He gazed dully at Mooney. “Gotta be up early. There’s no alarm clock.”
“That’s all right. I’ll wake you. Got a watch?”
Kerrigan was already prone on the mattress and his eyes were closed as he took out the pocket watch and handed it to Mooney. “Get me up at six-thirty,” he whispered, and while sleep closed in on his brain he wondered what Mooney would be doing awake at that time. But before he could put the question into words, he was asleep.
7
At ten in the morning the sun was like a big muzzle shooting liquid fire onto the river. Near the docks the big ships glimmered in the sticky heat. On the piers the stevedores were stripped bare to the waist, and some of them had rags tied around their foreheads to keep the perspiration from running into their eyes.
Alongside Pier 17 there was a freighter that had just come in from the West Indies with a cargo of pineapples, and the dock foremen were feverishly bawling orders, spurring the stevedores to work faster. There were some wholesale fruit merchants scurrying around, screaming that pineapples were rotting on the deck, melting away in the heat, while these goddamn loafers took their time and carried the crates as though they had lead in their pants.
Kerrigan and two other workers were struggling with a six-hundred-pound crate when a little man wearing a straw hat came up and shrieked, “Lift it! For God’s sake, lift it!”
They were trying to lift the crate onto a wheeled platform. But on this side of the pier there was a traffic problem. They were surrounded by a jam-up of crates and bales and huge boxes and they had insufficient space to get leverage.
Stooped over, with the crate leaning against their backs, the two stevedores were panting and grimacing while Kerrigan knelt on the planks, his hands under the edge of the crate, trying to coax it onto the platform.
“You morons!” the little man screeched. “That ain’t the way to do it.”