On the Waterfront Read Online Free Page B

sweepings of children with dirty streets for playgrounds and the soilings of infants, dirty clothes to soap and soak and rinse and hang out and pull in and iron and fold so they’d be ready to be dirtied again.
    Suckers, Charley thought, for that was the form of his social thinking, suckers to take it day in and day out, but that’s the way it had to be, or at least the way it was. At the top of the heap the real bigs like Tom McGovern, in the middle guys like mayors and D.A.’s and judges and Willie Givens, the International president who sneezed every time Tom McGovern stood in a draft. A step below them the local movers like Johnny F., then the lieutenants such as himself, then the goons and the sharks, the small operators, below them the body of regulars, the longshoremen and checkers and truckers who played ball, who helped to work the pilferage trick, and finally on the bottom below the bottom, the men who shaped up without an in, who took their chances, kicked back when they got too hungry to hold out any longer, lived mostly on loan-shark money they had to pay back at ten per cent a week and got a piece of that $2.34 an hour only when a ship was calling for fifteen gangs and everybody was thumbed in to work except the worst of the bottle babies, the dead beats and the rebels.
    Charley reached the entrance to the tenement he was headed for, a narrow, four-story building that had been thrown up sixty years earlier in a hasty effort to accommodate the influx when the new (now archaic) piers were built and bigtime shipping came to Bohegan. It was growing darker but a lot of kids were hollering up a stickball game in the street. On the stoop some of the older ones were idly watching. Old man Doyle was there, with a can of beer in his hand, more tired from the heavy work of the day than he’d admit, and with him, almost like a human appendage, was Runty Nolan, a jockey-sized, little gnome of a man barely five feet tall, with a face that had been hammered out of its original cast for thirty years of talking back. Not a young, up-to-date, Navy-wise, modern-trade-union-minded oppositionist like Joey Doyle but an incorrigible gadfly, a born needier, a party of one who fought Johnny Friendly in his own thick Irish way, by laughing at him, stinging him with humorous darts that were sharply defiant without quite provoking retaliation. Runty Nolan was like an old Navy man, perennially a seaman third, who knew by the book exactly how far he could push his Chief without risking court martial. A charter member of 447, in the days when Tom McGovern and Willie Givens were young dockwallopers working in the same gang, Runty in 1955 was exactly where he had been in 1915, a kind of self-appointed court jester of the docks, but too proud to serve a king, who accepted his beatings as part of a great joke he was playing on McGovern and Givens. “Those bums I knew ’em when they was glad to steal a chop off’n a meat truck,” he’d laugh, reading in the papers that McGovern had been appointed chairman of some kind of new port committee, or that Givens had just been voted twenty-five thousand a year for life plus expenses. “I wouldn’t pay the bum twenty-five cents,” he’d make a point of telling a Johnny Friendly supernumerary, knowing how the stooge would growl back at him for abusing the exalted president of the International Longshoremen’s Union.
    Runty as usual had a comfortable load on, and Pop Doyle was enjoying his beer quietly, also as usual, a man whose gentle face was lined and hardened with the hard years, slightly stooped in the shoulders and back from thirty years of bending over the coffee bags and the heavy boxes, dreaming a long time ago of a better deal for the men on the docks, talking now and then on the third or fourth beer of Gompers and the stillborn hope of an honest-to-God union in the port, but tired now, his sweet wife under the ground and something of his manhood and nerve buried with her, content to