On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  “What do you want to give us so much trouble for?” Truck asked earnestly. Any defiance of power disturbed him. “No kiddin’, you better straighten yourself out, Runty.” Truck was almost pleading with him. “You’d be working three-four days if you could only learn to keep that big yap of yours shut.”

  “It’s the fault o’ the nuns,” said Runty, laughing.

  “Nuns?” Truck grumbled. “What the hell’ve nuns got to do with it?”

  “When I was knee-high to a bar-stool,” Runty went on, enjoying this skating on thin ice, “the nuns used t’ say t’ me in school, ‘Runty, we can’t understand a word you’re sayin’. Ye’re talkin’ through yer teeth like you got a mouth full o’ fish-cakes. When ye’re talkin’, Runty me lad,’ they said, ‘talk with yer mouth wide open.’ So tha’s all I’m tryin’ t’ do—folly the advice o’ the nuns an’ talk with me mouth wide open.”

  Runty winked at his friends and the three of them laughed.

  “You better not talk so the boss c’n hear you,” Truck said, a little confused by Runty’s eloquence. “You know how Johnny is.”

  Moose looked at Runty with a warning in his eyes. There were Fran and the kids home waiting for money he’d have to borrow off the shylocks. Johnny’s shylocks. What was he doing here sticking himself out in front of all the rest of them anyway? What was he doing letting the priest get him all worked up? Why buck for the bottom of the river? Would the rest of the boys appreciate it when he took the knocks for them? Did they appreciate it when Andy Collins got himself killed or Peter Panto over in Brooklyn? Why couldn’t he stay away from Runty Nolan, who was so brave he was crazy? Forget about Joey Doyle. Listen to Fran and make his peace like so many other longshoremen who had no love for Johnny Friendly or Charley the Gent, but who went along to keep food on the table. There was no law said you had to like Johnny, but it sure made life simpler if he liked you.

  “C’mon, Runty, le’s go home,” Moose said.

  “Good idea,” Truck said. “Go home ’n stay home. Next time that priest calls his little prayer-meetin’, you stay home, unless you wanna eat cobblestones.”

  “Definitely,” Gilly seconded.

  Runty hated Gilly. He could almost taste it and enjoy how much he hated the whole stinking crew of them right up to Big Tom McGovern.

  “Y’know why ye’re so tall,” Runty shouted up at his towering opponent. “Your mother was constipated the night she had you and you come out like …”

  Gilly took a vicious swipe at Runty. Runty was hard to hit because he was so short. He had become a rough-and-tumble expert at fighting men who stood over him a good foot or more and outweighed him a hundred pounds. He timed a short, mean uppercut to Gilly’s groin and Gilly reeled back, holding himself.

  “You dumb harp, you must like gettin’ hit in the head,” Truck said, moving in heavily, feet apart to set himself to punch with his two hundred and fifty pounds swinging with him. Runty raised his knee and caught Truck. Truck bellowed like a wounded bull and made a club of his fist and swung it at Runty’s head, From somewhere behind them reinforcements arrived. Sonny and Barney came into it in time to clobber Jimmy and Moose. “Run!” Runty yelled when he saw them out-numbered.

  They took off down the street and around the corner. Runty lost track of the rest of them as he ran like a prairie dog into the park. In his youth he had been a sprinter for his neighborhood club and at fifty-five he could still run with his knees high. But Gilly was known for his accuracy with a blackjack used as a hurling piece and he was on his target this time again. Runty stumbled and skidded forward. After a few seconds, like a dead-game boxer, he started rolling over and crawling to one knee. But before he could gain his feet Sonny and Gilly were on him, holding him for the slow-moving Truck who went about his business with methodical brutality, working Runty over with those club-like fists while Sonny and Gilly held him in position.

  Runty let out a yowl like an embattled tom-cat and kicked at Truck’s shins and tried to bite Truck’s hand slippery with Runty’s blood. Then the little man was down on the ground, fighting a wounded animal’s way, grabbing and biting at legs, kicking, scratching, while the heels of the Friendly boys came smashing down on him. “Wise-guy … son-of-a-bitch …”

  The park closed in, around and over him like an ether cone. Then a sharp, nasal voice was saying, “Here, use this.” He looked up and saw a white handkerchief. “Where the hell did you come from?” The face looking down at him, lean and aroused, said, “I could hear the yelling from my room. I figured this might happen.”

  “Them dirty bastards,” Runty said. “ ’Scuse me, Father.”

  “Hell, I agree with you,” Father Barry smiled. “Open your mouth.”

  Runty obliged and the priest looked in at the bloody mess. “Not too bad,” he said. He wiped the blood of an extra mouth that had been cut into Runty’s forehead, and like a boxer’s second pressed the lips of the wound together. “How’s the rest of you? Your ribs?”

  Runty tried to laugh. “Could be worse. Considerin’ they were usin’ ’em for a football.” He spit into the priest’s bloodied handkerchief, and chuckled. “A hell of a thing to happen to a ladies’ man.”

  “And you’re still D ’n D?” Father Barry said. “You still call it ratting?”

  Runty was sitting up now and he looked at the angry priest for perhaps five seconds without saying anything. Then he said slowly, “Are you on the level, Father?”

  “What do you think?” Father Barry tossed it back at him.

  Runty shrugged. “Don’t get sore, Father. We’ve seen an awful lot of phonies on the waterfront. Politicians. Mayors. Police commissioners. D.A.’s. Even some priests.”

  “I know,” Father Barry said.

  Runty wiped the warm blood away from his mouth. The handkerchief was a bloody wet clot now.

  “If I stick my neck out and they chop it off, would that be the end of it?” Runty kept after the priest. “Or are ya willin’ to go all the way?”

  “Down the line, down the line,” Father Barry said impatiently.

  “I wonder,” Runty said. Forty years on the waterfront, he had seen a lot of good men crumble. That’s why Runty had stopped believing in anybody but Runty—and then only in Runty Nolan’s ability to fight a lost cause to the losing, bloody end. “They’ll put the muscle on ya too, turned-around collar or no turned-around collar.”

  “Come on across to the house,” Father Barry said. “Get yourself cleaned up.” As he helped the battered, gnome-like figure to his feet, the priest said, “You stand up and I’ll stand up with you.”

  “Right down to the wire?” Runty asked. He was a hard man to convince.

  “So help me God,” Father Barry said.

  Runty was on his feet now, a little unsteady, with blood still trickling down his chin from the gash inside his mouth. He nodded toward the rectory beyond the west entrance of the park.

  “Ya got any beer in there?”

  Father Barry nodded. He always kept a few bottles cached away for himself, to sneak into his room and drink before going to sleep. “I think I can dig up a bottle or two,” he said.

  Runty’s grin was a smear of blood, but the thought of cold beer was reviving. “What’re we waitin’ for?”

  The tall, rapid-talking priest and the battered featherweight docker kept the narrow, unadorned bedroom hot with talk until two in the morning. At first it was Runty’s way to suck on his beer bottle and listen. This priest had made a good start, but Runty still wanted to see what other cards he had in his hand. Runty had played a lone game too long to trust himself to anyone merely because he meant well or sounded right. He wanted to see how savvy the priest was. After all, if he went along with what the Father had in mind he was putting his life in the man’s hands. Sure, he always boasted he was on borried time and a bravadeero, but if he was going to go he wanted to have a voice in how and when. It was a deliberate game he had played with Johnny Friendly all these years. He was still alive because he was re
sourceful as well as almost miraculously enduring and lucky. No sense in letting a well-meaning amateur mess him up now.

  The men felt each other out like boxers in the early rounds. The priest kept probing for the reasons behind the waterfront wall of silence. Runty told him it went deeper than simple fear. Everybody on the waterfront had a lining of guilt; it ran all the way from murder and wholesale pilferage to the petty, habitual filching of whiskey, perfume, coffee, steaks, flight jackets. Runty’s room, he admitted, was full of the loot he had lifted over the years. It didn’t seem like stealing when you saw so much of it going by the truckload to the boys on top. The stuff was lying around begging to be taken. Like the bananas all over the deck. Is it stealing to take a pocketful home when the sweepers would only have to clean them up if they were left behind? In the hold, on the dock, in the loft you lived among abundance, mountains of oil, sardines, imported chocolates, portable radios, gloves, cases of Havana cigars. The pier was a giant grab-bag, Runty said, and you were either a big operator like Friendly or Charley the Gent, or a petty heister like Runty. “But God c’n strike me dead if I ever in me life lifted anything t’ sell,” Runty said righteously. “That’s what we call larceny down here. The stuff for your own house—we don’t consider that stealin’. That’s like a little extra bonus comin’ to us.”

  But, Runty explained, it all helped to keep them secretive, to feel that no matter how much they might hate the unequal way things worked out on the dock, their fate, their infinitesimal guilt was linked to the greater, blacker guilt of the big boys. That was as much a part of the code as the actual, physical fear. Take Runty’s own case. Nobody hated the “high-ocracy”—as he called them—more than he did. “Tom McGovern, Willie Givens, Johnny Friendly, the whole, stinkin’ high-ocracy, I hate ’em winter ’n summer, all day ’n all night. The day I don’t take some sort of poke at ’em I figure is a day lost. But Father, if you gotta know the truth, I did a little time meself once, when I was a kid an’ even stupider ’n I am now. And Moose, same thing with him, when he was an overgrown kid. Get ’im t’ tell ya about it one of these days. So we feel kinda funny runnin’ to the State with our troubles. We’d rather just battle it out on our own.”

  Father Barry opened another beer for Runty and told him a story. It took him back to a hungry time when the priest was twelve and his old man had been dead for a year or more. His mother was cleaning the police station, for a few dollars a week, and barely getting by on the little pension and some help from Family Aid. Christmas was coming up and the kid brother, Connie, wrote Santa Claus for a big red fire engine. His mother read the letter and cried. December was a hard month, with the need for winter clothes the kids were always growing out of. And the need for good substantial food, meat and chicken broths to keep them from catching colds. So a big fire engine, or any toy over a few pennies, was out of the question. Connie would just have to be disappointed.

  But little Connie kept asking about his fire engine. And every time he mentioned it, it made Pete wince. Pete felt bitter about it. Christmas had started out as the most joyous of all birthdays, but in Bohegan it looked more like a dirty trick played on the slum kids. Father Barry could still remember how he brooded about it more and more as the day approached. In this mood he hit upon a plan. By God, Connie was going to have his fire engine.

  Two days before Christmas he went up to the toy department of the biggest department store in town. “I figgered they could afford it better than some little joint,” was his rapid aside to Runty. “I looked around until I saw just what I was looking for. A glittering red fire engine three feet long, with a ladder you could wheel up into the air—a beauty. I went up to the sales lady and priced it. Three bucks. Wow! My mother gave me ten cents a week allowance and I made a dime an hour helping in Mr. Kanzanjian’s grocery store. Three bucks! Well, I went into the men’s can and I waited until the store closed for the night. Then I came out and went over to the cash register. I knocked it hard with my fists on both sides, the way little Frenchy had taught me. He’s away in Sing Sing now doing life as a three-time loser. We were raised two doors from each other. I always liked him. Well, anyway, the third time I tried it the gag worked and boom! out shoots the drawer. It looks like all the money in the world, right there in front of me. For a second, I’ve got to admit it, it crosses my mind to clean out the drawer. Boy, what we could do with that money! That’s what I mean when I say a lot of us could have gone either way. That’s why I feel for those fellers doing time. Yes, and even for Johnny Friendly. I know how it feels to want things so bad you c’n taste ’em. So you start grabbing with your own hands and the hell with everybody else. Isn’t that Johnny Friendly?

  “But I’m getting off my story. The cash register. The drawer open in front of me with all that cabbage. I finally decide to settle for the three singles. Then I try to get out of the store, but every door is locked, in some fancy way I can’t unlock it from the inside. I’m scared to death. I find a phone and call the grocery store to send word up to my old lady I’m okay and staying overnight with a friend. Then I hide in the men’s room for the night. I c’n hear footsteps coming. The night watchman. I go into the toilet partition and stand on the seat hunched down so he wouldn’t see my legs if he looked under. But if he comes in there I’m a goner. My heart was going like a pile driver. Bam bam bam. But the watchman just took a leak at the urinal and went on out again to make his rounds. In the morning when the store opened I bought the fire engine. Then I asked the janitor to keep it for me in the cellar until Christmas Eve. I was afraid my old lady would guess what happened and make me give it back.

  “Christmas morning I got my reward. Connie just about split a gut, he was so happy. But I could see my mother looking at me. I kept looking away. Finally she told me to follow her into the kitchen and she put it to me on the line. ‘Where would you get the money for a toy like that?’ I couldn’t tell her. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘as long as you tell Father Meehan. You’d better make a good confession.’

  “Waiting to see Father Meehan—I always call that my first visit to Purgatory. What if he made me give it back? It was Connie’s now. The best Christmas present he ever had. I made up my mind waiting in line—I’ll never forget it—if the priest gives me too much hell I’m through with the Church. I couldn’t believe it was such a terrible sin if it made Connie so happy.

  “Well, Meehan was okay. Oh, sure he warned me not to do it again and he threw the seventh commandment at me pretty hard, but he didn’t say anything about my having to bring it back. Just six Hail Marys and three Our Fathers. Whew! I walked out of there with both feet off the ground.” Father Barry laughed his sudden, hearty laugh.

  “So Runty, I’m in no position to sit in judgment on you when it comes to taking something home that doesn’t belong to you. I know the temptations, plenty. I know how it feels when they push you into a corner and lean on you until you feel you’ve just got to break out. That’s how a lot of these neighborhood punks feel. I figure our job isn’t to judge them, high and mighty, but to help ’em. I don’t want to act for you—but maybe I can fill the vacuum your union leaders would’ve filled if they were legitimate. I don’t want to try and lead you, but maybe I can give you a little more confidence to help yourselves.”

  Runty could feel himself slowly coming over to the priest. The first one he had ever known man to man. Father Barry was sitting on the bed with his collar and his jacket off, in his undershirt and suspenders, his balding head glistening with perspiration from the excitement of the talk. Runty told him of his lone-wolf efforts to spike the intrenched union mob. Like the time Willie Givens came down to the local to sit in on one of 447’s rare meetings. When it came time for “Good and Welfare,” President Willie was a master at chewing up the time with long-winded assurances of how much he loved the men and of the extent of his devotion to their welfare. The men would begin to yawn and get thirsty. By the time Willie was raising his voice to an eloquent peroration, most of his audience was i
n the saloon on the corner raising their whiskey glasses. Johnny Friendly would bang his gavel to adjourn the meeting and the pension, vacation and overtime ideas would be out the window for another year. No wonder the shippers were so fond of Weeping Willie.

  So, Runty was saying, this particular time he heard Willie through to the last flowery, whiskey-blown phrase. Whereupon Runty got the floor by saying he wanted to put in the form of a motion a brief tribute to President Givens. Johnny Friendly winked at Charley. So this little bundle of trouble was learning his lesson at last!

  “Mr. Chairman,” Runty began. “Our esteemed international president has only one fault. He gives too much of himself. He is so devoted to our interests that he don’t hesitate to stand on his feet to the point of exhaustion, ours as well as his, tellin’ us about it. So I’d like to make a motion, to protect the voice and strength of our esteemed president, that he never be allowed to talk to a meetin’ of Four-Four-Seven for more than five minutes at any one time.”

  The high-ocracy on the platform had been caught off balance. The fifty or so who were still present couldn’t help laughing and there were spontaneous cries of “Second the motion.” Charley the Gent, always the diplomat, tried to out-parliamentary the motion but Runty had boned up on his Rules of Order. On a point of order, he called for a vote. The question then had to be put and all in favor carried by a shouted vote of Aye! “It couldna gone through nicer ’n smoother if it had all been rehoised by a Commie fraction,” Runty chuckled. As Runty was well aware, Willie Givens was particularly unpopular in Four-Four-Seven, even among Johnny’s supporters, because he had gotten his start in this local. Oldtimers like Runty knew what a four-flushing wind-bag he was. Plenty of them respected Johnny Friendly for being tough and competent. But Willie, the International president, was just a blarney boy, a suck- around the higher-ups who had nothing but a lot of Irish oratory and some opportunistic good-time-charleying to go on. He needed the executive power of a Tom McGovern above him and the naked strength of a Johnny Friendly below him to prop him up to his exalted position as nominal head of all the dockworkers from Bangor to New Orleans.