"Howja make out with the sheet tin?" Johnny asked softly.

"Lovely," Skins said. "I wrote a lovely receipt if I do say so myself."

"Stow the receipt. I'll take the cash," Johnny said.

Skins had the wad. "Forty-five bills."

Johnny looked 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 following. Then one day he just walked into the office of the local, the little joint on the wharf, and when Fisheye came in he threw him out, into the scummy water of the slip, for all to see. "I'm the new president of Local 447," he explained. That's how union officers won elections on the waterfront. A few days later Hennessy came into the Friendly Bar (the Shamrock it was called in those days), and offered to shake hands with Johnny, but the hand had a knife palmed in it and in a flash Johnny's neck was wide open like a jack-o'-lantern mouth. Ten days later the water-logged, fish-mutilated remains of Hennessy were brought to the surface with grappling hooks. Johnny was brought in as a material witness, along with Specs Flavin. But no one could be found to testify as an eye-witness, so they were released in a few days. Turkey Smith was found in the Jersey marsh about a year later. He had been eaten away by lime and looked more like an anthropological discovery than a recently departed member of the human race.

Terry knew the old story, chapter and verse. The rapid and thorough way Johnny Friendly had come to power on the docks of Bohegan had a mythical hold on the local imagination. As did the promptness with which President Willie Givens and the bunch of lushes he called his District Council recognized and embraced the new slate of officers for 447. Of course Willie Givens, the Communion breakfast star, old Weeping Willie, professed to blissful ignorance when anyone so much as suggested that his Bohegan local was manned by the wrongest bunch of trade unionists this side of Dannemora. It wasn't his job to inquire too closely into the doings of the locals. He was a champion of local autonomy. As long as the locals paid their per capita to Willie and the International, Willie was all for their independence. With his twenty-five thousand annual and his unlimited expense account and his special fund for fighting subversives and his welfare fund and his gratuities from the shipping companies (Merry Christmas, Willie!) he could drink to his heart's content and his liver's distress at the Fleetwood Country Club with his good friend Tom McGovern while the Johnny Friendlys did the dirty work. Takin' over the local took a little doin'. Terry knew the whole story, chapter and verse.

"I know what's eatin' you, kid." Johnny kept his arm around Terry and Terry wished Charley hadn't brought this up. He didn't need all this crap. What he needed was to get gassed somewhere and knock off a little piece. He'd be all right in the morning. But Johnny was hanging onto him. Maybe they should've spelled out the whole thing for the kid, Johnny was ready to admit. So it wouldn't come as such a shock. But Rule One was: only tell each fella what he needs to know. One of these days maybe they could tie Terry in a little closer. But he always seemed like a kid, a natural fringer, a bum in his heart, and in this business as in any business you needed a little ambition. Just the same, Johnny remembered the Faralla fight and some favors in the ring that had paid off in thousand-dollar bills. So he took the trouble to explain to Terry. Hell, he liked the kid. And he was feeling good tonight. It was a relief to have Joey Doyle out of the way. Longshoremen were unpredictable. Johnny had been one of them, and he knew. They could lie smoldering for years, and all the time you think you've got them. Then all of a sudden something sets them off and whammo! it's like snoozing on top of a volcano. Joey Doyle might have thrown the switch on him if he had had a chance. And there were rumblings of revolt in other parts of the harbor. And a new contract with the Shippers was coming up in a few months and that was always a touchy time.

"Look, kid, you know I got fifteen hundred dues payin' members, that's fifty-four thousand a year legitimate. And when each one of 'em is willin' to put in a couple of bucks to make sure of gettin' a day, and they're good for a dollar every time we pass the cigar box for the welfare fund, and we got the numbers and the horses going, and some other stuff-well, you figure it out. We got a couple of the fattest piers in the fattest harbor in the world. Everything that moves in and out, we take our cut."

"We had to work hard for it," Charley said. "And there's plenty of headaches and responsibilities. Believe me, whatever we make, we're entitled to it."

Terry was between them now and wishing he was on his roof, waving his long exercise pole at his pigeons. But Johnny was on top of him, talking close into his face.

"So now look, kid, you don't think we could afford to be boxed out of a deal like this-a deal I sweated and bled for-on account of one lousy little cheese-eater, that Doyle bum, who goes around agitatin' and squealin' to that friggin' Crime Commission. Do you?"

Terry was on the floor. He was crawling on his hands and knees and the referee was counting and what the hell was wrong with him so he couldn't get up. Like the breath was knocked out of him ...

"... Well?"

Terry frowned and said, "Sure, Johnny, sure. I know he had his nerve givin' you all that trouble. I just figured if I was gonna be in it I shoulda been told what was goin' t' ..." He faltered, feeling Johnny's eyes on him, and Charley trying to signal him off. "I ... just ..." His voice trailed off. Why bother? They knew what he meant.

Charley was watching Johnny anxiously, but the boss was still in a soft mood where Terry was concerned. The kid had done his piece of it well and Specs and Sonny had taken care of the rest and everything was okay. Right now it was a hundred to one the coroner was handling it as a routine accident. The police would close it out ditto in a couple of days. There wouldn't even be the bother of a few minor arrests. Sam Millinder, who was now riding a seventy-five-thousand-a-year retainer, wouldn't even have a chance to show off his legal figure-skating. It was the kind of smooth operation that's only possible when you've got everybody with you. Johnny reached into his pocket, drew out a fifty and tucked it into the neck of the sweater Terry was wearing for a shirt.

"Here, kid, here's half a bill. Go get your load on."

Dully, darkly, as in an overclouded dream, a bleary snapshot torn out of the frayed album of beer-sodden sleep, Terry remembered the fresh young face of the Doyle kid leaning out over the sill. The money would only remind him. "Naw, thanks, Johnny." He tried to hold it off. "I don' need it, I ..."

Johnny didn't like to be refused in anything, even handouts. He pushed the bill deeper into the neck of Terry's sweater, with a laugh that was hard and generous. "Go on. A little present from your Uncle Johnny."

He turned around to Big Mac, who was waiting docilely for his split so he could spread money on the bar in a dozen traps and be a big man among cronies and freeloaders.

"Hey, Mac," Johnny commanded, "tomorra morning when you shape the men put Terry in the loft. Number one. Every day."

Big Mac nodded, sucking in his puffy cheeks, a sign of reluctant obedience.

"Okay, Matooze?" Johnny told Terry. "An easy ride. Check in and goof off on the coffee bags."

That was ninety bucks a week for reading See, She, Pic, Quick, Tempo, Stare, Dare and the Police Gazette.

"Thanks, Johnny," Terry said. He couldn't shake the mood of he-didn't-know-what. He stuffed his hands into the pocket of his jeans and went walking out with the fifty hot on his chest like a mustard plaster.

Charley had been watching his brother with shrewd, seasoned sympathy. "You got a real friend here, and don't you forget it," he felt the need to call after the kid.

Terry didn't turn around. He walked slowly toward the door, just as a beaten fighter, his head down, makes his way up the aisle through the crowd to his dressing room.

"Why should he forget it?" Johnny said grandly. And proceeded to pay off his boys, dealing out the week's take like cards across the pool table, and saving sheafs of bills for the Mayor and the Police Commissioner, whom he'd be seeing over at the Cleveland Democratic Club a little later.

Specs and Sonny and Gilly were at the bar rolling dice as Terry shouldered his way through. They called to him again, but he kept on going. He walked along River Street until he came to a little hole-in-the-wall bar called Hildegarde's which always struck him funny because Hildegarde was a good two hundred pounds, a great slab of warm-hearted, incongruous femininity who carried on a tearful running battle with her skinny, allergic-to-work husband Max. It was usually quiet in Hildegarde's, especially after she had thrown out Max. Terry sat there at the bar absently listening to Helen Forrest singing "My Secret Love," over and over and over again because Hildegarde's fat, damp hands kept feeding nickels into the box.

"Whatsa matter you so quiet tonight?" Hildegarde said.

Terry shrugged and gulped his fake-bottom jigger of Four Roses like something too hot to hold in his mouth. Hildegarde moved away from him, an experienced bartender respectful of her customer's mood. There was nobody else in the place, so she leaned the fat folds of her body on the juke box and crooned in a thick guttural accent, "Vunce I hoy a secret luff Dot liffed vit-in da heart off me ..."

Ordinarily Terry would have kidded her, as they had a kind of running gag about her boy friends-"Who's da new poy fran?" Terry would elbow her. "How's about you 'n me sneakin' off for the week-end? The No-tell Motel, huh, you may not be the best piece of ass in town but nobody c'n say you aint the biggest."

Hildegarde would pretend to be angry and call him a dirty-mouth fresh guy, but she liked Terry and she'd wind up buying him drinks, and letting him run up a bill until he had enough chips. But tonight it was different and big Hildegarde embraced the juke box in her loneliness and left Terry to whatever it was that had hold of his mind.

Six.

IT WAS AFTER TEN o'clock, but the kids on Market Street were still playing a noisy game of stoop-ball in the misty light of the sidewalk lamps. The ball bounced back into the street and a sweaty-faced twelve-year-old pursued it almost under the wheels of a taxi that had suddenly turned the corner. The people of this neighborhood traveled by subway and grumbled about the hiked fifteen-cent fares. A cab pulling up to a tenement doorway was an occasion. As it parked in front of the Doyle house, all the kids came running to surround it, some of them climbing on the fenders to the profane resentment of the driver. Before Katie Doyle could step out of the cab her name went whispering through the crowd. The kids bunched themselves around the door, pressing for a look at her, like the teenage fans of movie stars. Aside from her connection with her brother Joey, she was something of a celebrity in the neighborhood, because as a freshman at Marygrove College, up in Tarrytown, she had made an unusual break with the bluejean, shirt-out, fresh-talking younger set of Bohegan. She was a quiet, perhaps over-serious girl, sent off to school at the delicate age of twelve because Pop Doyle had been determined, to the point of obsession, to keep her off the streets and out of the trouble the best of pretty girls can stumble into on the Bohegan riverfront.

In her first year at Marygrove as an eighth-grader she had stood out from the class as the only one to recite the catechism as if the words had meaning, while the others were satisfied to repeat by rote what they were hardly thinking and certainly not feeling. It had made Katherine-Anne a difficult pupil. Within the frame of obedience she tried to think for herself. If the teaching sisters of Marygrove had given Katherine-Anne the key to Heaven, it could be said that she immediately tried to fit the key to the lock, and that she was prepared to examine the Room inside with an inquisitive persistence that was often a little more than the good sisters had bargained for. Sister Margaret who taught English poetry and disapproved of Gerard Manley Hopkins complained with fond irritation, "I wish she didn't ask so many questions."

The frankly staring, dirty-faced children of the neighborhood pressed toward her as Katherine-Anne paid off the driver. She had adored Joey, almost to the point of distraction if not sin, and now she seemed totally enclosed within her loss, still faint from the shock of the phone call that had pierced the seclusive barriers of Marygrove and pulled her back to Market Street and the terrible events that darkened the river. She was still wearing her blue middy blouse and skirt and in a number of less material ways she had not yet made the transition from the college campus on the outskirts of Tarrytown to this insistent row of crowded tenement dwellings around the corner from the piers. From the cab she walked straight up the outside steps and into the worn, familiar hallway.

Billy Conley, looking up at her from his strategic position at the bottom of the stoop, was moved to comment: "Boy, that Doyle kid really growed up since she was home last Easter."

Jo-Jo Delaney laughingly agreed: "And in the right places." He moved his hands in a grown-up way to show them what he meant.

A fat, twelve-year-old girl scolded: "Aint ya got no respeck for the dead?"

At the mention of this final word, the smirking, sex-bothered boys fell silent. Billy could be a beautiful Irish boy when his face was in repose and now he looked like an angel-faced choir-singer at High Mass as he raised his eyes not to heaven but just to the third-story window where the lights of the Doyle flat were burning.

It was a railroad flat, one of sixteen in the sixty-year-old aged-brick building, with an entrance into the narrow kitchen, with its small stove and its bathtub, covered by a lid on which Pop always sat to make room for visitors at the kitchen table. Beyond the kitchen was a dark cubicle, hardly twelve feet long, from which the doors had been removed to leave space for a bed. Another small bedroom and the front room which had once been a parlor but had been converted to a master bedroom (with a television set still being paid for) completed the living quarters. A railroad flat. Well-named, for the width is little wider than a pullman, with each room opening directly into the next, and with no outer hallway to allow more privacy. In the hall was a small toilet for the families of that floor, and if this was clearly not the way a majority of Americans lived, it was still the way the waterfront cargo carriers of Bohegan existed. Some of the tenement houses in this blighted stretch of coastline offered nothing better than outhouses, ramshackle monuments to social lag, erected in the paper-and-refuse-littered open squares between the Market Street apartments and the bars on River Street.

A half dozen people could give the Doyle flat a sense of being overcrowded and now there were at least twice that many present: Pop in his underwear shirt, and Runty and Moose passing the bottle, and a roomer from across the hall, Mr. Mathewson, who was North Irish Protestant but still welcome, and Jimmy Sharkey, a young friend of Joey's. There was also Mrs. Gallagher, a motherly neighbor who had eleven kids and was engaged in a lifelong tug-of-war with her husband as to who would get hold of his Friday-night check and yet somehow found time to mother the entire tenement. She was now in the cramped kitchen filling in for long-absent Mrs. Doyle, making sandwiches of ham and cornbeef and cheese that other neighbors had brought in. And there was Uncle Frank, a sergeant on the Force, a plump, red-faced, kindly man, who for some mysterious reason had never married and was always good for a nickel or a dime to the kids on the street. It was a cross-section of the neighborhood crowded into these small rooms, drinking and talking loud and telling stories and sometimes weeping with the neighbors who kept dropping in and passing through with a hug for Pop and a nip of the bottle and the ancient fumbling words for the poor lad's passing.

As Katherine-Anne came along the creaky upper hallway to the open kitchen door, Runty Nolan was holding the floor with a whiskey story told in an effort to lift Pop's sorrow.

"So I comes out the swingin' door of McCarty's"-Runty was acting it out with the mimic gifts of the old country-"an' do a header into a snowbank ..."

Moose was refilling Pop's glass and Pop was trying to laugh. "Go ahead, go ahead, Pop," Moose shouted. "Drink up."

"Well, just a little one," Pop said, dazed by all the people and the suddenness.

"... an' when Pathrick here (indicating Pop) tries to rouse me, I sez 'Ya got ya noive disturbin' a man in his own bed an' pullin' off his sheets.' 'Sheets, that's snow, ya rummy,' this old coot sez."

Runty had a hearty ho-ho-ho laugh and everybody joined in, those who didn't feel like laughing saying hah-hah-hah even louder than the others, until the crowded, stale-smelling, shabby-wall-papered rooms were truly waked with the unnatural, mournful laughter. So it sounded when Katie came in, a tall, straight, pink-skinned, remote figure in the sardine-crowded, whiskey-smelling kitchen.

The sight of his daughter entering so quietly that she was among them before they even noticed her coming was just what Pop needed to break down completely. Now his true feelings flowed at last as he held his Katie close to him and she felt his creased, unshaven face against her smooth cheek. Then he was sobbing into the harboring curve of her neck and shoulder. She held him quietly while he sobbed, "Katie girl ..."

Softly, still dry-eyed from the shock of it, she said, "Pop ... Pop ..." and the friends around them turned to each other both from embarrassment and to make an invisible wall of themselves behind which father and daughter could bare their sorrow.

On the other side of this invisible wall, Runty Nolan was offering the bottle to Mathewson. "Come on, Matty, ye're fallin' behind."

"Behind! One more 'n I'll be fallin' down," the North Irish Protestant said.

Katherine-Anne, watchful and remote, praying in her mind to her dear Mother Mary, was groping toward her own awareness of what had happened. In the seclusion of the Tarrytown convent school, guided by the sisters of St. Anne, she had lived with an almost feverish sense of sin and corruption and human misery. The Holy Family, in her eyes, was engaged in an hour-by-hour struggle against ignorance and error. The Trinity was as real to Katie Doyle as the cash register in Friendly's Bar and Grill was to Johnny's brother-in-law Leo. But slowly, Katie was beginning to sense, pushing blindly underground like a half-grown mole, what a world of pious dreams her moral being had been drifting through. Now, for the first time in her life, Katie had a real human misery, a live sin, a raw and vicious corruption thrusting through her faith. In her mind, cut off from the forced festivity of the wake, she was calling on her Blessed Mary as she would have turned to her own mother if only she had still been here. And when she cried to herself, Our Mother full of grace, help me, help me to understand, she was searching without yet knowing it for a real answer to a question of life or death, not far away on Calvary, with the angels sweeping down to their silent triumph over coarse soldiers, but here, on River Street and shabby Market Street, where the ships went WHOOOO- WHOOOOOM in the night and the oil-slick tongues of the monster river licked greedily for victims-not far away on Calvary in the pocket-sized Missal, but here, on the hillock of misery and violence between Market and River Streets on the Bohegan Banks.

"Yes, sir," Jimmy Sharkey was saying, for the fifth time at least, to keep the talk going, to keep this kind of party alive, "it'll be a long time before anybody stands up to them gorillas like Joey Doyle."

"Enough guts for a regiment," Moose shouted.

"A real bravadeero," Runty Nolan put in.

And Runty knew what it was to be a bravadeero on the docks. He went back to '14 when Local 447 got its charter. Willie Givens and Tom McGovern were charter members who worked right alongside him. Willie was a young blowhard always cadging drinks. One day he had a few too many and didn't see a piece of steel plating swinging past him toward the hold. Willie was laid up for three months, and Runty, out of the goodness of his heart, suggested to the membership, still in its unencrusted, democratic stage, that a job be made for Willie as assistant financial secretary of the local to see him through his convalescence. Willie took to bureaucracy like a waterfront kid takes to beer. He never did a day's work with a hook again. He went up and up. President of the Local. Vice-Chairman of the District Council. Finally President of the International. Twenty-five G and unlimited expenses. And presents from the shippers for being so understanding of management's problems. And a secret fund for "fighting Communism" that every firm in the harbor felt it its patriotic duty to support, an ostrich-sized nest-egg accountable only to Willie himself. The last Convention, a fine group of amiable rubber-stamps, had made Willie President for life, all in favor say Aye and God help the poor slob who dares raise his voice in the negative. Thus had Willie Givens developed into a parliamentary front for Johnny Friendly below him and Big Tom McGovern on top.

Big Tom was on the Board of Directors of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club and the Gotham Club and the Mayor jumped when he whistled and he had stevedore companies and tug companies and oil companies and sand-and-gravel companies and trucking companies and companies that owned other companies. In other words, he had the city by the head and the tail and while he was pouring twenty-five-year-old for the judges and the politicos, his strong-arms in the stevedore outfits were muscling the men who refused to knuckle under. From the penthouse on Fifth Avenue to the gutter on River Street where the blood ran, Big Tom had it all. But Runty could remember when young McGovern, a two-hundred-pound bully who had been told once too often that he resembled Jim Jeffries, was loading meat for the A.E.F., with his own meat-like hands, off a horse-truck at Pier B, and steering into the black market more beef than he was loading for our boys over there.

And Runty could remember how in three years Tom McG. rose from a loader at forty cents an hour to the owner of ten meat trucks of his own. Thus was born the Enterprise Trucking Co., and enterprise of a most direct kind it was, for Big Tom acquired his first two trucks by the efficient method of threatening their owner with extreme bodily harm if he did not sign them over.

Runty saw him use his own, brine-hardened fists to fight his way up to power on the docks. And he knew of the teamster-union official taken care of in one of the first waterfront murders so that Big Tom could push one of his own stooges into the teamster leadership, as soon after he was to set easy-dollar Willie Givens in the top spot with the longshoremen. And all the time that Big Tom was punching his way into the city's inner circle, and Weeping Willie was spreading his whiskey-tipped wings as a silver-throated labor leader, Runty Nolan remained the lowliest of longshoremen, the wielder of a hook in the hold, and that in the old days before all the equipment, when the main piece of equipment was your own back. A strong back and a weak mind was a hold-man's formula for doing the job.

But Runty, for all the whiskey and the long nights around the bars, had a strong or at least a consistent mind when it came to Willie and Big Tom. When he saw what they were up to, back there in the First War, when Tom was on his way to his first million and Willie was oiling his union machinery, Runty swore against them his undying hatred, or more accurately his dying hatred, swore on his sainted mother and his Cobh pierman father who died in a set-to with the Black and Tans in the days of the Trouble. And when a Nolan swears on these, he swears for eternity. So he talked up and he spoke back and he got himself flattened and kicked for good measure. But a life of beatings had failed to deaden the twinkle in his eyes.

Runty Nolan was always for seeing the funny side, even when he was looking down the business end of a triggerboy's .38. While other longshoremen turned away in fear, Runty seemed to take a perverse delight in baiting the pistoleros, as he called them. Sometimes they laughed him off and sometimes, if he went on provoking them-and longshoremen were watching to see if Runty could get away with it-they would oblige him with a blackjack or a piece of pipe. The stories of these beatings had become a riverfront legend.

In the bars they told of the time he was left face-down in an alley, after enough blows on the noggin to crack the skull of a horse. An hour later, when everybody figured he had a one-way ticket to the morgue, damned if he didn't stagger back into Friendly's and pound the bar for whiskey. "I should worry what they do t' me. I'm on borried time," Runty liked to say. And tossed into the black river for dead, he swam out, and got up. A gift for gettin' up, his cronies called it. His was a lone, lost, almost comic cause, for he wasn't a unit in an organized rebellion but a gadfly, a thorn in the heel of progress, if you can call progress the elaborate harbor-wide set-up of Tom McGovern, with the connivance of too many of the shipping companies, the boss stevedores and the pot-bellies who masqueraded as labor leaders. Runty Nolan had been a bravadeero-as he called it-for forty years, with more lives than a pair of cats and more spunk than was healthy for one little man.

So here at the wake, when he called Joey Doyle a bravadeero, in Joey's case a modernized, better-organized one, he knew whereof he spoke. He did not use the word lightly.

Pop, who loved Runty but had had the spirit beaten out of him long ago ("I just wanna woik and mind me own business and get me money home," he used to tell Runty in their friendly arguments), this old man with the bitter life of the docks cutting unmistakable lines in his face now moved to the center of the room, waving his thin, steel-muscled arms as the .86 proof brought him to a trembling line between rage and sorrow.

"Don't talk t' me of bravadeeros," Pop yelled. "There's oney one place a bravadeero winds up on this waterfront. On a slab. Jus' like our Joey."

"Lord've mercy on 'im," everybody mumbled, and grabbed for their drinks. Moose went around refilling the glasses and Runty, sorry for the bravadeero line that had aroused such bitter sadness in Pop, raised his glass in an obvious but nonetheless effective reach for a better, brighter mood.

"Well, here's to God, Ireland and present company," he said with that irrepressible coating of humor in his voice. And then, like the Elder Cato insisting upon the destruction of Carthage, he added: "And mud in the eye of Willie Givens."

There was a general assent of "Right," and "Here's health" and "God bless," and Runty was thinking to himself now we've got this wake on the right track at last, when Katie, still on the outer edges of the gathering and as quiet and remote as when she had entered, asked her little question: "Who did it?"

The question dropped explosively into the middle of the room. Moose, Runty, Pop, young Jimmy 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.