On the Waterfront Read Online Free

Racing Form and go get their load on after work. Peaceable citizens, that’s what we want around here. Well, we gave them their meeting. We called it on twenty-four-hours’ notice after posting it on the bulletin board here in the office. Sure the notice was on a scrap of paper one inch high but the constitution doesn’t say what kind of notice; it just says adequate notice must be given. I gave them their adequate. Only about fifty showed up. Fifty out of a possible fifteen hundred. And half of them was ours. You know, especially loyal members of 447. We all got elected for four more years. This Joey Doyle put up a squawk and Truck whose neck is as wide as some men’s shoulders, Truck had to take him outside and quiet him down. He’s a tough monkey, Joey Doyle. Doesn’t look it, but he’s there with the moxie and this trade-union bug has got him bad. Like his Uncle Eddie before him he’s hard to discourage. And then comes the clincher. The Governor’s got a bunch of stiffs he calls the State Crime Commission. A bunch of stuffed-shirt hypocrites who probably sponged it up good when they needed it. Now they get headlines about investigating waterfront crime. The Governor did plenty favors for Tom McGovern in his time, but it’s an election year and the Governor wants to score. First that clown Kefauver and then these jokers want to get in on the act. Well, of course, it’s for laughs. Who’s going to go blabbing to that bunch of striped-pants bums? Only we start hearing things about Joey Doyle. He’s been seen going in and out of the Court House where they sit around jacking off or whatever they do. I’m patient. On the District Council, ask anyone, they’ll tell you I’m one of the saner heads. I don’t go off half-cocked like my old pal Cockeye Hearn, God’ve mercy on his soul. You don’t see me going around giving it to them in broad daylight just because I don’t like the part in their hair. Cockeye down there in the Village had his good points and his partner Wally (Slicker) McGhee is still as quick a trick as you ever want to meet, but you have to be pretty stupid to blow somebody off the waterfront and wind up on the wrong end of the switch. Anyway, before I move Joey out of my way with muscle I look to con him out of my way with some soft soap. For that I’ve got Charley Malloy. Charley aint called the Gent for nothing. He’s got a lot better education than the rest of us got. He did two years in Fordham, believe it or no. And the reason he was bounced wasn’t because he wasn’t smart enough. He was a little too smart. Charley’s got brains to burn. He got caught selling examination answers, that’s all. Charley was always smart. Would’ve been a helluva lawyer. He can talk up a breeze like That matter to which you have reference to which and stuff like that. So I sent my trouble-shooter to my trouble-maker. Charley talks sense. He says he likes Joey and wants to help him, which he does. There might even be a place in the set-up for a bright kid like Joey. We don’t hold grudges. I’ve taken in plenty guys who started in bucking me. It shows they got spirit. I can use spirit. But when Charley wastes his best arguments and comes back with no dice and the scuttlebutt has the Doyle punk blowing his nose for the Crime Commission, which no respectable longshoreman would be caught dead in their company, what am I supposed to do, hang a medal on him? I worked too hard for what I got to frig around with a cheese-eater. Know what I mean?
    So Johnny and Charley, a waterfront idea of suavity and culture, worked up a little plan. Its virtue lay in its simplicity. No telltale firearms, not even the usual splash in the river. In the office on the creaky floating dock on the river’s edge, Johnny went over the plans with Charley and Sonny and Specs, who were providing the muscle. Johnny wasn’t like a lot of the Irish mob, hit ’em first and think afterwards. He had been raised with a lot of Italians