On the Waterfront

  “Lissen, Father, do you have to make such a big deal out of it? I got somethin’ I wanna tell ya.”

  “What brought you here, Terry? Can you tell me that first?”

  “I’m here, aint that enough? That stuff you was sayin’ on the dock yesterday about Runty. Sure, I know Runty was gettin’ ready to stool but”—he hunched his shoulders in an expressive helpless gesture again—“but he had balls. He got a lot of kicks out of life. And then this Doyle broad. And those goddamn pigeons of Joey’s.” He wiped across his mouth and nose with the back of his hand in the defensive gesture of a boxer trying to smear the blood off his face. “I tell ya, Father, it’s got me so I gotta come in here and sit down to find out what gives with me.”

  “Kid, I’ve got to change into my street clothes and make a call,” Father Barry said. “Sure, something’s eating you. That’s your conscience. It’s been buried in there pretty deep. It’s like a clean white tooth covered with green scum and grit. You don’t brush that away in five minutes.”

  “You mean you won’t buy me in there, huh?”

  Father Barry shook his head. “Not yet. I’ve got to run now. Why don’t you stay here and pray? Try St. Jude. He’s sort of a specialist on fellers who’ve got evil deep-rooted in ’em. He converted plenty of barbarians.”

  “Yeah? And how did he wind up?”

  “Beaten to death with a broadaxe,” Father Barry said. “Stay here and think about him. Pray to him. He’s a saint of desperate cases. Ask him to intercede for you. Maybe something’ll happen.” He started rapidly toward the sacristy. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Hey,” Terry called after him, but Father Barry was hurrying down the side aisle.

  A few minutes later, when Father Barry came down the steps of the church, two at a time, on his way to the Glennons’, Terry was outside waiting for him.

  “What is this, a brush-off?” Terry said.

  “That was a real quickie of a prayer,” Father Barry said, crossing the street into the park. A common pigeon was perched on General Pulaski’s head, which was turning a mottled green with oxidation. Father Barry had long legs and was moving them in such rapid strides that Terry had to trot occasionally to keep up with him.

  “Lissen, Father, I don’t wanna pray. Hell, why kid ya, I’d be fakin’ it if I prayed. But I got somethin’ that feels like it’s bustin’ me open inside—like a fist was in there beltin’ me from the inside …”

  Father Barry kept walking.

  “Lissen to me, goddamn it, don’t pull that high-and-mighty stuff,” Terry half begged, half bullied. “Hell, the other night you was beggin’ for someone to give you a lead on Joey Doyle.”

  Father Barry stopped and studied him.

  “Oh? You got a lead?”

  “Lead, hell.” Terry almost shouted. “It was me, understan’, it was me!” He grabbed the priest so fiercely by the arm that Father Barry thought for a moment he was going to attack him. Father Barry wrenched the arm of his overcoat free.

  “You been up all night, on the bottle?”

  “What difference?” Terry said, excited. It was like sticking a knife into your own carbuncle. You put it off as long as possible, but then it felt good to feel the pus ooze out. It hurt and felt good to squeeze the sore lips of the boil and empty out the infection. “I’m tellin’ ya it was me, Father. I’m the one who set Joey Doyle up for the knock-off.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Father Barry said.

  “Now this is strictly between you and I,” Terry said.

  “I don’t want it that way,” Father Barry said. “When you’re ready Father Vincent can hear your confession. I want to be free to use whatever you tell me.”

  “Listen, it’s you I feel like tellin’ this to. I’m takin’ a chance you won’t rat on me.”

  “I’m making no deals, Terry. I won’t rat on you, as you put it. But you’ll have to ride along on my judgment.”

  “Why can’t I have it like confession?” Terry persisted. “What the hell difference does it make whether it’s in that phone booth or out here with Palooskie lookin’ over my shoulder?”

  “Because you can’t have it both ways,” Father Barry said. “Now come on. Let’s keep walking and give it to me straight. Fish or cut bait. Spill or button up. Go on, I’m listening.”

  “Well, it started as a favor,” Terry began, and then the thumb of truth pressed against the sides of the inflamed lie and the pus oozed out in a relieving flow:

  “Favor? Who’m I kiddin’? They call it a favor, but you know their favors—it’s do it, or else. So this time the favor turns out to be helpin’ them whop Joey. But, Father, I didn’t know that. I figgered they was only goin’ to lean on ’im a little bit. Honest t’ God, Father, I never figgered they was goin’ t’ go all the way.”

  “You thought they’d just work him over, and that didn’t bother you,” Father Barry said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I thought they’d talk to ’im, try ’n straighten ’im out, maybe push ’im aroun’ a little bit, that’s all.”

  “And what I said on the dock yesterday about silence, that’s what brought you to me?”

  “Well, sorta. I’ll tell ya the truth, Father. It’s that girl. The Doyle broad. She’s got a way of lookin’ at me. I wanna yell out the whole goddamn truth. All the girls I know are like the Golden Warriorettes, crazy kids. But this Katie is, well, I didn’t know they made ’em like that. She’s so square, it’s funny. I walk down the street with her and I feel like—well, like I’m back in trainin’ and I just stepped out of the shower. I’d come home with that liniment smell on me and I’d feel clean for a while.”

  “What are you going to do about this?” Father Barry cut him off brusquely.

  “What d’ya mean, do? What d’ya mean?”

  “You think you should know a thing like this and keep it to yourself?”

  “I told ya, this was just between you and I,” Terry said quickly.

  “In other words you’re looking for an easy out,” Father Barry said. “You tell it to me so I can help you carry the load. But it’s still an open cesspool for other people to fall into—and drown in. Like Runty Nolan. Isn’t that right?”

  “You’re a hard man,” Terry said.

  “I’d better be,” Father Barry said. “I’m having a hard day.”

  “You should talk,” Terry said. “A week ago I was doin’ lovely. Now I’m in more trouble than a one-armed fiddle player.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “What? What? About what?”

  “The Commission? Your subpoena?”

  “How come you know about that?” Terry said defensively.

  “You know the waterfront Western Union,” Father Barry said. “I heard they were looking for you. Well? What are you going to do about it?”

  “I dunno. I dunno. It’s like carryin’ a monkey around on your back.”

  Father Barry nodded. “A question of who rides who.”

  They had reached the grilled fencing at the far end of the park. Beyond them at the river’s edge a giant pile driver began pounding an ear-shattering rhythm. A new pier was under construction.

  “I’m no rat,” Terry said. “And if I spill, my life aint worth a home-made nickel.”

  Father Barry stopped walking and put it to him hard. “And how much is your soul worth if you don’t? Who are you loyal to? Murderers? Killers? Hijackers? You’ve got the nerve to put the bite on me for absolution when you’re still buddy- buddies with that human meat you think are men?”

  “Lissen, what are you askin’ me to do, put the finger on me own brother? And Johnny Friendly. I don’t care what he done, he was always a hunnerd percent with me. When I was a snot-nose kid, everybody lookin’ to rap me in the head, Johnny Friendly used t’ take me to ball games. He done that for a lot of us kids. Just pick us up off the street ’n take us in to the ball games. I seen Gehrig ’n Lazzeri. ’N Hubbell ’n Terry in the Polo Grounds.”

  “Ball games!” Fath
er Barry exploded. “Don’t break my heart. I wouldn’t care if Johnny Friendly gave you a life’s pass to the Polo Grounds. So you got a brother, huh? Well, let me tell you something. You’ve got some other brothers, and they’re getting the short end while your Johnny’s getting mustard on his face at the Polo Grounds.”

  Father Barry grabbed Terry’s arm in a tight grip. “Listen, I think you’ve got to tell Katie Doyle. I think you owe it to her. I know it’s a hell of a thing to ask you, but I think you ought to tell her.”

  Terry pulled his arm away angrily. “Hell, ya don’t ask much, do ya?” Terry worked the fingers of his right hand into his scalp. “Ya know what you’re askin’?”

  “Never mind, forget it.” Father Barry said abruptly. “I’m not asking you to do anything. It’s your own conscience that’s got to do the asking.”

  “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.

  Twenty

  BACK 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.”