Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 27, No. 3. Whole No. 148, March 1956

Murder on the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg[6]

Budd Schulberg decided to become a writer when, as a boy, he listened to his father, then in charge of Paramount Studios in Hollywood, read from the worlds of Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, and Charles Dickens — great teachers all. At the age of fifteen, while traveling to Europe with his family, young Budd began seriously to put words one after the other. The first result was five chapters of a projected novel about a murderer who left no fingerprints because he had only a hook on his wooden arm. “That little number,” says Budd Schulberg, “has fortunately been lost to posterity.”

This was Budd’s “poetry period” too. Later, as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, he wrote short stories, and one of them won a prize in a national intercollegiate contest. But it was during the time he was wording in Hollywood, after graduation from Dartmouth, that Budd Schulberg began to come into his own. His father liked the short stories Budd was writing, showed them to a famous literary agent — and Budd Schulberg, the writer, was launched; for his first half dozen short stories sold to “Collier’s,” “Saturday Evening Post,” and “Liberty.”

One of those first short stories was a little number called “What Makes Sammy Run?” Budd Schulberg conceived the idea of expanding this short into a novel — and the rest is literary history. The novel — also titled WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? — raised a critical storm, added a new phrase to our language, created an unforgettable picture of an all-American heel, became a sensational success, and today has a permanent place in the Modern Library.

But Mr. Schulberg was only on his way. His second novel, THE HARDER THEY FALL, added to his stature by dealing realistically with the tough, ruthless world of prizefighting. And his third novel, THE DISENCHANTED, reached the top of the best-seller lists, achieving both popular and critical acclaim, THE DISENCHANTED, a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, created another great American portrait — that “golden figure of the glittering Twenties” (based on the life and times of F. Scott Fitzgerald).

And then Mr. Schulberg went back — seriously — to his father’s business. He wrote the original story and screenplay of “On the Waterfront” — one of the finest motion pictures in the whole history of that difficult art form. “On the Waterfront” won no less than nine Oscars for 1954 — and all richly deserved. It was voted the best picture of the year; Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint took top honors as best actor and best supporting actress; Elia Kazan was judged the best director of the year; and Budd Schulberg’s story and screenplay, suggested by Malcolm Johnson s Pulitzer Prize newspaper articles, won the most coveted writing award in the motion picture industry. Then in 1955 Mr. Schulberg followed up the prize-winning movie with a novel based substantially on the same material; WATERFRONT was hailed by “The New York Times” as “the best of Schulberg, a full-fledged performance by a gifted American writer.”

And now we bring you Budd Schulberg’s “Murder on the Waterfront.” This tale of Matt Gillis, an Irish-thick; rebel of a longshoreman, has the same background — “the violent, vivid, restless, corrupted” waterfront. Undoubtedly, the story is a by-product of Mr. Schulberg’s research and work on the motion picture and the novel: it has the same power, the same honesty, the same impact.

The alarm was about to ring when Matt Gillis reached out his bearlike, heavy-muscled arm and shut it off. Habit. Half-past 6. Summer with the light streaming in around the patched window shades, and winter when half-past 6 was black as midnight. Matt stretched his heavyweight, muscular body and groaned. Habit woke you up at half-past 6 every morning, but habit didn’t make you like it — not on these raw winter mornings when the wind blew in from the sea, whipping along the waterfront with an intensity it seemed to reserve for longshoremen. He shivered in anticipation.

Matt listened to the wind howling through the narrow canyon of Eleventh Street and thought to himself: Another day, another icy-fingered, stinking day. He pushed one foot from under the covers to test the temperature, and then quickly withdrew it into the warmth of the double bed again. Cold. Damn that janitor, Lacey — the one they all called Rudolph because of his perpetually red nose. Never enough heat in the place. Well, the landlord was probably saying, what do they expect for twenty-five a month?

Matt rolled over heavily, ready for the move into his work clothes. “Matt?” his wife, Franny, murmured, feeling for him drowsily in the dark. “I’ll get up; fix you some coffee.”

“It’s all right.” His buxom Fran. Matt patted her. Her plump-pretty Irish face was still swollen with sleep. For a moment he remembered her as she had been fifteen years ago: the prettiest kid in the neighborhood — bright, flirty, sky-blue eyes and a pug nose, a little bit of a girl smothered in Matt’s big arms, a child in the arms of a grizzly. Now she was plump all over, something like him on a smaller, softer scale, as if she had had to grow along his lines to keep him company.

“Matt, you don’t mind me gettin’ fat?” she had whispered to him one night in the wide, metal-frame bed after the kids finally had fallen asleep.

“Naw, you’re still the best-lookin’ woman in the neighborhood,” Matt had said gallantly.

“At least you can always find me in the dark,” Fran had giggled. They had got to laughing then, until Fran had to stop him because everything Matt did, he did big — laugh, fight, eat, drink, tell off the mob in the union. Even when he thought he was talking normally, he shouted, he bellowed, so when he had chuckled there in the bed, the children — Tom and Mickey and Kate and Johnny and Peggy, the five they had had so far — had stirred in their beds and Fran had said, “Shhh, if the baby wakes up you’ll be walkin’ the floor with her.”

Matt swung his long legs out of the bed and felt the cold touch of the linoleum. He sat there a moment in his long underwear, thinking — he wasn’t sure of what; the day ahead, the days of his youth, the time his old man came home from the pier with three fingers off his right hand (copper sheeting — cut off at the knuckle nice and clean), and all those years the old man battled for his compensation. It was all the old man could talk about, finally, and got to be a joke — never to Pop, but to Matt and his brothers when they were big enough to support him.

Big Matt sat there on the edge of the bed rubbing sleep out of his eyes, thinking, thinking, while his wife, warm and sweet and full in her nightgown, half rose behind him and whispered, “Coffee? Let me get up and make you a cup of coffee.” She wanted to say more; she wanted to say, “Look, Matt honey, I know what it is to go down there to the shape-up when the sun is still climbing up the backs of the buildings. I know what it is for you to stand there with three-four hundred other men and have the hiring boss, Fisheye Moran, look you over like you was so much meat in a butcher shop. I know what it is for you to go to work every morning like you had a job — only you haven’t got a job unless Fisheye, the three-time loser put there by the Village mob, hands you a brass check.” She wanted to say, “Yes, and I know what it is for you to be left standing in the street; I know what you feel when the hiring boss looks through you with those pale blue fisheyes that give him his name.” That’s all today, come back tomorra.

Matt was on his feet now, a burly bear in his long underwear, stretching and groaning to push himself awake. Fran started to get up, but he put his big hand on her shoulder and pushed her back into the warm bed. Well, all right. She was glad to give in. When could a body rest except these precious few minutes in the early morning? “You be careful now, Matt. You be careful. Don’t get in no trouble.”

Fran knew her Matt, the Irish-thick rebel of Local 474, one of the lionhearted — or foolhardy — handful who dared speak up against the Lippy Keegan mob, which had the longshore local in their pocket, and the loading racket, the lunch-hour gambling, and all the other side lines that bring in a quick dollar on the docks. Lippy and his goons ran the neighborhood like storm troopers, and longshoremen who knew what was good for them went along with Keegan’s boys and took what they could get. Matt was always trying to get others to back him up, but the fear was too deep. “Matt, I got me wife and kids to think about; leave me alone,” they’d say, and push their 30 cents across the bar for another whiskey.

Matt tried to make as little noise as possible as he went down the creaky stairway. He closed the tenement door behind him and stood a moment in the clammy morning, feeling the weather. He zipped up his windbreaker and pulled his old cap down on his forehead. Then he drew his head down into the heavy collar, threw out his chest, and turned his face into the wind. It was a big, strong-boned, beefy face, with a heavy jaw and a broken nose, a face that had taken plenty. Over the years the Keegan boys had developed a begrudging respect for Matt. They had hit him with everything and he still kept coming on. The gift of getting up — that’s what they called it on the waterfront.

Matt ducked into the Longdock Bar & Grill on the corner across the street from the pier. It was full of longshoremen grabbing a cup of coffee and maybe some ham and eggs before drifting over to the shape-up. There were men of all sizes and ages, with weatherbeaten faces like Matt’s, many of them with flattened noses, trophies of battles on the docks and in the barrooms; here and there were ex-pugs with big-time memories: the cheers of friends and five hundred dollars for an eight-rounder. Threading through the dock workers was a busy little man whose name was Billy Morgan, though everybody called him “J.P.” because he was the moneylender for the mob. If you didn’t work, J.P. was happy to lend you a deuce or half a bill, at ten per cent a week. If you fell too far behind, J.P. whispered to Fisheye, and Fish-eye threw you a couple of days’ work until the loan was paid off. They had you coming and going, the mob. Matt looked at J.P. and turned away.

Over in the corner were a couple of Lippy’s pistols, Specs Sinclair, a mild-looking, pasty-skinned man who didn’t look like an enforcer but had maybe a dozen stiffs to his credit, and Feets McKenna, a squat muscle man who could rough-and-tumble with the best. Feets was sergeant-at-arms for the local. Specs, for whom signing his name was a lot of writing, was recording secretary. Matt looked straight at them to show he wasn’t backing away, ever. Union officials. Only three-time losers need apply.

Matt pushed his way into the group at the short-order counter. They were men dressed like himself, in old trousers and flannel shirts, with old caps worn slightly askew in the old-country way. They all knew Matt and respected the way he stood up; but a stand-up guy, as they called him, was nobody you wanted to get close to. Not if you wanted to work and stay in one piece in Lippy Keegan’s sector of the harbor.

Matt was waiting for his coffee when he felt a fist smash painfully into his side. Fie winced and started an automatic counter at whoever it was, and then he looked down and grinned. He should have known. It was Runt Nolan, whose hundred ring battles and 25 years of brawling on the docks were stamped into his flattened face. But a life of beatings had failed to deaden the twinkle in his eyes. Runt Nolan was always seeing the funny side, even when he was looking down the business end of a triggerboy’s .38. Where other longshoremen turned away in fear from Lippy’s pistoleros, Runt always seemed to take a perverse delight in baiting them. Sometimes they laughed him off and sometimes, if he went on provoking them — and longshoremen were watching to see if Runt could get away with it — they would oblige him with a blackjack or a piece of pipe. Runt had a head like a rock and more lives than a pair of cats, and the stories of his miraculous recoveries from these beatings had become a riverfront legend.

Once they had left him around the corner in the alley lying face down in his own blood, after enough blows on the noggin to crack the skull of a horse; and an hour later, when everyone figured he was on his way to the morgue, damned if he didn’t stagger back into the Longdock and pound the bar for whiskey. “I should worry what they do to me, I’m on borried time,” Runt Nolan liked to say.

Runt grinned when he saw Matt rub his side with mock resentment. “Mornin’, Matt me lad, just wanted t’ see if you was in condition.”

“Don’t be worryin’ about my condition. One more like that and I’ll stand you right on your head.”

“Come on, you big blowhard, I’m ready for you.” Runt fell into a fierce boxing stance and jabbed his small knuckle-broken left fist into Matt’s face.

Matt got his coffee and a sinker and sat down at one of the small tables with Runt. Runt was rarely caught eating. He seemed to consider the need for solid food something of a disgrace, a sign of weakness. Whiskey and beer and maybe once a day a corned-beef sandwich — that was Runt’s diet, and in the face of medical science it had kept him wiry and resilient at fifty-five.

“What kind of a boat we got today?” Matt asked. Runt lived in a two-dollar hotel above the Longdock Bar and he was usually up on his shipping news.

“Bananas,” Runt said, drawing out the middle vowel in disgust.

“Bananas!” Matt groaned. Bananas meant plenty of shoulder work, toting the heavy stalks out of the hold. A banana carrier was nothing less than a human pack mule. There was only one good thing about bananas: the men who worked steady could afford to lay off bananas, and so there was always a need for extra hands. The docker who had no in with the hiring boss, and even the fellow who was on the outs with the Keegan mob, stood a chance of picking up a day on bananas.

By the time Matt and Runt reached the pier, ten minutes before the 7:30 whistle, there were already a couple of hundred men on hand, warming themselves around fires in metal barrels and shifting their feet to keep the numbness away. Some of them were hard-working men with families, professional longshoremen whose Ireland-born fathers had moved cargo before them. And some of them were only a peg above the bum, casuals who drifted in for a day now and then to keep themselves in drinking money. Some of them were big men with powerful chests, large, raw-faced men who looked like throwbacks to the days of bare-knuckle fights-to-a-finish. Some of them were surprisingly slight, wizen-faced men in castoff clothing, the human flotsam of the waterfront.

Fisheye came out of the pier, flanked by a couple of the boys, “Flash” Gordon and “Blackie” McCook. There were about three hundred longshoremen waiting for jobs now. Obediently they formed themselves into a large horseshoe so Fisheye could look them over. Meat in a butcher shop. The men Fisheye wanted were the ones who worked. You kicked back part of your day’s pay to Fisheye or did favors for Lippy if you wanted to work regular. You didn’t have to have a record, but a couple of years in a respectable pen didn’t do you any harm.

“I need two hundred banana carriers.” Fisheye’s hoarse voice seemed to take its pitch from the foghorns that barked along the Hudson. Jobs for two hundred men at a coveted $2.27 an hour. The three, maybe four hundred men eyed one another in listless rivalry. “You — and you — Pete — okay, Slim...” Fisheye was screening the men with a cold, hard look. Nearly twenty years ago a broken-down dock-worker had gone across the street from the shape-up. “No work?” the bartender had said, perfunctorily, and the old man had answered, “Nah, he just looked right through me with those blasted fish-eyes of his.” Fisheye — it had made the bartender laugh, and the name had stuck.

Anger felt cold and uncomfortable in Matt’s stomach as he watched Fisheye pass out those precious tabs. He didn’t mind seeing the older men go in, the ones he had shaped with for years, especially family men like himself. What gave him that hateful, icy feeling in his belly was seeing the young kids go in ahead of him, new-generation hoodlums like the fresh-faced Skelly kid who boasted of the little muscle jobs he did for Lippy and the boys as his way of paying off for steady work. Young Skelly had big ideas, they said around the bar. One of these days he might be crowding Lippy himself. That’s how it went down here. “Peaches” Maloney had been Number One — until Lippy dumped him into the gutter outside the Longdock. Matt had seen them come and go. And all the time he had stood up proud and hard while lesser men got the work tabs and the gravy.

Fisheye almost had his 200 men now. He put his hand on Runt Nolan’s shoulder. “All right, you little sawed-off rat, go on in. But remember I’m doin’ ya a favor. One word out of line and I’ll bounce ya off the ship.”

Runt tightened his hands into fists, wanting to stand up and speak his mind. But a day was a day and he hadn’t worked steady enough lately to keep himself in beers. He looked over at Matt with a helpless defiance and went on into the pier.

Matt waited, thinking about Fran and the kids. And he waited, thinking at Fisheye: It ain’t right, it ain’t right, a bum like you havin’ all this power. Fie couldn’t keep it out of his face. Fisheye flushed and glared back at him and picked men all around Matt to round out his two hundred. He shoved Matt’s face in it by coming toward him as if he were going to pick him and then reaching over his shoulder for Will Murphy, a toothless old sauce hound whom Matt could outwork five for one. There never had been enough caution in Matt, and now he felt himself trembling with anger. He was grabbing Fisheye before he had time to think it out, holding the startled boss by the thick lapels of his windbreaker.

“Listen to me, you fatheaded bum. If you don’t put me on today I’ll break you in two. I got kids to feed. You hear me, Fisheye?”

Fisheye pulled himself away and looked around for help. Blackie and young Skelly moved in.

“Okay, boys,” Fisheye said, when he saw they were there. “I c’n handle this myself. This bigmouth is dumb, but he’s not so dumb he wants to wind up in the river. Am I right, Matt me lad?”

In the river. A senseless body kicked off the stringpiece into the black and secretive river, while the city looked the other way. Cause of death: accidental drowning. Dozens and dozens of good men had been splashed into the dark river like so much garbage. Matt knew some of the widows who had stories to tell, if only someone would listen. In the river. Matt drew away from Fisheye. What was the use? Outnumbered and outgunned. But one of these days — went the dream — he and Runt would get some action in the local, some following; they’d call a real election and—

Behind Matt a big truck blasted its horn, ready to drive into the pier. Fisheye thumbed Matt to one side. “All right, get moving, you’re blocking traffic, we got a ship to turn around.” Matt spat into the gutter and walked away.

Back across the street in the Longdock, Matt sat with a beer in front of him, automatically watching the morning television: some good-looking, fast-talking dame selling something — yatta-ta yatta-ta yatta-ta. In the old days, at least you had peace and quiet in the Longdock until the boys with the work tabs came in for lunch. Matt walked up the riverfront to another gin mill and sat with another beer. Now and then a fellow like himself would drift in, on the outs with Lippy and open to Matt’s arguments about getting up a petition to call an honest union election: about time we got the mob’s foot off’n our necks; sure, they’re tough, but if there’s enough of us... it was the old dream of standing up like honest-to-God Americans instead of like oxen with rings in their noses.

Matt thought he was talking quiet but even his whisper had volume, and farther down the bar Feets and Specs were taking it in. They weren’t frowning or threatening, but just looking, quietly drinking and taking it all in.

When Matt finished his beer and said see-ya-later, Specs and Feets rose dutifully and followed him out. A liner going down-river let out a blast that swallowed up all the other sounds in the harbor. Matt didn’t hear them approach until Feets had a hand on his shoulder. Feets was built something like Matt, round and hard. Specs was slight and not much to look at. He wore very thick glasses. He had shot the wrong fellow once. Lippy had told him to go out and buy a new pair of glasses and warned him not to slip up that way again.

“What d’ya say, Matt?” Feets asked, and from his tone no one could have thought them anything but friends.

“Hello, Feets, Specs,” Matt said.

“Listen, Matt, we’d like to talk to you a minute,” Feets said.

“Then talk,” Matt said. “As long as it’s only talk, go ahead.”

“Why do you want to give us so much trouble?” Specs said — any defiance of power mystified him. “You should straighten yourself out, Matt. You’d be working three-four days a week if you just learned to keep that big yap of yours shut.”

“I didn’t know you were so worried about whether I worked or not.”

“Matt, don’t be such a thickheaded mick,” Feets argued. “Why be agitatin’ alla time? You ain’t gonna get anywheres, that’s for sure. All ya do is louse yourself up with Lippy.”

Matt said something short and harsh about Lippy. Feets and Specs looked pained, as if Matt were acting in bad taste.

“I wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that,” Specs said. His face got very white when he was ready for action. On the waterfront he had a reputation for enjoying the trigger squeezing. “You keep saying that stuff and we’ll have to do something about it. You know how Lippy is.”

Matt thought a moment about the danger of saying what he wanted to say: Fran and the kids home waiting for money he’d have to borrow from the moneylender. Why look for trouble? Why buck for the bottom of the river? Was it fair to Fran? Why couldn’t he be like so many other longshoremen — like Flanagan, who had no love for Lippy Keegan but went along to keep food on the table? Lippy ran the piers just like he owned them. You didn’t have to like Lippy, but it sure made life simpler if he liked you.

Matt thought about all this, but he couldn’t help himself. He was a self-respecting man, and it galled him that a pushy racketeer — a graduate of the old Arsenal Mob — and a couple of punks could call themselves a union. I shouldn’t say this, Matt was thinking, and he was already saying it:

“Yeah, I know how Lippy is. Lippy is gonna get the surprise of his stinkin’ life one of these days. Lippy is gonna find himself—”

“You dumb harp,” Feets said. “You must like to get hit in the head.”

“There’s lots I like better,” Matt admitted. “But I sure as hell won’t back away from it.”

Feets and Specs looked at each other and the glance said clearly: What are you going to do with a thickhead like this? They shrugged and walked away from Matt, back to their places at the bar. Later in the day they would give Lippy a full account and find out the next move. This Matt Gillis was giving their boss a hard time. Everything would be lovely down here if it wasn’t for this handful of talk-back guys. They leaned on the bar with a reassuring sense that they were on the side of peace and stability, that Matt Gillis was asking for trouble.

Matt met Runt in the Longdock around five-thirty. Runt was buying because he had the potatoes in his pocket. They talked about this petition they were getting up to call a regular meeting. Runt had been talking to a couple of old-timers in his hatch gang who were half scared to death and half ready to go along. And there were maybe half a dozen young fellows who had young ideas and no use for the old ways of buying jobs from Fisheye and coming on the double whenever Lippy whistled. Another round or two and it was supper-time.

“Have another ball, Matt. The money’s burnin’ a hole in me pocket.”

“Thanks, Runt, but I gotta get home. The wife’ll be hittin’ me with a mop.” This was a familiar, joking threat in the Gillis domain.

Matt wiped his mouth with his sleeve and rubbed his knuckles on Runt’s head. “Now don’t get in no arguments. You watch yourself now.” It was bad business, Matt knew, bucking the mob and hitting the bottle at the same time. They could push you into the drink some night and who was to say you weren’t dead drunk, just another “death by accidental drowning.”

Matt was worried about Runt as he walked up the dark side street to his tenement. Runt took too many chances. Runt liked to say, “I had me fun and I drunk me fill. What’ve I got to lose?”

I better keep my eye on the little fella now that we’re pushin’ so hard for this up-and-up election, Matt was thinking, when he felt something solid whop him just behind the ear. The blow had force enough to drop a horse but Matt half turned, made a club of his right hand and was ready to wield it when the something solid whopped him again at the back of his head. He thought it was the kid, the Skelly punk, there with Feets, but he wasn’t sure. It was dark and his head was coming apart. In a bad dream something was swinging at him on the ground — hobnailed shoes, the finishing touch. Feets, they called him. The darkness closed in over him like a black tarpaulin....

Everybody was talking at once and — was it time for him to get up and shape? — he was sprawled on the bed in his room. Go ’way, lemme sleep.

“Matt, listen, this is Doc Wolff.” The small, lean-faced physician was being pushed and breathed on. “The rest of you go on, get out of here.”

Half the tenement population was crowded into the Gillises’ narrow flat. Mrs. Geraghty, who was always like that, took the kids up to eat at her place. Doc Wolff washed out the ugly wounds in Matt’s scalp. Half the people in the neighborhood owed him money he would never see — or ask for. Some of the old-timers still owed his father, who insisted on practicing at seventy-five. Father and son had patched up plenty of wounds like these. They were specialists on blackjack, steel-pipe and gun-butt contusions. Jews in an Irish district, they never took sides, verbally, in the endless guerrilla war between the dock mob and the “insoigents.” All they could do, when a longshoreman got himself in a fix like this, was to overlook the bill. The Wolffs were still poor from too much overlooking.

“Is it serious, Doctor?”

“We’d better X-ray, to make sure it isn’t a skull fracture. I’d like to keep him in St. Vincent’s a couple of days.”

It was no fracture, just a couple of six-inch gashes and a concussion — a neat professional job performed according to instructions. “Don’t knock him out of the box for good. Just leave him so he’ll have something to think about for a week or two.”

On the second day Runt came up with a quart and the good news that the men on the dock were signing the petition. The topping of Matt had steamed them up, where Lippy had figured it would scare them off. Runt said he thought they had enough men, maybe a couple of dozen, to call a rank-and-file meeting.

Father Conley, a waterfront priest with savvy and guts, had offered the rectory library as a haven.

But that night Fran sat at the side of Matt’s bed in the ward for a long talk-to. She had a plan. It had been on her mind for a long time. This was her moment to push it through. Her sister’s husband worked for a storage company. The pay was good, the work was regular, and best of all there weren’t any Lippy Keegans muscling you if you didn’t play it their way. This brother-in-law said there was an opening for Matt. He could come in on a temporary basis and maybe work his way into regular union membership if he liked it. The brother-in-law had a little pull in that direction.

“Please, Matt. Please.” It was Fran’s domestic logic against his bulldog gift of fighting back. If he was a loner like Runt Nolan, he could stand up to Lippy and Specs and Feets and young Skelly and the rest of that trash all he wanted. But was it fair to Fran and the kids to pass up a sure seventy-five dollars a week in order to go hungry and bloody on the piers?

“Why does it always have to be you that sticks his neck out? Next time it’ll be worse. They’ll...”

Yes, Matt knew. The river: Lippy Keegan’s silent partner, the old North River, waiting for him in the dark.

“Okay, Franny,” Matt was saying under his bandages. “Okay. Tell Denny” — that was the brother-in-law — “I’ll take the job.”

In the storage vaults it was nice and quiet. The men came right to work from their homes. There was none of that stopping in at the corner and shooting the breeze about ships coming in and where the jobs might be — no hit or miss. The men were different too: good steady workers who had been there for years, not looking for any excitement. It seemed funny to Matt not to be looking behind him to see if any of Lippy’s boys were on his tail, funny to have money in his pockets without having to worry how he was going to pay it back to the loan sharks.

When Matt had been there three weeks, Fran went out and bought herself a new dress — the first new one in almost two years. And the following Sunday they went up to the park and had lunch at the cafeteria near the zoo — their first visit to a restaurant in Lord knows when. Fran put her hand in Matt’s and said, “Oh, Matt, isn’t this better? Isn’t this how people are supposed to live?”

Matt said yeah, he guessed so. It was good to see Fran happy and relaxed, no longer worried about food on the table for the kids, or whether he’d get home in one piece. Only — he couldn’t put it into words, but when he got back to work on the fifth floor of the huge storage building, he knew what was going to come over him.

And next day it did, stronger than at any time since he started. He wondered what Runt was doing, and Jocko and Bagles and Timmy and the rest of the gang in the Longdock. He hadn’t been in since the first week he started at the storage. The fellows had all asked him how he was feeling and how he liked the new job, but he felt something funny about them, as if they were saying, “Well, you finally let Lippy run you off the docks, huh, Matt?” “All that big talk about cleaning up the union and then you fold like an accordion, huh, Matt?” It was in their eyes — even Runt’s.

“Well, I’m glad to see you got smart and put your hook away,” Runt actually said. “Me, I’d do the same if I was a family man. But I always run too fast for the goils to catch me.” Runt laughed and poked Matt lightly, but there was something about it wasn’t the same.

Matt ran into Runt on the street a week or so later and asked him how everything was going. He had heard the neighborhood scuttlebutt about a new meeting coming up in the parish house. A government labor man was going to talk to them on how to get their rights. Father Conley had pulled in a trade-union lawyer for them and everything seemed to be moving ahead.

But Runt was secretive with Matt. Mike felt the brush; he was an outsider now. Runt had never said a word in criticism of Matt’s withdrawal from the waterfront — just occasional cracks about fellows like himself who were too dumb to do anything else but stand their ground and fight it out. But it got under Matt’s skin. He had the face of a bruiser, and inlanders would think of him as “tough-looking.” But actually Matt was thin-skinned, emotional, hypersensitive. Runt wouldn’t even tell him the date of the secret meeting, just asked him how he liked the storage job.

“It’s a real good deal,” Matt said. No seven-thirty shape-up. No muscle men masquerading as shop stewards. The same check every week. What more could he want?

What more than stacking cardboard containers in a long tunnel-like room illuminated by neon tubing? Matt wondered what there was about the waterfront. Why did men humiliate themselves by standing like cattle in the shape-up? What was so good about swinging a cargo hook — hoisting cement, copper ore, coffee, noxious cargoes that tickled your throat and maybe were slowly poisoning you?

But that didn’t tell the whole story, Matt was thinking as he handled the storage containers automatically. There was the salt air; there were the ships coming in from Spain, from South America, Greece, all over the world. There was the way the river sparkled on a bright day. And there was the busy movement of the harbor: the sound of the ferries, the tugs, the barges, the freighters, and the great luxury ladies with their autocratic noses in the air. There were the different kinds of cargoes to handle — furs, perfume, sardines, cognac — and who was to blame them if they got away with a bottle or two; it wasn’t pilferage on the waterfront until you trucked it away. There was the teamwork of a good gang working the cargo from the hatch and over the deck to the pier: the winch men, the deck men, the hatch boss, the high-low drivers, everybody moving together to an unstated but strongly felt rhythm that could be thrown off if just one man in a twenty-three-man gang didn’t know his job. And then there were the breaks for lunch — not cold sandwiches in a metal container, but a cut of hot roast beef in the bar across the street, with a cold beer to wash it down. And there was the talk of last night’s fight or today’s ball game or the latest cute trick pulled off by the longshore racketeers.

The waterfront: the violent, vivid, restless, corrupted, “we’re-doin’-lovely” waterfront.

Matt felt that way for days and said nothing about it. He’d sit in the front room with his shoes off, drinking beer, reading the tabloids, and wondering until it ached him what Runt and the boys were up to.

One evening when he came home, Flanagan and Bennett and some of the other neighbors were busy talking on the steps. Matt heard. “Maybe he’s just on one of his periodicals and he’s sleeping it off somewheres.” And, “He coulda shipped out somewhere. He used to be an A.B. and he’s just ornery enough to do it.” And Matt heard, “When he gets his load on, anything c’n happen. He could walk off the end of the pier into the river and think he was home in bed.”

Runt Nolan! No hide nor hair of him in three days, Flanagan said. Matt ran upstairs to tell Fran. She saw the look in his eyes when he talked about Runt, who always said he was “on borried time.” “Now, Matt, no use getting yourself excited. Wait and see. Now, Matt.” She saw the look in his eyes was the old look, before he settled for the cozy inland job with the storage company.

He paced up and down, but the children got on his nerves and he went over to talk to Father Conley. The father was just as worried as Matt. Specs had been warning Runt not to hold any more meetings in the rectory. Specs had told Runt to take it easy for his own good.

Matt went home after a while but he couldn’t sleep. At one thirty in the morning he put his clothes back on and went down to the Longdock. What’s the story, and news of Runt?

Nine days later there was news of Runt. The police department had made contact with Runt, by means of a grappling hook probing the soft, rotten bottom of the river. Runt wasn’t “on borried time” any more. He had paid back every minute of it. Cause of death: accidental drowning. On the night of his disappearance, Runt had been seen wandering the gin mills in a state of inebriation. In other words, bagged. There were no marks of violence on Runt. How could anyone prove he hadn’t slipped. The good old North River, Lippy’s silent partner, had done it again.

It was a good funeral. Everybody in the neighborhood was there — even Lippy Keegan, and Specs and Skelly and the rest of the boys. After the Mass, Father Conley came out on the sidewalk, and Matt and some of the others who were closest to Runt gathered around to hear what the father had to say.

They had seen the father steamed before but never like this. “Accident my eye,” he said. “If they think we’re going to take this lying down, they’re dumber than I think they are.”

“What can we do. Father?”

Everybody looked around. It was Flanagan, who had come up behind Matt; Flanagan, who always played it very cozy with the Keegans. But like most of the others, he had liked having Runt around — that cocky little bantam. The Longdock wouldn’t be the same without him. It looked like Runt, at the bottom of the river, had done more damage to Lippy than when he was around the docks shooting off his mouth.

Father Conley said, “We’re going to keep this case alive. We’ll question every single person who talked to Runt the day they hit him in the head. We’ll keep needling the police for action. Keegan hasn’t heard the end of Runt Nolan.”

“Now’s the time to put somebody up to run for president against Lippy,” the Bennett kid said.

Everybody looked at Matt. Matt looked down at his uncomfortable black shoes. He would have given anything to have been with Runt the night Keegan’s cowboys caught up with the little guy.

“That’s right, keep pressing them,” Father Conley said. “Maybe they don’t know it yet, but times are changing. One of these days you’re going to knock them out of the box for good.” He looked at Matt and said, “I can help you. But I can’t do it for you. It takes leadership.”

Matt looked down at the sidewalk. He always felt strange in his dark blue suit. He looked over at Fran, talking with some of the other wives. In his mind, Fran and the storage company and the welfare of the kids were all churning around with Runt and what Father Conley was saying and the faces of these dock workers looking at him and waiting for him...

The morning after the funeral Matt’s alarm clock split the silence at six thirty. Matt swung his legs over the side of the bed. Fran stirred behind him. “I’ll get up make you some coffee.” She sat up and they looked at each other.

“I’m sorry, Fran, I—”

“Don’t be,” she said.

Even before what happened to Runt, she had felt it coming. And on the way home from church he had said, “All the fellers liked Runt. There’ll be hell to pay. Now’s the time to get ’em movin’ in the right direction.”

Fran, sitting up in bed behind him, said, “Don’t get in no more trouble than you can help, Matt.”

Matt stood up and stretched, groaned, and reached for his pants. “Don’t worry, I’m gonna watch myself, I ain’t gonna take no crazy chances like Runt, Lord-’ve-mercy-on-’im.”

She wasn’t even disappointed about the storage job. A storage man is a storage man, a longshoreman is a longshoreman. In the deepest part of her mind she had known that all along.

“I’ll get up make you some coffee,” she said again, as she had a thousand times before, as she would — if he was lucky — a thousand times again.

For a moment he roughed her up affectionately. “You’re gettin’ fat, honey.” Then he was pulling his wool checkerboard shirt on over his long underwear. If there was enough work, Fisheye was liable to pick him, just to make it look good in case there was an investigation.

The cargo hook felt good in his belt. He zipped up his windbreaker, told Fran not to worry, set his cap at the old-country angle, and tried not to make too much noise on the creaky stairway as he made his way down through the sleeping tenement.

Flanagan was coming out of his door as Matt reached the bottom landing. The old docker was yawning and rubbing sleep out of his eyes but he grinned when he saw who it was.

“Matt me lad, we’ll be needin’ ya, that’s for sure.”

We. It had taken Flanagan a long time to get his mouth around that we. There wasn’t any we over at the storage company. Matt nodded to Flanagan, a little embarrassed, and fussed with his cap like a pitcher.

“Once a stand-up guy, always a stand-up guy, huh, Matt?”

Matt grunted. He didn’t want them to make too much of a deal out of it. Matt felt better when he got outside and the wind came blowing into his face. It felt good — like the cargo hook on his hip, familiar and good.

As they reached the corner, facing the elevated railroad tracks that ran along the river, two figures came up from a basement — Specs Sinclair and young Skelly. Specs had a bad cold. He was a sinus sufferer in the wintertime. He wished he was down in Miami scoring on the horses.

“So you want more?” he said to Matt, daubing his nose with a damp handkerchief. “We run you out of here once but you ain’t satisfied. What’s a matter, you lookin’ to wear cement shoes?”

Matt gazed at him and felt pleased and excited that he was back with this old hoodlum Sinclair and this punk Skelly. They were like old friends in reverse.

“Quit racing your motor,” Matt said. “It ain’t gonna be so easy this time. None of us is gonna go wanderin’ around alone half gassed like Runt Nolan. We’re stickin’ together now. And Father Conley’s got the newspapers watchin’. You hit me in the head and next thing you know they’ll hit you with ten thousand volts.”

Specs looked at Skelly. Everything was getting a little out of hand, there was no doubt about it. In the old days you could knock off an old bum like Nolan and that was the end of it. This Matt Gillis, why didn’t he stay in cold storage? For the first time in his life Specs worried whether Lippy Keegan would know the next move.

Matt crossed the street and pushed open the door of the Longdock. Everybody knew he was back. Everybody was going to be watching him. He wished Runt would come over and stick him in the side with a left hand. He knew it wasn’t very likely, but it made him feel better to wonder if that scrappy little son-of-a-biscuit-eater was going to be watching too.