When Matt had been there three weeks, Fran went out and bought herself a new dress — the first new one in almost two years. And the following Sunday they went up to the park and had lunch at the cafeteria near the zoo — their first visit to a restaurant in Lord knows when. Fran put her hand in Matt’s and said, “Oh, Matt, isn’t this better? Isn’t this how people are supposed to live?”
Matt said yeah, he guessed so. It was good to see Fran happy and relaxed, no longer worried about food on the table for the kids, or whether he’d get home in one piece. Only — he couldn’t put it into words, but when he got back to work on the fifth floor of the huge storage building, he knew what was going to come over him.
And next day it did, stronger than at any time since he started. He wondered what Runt was doing, and Jocko and Bagles and Timmy and the rest of the gang in the Longdock. He hadn’t been in since the first week he started at the storage. The fellows had all asked him how he was feeling and how he liked the new job, but he felt something funny about them, as if they were saying, “Well, you finally let Lippy run you off the docks, huh, Matt?” “All that big talk about cleaning up the union and then you fold like an accordion, huh, Matt?” It was in their eyes — even Runt’s.
“Well, I’m glad to see you got smart and put your hook away,” Runt actually said. “Me, I’d do the same if I was a family man. But I always run too fast for the goils to catch me.” Runt laughed and poked Matt lightly, but there was something about it wasn’t the same.
Matt ran into Runt on the street a week or so later and asked him how everything was going. He had heard the neighborhood scuttlebutt about a new meeting coming up in the parish house. A government labor man was going to talk to them on how to get their rights. Father Conley had pulled in a trade-union lawyer for them and everything seemed to be moving ahead.
But Runt was secretive with Matt. Mike felt the brush; he was an outsider now. Runt had never said a word in criticism of Matt’s withdrawal from the waterfront — just occasional cracks about fellows like himself who were too dumb to do anything else but stand their ground and fight it out. But it got under Matt’s skin. He had the face of a bruiser, and inlanders would think of him as “tough-looking.” But actually Matt was thin-skinned, emotional, hypersensitive. Runt wouldn’t even tell him the date of the secret meeting, just asked him how he liked the storage job.
“It’s a real good deal,” Matt said. No seven-thirty shape-up. No muscle men masquerading as shop stewards. The same check every week. What more could he want?
What more than stacking cardboard containers in a long tunnel-like room illuminated by neon tubing? Matt wondered what there was about the waterfront. Why did men humiliate themselves by standing like cattle in the shape-up? What was so good about swinging a cargo hook — hoisting cement, copper ore, coffee, noxious cargoes that tickled your throat and maybe were slowly poisoning you?
But that didn’t tell the whole story, Matt was thinking as he handled the storage containers automatically. There was the salt air; there were the ships coming in from Spain, from South America, Greece, all over the world. There was the way the river sparkled on a bright day. And there was the busy movement of the harbor: the sound of the ferries, the tugs, the barges, the freighters, and the great luxury ladies with their autocratic noses in the air. There were the different kinds of cargoes to handle — furs, perfume, sardines, cognac — and who was to blame them if they got away with a bottle or two; it wasn’t pilferage on the waterfront until you trucked it away. There was the teamwork of a good gang working the cargo from the hatch and over the deck to the pier: the winch men, the deck men, the hatch boss, the high-low drivers, everybody moving together to an unstated but strongly felt rhythm that could be thrown off if just one man in a twenty-three-man gang didn’t know his job. And then there were the breaks for lunch — not cold sandwiches in a metal container, but a cut of hot roast beef in the bar across the street, with a cold beer to wash it down. And there was the talk of last night’s fight or today’s ball game or the latest cute trick pulled off by the longshore racketeers.
The waterfront: the violent, vivid, restless, corrupted, “we’re-doin’-lovely” waterfront.
Matt felt that way for days and said nothing about it. He’d sit in the front room with his shoes off, drinking beer, reading the tabloids, and wondering until it ached him what Runt and the boys were up to.
One evening when he came home, Flanagan and Bennett and some of the other neighbors were busy talking on the steps. Matt heard. “Maybe he’s just on one of his periodicals and he’s sleeping it off somewheres.” And, “He coulda shipped out somewhere. He used to be an A.B. and he’s just ornery enough to do it.” And Matt heard, “When he gets his load on, anything c’n happen. He could walk off the end of the pier into the river and think he was home in bed.”
Runt Nolan! No hide nor hair of him in three days, Flanagan said. Matt ran upstairs to tell Fran. She saw the look in his eyes when he talked about Runt, who always said he was “on borried time.” “Now, Matt, no use getting yourself excited. Wait and see. Now, Matt.” She saw the look in his eyes was the old look, before he settled for the cozy inland job with the storage company.
He paced up and down, but the children got on his nerves and he went over to talk to Father Conley. The father was just as worried as Matt. Specs had been warning Runt not to hold any more meetings in the rectory. Specs had told Runt to take it easy for his own good.
Matt went home after a while but he couldn’t sleep. At one thirty in the morning he put his clothes back on and went down to the Longdock. What’s the story, and news of Runt?
Nine days later there was news of Runt. The police department had made contact with Runt, by means of a grappling hook probing the soft, rotten bottom of the river. Runt wasn’t “on borried time” any more. He had paid back every minute of it. Cause of death: accidental drowning. On the night of his disappearance, Runt had been seen wandering the gin mills in a state of inebriation. In other words, bagged. There were no marks of violence on Runt. How could anyone prove he hadn’t slipped. The good old North River, Lippy’s silent partner, had done it again.
It was a good funeral. Everybody in the neighborhood was there — even Lippy Keegan, and Specs and Skelly and the rest of the boys. After the Mass, Father Conley came out on the sidewalk, and Matt and some of the others who were closest to Runt gathered around to hear what the father had to say.
They had seen the father steamed before but never like this. “Accident my eye,” he said. “If they think we’re going to take this lying down, they’re dumber than I think they are.”
“What can we do. Father?”
Everybody looked around. It was Flanagan, who had come up behind Matt; Flanagan, who always played it very cozy with the Keegans. But like most of the others, he had liked having Runt around — that cocky little bantam. The Longdock wouldn’t be the same without him. It looked like Runt, at the bottom of the river, had done more damage to Lippy than when he was around the docks shooting off his mouth.
Father Conley said, “We’re going to keep this case alive. We’ll question every single person who talked to Runt the day they hit him in the head. We’ll keep needling the police for action. Keegan hasn’t heard the end of Runt Nolan.”