On the Waterfront Read Online Free PDF

loudspeaker’s voice, “This cheating heart … depends on you-hoo …”
    It was raucous and unprivate and unsanitary and un a lot of things, but one thing you had to say for it, it was living. It was no insignificant part of the mystery of from what power and to what purpose the human community endures.
    Charley Malloy tried to keep his mind from wandering off into one of the dark chambers of this mystery. With somewhat the detached manner of an insurance agent checking up on an injured client, he heavily climbed the stairs, pausing on the third landing, a little annoyed with himself for being so out of breath. He ought to pick up his handball again. This was no shape for a man of thirty-five. Maybe it was time to go on a diet. The doctor said he was twenty-five pounds overweight. This whole country is overweight. They got it too good. Except for dead beats like Pop Doyle. There wasn’t an extra half-pound of flesh on Pop Doyle. The best part of Pop Doyle had run off in sweat and soaked through into the floor of the hatch. Like an insurance agent, Charley Malloy plodded up the last stairway to the roof. Only in this case the accident hadn’t happened yet.

Two
    I T WAS POSSIBLE TO walk along the rooftops of the tenements all the way from Dock Street to Ferry Street, though this was no simple straightaway but a variety of different levels with a three-story building often tucked between a couple of fours and even those of equal stories unequal in height so that a block-long stretch of adjoining rooftops was like a great theatrical stage of multiple levels. In recent years these rooftops had sprouted television aerials in such abundance that to walk among them was to wander through a forest of steel branches. And between the aerials there were more clothes lines, and on almost every roof at least one pigeon coop, for pigeon racing was still a favorite sport in Bohegan, offering as it did a chance to extend yourself above and beyond the brick and mortar confines of the slum. Up into the unencumbered sky your flock of Belgian beauties soared, and if there was dirt and sweat and monotony in the daily life of the neighborhood, at least here on the roof you could reach up through your birds into a freer, cleaner world.
    At the top of the stairs leading from the fourth floor onto the roof Charley stood a moment, watching his younger brother at the edge of the roof with a long pole in his hand. At the end of the pole, like a makeshift flag of surrender, was an eight-inch strip from an old sheet, designed to frighten the birds into staying aloft for their training exercise. Around and around they flew in a great fluttering circle, some thirty of them, not arranged behind their leader in any pattern of formation like ducks or squadrons of men, but spread out in a natural cluster.
    Charley stood a moment, watching his brother Terry enjoying the sight of them, as he enjoyed this ritual two or three times a day, the birds winging out over the river and then swinging around in a quarter-mile arc to cast their fifty-mile-an-hour shadows over the tenement buildings, over the bars and the shabby seamen’s hotels and the slummy streets, the pigeons unaware of the people below and the people aware of the pigeons mostly as the subject of a hoary scatalogical joke. But to Terry Malloy they were a favorite and endlessly satisfying sight. “Look at ’em, the bums!” he’d think to himself reverently, the th thickening to a d when he actually spoke, “my birds, the best fuggin flock o’ homers in the neighborhood.”
    Pigeons, Charley was thinking, kid stuff. Why doesn’t he grow up? He’s twenty-eight years old already. Maybe he caught one too many in the head when he was the Pride o’ Bohegan. Some pride! Look at him, the best prospect turned out of Bohegan since Truck Amon caved in to Joe Louis on Joe’s Bum-of-the-Month Tour. Well, at least Truck is earning his keep on the muscle for Johnny Friendly, but what about this kid here,