The Christmas Kid (3 page)

HEROIN ARRIVED IN THE
neighborhood during Eddie Devlin’s first winter in the navy. He went off to boot camp in Bainbridge on the day after Labor Day and came home to the snows of Christmas and, by then, all his friends were riding the white horse. They came up beside him in the bars, while Christmas music played on the jukeboxes, and offered him junk. When he said no, they moved away and smiled thin, superior smiles and left him to the beer drinkers. A line had been drawn.

“When did this start?” Devlin asked his brother Liam, who was two years younger, in his second year of high school. “Who brought this crap around?”

Liam didn’t know, and Devlin’s mother didn’t know. His father, who was a good cop, might have known, except that Devlin’s father was dead. But others knew who brought heroin around, and they told Eddie Devlin. His name was Joe Tooks, a bone-thin, dark-haired man who drove a white Cadillac as he moved around the neighborhood. One snowy afternoon during Christmas leave, Devlin saw Joe Tooks get out of the Cadillac in front of the Athenia movie house, where the tough guys from the Leopards hung out in the summer. Joe Tooks looked immaculate in a long gray cashmere coat and matching gingerella hat, tapered dark pants, polished pointed shoes. Some of the old tough guys came over, but it wasn’t summer for the Leopards anymore and they would never be tough guys again. Joe Tooks smiled and listened and shook his head. When he drove away, the old summer tough guys looked forlorn and lost.

“Stay away from the crap,” Eddie Devlin told his kid brother on the day the Christmas leave was over. “And stay away from Joe Tooks.”

Eddie Devlin was assigned to Florida, going to school for three months in Jacksonville, then working as a helicopter mechanic in Pensacola. For a while, he boxed on the base team, going from 165 pounds to 182, all of it muscle, and then had to quit. He was too big to box 175-pound light heavyweights and too small for the heavyweights. He worked hard as a mechanic and talked about going to college when he was discharged and becoming an engineer. He listened to Hank Williams now and Webb Pierce instead of Sinatra and Crosby; his best friend was from a town in Kentucky with a total population of 127, less than half of his tenement block in Brooklyn. When he had a summer leave due, he went to Key West instead of New York. The neighborhood seemed a long way away.

“I don’t know anybody there anymore,” he’d say when asked why he never went home. He didn’t talk much about the letters from home, which read like reports from a distant battlefield. Charlie Barrows was dead. Sammie Pilser had died. The body of Danny Collins was found on a rooftop. Coconut was dead, too, and Jimbo Elliott and Frankie Flanagan and Junior Vittorino. There was a plague at home and the plague was called heroin. If the neighborhood was a kind of family, then the family was dying. Eddie Devlin would read the latest letter, shake his head sadly, and turn to the simpler, cleaner world of machines.

Then one December morning he was told to report immediately to the executive officer; there was a phone call from New York. He washed his hands and left the hangar, and as he moved across those tame green lawns, past the drooping date palms and the silent morning barracks, his mind filled with the spiky calligraphic images of fire escapes and gaunt tenements and the faces of the neighborhood. His stomach tightened and coiled; nausea made its move. It’s Liam. Something terrible has happened to Liam.

And he was right.

A cold steady rain was falling in New York when Eddie Devlin arrived at Floyd Bennett Field, after hitching a ride on a navy transport plane. He went straight to the funeral parlor. At the wake, nobody mentioned heroin; there had been too many deaths and too much shame. But Eddie Devlin knew, looking down on his brother’s ravaged face, and his mother knew, trembling among the sweet dying flowers and the ruined candles.

“The poor boy,” his mother said. “The poor little boy.” In the afternoon of his second day home, Eddie Devlin went off to Prospect Park, to look at the place where they’d found Liam’s body. He stood for a long time in a grove of ice-polished trees and knew what he had to do. It began to snow.

They found Joe Tooks two days later, under deep snow in the backyard of his apartment house. He was not pretty to look at. His elbows had been shot off. His left knee was gone. So was the back of his head. Most of the rest of him had been broken in the fall from the roof.

“Someone really did a job on this bum,” one of the cops said, looking up at the faces in the back windows of the surrounding buildings. “I’d say we got about four thousand suspects.”

The cops did their best, as news of the killing spread through the neighborhood like a stain. No, there had been no gunshots heard that night; it was snowing; snow muffles sound. No, there had been no strangers seen in the halls. Nobody knew Joe Tooks and nobody knew why anyone would kill him. It was as if no individual had killed Joe Tooks.

Eddie Devlin stayed at home, talking for long hours with his mother about his father, or gazing at the television set. The girls he used to know had married and moved from the neighborhood to the suburbs. The movie houses offered fare he had already seen at the base in Pensacola. His friends were all dead or strung out on junk. He was reading a book one night when the cops came knocking on his door.

“We’d like to talk to you about Joe Tooks,” the big one said, his coat wet from snow, his eyes weary from life and felony.

“Joe who?”

They sat in the living room, the big weary cop and a small lean cop with quick eyes. They had heard he bought a gun from a certain party in South Brooklyn a few days ago, and could it be possible that the gun was used on Joe Tooks? Not that the cop would blame him, given what happened to his brother, but murder was murder. Eddie Devlin smoked cigarettes, said he didn’t know what they were talking about, glanced at the falling snow. His mother offered the detectives tea. They accepted. They talked about Eddie’s father, a good cop. An hour later, they got up to leave.

“Who do you think killed Joe Tooks?” the weary cop said to Eddie Devlin.

“Everybody,” Eddie Devlin said.

The weary cop lit a cigar. “Yeah, well…see you around, kid. Enjoy the navy.”

The next morning, Eddie Devlin packed his seabag. The emergency leave was over, and it was time to go. He urged his mother to leave the neighborhood, go out to Queens, where her sister lived, or even think about Florida.

“There’s a lot of jobs down there,” he said. “You could work in one of the hospitals. Enjoy the sun.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

“Well, it’s not the same anymore,” he said. “It never will be what it was.”

He said his good-byes, went down through the scabrous wet halls of their tenement, and came out into the bright glare of the snow-packed street. He had to walk three blocks to the subway, which would take him to Penn Station and out of the neighborhood forever. People were already at work, shoveling snow in front of the stores on the avenue, accepting deliveries from trucks, shopping. He started to walk. And then heard the voices of his other family.

“Oh, Eddie,” Mrs. Vittorino said as he passed. “That was a wonderful thing that you did.”

“Thanks, Eddie,” Jimmie Barrows whispered.

“There was nothing else ya coulda done, Eddie Boy,” Bruno Pilser said. “Godspeed.”

Eddie Devlin smiled and said nothing and kept walking steadily until he reached the subway. There was a police car in front of the bakery on the corner. A cop waved. Eddie waved back. And then went down into the station without looking back.

DAVIS PARKED NEAR THE
corner of Gates Avenue and looked behind him at the tenement in the middle of the block. The old red brick was dark with the rain, the building’s somber face relieved by scattered Christmas decorations in the windows. There were no decorations in the windows of the apartment at the top floor right, where his Uncle Roy lived alone. Uncle Roy: the old one, the lost one, the brother of Davis’s mother. It had taken Davis two days, but now he’d tracked him down. The visit would not be pleasant. The only way to do it was quickly. He got out of the car, shielded by an umbrella, locked the door, and hurried through the rain to the building.

“Who is it?” the hoarse voice said from the other side of the door on the top floor.

“Your nephew, Uncle Roy,” he said. “Tyrone Davis.”

“Go away.”

“I gotta talk to you, Uncle Roy. About my mother.”

“I don’t want to talk about her, or about nothin’ else, boy.”

Davis tried the doorknob. Locked. He made a fist and thumped on the door. “Come on, Uncle Roy.…”

“Get lost.”

“She’s dead, Uncle Roy. My mother’s dead.” A pause. “We buried her last week.”

Davis waited while Christmas music drifted up from the floors below. There was movement in the apartment, and then the door opened. God, Davis thought, he’s old. The picture that Davis had grown up with, the picture leaning on the mantelpiece at home, was of a handsome young man in paratrooper jump boots, smiling, confident, bursting with life. This was a wasted, legless, gray-haired man in a wheelchair, staring at him with angry eyes.

“What happened?” the old man said quietly. Davis closed the door behind him, glancing around the small, spare, two-room apartment, with its TV set, bed, and stacked books, and tried to explain to Uncle Roy what had happened to his sister. He told him about the first heart attack, and how full of hope they’d been when she seemed all right for a year, and then how, when she was Christmas shopping the week before on Fulton Street, she’d pitched forward on her face and was gone.

“Damn,” the old man said softly. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“But I wanted you to know something, Uncle Roy,” the younger man said. “She wanted to make it up with you. She wanted to be friends. She wanted you over for a visit this Christmas, and so did my wife, all of us, and all the kids. She wanted that.”

“That never woulda happened,” he said, bitterness suddenly in his tone.

“Maybe not. But that’s what she wanted. She was sorry for what happened, Uncle Roy. Every day of her life. You must know that.”

“She ruined my damned life,” he said. “Her and that damned drunk boyfriend of hers…”

“She didn’t run you over!” Davis shouted. “
He
did!”

“She brung him around! I told her he was no damn good and she wouldn’t hear it! He came around, drunk, lookin’ for trouble, and…”

The old man turned his head, his eyes welling with old angers, and wheeled himself into the second room, where the bed was neatly made. He looked out at the gray rain.

“It was a long time ago, Uncle Roy.”

The old man’s voice was hoarse and distant. “It was yesterday, boy.”

Davis sighed. “Well, we still want you to come over to Christmas dinner, Uncle Roy. Two days from now. My house.”

“Shoot. Just go away, boy.”

Davis walked to the door. “Suit yourself,” he said, angry now. “I’ll see you sometime, Uncle Roy.”

Then Uncle Roy said, “It cold out there?”

“Thirty degrees. They say the rain might turn to snow.”

“Hell, it don’t snow anymore the way it used to, you know. Used to be ten, twelve feet out there. We’d build forts and tunnels, tall as a house. It’d snow for days when I was a boy. Prospect Park’d look like Russia…”

“What happened?”

“Some folks say it was that Panamanian canal. You know, it changed the Gulf Stream and whatnot, and the weather with it. All the way up here, fifty years after the canal opened. Lots of folks blame the atom bomb, too. Who knows.…You want some coffee?”

And so it began. The old man talked about the great stickball games after the war, and the gang fights between the Bishops and Robins, and the music, always the music; the great times he had at jump school in the army and coming home and seeing Max Roach, who was from right there on Gates Avenue, playing at Birdland, and feeling so proud, seeing a tough smart black man playing better than anyone in the world. He talked about women, and came finally to The Woman, the beautiful one, the one he thought was so sweet, the one who left him after the accident. He talked about a lot of things.

“What do you want for Christmas, Uncle Roy?”

“What do I want for Christmas?” he said, and laughed. Then he turned away, and his face seemed oddly younger. “Get me Ben Webster for Christmas. Or Dinah Washington. Or Willie Mays. Yeah. Let me watch Jackie take a lead off third with the Duke at bat and Campy in the on-deck circle.…” His face was lost in reverie now. The light in the apartment was grayer. “I want to stand at the bar of the Baby Grand and look at the pretty girls come in. I want to go to the Apollo on a Friday night. I want the Cardinals to come to Ebbets Field in September, Musial and Slaughter, all of ’em, and we win three out of four, and then we go for the goddamn Yankees. I want to go down to Bay Twelve and eat dogs at Nathan’s and find a pretty girl and swim out to the third barrel and tell her we can keep goin’, all the way to Spain. I wanna stay up late with Nat Cole on the jukebox and eat eggs in Monroe’s.…”

The old man paused. “Or jump out of an airplane. Or run in Prospect Park, in the morning, you know? When it’s hot and the grass is wet and there’s like a fog there. I’d like to see California. Or Florida. I’d like my woman to come up them stairs and tell me she’s sorry and she’s stayin’ for the last innings, know what I mean? I want to walk into the old Garden on a Friday night, with my friends, all of us laughin’, and excitement in the air, just standin’ in the lobby, where the statue of Joe Gans was, and we go in, and the place is packed and it’s Robinson, it’s Robinson, it’s always Ray Robinson. That’s what I want for Christmas.…”

Then he simply ran down. The words wouldn’t come. He stared off at the rain, his hands gripping the arms of the wheelchair. Davis came over, put an arm around the old man’s shoulders, and squeezed his chilly brown hand.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Roy. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Ah, the hell with it.”

“Want another coffee?”

“No. No more coffee. I’d never get to sleep later.”

He moved the chair away from Davis and looked down at the street. He was quiet for a long moment.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said finally. “I truly am.” He fumbled in his pocket, brought out a pack of Viceroys, lit one. “Listen…I mean, how’d you get me over your house, anyway?”

Davis said, “I’ve got two teenager sons, Uncle Roy. Big strong kids. Between us, we’d get you down the stairs, and the chair, too, get you back up, too. No sweat.”

The old man considered this. Davis could hear Christmas music drifting from the hall again, and down in the street he saw two kids lugging a tree through the rain. Then the old man said, “Ah, the hell with it. One thing I can’t stand is bein’ a bother to someone. Forget it, boy. I can’t stand pity, you know what I’m sayin’ to you? I don’t want nobody feelin’ sorry for poor ol’ Uncle Roy. Forget it.”

Davis said, “Okay, we’ll pick you up Christmas Day, at eleven. Case closed.”

“No, wait a minute, I don’t want to—”

“You got no choice, Uncle Roy. We’re comin’ to get you.”

Davis started for the door, and the old man turned in the wheelchair, the cigarette burning between his fingers.

“I ain’t gettin’ dressed up,” he said. “Not for nothin’.”

“Okay with me.”

Davis was at the door now. The old man was silent.

“What do you really want for Christmas, Uncle Roy?”

The old man’s eyes blinked a few times, and he ran a hand on the hidden stump of a ruined leg.

“Nineteen forty-nine,” he said. “Nineteen forty-nine.”