A little present from your Uncle Johnny.”

He turned around to Big Mac, who was waiting docilely for his split so he could spread money on the bar in a dozen traps and be a big man among cronies and freeloaders.

“Hey, Mac,” Johnny commanded, “tomorra morning when you shape the men put Terry in the loft. Number one. Every day.”

Big Mac nodded, sucking in his puffy cheeks, a sign of reluctant obedience.

“Okay, Matooze?” Johnny told Terry. “An easy ride. Check in and goof off on the coffee bags.”

That was ninety bucks a week for reading
See, She, Pic, Quick, Tempo, Stare, Dare
and the
Police Gazette.

“Thanks, Johnny,” Terry said. He couldn’t shake the mood of he-didn’t-know-what. He stuffed his hands into the pocket of his jeans and went walking out with the fifty hot on his chest like a mustard plaster.

Charley had been watching his brother with shrewd, seasoned sympathy. “You got a real friend here, and don’t you forget it,” he felt the need to call after the kid.

Terry didn’t turn around. He walked slowly toward the door, just as a beaten fighter, his head down, makes his way up the aisle through the crowd to his dressing room.

“Why should he forget it?” Johnny said grandly. And proceeded to pay off his boys, dealing out the week’s take like cards across the pool table, and saving sheafs of bills for the Mayor and the Police Commissioner, whom he’d be seeing over at the Cleveland Democratic Club a little later.

Specs and Sonny and Gilly were at the bar rolling dice as Terry shouldered his way through. They called to him again, but he kept on going. He walked along River Street until he came to a little hole-in-the-wall bar called Hildegarde’s which always struck him funny because Hildegarde was a good two hundred pounds, a great slab of warm-hearted, incongruous femininity who carried on a tearful running battle with her skinny, allergic-to-work husband Max. It was usually quiet in Hildegarde’s, especially after she had thrown out Max. Terry sat there at the bar absently listening to Helen Forrest singing “My Secret Love,” over and over and over again because Hildegarde’s fat, damp hands kept feeding nickels into the box.

“Whatsa matter you so quiet tonight?” Hildegarde said.

Terry shrugged and gulped his fake-bottom jigger of Four Roses like something too hot to hold in his mouth. Hildegarde moved away from him, an experienced bartender respectful of her customer’s mood. There was nobody else in the place, so she leaned the fat folds of her body on the juke box and crooned in a thick guttural accent,

“Vunce I hoy a secret luff

Dot liffed vit-in da heart off me …”

Ordinarily Terry would have kidded her, as they had a kind of running gag about her boy friends—“Who’s da new poy fran?” Terry would elbow her. “How’s about you ’n me sneakin’ off for the week-end? The No-tell Motel, huh, you may not be the best piece of ass in town but nobody c’n say you aint the biggest.”

Hildegarde would pretend to be angry and call him a dirty-mouth fresh guy, but she liked Terry and she’d wind up buying him drinks, and letting him run up a bill until he had enough chips. But tonight it was different and big Hildegarde embraced the juke box in her loneliness and left Terry to whatever it was that had hold of his mind.

I
T WAS AFTER TEN
o’clock, but the kids on Market Street were still playing a noisy game of stoop-ball in the misty light of the sidewalk lamps. The ball bounced back into the street and a sweaty-faced twelve-year-old pursued it almost under the wheels of a taxi that had suddenly turned the corner. The people of this neighborhood traveled by subway and grumbled about the hiked fifteen-cent fares. A cab pulling up to a tenement doorway was an occasion. As it parked in front of the Doyle house, all the kids came running to surround it, some of them climbing on the fenders to the profane resentment of the driver. Before Katie Doyle could step out of the cab her name went whispering through the crowd. The kids bunched themselves around the door, pressing for a look at her, like the teenage fans of movie stars. Aside from her connection with her brother Joey, she was something of a celebrity in the neighborhood, because as a freshman at Marygrove College, up in Tarrytown, she had made an unusual break with the bluejean, shirt-out, fresh-talking younger set of Bohegan. She was a quiet, perhaps over-serious girl, sent off to school at the delicate age of twelve because Pop Doyle had been determined, to the point of obsession, to keep her off the streets and out of the trouble the best of pretty girls can stumble into on the Bohegan riverfront.

In her first year at Marygrove as an eighth-grader she had stood out from the class as the only one to recite the catechism as if the words had meaning, while the others were satisfied to repeat by rote what they were hardly thinking and certainly not feeling. It had made Katherine-Anne a difficult pupil. Within the frame of obedience she tried to think for herself. If the teaching sisters of Marygrove had given Katherine-Anne the key to Heaven, it could be said that she immediately tried to fit the key to the lock, and that she was prepared to examine the Room inside with an inquisitive persistence that was often a little more than the good sisters had bargained for. Sister Margaret who taught English poetry and disapproved of Gerard Manley Hopkins complained with fond irritation, “I wish she didn’t ask so many questions.”

The frankly staring, dirty-faced children of the neighborhood pressed toward her as Katherine-Anne paid off the driver. She had adored Joey, almost to the point of distraction if not sin, and now she seemed totally enclosed within her loss, still faint from the shock of the phone call that had pierced the seclusive barriers of Marygrove and pulled her back to Market Street and the terrible events that darkened the river. She was still wearing her blue middy blouse and skirt and in a number of less material ways she had not yet made the transition from the college campus on the outskirts of Tarrytown to this insistent row of crowded tenement dwellings around the corner from the piers. From the cab she walked straight up the outside steps and into the worn, familiar hallway.

Billy Conley, looking up at her from his strategic position at the bottom of the stoop, was moved to comment: “Boy, that Doyle kid really growed up since she was home last Easter.”

Jo-Jo Delaney laughingly agreed: “And in the right places.” He moved his hands in a grown-up way to show them what he meant.

A fat, twelve-year-old girl scolded: “Aint ya got no respeck for the dead?”

At the mention of this final word, the smirking, sex-bothered boys fell silent. Billy could be a beautiful Irish boy when his face was in repose and now he looked like an angel-faced choir-singer at High Mass as he raised his eyes not to heaven but just to the third-story window where the lights of the Doyle flat were burning.

It was a railroad flat, one of sixteen in the sixty-year-old aged-brick building, with an entrance into the narrow kitchen, with its small stove and its bathtub, covered by a lid on which Pop always sat to make room for visitors at the kitchen table. Beyond the kitchen was a dark cubicle, hardly twelve feet long, from which the doors had been removed to leave space for a bed. Another small bedroom and the front room which had once been a parlor but had been converted to a master bedroom (with a television set still being paid for) completed the living quarters. A railroad flat. Well-named, for the width is little wider than a pullman, with each room opening directly into the next, and with no outer hallway to allow more privacy. In the hall was a small toilet for the families of that floor, and if this was clearly not the way a majority of Americans lived, it was still the way the waterfront cargo carriers of Bohegan existed. Some of the tenement houses in this blighted stretch of coastline offered nothing better than outhouses, ramshackle monuments to social lag, erected in the paper-and-refuse-littered open squares between the Market Street apartments and the bars on River Street.

A half dozen people could give the Doyle flat a sense of being overcrowded and now there were at least twice that many present: Pop in his underwear shirt, and Runty and Moose passing the bottle, and a roomer from across the hall, Mr. Mathewson, who was North Irish Protestant but still welcome, and Jimmy Sharkey, a young friend of Joey’s. There was also Mrs. Gallagher, a motherly neighbor who had eleven kids and was engaged in a lifelong tug-of-war with her husband as to who would get hold of his Friday-night check and yet somehow found time to mother the entire tenement. She was now in the cramped kitchen filling in for long-absent Mrs. Doyle, making sandwiches of ham and cornbeef and cheese that other neighbors had brought in. And there was Uncle Frank, a sergeant on the Force, a plump, red-faced, kindly man, who for some mysterious reason had never married and was always good for a nickel or a dime to the kids on the street. It was a cross-section of the neighborhood crowded into these small rooms, drinking and talking loud and telling stories and sometimes weeping with the neighbors who kept dropping in and passing through with a hug for Pop and a nip of the bottle and the ancient fumbling words for the poor lad’s passing.

As Katherine-Anne came along the creaky upper hallway to the open kitchen door, Runty Nolan was holding the floor with a whiskey story told in an effort to lift Pop’s sorrow.

“So I comes out the swingin’ door of McCarty’s”—Runty was acting it out with the mimic gifts of the old country—“an’ do a header into a snowbank …”

Moose was refilling Pop’s glass and Pop was trying to laugh. “Go ahead, go ahead, Pop,” Moose shouted. “Drink up.”

“Well, just a little one,” Pop said, dazed by all the people and the suddenness.

“… an’ when Pathrick here (indicating Pop) tries to rouse me, I sez ‘Ya got ya noive disturbin’ a man in his own bed an’ pullin’ off his sheets.’ ‘Sheets, that’s
snow,
ya rummy,’ this old coot sez.”