On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  The sight of his daughter entering so quietly that she was among them before they even noticed her coming was just what Pop needed to break down completely. Now his true feelings flowed at last as he held his Katie close to him and she felt his creased, unshaven face against her smooth cheek. Then he was sobbing into the harboring curve of her neck and shoulder. She held him quietly while he sobbed, “Katie girl …”

  Softly, still dry-eyed from the shock of it, she said, “Pop … Pop …” and the friends around them turned to each other both from embarrassment and to make an invisible wall of themselves behind which father and daughter could bare their sorrow.

  On the other side of this invisible wall, Runty Nolan was offering the bottle to Mathewson. “Come on, Matty, ye’re fallin’ behind.”

  “Behind! One more ’n I’ll be fallin’ down,” the North Irish Protestant said.

  Katherine-Anne, watchful and remote, praying in her mind to her dear Mother Mary, was groping toward her own awareness of what had happened. In the seclusion of the Tarrytown convent school, guided by the sisters of St. Anne, she had lived with an almost feverish sense of sin and corruption and human misery. The Holy Family, in her eyes, was engaged in an hour-by-hour struggle against ignorance and error. The Trinity was as real to Katie Doyle as the cash register in Friendly’s Bar and Grill was to Johnny’s brother-in-law Leo. But slowly, Katie was beginning to sense, pushing blindly underground like a half-grown mole, what a world of pious dreams her moral being had been drifting through. Now, for the first time in her life, Katie had a real human misery, a live sin, a raw and vicious corruption thrusting through her faith. In her mind, cut off from the forced festivity of the wake, she was calling on her Blessed Mary as she would have turned to her own mother if only she had still been here. And when she cried to herself, Our Mother full of grace, help me, help me to understand, she was searching without yet knowing it for a real answer to a question of life or death, not far away on Calvary, with the angels sweeping down to their silent triumph over coarse soldiers, but here, on River Street and shabby Market Street, where the ships went WHOOOO- WHOOOOOM in the night and the oil-slick tongues of the monster river licked greedily for victims—not far away on Calvary in the pocket-sized Missal, but here, on the hillock of misery and violence between Market and River Streets on the Bohegan Banks.

  “Yes, sir,” Jimmy Sharkey was saying, for the fifth time at least, to keep the talk going, to keep this kind of party alive, “it’ll be a long time before anybody stands up to them gorillas like Joey Doyle.”

  “Enough guts for a regiment,” Moose shouted.

  “A real bravadeero,” Runty Nolan put in.

  And Runty knew what it was to be a bravadeero on the docks. He went back to ’14 when Local 447 got its charter. Willie Givens and Tom McGovern were charter members who worked right alongside him. Willie was a young blowhard always cadging drinks. One day he had a few too many and didn’t see a piece of steel plating swinging past him toward the hold. Willie was laid up for three months, and Runty, out of the goodness of his heart, suggested to the membership, still in its unencrusted, democratic stage, that a job be made for Willie as assistant financial secretary of the local to see him through his convalescence. Willie took to bureaucracy like a waterfront kid takes to beer. He never did a day’s work with a hook again. He went up and up. President of the Local. Vice-Chairman of the District Council. Finally President of the International. Twenty-five G and unlimited expenses. And presents from the shippers for being so understanding of management’s problems. And a secret fund for “fighting Communism” that every firm in the harbor felt it its patriotic duty to support, an ostrich-sized nest-egg accountable only to Willie himself. The last Convention, a fine group of amiable rubber-stamps, had made Willie President for life, all in favor say Aye and God help the poor slob who dares raise his voice in the negative. Thus had Willie Givens developed into a parliamentary front for Johnny Friendly below him and Big Tom McGovern on top.

  Big Tom was on the Board of Directors of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club and the Gotham Club and the Mayor jumped when he whistled and he had stevedore companies and tug companies and oil companies and sand-and-gravel companies and trucking companies and companies that owned other companies. In other words, he had the city by the head and the tail and while he was pouring twenty-five-year-old for the judges and the politicos, his strong-arms in the stevedore outfits were muscling the men who refused to knuckle under. From the penthouse on Fifth Avenue to the gutter on River Street where the blood ran, Big Tom had it all. But Runty could remember when young McGovern, a two-hundred-pound bully who had been told once too often that he resembled Jim Jeffries, was loading meat for the A.E.F., with his own meat-like hands, off a horse-truck at Pier B, and steering into the black market more beef than he was loading for our boys over there.

  And Runty could remember how in three years Tom McG. rose from a loader at forty cents an hour to the owner of ten meat trucks of his own. Thus was born the Enterprise Trucking Co., and enterprise of a most direct kind it was, for Big Tom acquired his first two trucks by the efficient method of threatening their owner with extreme bodily harm if he did not sign them over.

  Runty saw him use his own, brine-hardened fists to fight his way up to power on the docks. And he knew of the teamster-union official taken care of in one of the first waterfront murders so that Big Tom could push one of his own stooges into the teamster leadership, as soon after he was to set easy-dollar Willie Givens in the top spot with the longshoremen. And all the time that Big Tom was punching his way into the city’s inner circle, and Weeping Willie was spreading his whiskey-tipped wings as a silver-throated labor leader, Runty Nolan remained the lowliest of longshoremen, the wielder of a hook in the hold, and that in the old days before all the equipment, when the main piece of equipment was your own back. A strong back and a weak mind was a hold-man’s formula for doing the job.

  But Runty, for all the whiskey and the long nights around the bars, had a strong or at least a consistent mind when it came to Willie and Big Tom. When he saw what they were up to, back there in the First War, when Tom was on his way to his first million and Willie was oiling his union machinery, Runty swore against them his undying hatred, or more accurately his dying hatred, swore on his sainted mother and his Cobh pierman father who died in a set-to with the Black and Tans in the days of the Trouble. And when a Nolan swears on these, he swears for eternity. So he talked up and he spoke back and he got himself flattened and kicked for good measure. But a life of beatings had failed to deaden the twinkle in his eyes.

  Runty Nolan was always for seeing the funny side, even when he was looking down the business end of a triggerboy’s .38. While other longshoremen turned away in fear, Runty seemed to take a perverse delight in baiting the pistoleros, as he called them. Sometimes they laughed him off and sometimes, if he went on provoking them—and longshoremen were watching to see if Runty could get away with it—they would oblige him with a blackjack or a piece of pipe. The stories of these beatings had become a riverfront legend.

  In the bars they told of the time he was left face-down in an alley, after enough blows on the noggin to crack the skull of a horse. An hour later, when everybody figured he had a one-way ticket to the morgue, damned if he didn’t stagger back into Friendly’s and pound the bar for whiskey. “I should worry what they do t’ me. I’m on borried time,” Runty liked to say. And tossed into the black river for dead, he swam out, and got up. A gift for gettin’ up, his cronies called it. His was a lone, lost, almost comic cause, for he wasn’t a unit in an organized rebellion but a gadfly, a thorn in the heel of progress, if you can call progress the elaborate harbor-wide set-up of Tom McGovern, with the connivance of too many of the shipping companies, the boss stevedores and the pot-bellies who masqueraded as labor leaders. Runty Nolan had been a bravadeero—as he called it—for forty years, with more lives than a pair of cats and more spunk than was healthy for one little man.

  So here at
the wake, when he called Joey Doyle a bravadeero, in Joey’s case a modernized, better-organized one, he knew whereof he spoke. He did not use the word lightly.

  Pop, who loved Runty but had had the spirit beaten out of him long ago (“I just wanna woik and mind me own business and get me money home,” he used to tell Runty in their friendly arguments), this old man with the bitter life of the docks cutting unmistakable lines in his face now moved to the center of the room, waving his thin, steel-muscled arms as the .86 proof brought him to a trembling line between rage and sorrow.

  “Don’t talk t’ me of bravadeeros,” Pop yelled. “There’s oney one place a bravadeero winds up on this waterfront. On a slab. Jus’ like our Joey.”

  “Lord’ve mercy on ’im,” everybody mumbled, and grabbed for their drinks. Moose went around refilling the glasses and Runty, sorry for the bravadeero line that had aroused such bitter sadness in Pop, raised his glass in an obvious but nonetheless effective reach for a better, brighter mood.

  “Well, here’s to God, Ireland and present company,” he said with that irrepressible coating of humor in his voice. And then, like the Elder Cato insisting upon the destruction of Carthage, he added: “And mud in the eye of Willie Givens.”

  There was a general assent of “Right,” and “Here’s health” and “God bless,” and Runty was thinking to himself now we’ve got this wake on the right track at last, when Katie, still on the outer edges of the gathering and as quiet and remote as when she had entered, asked her little question:

  “Who did it?”

  The question dropped explosively into the middle of the room. Moose, Runty, Pop, young Jimmy Sharkey and three or four other longshoremen passing through looked at one another and hung their heads in a gesture that had become a fixed reaction on the waterfront whenever such a question was asked.

  “Who did it?” Katie asked again, her question as simply put as the disconcerting ones she had a habit of asking her patiently impatient teacher in Christian Apologetics at Marygrove.

  The room was silent. A hush had fallen over the wake. And just when Runty had hoped to rouse a little life in it. You had to go on. It was rough, but life had to go on. That’s what a wake was supposed to say. Belt Irish whiskey all night and wind up in the kitchen when dawn began to seep in at the windows, singing “Galway Bay,” that’s how a wake was supposed to brace the bereaved and shake the living from the dead.

  But here was the girl, asking the question that even Runty, for all his bravadeering, felt bound—tradition-bound—not to answer.

  Katie turned around to everybody, perplexed, and not yet realizing what she was doing.

  “Don’t you hear me? Who’d want to harm Joey? The best kid in the neighborhood. Not because I’m his sister. Everybody loved him.”

  Silence can be so intense that it becomes a force in the room as great as sound. Katie felt she had to raise her voice to overcome it.

  “Are you all deaf? Has that horrible stuff you’re drinking eaten through your ear-drums? Who’d want to harm Joey?”

  Pop came over and put his hand on Katie’s arm, gently. He had sent her out to Tarrytown not just to keep her from the boys who loitered around the cigar-magazine store that was really a horse room, but because he was determined to keep her innocent of the vices that crawled along the waterfront. An anthropologist could have studied this waterfront as if it were an island culture of the South Pacific with its special mores and taboos. In this harbor community there was no stronger taboo than the silence of dockmen not only with law enforcers and outsiders, but even with their womenfolk. A longshoreman didn’t even like to tell his wife the number of the pier he was working, so she wouldn’t know what danger he might be in and would be unable to name his assailants if she ever were asked.

  Pop led Katie into the narrow cubicle behind the kitchen. He was a little drunk—half-gassed, he would have called it—and the creases of his face were moist, his eyes were misty and his voice was low and deliberate. His long underwear top, serving as a shirt, was stained where his unsteady hand had spilled whiskey from his chin.

  “Pray for ’im, Katie goil. Ask our Maker t’ grant ’im etoinal peace. But don’ ask no questions. Please, Katie, fer yer own good. Becuz you won’t get no answers. You won’t get nuthin’ but a snootful o’ trouble.”

  Katie glared at him.

  “Trouble? Can there be any more trouble? Joey is dead. Joey is dead …” It came out as a moan.

  Pop put both hands on Katie’s arms and tried to reason her back to quietness. “Don’ be sayin’ that, darlin’, don’ make it worse. If it’s God’s will …”

  “God’s will!” She pulled away angrily. “Don’t blame it on God. Since when was God an excuse for acting like pigs?”

  Pop let her go, helplessly. If only Joey had done as Pop had told him: mind yer own business. “But, Pop …” The boy would look at him with his clear blue, believing eyes (almost a twin of Katie’s in the fierceness of their faith). “But, Pop, that bunch of stiffs running our local like they owned us, letting the shippers chip our contract away because they’re on the take. What could be more our business?” Trouble with Joey, and now Katie who knew nothing about it and already putting her two cents into it. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he thought to himself, I sure hope I find a little peace in the next world.

  In the kitchen Runty was keeping the party going with a crack-voiced rendering of “The Rose of Tralee.” It was only a matter of time—another half-hour perhaps—until he’d be offering again to take Kathleen home again. Poor sentimentalized Kathleen, Katie thought. The good-for-nothing drunken Irish bums who were forever raising their voices in song to offer themselves as escorts for that perennial homeward journey with Kathleen. Irishmen, at least the ones she knew, were romantic fools, Katie had decided. Actually it was the Kathleens who did all the work and held things together. They didn’t have time to sing.

  Uncle Frank was finishing his beer, ready to button his uniform coat and fasten his gun-belt around, or rather under, his comfortable belly. The sight of his uniform suggested something to Katie and she scurried between people to get to him.

  “Uncle Frank, you’re the one. Why don’t you do something? You know Joey. You know he’d never—kill himself like that. He believed in God.”

  Uncle Frank was a hulking, temperate man who was ready to slack off on his retirement pay in a couple of years and was looking forward to the vacation after having had to observe the worst side of man’s nature for twenty-eight years. He drew Katie out the kitchen door into the hallway. People were passing to and from the wake, and to avoid them they went all the way back to the corner of the hall where there was, if not actual privacy, at least tenement privacy.

  “Katie,” Uncle Frank began, “you know the facts of life. I think Pop’s makin’ a mistake to keep you ignorant of them here on this waterfront. It c’n get you into trouble. A different kind o’ trouble from runnin’ around with the drugstore cowboys, but trouble all the same. It’s time you knew the score.”

  “Pop’ll never talk about it,” Katie said. “And even Joey—he’d say, some day, when I was older. As if I was still nothing but a kid to be babied. But the way they acted—almost like, like criminals themselves, looking at each other, and changing the subject, I knew something was wrong.”

  In the kitchen Kathleen had been taken home again. There was a pause, and then Moose’s booming voice cried out, “He had a heart o’ gold, that kid, a heart o’ gold,” to which the ample Mrs. Flanagan responded as in a catechism, “Aye, the good die young, they do, I never seen it fail …”

  Katie was searching the plump, ruddy face of Uncle Frank for answers.

  “Katie, down to the station house, we’ve got a file this thick of waterfront cases—deaths and disappearances and the like—at least four or five every year since I was a rookie back in Prohibition days. A hundred murders if there’s a one. And you know how many arrests? I’m not talkin’ about convictions, mind you. Just arrests?”

&nbs
p; Katie shook her head.

  “Five. And convictions? Two. Just two in all the twenty-eight years I’ve been on the force.”

  “But Uncle Frank, in civics we learn … In America …”

  “Katie, walk around the corner, over to River Street, and you’re out of America. It’s a jungle down there, a no-man’s land. The file tells the story.”

  “A hundred murders …”

  “It could be more. A fella falls in the river. They say he’s drunk and slipped off the stringpiece. Or a high-low backs into him or a sling slips. There’s a dozen different ways. There’s more industrial accidents in ship-loading than anything else in the country. I guess you know that. One in every five hundred longshoremen’s gonna wind up dead before his time. So these fellers help the accidents along a little bit. It’s hard to prove.”

  “But you’re supposed to protect them. Isn’t that what you’re there for, Uncle Frank?”

  “In the books you study, positively. But Katie, there’s a lot you don’t know, a lot of things about the way a city runs that never gets into them civics books. Things I’d lose my pension for telling you if it ever got back to my superiors. Donnelly, the Police Commissioner, appointed by the Mayor, used to drive a beer truck for Johnny Friendly. See what I mean?”

  “The Police Commissioner …”

  “Everybody knows that.” Uncle Frank nodded sadly. “I could tell you stories. Like what happened to me when I was on the waterfront squad and tried to arrest a loan shark.” Uncle Frank gave a short, bitter laugh. “I could of qualified for lieutenant six years ago except through Pop I was seeing too much of Runty and Moose who got themselves marked in Johnny Friendly’s book. Oh, I could tell you stories.”

  Katie shook her head. “I knew Bohegan was full of politics. I’ve heard Pop say that much. But the Sisters say we live in a Christian world.”