The Christmas Kid: And Other Brooklyn Stories

  That night, it started. Three shots were fired from a car and shattered Sonny’s plate-glass windows. A carpenter replaced the glass with plywood boards, and they came by again and shot out the glass pane in the door. Milk deliveries were smashed; stink bombs hurled into the Store; a fire started in the cellar. Sonny broke his own code and called the cops; they explained about budget cuts, undermanning, asked him to press charges if he saw the kids who did it. After the cops left, Sonny went out to his car and found all four tires slashed. At the end of ten days, he got a phone call at home. A young voice asked: “You ready for a deal?” Sonny Marino screamed something into the phone about the young man’s mother and hung up. That night, his daughter’s boyfriend dropped her off, and then was grabbed on the stoop. They took him to the park, stripped him, tied him to a tree, and painted him with glossy red paint. Next time, they told him, they’d set him on fire.

  His daughter cried, his wife talked about closing the Store and moving to Florida. But Sonny Marino said nothing. When they had all gone to bed, he sat alone in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. And then he knew what he had to do. He reached for the phone.

  Early on Sunday morning, before the rising of the sun, strange cars started appearing in the neighborhood. They had come from all over, from Long Island and Jersey, from the far reaches of Brooklyn, from the upper Bronx. One was driven all the way from Philadelphia. The drivers and passengers were all middle-aged. They parked on the empty streets around the factories, and when they got out, they were hefting baseball bats, tire irons, slabs of metal. They embraced each other, patted their stomachs, laughed, smoked cigarettes.

  Then, with Sonny Marino in front, the old Cavaliers started moving through the dark, empty streets. Ahead of them was the headquarters of the Savage Lords, the old tenement where the young hard guys slept. On the top floor, a light burned. In front of the building, Sonny looked at the others, at Nit-Nat, Stark, Wimpy, and the rest, feeling the old summer thrill, then turned and kicked in the front door. The Cavaliers came rushing in, and Sonny shouted up the stairs: “All right, tough guys! Let’s rumble!”

  The hospitals in that neighborhood had never before seen so many damaged people on Sunday morning. The fire department said later they could not save the old tenement and let it burn out. Sonny Marino opened for business as usual on Monday morning, his hands hurting, his body aching, a bandage across his left eyebrow. His wife murmured that maybe they should still sell and move to Florida. “Are you kidding?” Sonny Marino said. “I’m gonna live here the rest of my life.”

  Trouble

  WHEN LIAM DEVLIN TRUDGED to the door of Rattigan’s that Saturday night, the windows were opaque with steam. It was after midnight, and he was exhausted from a long shift delivering the fat Sunday newspapers. He hesitated for a moment. He could go and eat eggs at the Greek’s, read the paper, then just collapse in bed. But he wanted a beer. One or two, really, and a little television, maybe some music on the jukebox. He opened the door. There were only three customers in the dark, warm saloon, but right away, Liam Devlin wanted to leave. The reason was simple. Jack Parker was drinking at the bar.

  “That Parker is a real magician,” the bartender, George Loftus, once said. “He opens his mouth and he makes customers disappear.”

  On this night, Jack Parker was drinking alone, facing the beer taps, hatless, a thick mug in his fat pink hand. He didn’t look up when Devlin came in. This was itself unusual. Jack Parker was a cop, and a bully; the bullying was done entirely with words, with wisecracks and scathing remarks. But when he had goaded people to the point where they wanted to break his face, Jack Parker retreated behind the gun. He never used it. But everyone knew he carried it.

  “Fleischmann’s and beer,” Devlin said softly to Loftus. “You been busy?”

  “Look around,” the bartender said. “It’s like the plague broke out here.”

  As always, Devlin started reading the Sunday News from back to front, absorbed in the stories from spring training. He sipped his Fleischmann’s, and drank half the beer. Two old men drank in silence at the far end of the bar. The wind made a whining sound outside. Then Parker spoke.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  Devlin turned and saw Parker looking at him, a wet smile on his loose, florid face.

  “Nobody,” Devlin said. “I just walked in that door.”

  “George, you let anyone in here these days.”

  Loftus said, “Don’t start, Jack.”

  “I mean, lookit this guy,” Parker went on. “Those pants haven’t had a crease in them since the Dodgers left Brooklyn. The jacket’s like something outta Catholic Charities. And the shoes…”

  “We can’t all be fashion plates,” Devlin said.

  “And the hair,” Parker said. “You let your hair grow down to your belt, I bet. Like Deanna Durbin.”

  Devlin said, “What are you? Fred Astaire?”

  Loftus rubbed the back of his neck and leaned forward on the bar. “Hey, we don’t need this, Jack. You understand? We don’t need this. So Jack, leave the kid alone. And Liam, read your paper.”

  Parker downed his beer, nodded to Loftus to bring him another, and then stared for a while at himself in the part of the mirror visible behind the whiskey bottles. Devlin walked over to the jukebox. There were Irish songs by the Wolfe Tones and the Barleycorn, some tunes by Sinatra and Johnny Mathis, and a few rock-and-roll songs. He played “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. The first chords boomed through the bar, and Parker spun around.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Shut that off.”

  Devlin ignored him and walked to the bar. He said to Loftus, “Hit me again.”

  “I said I don’t want to hear that crap!” Parker said. “Turn it off!”

  “He put a quarter in, Jack,” Loftus said. “He can play the jukebox he wants to.”

  “I’m tryin’ to think!”

  “I could tell,” Devlin said. “You got a real pained expression on your face.”

  “You wise bastid!”

  He whirled, his eyes wild, while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards drove the Stones.

  There was a gun in Parker’s hand.

  “You want noise?” Parker said. “I’ll give you noise.”

  He walked over, very casually, and shot at the jukebox. The glass face shattered, the record scraped and died. Then he fired again. The shots were very loud. At the far end of the bar, the two old men looked up. Parker turned to Devlin.

  “There,” he said. “How do you like that?”

  Devlin didn’t answer. His hand trembled.

  “You want rock and roll? I’ll give you rock and roll,” Parker said, and walked back to the bar. “Didn’t you read in the paper? Rock and roll is dead.” He placed the gun beside his beer mug. Loftus gave Devlin a look that said: Don’t move. Then he went to Parker.

  “That’s enough, Jack,” Loftus said. “I think you oughta head home.”

  “Home? What home? What do I got at home? What’s that mean, home? Answer me that, George.”

  “You got a wife at home,” Loftus said. “A nice lady. You got kids. You got a nice warm bed. Go home.”

  “I had a wife,” Parker said. He turned to Devlin again. “What are you lookin’ at? This is none of your business, shmuck.”

  Devlin came at him in a rush, reaching for the gun, hurtling at the older man as quickly as he could. It was not quick enough. Parker grabbed the gun, spun, and slammed Devlin on the skull with the butt. Devlin fell, and then Parker kicked him. The two old men headed for the door.

  “Stop right there!” Parker said. “You’re not going nowhere.”

  They shuffled back to the bar. Devlin pulled himself up, climbing a stool rung by rung, as if it were a ladder. Parker faced him, an elbow on the bar. The gun was beside the beer mug.

  “All right, punk. Now, I want an apology.”

  Devlin touched his head, and his fingertips came away red. “Apology for what?”

  “For livin’, punk.”
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  “Go to hell,” Devlin said.

  Parker picked up the gun, his eyes wild now, and fired a shot into the ceiling.

  “You better apologize, or you’re a dead man.”

  Loftus leaned in. “Jack—”

  Parker whirled and backhanded the smaller man.

  “You shut up, George. This is between me and him. Me and this punk!”

  Loftus said, “You’re gonna get in trouble, Jack.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He waved the gun as if it were a toy. “Trouble, huh? Trouble!?!”

  He fired at the TV set and missed. Then he stared at the mirror and the bottles, extended his arm, and fired two more shots. The mirror smashed and fell in huge jagged shards. Bottles broke, tipped over, bounced on the floor. The noise was ferocious. And then the bar was silent.

  “Trouble,” Parker said to himself in a flat voice. “Trouble.”

  His eyes were now blank. His body sagged. The gun hand hung straight at his side. He looked at Devlin as if he’d never seen him before, and then turned around and walked to the door, shoving the gun into his side pocket, and went out into the night.

  “What the hell…” Loftus said. The two old men hurried to the door and left without a word. Loftus looked at the smashed mirror and started straightening the bottles.

  “That guy should be in a nuthouse,” Loftus said.

  “Give me a dime, George,” Devlin said. “That bum shouldn’t be walking the streets with a gun.”

  “I don’t have any dimes,” Loftus said. “I don’t have any nickels, either. The change is all gone. Go home, Liam.”

  Devlin went out. The wind was driving harder off the harbor. He went home for a while and then decided he couldn’t sleep while Parker roamed the streets. He dressed again and walked to the precinct house, ten blocks away, his face frozen, his feet without feeling, the soft swollen patch on his skull beginning to throb. He hurried up the steps of the precinct house. He stopped at the desk and explained to the desk sergeant that he wanted to file a complaint against a cop. A cop named Jack Parker.

  The sergeant looked at some papers. “Jack Parker? Forget it, sport. You’re too late. They just found him on his wife’s stoop, up there by the park. With a hole in his head.” He shook his head sadly. “Seems like he eighty-sixed himself.”

  Devlin bounced a fist off the rail in front of the desk.

  “That bum,” he said. “He really did have trouble.”

  “The worst trouble of all, sport.”

  The Home Country

  IT WASN’T A GOOD idea. Laverty was sure of that. But the girl had insisted, telling him that she couldn’t have this New York week before college without seeing the place where he’d grown up. She could never go alone, she said, and she didn’t know when they’d ever be together in New York again, and, so, after more of this, Laverty had agreed.

  Now she was beside him in the rented car, three thousand miles from the house on the hill in Laguna; far from bougainvillea and surfboard summers and horse trails on the Irvine Ranch; far from the great blue lake of the Pacific. She was beside him, the map unfolded in her lap, her blond hair tossed by the river wind, and they were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on a clear fall day and he was filled with dread.

  “Now, this must be the East River, right under us,” she said brightly. “Right, Dad?”

  “Right. Except I’m not sure it’s a river. I’ve read that it’s an estuary but I’ve also read that it has been cut through at the top, and that makes it a real river. All I know is the water goes uptown and downtown at the same time.”

  “Amazing. And your house? Which way is it?”

  “Away up there to the right. Where the green is.”

  He came down off the bridge, trying to get his bearings; there were government buildings on his right, new and ugly, and over to the left was Fulton Street, where the A&S department store was and Loew’s Met and past them the Duffield and the RKO Albee and the Brooklyn Paramount and the Fox. They were probably all gone now; movie houses were vanishing all over the country, taking the balcony girls with them and the matrons and the gaudy dreams that filled the darkness. Namm’s used to be down there somewhere, and Loeser’s, too; I haven’t pictured those stores in twenty-five years, Laverty thought. And remembered long aisles stacked with clothing, the elegant lettering on the Loeser’s sign, the forbidden whisperings of the lingerie department, the sound of women’s high heels on hardwood floors. And American Indians, all ironworkers, drinking around the corner in a place called the Wigwam.

  The dread seeped through him anew. He had seen the photographs in the magazines, the documentaries on TV, showing the desolation of the Bronx and Brownsville, places where people like Laverty once had lived the plenitude of youth. He had long since imagined his neighborhood consumed by the summer fires. And he didn’t really want to see the ruins.

  “Now, what’s that thing?” his daughter asked as they stopped at a light. He looked up at a huge glass-brick building on the corner of Atlantic Avenue. “I don’t really know,” he said, “but it’s sure as hell ugly.” And then she said, “Oh, it’s a jail. Look, it has bars, and cops outside, and all those women waiting on line to get in. It’s a jail, Dad!”

  “You’re right,” he said, and remembered the time Shorty and Lahr were arrested for stealing a Pontiac, and everybody in the crowd went to the jail on Raymond Street and waited until they were released on bail; and how they’d all gone down to Coney Island that night to celebrate and they got drunk and started fighting with some South Brooklyn boys in a joint called McCabe’s and Laverty woke up with skinned knuckles and no memory and knew that he wasn’t going to live like this very much longer.

  He remembered leaves burning everywhere that fall, in the yards of that neighborhood; and how when the other guys started to leave for the army, or for jail, or for swift, hot marriages, or for the murderous new joys of smack, he had stayed on at Brooklyn Tech, working late, sleeping with his head on the kitchen table, the books stacked around him, hungry for departure. And then when his father died, the dream of escape, of college, of the California he’d seen only in the movies, all of that wobbled, swayed, started to fall, and miraculously remained erect. He wanted to tell the girl, his daughter, about all of that, and maybe he would someday, but not now, not today.

  “It’s up ahead,” he said, moving along Flatbush Avenue, passing the street where Diron’s bar was and the Carlton movie house. He pointed to a bricked-up building. “My father used to drink right over there.”

  “Was he a drunk?”

  “No,” Laverty said, and laughed. “Not a drunk.” He glanced again at the boarded-up place where the bar had been, with its noise, music, laughter. “He just worked himself to death.”

  “I wish I’d known him.”

  “So do I.”

  I wish I could have penetrated the Mayo silence, Laverty thought, the iron restraint. I wish I knew why he wore a hat after everyone stopped wearing them and why he always wore a suit on Sundays, and why he insisted on cloth napkins for dinner in what even he must have known was a slum. He worked for the Transit Authority, and for Bohack’s on Thursday nights and all day on Saturday, and seemed always gray with exhaustion. He wouldn’t move out of the neighborhood, even when at last he could afford to, and later Laverty knew why: the extra money went into the bank and when Laverty graduated with honors from Brooklyn Tech, the money was there waiting for him, the money that took him out of Brooklyn, away from home, and across America, the money that bought his escape.

  Laverty had come back only twice: when the old man died, and when his mother followed seven months later. I wish I could have properly thanked him, Laverty thought. I wish I’d really thanked them both.

  “Hey, this is nice here,” his daughter said, and Laverty agreed, wondering if he’d made some wrong turn. There were restaurants along the avenue and boutiques and a bookstore and kids on bikes and trees in the side streets. Where were the empty lots, the gutted buildings? He drove on, moving stea
dily closer to the streets where he grew up. The streets of home. He crossed 9th Street and the hard light etched the buildings more sharply, and he began to fill with memories of a thousand mornings spent walking this avenue. A Spaldeen, he thought. I want to bounce a Spaldeen. Pink and powdery and fresh. Just that. Just a Spaldeen.

  “This is it, sweetheart,” he said, pulling the car into a spot beside a bodega. “That house, right there, on the corner. That’s where I grew up. Second floor. Where that fire escape is.”

  “Wow,” she said, and got out, and he told her to lock the door, and then he stood alone for a moment on his side of the car. In a way, everything had changed. Rattigan’s was gone, and the old Kent cleaners, and Semke’s meat market, and Mr. B’s candy store, and Our Own bakery, and Sussman’s hardware store. There were no longer any trolley tracks, no electric wires suspended over the avenue, and the Greek’s coffee shop had gone, too, and Bernsley’s heating oil and the variety store. But the buildings were intact. The names had changed, the people had changed. A lot of them were speaking Spanish here, not Yiddish or Italian. But it was here. The neighborhood. Laverty felt his blood coursing through him, the dread gone, excitement lifting him along.

  “This looks pretty rough, Dad,” his daughter said. “You think we should—”

  “It’s all right. It is. Let’s look around.”

  He went into the vestibule of the house where he’d lived his youth. The inside door was locked. The mailboxes were wrecked. He rang the bell of the old apartment, but nobody answered. “Just as well,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the same anyway.”

  Then the door jerked open suddenly, and a middle-aged man with watery eyes stared at him. The man wore soiled clothes, and needed a shave, and the girl backed up in fear. Then the man’s face softened.

  “Is that you, Jimmy?” the man said. “Jimmy Laverty?”

  “Frankie D’Arcy…”

  They hadn’t really been close; they’d just been boys in that neighborhood. But they embraced, and stepped into the bright sunlight, talking quickly, names and events and places coming in a stream as they went out into the street. Cubans now lived where the Lavertys had lived, but they were on vacation. “They’re good people,” Frankie said. “Hard workers…” Joe Fish had died, Eddie Gregg too. Joe Dee had four grandchildren now and lived out on the Island…