The Christmas Kid Read online

  “It was El Salvador, Ralph.”

  “You know what I mean. They’re all freakin’ nuts.”

  Sanno glanced at his watch. “I better go in.”

  “I’ll be right here.”

  Sanno got out and hurried through the rain to the restaurant. There was a bar to the right and then an entryway into a large room with booths along the wall to the left, tables filling the room, a trio playing tepidly at the far end. Sanno gave his hat and coat to the hatcheck girl and turned to the maître d’.

  “Carlos,” Sanno said, and the maître d’ nodded and led him through the crowded room to the booths. The Colombian was sitting alone. He was tanned, clean-shaven, and as he rose slightly in the booth and extended his hand, Sanno thought: a banker. Sanno shook the man’s hand and sat facing him. A Rolex gleamed on his left wrist.

  “Good to meet you,” Carlos said, in slightly accented English. “I hear about you a long time.”

  “I heard about you, too.”

  Carlos laughed. “Hey, don’t believe everything you hear, okay?” He waved to a waiter. “Drink?”

  “Scotch would help. Ice. Soda.”

  Carlos ordered in Spanish. Sanno turned to look at the trio, which was playing “We’ll Be Together Again.” He saw Junior eating alone at a small table. Sidge was at the bar, facing the mirror. He couldn’t see Tony Dee.

  “The other one’s down in the john,” Carlos said, smiling. “He should be back soon.”

  Sanno stared blankly at the younger man. One waiter brought the Scotch and soda and placed it before Sanno on a plate. A second waiter brought Carlos a fresh cup of coffee.

  “What do you want?” Sanno said.

  “Everything.”

  Sanno felt the whiskey burn its way through him and then settle and grow warm.

  “You really are crazy,” Sanno said. “Like they said.”

  “You asked a question, you got an answer.”

  “You better study a little more English, pal,” Sanno said. “Like that word ‘everything.’ I don’t think you know what it means.”

  “It means the jukeboxes. It means the loan-sharking in the produce market. It means the line to Montreal. And, oh, yeah, it means the union, too. I like that part mos’ of all. I like the union. I like everything.” He sipped the coffee. “One of my favorite words.”

  Sanno laughed and sipped some more whiskey and looked around. Junior was gone. Tony Dee was at the bar with Sidge.

  “You seen too many movies, Carlos,” he said. “This is the real world. This ain’t The Godfather. This ain’t Scarface.”

  “You saw Scarface? What’d you think?”

  “Too violent. But I liked the girl, Al Pacino’s sister.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “She’s Italian,” Sanno said. “Like Pacino.”

  “Don’t put me on.”

  “You could look it up,” Sanno said.

  “I like the movie,” Carlos said.

  “It ain’t a documentary, Carlos,” Sanno said. “It ain’t even a training film.”

  “Yeah, but it gotta point, man. I think you know what it is.”

  “No. What is it, Carlos?”

  “It’s our turn now.”

  “That’s the point? What are you, a critic, too?”

  “No, but I read history. First the Irish had it. Then the Jews had it. Then you people had it. Now we’re gonna have it.”

  “What’s ‘it,’ Carlos?”

  “Everything,” he said, and laughed.

  A waiter came over with two plates of marinated shrimp, placed them in front of the two men, bowed, and went away.

  “Suppose I tell you to get lost,” Sanno said.

  “Mistake.”

  “I’m thinking just sitting here’s a mistake.”

  Carlos tested one of the shrimps, then chewed it in a distracted way. He gazed out at the trio, which was now playing “Yesterday.”

  “Don’t worry,” Carlos said. “We’ll take care of business. And we make you a deal. You get a percentage the rest of your life. You move down t’ Florida someplace, you get a condo, you go to the track every day, you get a tan. You need girls, we get you some girls. You need a driver, we get you a driver. You be like a consultant. The percentage goes anywhere you want it. A bank here, a bank down there. Switzerland. The Caymans. Don’t matter to us.” He sighed. “It’s easy. You just get outta the way, and tell the right people it’s ours.”

  “Suppose I tell the right people to blow your head off?”

  Now he could see Junior, at the end of the bar, acting as if he didn’t know Sidge or Tony Dee. Carlos took a pack of Benson & Hedges from his inside coat pocket. Nothing moved in his face, and his eyes were cold and unblinking.

  “Look, I’m tryin’ to make this easy,” Carlos said. “We could come in, fight you for it. What happens? Lots of dead people. And we win that. Know why? We know you, and you don’t know us. You don’t know where we live. You don’t know nothin’. But you know we’re here. You’re not dumb, Sanno. You wouldn’t’ve lasted this long. But why have a mess? Why have a war?”

  “Maybe I’d just like to see you with a hole in your head.”

  Carlos smiled, and began to recite addresses. In New Jersey, in Brooklyn, in Lido Beach, in the North Bronx. Even in Huntington Beach, California. And Sanno knew who lived in all those places: his wife, his two daughters and his son, each of his grandchildren.

  “Now, if anything happens to me, something bad happens to the people that live in those houses,” Carlos said, smiling thinly. “Not just you. Not just the three dummies at the bar, and the other dummies you got workin’ for you. Everybody. Wives, children, babies: don’t matter. War is war, right? Anyway, they all been livin’ off what you made, so they’re part of it. We got one rule: hurt us, we hurt you back worse. Know what I mean?”

  He was serious. Sanno was certain of that. He struggled to contain the old instincts, the street rage, the urge to strike and hurt. But he showed nothing. He took another sip of Scotch, then glanced at his watch. He saw Marie, watching television. Then covered with blood.

  “I gotta run,” Sanno said.

  “Stay and eat.”

  “Not with you, pal.”

  Carlos speared another shrimp, and said: “So?”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Sanno said, and started easing out of the booth. Carlos touched his forearm, and Sanno paused.

  “The girl, Al Pacino’s sister,” Carlos said. “She’s really Italian?”

  “You could look it up,” Sanno said, getting out of the booth, nodding at Junior at the bar, going for his hat and coat, thinking: Yeah, it’s their turn. He looked out at the cold winter rain and saw palm trees and white sand and could hear the long slow roar of the sea.

  Footsteps

  NYDIA GLANCED AT THE ceiling. “There,” she said. “Did you hear it?”

  Ira blinked, his hands flat on the round oak table. She was cleaning away the dishes.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t hear anything, honey.” He forced a smile. “You sure you’re not getting paranoid?”

  “I know what I heard, Ira. It was someone walking. Someone on the roof. I heard it.”

  “Well, I didn’t hear a thing,” he said, abruptly rising and taking some of the other dishes to the sink. The room filled with the aroma of brewing coffee. He looked out the window at the darkness of the Brooklyn night.

  “I heard it last night,” she said, rinsing dishes and placing them in the dishwasher. “When you were over at Fred’s…I heard it last week, too. Footsteps. Someone walking. And now again, just now. There’s someone up there, Ira.”

  He whirled, a savage curl in his voice. “Well, what do you want me to do about it? Go up there and start shooting? If you’re so freaked, call the super! Call the cops! But stop whining!”

  Her face crumpled. She turned off the faucet and hurried into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. He held the edge of the sink and breathed out heavily. Brooklyn. What a mistake.
… He glanced around the loft, her stacked paintings, the new one on the easel, the cluttered table where she kept her paints. His own desk was piled with textbooks, yellow pads, red pens, the armory of a schoolteacher. It looked almost peaceful. And this loft, this space, was what they had wanted, what they had searched for through those grinding, humiliating months, wanting to live together in some civilized way. They had looked everywhere and at everything, at cramped one-bedroom places in SoHo, they’d trampled roaches on the West Side, badgered doormen on the East Side, and then had given up on Manhattan and crossed the river. They’d given up quickly on Brooklyn Heights, too, and Park Slope, and then they found the Factory.

  “It was closed for a few years,” the real estate man said, “and then someone bought it and decided to make it into co-ops. That didn’t work out too well. So it’s a rental now.…”

  The block-square building was a rambling nineteenth-century redbrick pile. It had one of those names invented by real estate developers, of course, but Ira soon discovered that the old-timers in the neighborhood still called it the Factory. And they talked about it in a sour, bitter way. Once, it had been a reason for the existence of the neighborhood, almost seven hundred jobs filling its floors, the workers living in the now-ruined streets around it, eating, drinking, growing old in the stores and bars along the avenue.

  Then had come the big strike, the men picketing through a brutal winter, management treating them with iron indifference, and finally there was a fire. Dozens of strikers rushed into the fire before the engines arrived, trying to save the machines that had given them jobs and life for generations. Some of them died. And then the Factory itself died, the owners packing up the remains and leaving for Taiwan or Alabama, and when the Factory died, so did the neighborhood.

  “You know what it meant when you people started moving in?” one old man said to Ira. “It meant jobs would never come back. Never. They were gone forever.…”

  Still, the price was right, and there was space for Ira’s books and Nydia’s paints, and the subway was only three blocks away. Brooklyn. It would be all right. It was the best they could do. What a mistake, Ira thought, moving across the loft to the bedroom door with a cup of fresh coffee as a signal of truce. He knocked.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  He heard no answer and opened the door. She was lying facedown on the large brass bed. The picture of her father outside their old house in San Antonio was tipped over. “Here’s your coffee, honey.…”

  She turned to him.

  “Thanks, Ira. Thanks. But I’m just too tired. I took a pill, and…”

  “Okay, I have some papers to grade.”

  She just didn’t know how to live in cities, he thought, never mind the Factory. That was the problem. There were sirens at night, bottles breaking, shards of arguments, a hundred radios blending into jumble and din. In the summer, he bought an air conditioner, and sealed the windows, but that didn’t work. The sounds of the Brooklyn streets still came at her like an assault.

  “I’ll never live in a quiet place again,” she said to him one Sunday morning. “I just know it….”

  And he knew then that people from cities and people from the West had grown up in different corners of the universe. On that Sunday morning, Ira from the West Bronx was washed by a sense of peace; the trembling weekday urgency was mercifully gone, the streets as bare of tumult as paintings by Hopper. Subways were almost quiet. And yet Nydia, of the San Antonio suburbs, heard sounds that his New York childhood had edited away forever. That day, he doubted for the first time his vision of the rest of their lives.

  Now thinner and tauter than when they moved to the Factory, her body poised like an exclamation point, she was hearing strangers on the roof. Ridiculous. He sighed and sat at his desk to begin the melancholy task of correcting essays.

  Then he heard the footsteps.

  Right above him. Someone walking slowly and deliberately. He sat very still, holding his breath. The footsteps described a small circle. And then stopped. Directly over his desk…His skin pebbled with fear.

  He picked up the telephone and dialed 911, and waited, and then tried to explain to a female voice that someone was walking on the roof of his building, and the woman said, “Yes?” As if saying, this is not news. And then Ira felt foolish, and hung up the phone.

  The footsteps moved again. Another small circle.

  “Goddamn it,” he muttered, and got up, and went to the door, taking a ski jacket off a peg, thinking: It’s probably some dumb kids, fooling around on the roof, smoking dope or something. But it can’t go on. I’ve got to tell them. He went into the hall. A flight of stairs led to a door that opened out onto the roof. As he hurried up the stairs, adrenaline rushed through him, fueled by anger. Kids. It must be kids. But whoever the hell it is, they shouldn’t be prowling around the roof of the Factory at night. He turned the lock and pushed open the heavy metal door.

  The roof was a black tar-paper field, from which jutted strange figures: chimneys, and cowled metal objects, and deep shadows cast by the smothered lights of the street. There was no moon. The wind made a whining sound. He stood for a moment, forcing his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but the far shadows were deep, blank, impenetrable.

  “Hey,” he said loudly. “Who’s out there?”

  The wind lifted his words and tossed them into the night. He tried to locate himself on the roof in relation to the apartment, to locate the spot on the roof that was above his desk. That was the street. That was the avenue. It should be…He walked out, and circled and knew where he was. Then the wind moaned, and he wanted to run. It was as if some gigantic figure loomed behind him, and he felt his scalp riffle, as if something were scurrying between skin and skull. But he couldn’t turn to look. He waited, glanced at the light from the street, warm and inviting. Suddenly there was a loud slam, metallic and final. The door.

  He grabbed for the handle, twisted it, yanked at it, then pounded against its painted metal skin. But the door was firmly, solidly locked. For the moment, at least, he was trapped in the black terrain of the roof. He cursed now, blunt obscenities retrieved from his youth, the words like impotent weapons hurled at the wind and the darkness and his own dread. And then, far across the rooftop, he saw something move.

  A man. In a T-shirt on this cold night. There were tattoos on his arms, and a bandanna around his brow, his skin a sickly white. “Who are you?” Ira asked hoarsely, across the distance. But there was no answer. Then he saw another figure, smaller, with Hispanic features, and then another, a heavy-bellied white man, and then a muscular black man, all of them emerging from the darkness.

  He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come, and he backed away, backed away, seeking light and escape, and still they came, more of them now, possessors of the roof and the Factory. He thought he heard the word “strike” once, then again, whispering at him in the darkness, “strike,” and then, at the lip of the roof, one final time, “strike,” before he plunged into the light.

  A Poet Long Ago

  THERE WAS A DOUBLE-PARKED panel truck on 52nd Street near Ninth Avenue, and a sanitation truck trying to squeeze by, and a line of backed-up cars from Jersey, their drivers leaning on the horns in the cold, anxious morning. Then one of the sanitation men came around from the front to see whether the squeeze was possible. He was very calm. He gave soothing signals to the people in the cars and then estimated the room the truck needed to pass through. I knew him. Sonny Rosselli.

  “Hey, Sonny!”

  He turned and I waved and he came to my car and peered at my face, as if trying to remember. I told him who I was and got out of the car. He embraced me and then the Jersey drivers were crazed again, and I told Sonny I’d pull around the corner after he got the truck through the morning slalom.

  Sonny Rosselli. Thirty years ago, he’d been Sonny Rosselli the poet.

  “Hey, listen, I’d love to talk to ya,” he said. “But I can’t leave the truck. I’m off at half past eleven. C
an I meet ya someplace?”

  “The coffee shop next to the Music Hall,” I said. “Eleven thirty.”

  All morning I thought about Sonny Rosselli. I had met him in the seventh grade, when he moved to our Brooklyn neighborhood from the Bronx. He was a good stickball player, a strong, curly-haired son of Sicilian immigrants, with a beautiful sister and two older brothers. He was lousy in math, but he could write like an angel.

  “I love the way these words sound,” he’d say. “Shore, I mean. ‘Shore’ sounds like a shore, know what I mean? Like the ocean’s comin’ right up there and making that sound. Shooore.” He liked “meadow,” too, and “dusk,” and “dark.” And soon he began to string these words together and make poetry. I don’t remember any of the poems, and perhaps they weren’t any good; I remember that Sonny’s major ambition was to have a poem published in Nick Kenny’s column in the Daily Mirror.

  “Look at this,” he’d say, showing me Nick Kenny. “Listen to what these guys do wit’ words.”

  We had a nice Xaverian brother named Rembert in the seventh grade, and he must have realized that Sonny Rosselli was special; he gave Sonny a rhyming dictionary and thesaurus, and gave him passing grades in math as long as Sonny kept making poems. He explained to Sonny that there were people called poets; that was their job; they wrote poems. And Sonny started saying that maybe when he grew up he could be a poet.

  “Imagine,” he’d say. “You write poems all day and they pay you for it!”

  That spring, the miracle happened. Sonny Rosselli sent a poem to Nick Kenny and Nick Kenny published it. It was about love, of course. And Brother Rembert had to fight back tears as he held up the Mirror for all of us to see and then read us that poem. We were all rough kids from the wrong side of Brooklyn, but one of us, at least, had made it. Sonny Rosselli was a celebrity. A poet. An honest-to-God published poet.

  His great moment didn’t last. The other boys teased him brutally, making swishing gestures at him, talking with pursed lips as they read off the verses. Sonny was confused; why wouldn’t they want to hear something beautiful? He fought three separate schoolyard fights on one afternoon, hurting his hands. He won all three, but he left the last one in tears.