On the Waterfront (28 page)

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.

R
UNTY 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.

Runty even wondered what was behind Big Mac’s thumbing him into the hold. He had approached the Crime Commission office by as roundabout a route as possible and he was fairly sure he had not been followed. Just the same there were ten thousand eyes on the waterfront, and you never knew.

Well, he wouldn’t stay out of the hold for that reason. He was on borried time, he always said, and if they were going to get him they’d find him anywhere. The hell with them! He could use that time-and-a-half, thirty-five dollars for the grueling, ten-hour night shift, bread and beer money, of which he would need all that he could get if he was really going to stick his neck out and testify in public. But there was an extra incentive tonight, a come-on absolutely irresistible to an Irishman fond of his whiskey and fonder of it still when he doesn’t have to pay for it. The ship being unloaded was the
Elm,
out of Cobh, Ireland, and the cargo was Irish linen and lace and hemp and a hatch compartment full of cases of Jameson’s whiskey.

Laughingly Runty reminded Moose of the time the
Ash
had come in with ten-year-old whiskey in hundred-gallon hogsheads, to be bottled over here. Runty had tapped the keg and then hollered “Fire!” Then the hatch boss and a few willing lads had run for the pails. Two hours later the shop steward had found Runty and most of the others sprawled on the hatch floor sleeping it off. “What’s the matter with these boys?” Barney Backus, the steward, had asked. Runty had gained sufficient consciousness to mutter, “It’s the water. Must be somethin’ in the water made us all sick as dogs.”

There was a pail next to Runty. Barney went over and peered into it. The fumes would have knocked over a smaller man. “Yeah, there’s something in that water all right,” he laughed. Barney got the shop-steward job because he was one of Johnny’s muscles, but he was a good-natured fellow and got along well with the rank and file and even with the “insoigents” like Runty, though he had to hit them in the head once in a while on Johnny’s orders.

The sound of a whistle carried to them from across the street and Runty pulled his old cap a little more to one side, as if it were a tarn.

“Well, time t’ go t’ work. The dear old
El-em,
loaded to the gunnels with sweet Irish whiskey.”

“Now, Runty, you don’t be liftin’ any o’ that,” Pop said severely. “You wouldn’t be breakin’ the law now?”

“I should say not,” Runty said emphatically. “O’ course if a case should fall ’n break and a bottle or two roll out on the deck, it would be a shame to see that fine old stuff go to waste, wouldn’t it now?”

Runty downed a quick one. He threw a dollar and a nickel on the Longdock bar to cover the last three whiskeys, threw his pals a “see ya tomorra” and swung into his rapid, chesty walk on his way to the Jameson’s.

Luke was on the hatch gang that night with a couple of other Negroes who got the left-over work in the hold if they kicked back enough, and several Italians who couldn’t speak English and probably just came over on some deal Johnny worked. They were given union cards right away and in return most of their pay was funneled into the back room of Friendly’s. These men had their lives in hock because one squeak out of them and Johnny would turn them over to the Immigration Department. There were also a couple of old Irishmen who were on Johnny’s s-list, but they had to be thrown some crumbs so they could repay the loan shark the fifty-five they owed on the fifty they borrowed that week. But the fella Runty was really surprised to see down there was Terry Malloy.

“Well, well, don’t tell me a member of the high-ocracy is comin’ down here and gettin’ his hands dirty,” Runty rode him. Terry stared at him sullenly. Old Runty didn’t seem to know he had one foot in the cement. Terry had been sweating out whether or not to smarten him. One wrong step now and he’d be S.O.L. with Johnny. And that L. stood for life, not luck. But he liked Runty. He got many a laugh out of him. He bought the way the little guy got up. He could sure sop up the punishment. Once they even threw him in the river for a corpse and he swam out. He was like a scrawny undersized tomcat everybody tosses a brick at and nobody can kill. Aah, screw, Terry thought to himself. If he wants to get his balls in a ringer, that’s his business. I didn’t ask him to go spill his guts to those stinkin’ investigators. That’s his business. My business is stayin’ alive. And I got my work cut out for me doin’ that, the way things been goin’.