On the Waterfront (19 page)

Father Barry, always intense and now wound dangerously tight as a result of what he had seen, strode up to the group. He had seen most of them at the wake.

“Well, what d’ya do now?”

The men didn’t look at him. A sense of guilt pressed upon them, as if they had to atone for their helplessness. And the presence of Katie shriveled them too. They were, most of them, Irishmen, never completely at ease with women under the best of circumstances and double-troubled here to see this girl they all respected come among them and see them in their shame.

Father Barry held his ground. He knew they didn’t want him down here any more than they wanted the girl.

“I said what d’ya do now?”

Luke shrugged. “Like the man sayed. Come back tomorra.”

“T’morra,” Runty snapped. “There’s no ship t’morra.”

“And if he won’t pick you the next day?” Father Barry asked.

Moose hunched his shoulders. “Ya hit ‘J.P.’ Morgan fer a loan. A longshoreman spends the money t’day he hopes t’make t’morra. That’s a fact, Father.”

“Not so loud,” Jimmy Sharkey warned, aware of Truck and Gilly looking on from the pier entrance.

“Moose, you try t’ whisper somethin’ and I swear t’ Christ they c’n hear it clear t’ the end of the next block.” Runty half laughed.

“I been standin’ here the last five mornin’s,” Moose shouted in what he thought was a confidential tone. “I tell ’im I got four kids t’ feed an’ my wife is half crazy. But they got me down for a Bolsheviki ‘cause they seen me talkin’ too much in the Longdock with Joey. Hell, we’re talkin’ about fights an’ ball games mos’ the time.”

His conspiratorial shout assaulted the suspicious ears of Truck and Gilly, whose invisible antennae were constantly tuned to mutiny. Truck waddled forward, with Gilly mechanically falling in step with him.

“Anyway five days I’m standin’ here,” Moose went on confiding in his booming voice. “And that McGown bum looks right through me like I’m an open winder.”

Truck moved in on him. “C’mon, get movin’. Y’heard d’ boss.”

“Yeah, get movin’,” Gilly chimed in, shoving Moose just a little.

Truck was a Catholic too, or he thought he was, and he was unable to pass on without acknowledging the priest. “I’m sorry, Father, but y’see, there’s no blocking the entrance way.”

“Da’s right. Definitely,” Gilly echoed.

Johnny Friendly’s pair of muscle men hard-shouldered their way over to herd another group away from the pier entrance.

“C’mon, let’s go get a ball,” Runty said. He was still breathing hard through his broken nose.

But Father Barry held them with his anger. “Is that all you do, just take it like this?”

The men looked at one another with a what’s-the-use shrug. Father Barry turned from one to the other. “I thought you boys had a union. There isn’t a labor union in the country that’d stand for a deal like this.”

Runty looked around to see if Truck and Gilly were still on the prowl. They were, and Runty took the priest’s arm.

“Take a walk with me, Father.”

Father Barry nodded to Katie, who had sense enough to keep quiet. It was bad enough she was down here at all. She knew what Pop must be feeling. Mad enough to put the strap to her. And she had begun to worry into what uncharted shoals she was leading the priest. She followed along and said nothing, watching them with her innocent, critical, lively blue eyes.

“If I wuz you, Father,” Runty said, “I wouldn’t push my nose in this thing. I don’ mean no disrespect. Fer yer own good I mean it. But if you want t’ know, we don’ have no union. We got these bums on top of us stickin’ our dues ’n kickbacks in their pockets an’ drivin’ around in four-thousand-buck convoitables.”

“You mean you fellers can’t get up in a meeting and …”

Again they looked at each other with humorous shrugs.

Jimmy Sharkey said, “You know what they call Four-Four-Seven? The pistol local.”

“I do remember hearing that,” Father Barry said.

“It’s one thing to hear it. It’s another thing to feel it with the pistol butts on yer noggin,” Runty said.

“You know how a pistol local works, Father?” Moose shouted.

“No—how?” Father Barry said.

Luke answered for them, speaking with a soft humor that could not sheathe the vicious edge of what he said.

“You get up in a meetin’, you make a motion, the lights go out, then
you
go out.”

All the men laughed at the bitter accuracy of Luke’s description.

“Tha’s no lie, Father,” Moose’s voice rose again. The subject always excited him. “You get up in a meetin’ and ask a question, you’re lookin’ t’ get your brains knocked out. Like one time I got up an’ tried t’ make a motion about a pension fund. I was in order too. Runty read me how t’ do it in Cushin’s Manual. Well, I start talkin’ an’, boom, I’m rollin’ down the long flight o’ stairs from the hall and I’m out on the sidewalk flat on my face.”

“That was two years ago,” Jimmy said. “The last meeting we had.”

Runty grinned. “Tha’s the way it’s been ever since Johnny and his pistoleros took over our Four-Four-Seven. When I got enough balls in me I go right up to ’em and tell ’em what bums they are. One time they hit me in the head with a pipe and threw me in the river. So me an’ the river know each other pretty good. It was winter time an’ the water was colder ’n a nun’s—well, I mean it was ice water, Father, an’ damn if it don’t bring me to.” Runty went ho-ho-ho as if he had just told a funny story. “So y’see, I’m on velvet, Father. I should worry, I’m on borried time.”

Father Barry felt himself being drawn in, deeper and deeper.

“Y’mean to tell me all this stuff’s been going on and it never even gets in the papers?”

“The
Graphic
is the Mayor’s sheet,” Moose shouted. “You oughta know that, Father. And the Mayor ’n Johnny Friendly are like
this,
with Johnny Friendly on top. Hell, the Mayor pays off little political favors by givin’ fellers in City Hall a note to Johnny or Charley to put ’em to work. It don’t matter if we’re regular longshoremen who need the work for the ice box and these bums who move in on us are just stinkin’ ward heelers.”

Father Barry looked skeptical. “You mean the Mayor and Johnny Friendly actually get together on who’s to be hired down here?”

Runty laughed. “Cripes, I thought everybody in Bohegan knew that, Father. The last Mayor walked out with maybe a million bucks. Where
you
been, Father?”

Father Barry looked at Katie uneasily. “Maybe I’ve been hiding in the church.”

“An’ if I wuz you I’d stay there,” Runty said. “This set-up down here is a pisser, ’scuse me again. I tell ya there’s nothin’ like it in the whole damn country. An’ God may kill me if I aint tellin’ the truth.”

“Okay, I believe you. But your ancestors must be rollin’ in their graves. A fine bunch of Irishmen! Hell, the English slaughtered our families like pigs for eight hundred years and we never quit. We found ways of fighting back.”

Father Barry had memories, faded but precious as old flags in mothballs, of his father’s glowing accounts of the O’Neills, Shane and Owen Roe, and Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, and of Red Hugh O’Donnell, that glorious lost-causer. They had figured in Pete Barry’s boyhood dreams and he invoked them now as he felt himself more and more deeply caught up in a struggle he had been discreetly avoiding.

“It aint so easy to fight back, Reverent,” said Luke, an occasional Baptist. “Right now we couldn’t even be talkin’ like this if we didn’t have you along for pertection. Those cowboys ’d be ridin’ herd on us.”

Moose nodded. “Name one place where it’s safe even t’ talk without gettin’ clobbered,” he yelled. “Name me one. Just one.”

“The church,” Father Barry said quickly.

“The church!” Moose shouted in amazement.

“Shhh, keep it down to a shout,” Jimmy cautioned. “You mean that, Father?”

“I said the church. Use the basement of the church.”

This time Runty didn’t laugh. “Do you know what you’re lettin’ yerself in for, Father?”

Father Barry felt in his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. The pack was crumpled and empty. “Anybody got a butt?” he asked.

Jimmy offered him a Home Run. “Union-made,” he said.

Father Barry took it and Runty snapped a match for him and held the light, looking at his face as if he had just come across him and was studying his features for the first time.

“You sure you know what yer lettin’ yerself in for?” Runty held his question steady like the light.

“No—I don’t,” Father Barry admitted. “But I’m ready to find out.”

Father Barry and Katie left the men at the entrance to the Longdock. When they came down for work at 7:30 and found nothing to do, what was there left for them except the companionship of the bar? Sometimes when a docker was hurt or they needed an extra hand, Big Mac sent somebody across the street to pull a man or two out of the bar.

Runty, Moose, Luke and Jimmy promised to show up in the church basement—used as an overflow chapel—at eight o’clock that evening. Father Barry hadn’t even thought about the question of permission. It had seemed to him the moment for unqualified hospitality. He’d cross the next bridge when he got to St. Timothy’s. He’d sit down with the Pastor just before lunch—no, maybe just after. Father Donoghue was a regular trencherman and was always in a better mood after he had eaten. “How much more Christian and merciful the Pastor is after he’s finished a steaming plate of corn beef and cabbage,” Mrs. Harris, their housekeeper, had once remarked, adding to the little repertoire of rectory jokes.

“I’ll walk you back to your door,” Father Barry told Katie.

Katie shook her head. “Thanks, but I’d like to stop in at the church anyway. There’s something I want to pray for.”

“For Joey?”

There was some of her father’s direct humor in her voice as she said, “I think it’s time I started praying for you.”

Father Barry laughed. “Y’know, Katie, I was raised on a tough block. In the gang we had, two of the boys got the chair and at least three others are doing time. It almost seems like we had only two choices—to run with the mob or buck for the collar. Lots of those fellows could’ve gone either way. I fought ’em in the streets before they got into the heavy artillery. I’m not afraid to take them on again, if I have to.”

“I’m getting you into trouble,” Katie said.

“You can say that again,” Father Barry said. “Every time you step outside the church in a neighborhood like this, you bump into trouble.”

They were walking into the wind. The cold damp gusts of river air lashed at their faces. The Hudson was the color of gray chalk, bleak and relentless. Ships were moving across and down river.

T
HE WATERFRONT WESTERN UNION
has no central office, no teletype machines, no uniformed messenger boys. Without them, news seems to flash around the harbor, from pier to pier, from bar to bar, from tenement to tenement. Each longshoreman approached for the meeting in St. Timothy’s was cautioned not to invite anyone else unless he first made sure he was anti-Friendly. But the first leak soon grew to a trickling stream, and finally, in less than an hour, into a torrent of speculation and excitement. The Bohegan docks buzzed with news that Father Barry was calling a protest meeting to look into the job done on Joey Doyle. In the hold the stool-man whose task it was to set the stalks of bananas on the carriers’ shoulders whispered into the ears of old Marty Gallagher.

“There’s gonna be a meetin’ on Joey Doyle in the bottom of St. Tim’s t’night. Eight o’clock. Pass the woid along.”

Gallagher, hard-working except when he went on his periodicals, shook his head. He got a tab most of the time and he knew better than to mess with Johnny Friendly.

“Lemme alone. I’m an old man.”

Most of those approached said nothing at all. They just nodded and went on working. Some of them might sound off to a few trusted cronies about the way things were stacked against them, but they weren’t going to commit themselves. And what the hell was a Roman collar butting into it for anyway? Nearly all of them were cynical and wondered what the priest was getting out of it. But one in a hundred felt strongly enough about Joey or about the whole stacked deal to take a chance.

Not Pop Doyle, though. When he came over to the Longdock for a beer and a cornbeef sandwich at lunch and heard what Father Barry was up to, he shook his head and muttered through a mouthful of cornbeef, “I’m ag’in’ it. Leave the dead sleep in peace. Aint we had enough trouble?”

Runty had been on the bottle all morning, drinking on the cuff against his next payday. He was reviving again after sleeping off the effects of the wake. “I don’ even begin to feel like a human bean until I’m half gassed.” He laughed, and shrugged off Pop’s surrender.

“I never yet seen the bunch that c’n stop Johnny and his respectable friend Weepin’ Willie. But I say, Hear the Father out. What’ve ya got to lose?”

“Just your life,” Pop said.

Runty grinned. “If God wanted me He’d ’ve taken me a long time ago. I’m on borried time.”

Because he wasn’t working and felt defiant, he ordered another 35-cent shot for Pop and himself.

“Here’s mud in the eye of Willie Givens,” he offered the old, bold toast.

“You shouldn’t be sayin’ that so loud,” Pop cautioned.

Word of the meeting whipped along the waterfront like the wind from the river. It blew out of the Longdock across the street to Friendly’s, along the bar and into the back room where Johnny Friendly was enjoying a high breakfast of pickled pig’s feet and his Pale India ale. He heard the news from Charley Malloy who told it to him tentatively, as if in fear of the dark-age practice of destroying bearers of ill tidings. You don’t get to be a leader by being frightened, and Johnny Friendly wasn’t going to be bugged by any parish priest and a handful of cry-babies. The Monsignor, O’Hare, was a buddy of Willie Givens, always ready to speak glowingly of the Pres at Communion breakfasts and, if worse came to worst, he might be able to get the Monsignor to nudge the Bishop to crack down on this upstart priest’s Pastor. But he was willing to bet it would never go that far. Most headlines blow over. Most rank-and-file beefs fall of their own weight.