The Christmas Kid Read online

  He called me Brendan. He’s softening. Even a gunman can understand it was all long ago.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t play games, Brendan. Everyone in the North knew you set him up. The British told them.”

  “It was a long time ago, mister. There were a lot of lies told. You can’t believe every…”

  The boss wasn’t really listening. He took out his pack of cigarettes, flipped one higher than the others, gripped its filter in his teeth, and lit it with the butt of the other. Then he tamped out the first cigarette in the ashtray. He looked out past the rain to the darkness of the cove.

  “Shoot him,” he said.

  The man on Brendan’s left opened the door a foot.

  “Oh, sweet sufferin’ Jesus, mister,” Brendan said. “I’ve got five kids. They’re all at home. One of them is making her First Communion. Please. For the love of God. If Dublin Command has told you to get me, just tell them you couldn’t find me. Tell them I’m dead. I can get you a piece of paper from one of the politicians. Sayin’ I’m dead. Yes. That’s a way. And I’ll just vanish. just disappear. Please. I’m an old man now, I won’t live much bloody longer. But the weans. The weans, mister. And it was all thirty years ago. Christ knows I’ve paid for it. Please. Please.”

  The tears were blurring his vision now. He could hear the hard spatter of the rain through the open car door. He felt the man on his right move slightly and remove something from inside his coat.

  The boss said, “You left out a few things, Brendan.”

  “I can send all my earnings to the lads. God knows they can use it in the North now. I’ve sent money already, I have, to the Provisionals. I never stopped being for them. For a united Ireland. Never stopped. I can have the weans work for the cause. I’ll get a second job. My Sarah can go out and work, too. Please, mister. Jesus, mister…”

  “Katey Devlin didn’t die of the flu,” the boss said. “And she didn’t die of a broken heart. Did she, Brendan?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Katey Devlin killed herself. Didn’t she?”

  Brendan felt his stomach turn over.

  The boss said, very quietly, “She loved Peter Devlin more than life itself. She didn’t want him to die.”

  “But neither does Sarah want me to die. She’s got the weans, the feedin’ of them, and the clothin’ of them, and the schoolin’ of them, to think of. Good God, man, have ye no mercy? I was a boy then. My own people were starvin’. We had no land, we were renters, we were city people, not farmers, and the war was on, and…They told me they would only arrest him. Intern him for the duration and let him out when the fightin’ stopped, and they told me the IRA would take care of Katey while he was inside. Please, mister, I’ve got five kids. Peter Devlin only had two.”

  “I know,” said the man in the right front seat. “I was one of them.”

  For the first time he turned completely around. His eyes were a cold blue under the shock of curly dark hair, Katey’s eyes in Peter’s face. He stared at Brendan for a moment. He took another drag on the cigarette and let the smoke drift from his nose, creating lazy trails of gray in the crowded car.

  “Shoot him,” he said.

  The man on his left touched Brendan’s hand and opened the door wide.

  The Radio Doctor

  EVERY NIGHT FOR TWO months, Tommy Mungo tried to get through to Dr. Verity Ambler. On the radio each night, she gave strength and advice to all the other callers: tearful young wives, husbands who thought they were gay, lonely widows, men whose women had run off, pregnant teenagers, parents who hated their children and children who hated their parents. He would listen to her alone in his bedroom, wearing a headset so his mother wouldn’t waken, listening to her cool, perfect voice, her strong words, her certainties. He was sure that somehow she could help him. She would give him some words and those words would change his life. So each night he dialed the station, and each night there was a busy signal, and this deepened Tommy Mungo’s sense of failure and despair.

  Then, amazingly, suddenly, without explanation, one night he got through. A man picked up the phone and asked Tommy his name and his problem, and Tommy Mungo told him, and the man said he would put him on hold, and when Dr. Ambler picked up, he should be certain that his radio was turned off. Tommy Mungo lay there with his heart pounding for another twenty minutes. And then suddenly he heard her voice.

  “Yes, Tommy, this is Dr. Verity Ambler. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I uh, you see, I’m twenty-eight years old,” Tommy said. “And I feel like I failed at everything.”

  “Yes, Tommy…”

  “For example, I can’t seem to finish anything. I never finished high school. And then I went to night school, to get a GED, you know? But I couldn’t finish that, either. I got a job in a sheet-metal shop. Like an apprentice, you know? You’re an apprentice for two years, then you move up the ladder, and eventually you become a journeyman and make good money. But I couldn’t stick with it, I couldn’t finish. My mother says—”

  “Do you live at home, Tommy?”

  “Yes, yes, I do.”

  “And you’re twenty-eight years old?”

  Tommy’s stomach knotted. He could feel Dr. Ambler staring at him with cold eyes, across the miles from her studio in Manhattan to his apartment in Brooklyn.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “Yes, I live at home.”

  “How does your mother feel about that, Tommy?”

  “Well, she doesn’t say much.”

  “And your father?”

  “My father…passed away.”

  Her voice was suddenly accusatory. “You sounded hesitant, Tommy. What was that about?”

  “Well…the truth is, he didn’t pass away, actually. That’s just something I tell people since I was fifteen. Actually, he just left. He took off somewhere; I don’t know where.”

  “I see,” Dr. Ambler said. “And how did your mother feel about that?”

  “She felt bad, of course,” Tommy said quietly. “But she always says to me, ‘Thank God you’re still here.’ And—”

  “Ah,” Dr. Ambler said, drawing the word out. “Don’t you see, Tommy? That’s the real problem, okay? And you can’t finish anything. What does it suggest to you, Tommy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her voice was reasonable, soft. “Well, what do you think is the first thing you must finish?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s why I—”

  “You must finish your adolescence, Tommy!” She was scolding now. “You have to move out of that house and go out on your own and become a mature adult, okay? Don’t worry about your mother. She’ll be fine. In fact, I think your mother’s being terribly unfair to you, Tommy, by refusing to let you grow up, okay? You’re not a surrogate for your father. You’re not a safeguard against your mother’s loneliness. You have to be your own person. You have to be your own best friend. You have to become a mature, ‘together’ person. Finish your adolescence and you’ll be able to finish other things in your life, okay? Thank you, Tommy.…”

  There was a click and she was gone, and Tommy felt suddenly abandoned, the unspoken words choking in his throat. He switched on the radio, and Dr. Verity Ambler was saying she would be back after “these messages” and the news. Tommy Mungo punched the pillow and said out loud: “You didn’t let me finish.…”

  I wanted to tell you about the crash on the Belt Parkway, he thought. And how my mother was crippled, her spine smashed, while nothing at all happened to my father. I wanted to tell you how he stayed with her for three years after that, until one night I saw him alone on the stoop, crying his eyes out. All of that was before he left. And then when she was alone, I promised her I wouldn’t let them stick her in some home or some hospital, wouldn’t leave her to charity. You didn’t let me tell you that, Dr. Ambler.

  The radio doctor was talking now to a woman whose fifteen-year-old daughter was still wetting her bed, and Tommy Mungo dialed the station again, got a bus
y signal, tried again, got another busy signal. I could write her a letter, he thought, and put in all the things she never gave me time to say. But no: she must get thousands of letters; she could never read them all, or answer them. No. He glanced at the clock beside his bed. Ten minutes to two. She’d be on air until three. He got up and started to dress. He had to speak to her; it could be months before he got through to her again. He’d have to go to the radio station and see her.

  All the way to Manhattan, driving the beat-up Pontiac across the Brooklyn Bridge and through the empty streets, he listened to Dr. Verity Ambler. He wasn’t angry at her; he was certain it must be his own fault, something in his voice, something in his manner. She was so logical with the others. She told a man whose wife was playing around that he must become “creatively selfish,” give his wife an ultimatum—tell her to stop fooling around—or leave. A man whose wife was an alcoholic was told to forget about her being cured; alcoholism can be treated, she told him, but not cured. “And you are obviously a terrific person,” she said, “so I think you should get into yourself more, okay?”

  Now he was in midtown Manhattan, a block from the station. She would be finished in twenty minutes. He parked across the street, listening to the radio show, and smoked a cigarette. At five minutes to three, he locked the car door and walked to the station entrance. Beyond the locked double door, there was a long empty corridor leading to a bank of elevators. A security guard sat in a chair beside the elevators, reading a newspaper. Tommy Mungo waited. A taxi pulled up and double-parked, the off-duty sign burning.

  Then a large man and a smallish woman stepped out of the elevator. The security man smiled and stood up, had them sign a book, and started walking with them along the corridor to the entrance. It was her. Dr. Verity Ambler. He had seen her picture once in a newspaper and another time on The Regis Philbin Show. But she seemed smaller than he imagined she would be, walking along in a fur coat and slacks, with the large man in front of her and the guard behind her. As the guard unlocked the doors, they all looked at Tommy Mungo.

  “Okay, back up,” the large man said.

  “But I’ve got to talk to Dr. Ambler,” Tommy said. “I was on the show tonight, talking to her, and I never finished explaining—”

  “Back it up!”

  The woman’s eyes seemed wide and alarmed, as the large man stepped between her and Tommy Mungo.

  “I never got to tell you!” Tommy shouted. “I can’t leave my mother! She’s not like you think. But I need help, I need advice, you have to help me!”

  He tried to get around the large man, but the man placed a huge hand on Tommy’s chest and pushed him backward.

  “Jack!” Dr. Ambler said. “Don’t do that, Jack! He might sue me or something!”

  “Please,” Tommy Mungo said. “Let me explain. I got through tonight! After months! After being on hold for hours and hours and hours, I got through! And then I never got to explain to you. I—”

  “Come on,” the woman said, taking the large man by the arm and leading him to the waiting taxi. She slammed the door behind them, and the taxi pulled away. Tommy Mungo stood there for a long time, wishing that somewhere in the city there was a person he could call.

  The Challenge

  SHANK WAS SITTING ON the windowsill, staring down at Algren Street, when Maria came in. She was big now; the baby would come soon. A month at most. Maybe sooner. He walked from the small living room into the smaller kitchen to greet her. Her face was troubled as she placed the grocery bag on the kitchen table and removed her coat.

  “He’s down there,” she said. “At the corner.”

  “So what?”

  “This time he said something to me.”

  Shank tensed, took her hand.

  “He did?”

  She pulled away from him, opened the refrigerator door, put milk and oranges on the metal shelf. “He said, ‘Hello, honey. I’m Rojo. Gonna get your ol’ man.’ Just like that. With those eyes of his.”

  “He’s crazy,” Shank said.

  “I know,” Maria said. “That’s why we gotta move, baby. Now. Tonight. Tomorrow. We gotta move, before the baby. We gotta get out of here, all the way out of the neighborhood.”

  “I can’t do that,” Shank said. “You know I can’t.”

  Her voice rose. “Why not? Why not just get outta here?”

  “’Cause I’m the president of the Dragons!” he said. “No punk Marielito makes me move!”

  “Yeah, but you’re twenty-one years old! You’re married! You gotta baby coming! You can’t go on like this, baby. Bein’ what you was when you was sixteen! You got…responsibility!”

  The word entered Shank like a blade. It was one of those grown-up words, like “opportunity” or “retirement,” that could chill his heart. He had no way to argue with her; she was right. But she didn’t understand a lot of things. She didn’t understand what it meant to be a Dragon, how much of his life was tied up with the Dragons, how hard it would be for him to just go away. He was president; he had been a junior before that, and a Tiny Tim, in the days when he used a knife as an equalizer against men older and tougher and meaner than he was. That’s how he got the name Shank. Back then. Four Dragons had died in street rumbles since he became president at seventeen; more than twenty had ended up in hospitals. Shot or knifed, battered with tire irons or chains or bats. Three had died of overdoses, early on, which was why Shank had led the war against heroin, kicking out users, crippling dealers. Guy wanted to smoke a bone here and there, okay. A little blow now and then, okay. But no smack. Smack kills. Smack was death. All those wars had brought them together, closer than a family. And Maria would never understand any of that.

  “My girlfrien’ Carmen, remember her?” Maria said. “She told me about this place, four rooms, steam heat, in Sout’ Brooklyn. Two eighty a month. And it gotta yard, Shank. We could go see it tonight. We could have all this stuff packed by morning. My brother Ralphie, he could get a U-Haul and—”

  “Stop,” he said. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  She shook her head and walked past him into the living room. She turned on the TV set and then sat back in the worn green armchair and watched a game show. Shank leaned on the refrigerator, thinking about this new kid, Rojo, this wild Cuban with crazy eyes and tattooed fingers and spiky red hair. Three weeks after Rojo had moved into the neighborhood with his mother, he’d stabbed a kid in the school yard on Farrell Avenue. A week later, he opened a wino’s belly on Lonigan Street. A smack dealer on Shulman Place was found with his neck sliced, and everybody said Rojo musta did it. He came over to Pepe’s one evening and said that he wanted to join the Dragons, and Pepe said, Yeah, maybe that could be worked out. And then Rojo said: “I want to be the president.” And Pepe laughed, and then found a blade at his neck, and Rojo saying: “Don’t laugh at me, man. I want the whole club.”

  Shank told Maria about that, trying to laugh when he told her. But she didn’t laugh. She started this business about moving, about getting away. But where could he go? He worked in this neighborhood, at Jaime’s Flat Fix. He came from this neighborhood and knew everybody, and they knew him. He couldn’t go to some strange new place where he wasn’t known. That would be like being fourteen again. This was his place, his turf, and the Dragons were his family.

  “I’m going out,” he said, stepping out of the kitchen.

  “Don’t,” she said, starting to rise. “Don’t go near him. Please don’t.”

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and going down the stairs, he thought: I should have a piece. I should stop at Benny’s and borrow his piece. That Walther P38. Put it in a newspaper. Go down and find this Rojo and just blow him away. But what if the cops land on me? What if I end up in the can? What happens to Maria? What happens to the baby? No: I gotta talk to the dude. I gotta work it out.

  Shank came out onto Algren Street. Mrs. Velasquez nodded hello, and Old Man Farley smiled. Shank saw Little Willy John sitting on the stoop across the street, and walked ove
r to him.

  “Take a walk,” Shank said.

  “What’s up?” Little Willie John said.

  “Rojo.”

  They picked up Face and Sammy Davis and Willowbrook, and told Zeppelin to take his car around the block and wait across the street from Chuckie’s Bar. Somebody went to get Benny, and with Shank in the lead, they walked toward Farrell Avenue.

  Rojo was standing alone in front of Chuckie’s Bar. The afternoon sun made his hair look even more red. He was wearing shades and a sleeveless lavender T-shirt. His hands were in the back pockets of his jeans. He didn’t move when he saw Shank coming around the corner, with the others behind him. He just smiled.

  “Wait here,” Shank said to the others. “I’ll talk to the dude.”

  He walked slowly over to Rojo, standing six feet away from him, out of range of the blade. He knew the blade must be in one of Rojo’s back pockets. One of his hands was on it. Rojo smiled.

  “I hear you been talkin’ about me,” Shank said.

  “Yeah? How you hear that?”

  “From my wife.”

  “Yeah? Which one is your wife?”

  “You know, man. Don’t play dumb.”

  “The pretty one, she having a baby? That one?”

  He smiled again. Shank fought down the urge to close with him and break his face apart.

  “Yeah, that’s the one. She says you’re gonna get me, man. Other people say you still want to run the Dragons. So I figure I better talk to you. I better hear it from you myself.”

  Rojo looked left and right, moving forward almost imperceptibly, the smile on his face.

  “Yeah, you heard right. I want it. I want what you got. You can give it to me. Or I can take it.”

  “It don’t work that way, man. The Dragons, you get elected president.” He turned and saw the others at the corner, all watching him. “You can join—then, who knows? The guys in the crew like you, and I decide to pack it in, maybe you end up president. But you don’t get the gig with a blade.”