On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  Terry walked away, back toward his coop. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen Swifty flying into the coop and he wanted to check his beak. He had noticed some dampness around the nostril holes. It could be a slight cold.

  Glover followed Terry, moving casually. He knew his business. He stood outside the coop looking in as Terry grabbed Swifty and felt his beak.

  Glover hadn’t seen the Malloy-Wilson match, but had gone to the trouble of checking on it with a boxing writer he knew.

  “I thought you were going to take him that night,” Glover said. “You won the first two rounds by a mile. But he sure caught up with you. Man, he really dumped you.”

  Terry let Swifty fly back to his perch and came closer to the wire netting.

  “He dumped me, huh? What would you say if I told you I hadda hold that bum up for half a round?”

  “I see. I see. You mean he was hurt?”

  “Whatta you think I was doin’ with them combinations, pettin’ ’im?”

  “You mean you had him, but you just couldn’t finish him off, huh?” Glover asked.

  “Finish him off,” Terry said scornfully. “Hell, I could feel him goin’. I coulda finished ’im off.”

  “The record book shows he finished you off,” Glover reminded him. “Fifth round, wasn’t it?”

  “Who the hell cares?” Terry said. The truth boiled up in him. “I was doin’ a favor for a couple of fellas …”

  “Favor! “ Glover said. “I’m glad I didn’t bet on that one. So that’s the way it was.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s the way it was. Ya know if I had copped that one I’d ’ve been in line fer the title? Wilson was rated third and I was right behind him and the two bums ahead of us didn’t have the connections.” Terry shook his head a moment, remembering the road work, the rata-ta-tatta of the light bag, the strategy. “I was real sharp that night.”

  “You sure looked it, those first few rounds. I figured you started too fast and that counter-punching of his took it out of you.”

  “Hah!” Terry snorted. The Wilson fight was a crimp in his mind he could never work out. “Them sports writers said the same thing, but it was a lousy bet took it out of me.”

  “You don’t say?” Glover said quietly and stretched. “Well, guess I better get going. Hit those stairs again. It’s been nice talking to you. I watch the fights on TV twice a week. I think you could clean up on these middleweights they got messing around today.”

  “Once in a while I get thinkin’ I could make it back,” Terry said. “I’m only twenty-eight. I still got my legs.”

  “And you could punch,” Glover said. “By the way, a friend of mine and I were arguing about the Wilson fight the other night. Was that a hook or a bolo you caught him with in the third round?”

  “Bolo,” Terry said contemptuously. “That’s for the birds. Some writer made that up to give Gavilan some color. A bolo is just a telegraphed uppercut.” He burlesqued one. “A big nothing.” The stance of shadow boxing and a whiff of the old flattery excited him. “I was strictly a short puncher,” he said proudly, and came out of the coop. “Look, you put your left out and I’ll show you somethin’.” He maneuvered Glover into an awkward semblance of a boxer’s pose.

  “I had that bum all figured out, see. He had a good left hand, ya know what I mean? Okay, so I let him slap me with the left for a couple of rounds. Build up his confidence, see? And all the time I’m watchin’ how he drops his right. So just when he thinks he’s gettin’ cute and can tag me whenever he wants me, I step inside the jab—whop, with a right!”—he threw his right hand viciously—“whop with a left, then when his hand comes down I bring up the uppercut—six inches, but I know how to throw it—WHOP! He falls into my arms. He don’ know if he’s in the Garden or in Roseland and from there on we’re just dancin’, dancin’ … That Wilson couldn’t fight too much.”

  “I believe you,” Glover said, apparently interested.

  “Well, that’s a fact! That’s a fact,” Terry said excitedly. “Jesus, how I wanted to put him away. But no dice. All for a lousy bet. Hell, my own bro …”

  Terry heard himself and stopped short.

  “Your own who?” Glover encouraged him.

  “Aah, it’s ancient history,” Terry subsided. “Who’n hell cares about me ’n Wilson?”

  “Well, I better get going,” Glover said. “Sorry to hear they wouldn’t let you win it. Better luck next time.”

  “Hah, hah,” Terry said bitterly. “With my luck and a subway token I couldn’t get to Times Square.”

  “See you soon,” Glover smiled. “I’d like to hear the whole story some time.” He disappeared into the rooftop stairway.

  An hour later Terry was still up there, sitting on an upturned box, watching his birds. He heard someone come up on the roof three houses away. It was Katie. She was wearing a blue scarf around her head to keep her hair from blowing. It was windy on the rooftop, although the sun was filtering through the cold marble sky. When she lingered at Joey’s coop, Terry didn’t know whether to call over to her or not. He had tried to avoid her on the dock at Runty’s impromptu send-off the day before and he was resigned to the fact that his chance was one to fifty that she would ever speak to him again. Well, he’d settle for that. Bohegan was a fishbowl and sooner than later it would get back to Johnny. Things were tough enough now.

  “Don’t see her no more,” Johnny had ordered.

  “You owe it to Katie to tell her the truth,” Father Barry had insisted.

  Terry felt like a one-man tug of war with his body on both ends and his head in the middle. “Kee—rist,” he said out loud.

  Katie turned from the coop on the other roof and came toward Terry. When she was close enough for him to see her face clearly, he felt panicky. She was so damned fresh-looking. When you looked at her you liked her, you trusted her, you wanted to take care of her. Christ! She was the kind of girl a hood like him had no right to be in the same room with. The same world. She wanted too much.

  “I was hoping I’d find you up here,” she said.

  “Yeah, I—got a sick bird.”

  “I was thinking about Joey’s birds,” she said. “We have got to get rid of them. Pop says the butcher will take them, but I …” She paused and he was very close to her and again he felt the urge to touch her cheek, put his arms around her, but of course he wouldn’t dare. In his whole tenement-roof, pool-hall and street-corner life he had never been unsure of himself with any girl before. “But I—I thought maybe you could take them in with yours,” she continued. “At least they’d have a nice life. I know you’d take good care of them. I could trust you for that.”

  “Sure, sure. Anything you say,” Terry mumbled. Then he took a small step forward, a big step inwardly. The tar-paper floor of the roof was vibrating from the concussion of the pile-driver at the river bank a block away.

  “Katie, listen to me,” Terry said. “I”—he reached back for Father Barry’s words—“owe it to ya to tell ya somethin’.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s been jabbin’, jabbin’ in my mind ever since that night in the church,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper with you,” she said. “It’s a sin not to forgive people, even when you want them to be better.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep sayin’ stuff like that,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it makes me feel like even more of a louse. It makes me feel like I’m crawlin’ in snakes. That’s why I gotta tell ya, Katie. You’ll hate my guts all your life, but I can’t keep it from comin’ out no more. It’s—it’s like—forgive the expression—like puke. Once ya feel it comin’ up in your throat ya’ve got to let it out.”

  “Then do,” Katie said. “Let it come out.”

  With a terrible panic he looked at her a moment from across the gulf. Then he plunged in.

  “Katie, I—I just told the Father what I did—what I did to Joey.”

  She put her face in her han
ds and shook her head into them. “No …”

  “What I did to Joey,” he raised his voice to overcome the insistent pounding of the pile-driver. Unconsciously Katie moved her hands from her face until they were pressing against her ears. Terry went on shouting, the guilt pouring out of him in a relieving purge—lissen—lissen—my brother Charley—and Johnny—good to me—a favor—the pigeon—got Joey to the roof—Specs and Sonny—the guilt and filth of it pouring out of him into Katie’s innocent, no longer trusting face and her horrified whisper “No … no …”

  A mighty ship swinging into mid-channel on its way to the Narrows let out a harbor-shattering blast with rows of earsplitting Zs and Ns in its BZZZZZNNNNN … but nothing could stop Terry from spewing it forth. It had to come out to the last shred of gagged-up phlegm. His voice rose hysterically to make itself heard above the giant thumping of the pile-driver and the violent intrusion of the ship’s whistle. “Katie, I’m tellin’ the truth. I’m not holdin’ nuthin’ back. I set Joey up for ’em. But, Katie, honest to God, I didn’ look to see ’im killed. I didn’ know. I DIDN’ KNOW …” The blast from the ship had suddenly stopped and Terry’s voice was so loud it sounded as if it could have been heard all over Bohegan. A moment later the pile-driver paused too, as if to catch its steam-engine breath. It was suddenly still. Terry lowered his voice almost to a whisper now. “Katie … Katie … I never thought they’d …”

  “You never thought anything—except how to stuff your mouth or your pockets,” Katie said with a fierceness that lashed Terry with a steel tip because it was so unexpected in her. “You weren’t killing him or not killing him. You were just looking out as usual for number one.”

  He put his hand out, tentatively to restrain her, but she turned and ran across the roof, dodging the skylights and ducking through the steel branches of the TV forest that had spread from house to house.

  Okay, he did it, he did it, he was thinking. Now what? What’s the deal? He had felt a kind of crazy exhilaration to get the thing off his chest to Katie. And now—nothing. He felt tired and just wanted to stretch out and be quiet—like after a hard ten-round fight. The pile-driver began its pounding again. Goddamn it, would it never quit? Was there never gonna be no peace nowhere? He envied Runty Nolan, wherever he was. At least he didn’t have to make any more moves. It was this having to decide things one way or another that drove pointed sticks into your head.

  “Jesus, Mary ’n Joseph …” Terry said, meaning to curse. But his mind was so battered and his spirit so torn that it issued from him softly, more like a prayer.

  Twenty-one

  THE GATHERING OF JOHNNY Friendly’s “pistol local” officials in the weather-beaten office on the wharf was only one of a chain of meetings going on in the longshoremen’s union offices all along the Jersey waterfront and around the harbor from Staten Island, the West, South and East Sides of Manhattan and far out into Brooklyn. There had been emergency sessions of the District Council. High-up members of the syndicate like Jerry Benasio’s dreaded brother Alky, who had Brooklyn and most of Jersey, and Wally “Slicker” McGhee, a big dealer from the Lower West Side, had flown up from hideouts in Miami and Hollywood, Florida, to help work out a common strategy for the dock bosses who were being subpoenaed.

  In other words, the heat was on. The Crime Commission had an order to call in and examine all the union books. Company records were being subpoenaed too, and the scuttlebutt was that shipping executives were being asked tough questions in private about the practice of keeping “phantoms” on the payroll to line the pockets of local officers and of systematically paying off the union leaders at Christmas for “keeping peace on the docks.” There were rumors that stevedore officials, faced with proof in canceled checks or confiscated payrolls—or a telltale absence of records—were talking in order to shift the blame away from the “respectable” shipping associations and onto the muscular shoulders of the crime boys who had been running the longshore locals as private mobs.

  Sure, there had been investigations before, at least a dozen of them, producing a week of headlines, but usually with no result more serious than the conviction of a hapless loan shark or two, or a loud-mouthed hoodlum the mob was ready to slough off anyway.

  But this time the dreaded tide of waterfront reform seemed to be on the rise. Metropolitan papers had begun to editorialize against a whitewash. An underground of rebel longshoremen seemed ready to erupt. There were even rumors that the Commission had the goods on Willie Givens, who had quietly appointed Sing Sing and Dannemora boys as union organizers, or had handed them charters to start new locals they could run as their own. But Willie himself was a civic leader. Willie was a vice-president of a state labor organization. Willie’s florid bulk was a familiar sight on the platform at political rallies in the Garden.

  The annual banquet of the Willie Givens Association boasted a guest list of political brass that rivaled anything in the State. And side by side with the mayors, borough presidents, councilmen, senators and judges you would find the Benasios, the McGhees, the pride of the Brooklyn Mafia, the social register of the narcotics trade and the gunmen and shakedown artists who had made the docks their own. At last year’s dinner Johnny Friendly had reserved Table 17 for himself, Charley, Big Mac McGown, Police Commissioner Donnelly, Bohegan Mayor Bobby Burke and assorted councilmen, local judges and body- guards. Now Bobby Burke, who was about to run for re-election and was a crumb-picker from the Keegan table in Jersey City, was panicky. He and Donnelly had a piece of the numbers in Bohegan, as well as something coming in from the docks. All he was looking for was to get out with his take without a Grand Jury or a State investigation.

  Johnny Friendly was the strength in the Bohegan sector. Now he was ready to show what he had that had put him up where he was. The thing to do was to close ranks and hang on, hard. “Tough it out” was Johnny’s motto. Admit nothing. Bull it through. The men around him could feel the bull, animal strength, not so much in the muscles but in his mind. In his mind he was right, he was justified. The way he ran the docks not only paid off for him, but kept the ships moving in and out. Not only had he mastered the larceny side, but he prided himself on knowing all the technical tricks of loading. He could spot a mistake quicker than old Captain Schlegel. He belonged down here. He had come up out of the hold. He knew everyone’s job. This was all his, and his mission in life was to keep it that way.

  Sitting with him was Charley and Truck and Gilly and “J.P.” Morgan and his hiring bosses, Big Mac, Socks Thomas and Flat-top Karger who had just been paroled on a manslaughter rap. Specs and Sonny had beat it to Florida as soon as Father Barry raised his stink on the dock. Johnny would have to stake them until the heat was taken off.

  There was no gavel here and no solemn oaths, but everybody knew that a court was in session, with Johnny as judge, jury and prosecutor, Terry Malloy on trial in absentia and his glib brother Charley on the anxious seat for the first time. The groundswell of resentment against Terry for hanging around the Doyle girl had mounted with reports of his having gone back to the church to see Barry. And from a rooftop across the street, where he had been instructed to maintain a lookout, the ubiquitous “J.P.” had seen plenty.

  “I couldn’t hear what they was sayin’, boss, but Terry and this bum from the Commission was nose to nose for ten fifteen minutes. Terry was doin’ a lot of talkin’, that’s for sure, and this flatfoot looked like he was eatin’ it up.”

  “Nose to nose,” Johnny Friendly said, looking at Charley.

  “Like a pair o’ lovers,” “J.P.” said.

  “Some brother,” Johnny said, looking at Charley.

  Charley swallowed and said nothing.

  “Well, you usually got something to say,” Johnny said.

  Charley took a deep breath and made an effort to trade on his slightly educated gift of gab.

  “Nose to nose might not mean too much, Johnny.” Charley tried to sound confident. “He could have been telling him off too, like he did before. I s
till don’t believe he’s going to talk. There won’t be any evidence of that until he gives public testimony.”

  Johnny pushed a cigar into his mouth and talked around it. His cold, sarcastic voice made second-string tough guys like Truck, Gilly and Big Mac feel relieved that they weren’t on the receiving end.

  “Thanks for the legal advice, Charley. That’s what I always kept you around here for. Now how do we keep this no-good son-of-a-bitch from giving public testimony? Isn’t that what you call—ah—the main order of business?”

  Big Mac muttered something in back of his hand and Truck’s fat-muscled shoulders shook with troubled mirth. Charley glared at them. Meatheads, the lot of them. And every one of them drawing down a couple of union salaries and expenses because Charley had set it up for them.

  “Johnny, he’s not the brightest, but he’s a good kid, you know that.”

  “He’s a bum,” Big Mac said. “After the days I gave him in the loft, he’s got no gratytude.”

  “You shut up,” Charley suddenly raised his voice at Big Mac. “How about your gratitude to me? I kept you on the job. Schlegel wanted to fire you half a dozen times.”

  Johnny put both hands out in front of him, fingers spread wide, to signal silence.

  “All right, Mac—Charley—I’m conductin’ this—investigation.”

  There were a few cautious smiles from the claque. But they were all worried. Charley was a valuable member. He was good at talking to the Central Trades Council and in the wage-scale negotiations and to the press. Now things were heating up all over the harbor and a legitimate-looking fella like Charley the Gent would be handy to have around. One of the best “sea lawyers” in the harbor.

  “Terry’s done a few favors for us, Johnny. We mustn’t forget that,” Charley tried again. “It’s simply that this girl and maybe the priest too have begun exerting some kind of influence over him that’s, well, that’s affecting his mental attitude. See what I mean?”

  This had been velvet talk for confusing honest members of the District Council or a militant wage-scale delegate. But Johnny had no patience with it now.