Sometimes he wasn’t sure. Sometimes he’d wake in the dead hours, moaning with fear, and only when he hurried to the window, sticking his head and shoulders outside, could he relax. Down below, in the moonlight, down below, in the rain, Tenth Avenue stretched before him. Not heaven maybe. But pretty close. The stillness of the Avenue in the hours after midnight, a stillness that wasn’t really still, but beating ever so slowly, would fold about him like some huge and peaceful wing.
Another wing covered the waterfront: the racket. A wing with many feathers. Kickback and shape-up. Phoney charity raffle and whiskey tax.
At 7.30 each morning, Willy stepped into Pete’s Shoe Repairs on Eleventh to pay his kickback buck. Pete was only the collector for the hiring boss. But there was always some sorehead in the crowd of dock wallopers smoking their stogies and belching after their three fried-egg breakfasts, who’d let off steam against the kickback racket by cursing Pete. “Lousy ginzo!” the sorehead’d jabber. “He’s gonna buy a yacht with our bucks!”
At 7:40 Willy and his work-gang were loafing at the head of the pier where the shape was coming off. They knew they were going to work, but hundreds of other dock wallopers were there on the off-chance. Dock wallopers in caps that looked as if they’d been fished off a rag pile. Dock wallopers in two sweater combinations. Dock wallopers with lucky scarves around their necks. “I never get hurted when I wear it.” Maybe the Queen Mary or the United States would be towering up to the sky, immense and iron-walled and yet somehow human as all ships are somehow human.
At 7:55 the hiring boss, Red Rizzo, showed up, a short bulky man who looked like a light heavyweight whose legs’d been cut down. Red Rizzo blew a whistle. The dock wallopers shaped-up around him in a semi-circle. This particular hiring boss liked to stare up into the sky. “Mickey’s gang,” he called, his eyes on a little cloud. As Mickey’s gang stepped out of the shape-up, he fixed his eye on a wheeling seagull. “Fat Tony’s gang... Ray’s gang...”
Willy was one of the boys in Ray’s gang. He worked steady even when the steadies were s. o. l. Willy developed into a pretty good man with a hook. He was husky to start with and up in Sing Sing he’d been in the metal shop five years. Ray taught him how to use a sling. Pete Harris, an ex-con like himself, demonstrated a few tricks of the trade. “The load’s like a woman. She’s gonna give if you work her right.” Out on the piers jutting into the sparkling river, Willy’s face tanned and he began to feel good. Even when he climbed down into the holds of the great ships, he didn’t feel closed in as in prison where the bars somehow threw their shadows into the sunniest of yards.
Kickback? Shape-up? So what, Willy thought. Every morning he saw the beaten-hound look in the eyes of the men Red Rizzo hadn’t called. Some of those men’d been members of the union for twenty years and were still catch-ons. They could drag their tails home. Or if they were lucky, the hiring boss might let them treat him to a shot of whiskey at Reagan’s. Or even buy him a pint or a fifth.
No man in Clancy’s local drank anywhere else but Reagan’s. The rumble was that Johnny Blue Jaw was Reagan’s silent partner. And it was a fact that in the back-room at Reagan’s, the mob hung its hat. “Between you an’ me an’ the crapper,” a blarneying dock walloper by the name of Paddy Lynch said to Willy one night over a beer at Reagan’s brawling bar, “I’d like to be in the boots of the boyo who’s always needin’ a shave to mention no names. There’s the kickback king, himself.”
“Yeh?” Willy led him on. “That so?”
“Reagan kicks back to him, Red Rizzo kicks back to him.”
Willy asked himself if Paddy Lynch was one of the secret followers of Father Bannon. He’d heard of this Father Bannon, a waterfront priest always talking up Jesus Christ and reform. About Father Bannon, the dock wallopers said, “The father’s a nut. Nobody’s ever seen Jesus Christ down the waterfront, and nobody ever will.”
“Red Rizzo gets paid by the steamship an’ stevedore comp’nies,” Paddy Lynch was saying. “But who picked him for the job? The boyo who’s always needin’ a shave.”
“Lynch, you’re a God damned troublemaker!” Willy said and picking up his beer, he walked away. Before that night was over, Delaney, secretary-treasurer of the union, had soaked him for a raffle ticket. “You might win a Chewy and ride to work,” Delaney’d smiled. But every dock walloper stuck with a ticket knew the only riding they would do’d be inside their double-soled shoes.
“Everything’s a racket,” the ex-stickup man and ex-con would have said if anybody’d asked his opinion. And if this particular racket worked both sides of the street, Willy Toth for one couldn’t get excited. It was a racket that scrounged every loose buck it could out of the dock walloper’s pay. And it just about used a winch helping itself to steamship cargo. “That Johnny Blue Jaw deserves a lot of credit,” Willy used to say in a voice full of genuine admiration to Pete Harris. And that ex-con would answer with an admiration gone just a little sour. “Yeh. He’s a wonder, a cock-eyed wonder.”
Working the 5 P.M. or midnight shapes, the two best shapes for stealing, Willy had marveled at the operations of Al Linn, one of Johnny Blue Jaw’s top men. Al Linn was a gray-faced mobster, a sick man who couldn’t drink or chase women whom the dock wallopers called “Vice President of the Stealing Department.” All Al Linn had left were his brains. The rumble was that Johnny Blue Jaw listened to Al Linn when he wouldn’t listen to anybody else in his mob. One night Willy’d seen an Al Linn truck, loaded with ship’s cargo, almost run over a pier watchman. “Pete,” he said later over pancakes and coffee. “That watchman’d jumped out of the way like a rabbit and kept on jumping.”
“What’d you want him to do? If he ratted to the dock super he’d’ve had himself an accident.”
The huge ships were floating department stores full of Christmas presents all the year round — Christmas presents for the taking. And the “Vice President of the Stealing Department” took. And the dock wallopers said, “We gotta right to a lit honest stealin’ ourself. We’re entitle’ too!”
Down in the hold of the Ile de France, Ray’s gang broke open a box of perfume, stuffing the bottles under their shirts.
“I know a guy’ll gimme a buck apiece,” they said.
“Not for me. I want my ole woman to smell nice.”
“Yeh,” a wisecracker said. “Put this parley voo stuff onna tits and you won’t smell the cabbage and diapers.”
“So long I put it on her tits okay.”
Only Willy felt uneasy. He was stuffing perfume, too, but he couldn’t help muttering, “Our luck to have the watchman grab us.”
They gave him the horse laugh. “Hell,” Willy argued, “I don’t care how crooked they are, they have to make an arrest once in a while for the record.” He’d had his experience with crooked coppers.
Ray, the gang-boss, agreed. “Willy’s got something. There was a dumb mick Lacey once, something wrong with his head. Well, one night on a Queen ship, he stuffed a bunch of them soft wooly limey sweaters into his pants. Stuffed so damn many he looked like a clown in the circus. When Lacey walked out on that pier in broad daylight, the watchman just had to arrest him. They took that dumb mick Lacey to the judge and the judge says, ‘You plead guilty or not guilty.’ Lacey was so mixed up he says, ‘Guilty.’ The judge didn’t believe his ears. ‘Guilty?’ he says. ‘Guilty!’ says Lacey. ‘Six months,’ says the judge. ‘Sentence suspended.’ ”
Babe or Lulu couldn’t believe it when Willy gave her a bottle of French perfume. “Gee!” she exclaimed happily. “You’re a sweetie. I oney wished you hadda nickname, Willy. Suppose—” doubtfully — “do you like Big Boy, Willy?”