On the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg

around for Terry. Terry was standing there glum, trying to think. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what to say, much less how to say it. He felt funny, like being down on the canvas without feeling any pain and yet unable to get up. That had happened to him the time McBride had knocked him out in Newark. His head was clear and he could hear the count and he felt he could get up and fight, but there was something cut off between his head and his legs and he was still down on his hands and knees at the count of ten.
    “Here, Terry, you count this,” Johnny handed him Skins fistful of cash.
    “Aw, Johnny …” Terry started to say.
    “Go ahead,” Johnny ordered. “It’s good for you. Develops your mind.”
    “What mind?” Big Mac dead-panned it.
    Terry turned on him, relieved to find a target. “You’re not so funny tonight, fat man.”
    Big Mac bellied up to Terry, ready with his hands. The kid was nothing, as far as he was concerned. Charley was smart and useful but he could see no point to Terry.
    Johnny moved between them, and put his arm around Terry. “Back up, Mac, I like the kid. Remember the night he took Faralla at St. Nick’s? We won a bundle.” He dug a grateful fist into Terry’s still-boxer-toughened side. “Real tough. A big try.”
    The blow and the talk and the headache Terry came in with threw him off his count. “I gotta start over,” he said.
    Johnny laughed and slapped him on the back. “Skip it, Einstein. How come you never got no education, like your brother Charley?”
    Charley looked particularly scholarly with his glasses on. He read a lot. He was proud of having finished From Here to Eternity. He liked books he thought were true to life.
    Big Mac nodded toward Terry, out to get his goat. “The oney arithmetic he ever loined was hearin’ the referee count up to ten.”
    It got some laughs and Terry was ready to bury a fisted right hand in Big Mac’s paunch. Johnny didn’t like roughhouse in the back room. This was a business room and Johnny never looked for unnecessary trouble. He had smoothed out a good deal with prosperity and Charley had helped to dress up the operation. Legitimatize it, Charley called it. He represented the local on the District Council and could sound more like an upright trade unionist than Reuther himself. Now Johnny pulled Terry away, blocking him off with his squat, authoritative body and asking his brain-man:
    “What gives with our boy, Charley? He aint himself tonight.”
    “It’s the Joey Doyle thing,” Charley spoke softly. “You know how he is. Things like that. He exaggerates them. Too much Marquis of Queensbury.”
    Johnny pulled the kid toward him with hard-jaw affection.
    “Listen, Terry boy, I’m a soft touch too. Ask any rummy on the dock if I’m not good for a fin anytime they put the arm on me. But my old lady raised us kids on a stinkin’ city pension. When I was sixteen I had to beg for work in the hold. I didn’t work my way up out of there for nuthin’.”
    Terry knew the story. Johnny liked to recite it when he was feeling mellow and sometimes he struck back with it as an argument for doing whatever it was he wanted to do.
    “I know, Johnny, I know,” Terry said, wishing he hadn’t opened this can of peas.
    “Takin’ over this local, you know it took a little doin’,” Johnny went on with the self-righteous dramatics that always colored the old story. “Some pretty tough fellas were in the way.” Violently, he raised his head, stretching his bull neck taut to show the long, ragged, celebrated scar. “They left me this to remember them by.”
    Charley nodded. “He was holding his throat to keep the blood in and still he chased them out into the street. Fisheye thought it was a dead man coming after him.”
    Terry had been a kid when it happened. Fisheye Hennessy and Turkey Smith had the Bohegan piers in those days and Johnny had worked up to hatch boss. He was taking plenty and building up a