On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  “You training to be a nun or something?” he asked suddenly.

  “No,” she said seriously, “it’s just a regular college.”

  They were passing the section near the River Street entrance laid out as a children’s playground. Impulsively Terry sat down on one of the swings.

  “Care to join me in a swing?” His manner now was half courteous, half teasing.

  “No, thank you,” she said gravely. “It’s getting very late.” But she lingered uncertainly.

  He let himself swing a few feet back and forth. “A regular college, huh? It’s funny, I thought it was kinda like a nunnery.”

  She smiled. “It’s just run by the nuns. The Sisters of St. Anne.”

  “Yeah? Where is that? Where you stay?”

  “In Tarrytown.”

  “Tarrytown?” He wrinkled his nose. “I’ll bet that’s a real corny joint. How far is that?”

  “Just up the river about thirty miles. Out in the country.”

  He made a face again. “I don’t go for the country. I was in a training camp once. The crickets made me nervous. What a racket!”

  She laughed, for the first time. She was prettier than he had thought. His first impression had been of a nice-featured, rather plain girl. “You know you’ve got a real sweet laugh,” he said, “real sweet.”

  The line, she thought. The roughneck under wraps. But there was something about him. Or was it simply that she hadn’t been let out very often with unauthorized boys? That’s what the Mother Superior called them at Marygrove. Unauthorized boys. She was a little frightened and excited. It was no better than a pick-up.

  He swung back and forth slowly, a little too sure of himself. “You come down here often?”

  “Vacations,” she said. “I haven’t been here since Easter. I was away for the summer as a counselor.”

  “That’s nice,” he said. “And you spend all your time up there just learnin’ stuff, huh?”

  She nodded with a small smile. “There’s a lot of stuff to learn. I want to be a teacher.”

  “A teacher!” he said. “Wow. You know personally I admire brains. My brother Charley is a very brainy guy. He had a couple of years of college. He can talk as good as any lawyer. Very brainy.”

  “It isn’t just brains,” Katie said. “It’s, well—how you use them.”

  Terry looked at her and nodded, impressed. Charley was brainy, all right, but he never talked like this. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I get your thought.”

  His effort to look like a thinker made her smile. “Now I have to be going,” she said. “Pop’ll be doing handstands. I’ll be all right from here.”

  She started walking toward the River Street entrance. There was a high iron railing on each side of the path leading to the street. Beyond them the banana boat was still being unloaded. The sound of the groaning winches carried to them. Fog horns moaned on the river.

  Terry had jumped up from the swing to follow her. He knew Charley would chew him out, but he could not stop following her.

  “You know, I’ve seen you lots of times before,” he said. “Remember parochial school here on Palooskie Street? Seven, eight years ago. Your hair come down in …”

  “Braids?”

  Terry nodded. “Looked like a hunk o’ rope. You had wires on your teeth an’ …”

  “I thought I’d never get them off.”

  “… an’ glasses, pimples …” He suddenly interrupted himself with laughter. “Man, ya was really a mess.”

  Katie kept on walking. “I can get home all right now.”

  “Don’t get sore, don’t get sore now.” Terry trotted after her. “I was just kiddin’ ya a little bit. All I’m tryin’ to tell ya is—well, ya grew up very nice.”

  “Thank you.”

  She tried to walk ahead of him but he stayed abreast of her. She was so quiet and nice. The word nice kept beating in his head.

  “You don’t remember me, do ya?”

  “Not at first,” she said, “but tonight I began to …”

  He pointed proudly to his dented nose. “By the nose?” He strutted a little. “Some people just got faces that stick in your mind.”

  “I remember you were in trouble all the time,” Katie said.

  Terry was pleased. “Now ya got me. Boy, the way those Sisters used t’ whack me. Crack! It’s a wonder I wasn’t punchy by the time I was twelve.” He laughed. “They thought they was gonna beat an education into me, but I foxed ’em!”

  Katie looked at him as if she understood not only the young street hoodlum, but the whole foul-mouthed street-corner set she had watched grow up from ragged little boys dodging the cars and the blows of bigger boys. “Maybe they just didn’t know how to handle you.”

  Terry was enjoying the turn of conversation. He was feinting her with his question to make her lead, “How would you’ve done it?”

  “With a little more patience and kindness,” Katie said. “You know what makes people mean and difficult? When other people don’t care enough about them.”

  While she was talking Terry had raised an imaginary violin to his chin and started to hum a nasal, mocking version of “Hearts and Flowers.”

  “All right, laugh,” she said firmly.

  “Patience and kindness,” he said. “Now I heard everything.”

  “And what’s so wrong with patience and kindness?” she asked angrily.

  “Aah—what—are ya kiddin’ me?” Terry said.

  “Why should I?” Katie asked. She looked at him so directly that Terry turned his eyes away, disturbed.

  “Come on,” he said, “I’d better get you home.”

  They were walking along the high iron railing at the eastern boundary of the park. They could hear the river washing along the bank beyond them in the darkness. Terry felt good to be walking beside her. Right now he didn’t give a damn what Charley thought.

  “Ya see, I’m not gonna let ya walk home alone,” he explained. “There’s too many guys around here with only one thing on their mind.”

  They were both silent then, and Katie followed him with quiet grace. He stopped abruptly. “Am I going to see ya again?”

  Katie looked at him with a guileless, blue-eyed expression unlike anything he had known. “What for?” she asked simply.

  Terry paused, shaken by her frankness, by her—the word eluded him—purity. He lifted his shoulders in a characteristic shrug. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But are ya?”

  In the same gentle, matter-of-fact tone as before, Katie said, “I really don’t know.”

  This was a new one, cool and refined, and yet on the level and warm. He walked ahead of her and turned to see if she was following. “C’mon,” he beckoned.

  She hesitated, with a tiny, mysterious smile that baffled him. “C’mon.” He waved to her, less tough, more pleading this time. When she walked slowly toward him, it seemed to him as if she were floating in his direction.

  They walked along silently, full of their own thoughts, listening to the river sounds. At the end of the next block, Katie said, “Thank you. It’s only around the corner now. I’ll say good night.”

  “It’s been—nice talkin’ to ya.” Polite conversation was like an awkward, sticky wad in Terry’s mouth. She smiled at him again, faintly, and an imperceptible shudder went through him. It didn’t seem possible that the barest suggestion of a smile could communicate so much, patience and kindness and the far echo of physical love. Or was he only guessing and wishing as she hurried on? With a wry, pained look on his face he watched her melt away from him. Then he punched his right fist into the palm of his left hand so hard that it stung. “God damn,” he said to himself out loud. “God damn.”

  The moment Pop heard Katie’s footsteps in the hall he grabbed the knob from the inside and threw the door open. He was boiling mad. Having Katie up at Marygrove had been a strong rope to hang onto. It justified the back-breaking work, the anxious mornings in the shape-up and all he had to take from Big Mac.
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br />   “C’mere,” he said to Katie. With his suspenders hanging down over his pants and his upper body stooped in its dirty white long underwear shirt, he led the way from the kitchen to the cell-like bedroom. On the bed, next to Toesie, Katie’s alley cat, was a small suitcase that had been packed in furious, careless haste.

  “Ye’re all packed,” Pop yelled. “An’ here’s yer bus ticket. Ye’re on yer way back to the nuns.”

  “Pop, I’m not ready to go back yet,” Katie said.

  Pop cursed privately, under his breath. “Katie, for years we pushed dimes ’n quarters into a cookie jar t’ keep ya up there with the Sisters, to keep ya from things like I just seen out the winder. Me own daughter arm-in-arm with Terry Malloy.”

  “He was only trying to help me, Pop. There was—there was a little trouble down at the church …”

  “I could of told ya,” Pop said.

  “… and he was nice enough to help me get home.”

  “Nice enough!” Pop shouted. “Jesus, Mary ’n Joseph. You know who this Terry is?”

  “Not exactly. Who is he, Pop?”

  “Who is he?” Pop mimicked in an angry falsetto. “The kid brother of Charley the Gent, that’s all he is. Now go ahead, ask me who Charley the Gent is. Johnny Friendly’s right-hand man and a butcher in a camel’s hair coat.”

  Katie was stroking the ugly, heavily pregnant Toesie. “Are you trying to tell me Terry is too?”

  “I aint tryin’ t’ tell ya he’s Little Lord what’s-his-name.”

  “Sure, he tried to act tough,” Katie said, “the way they all do. But there’s something in his eyes …”

  “Somethin’ in his eyes.” Pop’s voice could be heard all the way down through the four floors of the tenement. “Hold your hats, brother, here we go again. You think he’s one of those cases you’re always draggin’ in and feelin’ sorry for. Like that litter of kittens. The only one she wants to keep has six toes and it’s cockeyed to boot. Look at her—the lazy bum!”

  “This place would be crawling with rats if it wasn’t for Toesie,” Katie insisted.

  Pop, in quieter moments, had boasted about the hunting abilities of their odd-looking pet, but he was in no mood to admit anything. “If only I knew what it was in ya that keeps pullin’ you toward these goddamn misfits,” he went on shouting.

  “Pop,” Katie tried to interrupt.

  “Six-toed, cross-eyed cats! Well, don’t think this Terry Malloy is any six-toed, cockeyed pussycat. He’s a bum. Johnny Friendly owned him when he was a fighter. And when Johnny rings the bell he still goes into action and don’t ya forget it.”

  “He asked if he could see me again,” Katie said, drifting along some channel of her own.

  Pop’s anger propelled him forward, a taut, livid figure of wrath. “See this arm …” He stuck his thin, stringy-muscled arm in front of Katie’s face. The pitch of his anger made both his voice and the arm tremble. “This arm’s two inches longer ’n the other one. That’s years of workin’ and sweatin’, liftin’ and swingin’ a hook. And every time I heisted a box or a coffee bag I says to meself—this is fer Katie, so she c’n be a teacher or somethin’ decent …”

  Katie put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Pop …” But he pushed her away. “I promised your Mom, Katie.”

  The sudden anger had swept through him and passed by, leaving an old, tired man full of aches and pains and disappointments. Katie thought of all the mornings he had pulled on the same worn work clothes and gone down to the pier, in frost-bite weather and suffocating summer heat, accepting the lowly hatch work when the hiring boss favorites copped all the rest. Lifting machine tools, bananas, hemp and bags of coffee, cocoa, cement … Lifting and waiting and borrowing and cutting down his smokes for Katie’s education money. Katie could see how the years had worked their erosion in his face, in his fleshless chest and his stooped shoulders.

  She put her arms around him, kissed his stubble cheek and said softly, “Pop, don’t think I’m not grateful for all you’ve done, for giving me the chance and keeping me away from all this.” She kissed him again, but hurriedly, as if to prepare him for what she had to say.

  She backed away from him, for she knew his anger was quick and violent, especially when it was tied up with his ideas of right and wrong. She had felt the sting of it on her cheek when she was younger. “I’m going to stay, Pop. I’m going to keep on trying to find out who’s guilty for Joey …”

  “You aint gonna go to no more of them crazy meetin’s,” Pop raised his voice. “That Father Barry oughta have his head examined, encouragin’ ya, stirrin’ everybody up like that. For what—so Moose, or Jimmy or somebody else winds up in the river with a pair of cement shoes?”

  He was shouting now, temper-shaken, frustrated, sorrow-racked. Afraid that tears might squeeze into his eyes, he stomped to the icebox for a beer.

  “Be a good goil, Katie,” he pleaded. “On the memory of yer mother, God rest her soul, lissen to yer old man. I know as much about the waterfront as anybody. And I know it’s something you don’t fool with—if ya wanna keep alive.”

  Fourteen

  WHEN THE MEETING IN the church basement broke up, Runty sprinted down River Street to the Longdock. In a few minutes, Moose and Jimmy, having chosen a more circuitous route, joined him. None of the customers around the bar had been to the meeting, but it was a live subject in their minds. Each one had decided for himself how he was going to handle it. Old man Gallagher, for instance, who knew and liked Moose, barely grunted a greeting and edged away so as not to be drawn into conversation. He lived in the same house with the Doyles and liked them; his big-hearted wife Mary would do anything for them; all the more reason for Marty Gallagher to be careful.

  Runty, Moose and Jimmy felt themselves a three-cornered island connected to the others by underwater reefs of experience and even sympathy, but separated by channels of caution and self-preservation. As the three downed their drinks and talked among themselves they knew they were being both respected and resented, as anyone with the courage to stand up is respected on the waterfront, and as anyone who dares to tamper with the delicate status-quo is bitterly resented.

  The meeting of a dozen longshoremen with an agitating priest was a tiny pebble tossed into the river. But even a pebble can set up an ever-widening circle of ripples. Already it was all over Bohegan that Father Barry’s pitch had been to urge the boys to co-operate with the Crime Commission as the only way to blast the corrupted union and clear the way for a new organization. In a few hours the name of Father Barry had become a dirty word to the waterfront bosses, and even the ordinary dock wallopers were wondering out loud why he had to go pushing his nose into their business.

  Truck Amon and Gilly Connors, after beating their pavement chorus outside the church, had watched for Runty to come out and had tailed him to the Longdock. They took up a strategic position at the short side-section of the bar where they could keep an eye on Runty, Moose and Jimmy. On any ordinary night they were to be found over at Friendly’s. The musclemen never entered the Longdock unless they were tracking trouble. Runty caught them out of the corner of his eye and went right on making his jokes and laughing his chesty laugh.

  He was rebel Irish to his toenails, and the blood quickened in him, made him feel desperately, gaily alive at the prospect of a good scrap.

  Moose was different. He had a family and his hulking, over-two-hundred-pound physique concealed an unexpectedly nervous temperament. The needle of his courage swung the full arc from hurricane to doldrum. He had nights when, impulsively lion-hearted, he would get up and tell off his persecutors in loud heroics, be beaten down the stairs into the street, rise and try to fight his way back into the hall again. Next morning all the nerve would be out of him and he’d be riding the rim of fear, bruised and muscle-sore and terrorized by the possible consequences of his resistance. Nor would his wife, Fran, shore up his spine by bawling him out for messing himself in “politics” when there were five mouths to feed, and healt
hy eaters all of them, no matter who ran the waterfront. Then big Moose McGonigle would be a good boy until the next time something set him off again.

  Jimmy Sharkey was still another kind of fish. He was straight, tough, quiet, direct. He never went looking for fights like Runty and never exploded into them like Moose. He simply took them as they came, as hard, unavoidable facts of life in the harbor.

  The two groups, goons and rebels, were like actors on a stage, laughing and drinking and small-talking and once in a while casually glancing over at one another, while the rest of the drinkers made up the audience, watching intently though pretending not to. The trio from the church meeting had three or four more drinks, kidding with Shorty, the night bartender as if this was just another good-time evening. Then they said their good nights and strolled out. Truck and Gilly finished their drinks, left a fat tip on the bar and followed them out.

  Outside, Runty, Moose and Jimmy started down River Street toward their homes. Runty walked along with them although he lived in a furnished room only a few doors down from the Longdock. The footsteps of Truck and Gilly were behind them. The night was cold and Runty blew a little cloud of his own warmer air into it. Suddenly, in his best bravadeero manner, he stopped and turned around and waited for the well-named Truck and his rangy side-man to approach.

  “Whad d’ya say, fellers?” Truck said, the bristle skin around his eyes crinkling into a slit-eyed smile. His tone sounded like a bass gargle but was meant to be friendly.

  “Hiya, Truck, Gilly,” the three muttered.

  “Lissen, we’d like t’ talk t’ ya a minute,” Truck said.

  “Ye’re talkin’ to us right now, aintcha?” Runty said.

  “Wise-guy,” Gilly growled.

  Runty was midget-sized alongside Gilly’s six-foot-one. Gilly glared at his dwarf antagonist and then appealed to Truck: “What’s with this little bassard? Always has to be such a wise-guy.”