On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  A few minutes before, Captain Schlegel had been surprised when an Irish priest from across the park at St. Timothy’s had come in with Joey Doyle’s sister and asked if they could see a shape-up. Privately Captain Schlegel had considered Joey a trouble-maker, an agitator, the sort of smart-aleck who quoted back to you the union-stevedore agreement. But he hastened to assure the priest and the girl that her brother had been well liked by the company, a good worker, a fine boy. In behalf of Interstate Captain Schlegel extended his sympathies. Although the accident was off-hours, away from the pier and the company was in no way involved, Captain Schlegel was going to recommend that Interstate send Mr. Doyle a check for $100 as an official expression of company condolence. As to the shape-up that they wished to see, he frankly wondered why they should want to bother themselves watching a routine hiring practice. But if they wished to take the time, he would be happy to have a guard escort them to the entrance to Pier B where the morning hiring was about to take place. However, it would be better, he suggested, if they did not stop to ask Mr. McGown any questions, as he would be extremely busy with his morning duties. Captain Schlegel was anxiously unsure as to just what this priest and this girl were getting at, and Big Mac with a load on wasn’t the man to satisfy their curiosity.

  The shape-up is often criticized unfairly, Captain Schlegel explained as he walked them to the door of his office. Obviously men cannot be given regular jobs when three hundred are needed one day, only one hundred the next, and perhaps none at all the third day when the outgoing ship is gone and the incoming vessel not yet arrived. In practice our hiring boss tries to pick the most competent and deserving men, and the majority of them average out pretty well in a month. So the system is not quite as haphazard and inhuman as a few alarmists have tried to make it sound. “Of course they have to sell papers and if it helps to exaggerate a little, who can blame them?” No system is perfect. He had been in nearly all the great ports of the world and this shape-up, as they called it, worked as well as any. Privately over beer at the Hofbrau Haus with his fellow-stevedore captains, Schlegel had said, “When we call five hundred men for two hundred jobs and each fella sees with his own eyes there’s at least two or three of ’em for every job, then by golly we can keep them towing the mark like we want ’em.”

  He didn’t like this Father snooping around. He’d have to check into this. And the Doyle girl coming down was not a good sign either. Actually Interstate employees had been responsible for much of the dock violence in Bohegan, but the name of McGovern was a powerful one and Interstate had never been mentioned in connection with waterfront crime. But Captain Schlegel knew how to be correct with a Roman collar and a young lady. He bowed and brought his heels together in a habit-hardened courtesy, and assured them of his eagerness to show them any phase of the stevedore operation they wished to see.

  So Father Barry and Katie were looking on when Big Mac came out to the pier entrance with the cigar box full of brass tabs. The only reason the hiring boss wasn’t swaggering or swaying was because he was a big-bodied man who could absorb a fifth a day with beer to wash it down and still walk a reasonably straight Une, even if his movements became uncertain and his behavior unpredictable from minute to minute.

  McGown’s cheeks puffed out as he blew on his whistle. Some four hundred men fell into a dutiful, silent horseshoe around him.

  They shaped according to custom, with the deck men on the left, the hold men to their right, then the dock men, hi-low drivers and on the extreme right the longshore casuals, the extra men. Father Barry and Katie saw how they pressed forward, begging with their eyes for the coveted jobs as Big Mac approached them. First he called out the men for the loft, mostly old men no longer fit for the heavy work, but scattered among them a few youthful privileged characters to whom Johnny Friendly owed some favor. “Hogan—Smith—Krajowski—Malloy—” Big Mac shouted. Terry caught his tab with a Willie Mays flourish and winked to Chick and Jackie as he started toward the entrance where he sang out his number to the timekeeper.

  Then Big Mac began filling the regular gangs, looking for familiar faces and the kickback matches, and saying, “You—yeah you—okay you …” When he got down to the banana carriers the desperation mounted. Men jostled his arm in their eagerness, their frost-bitten faces challenging him, expressing an odd mixture of obsequiousness and defiance. “C’mon, Mac, I need a day bad …” “I got five kids home, Mac, I gotta work t’day …” “Hey, Mac, remember me, you said next time you’d …” And Runty, half begging but always saving his pride, “Who d’ya have t’ know t’ get a tab around here, fat boy?”

  Watching this, Father Barry felt ashamed. He had seen the shape-up from the distance of a block and a half when he had come out into the park for a breath of air after the 7-o’clock Mass. But he had never come close enough to look into these desperate faces. Here was depersonalization, here was indignity, across the park from St. Timothy’s, under his very nose. It was one thing to hear abstract criticism of the shape-up. It was quite another to stand here, close enough to see the cold breath of the men, and to look into their eyes, pleading—for what? For a four-hour job, about nine dollars to lug two-hundred-pound banana stalks in a late November wind. No wonder some of the faces were blank and defeated and some of them were already sodden with drink. He looked at Katie, who was staring in fascinated disbelief as she watched her father offering himself to Big Mac like the others. The priest thought again of Xavier and how the little Basque would’ve lowered the boom on a deal like this. Man is such a noble creature, his mind snatched from some familiar text, that only God is his master.

  “—C’mon, Mac, gimme a break, I need a day bad, real bad,” a husky voice carried to him.

  He looked at the girl staring speechlessly at a scene that might have been ripped out of some medieval sketchbook of enslavement.

  “No wonder Pop never talked about it,” Katie said. “And always warned me never to come down here.”

  “You gotta be deaf, dumb and blind not to see that this set-up stinks to Heaven,” Father Barry said.

  “Now you see some of what Joey was trying to change,” Katie said. Her face became taut. Her long blonde-brown hair blew about her in the wind. “I still want to know—who killed my brother?”

  Father Barry said, “The least of mine. Oh, brother, are they giving it to the least of mine!”

  Ten

  EXACTLY HOW IT STARTED a moment later was never clear. It was “one of those things,” a question mark to be raked over and argued in the bars for years to come. Big Mac was being crowded, jostled, heckled. Whether, tipsy and contemptuous, he deliberately tossed the cherished tabs into the air, or whether some over-anxious docker grabbed for a tab and upset the box, the fact remained that nearly two hundred tabs flew into the air. They scattered in front of the pier entrance and as they fell nearly four hundred men howled and scrambled and hustled and fought for them.

  There were human snarls as vicious as any animal’s and the sound of crunching bones and work-hardened fists making bloody wounds. Men who had had to rough-and-tumble on the docks all their lives fought with their heads, their knees, their feet.

  Truck and Gilly looked on in amusement.

  “Meatballs,” Truck grunted.

  “Definitely,” Gilly said with his echoing chuckle.

  It had begun so suddenly and was so unreal, even as it raged in front of them, that Father Barry and Katie experienced it as if it were a nightmare so terrible that they wanted to pull themselves awake to escape its horror. They saw Moose make a flying lunge at a tab, only to have a heavy boot stomp his hand to a bloody mess. In the melee they caught sight of Runty, bobbing up like a battered dinghy in a stormy sea. Blood was dripping from one eye but he wasn’t taking a backward step to adversaries a hundred pounds heavier and a foot taller. Katie screamed as she saw him carried down swinging and kneeing into the swirling bodies, chopping and rolling against one another like the breakers of an angry sea. Pop, Pop, where was Pop! She couldn�
��t bear the thought of her stringy-armed father overwhelmed and dragged down into that churning, bloodied tangle of bodies. “Pop, Pop!” she cried out. Then she saw him, battling near the circumference of the free-for-all. He spied a tab on the ground near him, reached out to it, grabbed for it, was shoved aside, pistoned his fists into the nearest face and finally was ready to pick up the prize when the voice of the figure he had just knocked out of the way shouted:

  “Hey, Terry, grab it fer me.”

  Terry Malloy, standing just beyond the timekeeper, enjoying the fun, executed a quick-reflex reach for the tab and scooped it up.

  “Here ya go, Jackie boy,” he sang out, easily body-checking the old man. But Pop came at him with blood in his eye: Hey gimme that and swung a wild right-hand punch at Terry that looped harmlessly over his head as Terry slipped it neatly to one side.

  Before Father Barry could stop her, Katie was rushing forward. She was too angry and panicked to know what she was doing. She had seen that young bully use his strength and his youth to block out her old man and send him sprawling. “Give me that, give me that,” she screamed at him, grabbing at the tab in Terry’s upraised hand. Terry swung around, away from her hand, circling to her left as a boxer avoids a right-hand puncher. Light on his feet, amused, playing with her, he kept saying, “Huh? Huh? What you want? Huh?”

  “Give it to me! Give it to me!”

  Terry laughed. “Hey, things’re lookin’ up on the docks, hey, Jackie?”

  “It belongs to Pop. He saw it first.” Katie was trying not to cry. Terry was grinning at her and she slapped at his face, but he pulled away, still grinning at her.

  “Pop? I thought maybe you was gonna work—with all them muscles.”

  “It’s for Pop,” she said, lunging futilely again as Terry circled away from her, in his old boxing style when he wanted to spin an opponent into the ropes.

  A real cool-looking broad, Terry sized her up as he clowned with her. Tall, young, firm, sweet, a lot of class. “Your Pop, huh? What makes him so special?”

  As Katie made another grab at the tab that Terry managed to keep just out of her reach, it was Jackie Roche who said, “Don’t ya recognize him, dopey? That’s old man Doyle.”

  Hey Joey, Joey Doyle—he’s one of yours—I recognized the band.

  Terry stopped circling away from her. He could feel something vague and bewildering, something falling away from him, like his stomach on the roller-coaster at Coney.

  “Doyle … Joey Doyle’s … you’re his …”

  “Sister,” Katie said, in a flat, direct tone, “Yes, I am.”

  Terry looked at her, took off his cap, ran his hand through his hair and shook his head as if he was clearing it after a bad round. Then he made himself tough again. He turned to Jackie. “Who the hell wants to lug bananas in the rain anyhoo? Am I right, Jackie boy?”

  “Aah, give it to ’im,” Jackie said.

  “Here ya go, muscles,” Terry said to Katie and slapped the tab into her hand. “It was nice wrastlin’ with ya.”

  He raised his left hand, boxer style, flicked a couple of quick jabs into the air and winked at her.

  “C’mon, Jackie, let’s go over to Friendly’s and catch a few beers. I c’n check in any time.”

  He and Jackie started across the street to the bar, walking tough. He was conscious of the girl’s angry eyes on him. His side-to-side boxer’s swagger was a little more exaggerated than usual. Goddamn it, who dragged the Doyle broad into this? Just when he was ready to take life easy in the loft. In the loft you were out of the rat race, you were out from under the shape-up pressure if you had a regular job in the loft. He’d need three four five straight shots to get this out of his mind.

  Katie watched him go, with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched, wise-cracking to his chum out of the corner of his mouth. She had been away from Bohegan most of her teen-age life. But Katie knew this type. The streets of her childhood had teemed with them. Dirty-faced, foul-mouthed, gutter-toughened little people drawn toward the strongest and most ruthless as nails to magnets. Slapped by the nuns, cuffed by the cops, whipped by their parents, beaten by bigger boys and each day challenged to be louder with their mouths and quicker with their fists; grabby, suspicious, loyal only to a few no-good cronies, sneering at authority, mean little twentieth-century savages—oh, Katie had known them all her life, had been warned by her father against them all her life, boys like the one who had just fought her for the tab, who could never stop proving to their pals just how tough they were. How little they knew, Katie was thinking as Terry headed for the bar. How they counted on force for everything and never suspected that no one is more the victim of force than he who thinks he must depend on it.

  “Who is that fresh kid?” she asked Moose, who had come up out of the battle royal to see if she was all right.

  “That was Terry Malloy, the kid brother of Charley the Gent,” Moose explained. “Just a punk.”

  “Charley the Gent?”

  “He’s our local representative on the District Council. A politician.” Moose didn’t want to tell her any more.

  Father Barry came rapidly toward them, half leading Pop, who was wiping the blood off his face with a handkerchief the priest had given him. Pop pulled himself free. He was in a sweaty rage, not so much at losing the tab. Nearly forty years on the waterfront had hardened him to the everyday setbacks. Even the fact that his nose felt broken didn’t discourage him too much. He was a tough old man. No, the rage was for Katie’s being down here where he had always forbidden her.

  “Lemme alone, Father,” he said, and pulled himself free.

  Katie held the tab out to him, ashamed at having to see his shame.

  “Here—I got it for you.”

  Pop grabbed it from her.

  “Okay—I c’n use it.” He would have slapped her if it hadn’t been for the presence of the priest. “Now just as soon as we bury ’im you’re goin’ back to the Sisters where you belong.” He turned on the priest. “I’m surprised at you. Father, if ya don’ mind me sayin’ so. Lettin’ her see things that aint fit fer the eyes of a decent goil.”

  “She seems to know her own mind,” Father Barry said.

  “Stubborn as an Irish donkey ya mean,” Pop said, glaring at her. “Stay away from here.” Then back to the priest, “And if I wuz you I’d stay outa this too, Father.”

  “She wanted to have a good look at it. Maybe it’s time we all took a good look at it,” Father Barry said.

  “I think the two of yuz is blowin’ yer corks.”

  “A time for patience and a time to blow your cork?” Father Barry said.

  “Jesus, Mary ’n Joseph, everybody is got an answer,” Pop protested.

  A bull voice broke in. It was Big Mac, drunkenly rebuilding the blocks of his dignity. “Hey, Doyle, you got a tab?”

  Pop held it up defiantly. “Yeah.”

  “Then knock off the chin music. Git in there. Number two hatch starboard gang. Puh-ronto.”

  “Okay, okay, hold ya water,” Pop said. Specks of blood on his upper lip gave him the look of an embattled, straight-faced circus clown as he turned back for a final word to his daughter and the priest.

  “You mind what I’m sayin’ now. You too, Father. This aint no surroundin’s for a man of God.” Then he started into the pier entrance, muttering to himself.

  Captain Schlegel usually stayed in his office inside the pier, but this time the commotion brought him out to the entranceway. When he saw Father Barry he hurried over to assure him that what he had just seen was in no way typical of the morning hiring. (That dumbkopf McGown, he was thinking. Maybe he could get Captain Bateson to shift him to the new pier so he could make life miserable for some other stevedore captain.)

  Even without the scramble, Father Barry answered, it did seem to him as if the shape-up was a wasteful, callous, inefficient way of hiring human beings. It seemed to be a system of no-system, with the men who were passed over having to get up and
report for work just as if they had a regular morning job. That was hardly fair. And now, wasn’t it too late for them to try their luck at other piers? Hadn’t all the work-gangs been filled for the day, from Bohegan to Red Hook? And, Father Barry said, talking very fast as he always did when an idea seized him, was it wise to give one man such power over five hundred others as this Big Mac obviously had? “A hiring boss would have to be a saint not to misuse this kind of power,” Father Barry said. “And that big fellow with the pot belly may not be the worst of them but he’s not exactly my idea of a saint.”