The Christmas Kid (7 page)

FACTS MCCARTHY KNEW EVERYTHING.
He’d meet you in the street and ask which continent was the largest, and you’d hesitate, and he’d say triumphantly: “Asia! It’s seventeen million, one hundred and twenty-nine thousand square miles, twenty-nine point seven percent of the world’s land. You could look it up.” You’d light a cigarette and he’d tell you that the geographical center of the United States was near Castle Rock, South Dakota, and Gaborone was the capital of Botswana, and 116,708 Americans died in World War I.

“Who led the American League in home runs in 1911?” he asked one night in Farrell’s Bar in Brooklyn. “Don’t even try to answer. It was Franklin ‘Home Run’ Baker. But here’s the beauty part; how many did he hit?”

“Er…uh…thirty?”

“Eleven!” Facts McCarthy shouted. “He led the whole league with
eleven
home runs! Can you imagine? Look it up!”

Information was a kind of sickness for Facts, and the infection began in the sixth grade. That was when he discovered he could memorize entire chapters of geography books, most of the Latin Mass, great swatches of the Baltimore Catechism. In the Catholic school that Facts and I attended, such prodigies of memory were always rewarded, and Facts became an A student. As an A student, he was a kind of star, acknowledged to be superior, his memory overwhelming certain weaknesses in the essay form. Nobody had a happier childhood.

But later, when Facts left school and ventured into the real world, he swiftly discovered that his talent was not so universally acknowledged. The world did not, after all, usually give out grades; the world was more of an essay than a multiple-choice exercise, and Facts did not do well in the face of the world’s chilly indifference. Eventually he made his accommodation. He worked in the post office, and, in his spare time, devoted himself anew to the acquiring of information.

“Who ran with Tom Dewey on the 1944 Republican ticket?” he’d ask. “John W. Bricker! One of the all-time greats!”

The information would come in a great flow. The name of Richard Nixon’s wife is really Thelma; she picked up “Pat” from her father. The most common name in the United States is Smith, which belongs to 2,382,509 people, followed by Johnson. The birthstone for August is peridot. Savonarola was burned at the stake in Florence in 1498, the same year that Leonardo da Vinci finished
The Last Supper
in Milan. Babe Ruth was given the most bases on balls in major league history, 2,056 over twenty-two seasons, and the planet Jupiter has sixteen moons. Facts was almost always right, although a lot of bars had to buy almanacs and the
Guinness Book of Records
just to be certain. But as he moved from his twenties to his thirties and then into his forties, the mass of information became denser and more impacted. Running into Facts McCarthy was like running into a black hole.

Naturally, he lived alone.

“Women just don’t understand an intellectual like me,” Facts said modestly one winter night. “Women are emotional, intuitive, know what I mean? They don’t understand facts. They never let facts get in the way of their opinions. I mean, they’re nice to
look
at. But, hey, I’m not
missing
anything.”

This could be dismissed as a carryover into adult life of his weakness in the essay form. But it was more than that. The truth was that no woman would have him. In a bar it was easy to put up with a man who said hello by asking you the name of the largest glacier in the world. You can always leave a bar. But it isn’t so easy to leave a marriage.

And there was the added impediment of the Facts McCarthy Memorial Library. In the four-room flat that Facts kept after his mother died, every surface was covered with sources of information: all editions of every almanac, three different sets of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
(marked with yellow markers), an almost complete set of
National Geographic,
complete runs of
Facts on File
and
Current Biography,
sports, science, business and political yearbooks, and almost eight thousand other books, not one of which was a novel.

“Being me,” said Facts McCarthy, “is a full-time occupation.”

And then Mercedes Rodriguez moved into the flat downstairs with her widowed mother. Mercedes was a twenty-two-year-old blonde from the Dominican Republic, and when Facts saw her that first day, unloading a Chevy filled with household goods, he thought he had never seen anyone more beautiful. When he should have been studying the 1963
Information Please Almanac,
he found himself watching her walk up the block to the grocery store. He mooned over her. He sighed a lot. In the bars he was even silent. And then he decided it was time to act. He had to talk to her, and one day, in the vestibule, they found themselves facing each other.

“Hi,” Facts said, with his great gift for small talk. “Do you know how many books there are in the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore?”

“What?”

“In 1978, there were two million, three hundred and seventy-five thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one. You could look it up.”

“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.”

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, sitting 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.