Read Online On the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg - Free Book Online Page A

He liked to give the men a break. Johnny Friendly had warned him, but he wouldn’t play. Beaten him up, but he kept on. There was talk he was ready to buck the outfit and try to take over the local and run it like a union. Mrs. Collins was a little out of her head on the subject. “Every time I hear a key in the door I think it’s him comin’ home,” she’d keep saying. Pop Doyle could shout at her all he wanted. She was going to have her say.
    “Joey Doyle was the only one with the guts to talk up for his rights around here. He was for holdin’ regular meetin’s. An’ he was the only one with the moxie to talk up to them Crime Investigators. So this whole stinkin’ mess could …”
    “Shet up!” Pop was trembling, the pain of his loss meshed in with his rage and frustration.
    “Everybody knows that.”
    “Who asked ya? Shut ya trap. If Joey had taken that advice he wouldn’t be …”
    Pop looked at what was left of Joey Doyle and turned away with his face growing damp as tears and sweat mingled in a slow, salt flow. The whistle of another ocean liner went WHOOM WHOOM WHOOOOOOM on the river. In his mind the river and Johnny Friendly were one, endlessly dangerous and never sleeping.
    “Everybody knows that,” Mrs. Collins was whimpering to herself.
    Mutt Murphy had come along and was shouldering his way in and trying to talk to people who turned aside to avoid his stale breath and the sight of his livid, swollen-from-drinking lips.
    “ ’s a good boy,” he muttered, accustomed to talking to himself. “Oney one ever tired t’ get me me compensation, God bless ’im …”
    Lieutenant Foley had had enough of Pop. He turned to Moose McGonigle and Runty Nolan.
    “How’s about you fellas, any of you ever hear any threats to …”
    Moose had a bull-necked voice, made emotional by a hard life, and his ordinary conversational tone was louder than most men shouting.
    “One thing I loined—all my life on the docks—don’t ask no questions—don’t answer no questions, unless you …”
    He stopped, and looked at the lump of flesh lying under the alley-newspapers, waiting for its senseless ride to the city morgue.
    “He was all heart, that boy,” Runty said reverently, lowering his face full of broken bones, unable to see the body at his feet because he had been beaten for back-talking until his sight was only a shifting screen of shadows.
    “Guts,” Pop said it as if it was a curse. “I’m sick o’ guts. He gets a book in the pistol local and right away he’s gonna be a hero. Gonna push the mob off the dock single-handed.”
    “In other words, you’re pretty sure it wasn’t no accident,” Detective Foley said, not so much probing as covering himself either way.
    “Listen, Foley,” Pop said. “I aint sure o’ nuthin’. And if I was I wouldn’t tell ya. You’d bury it in the files and they’d bury me in the river.”
    Foley made a few routine notes. The whole thing was routine. Everybody knows and nobody says and you fatten the waterfront file, just as the old man says, push another report in the file and wait for a next time.
    “Okay, you c’n take it in,” he said to the intern. “Another D.O.A.”
    Father Barry, a tall, lean, fast-talking product of Bohegan, praying for Joey while anointing him, told God he thought Joey deserved mercy in heaven since it had been so rudely denied him in his short visit on this earth. He was born and raised in Bohegan, Father Barry, and he was no pious-tower religious. His old man had been a cop, honest, therefore in trouble, getting the Siberian treatment, pounding a beat on the outskirts, believing in his religion as an ethical guide as well as a sacramental experience and not afraid to tirade against the birettas and the high cloth when he thought them too worldly and over-impressed with wealth and position. A natural-born rebel, an independent man had been Patrolman John Francis Barry. His son, the priest, thinking what a poor end this was for