On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  “Who were those two?” Katie said.

  “It aint safe,” Terry continued. “Now I’m tellin’ you for your own good. It just aint safe. I tell you, lay off.”

  “Why worry about me?” Katie said. “You’re the one who was just saying you only look out for yourself.”

  “Okay, okay,” Terry said harshly, feeling some relief from guilt and his frustrated attraction for her in being able to lash out at her. “Go ahead, get in hot water. Just don’t come hollerin’ to me when you get burned.”

  “Why should I come hollering to you at all?” Katie asked.

  “Because …” Terry said resentfully, “because…I think you and me are gettin’ …”

  He looked at her angrily, and guiltily, and hung his head.

  “I won’t let myself,” Katie warned him. “Not me! “

  “That goes for me double,” Terry said.

  Inside, in the private room, the overhead lights were dimming again. The band swung into a Lombardo version of a Dick Rodgers waltz.

  “I’m leaving,” Katie said.

  “Yeah, let’s cut outta here,” Terry said. “I’ll see ya home.”

  It had grown colder as the sun ducked behind the massive ridge of factories marking the western outskirts of the city. They no longer had anything to say to each other. They walked rapidly down Dock Street. Approaching Terry’s stoop, a half dozen doors down from the Doyles’, Katie was just about to tell him there was no need for him to accompany her any farther when a man in a brown tweed overcoat and a dark brown hat stepped quickly out of the front hallway where he had been waiting. “Mr. Malloy?” he called out to Terry.

  Terry swung in surprise at the mister. He frowned as he recognized the Crime Commission joker, the tall, broad-shouldered one who had asked him too many questions at the Longdock.

  “Yeah, yeah?” Terry said.

  Glover approached with a pleasant smile. “I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Malloy. You’re being served with a subpoena, Mr. Malloy.”

  He handed the unprepossessing sheet of paper to Terry. Terry didn’t look at it. He crumpled it into a ball in his hand.

  “Be at the State House. Courtroom Nine, at ten o’clock Monday morning,” Glover said.

  This was too much for Terry. “Listen, I already told ya. I don’t know nuthin’. I don’t know nuthin’ about that.”

  “You’re entitled to bring a lawyer with you,” Glover went on. “And you’re privileged under the Constitution to protect yourself against questions that might incriminate you.”

  “Are you kiddin’?” Terry said, suspended somewhere between anguish and anger. “Y’know what you’re askin’ me to do?”

  “Mister Malloy,” Glover said in a practiced voice, as if he had spoken this line a thousand times, “all we’re asking you to do is to tell the truth.”

  “All,” Terry said bitterly. “That’s all, huh?” He shook his head scornfully. “Boy, what you don’ know.”

  “See you Monday morning,” Glover said. “And of course failure to appear means a warrant for you and an automatic contempt of court. Good day, Mr. Malloy.”

  “Mister Malloy,” Terry said with his hands on his hips, disdainfully, as he watched Glover walk away. “Cop!”

  “What are you going to do?” Katie said.

  Terry had forgotten she was still there. “Tell you one thing,” he said viciously. “I aint gonna eat cheese for no cops, and that’s for sure.”

  It was hoodlum talking, pure hoodlum and it aroused a sharp, pure reaction in Katie. “It was Johnny Friendly who killed Joey, wasn’t it?” she said.

  Terry clenched his fingers around the subpoena. He looked down at his feet. He felt like running, as if he just swiped some stuff off a pushcart and should be getting out of there in a hurry. “Katie …” he started to say.

  But now Katie was pressing. “He had him killed or had something to do with it, didn’t he? He and your brother Charley? Isn’t that true?”

  “Katie, listen …”

  “You can’t tell me, can you? Because you’re part of it. And as bad as the worst of them. Just as bad. Aren’t you? Tell me the truth, Terry. Aren’t you?”

  She was raising her voice, on the verge of tears, and Terry took a step backward and put a hand out as if to calm her.

  “Shhh, take it easy, take it easy. You better go back to that school out in daisyland. You’re drivin’ yourself nuts. You’re drivin’ me nuts. You’re drivin’ everybody nuts. Quit worryin’ about the truth all the time. Worry about yourself.”

  Katie lowered her voice, so as not to scream at him. “I should have known you wouldn’t tell me. Pop said Johnny Friendly used to own you. I think he still owns you.”

  “Please. Don’t say that to me, Katie …”

  Katie looked at him and wanted to cry. Then she said, as gently as she could, “No wonder everybody calls you a bum.”

  “Don’t say that to me, Katie. Don’t say that to me now.”

  “No wonder … no wonder …” Katie kept repeating softly.

  “I’m—I’m tryin’ t’ keep ya from bein’ hurt. Don’t you see? What more d’ya want?”

  “Much more, Terry,” Katie said. “Much much much more.”

  She turned away abruptly and ran up the street toward her tenement stoop so as not to let him see her crying.

  Terry watched her hurry up the steps into her hallway. Then he looked at the crumpled paper in his hand. “Son of a bitch,” he said fervently, “son of a wall-eyed bitch. Son of a lousy joint-chewing wall-eyed bitch.”

  Then he remembered Johnny Friendly. He must be getting light in the head to follow a broad like this and disobey a direct order from Johnny Friendly. With his head down, trying to think, and the stinking subpoena burning a hole in his pocket, he turned the corner toward the docks and the back room of the Friendly Bar on River Street where Union Brother John Friendly was waiting for him.

  Sixteen

  BIG MAC AND GILLY and Truck and Sonny and Specs and “J.P.” and the rest of them stared at Terry when he entered the back room of Johnny Friendly’s bar. They looked at him as if they had never seen him before. Even Charley barely mumbled “Hiya, kid.” They were waiting for Johnny Friendly to make the move.

  “Well, it’s nice of you to drop around,” Johnny said as Terry approached. Friendly’s eyes were feared around here for their cold-blue dead-pan stare when he was crossed. His lips barely moved when he talked. There was more than anger in him.

  There was a studied withdrawal that made men who incurred his enmity come close to collapse when he fixed them with this look. It was known and dreaded on River Street as “The Friendly freeze.”

  Terry was on his guard because he could feel all their eyes watching him for sign of geezer. How tough was the tough kid now? their eyes were asking.

  “I was comin’ over,” Terry said carefully. He glanced at Charley, who was standing near Johnny. Charley was with him, but he kept a stern face on him so as not to weaken himself with Johnny. These were make-or-break moments in this business. Johnny’s was a terrible authority, beyond appeal. There was no hedging, no uncertainty. Mercy or punishment was dealt from the top of the deck, slapped on the table for all to see, irrevocable.

  “Just comin’ over here,” Johnny said mincingly. Then he made his voice coarser and louder. “How? By way of Chicago?”

  Big Mac and one or two others laughed obligingly. Terry tightened his mouth at them and tried to stop Johnny from jabbing him silly with words.

  “No kiddin’, Johnny, I was …”

  “Shut up, you shlagoom,” Johnny said. The seventy-five-cent H. Uppmann clenched in his mouth was like the muzzle of a .45 fixing Terry at point-blank range. “How many times you been knocked out, Terry?”

  There was scattered laughter again, but this time Terry didn’t turn away from Johnny’s ice-blue eyes.

  “Knocked out? Uh …” Terry thought back, over the good nights and the tough ones. “Only two times. And one was on cuts th
at night …”

  “Shut up,” Johnny said. “Two times. That must’ve been once too often. Your brains must be rattling. What you got up there, Chinese bells? Huh? You got a bunch o’ Chinese bells up there where your brains useta be?”

  There was another claque-like chuckle, and Johnny said over his shoulder, “All right, turn it off. This aint no comedy hour. Because of this—genius here, we’re in a squeeze.”

  “What’s a matter?” Terry said. “What I done wrong?”

  Johnny turned to Charley the Gent who was trying to play it cool. “I thought he was gonna keep an eye on that church meeting? I thought you said he could do the job?”

  Charley said nothing.

  “Johnny, I was there,” Terry said. “I cased the whole thing. There was nothin’ happened.”

  Johnny turned to Charley again. Charley managed an expression for his face that was no expression. Johnny Friendly pushed the needle in deeper. “Nothing happened, the kid says. Some operator you got yourself there, Charley. One more like him and we’ll all be wearing striped pajamas.”

  This time nobody laughed. The silence in the room was like a sudden lack of oxygen. Behind him in the front room Terry could hear the indistinct buzz of bartalk and the senseless laughter from the television. He longed to be out there, tanking up and shooting the breeze. He touched his forehead with his fingers and the skin was cold and wet. He hated to give himself away in front of these other punks. You could hold on to yourself inside, but those sweat glands kept pumping fear onto your face.

  Terry turned to Charley for solace, for support. “I told ya, Charley, it was a big nothin’. The Father did all the talkin’.”

  Johnny looked around at the group whose indignation was a barefaced copy of his own. “All right, you fellas, beat it,” he said. “Everybody but Charley. I want to talk to this shlagoom alone.”

  They filed out dutifully. Johnny chewed forcefully on the end of his cigar.

  “The Father did all the talking,” Johnny kept taking Terry’s words, crumpling them into hard balls and throwing them back in Terry’s face. “Well, this afternoon your goddamn priest took a certain Timothy J. Nolan into a secret session with the Crime Commission and Nolan did all the talking. Now whaddya think of that?”

  “You mean little Runty Nolan? The oldtimer? Half gassed alla time?” Terry shrugged. “He don’t know much.”

  “He don’t, huh?” Johnny said. Reaching into his inside pocket he pulled out a thick manuscript bent lengthwise, and slammed it down on the table.

  “You know what this is?”

  Terry shook his head, worried.

  “Just thirty-nine pages on the way we operate, that’s all.”

  “How’d you get that?” Terry was impressed.

  Johnny gestured with his thumb in the direction of some higher connection. “None of your goddamn business. I got it.”

  “Never mind, he got it,” Charley seconded. “The complete works of Timothy J. Nolan. Hot off the press. Thank Christ it was an executive session and can’t be used against us until he testifies in public.”

  “Charley,” Johnny said, “you got the brains to talk, but sometimes you haven’t got the brains not to talk. You know what I mean?”

  Charley knew what he meant. When the pupils of Johnny’s eyes were the size and hardness of buckshot even his intimate friends were cowed.

  “Nolan!” Terry couldn’t get over it. “I knew he had the guts, but …”

  “Guts!” Johnny stood up with both fists shaking. Charley had seen him like this perhaps a dozen times and each time it had signaled an execution. “A crummy pigeon who’s lookin’ to get his neck wrung.”

  He turned his back on Terry, whose face was an expressive composite of fear, resistance and resignation.

  “Charley, you should’ve known better than to trust this punched-out kid brother of yours. He was all right hanging around for laughs. But this is business, important business.

  We’re chopping up ten G’s a week. I can’t afford to have goof-offs messing in my business.”

  “Now listen, Johnny, how could I tell …” Terry tried to cut in.

  “I told you shut up. It’s too late now. You should’ve kept an eye on ’em. Every one of them cudsuckers. You should’ve asked for more troops if you needed help.”

  He turned to Charley again. “Charley, do you realize what this means?” He flipped through the pages of the transcript. “The stuff Nolan’s got in here is dynamite. He was around when Willie Givens and Big Tom were gettin’ started. He knows where a couple of bodies are buried.”

  “For Mr. Big it’s forty years ago,” Charley said. “Statute of limitations.”

  “Sure, sure,” Johnny said. “But it’ll be all over the papers. Even if they can’t indict him, it won’t do Willie Givens any good. And the big guy’ll be pissed off at us for not cutting this Nolan down. And the bunch we got over here in City Hall is pretty shaky. A bad stink now could blow the lid off.”

  “It’s still only one fella,” Charley said. “And we’ve been investigated before.”

  “Sure, sure,” Johnny said. “And rode ’em out fine. And we will again. They aint gonna pry me loose just because they blow on me a little. I worked too hard. Only remember, the last time we had an investigation, it was a city job and they weren’t pushing too hard. So it was all a lot of headlines and recommendations and when all the smoke and the bullshit blew away we was still in solid, just like before.” He chuckled hard to himself. “Was that funny, in Brooklyn the investigation found out that the Genotta family was the officers of all the locals. So they recommend there’s gotta be a new honest election. So all the Genotta boys win every office again. And the city certifies this is now okay because there was a new election like they recommended.”

  Charley joined, tentatively, in the laugh on reform futility. “Yeah, it’s pretty hard for a city to investigate itself.”

  “But this is a State job, Charley, a bi-state job. There’s already been some stink in the papers, and the Governors and the City Halls got no love for each other. I tell you, Charley, I don’t like this investigation. I don’t like this Father Buttinsky. I think it’s time Willie Givens tries to get the Monsignor to stick a towel in his mouth. Slap him back in the church and make him shut up, for Christ sake. I’d be willing to make a nice contribution if this Barry would only get lost.”

  “Gee, Johnny, I thought I done what I was …” Terry tried another half-hearted lead. This time it was Charley who cut him off.

  “What the hell are you going around with his sister for?”

  “I’m not, I’m not. I was only …”

  “Johnny, it’s that girl,” Charley interrupted. “He meets that Doyle broad in the church and whammo, he can’t find his way back to his corner.” He turned and raised his voice to Terry. “It’s an unhealthy relationship.”

  “Move away from her, stay off her,” Johnny ordered. “Unless you’re both tired of living.”

  “Crazy kid,” Charley said.

  Johnny said, “Charley, the next week or two is gonna be very touchy. We better have a meeting with Willie Givens tonight, and our legal eagle and some of the other—officials around the harbor. Sort of close ranks.”

  “We’ve got to make this investigation look like a union-busting conspiracy,” Charley said. “It’s a dangerous precedent for the State to investigate or try to control a bonafide labor union.”

  “Right,” Johnny said. “You keep working on that. Talk to some of the reporters friendly with the shipping companies. We want to get this into the best papers. As for this Nolan—that dirty stooling bastard, we got to find a way to put the muzzle on him or he might start a whaddya call it—when it gets going faster ’n faster.”

  “An avalanche,” Charley said.

  “Yeah,” Johnny said, “a pebble gets rolling and then a few rocks and whammo the whole goddamn mountain is coming down on top of us.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll ride it out,” Charley said. “
There’s too much money on our side. Too many connections.”

  “And thank God we got the best muscle on the waterfront,” Johnny said. “The time to use it is now, pronto, before that phony priest talks any more of these screwball Nolan bastards into singin’ on us.”

  “How can a little barfly like Runty …” Terry started to say.

  Johnny Friendly walked over to him until his mouth was shouting in Terry’s face. “The only time you talk now is when I ask you something. You know where you’re going? Down in the hold. No more cushy jobs in the loft. It’s down in the hold with the sweat gang until you learn your lesson.”

  “It’s nice of him to give you any job at all after you goof like that,” Charley said.

  “Yeah … I guess so,” Terry said miserably.

  “On your way out tell Specs Flavin to come in,” Johnny dismissed him. Terry tried to keep his chin up as he walked out. Charley looked worried and Johnny said to him, “I guess once a bum, always a bum. Same reason he never made a great fighter.”

  When Terry passed through the front room nobody called to him to stop for a shot. He kept on walking. He walked down to the foot of Dock Street and along the river to a burned-out pier. The blackened, fire-chewed pilings stuck up out of the water, some of them barely rising above the surface, others nearly as tall as their original height. Terry sat on a charred stump near the river’s edge and stared into the murky, refuse-littered surface of the Hudson. Near-by a plump girl of about eleven in a dirty dress and a younger brother in an oversized torn sweater were fishing for coins, just as Terry used to do when he was a kid. You used a long stick and a piece of string and a stone with chewing gum on the bottom. Out in midstream a tug was towing a lighter with three freight cars on it. How many times Terry had stowed away in one of those boxcars to beat the ferry out of a nickel. Terry stared down at the dark, brooding reflection of himself in the filthy water.

  Miss Square from Nowhere, he thought. Hell, the way he was going, they were a pair from nowhere.

  Seventeen

  RUNTY NOLAN LEANED ON the bar at the Longdock conversing with his friends Moose McGonigle and Pop Doyle. He was wondering whether or not to show up for the night shift in the hold he had been tabbed for at the shape-up that morning. After seeing Charley the Gent’s brother at the church meeting, he had been rather surprised that Big Mac had given him the nod for anything, even the hatch gang. The hold was a kind of longshore slum usually reserved for the more recently arrived foreign-born, the ship-jumpers, the Negroes and the Johnny-come-latelies without influence on the docks. It was a studied insult to offer a hatch job to a veteran docker. Most of the American-Irish on Big Mac’s pier would have spit in the hiring boss’ face at the suggestion that they help lift the hatch covers, break into the top-compartment cargo and gradually work their way down into the bowels of the ship.