On the Waterfront (5 page)

Now the ship’s whistle sent its raucous, moody song echoing down the watery canyon between the eastern and the western shores, its harsh and mournful song. Terry ran his fingers rapidly backward across his upper lip and against his nose, a vestigial gesture from his boxing days when the blood used to gush into his nostrils and his glove had to serve for a handkerchief. Behind him his pigeons, conventional creatures with orderly manners, had squatted down on the perches to which habit and some brief but violent give-and-take had assigned them. Their cooing was lower in their throats now and modulated to the night.

Terry reached into his coop, expertly, and grabbed the nearest of his birds, careful to come down on it from above, spreading his hand across its back from wing to wing so it would lie quietly in his hand and not upset the others. He placed the bird inside his black-and-red checked windbreaker. That goddamn 447, he thought. Sooner or later they got into everything, even into this flock of pigeons which were his alone.

As he reached the third-floor landing, Billy and Jo-Jo were underfoot, flipping nickels in an impromptu tossing game.

“Hey, Terry, where you goin’?”

“Yankee Stadium, me ’n Marciano,” Terry said.

“No kiddin’, Terry, c’n we go with ya?” And Jo-Jo: “Yeah Terry, we’re goin’ with ya.”

Terry liked these kids. Good tough kids. They’d do anything for him. Always running little errands for him. He was to them something like Johnny Friendly was to him. Or McGovern was to Johnny Friendly. That’s the way it was down here. You had to look up to someone. You had to have someone looking out for you.

“Get lost,” Terry said, humorously, and went on down the stairs, stroking the head of the pigeon to keep it quiet inside his jacket.

The two kids grinned at each other, pleased at the warmth of familiarity in Terry’s remark, and went on with their game.

Terry walked around the corner and down a narrow alley into an open courtyard used by a dozen tenements as a handy place for their empty cans and old papers. Foresight and care, or just plain common sense, might have turned this yard into an organized playground for the kids, but instead this littered plot of wasted ground was a squalid rectangular monument to civic neglect—despair—call it what you will. A couple of half-wild cats hungered and prowled among the cans. The Hudson was as black as a river of oil now, and seemed to be flowing as slowly and thickly. But the boats were ever on the move in their restless coming and going. Turn ’er around and get her out. Cargo plus movement equals money. And the harbor was a greedy bitch. The harbor was Hetty Green with muscle.

As Terry came under Joey’s window he could hear someone singing in the distance in a toneless and terrible voice. Some drunk, some sauce hound lifting his whiskey rotten voice in an unrequested number:

“Tippi tippi tin tippi tin

Tippi tippi tan tippi tan….”

Oh, my good God Christ. The bums they got around this neighborhood. As somebody said, maybe Charley, the asshole of the universe is Bohegan and midtown Bohegan is Paris compared to the Bohegan docks. The piers themselves are thirty years behind the times. The pilings are rotten. The human scum wandering from bar to bar looking for something they’ll never find because they haven’t the slightest idea of what they’re looking for.
Tippi tippi tin,
what the hell kind of song is that? At least if the juice-head got to sing let him sing Galway Bay or something. Galway Bay was a beauteeful song. That scuffed up little clown, Runty Nolan, when he had enough balls in him, he could really give out with Galway Bay.

Terry looked up at Doyle’s window, his vision obstructed by all that wash on the line and the lattice of fire escapes. He felt inside his jacket for the pigeon. The pigeon felt nice and warm and peaceful. He wished he didn’t have to call Joey out. He got along pretty good with Joey. Always kiddin’ him about how his birds were nothin’ but a bunch of lousy park culls, and stuff like that. Joey would laugh. Joey had a pretty good sense of humor. It was hard to figure a kid like that getting in all this trouble. Getting himself marked lousy in Johnny and Charley’s book. An agitator. Talking in the bars about all the things he found wrong with the union. Fifty years behind every other union in America, he’d say, spouting the stuff his Uncle Eddie had learned him. Where’s our seniority? Where’s a decent pension plan? Where’s a hiring system that aint based on some Sing Sing hiring boss doing you a favor? Where’s an up-and-up election? Where’s a public accounting for the five G’s in dues we pay in every month? And on and on with that kind of talk. Some of the men would argue back. Those that worked regular and had Johnny and Charley to thank for it. And some of the men just hung their heads and drank their beers and tried to change the subject to the respective merits of Mays and Snider.

One time, listening to Joey shoot his mouth off about the old men and how the railroads or the mines would be looking out for them at sixty because those outfits gave out in services what they took in dues, Terry listened to all he could stand and finally asked,

“What’s in it for you, Joey? That’s what I can’t figure. You’re only twenny-three four years old. You’re a good worker. Your old man stands in pretty good. You could get all the work you want if you’d only keep your mouth shut. Why worry about a lot of washed-up stumblebums? Why don’cha look out for you?”

And Joey had answered, “There’s a right and a wrong, Terry. Takin’ over our union and runnin’ it with a pistol like Johnny’s doin’, that’s wrong. And if more fellas had some guts down here they’d stand up and holler it’s wrong.”

This Joey Doyle must be crazy. Terry had had to walk away. Talk like that wasn’t healthy, and right in Friendly’s Bar. A nice, clean-looking kid, but with a noggin full of the kind of ideas that can get you hit in the head.

Under Joey’s window Terry cupped his hands to his mouth and hollered, “Hey Joey, Joey Doyle!”

Three stories up a window opened and Joey peered over the sill, cautiously.

“Terry?” He tried to see the figure standing in the empty courtyard. He knew what it was to buck the Johnny Friendlys. The cops were looking the other way. City Hall, the whole town was looking the other way. When it came to protection, the waterfront was an orphan. You were on your own. His old man had begged him to take it easy. His friends had warned him not to go out.

“Whaddya want, Terry?”

Terry reached into his windbreaker and held up the pigeon. The bird was frightened and when it sensed the open air it tried to thrust itself forward out of Terry’s hands. It managed to work one of its wings free and beat wildly to wrench itself from Terry’s grasp. Terry held it firmly by its legs and with his other hand pinned its wings down with authority.

“Ya see this,” he shouted up through the limp and gaudy laundry. “He’s one o’ yours. I recognized the band.”

Joey leaned out a little farther. He had the young, pink-cheeked, slightly fleshy good-looking Irish face associated with choir boys.

“Lemme see. Maybe it’s Danny Boy. I lost ’im in the last race.”

Terry wasn’t thinking what he was doing. Just doing it like he was told. “He followed my birds into their coop. Here—you want ’im?”

It was nice of Terry to bring his bird back. Joey had felt bad about losing Danny Boy. He had figured to mate him with a fast hen, Peggy G. He started to say he’d be right down. But the animal watchfulness of the Bohegan docks was in him and the words wouldn’t come out. The rat-quickness of the docks was in Terry too. Without having to think about it, Terry added, “I’ll bring him up to the roof. Meet ya at yer loft.”

The pigeons were the peaceful and satisfactory part of Joey Doyle’s life, as they were of Terry’s, and the sight of the sleek, firm bird in Terry’s hand, and the mention of the loft, Joey’s only escape from the bruising immediacy of the waterfront, were reassuring.

“Okay, okay,” Joey said, “I’ll see ya on the roof.” As Joey Doyle turned away from the window, Terry took a couple of backward steps and released his hold on the pigeon. It flew aimlessly upward, brushing the aerial laundry in awkward, night-blinded flight. On the roof Terry could see the silhouette of a couple of hulking business suits waiting for their quarry in the dark. They were a couple of pistols, Sonny and Specs, and he hoped they wouldn’t give Joey too much of a hard time. If Joey would only get smart and come around. This is the way it was and this is the way it would always be and you had to be an awful meatball to go against the set-up or think any different. It was no skin off Terry if Joey wanted to louse himself up. Terry backed away into the alley, crabwise and with a crab’s instinct for pulling his head in. The cracked record behind him was croaking its miserable tin-pan-alley dirge.

“Tippi tippi tin tippi tin

Tippi tippi tan tippi tan….”

Jesus, these rummies down here, they could sure get on your nerves. The unkempt, staggering form lurched into Terry and a wave of disgust broke over him as he recognized Mutt Murphy, a one-armed dock-worker rotted out with cheap whiskey, who started his day in the afternoon like a gentleman, made the rounds of the bars (usually on the end of a quick heave-ho) until the early hours and then flopped in a hallway or a tenement basement.

Mutt had left his arm between a couple of packing cases some ten years back. He had been wandering around griping about his compensation and cadging drinks ever since. Terry had heard the sob story and had had the sour whiskey breath blown in his face too many times. As Mutt made contact with anyone who happened to wander across his stumbling path, his left arm shot out automatically, his palm uplifted in the classic gesture of supplicants, at once ashamed and aggressive.

“A dime. Got a dime you don’t need? For a crippled-up member of 447?”

“Go on, get outa here,” Terry said, pushing the wreck away from him and farther along the alley.

Being pushed was an all-day every-day experience for Mutt and he wasn’t even slightly discouraged. He had learned to accept being pushed and cuffed around as his principal contact with these riverfront people among whom and off whom he lived. His life would have been unbearable without these signs of attention, if not affection, from passers-by.

“A dime—a dime for a cupa coffee?”

“Don’t give me that coffee, you juice-head.”

Angered by Mutt’s refusal to go, and nervous about what was going to happen to Joey up there on the roof, Terry leaned over and spat savagely into Mutt’s upraised hand. Mutt drew his hand back indignantly and wiped the spittle on the sleeve of his stump. The violence of the gesture seemed to bring the sturdy, swaggering figure of the young man into focus for Mutt.

“Terry. I shoulda known.” He straightened up a little and wiped his hand against his filthy slept-in denim pants. “Thanks fer nuthin’, ya bum.”

“Get lost,” Terry mumbled as he watched the one-armed bottle-baby drift off into the evening mist.

“Tippi tippi tin. …” the wanderer went back to his hoarse and mirthless chant, some ritual of his own, as if in a stroke of revelation, he had found an anthem for his emptiness.

Terry took a last, wondering look at the rooftop where Joey must be already involved in critical conversation with Sonny and Specs. Then he brushed his fingers against his nose, boxer style again, and started walking in his rolling, light-footed, shoulder-shifting way toward the Friendly Bar and Grill over on the corner of River and Pulaski.

B
Y THE TIME TERRY
Malloy reached the end of the alley, giving on River Street, he had pretty well succeeded in putting Joey Doyle and the pigeon out of his mind; maybe, without his being aware of it, it was merely pushed back and buried in the dense undergrowth of forgotten or half-understood impressions that lay entangled in Terry’s mind. The luxury of anticipation and the pain of contrition and afterthought were unknown to Terry. Sometimes the corner cowboys tapped their heads and laughed, meaning Terry was punchy. But Terry’s inability to look into himself or to experience anything other than immediate pleasure or pain was nothing but sloth.

You ate, you slept, you drank, you copulated, you took in a movie or shot a little pool and you worked when you had to, at the softest job you could find, to keep a few dollars in your pocket. That was the day-to-day existence of Terry Malloy. Johnny Friendly called you by your first name. You usually had enough cabbage or credit to get your load on Saturday nights. There was always a tramp somewhere to come up to your room and help you get the hot water off your stomach. What more could you want? What more could you want? What more could you possibly want?

Feeling like that, full of life in a deadened sort of way, on his own, on the prowl, ready to run or bite or snatch off something good, ready for the minute but with no sense of time or urgency, Terry walked tough along the bars of River Street.

There were at least half a dozen to every block, and each one doing business in fifteen-cent beers and thirty-five-cent shots; here and there a juke box blared, the Honeydreamers and the Four Aces, “I feel so lonely when I’m … here without you …” And bars where the old aimless conversations were displaced by television sets, drawing the row of customers’ faces in one direction and fixing them so rigidly as they nursed their beers that they seemed a depersonalized line of wax dummies.

Except for this singular invention, the saloons were unchanged for generations, many of them a century old, with time-polished mahogany bars, elegant brass spittoons and brass rails that had supported the heavy feet of the great-grandfathers of the present company. The men among whom Terry walked along River Street had not changed their style either. There was something about this waterfront that stubbornly avoided progress, or even change. As in the days of the sailing ships, the street along the river was peopled with barrel-shaped men with faces weathered by sea air and drink, burly in their windbreakers, with heavy-toed shoes and caps tilted at a rakish angle. They were hard workers who carried their liquor and got their pay safely home to the wife, and staggering among them the casuals who picked up just enough work to keep themselves in whatever it was they drank in search of reassurance or forgetfulness.