On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  He tried to catch the eyes of his listeners again, but not one of them would be trapped. Moose was staring into his big lap and Runty leaned back and pulled his chin down as if sleeping off a drunk. Luke half turned in his seat to study the bare wall and Jimmy ran one hand over the knuckles of the other in front of his face. Who killed who was a taboo question on the waterfront. Father Barry should have known that.

  In the silence Father Barry had cracked a match alive to light a cigarette. He looked over his little audience angrily. By God, if he was going to get into hot water with that Monsignor O’Hare and maybe even the Bishop, he’d like a little cooperation. Father Barry thought of Sergeant Doyle’s words, “Those dock workers are funny fellows …” and threw his hook again:

  “Not one of you has a line on who killed Joey Doyle?”

  The silence became oppressive. The wooden pews creaked as men shifted weight self-consciously.

  “I’ve got a hunch every one of you could tell us something about it,” Father Barry said.

  The men pressed their lips together and their eyes avoided his face.

  “All right, then answer me this,” Father Barry tried again. “How can we call ourselves Christians and protect these murderers with our silence?”

  Silence seemed not only to hang in the room but to swell as if it were feeding on itself, wave on wave of silence.

  “Can’t you see?” Father Barry was shouting now. “On this waterfront, in a supposedly Catholic neighborhood, murder has become a commonplace. There’s something lousy rotten on this waterfront. And the entire parish—all of you—are conspiring in it.”

  His loud, harsh voice, not so different in timbre from Johnny Friendly’s, trailed away. In the silence the creaking of a door in the rear of the room was very loud. It was Terry Malloy, entering with an exaggerated rolling of his shoulders. He slumped down into the back pew just as Katie was turning to confront Jimmy.

  “Jimmy Sharkey, you were Joey’s best friend. How can you just sit there and not be saying anything?”

  Jimmy started confidently. “Sure, and I’ll always think of him as my best friend. But … but …” He lowered his head again and was silent, withdrawing into the group apathy again.

  Katie pushed the palms of her hands against her face and shook her head slightly. Jimmy saw the gesture of futility and felt miserable, helpless, ashamed. But what could he do?

  Terry Malloy was slouched in his seat, leaning back with his hands clasped behind his neck. He could not have found a more appropriate posture for the scorn, superiority and boredom he was feeling at having to oversee these proceedings. A screwball priest and a bunch of meatballs. Lousing themselves up on the waterfront so that even a crummy loan shark wouldn’t look at them. Charley would want to know their names. Hell, he didn’t like stooling for anybody, even Charley, but if these clowns were stupid enough to throw themselves into the pot, maybe they had it coming to them. Just the same, Terry wished he wasn’t here. He dreamily saw himself lying under a palm tree with a bottle of rum and a Latin broad ready to love him up like the one in the magazine. That priest should know what I’m thinkin’, he thought to himself with an inward, satisfied smile.

  Runty Nolan glared across the empty rows at Terry and then muttered audibly to Moose, “Who invited him t’ this party?” Moose looked around and expressed his feelings with a big-shouldered shrug.

  Terry leaned back, looking smug. He felt out of place.

  “Anybody in the harbor is welcome here,” Father Barry said, rebuking Runty. Then he spoke directly to Terry.

  “I’m trying to find out just what happened to Joey Doyle. Maybe you can help.”

  Terry kept his hands behind his neck and shook his head slightly, still wearing the mask of scorn and boredom.

  “The brother of Charley the Gent,” Runty stage-whispered to Moose. “They’ll help us get to the bottom of the river.”

  Terry had been instructed not to open his mouth. But he had a strong feeling about anyone’s mentioning his brother. It was a mixture of pride and shame. So now he could not resist saying, “You better keep Charley outa this.”

  Runty never could keep his trap shut. It was an irrepressible, old-country trait, like never backing away from anyone, regardless of size. “You don’t think he’d be helpful?” he turned and asked the kid.

  Terry hesitated a moment and smiled at what he felt was a smart answer. “Ask him yourself, why don’t you?”

  “Maybe I will,” Runty said. “One of these days.”

  Terry snickered, and leaned back like a winner. “One of these days.”

  Katie, half-turned in her seat, had been watching the late-comer curiously. She recognized him as the boy who had given her the work-tab after roughly blocking Pop out to grab it away from him. And now, studying his face, she remembered him from earlier days, at parochial school on Pulaski Street before she went away to Marygrove. She remembered the Sisters shaking their heads at him, forever calling him a “bad boy.” Then he had been sent away some place—a Catholic corrective school, she vaguely remembered. She had been going on thirteen then, and his swarthy, handsome, dirty, evil presence wasn’t easy to define in the haze of early adolescence. He had been a dark spot to be avoided; that was almost all Katie could remember of him.

  “Now listen!” Father Barry snapped them back to attention. “Don’t kid me. I’ve been talkin’ to people about this thing all day. You know who the pistols are. Are you goin’ to keep still until they cut you down one by one. Are you? Are you?”

  Because Nolan had spoken up, and had a reputation for guts, Father Barry took a step toward him. “Hey, Nolan, Nolan, how about you?”

  “One thing you’ve got to understand, Father,” Runty said. “On the docks we’ve always been D ’n D.”

  “D ’n D?” Father Barry hadn’t heard that one.

  Runty nodded. “Deef ’n dumb. No matter how much we hate the torpedoes, we don’t rat.”

  All the men nodded their heads or muttered an almost in- audible “Tha’s right, Father.”

  Here was the nub of it, here was the code. Father Barry felt like a man trying to tear down a cemented stone barricade with his bare hands.

  “Boys get smart,” he shouted. “I know you’re getting pushed around, but there’s one thing we’ve got in this country and that’s ways of fighting back. If you’ll use ’em. Like this investigation they’re trying to get going. Sure you don’t like the State butting in, I know all about that. But think of it this way, the State—which is after all only you and you and everybody else—is giving you a chance to get something out into the open that’s been festering in the dark for years and years. You stand up and testify for what you know is right and decent and democratic and Christian against what you know is wrong and evil and stinks like dead fish floating at the edge of the river. You do that and you start to make a new climate, a new soil where honest-to-God trade-unionism can start to take root for a change. Boys, break the Joey Doyle case and you begin to break the power of the mob. Break the power of the mob and you begin to see a little daylight on the kind of job security set-up you deserve down here. You say ratting. What’s ratting to them is telling the truth for you. Now can’t you see that? Can’t you see that?”

  Again the same crestfallen, self-ashamed silence hung over the room. Father Barry lowered his hands, defeated. He started to raise his hands and then dropped them again in a gesture of despair. He looked over the heads of the silent men to Katie, as if to ask: Where do we go from here? She tightened the scarf around her neck and stared back at him.

  Terry was leaning back with his hands still clasped behind his neck, enjoying the priest’s discomfort. He could have told this round-collar joker how the men would clam up. It made him smile to think of this bunch of losers making trouble for real men like Johnny Friendly and his brother Charley.

  There was a prolonged, awkward pause after Father Barry stopped talking. Father Vincent, who had shaken his head several times with impatience, seiz
ed this moment to take over the meeting. Smiling at Father Barry, and with a benign voice, he said, “This seems to be just about all we can do at this time. I think you will agree with that, Father. And so may we close with a few words from St. Matthew, ‘Come unto me, all ye who are heavily burdened and I …’ ”

  Father Vincent’s benediction was never completed. At this moment he was drowned out by an explosive wooden thunder outside on the sidewalk above the basement window level.

  “Baseball bats,” Runty said. “That must be our friends.”

  Everybody was on his feet. Joey Doyle was forgotten now.

  “There’s a back way out through the inner courtyard,” Father Barry shouted. “You better go home in pairs. Two’s is two, you know.”

  A number of men hurried to the side door to the inner courtyard.

  “If they lay a hand on any of you I’ll see they go to jail, I swear it,” Father Barry shouted.

  “Fat chance,” somebody grunted.

  “I’m walkin’ out the front way,” Runty boasted. “Let ’em have me. I don’t hide from them bums.”

  “I got a wife and kids,” Moose shouted. “If I’m laid up they don’t eat. I’m duckin’ out the back.”

  “And then you better run like hell,” Jimmy Sharkey said.

  Outside the pounding of baseball bats on the sidewalk rose to a frightful crescendo—boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. Inside people were shouting against the din. “This way, Tim. Hey! C’mon, hurry …”

  Father Barry was trying to restore order, but the group was out of his control now. Truck Amon and his goons had taken the play away from him.

  “What did I tell you—sticking your neck out?” Father Vincent shouted at Father Barry. “This is a police problem. Let them try to handle it.”

  “These fellers need help, Harry,” Father Barry insisted.

  “Okay, okay,” Father Vincent yelled back. “I hope you’re ready for the consequences.”

  Father Barry laughed. “I’m gonna go out and get those baseball bats.” But when he stepped outside, the Friendly muscle seemed to have vanished into the shadowy dampness of the night. He peered into the darkness, puzzled and disconcerted. Down the street from the park the blur of red neon lights beckoned men to drink, and to forget, to drink and to dummy up.

  Thirteen

  WHEN FATHER BARRY RETURNED, the basement chapel was empty. During the moment he had stepped outside, there had been a brief, charged, almost wordless meeting between Katie and Terry Malloy that had brought them together and hurried them out into the night before she could focus her mind on what was happening. Watching her, Terry had been quick to notice how she stood uncertainly at the side door, too frightened at the pounding of the bats to be able to follow Moose and Jimmy out when they had called her. In that instant of hesitation, Terry had grabbed her arm. “Not that way. C’mon, I’ll get ya out.” Obeying the rough grasp of his hand on her arm she had almost automatically started running along with him, out the back door and up the stairway to the main level, then through an emergency exit and down a fire escape that led into an alley.

  They hurried across the street into Pulaski Park. A clammy mist floated over the empty benches and curled around the neglected, bepigeoned statue of the old General, erected by the Polish Society just after the First World War. In the darkness the riding lights of the ships on the river were indistinct yellow sparklers.

  It was not until they entered the park that Katie became conscious of his tight grip on her arm and pulled away.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Why did you do it?”

  He shrugged. “Why not?”

  She looked back at the dark outlines of the church. “Baseball bats!” She shuddered.

  “Yeah, they play pretty rough,” Terry said.

  They were following the central path through the block-square park that opened on River Street. She looked at him, puzzled. He was dark, with high cheek bones, and a strange puffiness around his left eye. He would have had a fine, Roman nose if it had not been dented in the bridge. He looked deliberately disreputable. He had a cocky, rolling, yet graceful way of walking. His manner was careless, arrogant, uninvolved. Oh, she knew the type, hated the type.

  “Which side are you with?” she asked suddenly.

  He raised his shoulders cynically and tapped his chest. “Me? I’m with me—Terry.”

  She turned away from him. What was she doing out here, in a park, alone, with a—punk, Moose had called him that. “I’ll be able to get home all right now,” she said.

  She started along the path that led through the middle of the park, past the forgotten Polish General who brooded over the empty benches with sad, metallic eyes. Terry followed behind her. Casually, with his hands pushed deep into his pockets, he trailed her. She glanced back questioningly and quickened her steps. What was he up to, protecting or pursuing her? Stay out of the parks after dark, her father always had warned her.

  Near the River Street entrance a shabby form rose out of the darkness at her from a stone bench. She gave a short shrill cry and ran a few steps backwards, almost into the arms of Terry.

  “A dime. Ya gotta dime? A dime for a cupa cawfee?”

  The figure had one arm and a foul whiskey breath. It seemed not only his breath but his whole, ragged, unkempt body was saturated with cheap whiskey, as if he had slept and wallowed in it. Now she recognized him, Mutt Murphy, the wreckage of a human being who had staggered into the wake.

  “Cawfee …” Mutt was cackling, his trembling hand outstretched. “One little dime ya don’t need …”

  “Some coffee,” Terry laughed as he made the gesture of downing a shot of whiskey. He raised his hand as if to slap Mutt away. “G’wan, beat it, ya bum.”

  Ignoring him, Mutt moved several steps closer to Katie, until his sodden face was staring into hers. The look and stench of him was horrible, yet Katie could not bring herself to back away. He screwed up his eyes as if trying to draw her into focus through the fog.

  “I know you … You’re Katie Doyle .…” Quickly he crossed himself. “Your brother’s a saint. Oney one ever tried t’ get me me compensation …”

  “C’mon,” Terry said, pushing him away. “Let’s get outa here.”

  Being pushed was so familiar to Mutt Murphy that he was no longer even aware of the indignity. Pointing a wavering, accusing finger at Terry, he started to say, “You remember, Terry. You was there the night Joey was …”

  “Aah, for Christ’ sake quit ya gassin’,” Terry said. “Disappear! You’re botherin’ the lady.”

  “You remember,” Mutt persisted, “ya bumped inta me when ya was walkin’ …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Terry said, stepping in fast. He reached into his pocket for a handful of change. “Here’s a couple of shots for ya. Go have yourself a ball.”

  Mutt stopped talking to admire the coins in his hand. Terry had scooped them out of his pocket without even bothering to count them—quarters, dimes, nickels. Mutt stared at them incredulously. “I can’t believe it. A small fortune.” He reached down into his frayed jacket and pulled out a little tobacco pouch into which he deposited the coins one by one. Then withdrawing a few feet he raised his cap to Katie with incongruous formality.

  “Goo-luck, Katie. Lord’ve mercy on Joey.”

  Then he screwed up his face in an ugly grimace and his voice came out full and angry for the first time. “You can’t buy me.” He glared at Terry. “You’re still a bum!”

  He staggered off along the path they had taken, stiff-legged, his chin upraised with a last display of dignity.

  Terry looked after him, relieved that Mutt hadn’t mentioned the pigeon. Lucky for him that the one witness who had stumbled onto Terry’s role in the Doyle job was a goofed-up sour-belly that nobody would take seriously. He turned to Katie with what he considered his most debonair, light-hearted manner. “I ask you to look at what’s callin’ me a bum.”

  Katie watched the shaggy figure of Mutt fading back into the mist. At the
statue in the middle of the park he seemed to be trying to engage General Pulaski in conversation.

  “Everybody loved Joey,” Katie said, as if to herself. “From the little kids to the old rummies.”

  Terry was standing there wondering, Who boxed me into this? What do I have to be tailing after Joey’s sister for? Last tomato in the world I oughta be seen with. “Yeah,” Terry said.

  She turned her head and looked at him a moment before asking, “Did you know him very well?”

  Terry tried to keep his tone casual. “Well,” he shrugged, “you know how it is. He got around.”

  Katie frowned. She looked back along the path that seemed to have swallowed Mutt. “What did that poor man mean just now when he said …”

  “Aah, don’t pay no attention to him.” Terry waved the rummy aside. “He’s fallin’ down drunk all the time. Just a juice-head. Talks to himself. Don’t pay no attention.”

  She shivered slightly and pulled her cloth coat closer around her. “It’s cold. I’d better go home.”

  She started at a rapid pace, making it clear that she was walking apart from him. But he loped alongside, drawn along with her. She veered away.

  A nice girl, Terry thought. How long had it been since he had walked with a nice girl? Twenty to one a virgin even. Look how cool and quiet she walks. Melva would have been all over him. The park was a regular boudoir for Melva. What did you say to a nice girl? How do you break the ice? How do you get around to touching a nice girl?

  “You don’ hafta be scared of me,” he told her. “I’m not gonna bite ya.” He had closed the gap between them to within a foot or so. She kept her eyes straight ahead. “Wha’s the matter?” He kept at her. “They don’ let you walk with fellas where you’ve been?”

  She tossed her head slightly. She didn’t want to be a prude. He was coarse, a roughneck, but he hadn’t really done anything wrong.

  “You know how the Sisters are,” she said.

  She had lovely skin, smooth and fresh, like a—his clumsy mind groped—like a pink rose. He had noticed how her skin glowed in the light of the church basement. Rose hell, she was like a full fresh peach in the market at 4:30 in the morning. Sometimes he’d stop on his way home from the bars, pick up the best-looking fruit he could find and take it back to his room under the roof of the tenement. Breakfast, courtesy of the Bohegan market.