On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  A. “I don’t pay much attention to them details.”

  Q. “Well, what do you do as president?”

  A. “Run back and forth, see that the men do their jobs, keep an eye on the shape-up, handle the meetings, and things like that.”

  Q. “Well, you haven’t had a membership meeting in over five years, have you?”

  A. “Yeah, I think we had a few.”

  Q. “Isn’t it a fact that one of the changes the late Mr. Joseph Doyle was campaigning for was regular meetings where the members would be allowed to express themselves? And isn’t it a fact that this is one of the reasons why you had young Mr. Doyle put to death?”

  Johnny glanced around until he located Terry in the audience and fixed him with a baleful look. Terry pressed his lips together and stared back at him.

  A. “I don’t know nothin’ about them killin’s.”

  Q. “I have only asked you about one, so far.”

  A. “Well, you can save yourself some time because I don’t know about any murders.”

  Q. “Do you realize that you are testifying under oath?”

  Hang on, look ’em in the eye and bull it through was Johnny Friendly’s witness-chair conduct, and as he was excused from the stand, he was heard to mutter, “You bunch o’ sons a …”

  The next witness called was Terry Malloy. He and Johnny passed each other in the aisle. Johnny opened his mouth in a sneer and Terry just looked at him coldly. Inside he felt a nervous quiver. How had he gotten here? It seemed only the other day that he and Johnny and Charley were watching a television fight together in back of Friendly’s and having a few laughs.

  “Mr. Malloy,” the clerk was saying, “do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

  “Yeah—right.”

  “I do,” the clerk corrected.

  “I do,” Terry grunted.

  The Counsel led Terry through a series of sullen answers concerning his own activities on the docks and then dropped the sixty-four-dollar question.

  “Mr. Malloy, is it true that on the night Joey Doyle was found dead that you were the last one to see him before he was pushed or fell off the roof?”

  A. “Brother, he was pushed!”

  Q. “Yes, we’ll come to that in a moment, but you were the last one to see him?”

  A. “Yeah—I mean—yes, you’re right.”

  Q. “And is it true that you went …”

  A. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, I mean I was the last one to see him except for the guys who pushed him off.”

  Q. “And you were acquainted with those gentlemen?”

  A. “You mean that pair o’ bums called Sonny and Specs.”

  Q. “Do you refer to Richard C. Flavin?”

  A. “That’s Specs.”

  Q. “And Jackson H. Rodell?”

  A. “Yeah, that’s Sonny.”

  The Chairman of the Commission interrupted. “Have Flavin and Rodell responded to their subpoenas?”

  The Chief Counsel: “No, sir. They are said to be out of the State at the present time and beyond our jurisdiction.”

  The answers came easier as Terry felt the sharp recoil of how they had suckered him into the murder of Joey. How could he have been so stupid as not to realize what they were up to when he already knew Joey was giving them a bad time, and anybody who gives Johnny Friendly a bad time has only two choices: to change his tune or stop whistling altogether.

  Q. “Now, Mr. Malloy, did Mr. Friendly ever say anything to you that would indicate his responsibility for getting rid of Joey Doyle—for wanting to end his life?”

  A. “Are you kiddin’? Hell, yes!”

  Q. “Now, please, Mr. Malloy, in somewhat less exclamatory language, would you be good enough to …”

  And the truth, the raw, ugly, purging truth poured out of Terry, unrehearsed, unexpurgated, uninhibited, his own sins merging with the velvet-glove racketeering of his brother Charley and the ruthless reign of terror that in the name of Johnny Friendly had made the docks of Bohegan a one-man show—and a slaughter house.

  A. “Yeah, and I could tell you about the time …”

  The Chief Counsel stepped forward. “Mr. Malloy, you may stand down now. I want to thank you for your forthright statements. I might say they offer something of a contrast to some others this afternoon.”

  Terry stepped down, excited. Talking about Charley and that last cab ride and how he knew it must have been Danny Dondero who took him out as a substitute for himself, these violent impressions fired off inside him like hot powder flashes, and he was half dazed and trembling with it when he felt rough hands grab him and shake him. It was Johnny Friendly struggling away from a Commission guard to shriek-spit into Terry’s unready face:

  “You stinkin’, rotten cheese-eater. You just dug your own grave. Go fall in it. You’re dead on this waterfront and every waterfront from Boston to New Orleans. You don’t drive a truck, you don’t push a baggage rack, you don’t even live. You’re a walking dead man.”

  As the Commission gavel pounded and the guards wrestled Johnny Friendly away, he spat into Terry’s face. Terry started his right hand, but someone grabbed it and he was pinned from behind and pulled away. There was a swirl of faces and camera flashes and reporters full of questions. It was almost like winning a fight and being rushed back to the dressing room. But Terry knew, jostled and overexcited and confused, he knew that this one was a lot harder, and it wasn’t over yet.

  Twenty-four

  STILL MUMBLING ABOUT JOHNNY Friendly, Terry was hustled into a delivery elevator and led out a back entrance by two uniformed cops who had been assigned to guard him. He had hated cops all his life and the sight of them was no more welcome to him now than it was before.

  They drove him to his tenement in their police car. He didn’t say anything, and they didn’t either. They were Donnelly men, looking to the Police Chief for advancement. Now that the Burke-Donnelly-Friendly team was under fire, their jobs on the Waterfront Squad were in jeopardy. A new police chief might even investigate their own weekly handout from the bookies, crap-game bankers and numbers men who operated on the piers under Friendly auspices.

  When Terry got out of the car he started to slam the door behind him, but the cops followed him out.

  “What’s the story?” Terry said, wanting to walk away from them.

  “We’re detailed to stay with you,” said Patrolman Novick.

  “Who wants you? Get lost,” Terry said irritably.

  The officers fell into step with him. “Orders, kid. You’re hot. You ought to be glad we’re with you.”

  “Aaaah,” Terry snarled at them. “Y’ make me feel like a canary.”

  They looked at each other and smiled. “Well…”

  “No kiddin’, you’ll drive me nuts hangin’ on my tail like this. How c’n I shake you guys?”

  “We’ve got to park outside your door tonight,” Thompson, the other patrolman said. “Tomorrow, if you still feel the same way, we’ll take you down to Headquarters and you can sign a release. At least then if they leave you like a Swiss cheese, our boss’ll have something to show the papers to get him off the hook.”

  “Ho, ho, very funny,” Terry said.

  Terry spent the rest of that day and most of the next morning in his room. Nobody called him or came to see him and it gave him a creepy feeling, as if he was sealed in a tomb, like being buried alive. He played three-handed poker with the cops, and one of them went out and brought in some sandwiches. Then he lay on his bed, sulking and wondering where the hell everybody was. He thought about Katie; he had half hoped she might come and pat him on the back for what he did. Then he thought: for what, for admitting I had a hand in the knock-off of her brother? And could’ve told Runty what he had coming, but didn’t quite work up the guts to? And let Charley throw himself into the pot to give me a chance to jump out of it? Yeah, I’m one heroic sonofabitch. Katie ought to run in and kiss me all over, I’m such a goddamn nob
le character.

  By noon next day he was too restless to imprison himself any longer. So he went down to Headquarters with Novick and Thompson and signed some kind of paper, blowing them off. Some of the detectives down there gave him the horse laugh. “How’s the big reformer?” one of them said. “Did you say informer?” another asked archly. Terry glared at them and told them where to put it.

  Just the same it felt funny-peculiar, walking down the street alone. He felt exposed. The Bohegan Graphic carried his picture that day with a subtle caption: Marked for Mob Vengeance? It was queer seeing it in print like that. It didn’t really feel like him. Somebody with the same name who looked like him. In a way he still felt as if he could saunter in to the Friendly Bar and have a beer and kid around with Johnny. Actually he was being careful to make a wide circle around Friendly’s. He wasn’t afraid, or anything. It was just that it would be easier not to have to see any of those guys for a while. He had a queasy feeling inside him that he would not have been able to explain to anybody. He knew he had done right. He knew Father Barry had it pegged right when he said the only possible way to get Friendly off their necks was to pack in the facts so the guys who wanted a better shake could have a chance. What the hell, if Johnny and the rest of them were going to do these things, they had to take their chances of guys on the other side getting up and fingering them. It wasn’t so much that Terry felt he had done right as that he had done what he had to do when they had pushed him to the edge. Still, there was some hangover of guilt in him, something that was just there, small but uncomfortable, like an infinitesimal pebble inside a sock.

  He dropped into a bar he had never patronized, a few blocks in from the waterfront, and had a few beers. He felt people staring at him. He felt alone. A couple of customers walked out. Maybe they were ready to anyway. But Terry imagined that they wanted to get out of gun range in case that crap in the Graphic turned out to be true. He decided to drop in on Hildegarde. Fat Hildegarde always liked him. She’d sort of be a test.

  Hildegarde said, “Hullo, mein sweetheart. I buy you a trink,” and seemed to be her usual good-natured-slob self. But Terry was more sensitive to mood than he had ever been before and he wondered if Hildegarde wasn’t forcing her gaiety in order to show him that everything was as it had been before. To make it worse, a couple of longshoremen friends of Pop Doyle were in the place and they pointedly moved farther down the bar from him, whether through physical fear or ostracism, who could tell? I go down the line for them and the Doyle crowd still treat me like a bum, Terry thought bitterly. And the other side’s looking to chop me. Some deal.

  On his way home he passed his chums, Chick and Jackie, with whom he used to have breakfast nearly every morning at the Longdock.

  “Hi, Chick—Jackie boy,” he called.

  They looked right through him and kept on going.

  Terry was jolted. Chick and Jackie, who were always laughing at his jokes and telling him what a fighter he was. Then his divided mind tried to reassure him. What made them so great, a couple of mob hangers-on, with not enough guts to go straight and not enough moxie to qualify for a spot with Johnny Friendly? What gave those two shlagooms the right to look away from Terry Malloy?

  He passed a couple of real small kids, ten or eleven, playing stick ball, and he stopped to talk to them. He had to talk to somebody. He thought of Billy and the Warriors, and his pigeons up on the roof. That was it. He’d go up and talk to them. Sometimes it seemed to him as if those pigeons could talk. Swifty would throw his neck out and make a noisy cooing sound and Terry would swear he could understand what the guy was trying to say.

  He felt a little better when he stepped out on the roof and saw Billy at the far end of it, near his coop.

  “Hiya, champ?” He tried to put some of the old ginger into his voice. “How’s the kid?”

  Billy didn’t answer. Billy just stared at him. There were tears of bitter rage in his eyes.

  “A pigeon for a pigeon!” The boy’s terrible contempt was hurled across the roof at Terry, and with it an object that struck him and fell at his feet. Then Billy was hurrying down the ladder to the fire-escape. But Terry was conscious only of the dead bird in his hand—Swifty—his lead bird, his favorite, whom he and Billy had waited for at the end of races so many times, shouting and slapping each other when Swifty came winging home high above the buildings or out over the river, Swifty, the strongest, the fastest, the best goddamn bird in the neighborhood. Feeling sick, with the bird’s limp, wrung neck hanging down from his hand, dreading even having to look, he walked slowly over to his coop.

  “Oh, Christ!” he moaned when he saw what had been done. “Oh, Christ, oh, Christ, oh, Christ …”

  Every single pigeon of Terry’s flock lay dead. Every single bird had been wrung by the neck. They lay in a sickening pile where they had been tossed on the floor of the coop.

  Terry sank down in the doorway of his coop and put his face into his hands and cried. When he had cried last, he had no idea. Not since he was seven, that’s for sure.

  How long had he been sitting there? It could have been half an hour. He looked up and Katie was coming toward him. He didn’t bother to greet her.

  “I’ve been wanting to see you,” she said.

  “Yeah. Well, you took your time.”

  “Pop wouldn’t let me come near you. He said it was dangerous.”

  “He’s probably right,” Terry said.

  “I’m going back to Marygrove tomorrow.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Terry said.

  “But I had to tell you that what you did …”

  “Aah, forget it,” he cut in. “It’s done.”

  It was only then that she looked behind him into the coop and saw the pigeons.

  “Oh, my God!” she said. “Oh, no, oh, no …”

  “Every goddamn one of them,” he said. “Every one.”

  “Oh, Terry, why, why?”

  He hesitated and then said in a low voice, “I guess that’s the kids’ idea of showin’ me what they think of stool pigeons. I guess that’s it.”

  “But what do they want instead, murders and …”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “Terry, you’ve got to get away from here now,” she said. “Maybe on a ship or out West, a farm …”

  “Farm!” he said with disgust.

  “Well, I don’t care, anywhere, as long as it’s away from here, from Johnny Friendly, from the whole horrible …”

  “Look,” he said. “Save your breath. There’s an old sayin’ on the waterfront. If they’re goin’ to get you, they’re goin’ to get you. They’ll follow you out West. They’ve gotten guys in Sing Sing. I even heard of them catchin’ up with a fella in Australia.”

  Katie pressed her fist hard against her lip so as not to cry.

  “Anyway don’t worry about me,” he said. “You’ll go back to school. Get to be a teacher and try to pound some sense into a lot of snotnose kids. Maybe meet a man teacher, so the two of you c’n starve to death an’ live happily ever after …”

  He tried to laugh at her trying not to cry.

  “Now you better beat it,” he said. “Your old man’s right. I know how to duck. But you want to get back to that daisyland of yours lookin’ as good as when you come down.”

  She almost bent forward to kiss him and then at the last moment she put out her hand.

  “I’ll pray for you,” she said. “I won’t forget you.”

  “That goes for me double,” he said. “Take it easy now, Katie.”

  She turned and walked back across the roof. She had the most graceful way of walking of any person he had ever known. What if he called out to her? What if he said, “Hey, Katie, come back!” Ten to one she would have. That’s what was so strange about it. He never went too far in school, but this he knew. The basic stuff he knew. And, brother, that lovely kid with her head in the clouds, maybe she wasn’t quite with it yet, not quite ready for it, but this was the basic stuff. And he never ki
ssed her, never even so much as touched her, except that minute and a half when they found themselves dancing. Boy, that was some minute and a half:

  … I left my love in Avalon

  And sailed—away …

  He watched the last bit of her long, streaked-brown hair disappearing into the stairwell three roofs beyond. The pile driver on the waterfront was still banging away, busy at the new pier where Terry had been offered the boss loader slot, but Terry was oblivious to the pounding. He stood there thinking about her.

  A few days later he was walking along Dock Street, wondering if he could wangle a job as a teamster with an anti-Givens local in the near-by town of Hoboken. A car pulled up to the curb near the corner and Johnny Friendly got out, followed by Truck and Gilly. There had been some newspaper demands for Johnny Friendly’s arrest for his part in the various waterfront murders cited at the hearings. But the local district attorney, part of the old City Hall crowd desperately hanging on, had explained that it was impossible to indict Friendly as accessory to a murder when the two principals in the case were out of the country. Specs Flavin and Sonny Rodell were believed to be in Cuba, and even if they were extradited, Friendly could hardly be indicted unless they were willing to identify him as the instigator of the plot.

  Terry’s immediate reaction when he saw Johnny Friendly at the end of the block was to turn away and drift over into a cigar-store entrance and keep his head averted until Johnny had disappeared around the corner. But as he tried to hide himself on a public street in broad daylight, he remembered what he had told Katie about the mob’s being able to track you down. Hell, they were their own F.B.I. And with this, some of his old cocksure, I’m-with-me feeling poured back into him. He pivoted in Friendly’s direction and quickened his steps and even called to him, “Hey, Johnny. I wanna see ya.”

  Johnny Friendly stopped and waited. He was calm. He had been working around the clock to hold everything together and he had a good grip on himself. It was Terry who was overwrought now.

  “Hey, Johnny, you want to know the trouble with you?” he slugged it in. “You take them heaters away from you, you take the tailored suits and the kickbacks and the shakedown cabbage and the pistoleros away from you, and you’re nothin’! You’re nothin’! Your guts is all in your wallet and your trigger-finger! You know that?”