On the Waterfront (37 page)

Half a dozen fellers had seen it with their own eyes, and when it came to a coroner’s hearing, not one of them could remember who had done it. From that day on Jocko had been impressed with Johnny Friendly. Of course he didn’t bother with these jobs himself any more. But it had been an effective way of establishing confidence in the beginning. Jocko wondered if Terry was taking nose candy or something. What else would spark him into open warfare with a big engine like Friendly?

Father Barry was in the small rectory library, answering letters he had received from various people around the harbor who had read of his hard-hitting sermon on the dock. It gave him hope that he and his little group weren’t alone even though they seemed isolated and nearly helpless in Bohegan. An old Italian longshoreman who was under the gun in Jersey City and afraid even to sign his name said he was praying for him. An Irish wife from Manhattan’s West Side said she was for throwing those bums out even if Joe and I and the two kids have to live on relief for a while. There were anonymous letters mailed here in Bohegan from dockers who said they kicked back to Big Mac and had to chip in on all the phony welfare collections but were afraid to protest. This is the way it has been for years, one of them wrote, and you’re lucky you’ve got that collar on backwards or they’d never let you get away with that talk you made. In fact, I hope you watch yourself, Father, because they’ve got too many ways of having accidents.

As Father Barry paused to consider this, with a faint, weary smile, Katie burst in. Her hair was wet and she was out of breath and almost incoherent.

But when he heard that Charley was dead and that Terry had a gun and was talking out of his head with grief, Father Barry jumped up and said he’d go out and find him. If Terry was gunning for Johnny, there were only a few places to look—the union office, the Friendly Bar, the local political club.

“Don’t worry, I’ll find him,” Father Barry promised. “Get Father Vincent for Charley. Call your uncle at the station house. Tell him where Charley is. And ask him to see you home.”

“Be careful, Father,” Katie said.

Father Barry shrugged. “There isn’t time to worry.”

It was only when he was trotting down the block with the sleet now turning to wet snow in his face that he wondered if this unexpected mission was a defiance of the Pastor’s orders not to leave the church again on waterfront business. But where did approved Christian charity for the Glennons leave off and a battle for a more Christian life for all of them here in Bohegan begin? Terry Malloy, trying to crawl out of the slime, was part of that battle. Must he love Mrs. Glennon, pious, sick, maternal and long-suffering, more than he loved Terry Malloy, dark-souled, blood-stained and hiding from God and conscience and himself? Oh, it was much easier to console the tearfully grateful Mrs. Glennon. But Terry Malloy was the problem. This seething waterfront was the problem. And Father Barry’s mind raged on to the terrifying boundary of disobedience. Pastor or no Pastor, Monsignor or no Monsignor, yes, Bishop or no Bishop, this was the problem the Church couldn’t afford to duck if it wanted to be a moral force that had the virility of the living Christ.

Ahead of him he saw the red neon smear of the Friendly Bar, inviting men to quick courage or a short cut to well being.

Terry was crouched down against the bar with his hand ready to reach the gun when the door began to open. Everybody was watching as the door squeaked ajar. Everybody was surprised when in walked a priest.

Father Barry spotted Terry quickly and he came right on walking until he was halfway down the bar from him.

“I want to see you, Terry,” Father Barry said.

“You got eyes. I’m right in front of you,” Terry sneered.

“Now don’t give me a hard time,” Father Barry said, coming closer.

“Who asked ya here?” Terry said. “What d’ya want from me?”

“Your gun,” Father Barry said, close enough now to put his hand out for it.

“Hah, hah,” Terry gave a forced laugh.

“Your gun.”

“Go and chase yourself.”

“I said give me that gun. I’m not going out of here without that gun.”

“You go to hell,” Terry said.

“What did you say?” Father Barry’s face reddened.

“Go to hell!”

As a youngster, Father Barry had fought in the streets and the punch he threw now seemed to come from him naturally. It was a right-hand driven hard from the shoulder and it caught Terry by surprise and off balance and knocked him down.

“Let me help you up,” Father Barry said.

Terry pushed him away hysterically. “Get away! Keep your hands off me!”

“You want to be brave?” Father Barry said angrily.

“It’s none of yer business,” Terry shouted at him.

Father Barry shouted right back at him. “You want to be a brave man by firing lead into another man. That’s being brave, huh? Well, firing lead into another man’s flesh isn’t being brave at all. Any bum can pick up a .45 in a pawn shop and be that brave.”

“It’s none of your business,” Terry kept saying, almost sobbing. “Why don’t you mind your own business? It’s none of your goddamn business.”

“You want to hurt Johnny Friendly?” Father Barry talked right through him. “You want to hurt him? You want to fix him? Do you? You really want to finish him?”

“Goddamn right,” Terry said.

“For what he did to Charley,” Father Barry poured it on. “And a lot of men who were better than Charley. Then don’t fight ’im like a hoodlum down here in the jungle. Sure, that’s just what he wants. He’ll hit you in the head and plead self-defense. And beat that rap like he beat all the others. Now listen to me, Terry, the way to fight him is in the hearings with the truth. Hit him with the truth, instead of with that—that cap pistol of yours.”

Slowly Terry had begun to listen. He frowned and screwed up his face as if it were hurting.

“Just a minute. Don’t rush me,” he said.

“Get rid of the gun,” Father Barry said. “Unless you haven’t got the guts. Because if you haven’t, you’d better hang on to it.”

Terry took the gun out of his pocket and studied it thoughtfully. Father Barry’s lips were dry. He ran his hand over them, looked anxiously at the gun and called to Jocko. “Give me a beer,” Father Barry said, slapping his cigarette money on the bar. Terry was still looking at the gun. “Make it two,” Father Barry said. He pushed a glass toward Terry. He drank his down thirstily. Terry drank his slowly.

“If you don’t want to give me that gun, leave it here,” Father Barry said.

On the wall in the back of the bar was a framed picture, taken in happier days, of Johnny Friendly and Charley Malloy flanking their International president, Willie Givens. It had been taken at Jamaica and caught the three of them arm in arm and wreathed in exaggerated smiles.

“The hell with it,” Terry said aloud, and hurled the gun over the bar into the middle of the glass-encased picture. “Tell Johnny I was here.”

Father Barry gave an audible sigh of relief when they got outside.

“I’m going to put you up at my place tonight,” he said.

“I aint afraid where I am,” Terry said.

“Did I say you were?” Father Barry said. “I thought I’d go over your testimony with you. You can really slam ’em with your stuff on the Doyle and the Nolan jobs. And what they did to Charley. There are going to be three or four other fellas you know over there working on what they’re going to say. We want to get the picture as full as possible. That’ll hit Johnny where it hurts.”

He took Terry by the arm and started to walk through the sleet toward the rectory.

“Hey, Terry, don’t happen to have a cigarette on you, do you?”

F
ROM THE COURT HOUSE
, where the waterfront hearings were conducted by the Crime Commission, the years and decades and generations of corruptive filth, of criminal sludge, of collusive mire were being dredged up and poured out over the city. The headlines were thick and black. Radio and television commentators conjured the specter of New York harbor as a contaminated giant. National magazines, awakened at last, threw open their pages to the inhumanity of the shape-up, the waterfront distortion of trade unionism and the shameless complicity of the shipping executives and tainted city officials. The lid was off the waterfront and the sewage was spilling out at last. As if the warning to stay away from the waterfront unless on pastoral duties had been a preliminary danger-signal, now there followed a last-minute order from the Bishop to Father Donoghue forbidding Father Barry to take the stand at the hearings. But the curate was too elated at the way things were going to feel discouraged. He knew, through his own underground, that Monsignor O’Hare was bringing into play every strategy he could devise to protect his old friends Willie Givens and Tom McGovern, and he was sure his higher-ranking rival was doing everything in his power to prejudice his case with the Bishop. Just the same, he had his Pastor moderately, or perhaps judiciously, on his side, and he felt secure in his conviction that the overwhelming evidence of waterfront racketeering and violence would swing the diocesan headquarters over to his side.

On the opening morning of the hearings he had added to his prayers at Mass a special plea for the successful outcome of this investigation, so that the men of the waterfront could begin to enjoy the human dignity of labor which Christ understood and which God intended for them. O God, knock those Johnny Friendlys out of the box for good, he had prayed, and while You’re at it, God, don’t forget their respectable protectors. The same ones Xavier used to beef to the king about in the 1550’s.

Father Barry did his best to keep up with his hour-to-hour religious and parish duties while sending out for every new Extra, sneaking in radio reports and getting excited telephone calls from Moose and Jimmy and some of the other of his boys who were sitting in on the hearings or waiting to be called. At least, if he wasn’t there, he had the satisfaction of knowing that some of the harbor workers who had consulted him were in there taking the oath to lay the facts on the line. Not that he had gone by any rule-of-thumb conviction that they should testify. Luke, for instance, had come in with the problem of how to feed a family of five if he was to get up there and tell how Negroes got the short end of the short end on the docks.

“My wife is so scared she’s been cryin’ every night,” Luke had said. Father Barry promised he would talk to the Commission Counsel about that. He didn’t think they could ask men with families to take those chances without some assurance of physical and economic protection.

A bandy-legged member of the watchmen’s union, affiliated with and in fact dominated by the longshoremen bosses, told Father Barry he had been subpoenaed because of the high percentage of pilferage on the pier he was supposed to watch. It happened to be a Johnny Friendly pier. “My first week on the job I was so green I saw some stealin’ of ladies’ gloves, whole cases of ’em, and so I reported them to the police. Next day this fella Truck comes up to me, asks me if my name is Michael McNally, and when I says ‘yes’ he hauls off and cracks me nose. ‘From now on, mind your own business,’ he says to me. ‘I thought watchin’ is a watchman’s business,’ I told him. ‘You just watch yourself,’ he says to me. ‘That’s all the goddamn watchin’ you have t’ do.’ ”

Now McNally’s problem was: should he tell that story? It meant the end of his job, and at his time of life there weren’t too many jobs a man can do. Father Barry hadn’t urged him to testify, as he had Terry, preferring to let this old man make up his mind for himself. The troubled watchman had come back the following day to say that he and his wife had talked it over and decided that he had to testify. “Our faith is supposed to teach us a right and a wrong,” he had said, and Father Barry, whose parents came from a Kerry where courage counted more than safety, had to smile. He would talk to Father Vincent, whose family owned a chain store and perhaps might have a watchman’s opening for McNally. “I knew you’d get me into this circus of yours,” he could hear Harry Vincent saying, good-humoredly disapproving.

Port Watchman Michael McNally was the first witness called, and when, after describing his violent initiation to the job, he said: “If I knew at that time what I know now, I never would’ve bothered to try ’n save those boxes of gloves,” the honesty of his admission was so startling that a laugh of recognition ran through the audience. The truth has a lovely ring, like a ship’s brass bell, Father Barry thought to himself as he heard a playback of McNally’s testimony over the radio at lunchtime. But to millions of people McNally’s testimony would be just so many lines of questions and answers, Q—, A—, Q—, A—. Behind this long line of witnesses were human beings, with fear, doubts, bread-and-butter problems, and for the rebels and turncoats the big Question—Life, and the possible answer—Death.

The watchman was followed by an insurance-company detective who gave a chalk-talk with charts on systematic wholesale pilferage. “It’s like fighting an army of locusts,” he admitted before he stepped down.

A florid-faced head of a stevedore company admitted he had given an East River union boss $15,000 to pay for the wedding of the boss’s daughter.

“Isn’t that an unusually generous wedding gift?” the dignified Commission Chief Counsel asked with a straight face.

“We were personal friends and she happens to be a very nice girl,” the stevedore executive insisted.

“Isn’t it a fact that the $15,000 was paid out by the McCabe Stevedore Company and not by you personally?”

The stevedore employer got a little redder in the face and asked if he could consult with his lawyer before he answered.

A raw-boned thug admitted that he had come directly from Sing Sing back to the docks, had gone back on the union payrolls as a delegate at a hundred and fifty dollars a week salary and expenses and had cut himself in for a share of the loading graft. Only he put it more delicately.

A. “I went back to this here perishable pier and bein’ I done the work there before I was away, we talked it over and decided the three of us would be partners.”

Q. “And you didn’t use any pressure to get them to agree to that?”