G.B. was looking at me with those piercing eyes of his. Looking right into me, without saying a word.
It's not the money, G.B.," I said. "It's that walk twice every night from the dock to your office. It's getting on my nerves...if I could only get out checking freight. It's not working nights bothers me. I like it...but between the Belle Dock and the Red Building...I know every doorway...every stone...every lamp-post...."
And as I talked I was seeing them: the doorways, and in every doorway her face, and under every street lamp the light on her hair....I got up.
"G.B., you've got to take me off that job. If you don't I'll have to quit....Go back."
He put his hand on my shoulder.
"That's all right, son," he said. "We'll see what can be done."
And I straightened up and looked at him, and it made me feel as if I had told him everything. Afterwards, I sometimes wondered if he had not read what was in my mind and in my heart. For when I felt the hand of this childless New Englander on my shoulder it was as though it had the firmness of my father's hand, yet in the touch of it was the tenderness and understanding of my mother.
"That's all right, son," he said again, and his voice was crisper and rasped more than usual. "We'll see what can be done. You've stuck to the job pretty well."
Two weeks later I was a day clerk in freighthouse B. Buffalo had been talking to the boss about me, so it had just needed the word from G.B. to fix things. G.B. had made no direct move, for he wanted my advancement to come as the result of my work, not through favoritism; but the reports on me from chief clerk Hogan at the Belle Dock record office were A number 1.
A three dollar raise came with my new job. Buffalo was laid off for a few days with a fouled ankle and hung around the offices in freighthouse B., getting me acquainted with his pals and fixing things generally. They had some good guys in that B. office. There were two brothers, twins, Tommy and Billy, who could do song and dance numbers like George M. Cohan. They had pulled down $125. a week for it before the bottom dropped out of the show business, they said. They were snappy dressers. Both wore the same kind of suits, ties and overcoats. Their last engagement had been at Poli's in New Haven where they were stranded two years before.
"You can take all the big time there is and shove it up," Billy used to say. "I wouldn't change that little envelope they hand me fifty-two times a year with twelve bucks in it for all the big time there is."
There was another guy who was not so good. Before lunch hour he used to tell the rest of us about the swell food he was going to eat for lunch. His father was a pawnbroker and they lived about ten minutes from the yards by trollycar. When he got back from lunch he would tell us about all the swell food he had eaten, and he ended by getting everyone's goat, mine most of all, because we worked at the same desk. He was very offensive at times and got away with it because he was big and husky and no one felt like starting trouble with him. We used to call him 'Swellfed Moe'.
Every morning the waybills were stacked up on our desk, half for me and half for Moe to copy. As we copied them we shoved them into the pigeon holes in front of us. When I was not looking, Moe had a habit of slipping a bunch from his pile to mine. Billy put me wise. The same morning I caught Moe in the act and threw the waybills back at him, upsetting his pile on the floor. He said did I want to fight and when and all the Irish were tads. I thought it over and said after lunch and he said okay.
When we quit for lunch Moe rushes across the clearing behind the freighthouse like a bat out of hell to catch the trollycar for home and lunch. Just then Buffalo blows over and sees him.
"Is Moe gone bugs?" he says to me.
"He's got to get back for a fight before one o'clock. Guess he's scared he won't have time for dessert."
"Who's he fighting?" asks Buffalo.
"Right here."
"Jesus, he got fifteen pounds on you," says Buffalo.
"Can't help that. He said all Irish were tads and asked me to fight. What is a tad, anyway?"
"He did, did he?" says Buffalo. "Well, that means me, and a tad is to a Harp what a kike is to a Jew."
Buffalo sits down next to me on the runway outside the freighthouse.
"I picked the time—after lunch. Figured all the swell food would slow him up," I said.
"You done right," says Buffalo with a sausage in one hand and a tomato in the other. "You ain't eating yourself. Wise kid."
At a quarter to one sharp Moe drops off the trollycar and bears down on us eleven secs to the hundred. He pulls up in front of me. There is raspberry jam and crumbs on his mouth from the pie.
"Come on you lousy tad!" he says pulling off his coat.
Buffalo lays his sausage and tomato on the runway and catches Moe with a half-arm jolt to the pit of the stomach. As Moe's head jerks forward a right uppercut smacks into his face. The left hook that snaps over to the jaw drops him. Just three blows. Moe sits there in the dirt, his mouth and nose all blood and jam. It takes him a full minute to get his bearings.
"What did you hit me for?" he says to Buffalo in an injured voice.
"What did you call me a tad for?" says Buffalo.
"I never said you was a tad," says Moe. "I was talking to the guy next to you."
"Thats too bad," says Buffalo in his quiet voice, "I hope you'll excuse me, I thought you was talking to me."
Then he comes over to where I'm standing.
"You won't have no trouble with that punk now. Walk into him when he gets up," he says and beats it.
The boys coming back to work get around Moe, but no one gives him a hand. When he gets to his feet he grabs the runway and spills the swell lunch, raspberry pie and all, over his vest and pants and shoes on account of facing the wind. The gang give him lots of lee-way, Billy and Tommy in particular with their big-time brother act duds. When Moe gets through he's white around the gills all right. Then the whistle blows. I figure out the smell will not be so good working next to him, so I take his arm and tell him to go on home and change.
"Want to get me fired?" he says.
"No, Moe, I'll handle your waybills till you get back. But you got to stay over after six if any of my own are left."
"Sure," he says. "Thanks."
After that Moe quieted down. He never talked about what he had for lunch again, and once he took Tommy and Billy and me home with him at noon, and his mother could sure cook.