On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  It seemed a long way from Bethlehem to the corner of River and Pulaski Streets. There “J.P.’s” pockets bulged with Johnny Friendly’s ready cash and there “Jockey” Byrnes, an ancient gnome ruled off the tracks as an apprentice in some dust-covered scandal, ran a book that longshoremen were expected to patronize. At least it was no secret that Jockey worked for the set-up along with “J.P.,” Big Mac, and Socks Thomas, familiarly known as “A ’n B” in honor of the number of times he had been charged with assault and battery.

  These were some of the people standing outside the Friendly Bar and Grill when Terry appeared. Leaning against the bar window, waiting calmly, was Charley, flanked by Truck Amon, a fat fortress of a man who was said to consume three gallons of beer every day, and Gilly Connors, another fat boy, who was once told by Charley to use his head in handling a certain situation, whereupon he butted the fellow so effectively the victim went to the hospital with fractures of the nose and jaw.

  When Terry was close enough, Charley said in his habitually soft voice, as if the vocal cords had been designed for conspiracy, “How goes?”

  Terry nodded impatiently. “He’s on the roof.”

  “The pigeon?” Charley’s voice was barely audible.

  “Like you said,” Terry grumbled, still resenting the conversation, as if merely avoiding the subject could disassociate him from whatever they were doing with Joey Doyle. “It worked.”

  “You’re sure? You saw ’im go up?” Charley pressed him.

  “Yeah, yeah, it worked, it worked.”

  Truck Amon tapped his temple, pressed his thick lips together and nodded sagely at Terry. “That brother of yours is thinkin’ alla time. Alla time.”

  “All a time,” Gilly Connors agreed, his lower lip protruding and his head bobbing in a characteristic series of abbreviated nods.

  Terry looked at his brother questioningly, not knowing what more to say. Usually he waited for Charley to peg the conversation, but this time Charley was silent and pensive. There was a sad, sweet, distracted look on his face, an expression of concentrated preoccupation. As Terry looked at him, wishing he could figure what was on his older brother’s mind, that brainy mind, a sound came to his ears, and to the ears of everybody in the neighborhood, for it could be heard for blocks around, that was the most terrifying he had ever heard. It was a scream, such as might have been torn from the bloody throat of a savage animal being ripped apart by fiercer beasts. It was a scream, a cry, a shout, a prayer, a protest, a farewell. Unmistakably it gave voice to death, sudden and violent, a tongue ripped from its living mouth at the very moment of its outcry against the act, a shrill, hoarse, descending wail, choked with agony.

  “I’m afraid somebody fell offa roof,” Truck Amon said looking from Gilly to Charley for appreciation of his wit.

  The barflies were pouring out of Friendly’s in the direction of the scream and the sickening, thudding punctuation that had ended it. Only Charley didn’t move. Truck and Gilly and “J.P.” and a few others sat there with blank and withdrawn faces, curtained against the act of mercy or a show of compassion. Terry looked into their faces, into the purposely bland face of his brother. Suddenly he saw what they had done to him. He had been a decoy, like the pigeon, as ignorant and almost as innocent.

  Around the corner there was an increasing babel of voices. A police car sirened in. Charley and Truck and Gilly watched, with tired, mind-our-own-business eyes. Terry watched Charley and Gilly and Truck. Truck said, in his dry, thick-toned monotone:

  “He thought he was gonna sing for the Crime Commission. He won’t.”

  Terry said to Charley quietly, more befuddled than accusing, “You said they was only gonna talk to him?”

  Charley wouldn’t look at Terry. He kept staring straight ahead, at the passers-by, as if it were any other night. He tried to be as cold and business-like as Johnny Friendly. “That was the idea.”

  “I thought they’d talk to ’im. Try to straighten ’im out. Get him to dummy up. I thought they was only gonna talk to him?”

  Terry’s was less a question than an awkward searching of himself.

  “Maybe he gave ’em an argument,” Charley suggested.

  “I figured the worst they’d do is work ’im over a little bit,” Terry said.

  “He probably gave ’em an argument,” Charley persisted. He said it in a way intended to cut off further discussion. Terry was a funny kid, a roughneck, a natural cop-hater, but not quite a working hoodlum in the Specs or Sonny or Truck or Gilly sense. A little too much of a loner. People didn’t realize you had to have an organization sense to rate as one of the boys. Terry was like a masterless half-vicious mongrel dog that never ran with the pack. He was satisfied to gnaw on any stray bone he picked up in the street when he could be stealing meat off a butcher truck. A hard guy to figure, hard to trust, in a funny way. That’s why Charley had never bothered trying to get Terry into the organization. People wondered why Charley with his connections didn’t do a little more for the kid brother. The reason was in Terry himself. He couldn’t do a simple favor without asking dumb questions about it.

  “Just work ’im over a little, that’s what I figgered,” Terry was muttering.

  “That Doyle’s been givin’ our boss a lot of trouble lately,” Truck said in a righteous, almost prim tone of voice. To Truck Amon, born and raised in Bohegan to respect muscle and power, any flaunting of the authority of Johnny Friendly was an affront to his sense of order. Johnny had made him and Johnny could break him. He was on the payroll for a bill and a half a week and what he could look to steal. That’s all he knew and all he needed to know.

  Terry was still talking to himself. Charley had an eye on him. What was the kid eating himself for? Maybe he should have given him the whole picture. But it was bad security. Don’t tell nobody no more than he has to know to do what ya tell him to, Johnny Friendly always said. Like many a successful racket guy, Johnny would have made a pretty good division commander. So how could Charley give Terry the whole story? He hadn’t figured Terry would give him any trouble. Terry knew certain things had to be taken care of in this business. He had to know that much.

  “He wasn’t a bad little fella, that Joey,” Terry said under his breath.

  “No, he wasn’t,” Charley said.

  “Except for his mouth,” Truck said.

  “Talkative,” Charley said.

  “Yeah, talkative,” Gilly seconded, liking the sound of the word.

  “Wasn’t a bad little fella,” Terry couldn’t seem to stop saying. Maybe if he had known it was to be his pitch to call Joey out for the knock-off, if he had had a little time to get used to it, it might have been okay. Joey had been asking for it, that’s for sure. So he had only himself to blame. Terry could see that. But what was getting under his skin was this not telling him. As if he was too dumb to be trusted with the job if he had known they were going all the way. That’s what was crawling inside him. That’s what he figured it was. All he knew was he felt bad. Until the time Charley had come up to get him on the roof, he had felt okay, his usual okay self, and now he felt something like a bellyache in his head, the way his head had buzzed and felt heavy and big when an opponent had scored with a combination to the jaw and the ear, and he knew he was hurt and needed to cover up until he could shake his head clear.

  Everyone on the corner was looking in the direction of the tenement rooftop from which Joey had fallen unwillingly into the littered courtyard.

  “Maybe he could sing,” Truck said with his guttural wit, “but he couldn’t fly.”

  “Definitely,” Gilly rumbled, with his abbreviated St. Vitus nods, and a bull-frog chuckle in his throat.

  Terry looked at them and he felt he was catching blows to the head again. It was like being caught in a flurry and trapped in the other guy’s rhythm. Charley saw the look on Terry’s face and figured he better get the kid away from Truck and Gilly before they said anything else to rub it in worse. Especially that Truck, who wasn’t satisfied j
ust being a thickneck and had to double as a comedian.

  “Come on, kid, I’ll buy you a drink,” Charley offered, sliding his arm over Terry’s shoulder.

  “You go in. I’ll be in in a minute,” Terry said.

  “It happens, kid,” Charley said philosophically.

  “I know. I know. I just wanna get some air,” Terry said, ashamed to be caught soft in front of Charley.

  Charley hesitated for a moment and then turned toward the entrance, giving Truck and Gilly the eye to follow him in.

  With his mind full of confusion, Terry watched the stream of people, longshoremen, truckers, wives and kids and drifters, moving in the direction of the accident.

  Four

  IN THE CLEARING BEHIND the row of tenements at least fifty people had gathered around the heap of inert bone and flesh and crumpled clothing that had been Joey Doyle. Their heads were bent in the age-old attitude of grief, in this case genuine grief, for Joey had been a popular kid before developing into a respected neighborhood figure. But there was also in this atmosphere a deep sense of shame, as if the entire neighborhood was implicated in this sudden and yet not unexpected violence.

  Group resentment, smoldering, was silent and invisible, and yet a force, like a field of electric current coursing around the body, which someone had had the grace to cover with pages of a daily tabloid. In fact, if one looked carefully he could see the dark headlines crying out the day’s rapines, holdups and murders, so that the rags of violence covered the remains of violence in the back alley of this river town.

  Pop Doyle stood with his friends, Runty Nolan and big, bull-voiced Moose McGonigle, a Mutt-and-Jeff combo who did a lot of drinking and clowning together and liked to abuse each other. They knew the whole story of Joey Doyle and they also knew—while often straying from—the narrow, twisting paths of waterfront survival. So they weren’t saying anything. The three of them stood mute and guarded near the body. And although the motionless grief of Pop Doyle was deeper, for Joey had been a beloved only son (an infant brother losing to pneumonia years before), Pop’s face, like the faces around him, made an effort to hide its feelings and its knowledge. To know nothing, or to act know-nothing, was the one sure way of survival on the waterfront.

  As always, the city had put smoothly into motion its machinery for handling personal tragedy. Joe Regan, the cop on the beat, had called for the ambulance while Mrs. Geraghty, a neighbor, had sent her boy running for Father Barry over at St. Timothy’s, a block and a half away. The intern and the neighborhood priest had arrived only minutes apart, the rangy, fast-talking and usually chain-smoking young parish priest pushing people aside with a rough “Outa my way, outa my way,” and having time to administer the last rites while the body was still warm and the intern was listening in vain for a faltering heart beat. As Father Barry was praying for God’s mercy and the gift for Joey Doyle of a life everlasting, the intern was telling Regan, the cop, to pencil his report D.O.A. Another Dead on Arrival from River Street.

  Regan had asked a few routine questions of the onlookers—had anyone seen the fall and did anyone know whether young Doyle had been alone on the roof?—questions that had to be asked to cover Regan in case he was checked. Then, for the same reason, because it looked like an accident but probably wasn’t, he sent for the homicide squad. They drove up a little later, a pair of first-grade detectives who took over, especially the older man Foley, a fatgut who had started out doing a job on these waterfront cases until his captain had straightened him out. Most of the action in town was on the piers: the horse play and the dice and a cut of the pilferage, not to mention the pay-off on the ship jumpers and the nose candy from the Italian mob who maintained an uneasy truce with the Irish and Johnny Friendly in Bohegan. Foley had been ready to play it straight at the beginning but with a take-artist like Donnelly as Commissioner you would just louse yourself up and push yourself back into a uniform if you didn’t play along.

  So Foley knew what kind of a report he was expected to bring in, but he also knew enough to make his questions hard and official. There would be days of this, all the motions of a thorough investigation, for there was nothing the Bohegan police force was better schooled in than covering up its tracks. The neighbors were watching warily as Lieutenant Foley turned to Pop Doyle.

  “You’re Doyle, aren’t you? The boy’s father?”

  Pop stared at him, angry behind his mask. “That’s right.”

  “Would your son usually’ve been up on the roof at this time of night?”

  Pop shrugged. “Once in a while. He’d be up there with his boids.”

  “Any idea whether he was alone or not?”

  “How should I know? I wasn’t up there.”

  Mrs. Collins was pushing forward to have her say. She was a thin, once-pretty, nervous and overworked woman in her early thirties whose husband had been a hatch boss fished out of the river in the late 40’s. “Billy Conley and Jo-Jo Delaney are up on the roof all the time. Maybe they could tell you something about it.”

  Pop glared at her. Helping cops was a waterfront taboo, no matter how you felt about the bums who muscled your union. “Buttinsky, you keep outa this,” he told her harshly.

  The Conley and Delaney kids were standing near the front of the crowd. Foley knew them. They were marked tough juves who bore watching. The familiar blank look of caution-with-cops slipped over their faces.

  “We aint been up on the roof for a nour. We didn’ see nothin’.”

  Foley turned away from them. Punks. He’d have trouble with them one of these days. Everybody was staring at Foley and his partner with the same cold, disdainful look. The lips of old man Doyle were pressed together in a melancholy sneer. He was waiting for the next question.

  “You’re sure you got no idea what he was doing up on the roof after dark? And whether he was expecting to meet anyone?”

  A low growl of resentment came out of Pop. Cops! Who wants cops? Any ideas, he wants to know. A helluva lot he’d do if I filled him up to the eyebrows with ideas. Just get in more trouble, like poor Joey here.

  “Any ideas, Pop?” Foley said again. “Any suspicions? Anything like that?”

  “None,” Pop said.

  Mrs. Collins pushed forward again.

  “It’s the same thing they did to my Andy five years ago.”

  Pop wheeled on her. Busybody. All of them. Why couldn’t they leave him alone with his heartache and his kid? All these questions and people poking their noses in. For what? Another whitewash. “You shut up,” he told Andy Collins’ widow. “You keep your big yap outa this.”

  Mrs. Collins glared at everybody. She was always talking about her Andy and the thing they did to him five years ago. He had been a hatch boss on Pier C who hadn’t forgotten his years with a hook in his hand for one-thirty-seven an hour. He liked to give the men a break. Johnny Friendly had warned him, but he wouldn’t play. Beaten him up, but he kept on. There was talk he was ready to buck the outfit and try to take over the local and run it like a union. Mrs. Collins was a little out of her head on the subject. “Every time I hear a key in the door I think it’s him comin’ home,” she’d keep saying. Pop Doyle could shout at her all he wanted. She was going to have her say.

  “Joey Doyle was the only one with the guts to talk up for his rights around here. He was for holdin’ regular meetin’s. An’ he was the only one with the moxie to talk up to them Crime Investigators. So this whole stinkin’ mess could …”

  “Shet up!” Pop was trembling, the pain of his loss meshed in with his rage and frustration.

  “Everybody knows that.”

  “Who asked ya? Shut ya trap. If Joey had taken that advice he wouldn’t be …”

  Pop looked at what was left of Joey Doyle and turned away with his face growing damp as tears and sweat mingled in a slow, salt flow. The whistle of another ocean liner went WHOOM WHOOM WHOOOOOOM on the river. In his mind the river and Johnny Friendly were one, endlessly dangerous and never sleeping.

  “E
verybody knows that,” Mrs. Collins was whimpering to herself.

  Mutt Murphy had come along and was shouldering his way in and trying to talk to people who turned aside to avoid his stale breath and the sight of his livid, swollen-from-drinking lips.

  “ ’s a good boy,” he muttered, accustomed to talking to himself. “Oney one ever tired t’ get me me compensation, God bless ’im …”

  Lieutenant Foley had had enough of Pop. He turned to Moose McGonigle and Runty Nolan.

  “How’s about you fellas, any of you ever hear any threats to …”

  Moose had a bull-necked voice, made emotional by a hard life, and his ordinary conversational tone was louder than most men shouting.

  “One thing I loined—all my life on the docks—don’t ask no questions—don’t answer no questions, unless you …”

  He stopped, and looked at the lump of flesh lying under the alley-newspapers, waiting for its senseless ride to the city morgue.

  “He was all heart, that boy,” Runty said reverently, lowering his face full of broken bones, unable to see the body at his feet because he had been beaten for back-talking until his sight was only a shifting screen of shadows.

  “Guts,” Pop said it as if it was a curse. “I’m sick o’ guts. He gets a book in the pistol local and right away he’s gonna be a hero. Gonna push the mob off the dock single-handed.”

  “In other words, you’re pretty sure it wasn’t no accident,” Detective Foley said, not so much probing as covering himself either way.

  “Listen, Foley,” Pop said. “I aint sure o’ nuthin’. And if I was I wouldn’t tell ya. You’d bury it in the files and they’d bury me in the river.”

  Foley made a few routine notes. The whole thing was routine. Everybody knows and nobody says and you fatten the waterfront file, just as the old man says, push another report in the file and wait for a next time.