On the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg Page B

Sharkey and three or four other longshoremen passing through looked at one another and hung their heads in a gesture that had become a fixed reaction on the waterfront whenever such a question was asked.
    “Who did it?” Katie asked again, her question as simply put as the disconcerting ones she had a habit of asking her patiently impatient teacher in Christian Apologetics at Marygrove.
    The room was silent. A hush had fallen over the wake. And just when Runty had hoped to rouse a little life in it. You had to go on. It was rough, but life had to go on. That’s what a wake was supposed to say. Belt Irish whiskey all night and wind up in the kitchen when dawn began to seep in at the windows, singing “Galway Bay,” that’s how a wake was supposed to brace the bereaved and shake the living from the dead.
    But here was the girl, asking the question that even Runty, for all his bravadeering, felt bound—tradition-bound—not to answer.
    Katie turned around to everybody, perplexed, and not yet realizing what she was doing.
    “Don’t you hear me? Who’d want to harm Joey? The best kid in the neighborhood. Not because I’m his sister. Everybody loved him.”
    Silence can be so intense that it becomes a force in the room as great as sound. Katie felt she had to raise her voice to overcome it.
    “Are you all deaf? Has that horrible stuff you’re drinking eaten through your ear-drums? Who’d want to harm Joey? ”
    Pop came over and put his hand on Katie’s arm, gently. He had sent her out to Tarrytown not just to keep her from the boys who loitered around the cigar-magazine store that was really a horse room, but because he was determined to keep her innocent of the vices that crawled along the waterfront. An anthropologist could have studied this waterfront as if it were an island culture of the South Pacific with its special mores and taboos. In this harbor community there was no stronger taboo than the silence of dockmen not only with law enforcers and outsiders, but even with their womenfolk. A longshoreman didn’t even like to tell his wife the number of the pier he was working, so she wouldn’t know what danger he might be in and would be unable to name his assailants if she ever were asked.
    Pop led Katie into the narrow cubicle behind the kitchen. He was a little drunk—half-gassed, he would have called it—and the creases of his face were moist, his eyes were misty and his voice was low and deliberate. His long underwear top, serving as a shirt, was stained where his unsteady hand had spilled whiskey from his chin.
    “Pray for ’im, Katie goil. Ask our Maker t’ grant ’im etoinal peace. But don’ ask no questions. Please, Katie, fer yer own good. Becuz you won’t get no answers. You won’t get nuthin’ but a snootful o’ trouble.”
    Katie glared at him.
    “Trouble? Can there be any more trouble? Joey is dead. Joey is dead …” It came out as a moan.
    Pop put both hands on Katie’s arms and tried to reason her back to quietness. “Don’ be sayin’ that, darlin’, don’ make it worse. If it’s God’s will …”
    “God’s will!” She pulled away angrily. “Don’t blame it on God. Since when was God an excuse for acting like pigs? ”
    Pop let her go, helplessly. If only Joey had done as Pop had told him: mind yer own business. “But, Pop …” The boy would look at him with his clear blue, believing eyes (almost a twin of Katie’s in the fierceness of their faith). “But, Pop, that bunch of stiffs running our local like they owned us, letting the shippers chip our contract away because they’re on the take. What could be more our business?” Trouble with Joey, and now Katie who knew nothing about it and already putting her two cents into it. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he thought to himself, I sure hope I find a little peace in the next world.
    In the kitchen Runty was keeping the party going with a crack-voiced rendering of “The Rose of Tralee.” It was only a matter of