“Listen, Matt, we’d like to talk to you a minute,” Feets said.
“Then talk,” Matt said. “As long as it’s only talk, go ahead.”
“Why do you want to give us so much trouble?” Specs said — any defiance of power mystified him. “You should straighten yourself out, Matt. You’d be working three-four days a week if you just learned to keep that big yap of yours shut.”
“I didn’t know you were so worried about whether I worked or not.”
“Matt, don’t be such a thickheaded mick,” Feets argued. “Why be agitatin’ alla time? You ain’t gonna get anywheres, that’s for sure. All ya do is louse yourself up with Lippy.”
Matt said something short and harsh about Lippy. Feets and Specs looked pained, as if Matt were acting in bad taste.
“I wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that,” Specs said. His face got very white when he was ready for action. On the waterfront he had a reputation for enjoying the trigger squeezing. “You keep saying that stuff and we’ll have to do something about it. You know how Lippy is.”
Matt thought a moment about the danger of saying what he wanted to say: Fran and the kids home waiting for money he’d have to borrow from the moneylender. Why look for trouble? Why buck for the bottom of the river? Was it fair to Fran? Why couldn’t he be like so many other longshoremen — like Flanagan, who had no love for Lippy Keegan but went along to keep food on the table? Lippy ran the piers just like he owned them. You didn’t have to like Lippy, but it sure made life simpler if he liked you.
Matt thought about all this, but he couldn’t help himself. He was a self-respecting man, and it galled him that a pushy racketeer — a graduate of the old Arsenal Mob — and a couple of punks could call themselves a union. I shouldn’t say this, Matt was thinking, and he was already saying it:
“Yeah, I know how Lippy is. Lippy is gonna get the surprise of his stinkin’ life one of these days. Lippy is gonna find himself—”
“You dumb harp,” Feets said. “You must like to get hit in the head.”
“There’s lots I like better,” Matt admitted. “But I sure as hell won’t back away from it.”
Feets and Specs looked at each other and the glance said clearly: What are you going to do with a thickhead like this? They shrugged and walked away from Matt, back to their places at the bar. Later in the day they would give Lippy a full account and find out the next move. This Matt Gillis was giving their boss a hard time. Everything would be lovely down here if it wasn’t for this handful of talk-back guys. They leaned on the bar with a reassuring sense that they were on the side of peace and stability, that Matt Gillis was asking for trouble.
Matt met Runt in the Longdock around five-thirty. Runt was buying because he had the potatoes in his pocket. They talked about this petition they were getting up to call a regular meeting. Runt had been talking to a couple of old-timers in his hatch gang who were half scared to death and half ready to go along. And there were maybe half a dozen young fellows who had young ideas and no use for the old ways of buying jobs from Fisheye and coming on the double whenever Lippy whistled. Another round or two and it was supper-time.
“Have another ball, Matt. The money’s burnin’ a hole in me pocket.”
“Thanks, Runt, but I gotta get home. The wife’ll be hittin’ me with a mop.” This was a familiar, joking threat in the Gillis domain.
Matt wiped his mouth with his sleeve and rubbed his knuckles on Runt’s head. “Now don’t get in no arguments. You watch yourself now.” It was bad business, Matt knew, bucking the mob and hitting the bottle at the same time. They could push you into the drink some night and who was to say you weren’t dead drunk, just another “death by accidental drowning.”
Matt was worried about Runt as he walked up the dark side street to his tenement. Runt took too many chances. Runt liked to say, “I had me fun and I drunk me fill. What’ve I got to lose?”
I better keep my eye on the little fella now that we’re pushin’ so hard for this up-and-up election, Matt was thinking, when he felt something solid whop him just behind the ear. The blow had force enough to drop a horse but Matt half turned, made a club of his right hand and was ready to wield it when the something solid whopped him again at the back of his head. He thought it was the kid, the Skelly punk, there with Feets, but he wasn’t sure. It was dark and his head was coming apart. In a bad dream something was swinging at him on the ground — hobnailed shoes, the finishing touch. Feets, they called him. The darkness closed in over him like a black tarpaulin....
Everybody was talking at once and — was it time for him to get up and shape? — he was sprawled on the bed in his room. Go ’way, lemme sleep.
“Matt, listen, this is Doc Wolff.” The small, lean-faced physician was being pushed and breathed on. “The rest of you go on, get out of here.”
Half the tenement population was crowded into the Gillises’ narrow flat. Mrs. Geraghty, who was always like that, took the kids up to eat at her place. Doc Wolff washed out the ugly wounds in Matt’s scalp. Half the people in the neighborhood owed him money he would never see — or ask for. Some of the old-timers still owed his father, who insisted on practicing at seventy-five. Father and son had patched up plenty of wounds like these. They were specialists on blackjack, steel-pipe and gun-butt contusions. Jews in an Irish district, they never took sides, verbally, in the endless guerrilla war between the dock mob and the “insoigents.” All they could do, when a longshoreman got himself in a fix like this, was to overlook the bill. The Wolffs were still poor from too much overlooking.
“Is it serious, Doctor?”
“We’d better X-ray, to make sure it isn’t a skull fracture. I’d like to keep him in St. Vincent’s a couple of days.”
It was no fracture, just a couple of six-inch gashes and a concussion — a neat professional job performed according to instructions. “Don’t knock him out of the box for good. Just leave him so he’ll have something to think about for a week or two.”
On the second day Runt came up with a quart and the good news that the men on the dock were signing the petition. The topping of Matt had steamed them up, where Lippy had figured it would scare them off. Runt said he thought they had enough men, maybe a couple of dozen, to call a rank-and-file meeting.
Father Conley, a waterfront priest with savvy and guts, had offered the rectory library as a haven.
But that night Fran sat at the side of Matt’s bed in the ward for a long talk-to. She had a plan. It had been on her mind for a long time. This was her moment to push it through. Her sister’s husband worked for a storage company. The pay was good, the work was regular, and best of all there weren’t any Lippy Keegans muscling you if you didn’t play it their way. This brother-in-law said there was an opening for Matt. He could come in on a temporary basis and maybe work his way into regular union membership if he liked it. The brother-in-law had a little pull in that direction.
“Please, Matt. Please.” It was Fran’s domestic logic against his bulldog gift of fighting back. If he was a loner like Runt Nolan, he could stand up to Lippy and Specs and Feets and young Skelly and the rest of that trash all he wanted. But was it fair to Fran and the kids to pass up a sure seventy-five dollars a week in order to go hungry and bloody on the piers?
“Why does it always have to be you that sticks his neck out? Next time it’ll be worse. They’ll...”
Yes, Matt knew. The river: Lippy Keegan’s silent partner, the old North River, waiting for him in the dark.
“Okay, Franny,” Matt was saying under his bandages. “Okay. Tell Denny” — that was the brother-in-law — “I’ll take the job.”
In the storage vaults it was nice and quiet. The men came right to work from their homes. There was none of that stopping in at the corner and shooting the breeze about ships coming in and where the jobs might be — no hit or miss. The men were different too: good steady workers who had been there for years, not looking for any excitement. It seemed funny to Matt not to be looking behind him to see if any of Lippy’s boys were on his tail, funny to have money in his pockets without having to worry how he was going to pay it back to the loan sharks.