On the Waterfront Read Online Free PDF Page B

a grown man already who never quite grew up, with his thickened nose and his slightly puffed eyes from too much leather, a good-looking kid except for the nose and the scar tissue, always looking to Charley like a father because their real father forgot he was a father and drifted off into some skidrow heaven and was neither dead nor alive so far as Charley and Terry were concerned. All they ever got from him was the name, Malloy. Charley had to hustle and use his head. And he looked out for the kid, Terry, when he could. Only how much could you do for a kid like this, flapping his silly pole at a bunch of silly birds? And a couple of neighborhood kids in bluejeans and basketball jackets with block letters spelling out “Golden Warriors” on their backs, a brace of reform-school candidates called Billy Conley and Jo-Jo Delaney, helping Terry with the birds and looking up to him as if he were something big and not just Terry Malloy, an ex-pug who had had it for a little while and now was only accepted by the big men in the neighborhood because he had the good fortune to be the brother of Charley the Gent.
    Charley came up behind Terry and spoke softly, but the unexpected presence startled the kid—as most people still called him—and he pivoted quickly.
    “Oh, Charley, I didn’ hear ya come up.”
    He lowered his pole and the leader of his flock, a firm-looking blue-checker full of its importance, circled in for a landing on the roof of the coop, all the others following him smoothly.
    “I’m gettin’ ’em ready for the Washington race,” Terry said. “I come in twelfth last time. Number one in the neighborhood. I made myself a coupla hundred bucks from the pool.”
    “He’d a-come in eleventh or maybe tenth if Swifty had gone right inta the coop so we could punch the band in the clock,” Billy put in.
    “That’s his one bad habit,” Terry said, as if reluctant to admit any fault in his prize.
    Charley looked at the birds, bored. “Kids, vamoose,” he told the two Warriors. “I want to talk private with Terry.”
    The boys withdrew with the sullen obedience of soldiers. The prestige of Charley the Gent in this neighborhood was something like that of a general’s aide. The day would come when these kids would want commissions in the only organization with a future on the banks of Bohegan.
    “Good kids,” Terry said as they scampered off. They made him feel good. Asking him about them Garden fights. The night he took DeLucca out with a big left hook. The Brooklyn wallios thought they had something in Vinnie DeLucca until that night Terry tagged him with a left hand. Terry liked it for the kids to ask him about DeLucca. Or when they came to him for pointers on how to handle the Blue Devils. Good kids.
    “Punks,” Charley said. “The kids around here get dumber every year. It’s a disgrace.”
    Then seeing Terry look at him uncomprehendingly—with a certain patient lack of expression he always assumed when Charley got too far ahead of him in the think department—the older brother came to the point of his visit:
    “They”—which could be anybody from Johnny Friendly down—wanted to talk to Joey Doyle. But Joey had been playing it cute. Ever since his trips to the Crime Commission, when he spotted Sonny tailing him, he had never gone out at night except with two or three young, tough longshoremen for protection. Johnny wanted to get Joey alone. It was highly important they should talk to him. Before Joey went and did something very foolish. Now Charley had an idea. That’s what he was expected to have, ideas. He glanced over at the pigeons. A number of them had flown into the coop and were fussing and cooing in their elaborate ritual of settling down for the night.
    Joey Doyle raised pigeons too. For years there had been a friendly rivalry between him and Terry. A friendly piracy. There was the old trick of tying a piece of ribbon to your homer’s leg. A pigeon is incorrigibly curious. Sometimes a