The Christmas Kid (9 page)

ONE MORNING THAT SPRING,
Dwight Roberts first saw the horn man. Dwight and his mother were going down the stairs of the house on Gates Avenue, he to school and she to work, and the horn man was coming up. He was a large man, with hooded eyes that made him look Asian, tan skin, a wrinkled blue suit, and dirty black-and-white shoes. He had a cheap canvas suitcase in one hand and the horn, in a scuffed black case, in the other. He was wheezing.

“’Scuse me,” he said in an exhausted voice. “Where’s 4D at?”

“Keep climbin’,” said Dwight’s mother. “It’s in the back, right over us.” She paused. “You lookin’ for Jimmy?”

“He moved,” the horn man said. “Went south.”

The man paused, as if gathering strength, and resumed the climb.

That evening they were having dinner, Dwight and his mother and his two little sisters, and first they heard the man walking, his tread heavy on their ceiling, and then the sound of water running. And then, suddenly, abruptly, they heard music. The windows were open to the warm spring air, and first there was a series of incredibly quick notes, up and down the scale, glistening, running, and then a shift into a beautiful, clear, lyrical song—a complaint, a sigh, a lament. Dwight Roberts had never heard anything like it before in his life.

“Just what I thought,” Dwight’s mother said. “A musician. Now, you stay away from him, Dwight, boy, you hear? You stay away from that horn man.”

“But why, Momma?” Dwight asked.

“Cuz he be playin’ the devil’s music.”

The horn man finished after twenty minutes, and in a while, they heard him thumping down the stairs into the night. The next day was Saturday, and in the spring morning, Dwight was reading a comic book on the stoop when a taxicab pulled up and the horn man got out. He looked up at the building and said to Dwight: “Need an elevator here. This ain’t human, man.”

And hurried up the stoop.

On Sunday mornings, Dwight and his mother and sisters always dressed for church. This was the most important day of Dwight’s mother’s life, the day she prayed for everybody: her mother, and President Truman, and the children, and Joe Louis, and Clark Gable, and even Dwight’s father, who’d gone out for a bottle of milk one night during the war and had never come back. On Sundays, starch cut Dwight’s neck; his sisters smelled like soap; his mother wore her blue hat with the white veil. Today was Sunday, and Dwight’s neck hurt.

When they came out onto the stoop on Gates Avenue, the biggest car in the world pulled up to the curb. It was all shiny and black. A man with a cap was driving. The door opened and the horn man got out, and waved good-bye to a white woman. A white woman. The horn man looked bleary and surprised. He put the horn down.

“Where the hell I’m at?” he asked as the limousine pulled away.

“Brooklyn,” Dwight’s mother said sharply. “Outside the house you’re stayin’ at.” A pause. “On Sunday. The Lord’s Day.”

“Well, abide by me, Momma,” the horn man said, smiling a big, wonderful smile. “And hey! Lay a little prayer on me, would ya, Momma? Like a good Baptist.”

“I don’t even know your name,” Dwight’s mother said icily. The horn man lofted the scuffed black case.

“Charlie Chan,” he said, bowing formally at the waist, and then hurrying up the stoop. Dwight had never seen his mother look the way she looked at that moment.

The horn man did not go out that night, or the night after that, and, at dinner, Dwight wondered out loud if the man was all right. Dwight’s mother said he was probably worn out from sinning. Then Dwight said it would be Christian to bring the man some soup, and Dwight’s mother was trapped. The boy brought the bowl of soup upstairs, with a plate over the top to keep it from spilling. Then he heard the horn: the door to the roof was open and Dwight followed the sound. The man was standing on the roof in a gray bathrobe and street shoes, his eyes closed, playing his glistening horn for the trees and the backyards and the birds of Brooklyn.

Dwight waited there, mysteriously chilled by the music, until the horn man finished. Then the man opened his eyes and looked at the boy and smiled. “What you got there, man? Oh, hey, chicken noodle! That for me? Chickendamnnoodle! The best! Damn!”

He laid the horn against a chimney and took the bowl in both hands and drank greedily. Dwight offered him a spoon; he ignored it, and shoved the final noodle into his mouth with his fingers. Then he saw Dwight looking at the horn. “Go ahead, man. Give it a try.”

Dwight lifted the horn, feeling the chill enter him again, and blew into it. Nothing happened. The man showed him how to hold it, where to put his fingers, how to breathe, and that evening on the roof on Gates Avenue, it began. He hummed a tune in bed. Over and over. A tune he learned from Charlie Chan. At the end of the week, the eleven-year-old boy could play “London Bridge” on this thing called an alto saxophone. He went up to the roof every day. The horn man was his teacher. The boy added “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” They met each evening on the roof, and played together for an hour, the boy bringing soup, the man full of music. After their session, the man went to work, way over in New York. Dwight’s mother began to include the man in her prayers. And Dwight told everybody he was going to be a musician just like Charlie Chan. Everyone except his mother.

One afternoon, after playing stickball with his friends, he hurried to the family apartment. The kitchen window was open to the summer. His mother was beside it, listening to the music of the horn man drifting down from the roof. She was very still, her face lost in melancholy. Then she heard Dwight and turned.

“Jus’ takin’ a break, son,” she said with a chuckle. “Need something to eat?”

“No, Momma. I gotta go back. Just, you know—”

He darted into the bathroom, closed the door. When he returned, he took a deep breath.

“Momma, I wanna tell you something,” he said. “I want to be a musician. Just like Charlie Chan.”

“No, no, no,” Dwight’s mother protested. “You’re gonna be a lawyer! A doctor! No musicians! Just look at that man.
He
plays. He plays
real
good. Sometimes, he plays…beautiful. And where’s he livin’? Right here with
us
! I don’t want you endin’ up where you started, Dwight Roberts!”

But Dwight persisted. He took a summer job at a grocery store a few blocks away, saving money for his own Selmer. He found a radio station that played jazz. He learned sixteen bars of “April in Paris.” One evening, he even told Charlie Chan he wanted to be a musician.

“Now, hold on, man,” Charlie Chan said. “You know what you’re saying? You know what it
means,
man? It means you gonna go to
school,
gotta learn to
read,
gotta learn harmony and composition. Not just play. You gotta
create,
man. You gotta know
everything
. Louis Armstrong, Stravinsky, Mahler, Bessie Smith,
everything,
man. You gotta see if you got it
here,
” he said, tapping his heart, “even more than up
here,
” he added, tapping his head. “You gotta have the other thing, too. You gotta have…I dunno, man. It’s mysterious. It ain’t got a name. Max got it. Dizzy got it. I got it. It don’t have a name. But you gotta
have
it, man. You gotta have it.” He looked sad. “It ain’t easy, man.”

The next day, while he was working at the grocery store, Dwight Roberts heard the sound of the fire engines. They were screaming up Gates Avenue. Dwight went out to look, and saw in the distance that smoke was pouring from his own house. He ran all the way. The street was a wilderness of hoses, engines, a pumper, three police cars. Kids were clambering on the apparatus or watching from across the street. Then he saw his mother against the fence, shaking and sobbing. The horn man was beside her, his arm on her shoulder.

“You be quiet now,” he was saying to her in a crooning, singsong voice. “You jus’ be calm, you jus’ be quiet.…”

And Dwight ran over and heard the story, about the fire in the kitchen, and his sisters screaming, and the wall of flame, and how the horn man was suddenly coming through the rooms, a blanket over him, grabbing kids, shoving his mother into the hall, the great large man knocking over furniture, shouting for them to get low, and then banging on all the doors on the way to the street. The apartment was ruined. But they were alive. And now the horn man was asking about the subway, his clothes gone, his horn in the rubble. He kissed Dwight’s mother, hugged Dwight, and started walking. Dwight shouted after him: “Where you goin’, Charlie Chan?”

“I’ll be around,” the horn man said, and walked out of the neighborhood, and out of Dwight’s life. Dwight turned to his mother, who was sobbing and praying, waiting for a chance to inspect the ruins. She glanced at the corner where Charlie Chan had disappeared.

“He was just like a bird,” she said. “Come here in the spring, and then flown away. Just like a bird.”

MISS FLANAGAN WAS FORTY-ONE
when Mr. Macias came knocking at her door. He had a newspaper under his arm and a tentative look in his eyes. Did she have a room to rent? The words stumbled, then broke; his English was not good. But she understood. Yes, she had a room to rent.

“Well,” he said. “I can see it, please?”

She looked down at him; he was a small man with a neat mustache, a cheap brown suit wrinkling at elbow and knee, black-and-white shoes. On the stoop beside him there was a battered suitcase. His eyes convinced her to let him into the hall; they were filled with rejection, and on that subject Miss Flanagan was an expert.

“Yes, of course.”

The room was at the back of the parlor floor, directly off the stoop. When her parents were alive, they’d used it for a bedroom; her mother liked the view of the garden, the fireplace in winter, the parquet floors, the elegant molding that was popular when the old craftsmen built the brownstones in this part of Brooklyn. But Miss Flanagan could never sleep there; she felt as if she were usurping part of her own past. It was all right for strangers; it simply wasn’t for her. When she opened the oak door, with its solid-brass fittings, and showed the room to Mr. Macias, he issued an involuntary little breath of surprise.

“Oh,” he said. “Is so beautiful.”

“Yes,” Miss Flanagan said. “It is beautiful.”

He ran a hand over the polished wood mantelpiece. He gazed through the windows at the garden, white with winter, the tree as precise as calligraphy. He turned to her, and his mouth trembled, and rejection washed through his eyes.

“How much it is?” he said.

She thought: a Hispanic man, the neighbors will be alarmed, I don’t know him, I don’t know where he came from, I don’t know what he might have done in his past. And then: to hell with it. He has sad eyes.

“Thirty dollars a week,” she said.

The sum must have been enormous to him. He inhaled, placed a hand in his pocket, took out some bills, and handed three tens to Miss Flanagan. He gazed again around the large, bright room and said: “I can move in now?”

And so it began. Every morning at nine, Mr. Macias left for work; every evening he arrived back at precisely seven; every Friday morning, the envelope with thirty dollars in cash was in her mailbox. Gradually, he bought himself new shoes, another suit, and a guitar. And the guitar changed everything. Miss Flanagan would lie alone at night in her bed on the third floor, trying to read or watch television, tired from the day’s work at the hospital, and she would hear Mr. Macias playing softly and singing in his own language.

She didn’t understand the words, but she knew their meaning. They were full of heartbreak, loss, exile; and she remembered her father when she was a little girl, when the uncles would come over for dinner, and the house would be loud with laughter and argument, and then, as night arrived, the mood would change, and her father would stand at the kitchen table and sing the old ballads of a lost home across a sea, of heartbreak, of exile.

She met him in the hall one Saturday morning and said: “Oh, Mr. Macias, you sing so beautifully.”

“Oh, sank you, sank you,” he said, and his eyes sparkled, and he smiled for the first time since coming to the room on the parlor floor. Miss Flanagan thought he had the most wonderful smile. “I’d love to hear you sing more,” she said. “And maybe you could teach me the words?”

“Oh, yes, okay. And maybe you teach me English better?”

Spring came and then the summer. She began to cook for Mr. Macias, to anticipate his arrivals, to sit with him at the kitchen table after dinner, and show him the meaning of the words in the newspapers, and give him books, and correct his pronunciation; and then he would sing the songs of Mexico. She loved a song called “La Cama de Piedra,” about a man who lies on a bed of stone, awaiting execution; she was moved by a song called “¿Dónde Estás?” and its line that said “Yo, sin tu amor, yo soy nada,” which meant “I, without your love, I am nothing.” He explained where Guadalajara was, Jalisco, and where the revolutionary heroes fought the battles mentioned in some of the songs, and he smiled his wonderful smile and she thought, Yo, sin tu amor, yo soy nada.

One night he took her to Roseland, and Miss Flanagan, who had considered herself too plain for most men, who was heavier than the fashion, whose clumsiness was a family joke when her parents were alive, Miss Flanagan began to dance. Mr. Macias showed her the simplest steps, in the shadows along the wall, and then led her into the crowd while a Latin band played a bolero. She was almost a foot taller than Mr. Macias, but he guided her firmly, and calmed her trembling, and held her closer than a man had held her in almost twenty years. That night, she moved to the room on the parlor floor.

There was no talk of marriage. That idea had died in her long ago; she would be what they used to call an old maid, she was certain of that. Certainly she could never propose such a thing to Mr. Macias. If she did, he might panic, flee; he might even have some buried secret, some wife in the old country, someone in his life whose existence Miss Flanagan didn’t want to know about. If Mr. Macias did not raise the question, then neither would Miss Flanagan. She would just enjoy this time for as long as it might last, this sudden, rich, and lovely interlude, this delayed portion of her youth, this gift.

Of course, it was technically a sin. She knew that. And yet Miss Flanagan believed in a merciful God: how could something so sweet, so tender, so human, be an offense against a just and merciful God? When her mother died, and her father lay sick and old for so many years, she had surrendered all hope of union with a man. She had sacrificed, denied herself, endured the long penance of loneliness. Did that mean she would go to her grave on the cama de piedra? Yes, she thought, I am a sinner, and I am now reduced to going to confession in different churches; but I am here, alive, on this earth, and I want Mr. Macias. Yo, sin tu amor, yo soy nada.

Then one morning, as she left for the hospital, she saw two men sitting in a blue Plymouth parked beside a fire hydrant. They seemed to be watching her, and Miss Flanagan was suddenly alarmed. She walked to the corner to take the bus, and looked back, and saw the blue Plymouth pull away. She stepped into a telephone booth and called her own number. Mr. Macias answered.

“There were two men in a car watching the house,” she said. “Do you think they were looking for you?”

He hesitated. “Why? Why would they look for me?”

“I—I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought—”

“Don’t worry. Please don’t worry.”

But all day at the hospital, she worried. And when she came home that night, and started to cook a meal, and realized swiftly that Mr. Macias was late, panic rushed through her. Suppose he never came back? Suppose he was afraid, scared of the police, an illegal alien who would be arrested and shipped home to Mexico? She tried to imagine the house with Mr. Macias gone, and she began to weep.

Then she heard the key turning in the gate beneath the stoop and the double doors opening, and when Mr. Macias entered, smiling, holding a large bunch of roses, she ran to him and wrapped her arms around him and held him to her generous breasts and thumping heart and wept some more.

A week later, at seven o’clock on a Friday morning, the doorbell rang. It was as she knew it would be. She pulled on a robe and walked along the parlor floor. Through the cut-glass inner doors, she could see the two men from the Plymouth. One was tall and blond, the other shorter, balding, smoking a cigarette. They each wore raincoats and bored expressions. She opened the door.

“Good morning,” the blond one said. He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet and showed her a plastic card that bore his picture.

“We’re here to pick up a man named Macias,” the shorter one said, flipping his cigarette into the street.

“Can I help you?” she said, and smiled. “I’m Mrs. Macias.”