On the Waterfront (33 page)

“Conscience …” Terry muttered as if he were trying to translate a foreign word. “You mean that bill of goods you fellas keep tryin’ to sell? Conscience ’n soul ’n all that stuff? That stuff c’n drive you nuts.”

“You’re making me late for Mrs. Glennon,” Father Barry said as he walked away from Terry, down the steps, out of the park. “Good luck,” he said crisply over his shoulder.

“Is that all you got to say to me?” Terry called after him. He hated this smart-aleck priest, but he didn’t want him to walk away. He didn’t want to be left alone.

“You want to have it both ways, brother,” Father Barry called back over his shoulder. “Well, you got it.”

He took the small park steps to the street-level sidewalk three at a time at so rapid a pace he almost seemed to be running.

“The round-collar bastard leaves me standin’ here with my ass hangin’ out,” Terry muttered to himself in a fury of confusion.

The pile driver had been silent for a few moments, but now it swung into action again, pounding pounding pounding its steel pilings down through the soft bottom muck to the river floor. Pound! Pound! Pound! Pound! It echoed through all of Port Bohegan.

“Goddamn the goddamn noise,” Terry said, with his hand to his head. A cock pigeon on the frost-yellowed grass was fussing himself up for the benefit of a tacky female cull. He blew out his chest and spread his tail, cooed importantly and cakewalked around her. Terry watched the performance and thought of his own birds. Of Swifty with his powerful frame, his shiny blue-purple neck and his fine, powder-blue head. He wished he was a carefree kid again, running from the cops, swimming in the scummy river and watching his birds skim across the sky.

B
ACK ON THE ROOF
tending his birds again, Terry was able to sidestep his troubles for a while. He went into the loft and busied himself cleaning out the nest boxes. One wall of the coop was lined with orange-crates, with each pair of birds occupying one compartment. Terry liked to watch the mates building their nests from the clean straw and he enjoyed the regular way the cocks and hens took turns sitting on the two small white eggs, the males by day, the females by night, in well-regulated shifts. He liked to watch the growth of the grotesque, featherless, Durante-beaked, one-day-old squabs into plump, fluttery, thirty-day-old adolescents ready to leave the nest. Boy, how they hated to get their fannies out of that nest! They were squawkingly scared of the big, open world beyond their nest box and they hung on for dear life when their old man and old lady tried to push them out over the edge. It used to make Terry laugh and feel sorta sad at the same time—all that flapping of wings and squealing commotion. Then the full-grown rejected squabs, big enough to fly, but still too dumb to know they had it in them, would flop heavily to the floor of the loft. For a few days they’d go through hell, unweaned and unwanted, miserably suspended between their old nest-box dependence and an independence they hadn’t latched onto yet. Each time Mr. and Mrs. Pigeon flew down to the scratch-grain feeder the dispossessed kids would rush over to them with their beaks wide open, their wings flapping, clamoring for a hand-out It was pitiful, the way the old birds pecked them away. Just a couple of days earlier this same mom and pop had been on the nursing shift, regurgitating the soupy, digested grain into these waiting twenty-eight-day-old throats.

Hundreds of times he had watched those squabs, confused, more and more frantic, finally driven so nuts they’d turn to other adult birds and cry to cadge a meal, only to be pecked and bullied away. Terry would look in at night to see the disappointed waifs huddled together on the floor, starved, abandoned, demoralized. But they never starved to death. Sure, they were more confused than an Irishman caught in Liverpool on Paddy’s Day. Finally the homeless birds, without knowing what they were doing, would pick up a grain of cracked corn. The food filled a hole in the empty crop. The squab went for repeats. Eureka! He had learned the old lesson of the empty belly. You’ve got to get out and get it yourself.

Strengthened by the food, the little guy would be ready to try the self-serving watering can. Then his wings. Many a time Terry and Billy watched them hurl into the air, up a few feet, flap, flap, and then down they’d go. And try again. A week later the poor little bastard would be air-borne, able to make short, practice hops, a little unsteady yet, but each day learning some new wrinkle about his new-found stunt

In one of the nests was a fuzz-yellow, ungainly squab nearly ready for its ordeal of joining the flock. It was a fat, oversized fledgling because its twin had died after a few days and this one had doubled up on the regurgitated grub. Terry put his finger toward it and it fluttered its undeveloped wings and tried to peck him with its not-yet-hardened ludicrously large brown beak. It takes a pigeon a couple of months to grow into its beak. At first he looks all nose, like that infant from the old comics, Bunker Hill, Jr. Terry laughed at the futile pecking rage of the big squab. Then he put his hands carefully down over its wings and picked it up. It looked at him with frightened eyes.

“Kid, you got it made for another day or two and then out you go. No more …”

Christ, he thought suddenly, it almost seems to fit, the bull voice of Johnny Friendly, roaring, “No more cushy days in the loft.”

Gently, he put the squab back in the nest of dirty straw, held together with a mortar of pigeon dung.

Young Billy Conley came up the skylight steps, jumped out on the roof and looked around for Terry.

“Hey, Terry, guess who’s here.” He hurried over to the coop.

“Rose La Rose? Sorry, I’m too busy,” Terry said through the chicken wire.

“Listen, Terry,” the boy said. “It’s that joker from the Crime Commission. He’s comin’ up the stairs.”

Terry shook his head, dazed. “What? Lookin’ for me?”

Billy nodded. “I heard him askin’ the super on the first floor. He’s got his nerve gum-shoein’ around here. I hear you really blistered him in the Longdock.”

“Yeah, yeah …” Terry said absently. He came out of the coop wiping his hands on his dark corduroy trousers. Suddenly he grabbed his sweet-looking, foul-mouthed young friend. “Billy, listen. Suppose you know something, like a job some fellas did on a certain fella. You don’t think you should turn ’im in?”

The boy looked at him in amazement. “You mean holler cop? Are you kiddin’?”

Billy stared at him. His young lips pressed together in a tough-neighborhood sneer. “You off your rocker?”

Terry felt the hook. The code held for the teen-age gang just as it did for the outfits on the dock. He tapped Billy’s dimpled try-to-be-hard jaw affectionately. “You’re a good kid, Billy. A good, tough kid. A couple of Golden Warriors.” He hugged the kid’s head roughly. “We got to stick together, huh, kid?”

“You was our first ace-man,” Billy said. “You in some kind of a jam?”

“Kid, I got the bases loaded, no outs, and Dusty Rhodes is comin’ in to bat,” Terry said.

“He’s on his way up,” Billy said, nodding toward the covered stairway leading onto the roof. “Duck behind the coop and I’ll tell ’im you’re gone.”

“But I aint gone!” Terry said loudly. “I’m here. I’m here. Who’m I kiddin’?”

“It’s a good thing you aint boxin’ no more,” Billy said. “You’d get a sixty-day suspension for talkin’ double.”

The tall, well-built investigator in the tweed overcoat stepped out on the roof with his brief case. “Mr. Malloy?”

“See ya later,” Terry dismissed his young side-kick. Then he walked across the rooftop to where Glover was sitting on a low-walled partition rubbing his feet. “You lookin’ for me?” Terry asked. His voice had a chip on its shoulder.

“Oh, not exactly,” Glover said, rubbing his ankles. “I was just resting my dogs a minute.” He took off his hat and rubbed the line where his hat-band had been. “Next investigation we get into, I hope it’s buildings with elevators in them. So far this one has been nothing but climbing stairs.”

“What d’ya climb ’em for?” Terry said.

Glover smiled. “I’m what they call a public servant. They tell me the taxpayers have a right to know what’s going on down here.”

“Politics,” Terry shrugged it off.

Gene Glover knew enough about his job not to press the point. He had been trained as a Treasury investigator and there were definite techniques for these interviews. He had been studying Terry’s record and he had discussed with his colleague, Ray Gillette, the best approach. Terry’s mind would be shut. Any waterfront question would put him on guard. Now, let’s see … They had talked it over together in Glover’s kitchen over some beer the night before. Terry used to be a fighter. Ex-fighters like to talk about their lives in the ring. For a lot of them it was the biggest they’d ever be. Headlines. Back-stoppers. Money. A sense of achievement. When he was no longer sport-page copy, every fighter who ever hung up his gloves knew the let-down.

So now Glover tried to make his question sound spontaneous, but it was rehearsed:

“Didn’t I see you in the Garden three four years ago with a fellow called Wilson?”

“Wilson? Yeah. I boxed Wilson.”

Terry walked away, back toward his coop. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen Swifty flying into the coop and he wanted to check his beak. He had noticed some dampness around the nostril holes. It could be a slight cold.

Glover followed Terry, moving casually. He knew his business. He stood outside the coop looking in as Terry grabbed Swifty and felt his beak.

Glover hadn’t seen the Malloy-Wilson match, but had gone to the trouble of checking on it with a boxing writer he knew.

“I thought you were going to take him that night,” Glover said. “You won the first two rounds by a mile. But he sure caught up with you. Man, he really dumped you.”

Terry let Swifty fly back to his perch and came closer to the wire netting.

“He dumped me, huh? What would you say if I told you I hadda hold that bum up for half a round?”

“I see. I see. You mean he was hurt?”

“Whatta you think I was doin’ with them combinations, pettin’ ’im?”

“You mean you had him, but you just couldn’t finish him off, huh?” Glover asked.

“Finish him off,” Terry said scornfully. “Hell, I could feel him goin’. I coulda finished ’im off.”

“The record book shows he finished
you
off,” Glover reminded him. “Fifth round, wasn’t it?”

“Who the hell cares?” Terry said. The truth boiled up in him. “I was doin’ a favor for a couple of fellas …”

“Favor! “ Glover said. “I’m glad I didn’t bet on that one. So that’s the way it was.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the way it was. Ya know if I had copped that one I’d ’ve been in line fer the title? Wilson was rated third and I was right behind him and the two bums ahead of us didn’t have the connections.” Terry shook his head a moment, remembering the road work, the rata-ta-tatta of the light bag, the strategy. “I was real sharp that night.”

“You sure looked it, those first few rounds. I figured you started too fast and that counter-punching of his took it out of you.”

“Hah!” Terry snorted. The Wilson fight was a crimp in his mind he could never work out. “Them sports writers said the same thing, but it was a lousy bet took it out of me.”

“You don’t say?” Glover said quietly and stretched. “Well, guess I better get going. Hit those stairs again. It’s been nice talking to you. I watch the fights on TV twice a week. I think you could clean up on these middleweights they got messing around today.”

“Once in a while I get thinkin’ I could make it back,” Terry said. “I’m only twenty-eight. I still got my legs.”

“And you could punch,” Glover said. “By the way, a friend of mine and I were arguing about the Wilson fight the other night. Was that a hook or a bolo you caught him with in the third round?”

“Bolo,” Terry said contemptuously. “That’s for the birds. Some writer made that up to give Gavilan some color. A bolo is just a telegraphed uppercut.” He burlesqued one. “A big nothing.” The stance of shadow boxing and a whiff of the old flattery excited him. “I was strictly a short puncher,” he said proudly, and came out of the coop. “Look, you put your left out and I’ll show you somethin’.” He maneuvered Glover into an awkward semblance of a boxer’s pose.

“I had that bum all figured out, see. He had a good left hand, ya know what I mean? Okay, so I let him slap me with the left for a couple of rounds. Build up his confidence, see? And all the time I’m watchin’ how he drops his right. So just when he thinks he’s gettin’ cute and can tag me whenever he wants me, I step inside the jab—whop, with a right!”—he threw his right hand viciously—“whop with a left, then when his hand comes down I bring up the uppercut—six inches, but I know how to throw it—WHOP! He falls into my arms. He don’ know if he’s in the Garden or in Roseland and from there on we’re just dancin’, dancin’ … That Wilson couldn’t fight too much.”

“I believe you,” Glover said, apparently interested.

“Well, that’s a fact! That’s a fact,” Terry said excitedly. “Jesus, how I wanted to put him away. But no dice. All for a lousy bet. Hell, my own bro …”

Terry heard himself and stopped short.

“Your own who?” Glover encouraged him.

“Aah, it’s ancient history,” Terry subsided. “Who’n hell cares about me ’n Wilson?”

“Well, I better get going,” Glover said. “Sorry to hear they wouldn’t let you win it. Better luck next time.”

“Hah, hah,” Terry said bitterly. “With my luck and a subway token I couldn’t get to Times Square.”

“See you soon,” Glover smiled. “I’d like to hear the whole story some time.” He disappeared into the rooftop stairway.

An hour later Terry was still up there, sitting on an upturned box, watching his birds. He heard someone come up on the roof three houses away. It was Katie. She was wearing a blue scarf around her head to keep her hair from blowing. It was windy on the rooftop, although the sun was filtering through the cold marble sky. When she lingered at Joey’s coop, Terry didn’t know whether to call over to her or not. He had tried to avoid her on the dock at Runty’s impromptu send-off the day before and he was resigned to the fact that his chance was one to fifty that she would ever speak to him again. Well, he’d settle for that. Bohegan was a fishbowl and sooner than later it would get back to Johnny. Things were tough enough now.