“Matt, you don’t mind me gettin’ fat?” she had whispered to him one night in the wide, metal-frame bed after the kids finally had fallen asleep.
“Naw, you’re still the best-lookin’ woman in the neighborhood,” Matt had said gallantly.
“At least you can always find me in the dark,” Fran had giggled. They had got to laughing then, until Fran had to stop him because everything Matt did, he did big — laugh, fight, eat, drink, tell off the mob in the union. Even when he thought he was talking normally, he shouted, he bellowed, so when he had chuckled there in the bed, the children — Tom and Mickey and Kate and Johnny and Peggy, the five they had had so far — had stirred in their beds and Fran had said, “Shhh, if the baby wakes up you’ll be walkin’ the floor with her.”
Matt swung his long legs out of the bed and felt the cold touch of the linoleum. He sat there a moment in his long underwear, thinking — he wasn’t sure of what; the day ahead, the days of his youth, the time his old man came home from the pier with three fingers off his right hand (copper sheeting — cut off at the knuckle nice and clean), and all those years the old man battled for his compensation. It was all the old man could talk about, finally, and got to be a joke — never to Pop, but to Matt and his brothers when they were big enough to support him.
Big Matt sat there on the edge of the bed rubbing sleep out of his eyes, thinking, thinking, while his wife, warm and sweet and full in her nightgown, half rose behind him and whispered, “Coffee? Let me get up and make you a cup of coffee.” She wanted to say more; she wanted to say, “Look, Matt honey, I know what it is to go down there to the shape-up when the sun is still climbing up the backs of the buildings. I know what it is for you to stand there with three-four hundred other men and have the hiring boss, Fisheye Moran, look you over like you was so much meat in a butcher shop. I know what it is for you to go to work every morning like you had a job — only you haven’t got a job unless Fisheye, the three-time loser put there by the Village mob, hands you a brass check.” She wanted to say, “Yes, and I know what it is for you to be left standing in the street; I know what you feel when the hiring boss looks through you with those pale blue fisheyes that give him his name.” That’s all today, come back tomorra.
Matt was on his feet now, a burly bear in his long underwear, stretching and groaning to push himself awake. Fran started to get up, but he put his big hand on her shoulder and pushed her back into the warm bed. Well, all right. She was glad to give in. When could a body rest except these precious few minutes in the early morning? “You be careful now, Matt. You be careful. Don’t get in no trouble.”
Fran knew her Matt, the Irish-thick rebel of Local 474, one of the lionhearted — or foolhardy — handful who dared speak up against the Lippy Keegan mob, which had the longshore local in their pocket, and the loading racket, the lunch-hour gambling, and all the other side lines that bring in a quick dollar on the docks. Lippy and his goons ran the neighborhood like storm troopers, and longshoremen who knew what was good for them went along with Keegan’s boys and took what they could get. Matt was always trying to get others to back him up, but the fear was too deep. “Matt, I got me wife and kids to think about; leave me alone,” they’d say, and push their 30 cents across the bar for another whiskey.
Matt tried to make as little noise as possible as he went down the creaky stairway. He closed the tenement door behind him and stood a moment in the clammy morning, feeling the weather. He zipped up his windbreaker and pulled his old cap down on his forehead. Then he drew his head down into the heavy collar, threw out his chest, and turned his face into the wind. It was a big, strong-boned, beefy face, with a heavy jaw and a broken nose, a face that had taken plenty. Over the years the Keegan boys had developed a begrudging respect for Matt. They had hit him with everything and he still kept coming on. The gift of getting up — that’s what they called it on the waterfront.
Matt ducked into the Longdock Bar & Grill on the corner across the street from the pier. It was full of longshoremen grabbing a cup of coffee and maybe some ham and eggs before drifting over to the shape-up. There were men of all sizes and ages, with weatherbeaten faces like Matt’s, many of them with flattened noses, trophies of battles on the docks and in the barrooms; here and there were ex-pugs with big-time memories: the cheers of friends and five hundred dollars for an eight-rounder. Threading through the dock workers was a busy little man whose name was Billy Morgan, though everybody called him “J.P.” because he was the moneylender for the mob. If you didn’t work, J.P. was happy to lend you a deuce or half a bill, at ten per cent a week. If you fell too far behind, J.P. whispered to Fisheye, and Fish-eye threw you a couple of days’ work until the loan was paid off. They had you coming and going, the mob. Matt looked at J.P. and turned away.
Over in the corner were a couple of Lippy’s pistols, Specs Sinclair, a mild-looking, pasty-skinned man who didn’t look like an enforcer but had maybe a dozen stiffs to his credit, and Feets McKenna, a squat muscle man who could rough-and-tumble with the best. Feets was sergeant-at-arms for the local. Specs, for whom signing his name was a lot of writing, was recording secretary. Matt looked straight at them to show he wasn’t backing away, ever. Union officials. Only three-time losers need apply.
Matt pushed his way into the group at the short-order counter. They were men dressed like himself, in old trousers and flannel shirts, with old caps worn slightly askew in the old-country way. They all knew Matt and respected the way he stood up; but a stand-up guy, as they called him, was nobody you wanted to get close to. Not if you wanted to work and stay in one piece in Lippy Keegan’s sector of the harbor.
Matt was waiting for his coffee when he felt a fist smash painfully into his side. Fie winced and started an automatic counter at whoever it was, and then he looked down and grinned. He should have known. It was Runt Nolan, whose hundred ring battles and 25 years of brawling on the docks were stamped into his flattened face. But a life of beatings had failed to deaden the twinkle in his eyes. Runt Nolan was always seeing the funny side, even when he was looking down the business end of a triggerboy’s .38. Where other longshoremen turned away in fear from Lippy’s pistoleros, Runt always seemed to take a perverse delight in baiting them. Sometimes they laughed him off and sometimes, if he went on provoking them — and longshoremen were watching to see if Runt could get away with it — they would oblige him with a blackjack or a piece of pipe. Runt had a head like a rock and more lives than a pair of cats, and the stories of his miraculous recoveries from these beatings had become a riverfront legend.
Once they had left him around the corner in the alley lying face down in his own blood, after enough blows on the noggin to crack the skull of a horse; and an hour later, when everyone figured he was on his way to the morgue, damned if he didn’t stagger back into the Longdock and pound the bar for whiskey. “I should worry what they do to me, I’m on borried time,” Runt Nolan liked to say.
Runt grinned when he saw Matt rub his side with mock resentment. “Mornin’, Matt me lad, just wanted t’ see if you was in condition.”
“Don’t be worryin’ about my condition. One more like that and I’ll stand you right on your head.”
“Come on, you big blowhard, I’m ready for you.” Runt fell into a fierce boxing stance and jabbed his small knuckle-broken left fist into Matt’s face.