On the Waterfront (29 page)

The temperature had been dropping throughout the evening and the damp cold lashed at the faces of the hatch gang as they worked their way through the top layer of packaged linen. The up-and-down fall tackle, worked from the winches on the dock and the pier, lowered the pallet down and the men loaded the cases onto it with the help of their curved, pointed hooks. Now and then Luke would hum or sing a snatch of a song as he labored.

“Mississippi water taste like sherry wine.

Yes, Mississippi water taste like …”

he sang for the amusement of the gang.

“North River water taste like turpentine …”

Runty laughed. “To hell with that sherry wine. Let’s get down to the Jameson’s.”

Old man Gallagher, the hook man, attached the tackle hook to the cover of the third level and when all the covers were lifted off, swinging dangerously across the deck in the imperfect light of the overhead 100-arc, there were the whiskey cases, as handsome an invitation to pilferage as Runty had seen in many a day. But Big Mac was prowling around the lip of the hatch, so the men had to bide their time. Except for one case that accidentally slipped off the pallet and broke open, rationing each man in the hatch a single bottle, the men were circumspect until they had unloaded their way down to the bottom of the third level. There they could work on cases under the deck, away from the hatch opening and the prying eyes of Big Mac.

“You see, fellers, the good Lord does watch over us, after all.” Runty grinned at his mates as he went to work expertly on the bottom slats of the whiskey case with his cargo hook. The trick was to open the case from the bottom, remove its contents and then close the empty case again, load it on the pallet and send the intact-looking case up out of the hatch.

“Now doesn’t this call for a bit of a party?” Runty said happily. “We’ll drink to God ’n Ireland, its whiskey and its women, to Joey and Andy Collins, all the good ones gone. An’ death to tyrants everywhere.” He held a bottle to his lips a moment, then lowered it with a chuckle. “We’ll even let these wallios drink to Ireland and Old Jameson. That’s how good I feel tonight.”

He began stuffing the bottles into the deep pockets of his windbreaker. “Now you see the beauty of a little man in a big coat.”

“That sure is some swag jacket,” Luke said admiringly.

Runty looked across the hatch at Terry, who was working listlessly, loading the cases onto the pallet.

“Hey, Terry, what you doin’ down here?” he called out, the alcohol warming the bravadeero in him. “Keepin’ an eye on us so we don’t make off with any of Mr. Friendly’s precious cargo?”

“Aah, go ahead, drink yourself into the shakes for all I care,” Terry said.

Runty laughed and raised the bottle in a general toast. “Up Kerry! Where me lovely mother first saw the glint in me old man’s eye.” He talked d-dropping Boheganese most of the time, but the brogue seemed to come on him a little more with each swig. “I wonder if I can walk with a couple of these down my trousers,” he said.

“Runty, you’re a walkin’ distillery.” Luke laughed.

“God bless the
El-em
,” Runty said. “And God bless Mr. Jameson. And God bless the Irish. And God forgive us for breedin’ bums like Willie Givens and Tom McGovern and Mac McGown up there an’ …”

Almost as if Big Mac had been eavesdropping on the impromptu party at the bottom of the hatch he shouted down, “Now don’t be walkin’ off with any o’ that cargo. Ya know how the boss feels about pilferage down there.”

“Why, Brother McGown,” Runty called up to him, “you wouldn’t be accusin’ us of stealin’. I never stole anything in me life.” Then he whispered to Luke, “Except Irish whiskey …”

“I want every one of ’em cases on the dock—puhronto,” Mac cupped his hands to bellow into the hatch.

Runty pretended to clean out his ears. “Talk louder. I can’t hear ya.”

Mac shouted down, “If ya kept ya ears open once in a while instead of your big mouth …”

“It aint that my mouth is so big,” Runty grinned up at him irrepressibly. “It’s just that the rest of me is so small.”

The hatch gang stopped their work and roared with laughter.

“Okay, okay, more work ’n less lip,” Big Mac shouted, remembering not to get into a word-wingdo with this trigger-phrased little bat. “We gotta get this ship out tomorra night. Get the lead out down there, you drunken bums.”

“That drunken bum can’t talk to us drunken bums like that,” Runty said, sitting down now and leaning against the bulkhead to work on his bottle.

Oh, brother, what a pushover he’ll be, Terry was thinking. One little push. Splash, and it’s deep six for Runty Nolan. They must’ve known this job on the Jameson’s would set him up. They aint so dumb. They work pretty cute. Once more he even tried to edge over to Runty, to warn him to take it easy, but Runty was full of flit and real sassy now.

“You don’t fool me,” Runty put him off. “First they send you in the church and then they stick you down here to keep an eye on us. You’re lucky we don’t run this hook in one side of you and out the other.”

“Runty, I’d take it easy if I was you, if I was in your shoes,” Terry tried to warn him again.

“Well, you aint,” Runty said, feeling better and better on the Jameson’s. “You’re up there with Charley and Mac. I’m down here with Joey and fellas who stand up.”

“Man, you aint standin’ up, you’re sittin’ down,” Luke said good-naturedly. “An’ one more swallow o’ that bottle an’ you’ll be layin’ down.”

“I gotta stand up,” Runty said. “Because I feel the singin’ o’ The Green Above the Red comin’ on me. An’ you’ll never find an Irishman who’s worth a damn who won’t stand up for The Green Above the Red.”

Terry shrugged and went back to the other side of the hatch. Luke helped Runty to his feet and he sang all three verses of the sweet anthem of the trouble days in a wavering, dedicated voice.

“… an’ freely as we lift our heads

We vow our blood to shed

Once ’n forever more t’ raise

The green above the red …”

By two in the morning he was trying to teach the words to the bewildered Italian immigrants. In the next two hours Runty passed through his entire repertoire from the potato song to Galway Bay. By four o’clock he was beyond singing. Staggering from case to case, he groped his way to the hatchway ladder, his sexagenarian nimbleness hindered by the liquor in him and on him. Weighted down by the half dozen bottles in his deep pockets, he somehow managed to climb the long narrow ladder and scramble out over the side of the hatch onto the deck, deliberately careful to protect his own cargo of Jameson’s.

The hatch gang had called it a night and he felt proud of himself for having resisted Luke’s repeated offers to take him home. Hell, nobody ever had to take Runty Nolan home. He stepped off the gangway onto the stringpiece, balancing himself with the grace of a tightrope walker—he thought—and went into the pier shed. A hundred yards in he could barely make out the backs of the last hatchmen as they walked slowly down the pier to the street.

“An’ fleely azh we …” he tried to sing, gave it up and flopped down to rest on a convenient hand-truck. He reached into his pocket for the bottle he had been drinking from, but just as he raised it to his lips it slipped from his hands and smashed to the floor. Inside the entrance to the pier Specs Flavin and Sonny Rodell heard the sound of the breaking glass. They looked at each other and kept on walking forward. “He’ll be blind,” Specs said. “Take him out quick with the jack. Now don’t miss him, goddamn it.”

Specs had been over at Friendly’s most of the night, getting ready for this. Every trip to the can, to sniff up the junk, added an extra layer of confidence. He was just a small, nervous, pasty-faced man, but by four in the morning he had grown ten feet tall. Truck and Gilly and the rest of them, they were supposed to be tough guys, but a job like the Joey Doyle job or this one was too much for them. It needed Specs Flavin. It took guts to go all the way. It took a real man. Specs wore thick glasses and sometimes they kidded him about his astigmatism and the fact that he had to pay for his gash because he wasn’t good-looking enough. Well, he’d show ’em, he’d show ’em all. The viciousness rose and rose in him until he could feel it boiling in his head, ten feet tall. Sonny wasn’t on the junk, but he had had about a dozen snorts to steady himself. He wasn’t a natural killer or a psycho or anything, and he only did this out of a certain awe for Specs and to prove he was tougher than Truck and Gilly figured.

When they came up to Runty he had passed out cold on the hand-truck. He was stretched out on his back, snoring irregularly through his broken nose.

“Jesus, he sounds like the winch is still working,” Sonny said.

“Christ, he’s a homely little bastard,” Specs said.

“How could one little guy give us so much trouble?” Sonny said.

“He won’t give us no more,” Specs said. “What a rummy he was!”

“He could sure take a beatin’,” Sonny said with admiration.

“Maybe you better hit ’im in the head with the jack once for luck,” Specs said. “I don’t trust that little bastard not to come to.”

Sonny did as he was told.

It takes a big man to do this, Specs was thinking, lifted on the nose candy. It’s like you’re God or something. He’s dead and don’t know it, but I know it because I got the power in me.

“See that bailing wire over there,” he said to Sonny. “Wind it around him and under the truck.”

Sonny did as he was told, but he did it hastily. He was anxious to get it over with.

“Now grab the handles and push the damn thing out to the stringpiece.”

For a moment they stood together on the stringpiece ten feet above the level of the river. The night was still dark, but the eastern sky held a promise of morning. Below them they could hear the water washing against the pilings.

“Give it a good hard push,” Specs said.

It was almost like a formal burial at sea, the two of them standing there with their heads bent. The hand-truck trundled to the edge of the pier and plunged Runty Nolan into the depths of the black river. No longer was Runty on borried time. Specs Flavin had called in the I.O.U. The good old North River, Johnny Friendly’s silent partner, had done it again.

“I’ll bet it’s plenny cold down there t’night,” Sonny said.

“Not where he’s goin’,” Specs laughed nastily.

Specs Flavin turned from the stringpiece and Sonny followed him back into the pier shed. The stuff was slowly wearing off and Specs was uncomfortably shrinking back to his own self-despising, nondescript size.

O
NLY A FEW BLOCKS
away the light was still on in Father Barry’s room. He had been up all night working on a report for the Crime Commission hearings. More and more clearly in these few days he had come to see that the shape-up, depending on a surplus of man-power so the hiring boss could pick and choose, was the seat of infection poisoning the labor relations of the harbor. The shape-up had been abolished years ago in Liverpool and London, in Seattle and Portland.

Why did it still fester in the greatest harbor in the world? That the waterfront racketeers should cling to it for the power it gave them over the rank-and-file was understandable. But now Father Barry had been reading reports proving conclusively that the association of shipping companies and the leading stevedore companies favored the shape-up too, and, not only that, were closely tied to the mob elements around the harbor through a deeply imbedded system of personal bribery.

At the Crime Commission offices, when he had escorted Runty to the secret session, he had seen the charts. The most respectable shipping and stevedore companies in the harbor had been handing out regular monthly bribes for years to known hoodlums like Johnny Friendly and Charley Malloy, to the mob on the midtown piers across the river, to the Benasios in Brooklyn, to Danny D., to Slicker McGhee on the Lower West Side and the rest of the tribe. On the walls of the Commission office Father Barry had seen the truth: two hundred of the most notorious hoodlum “labor leaders” in the harbor were on the payroll of the great luxury and freighter lines and their stevedore subsidiaries. Looking over those charts and remembering that an overwhelming majority of the executives and dock bosses as well as working hands were Catholic, Father Barry could not help thinking again of Xavier and his problem in India four hundred years earlier—his appeal to the King to send out honest officials. The ones who were wielding temporal Christian power in India, he wrote, were wolves and jackals who preyed on Mohammedans and Christians alike, and were so depraved, so greedy, so selfish, so lacking in every Christian virtue, that they were making a daily mockery of Xavier’s tireless efforts at conversion.

The harbor was crying out not only for a thorough housecleaning of a corrupted union, not only for a new, modern, humane, efficient method of hiring, but actually for a moral revolution that would prevent prominent Catholic laymen like President Willie Givens and king-maker Tom McGovern from mouthing pious speeches at Communion breakfasts while providing respectable coloration for convicted criminals masquerading as union delegates, shop stewards and hiring bosses.

Father Barry took heart from the knowledge that he wasn’t the first priest in the harbor to raise his voice against the moral rot that permitted the underworld to sit at the partnership table with shipping magnates and political leaders. Old Father Mahoney on Staten Island—where Vince Donato ran the
docks
—had been delivering fiery sermons against this jungle for decades. If Father Barry were called to testify at the waterfront hearings, as had been suggested, he wanted to quote the old priest’s warning: “When the Church and the community cease to be interested in the men that labor, both the Church and the community die.”

But Father Mahoney was a pastor over there and had established his right to speak his mind through two generations of service. He had baptized the grandchildren of the parents he had married. He could defy Donato even though that padrone, with the docks in his pocket, was a big political wheel on Staten Island. Here in Bohegan, Father Barry was still a young curate, and already his Pastor had stopped to talk to him that afternoon about the danger of committing himself too deeply on an issue that might first require discussion with the Bishop. Father Donoghue did not want to discourage his curate’s interest in the plight of the parish dock workers, not at all. Perhaps it was time to apply a little Christian charity to what did seem an unfortunate, unChristian state of affairs. But sometimes it was better to walk carefully than to rush ahead and stumble. However, as long as Father Barry confined his guidance to local communicants from the docks who came in for assistance, Father Donoghue could see no objection. He too regretted the brazen self-interest of certain prosperous Catholics and he was more than willing to remember at Mass Father Barry’s campaign against the evil spirits of profiteering and self-aggrandizement. “Just go easy, lad,” the aging Pastor advised. “Easy, easy. Like mountain climbing. Make sure one foot is securely dug in before you try raising the other.”