On the Waterfront (4 page)

A second-story window opened suddenly and a massive woman placed her formidable, fat arms on the window sill. Her loud, slightly nasal voice was not to be denied, even by the high-pitched babel of the street. Not even the screeching whistle of a ferry sweeping into the Bohegan slip could prevail over Mrs. McLaverty. “Michael, Michael, next time I call you it’s gonna be with a strap!”

A kid in the street turned his freckles, coated in stickball sweat, toward the offending window. “Aw Ma, the game aint over. Gimme ten more minutes.”

Careful not to let his resplendent camel’s hair coat touch the dirty door or the walls of the tenement hallway, Charley entered the dim entrance to the railroad flats. It was one of those buildings that makes a local mockery of the city’s pretensions of modernity. Only some back-of-the-hand understanding between the landlord and a legman for the housing commissioner could have saved this building from condemnation fifteen years earlier. The walls along the stairway were cracked and stained and scribbled with the random observations, protests and greetings of a long succession of occupants, forming a sort of archeological strata of primitive tenement communication. The preparation of at least half a dozen different meals in this four-story beehive created a warm, sweet and sour hallway aroma that Charley was always to associate with the life he had hustled his way out of. And the confusion of sounds, the bedlam, always a baby crying, and some bigger kid clobbering a smaller one, fighting back and bawling at the same time, and the distracted mother threatening to smack ’em both and a married couple hollering at each other in a loud, continuous debate of inconclusive affirmatives and negatives, the staccato gunfire of a radio melodrama and the Murphys who got on like lovers in their middle age of all things invariably laughing together and someone playing Frankie Laine at the top of his and the loudspeaker’s voice, “This cheating heart … depends on you-hoo …”

It was raucous and unprivate and unsanitary and un a lot of things, but one thing you had to say for it, it was living. It was no insignificant part of the mystery of from what power and to what purpose the human community endures.

Charley Malloy tried to keep his mind from wandering off into one of the dark chambers of this mystery. With somewhat the detached manner of an insurance agent checking up on an injured client, he heavily climbed the stairs, pausing on the third landing, a little annoyed with himself for being so out of breath. He ought to pick up his handball again. This was no shape for a man of thirty-five. Maybe it was time to go on a diet. The doctor said he was twenty-five pounds overweight. This whole country is overweight. They got it too good. Except for dead beats like Pop Doyle. There wasn’t an extra half-pound of flesh on Pop Doyle. The best part of Pop Doyle had run off in sweat and soaked through into the floor of the hatch. Like an insurance agent, Charley Malloy plodded up the last stairway to the roof. Only in this case the accident hadn’t happened yet.

I
T WAS POSSIBLE TO
walk along the rooftops of the tenements all the way from Dock Street to Ferry Street, though this was no simple straightaway but a variety of different levels with a three-story building often tucked between a couple of fours and even those of equal stories unequal in height so that a block-long stretch of adjoining rooftops was like a great theatrical stage of multiple levels. In recent years these rooftops had sprouted television aerials in such abundance that to walk among them was to wander through a forest of steel branches. And between the aerials there were more clothes lines, and on almost every roof at least one pigeon coop, for pigeon racing was still a favorite sport in Bohegan, offering as it did a chance to extend yourself above and beyond the brick and mortar confines of the slum. Up into the unencumbered sky your flock of Belgian beauties soared, and if there was dirt and sweat and monotony in the daily life of the neighborhood, at least here on the roof you could reach up through your birds into a freer, cleaner world.

At the top of the stairs leading from the fourth floor onto the roof Charley stood a moment, watching his younger brother at the edge of the roof with a long pole in his hand. At the end of the pole, like a makeshift flag of surrender, was an eight-inch strip from an old sheet, designed to frighten the birds into staying aloft for their training exercise. Around and around they flew in a great fluttering circle, some thirty of them, not arranged behind their leader in any pattern of formation like ducks or squadrons of men, but spread out in a natural cluster.

Charley stood a moment, watching his brother Terry enjoying the sight of them, as he enjoyed this ritual two or three times a day, the birds winging out over the river and then swinging around in a quarter-mile arc to cast their fifty-mile-an-hour shadows over the tenement buildings, over the bars and the shabby seamen’s hotels and the slummy streets, the pigeons unaware of the people below and the people aware of the pigeons mostly as the subject of a hoary scatalogical joke. But to Terry Malloy they were a favorite and endlessly satisfying sight. “Look at ’em, the bums!” he’d think to himself reverently, the
th
thickening to a
d
when he actually spoke, “my birds, the best fuggin flock o’ homers in the neighborhood.”

Pigeons, Charley was thinking, kid stuff. Why doesn’t he grow up? He’s twenty-eight years old already. Maybe he caught one too many in the head when he was the Pride o’ Bohegan. Some pride! Look at him, the best prospect turned out of Bohegan since Truck Amon caved in to Joe Louis on Joe’s Bum-of-the-Month Tour. Well, at least Truck is earning his keep on the muscle for Johnny Friendly, but what about this kid here, a grown man already who never quite grew up, with his thickened nose and his slightly puffed eyes from too much leather, a good-looking kid except for the nose and the scar tissue, always looking to Charley like a father because their real father forgot he was a father and drifted off into some skidrow heaven and was neither dead nor alive so far as Charley and Terry were concerned. All they ever got from him was the name, Malloy. Charley had to hustle and use his head. And he looked out for the kid, Terry, when he could. Only how much could you do for a kid like this, flapping his silly pole at a bunch of silly birds? And a couple of neighborhood kids in bluejeans and basketball jackets with block letters spelling out “Golden Warriors” on their backs, a brace of reform-school candidates called Billy Conley and Jo-Jo Delaney, helping Terry with the birds and looking up to him as if he were something big and not just Terry Malloy, an ex-pug who had had it for a little while and now was only accepted by the big men in the neighborhood because he had the good fortune to be the brother of Charley the Gent.

Charley came up behind Terry and spoke softly, but the unexpected presence startled the kid—as most people still called him—and he pivoted quickly.

“Oh, Charley, I didn’ hear ya come up.”

He lowered his pole and the leader of his flock, a firm-looking blue-checker full of its importance, circled in for a landing on the roof of the coop, all the others following him smoothly.

“I’m gettin’ ’em ready for the Washington race,” Terry said. “I come in twelfth last time. Number one in the neighborhood. I made myself a coupla hundred bucks from the pool.”

“He’d a-come in eleventh or maybe tenth if Swifty had gone right inta the coop so we could punch the band in the clock,” Billy put in.

“That’s his one bad habit,” Terry said, as if reluctant to admit any fault in his prize.

Charley looked at the birds, bored. “Kids, vamoose,” he told the two Warriors. “I want to talk private with Terry.”

The boys withdrew with the sullen obedience of soldiers. The prestige of Charley the Gent in this neighborhood was something like that of a general’s aide. The day would come when these kids would want commissions in the only organization with a future on the banks of Bohegan.

“Good kids,” Terry said as they scampered off. They made him feel good. Asking him about them Garden fights. The night he took DeLucca out with a big left hook. The Brooklyn wallios thought they had something in Vinnie DeLucca until that night Terry tagged him with a left hand. Terry liked it for the kids to ask him about DeLucca. Or when they came to him for pointers on how to handle the Blue Devils. Good kids.

“Punks,” Charley said. “The kids around here get dumber every year. It’s a disgrace.”

Then seeing Terry look at him uncomprehendingly—with a certain patient lack of expression he always assumed when Charley got too far ahead of him in the think department—the older brother came to the point of his visit:

“They”—which could be anybody from Johnny Friendly down—wanted to talk to Joey Doyle. But Joey had been playing it cute. Ever since his trips to the Crime Commission, when he spotted Sonny tailing him, he had never gone out at night except with two or three young, tough longshoremen for protection. Johnny wanted to get Joey alone. It was highly important they should talk to him. Before Joey went and did something very foolish. Now Charley had an idea. That’s what he was expected to have, ideas. He glanced over at the pigeons. A number of them had flown into the coop and were fussing and cooing in their elaborate ritual of settling down for the night.

Joey Doyle raised pigeons too. For years there had been a friendly rivalry between him and Terry. A friendly piracy. There was the old trick of tying a piece of ribbon to your homer’s leg. A pigeon is incorrigibly curious. Sometimes a bird from a strange or rival loft would follow that ribbon right into your own coop. Terry had picked up some nice birds that way. Army birds and prize stuff off their course. In every long-distance race hundreds of birds were lost. Sometimes they followed others home. Terry had mentioned this to Charley once and Charley hadn’t paid much attention as he always thought this pigeon business of Terry’s was a kid’s waste of time. One of the things helping to keep him small. Twenty-eight years old and no regular job and nothing going for him on the docks where the livin’ was easy if you just worked one or two little angles. There was no excuse, simply no excuse for not making four or five bills a week. A little initiative, that’s all. Charley wasn’t a driver, a congenital go-after-it like Johnny Friendly. But thank God he wasn’t a drifter, a fringer like his poor slob of a kid brother, too slow to come in out of the rain, or even to know if it was raining half the time. Had it been the punching that did it? It was hard to tell. Terry had racked up before those little blood trickles washed away his reason and his reflexes. Maybe it had something to do with the old lady dying. Charley was sixteen then, Terry only nine. He had taken it pretty hard. For a couple of years he hadn’t talked very much. The doctors had some fancy word for that. Something inside of you feels so cheated and mean you just don’t respond to nothin’.

It was the boxing that had brought Terry out a little. Right away he was better at it than the other kids and it gave him a position. Everybody needs a position. There goes Terry Malloy, he’s the boxer—that’s position. Some little thing you do, or are, in particular. Up at the dump they stuck him in, it was called Saint Joe’s Home, he could lick the big boys of fifteen when he was only eleven. It gave him something to hang onto. It still did, a little bit, the way he shifted his shoulders when he walked and the way he carried his hands and the way he felt inside and the little wake of admiration he still left behind him as he heel-and-toed along River Street—“There goes Terry Malloy. Useta be a pretty good fighter.”

“—I figured maybe if you call up to him you got one of his pigeons, you could get him to come up on the roof so a couple of the boys could have a little talk with him,” Charley was saying.

Terry frowned. He had a little more work to do banding some squabs and cleaning up around the coop and then he had figured to drop in and shoot a little pool with Chick and Jackie, then wander over to Friendly’s, have a few beers and watch the fight on TV. One trouble with Charley and Johnny’s business was they were always working. Day and night there was something to take care of. That’s the trouble when you get too big. Always something or someone to look out for.

“—now you sure you got it straight?” Charley was saying.

“Yeah, yeah, okay, okay,” Terry said. “It sounds kinda corny, but …”

“Yours not to reason why,” Charley recited.

“Huh? What’s that?”

“Poetry. Kipling I think it is.”

“You and your double talk,” Terry said, proud of Charley’s brains and knowledge. “No kiddin’, Charley, when they put you together they stuck in an extra tongue.”

“And a good thing,” Charley said. “Since I always had to talk for the two of us.” He tapped Terry twice, fondly, on the shoulder in semi-conscious imitation of John Friendly. “Now get on it. And don’t goof it up. It’s important to Johnny, highly important. Tell ’im you’ll meet him on the roof and then cut over to the joint. I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Okay, okay,” Terry said heavily. He was like a boy whose father tells him to go help his mother with the dishes in the kitchen. He felt lazy and the chore was dull, but how do you stand off a thing like that?

Charley took a last look around as he headed for the steep stairway leading down from the roof. “Jesus it’s filthy up here,” he said.

“Whatta you want the Waldorf Astoria Roof Garden?” Terry said.

“I guess a pig-sty looks clean—to a pig,” Charley said gently. “I’ll see you, slugger. Don’t goof. And by the way, there’s a sawbuck in it for you.”

The immaculate camel’s hair coat, incongruous on this roof-top dusted with soot from the nearby factories and spotted with pigeon droppings, disappeared into the stairwell. A loud, rasping blast from the
United States
swinging out into midstream and pointing for the Narrows, made Terry forget for a moment what it was he had to do. Those pilots, he wished he could’ve learned something like that. There was only a hundred of ’em in the entire harbor and they could average fifty bucks an hour. Twenty-five thousand a year just for steering a boat. Only trouble was most of ’em cracked up from all that pressure after a while. But they always had the pension waiting and meanwhile it was something to come aboard the
United States
or the
Liberté
and take over from the captain himself. Now the
Liberté
is yours, to run like an outboard and you work her down through the main channel and then into Ambrose Channel until you’re out beyond the Light. “Okay,” you say, “from here on it’s easy, no problem, just the open sea. Here, bub,” you say to the four-striper with his rows of ribbons, “I guess you c’n handle it from here.”