On the Waterfront Read Online Free PDF Page A

sit on the stoop and let the beer make a cool river in his throat and chuckle at Runty Nolan’s sly barbs and jokes.
    “Well, if it aint Brother Malloy,” Runty spoke up with the irrepressible laugh in his voice that years of heavy blows had failed to silence. Runty always made a point of calling every one of the Friendly boys “Brother” and it never failed to raise a laugh or a smile from the men, Runty Nolan’s own, ingenuous way of making clear for all to hear just what he thought of Friendly’s type of union brotherhood.
    “Hello, boys,” Charley said affably. He couldn’t stand Runty Nolan, a soused-up wiseacre always looking for trouble and getting by with murder because he was small and somewhat comical. And Charley wasn’t made any happier at the sight of Pop. There was a quiet passive resistance to Pop that could be a little unnerving if you were a sensitive man. The trouble with me, Charley was thinking, I let this stuff get me. Eight years I’m with Johnny now and I still let it get me. I should be over in City Hall where I could get the loot with a lot less of the dirty work. Just go around kissing babies, of various ages, and pocketing mine. Some day. Some day, maybe he’d make Commissioner. Maybe even Police Commissioner. Like Friendly’s old chauffeur from the bootleg days, Donnelly. Donnelly was Commissioner of Public Safety now and doing very lovely. That was the way it went in Bohegan. Across the river in the big town it was a lot more complicated. A D.A. might enjoy the hospitality of Tom McGovern and go easy on the waterfront but he wasn’t an out and out goniff like Donnelly. Over here in Bohegan you had a chance. Charley looked at the old man, Doyle, whose son was the job Charley had been assigned to. Pop Doyle, Charley thought, how much hard work and grief was indelibly written into that sad Irish kisser. And now more grief. And Charley the Gent, a soft sensitive type except for an ineradicable stain of larceny in his heart, had to be its messenger.
    A second-story window opened suddenly and a massive woman placed her formidable, fat arms on the window sill. Her loud, slightly nasal voice was not to be denied, even by the high-pitched babel of the street. Not even the screeching whistle of a ferry sweeping into the Bohegan slip could prevail over Mrs. McLaverty. “Michael, Michael, next time I call you it’s gonna be with a strap!”
    A kid in the street turned his freckles, coated in stickball sweat, toward the offending window. “Aw Ma, the game aint over. Gimme ten more minutes.”
    Careful not to let his resplendent camel’s hair coat touch the dirty door or the walls of the tenement hallway, Charley entered the dim entrance to the railroad flats. It was one of those buildings that makes a local mockery of the city’s pretensions of modernity. Only some back-of-the-hand understanding between the landlord and a legman for the housing commissioner could have saved this building from condemnation fifteen years earlier. The walls along the stairway were cracked and stained and scribbled with the random observations, protests and greetings of a long succession of occupants, forming a sort of archeological strata of primitive tenement communication. The preparation of at least half a dozen different meals in this four-story beehive created a warm, sweet and sour hallway aroma that Charley was always to associate with the life he had hustled his way out of. And the confusion of sounds, the bedlam, always a baby crying, and some bigger kid clobbering a smaller one, fighting back and bawling at the same time, and the distracted mother threatening to smack ’em both and a married couple hollering at each other in a loud, continuous debate of inconclusive affirmatives and negatives, the staccato gunfire of a radio melodrama and the Murphys who got on like lovers in their middle age of all things invariably laughing together and someone playing Frankie Laine at the top of his and the