On the Waterfront (13 page)

Father Barry felt exhilarated. More than the breeze rising from the river was bracing him now. He didn’t know exactly what he was going to do, but at least he was ready to take the first step. By God, he wasn’t going to be just another swinging smokepot.
Duc in altum.
Launch out into the deep. Those words always had fascinated him. Be ready to venture out into unknown depths. Was he up to it? Did he have the gospel guts to launch out into the depths?

He turned and started walking rapidly back to the rectory a mile away. Crossing River Street a few blocks farther down, a tough compact figure came lurching toward him, a young fellow in dark corduroy pants and a black-and-red-checked wool windbreaker, with hands pushed deep into the pockets, and his head down.

“Hey, kid, you don’t happen to have a cigarette on you?” Father Barry asked.

Here he was again using his ecclesiastical position to pressure small favors. Like showing up at shops when the doors opened Monday mornings on the chance that superstitious shop owners would give him free the things he was after. Bad luck to turn away the first customer, and to double it, a wearer of the cloth. Father Barry had learned to scrounge early. There was a touch of larceny in him that remained a vestige of the street kid’s scramble to survive.

“What’s this—a gag?” the moody young man—Terry Malloy—asked angrily. “Ten to one you aint a priest at all. I seen that racket plenny o’ times.” Terry walked away, muttering profanity.

Father Barry shrugged and strode back to the rectory. That kid, that punk had probably been baptized, gone to parochial school and received Communion. But look at him, a foul-mouthed Bohegan hoodlum, hostile, suspicious, dangerous and alone.

A
WAKENING ON THE METAL
frame bed that almost filled the small, stuffy bedroom, Katie felt confused. Her window at school faced east into the morning sunlight, and she always liked to linger a few moments between the clean white sheets, stretching and letting the sunlight bathe her. It was a precious moment to her, a brief interval between sleeping and waking, between the ease of sleep and the active schedule of the day. But this morning there was no sun, and no sheets. She was still in her clothes, on top of the bed where she had fallen at last into exhausted sleep. The single window in the north wall of the narrow room opened on the side of the adjoining building a scant foot away, so that even on the brightest day the light had to filter down from the roof above. It was airless and gloomy. Heavily, with a sense of discomfort, of a slovenliness that she loathed, she remembered where she was and why she was here. A neat girl, proud of the clean, scrubbed look that was natural to her and that she cultivated, she rose guiltily, straightened out the worn spread and tried to smooth out the wrinkles in her navy-blue skirt.

In the front room there was an unmusical counterpoint of masculine snoring, as the loyal members of the wake lay where they had fallen. Runty Nolan was sprawled on the floor with his arms outflung as if he had been impaled in mid-gesture as he was telling one of his stories. Jimmy Sharkey lay asleep in the big easy chair with the stuffing working out of it. Moose was boisterous even in sleep; his big body rose and fell with his heavy breathing. Pop’s stringy, small-muscled arms hung over the edge of the day-bed. His twenty-four-hour growth of beard and the soiled long underwear top added to the gloom. The room was littered with the leavings of the wake, a couple of bottles of Four Roses toppled on the floor like the men into whom they had been emptied; a cigarette stand on its side, its accumulation of blackened tobacco, used cigars and crushed cigarettes making a small dumping ground on the carpet; a shirt draped over a lamp; shoes spread about like ducks after a shoot; and glasses—dirty glasses, half-filled glasses, broken glasses, overturned glasses, glasses that would remind Katie of whiskey and death and the stale horror of the morning after.

Katie went into the kitchen, saw the disheartening clutter of plates in the small sink, the left-over sandwiches, the spill of whiskies souring the atmosphere. Again her mind went wishfully back to Marygrove where the Sisters moved immaculately and the faces of her classmates were scrubbed clean. Dutifully, Katie turned her mind away from Tarrytown to the reality of dirty dishes and a need for coffee to stir Pop and his friends to the efforts of the day. This cold, drizzling sunless day, this Joey-less day.

The sound of coffee perking and Katie rattling the dishes as she stacked them in the sink had begun to penetrate the fuzzy sleep of Patrick Doyle. He swung slowly to a sitting position on the couch and rubbed his face in his hands with his eyes still shut against the day. He stretched and groaned and Runty shifted position on the floor and opened his eyes to a slit.

“A grand wake, Patrick,” he muttered with a cheerfulness that was almost automatic. “As handsome a sendoff as I’ve seen since I buried me own father.”

“Me achin’ head,” Pop groaned.

Runty struggled to his feet and stretched himself to his full height of five feet two inches. Then he looked around for the fallen Moose and kicked his rear end with well-concealed affection.

“Git up, ya bum, you. Whatta ya think ya are, a goddamn millionaire?”

Moose woke up in a hurry and cocked his fist. “If it wasn’t we was out visitin’, as God is me judge I’d beat the hell outa ya.”

“You aint big enough,” Runty challenged his two-hundred-pound companion.

Jimmy Sharkey rose stiff-legged from the easy chair. His eyes were bloodshot and his head felt as if it had been clubbed by a Gaelic hurling stick.

“Awright, awright, knock it off, you two juiceheads. Have a little respect.”

“Don’ mind ’em,” Pop said soothingly. “They always stood by me. They just like to string each other along. They don’t mean no harm.”

Katie came in with a pot of coffee and some clean cups. Her lips were pressed together in anger. What made them behave like this, lost and beaten down, accepting Joey’s death as a dead-end?

“Morning, Pop,” she said. “Here’s some coffee for you. And for your friends.”

She set the coffee down, with the cups and spoons, and went back to the kitchen.

“She’s a grand goil,” Runty said. “Lucky for you she favors her mother.” He gave his ho-ho-ho laugh.

They drank their coffee down in silence. From the river came the hoarse vibration of a boat whistle. Pop could tell the time from the sounds of the river traffic. “Seven o’clock ferry gettin’ ready to pull out for Christopher Street,” he said. “Time we was gettin’ down to the corner.”

There was a coffeepot across from the pier, on the opposite corner from Friendly’s, an informal information center where—in lieu of some more orderly system—the men picked up their info on the ships coming in. One of the things Joey had plugged for was a hiring center, where the men could get regular advance information on what ships were docking where and when, and how many jobs would be available. “The shipping companies ought to be able to tell us two days ahead,” he had insisted, “exactly how many gangs they’ll be needing. A decent union ’d systematize it. Instead of every morning the same old rat race.” That was Joey talking. But around the entire harbor there was only a handful like him, stand-up guys, with their necks out a mile.

The men were rubbing the sleep out of their eyes and pulling on their windbreakers. Pop took his worn wool workcoat off a hook with the dirty canvas gloves that were a mark of his trade, along with the stubby cargo hook that was almost a physiological extension of a longshoreman’s right arm.

“Put ya hook down,” Runty said. “This aint no day for you t’ be woikin’. The lads who get woik t’day ’ll be chippin’ in gladly.”

“Sure, Pop, stay home. We’ll pass the box for ya,” Jimmy Sharkey said.

“Ya bet we will!” Moose shouted.

“Thanks, boys, but I’m gonna shape,” Pop said, sticking his hook through his belt over his rear pocket. “Who d’ya think’s gonna pay for the funeral? Tom McGovern an’ his stinkin’ stevedore company? Or Willie Givens, the bum? Nobody’s passin’ no box for me, thank you just the same. I’m gonna shape.”

He led them through the bedroom to the kitchen door. From a hook on the door hung Joey’s windbreaker, a fur-lined Navy issue that Pop had filched in the hold. Impulsively Pop reached for it and handed it to Runty.

“Here. Ya might as well get some use out of it. Yours is more full o’ holes ’n the Pittsboig infield.”

Runty nodded, slipped out of his old woolen windbreaker and tried on Joey’s. It hung loosely on his small, bony frame.

“Plenny o’ room for stuffin’ steaks or Johnny Walker,” he said approvingly.

“It’ll start to fit ’im after a while,” Moose laughed. “After all he’s still a growin’ boy.”

“Le’s go down get some more joe,” Jimmy said. “My eyeballs are draggin’ on the floor.”

“Whatsa matter with these young fellers?” Runty winked to Pop. “Looks like they’re gettin’ soft, the lot of ’em. Show me one of ’em c’n stand up to the amber like us old timers.” Halfway through he was sorry for the saying of it, for the look on Pop’s face changed, the lines seeming to cut deeper, the light of false banter fading out of the eyes. Runty knew he was thinking of Joey again. It was just a show they were putting on and they all knew it. Nobody was fooling anybody else, but they had to keep trying, keep it bubbling. That was the tradition.

Pop turned to embrace Katie, who had been standing behind them, watching them with troubled eyes.

“Have a good day, Pop,” she said tightly.

Pop took it as a reproach and his voice edged up to her carefully, wanting to soothe her and afraid that any recognition of the subject would rouse her again.

“Katie, I know it aint easy. Maybe when ya get back to Tarrytown the Sisters c’n help ya accept it.”

“Why must we accept it?” Katie said.

Pop shrugged. “God must know what He’s doin’.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Katie said.

Pop put his hands out, as if to appeal to the others, in a rather comic gesture. “Jesus, Mary ’n Joseph. I been coised with stubborn children.”

“It would have to be drizzlin’,” Jimmy said, thinking of accidents. “It’ll be just our luck t’ get sheet copper in the rain.”

“Or bananas,” Pop said. “When you start slippin’ on them rotten bananas …”

Runty chuckled. “Wouldn’t it be a sight now t’ see a ship come in from Ireland herself, Gawd love her, the
Maple
or the
Elm,
loaded t’ the gunnels with Jameson’s Irish.” Runty stuck his small, broken-knuckle hands into the pockets of his new windbreaker. “That’ll be the day this loot jacket comes into its own.”

Katie watched them disappear into the lower stories of the tenement, laughing and talking loud. Had they no feelings? Yes, of course she knew how Pop cried to himself, and Runty was soft as cheese under his bantam swagger. And Moose was rough and loud, but she knew inside he was almost too gentle for the bruising give-and-take of the life on the docks. But there had been too many “accidents” like Joey’s on the waterfront. Too many ribs caved in. Too many faces hacked with steel pikes and gun handles. Until finally even the best of them, like Pop, were as accustomed to homicide and assault as they were to the sound of foghorns and ship whistles. It was, she thought, as if their hearts had developed a coating as thickened and difficult to penetrate as the callouses that years of rough work had grafted onto their hands. Though Pop had been careful not to speak of it to her, this violence they had learned to live with was in the air the neighborhood breathed. She had heard it whispered in the grocery store when she was home for week-ends, accepted it herself as just another harsh Bohegan reality, and never dreamed it would break down the door into their own life.

From the roof the cold morning sun could be seen across the river, rising behind the jagged range of steel, concrete and glass. In the summer these rooftops made a tenement riviera where the poor could bare their torsos to the sun, watch the sparkle and movement of the river and sometimes sneak a night’s sleep away from the stifling heat of the airless bedrooms. But in the early morning November chill the rooftops were deserted, except for the pigeon fanciers who were up at dawn to feed and exercise their flocks before going off to work.

This morning there was only one figure on the roof. He was Terry Malloy, who had rolled in from the bars only an hour or so before, his fifty clams spread around a score of ginmills from Bohegan to Manhattan. The Bohegan bars closed their doors at two and reopened at five, not so much as a moral curfew as a respite providing time for a badly needed clean-up. The Manhattan joints were in business until four, so an enterprising boozer could shuttle over on the ferry at two, nurse his drinks in a West Side pub until he was pushed out into the sick-blue light just in time to hit the River Street spots on the Bohegan side again. A small but convincing demonstration of the American talent for jimmying through any law that tries to violate the pleasure principle.

The brain of Terry Malloy was smoky with thirty-five-cent whiskies and beer chasers. His tongue felt—he thought with heavy humor—like the bottom of his pigeon coop. But there was relief in leaning back against the tar-papered side of a skylight and watching the birds circle out across the river. He inhaled deeply the cold air of the river that filtered out the soot and the factory smog. He liked the way the pigeons flashed the light undersides of their brown and blue and silver-grey wings as they swept overhead.

Hot damn, they were beauteeful, and they were his, the one thing in his life over which he had complete say-so, his to keep flying with his long be-flagged pole, his to send off into the unknown of distant cities to be released for the race home to Bohegan. He’d run for his coop as soon as he saw his bird dart through the movable bars, pull the racing band off its leg with quick, sure motion and push it into the racing clock without a lost moment to register the split-second time of arrival. Some feeling it was to have that first band in the clock.

How in hell as they flew high over the cities of East Jersey they could pick out his—Terry’s—one little rooftop loft—that he would never understand. They must have plenty of brains packed into those perky, smooth-feathered little noggins. Brains and guts, that’s what it took to be a racing pigeon, something like being champion of the world. Don’t let anybody ever tell you they’re born that way, Terry was thinking. Hell, he’d like to have a buck for every one he had lost on the practice flights. They had something special, the ones that came through. Like you take this here Swifty, he thought, his lead bird, the master of the flock, who had fought his way up to the top perch and had come through two tough five-hundred-mile races, once with some of his head feathers gone and blood showing where a pigeon hawk had tried to make a meal of him. Another time he had flopped through the entrance bars with a broken leg. Terry never knew how it happened. But a bird with the true homing gift won’t stop for food or water or injury. As long as he’s able to move his wings he’ll keep homing. Swifty was crippled now but still formidable, a powerful, hustling, proud cock of a bird. Something like Johnny Friendly, the way he cock-of-the-walked it over all the others. You had to admire him as you admired Johnny Friendly, the way he fought his way up, the way he had hustled to the front of the pack, the way he had pecked off anybody threatening that top perch. It took guts and know-how and …