“Okay, boys,” Fisheye said, when he saw they were there. “I c’n handle this myself. This bigmouth is dumb, but he’s not so dumb he wants to wind up in the river. Am I right, Matt me lad?”
In the river. A senseless body kicked off the stringpiece into the black and secretive river, while the city looked the other way. Cause of death: accidental drowning. Dozens and dozens of good men had been splashed into the dark river like so much garbage. Matt knew some of the widows who had stories to tell, if only someone would listen. In the river. Matt drew away from Fisheye. What was the use? Outnumbered and outgunned. But one of these days—went the dream—he and Runt would get some action in the local, some following; they’d call a real election and—
Behind Matt a big truck blasted its horn, ready to drive into the pier. Fisheye thumbed Matt to one side. “All right, get moving, you’re blocking traffic, we got a ship to turn around.” Matt spat into the gutter and walked away.
Back across the street in the Longdock, Matt sat with a beer in front of him, automatically watching the morning television: some good-looking, fast-talking dame selling something—yatta-ta yatta-ta yatta-ta. In the old days, at least you had peace and quiet in the Longdock until the boys with the work tabs came in for lunch. Matt walked up the riverfront to another gin mill and sat with another beer. Now and then a fellow like himself would drift in, on the outs with Lippy and open to Matt’s arguments about getting up a petition to call an honest union election: About time we got the mob’s foot off’n our necks; sure, they’re tough, but if there’s enough of us … it was the old dream of standing up like honest-to-God Americans instead of like oxen with rings in their noses.
Matt thought he was talking quiet but even his whisper had volume, and farther down the bar Feets and Specs were taking it in. They weren’t frowning or threatening, but just looking, quietly drinking and taking it all in.
When Matt finished his beer and said see-ya-later, Specs and Feets rose dutifully and followed him out. A liner going downriver let out a blast that swallowed up all the other sounds in the harbor. Matt didn’t hear them approach until Feets had a hand on his shoulder. Feets was built something like Matt, round and hard. Specs was slight and not much to look at. He wore very thick glasses. He had shot the wrong fellow once. Lippy had told him to go out and buy a new pair of glasses and warned him not to slip up that way again.
“What d’ya say, Matt?” Feets asked, and from his tone no one could have thought them anything but friends.
“Hello, Feets, Specs,” Matt said.
“Listen, Matt, we’d like to talk to you a minute,” Feets said.
“Then talk,” Matt said. “As long as it’s only talk, go ahead.”
“Why do you want to give us so much trouble?” Specs said—any defiance of power mystified him. “You should straighten yourself out, Matt. You’d be working three-four days a week if you just learned to keep that big yap of yours shut.”
“I didn’t know you were so worried about whether I worked or not.”
“Matt, don’t be such a thickheaded mick,” Feets argued. “Why be agitatin’ alla time? You ain’t gonna get anywheres, that’s for sure. All ya do is louse yourself up with Lippy.”
Matt said something short and harsh about Lippy. Feets and Specs looked pained, as if Matt were acting in bad taste.
“I wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that,” Specs said. His face got very white when he was ready for action. On the waterfront he had a reputation for enjoying the trigger-squeezing. “You keep saying that stuff and we’ll have to do something about it. You know how Lippy is.”
Matt thought a moment about the danger of saying what he wanted to say: Fran and the kids home waiting for money he’d have to borrow from the loan shark. Why look for trouble? Why buck for the bottom of the river? Was it fair to Fran? Why couldn’t he be like so many other longshoremen—like Flanagan, who had no love for Lippy Keegan but went along to keep food on the table? Lippy ran the piers just like he owned them. You didn’t have to like Lippy, but it sure made life simpler if he liked you.
Matt thought about all this, but he couldn’t help himself. He was a self-respecting man, and it galled him that a pushy racketeer—a graduate of the old Arsenal Mob—and a couple of punks could call themselves a union. I shouldn’t say this, Matt was thinking, and he was already saying it:
“Yeah, I know how Lippy is. Lippy is gonna get the surprise of his fuckin’ life one of these days. Lippy is gonna find himself—”
“You dumb harp,” Feets said. “You must like to get hit in the head.”
“There’s lots I like better,” Matt admitted. “But I sure as hell won’t back away from it.”
Feets and Specs looked at each other and the glance said clearly: What are you going to do with a meathead like this? They shrugged and walked away from Matt, back to their places at the bar. Later in the day they would give Lippy a full account and find out the next move. This Matt Gillis was giving their boss a hard time. Everything would be lovely down here if it wasn’t for this handful of talk-back guys. They leaned on the bar with a reassuring sense that they were on the side of peace and stability, that Matt Gillis was asking for trouble.
Matt met Runt in the Longdock around five-thirty. Runt was buying because he had the potatoes in his pocket. They talked about this petition they were getting up to call a regular meeting. Runt had been talking to a couple of old-timers in his hatch gang who were half scared to death and half ready to go along. And there were maybe half a dozen young fellows who had young ideas and no use for the old ways of buying jobs from Fisheye and coming on the double whenever Lippy whistled. Another round or two and it was suppertime.
“Have another ball, Matt. The money’s burnin’ a hole in me pocket.”
“Thanks, Runt, but I gotta get home. The wife’ll be hittin’ me with a mop.” This was a familiar, joking threat in the Gillis domain.
Matt wiped his mouth with his sleeve and rubbed his knuckles on Runt’s head. “Now don’t get in no arguments. You watch yourself now.” It was bad business, Matt knew, bucking the mob and hitting the bottle at the same time. They could push you into the drink some night and who was to say you weren’t dead drunk, just another “death by accidental drowning.”
Matt was worried about Runt as he walked up the dark side street to his tenement. Runt took too many chances. Runt liked to say, “I had me fun and I drunk me fill. What’ve I got to lose?”
I better keep my eye on the little fella now that we’re pushin’ so hard for this up-and-up election, Matt was thinking, when he felt something solid whop him just behind the ear. The blow had force enough to drop a horse but Matt half turned, made a club of his right hand and was ready to wield it when the something solid whopped him again at the back of his head. He thought it was the kid, the Skelly punk, there with Feets, but he wasn’t sure. It was dark and his head was coming apart. In a bad dream something was swinging at him on the ground—hobnailed shoes, the finishing touch. Feets, they called him. The darkness closed in over him like a black tarpaulin.
Everybody was talking at once and—was it time for him to get up and shape?—he was sprawled on the bed in his room. Go ’way, lemme sleep.
“Matt, listen, this is Doc Wolff.” The small, lean-faced physician was being pushed and breathed on. “The rest of you go on, get out of here.”
Half the tenement population was crowded into the Gillises’ narrow flat. Mrs. Geraghty, who was always like that, took the kids up to eat at her place. Doc Wolff washed out the ugly wounds in Matt’s scalp. Half the people in the neighborhood owed him money he would never see—or ask for. Some of the old-timers still owed his father, who insisted on practicing at seventy-five. Father and son had patched up plenty of wounds like these. They were specialists on blackjack, steel-pipe and gun-butt contusions. Jews in an Irish district, they never took sides, verbally, in the endless guerrilla war between the dock mob and the “insoigents.” All they could do, when a longshoreman got himsel
f in a fix like this, was to overlook the bill. The Wolffs were still poor from too much overlooking.
“Is it serious, Doctor?”
“We’d better X-ray, to make sure it isn’t a skull fracture. I’d like to keep him in St. Vincent’s a couple of days.”
It was no fracture, just a couple of six-inch gashes and a concussion—a neat professional job performed according to instructions. “Don’t knock him out of the box for good. Just leave him so he’ll have something to think about for a week or two.”
On the second day Runt came up with a quart and the good news that the men on the dock were signing the petition. The topping of Matt had steamed them up, where Lippy had figured it would scare them off. Runt said he thought they had enough men, maybe a couple of dozen, to call a rank-and-file meeting.
Father Conley, a waterfront priest with savvy and guts, had offered the rectory library as a haven.
But that night Fran sat at the side of Matt’s bed in the ward for a long talk-to. She had a plan. It had been on her mind for a long time. This was her moment to push it through. Her sister’s husband worked for a storage company. The pay was good, the work was regular, and best of all there weren’t any Lippy Keegans muscling you if you didn’t play it their way. This brother-in-law said there was an opening for Matt. He could come in on a temporary basis and maybe work his way into regular union membership if he liked it. The brother-in-law had a little pull in that direction.
“Please, Matt. Please.” It was Fran’s domestic logic against his bulldog gift of fighting back. If he was a loner like Runt Nolan, he could stand up to Lippy and Specs and Feets and young Skelly and the rest of that trash all he wanted. But was it fair to Fran and the kids to pass up a sure seventy-five dollars a week in order to go hungry and bloody on the piers?
“Why does it always have to be you that sticks his neck out? Next time it’ll be worse. They’ll …”
Yes, Matt knew. The river: Lippy Keegan’s silent partner, the old North River, waiting for him in the dark.
“Okay, Franny,” Matt was saying under his bandages. “Okay. Tell Denny”—that was the brother-in-law—“I’ll take the job.”
In the storage vaults it was nice and quiet. The men came right to work from their homes. There was none of that stopping in at the corner and shooting the breeze about ships coming in and where the jobs might be—no hit or miss. The men were different too: good steady workers who had been there for years, not looking for any excitement. It seemed funny to Matt not to be looking behind him to see if any of Lippy’s boys were on his tail, funny to have money in his pockets without having to worry how he was going to pay it back to the loan sharks.
When Matt had been there three weeks, Fran went out and bought herself a new dress—the first new one in almost two years. And the following Sunday they went up to the park and had lunch at the cafeteria near the zoo—their first visit to a restaurant in Lord knows when. Fran put her hand in Matt’s and said, “Oh, Matt, isn’t this better? Isn’t this how people are supposed to live?”
Matt said yeah, he guessed so. It was good to see Fran happy and relaxed, no longer worried about food on the table for the kids, or whether he’d get home in one piece. Only—he couldn’t put it into words, but when he got back to work on the fifth floor of the huge storage building, he knew what was going to come over him.
And next day it did, stronger than at any time since he started. He wondered what Runt was doing, and Jocko and Luke and Timmy and the rest of the gang in the Longdock. He hadn’t been in since the first week he started at the storage. The fellows had all asked him how he was feeling and how he liked the new job, but he felt something funny about them, as if they were saying, “Well, you finally let Lippy run you off the docks, huh, Matt?” “All that big talk about cleaning up the union and then you fold like an accordion, huh, Matt?” It was in their eyes—even Runt’s.
“Well, I’m glad to see you got smart and put your hook away,” Runt actually said. “Me, I’d do the same if I was a family man. But I always run too fast for the goils to catch me.” Runt laughed and poked Matt lightly, but there was something about it wasn’t the same.
Matt ran into Runt on the street a week or so later and asked him how everything was going. He had heard the neighborhood scuttlebutt about a new meeting coming up in the parish house. A government labor man was going to talk to them on how to get their rights. Father Conley had pulled in a trade-union lawyer for them and everything seemed to be moving ahead.
But Runt was secretive with Matt. Matt felt the brush; he was an outsider now. Runt had never said a word in criticism of Matt’s withdrawal from the waterfront—just occasional cracks about fellows like himself who were too dumb to do anything else but stand their ground and fight it out. But it got under Matt’s skin. He had the face of a bruiser, and inlanders would think of him as “tough-looking.” But actually Matt was thin-skinned, emotional, hypersensitive. Runt wouldn’t even tell him the date of the secret meeting, just asked him how he liked the storage job.
“It’s a real good deal,” Matt said. No seven-thirty shape-up. No muscle men masquerading as shop stewards. The same check every week. What more could he want?
What more than stacking cardboard containers in a long tunnel-like room illuminated by neon tubing? Matt wondered what there was about the waterfront. Why did men humiliate themselves by standing like cattle in the shape-up? What was so good about swinging a cargo hook—hoisting cement, copper ore, coffee, noxious cargoes that tickled your throat and maybe were slowly poisoning you?
But that didn’t tell the whole story, Matt was thinking as he handled the storage containers automatically. There was the salt air; there were the ships coming in from Spain, from South America, Greece, all over the world. There was the way the river sparkled on a bright day. And there was the busy movement of the harbor: the sound of the ferries, the tugs, the barges, the freighters and the great luxury ladies with their autocratic noses in the air. There were the different kinds of cargoes to handle—furs, perfume, sardines, cognac—and who was to blame them if they got away with a bottle or two; it wasn’t pilferage on the waterfront until you trucked it away. There was the teamwork of a good gang working the cargo from the hatch and over the deck to the pier; the winch men, the deck men, the hatch boss, the high-low drivers, everybody moving together to an unstated but strongly felt rhythm that could be thrown off if just one man in a twenty-three-man gang didn’t know his job. And then there were the breaks for lunch—not cold sandwiches in a metal container, but a cut of hot roast beef in the bar across the street, with a cold beer to wash it down. And there was the talk of last night’s fight or today’s ball game or the latest cute trick pulled off by the longshore racketeers.
The waterfront: the violent, vivid, restless, corrupted, “we’re-doin’-lovely” waterfront.
Matt felt that way for days and said nothing about it. He’d sit in the front room with his shoes off, drinking beer, reading the tabloids, and wondering until it ached him what Runt and the boys were up to.
One evening when he came home, Flanagan and Bennett and some of the other neighbors were busy talking on the steps. Matt heard. “Maybe he’s just on one of his periodicals and he’s sleeping it off somewheres.” And, “He coulda shipped out somewhere. He used to be an A.B. and he’s just ornery enough to do it.” And Matt heard, “When he gets his load on, anything c’n happen. He could walk off the end of the pier into the river and think he was home in bed.”
Runt Nolan! No hide nor hair of him in three days, Flanagan said. Matt ran upstairs to tell Fran. She saw the look in his eyes when he talked about Runt, who always said he was “on borried time.” “Now, Matt, no use getting yourself excited. Wait and see. Now, Matt.” She saw the look in his eyes was the old look, before he settled for the cozy inland job with the storage company.
He paced up and down, but the children got on his nerves and he went over to talk to Father Conley. The father was just as worried as Matt. Specs had
been warning Runt not to hold any more meetings in the rectory. Specs had told Runt to take it easy for his own good.
Matt went home after a while but he couldn’t sleep. At one-thirty in the morning he put his clothes back on and went down to the Longdock. What’s the story, any news of Runt?
Nine days later there was news of Runt. The police department had made contact with Runt, by means of a grappling hook probing the soft, rotten bottom of the river. Runt wasn’t “on borried time” any more. He had paid back every minute of it. Cause of death: accidental drowning. On the night of his disappearance, Runt had been seen wandering the gin mills in a state of inebriation. In other words, bagged. There were no marks of violence on Runt. How could anyone prove he hadn’t slipped. The good old North River, Lippy’s silent partner, had done it again.
It was a good funeral. Everybody in the neighborhood was there—even Lippy Keegan, and Specs and Skelly and the rest of the boys. After the Mass, Father Conley came out on the sidewalk, and Matt and some of the others who were closest to Runt gathered around to hear what the father had to say.
They had seen the father steamed before but never like this. “Accident my eye,” he said. “If they think we’re going to take this lying down, they’re dumber than I think they are.”
“What can we do, Father?”
Everybody looked around. It was Flanagan, who had come up behind Matt; Flanagan, who always played it very cozy with the Keegans. But like most of the others, he had liked having Runt around—that cocky little bantam. The Longdock wouldn’t be the same without him. It looked like Runt, at the bottom of the river, had done more damage to Lippy than when he was around the docks shooting off his mouth.
Father Conley said, “We’re going to keep this case alive. We’ll question every single person who talked to Runt the day they hit him in the head. We’ll keep needling the police for action. Keegan hasn’t heard the end of Runt Nolan.”
“Now’s the time to put somebody up to run for president against Lippy,” the Bennett kid said.
Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales Page 18
