The Christmas Kid Read online

  “What’d you say?” Mercedes asked, and laughed out loud.

  This was obviously love at first sight. Two days later, Facts was sitting with her in Loew’s State in Times Square, blitzing her with information about past Academy Award winners. Later he took her to Coney Island, and he rolled on, and Mercedes listened, nodding, offering no resistance. On the weekend, with her mother as chaperone, and Facts as a tour guide, she visited his apartment. The mother sighed a lot, saying, “Ay, bendito,” fanning herself with an Editor & Publisher International Year Book. Facts left them in the former living room and went to the former kitchen to make coffee.

  “¿Cómo se dice ‘loco’ en inglés?” the mother asked.

  “Crazy,” Mercedes said.

  “Ah, sí,” the mother said. “Crazy. Es Crazy. Este Irlandes es crazy.”

  Yes, Mercedes said, the Irishman was crazy, but wasn’t he crazy like her father? Didn’t Papi sit in the house in Santo Domingo cutting articles out of newspapers, piling them up in closets, asking everybody questions about everything under the sun? Didn’t Papi know about baseball and ice-making machines and Indian gods and the Gulf Stream? Yes, her mother said, and he died young.

  Facts came back from the kitchen with three cups of coffee.

  “It’s an interesting place, the Dominican Republic,” he said. “Known by the Indians as Quisqueya, eighteen thousand, eight hundred and sixty-one square miles, population, about five million, four hundred and fifty thousand in 1980.” He sipped his coffee. Mercedes looked at him with glassy eyes. “The main rivers are the Yaque del Norte, the Haina, the Ozama, and the Yaque del Sur.” The mother squinted at him, impressed by the names of familiar places. “You got bauxite there, nickel, silver, and gold, and the average life expectancy is sixty-one years.…”

  “Oh, Facts,” Mercedes sighed.

  They didn’t see Facts around the bar much anymore, and there were rumors that he was memorizing the entire written work of Joseph Stalin. Someone saw him once, walking in the park with a pretty girl, but nobody could believe it. And then one day, the invitations came by mail, in English and Spanish, and we learned that Facts McCarthy was getting married to Mercedes Rodriguez. This was stunning news.

  “Yeah, it’s absolutely true,” Facts said on the phone. “We’re tying the el knotto.”

  He was not willing to surrender the library, but neither was Mercedes; they brought in a contractor who cut a hole in McCarthy’s floor into the Rodriguez apartment and connected them with a spiral staircase, giving the mother her own room and Facts a duplex. We all went to the wedding, and then Facts disappeared into the Brooklyn winter, his studies, and his marriage. I didn’t see him again until the spring. Then I came out of the subway one afternoon and saw him walking alongside the park with Mercedes. She was pregnant and obviously happy.

  “Ola,” Mercedes said, smiling broadly. “Dígame, what’s the longest suspension bridge in the world? You never guess. The Humber! In Hull, England, four thousand, six hundred and twenty-six feet long.”

  “You could look it up,” Facts said proudly.

  “You could.”

  6/6/44

  DRUM AND KEEGAN, OLD now, steel-haired, their skins freckled, shirts too tight, sat together in the warm June sunshine on a bench across from the playground. Prospect Park smelled of new-mown grass. There was no breeze. Keegan smoked a cigarette and glanced at the newspaper on his knee. Drum watched young mothers pushing children on swings.

  “I don’t even give a hill a beans what’s in the paper,” Keegan was saying. “I carry it around because you gotta have sumpthin’ to do. Or sit on. Old guy sits on a park bench nowadays, they think you’re a degenerate.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “But lookit this stuff.” He tapped the newspaper. “Nicaragua. El Salvador. We’re mining harbors in a country we ain’t at war with, Harry. We pay all these el creepos—the contras—to fight for us. These people kill nuns, Harry. I don’t get it anymore, Harry.”

  Drum smiled. “It’s no concern of ours anymore, Charlie.”

  “Yeah? Well, we didn’t pull crap like this when I was a kid, when you was a kid.”

  Drum leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “That woman in the dungarees. With the yellow blouse. Remind you of Helen, doesn’t she?”

  Keegan looked at Drum. “I thought you weren’t gonna talk about her anymore.”

  “I’m not talkin’ about her. I’m just sayin’, that woman looks like her. A statement of fact. Look at me. You see a tear? You see me upset?”

  “No, but I don’t want to, neither. Every time you talk about Helen, you get weepy.”

  “I was married to her for thirty-two years, Charlie.”

  Keegan opened the newspaper. “Hey, lookit this! Forty years! The anniversary. Forty years since D-day. Can you believe it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jeez, I forgot, Harry. You was there, right?”

  Drum shrugged and stood up. “Let’s take a walk.”

  They loaded us on the LCVs in the dark, thirteen miles out, the waves rising and falling, bazookas and TNT piled on the deck, and all of us with full field packs, knowing everything came to this moment, this night, this day in the English Channel; all the training, the convoy across the Atlantic, the boredom and pubs and women of England. I wrote Helen 121 letters from England alone, crazy letters, mad nutty kid letters, the words just pouring out of me, nothing about the war, nothing about Nazis or democracy or freedom or any of that; just me crazy for her, crazy to be with her, crazy to come back alive, crazy to have kids with her, a house with her, crazy to live a life. With her. And in the LCV, jammed in with Smitty and Ralph and Cappy and Max, that’s all I thought about. If I could think about Helen, her face, her hair, the way she laughed, the smell of her in the park in summer, then I wouldn’t have to think about what was on the other side of the Channel. I dozed and thought about her. I squatted there, and thought about her, I even thought of her as we rose and fell and moved through the waves, and the big guns pounded the shore.

  They came over a rise and looked down at the broad green sward of the meadow. The parks department had erected metal fences for ballplayers, and Drum hated them. Drum wanted the world to stay the same for all of his life.

  “I see those fences,” he said, “I want to blow them up.”

  “They put you in the can for that,” Keegan said, laughing in his wheezy way. “And I’m too old to come visit you.”

  “But do you blame me?”

  “Everything’s changed, Harry. You can stand here and pray for a week, you ain’t gonna see a trolley car, you ain’t gonna go to Ebbets Field, you ain’t gonna go to Luna Park.”

  “I know.”

  I never forgot the noise. The guns of the Texas and the engines of the assault craft, and planes bombing, and guys yelling with megaphones from one boat to another. The sky went from black to gray. Miller, the farm kid from South Carolina, got up and lurched to the side of the LCV and vomited over the side, and the wind blew it all around, and then another guy was puking, and then dozens of them, and next to me Max was stiff against the steel bulkhead, his teeth chattering, and all of us were wondering who would live and who would die. The boat rose on the crest of a wave and I could see LCVs everywhere, and right ahead of us was Omaha Beach.

  They strolled down to the marsh that used to be the Swan Lake. Keegan dropped the newspaper in a trash can. There were ugly chunks of dirty concrete where the boathouse used to be.

  “There was a waterfall over there,” Drum said. “Remember? And paddleboats shaped like swans, and a guy selling Cracker Jacks, and everybody walking across the park to the ball games.”

  “Yeah, and up there, past the waterfall, there was a stream. Cleanest water I ever seen.”

  “Devil’s Cave was next to the stream.”

  “On the left,” Keegan said. “I used to hide there when it rained.”

  He looked at Drum, who was staring out at the dead lake. “It was nice, sit
ting there in the rain.”

  “It was.”

  And then it was day and we were a thousand yards from shore and the coxswain’s eyes were panicky and the lieutenant unsure of where he was, looking at this map, which was soaking wet, and peering out over the top and moving his mouth without making words. I could see the beach, two tanks with smoke pouring out of them, the wind blowing the smoke flat, and a church steeple and then the high dull thump of explosives got sharper, splitting the air. And then I saw tracers coming from the cliffs and rows of bundles on the beach. There were huge poles rising from the water with contact mines hanging from them like pie plates, and huge logs cantilevered out of the sand, and Belgian gates, these huge steel-frame doors leading to nowhere, and we were getting closer, and bullets were caroming off the steel bulkheads, and we were closer, and then I saw the bundles on the beach again, and they weren’t bundles, they were men, the men of the first wave, and the second wave, and the third; and two tanks were burning, and there was no artillery, and we were closer, and the coxswain was screaming at the lieutenant, and then there was a grinding sound, and the engines idled, and then the ramp was lowered, and waves pouring into the LCV, and we were moving into the water. It was over our heads. I saw Cappy go under and Ralph thrashing in the water and then Miller’s head exploded and there was blood and bone and tissue all over us and then Robert shoved him out ahead of us into the water and then it was my turn and I said, Helen. I said, Helen. I said, Helen, Helen, Helen.

  They left the park at Eleventh Avenue.

  “Come on over later, eat something, Harry,” Keegan said. “I don’t like it that you’re living alone. You’re what? Sixty? That’s a young guy nowadays, Harry. You should—”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Charlie.”

  I lay behind two bodies while the machine guns hammered. I could see two battleships and a couple of cruisers, and someone was screaming off to the left, and mortars exploded in the sand, and there was blood on my face and hands and my carbine and none of it was mine. The noise was ferocious, shells screaming in from the Texas, metal and rocks breaking and splintering, rifle fire and machine guns hammering and mortars and my face in the sand, and then I turned and saw two cans racing in near the shore, unloading their five-inchers, and a whumping sound, and more screaming, and one of the guys I was huddled behind was whimpering. And then someone shouted that we better get up or we’d die on the damned beach, and I waited, and then got up, and started to run, and then I was down and I could see planes overhead and my leg burning and when I tried to move I couldn’t and I looked at the sky again and thought, that’s it, it’s over, I won, that’s my war, I thought. That’s it, Helen. I thought, it’s June 6, 1944, 6/6/44, and I just got my ticket home.

  The Trial of Red Dano

  EVERY NIGHT, IN HIS room at the Hotel Lotus, Red Dano would try desperately to sleep. He would lie in the dark on the sagging bed, logy with beer, listening to the murmur of the street. He would shift position, lying first on his left, then on his right. But sleep wouldn’t come.

  There was no television in the room, but pictures moved constantly through his brain. He saw the cell at Dannemora. The yard at Green Haven. He saw a thousand faces, a hundred scenes, the debris of meals, and iron corridors: the jumbled, detailed scrapbook of nine years in prison. Sometimes other pictures forced themselves onto Dano’s private screen, and then he would get up and walk to the window and part the slats of the venetian blinds and stare into the street to verify that he was truly there.

  “Corinne,” he sometimes said aloud, as if uttering the name would grant him forgiveness, and forgiveness would grant him sleep. “I’m sorry, Corinne. I’m very, very, sorry, Corinne.”

  But there was nobody present to forgive him, and he walked around the room, his damp bare feet making a peeling sound on the linoleum, a million miles from Brooklyn. And then, long after midnight, when the Spanish restaurant was closed downstairs, and the street wheeze of the crosstown bus came less often, and even the hookers and junkies had retired for the night, Dano would sleep.

  Working through the day, exhausted from the sleepless nights, he loaded and unloaded trucks for Sherman and Dunlop, and felt old among the hard young kids beside him. He told them nothing about himself, but they seemed to know, without being very interested. “Bet you didn’t work this hard in the can,” the one named Ralph said one morning, as they loaded canned peaches. Dano grunted his agreement, and Ralph then turned his attention to the troubles of the Yankees. The young man’s indifference was to Dano at least one small consolation: after eleven weeks on the outside, he was finding a small place in the city he’d lost for nine long years.

  “I hear you killed someone,” Ralph said when they stopped one Friday evening for beer after a Hunts Point run. “That true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hear you killed your girlfriend.”

  “True.”

  “Amazing. I never met anyone killed anyone. Except guys who were in the army.”

  “It’s nothing to be proud of, kid.”

  “Ah, well, some of them deserve it.”

  “She didn’t.”

  Later that night, Dano went to a movie. Burt Reynolds. Fat sheriffs. Car crashes. Then he stopped in the Oasis, a bar near the hotel. The news was on TV: marines killed in Lebanon, a big shot quits a subway job, a woman jumps off a building. None of it mattered to him, and he nursed a beer in silence. A few stools away, a toothless old drunk mirthlessly repeated a line from a song: “Pack up yer troubles in yer ol’ kit bag an’ smile, smile.…” The drunk stopped, sipped his beer, began again, while the bartender shook his head and watched the ball game. Dano glanced at himself in the mirror: the red hair now gray, face lean and white and pasty; thinking, I’m old. She would be twenty-three forever. Corinne. But I’m walking around with her inside of me still, and I’m old.

  A pudgy, dark-haired woman came in the open door, her hair ruffled by the huge fan, and the bartender looked up.

  “No trouble, Mary,” he said in a kind of warning.

  “What do you mean? I’m sober. I never been in trouble when I’m sober.”

  “No. But then you get drunk, Mary. Then you throw things. Ashtrays…”

  “Shut up, Harry,” the woman said. “Who ast you?”

  “Pack up yer troubles in yer ol’ kit bag an’…”

  Dano wondered if he’d ever be able to sleep with a woman again. On his third night out of prison, he’d tried, with a kid from West Street, but it hadn’t worked. Maybe that’s how I’ll pay, he thought. I’ll just live in a little prison of my own, forever. He glanced past the singing drunk at the pudgy woman, wedged now on a stool, a whiskey in her small, thick-fingered hand. Thirty, maybe. A shiny black dress. Dark stockings, high-heeled maroon shoes. Her face was almost pretty, with liquid brown eyes, a short nose, hair piled in curls, a dirty laugh. Come with me, Dano thought. But he said nothing. Come, we’ll have dinner somewhere and tell each other lies and then go to my room and you can help me sleep. But he did nothing. He glanced at her, then picked up his change and walked into the night.

  He had his key in his pocket and walked through the bright, cramped lobby without stopping at the front desk. He felt very tired as the elevator groaned to the fourth floor. He walked down the corridor to room 411, stopped, unlocked the door, and reached for the light switch.

  There were three of them waiting for him in the room. One was at the window, his foot up on the radiator. Another was in the chair and the third was sitting on the bed. They didn’t move. Dano knew the one at the window, the lean gray man holding the gun.

  “Hello, Charlie,” Dano said.

  Charlie gestured with the gun in an offhand way. “Close the door, Red.”

  “You put on a little weight, Charlie,” Dano said, closing the door behind him. The one on the bed came over and patted him down, shrugged, looked at Charlie, went back to the bed. “Ten pounds?”

  “Ten years, ten pounds,” Charlie said. “Not too bad.”<
br />
  “You still in Brooklyn?”

  “Same street, same house, Red. Except my mother ain’t there. She died, Red.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “She never got over Corinne, Red.”

  “I understand.”

  “You better, Red. You broke her heart with what you did to my sister.”

  “And I paid for it, Charlie.”

  “Not enough.”

  Charlie took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lit one with a cheap lighter, reached out, and offered the pack to Dano. He held the gun casually at his side. Dano took a cigarette from the pack, fighting to control the shaking of his hand.

  “Ma used to wake up in the middle of the night, Red. Shouting Corinne’s name. We’d go to her and she’d be shaking and crying and all and cursin’ you, cursin’ you for ever livin’, for comin’ into Corinne’s life, into our lives, cursin’ your fancy talk and your big-shot smile. Ma never forgot you, Red.”

  Dano leaned in for a light without looking at Charlie’s eyes. Charlie raised the gun and snapped the lighter into flame.

  “She used to go quiet, Ma did, like for days, Red, never sayin’ anything. For weeks, even. When they sent you up, I think she went a little crazy. Fifteen years for her daughter’s life? You can imagine what she was thinkin’, knowin’ you’d be out in nine, ten with good behavior an’ all. It drove her crazy, Red. First Corinne, and then her.”

  The one in the chair shifted, glanced at his watch. “Let’s get it on, Charlie,” he said. “It’s late.”

  “Let him finish his cigarette.”

  Dano took a deep drag on the cigarette. A tune started moving in his head: “Pack up your troubles in your…” He wondered about the full, ripe body of Mary, sitting on her stool a block away, getting ready to throw ashtrays. And his body felt limp, the muscle like liquid, the bone grinding into sand. He took another drag, the cigarette burning down to his fingers now.