The Christmas Kid (17 page)

AT FORTY-EIGHT, SONNY MARINO
lived with his wife and three daughters in a small brick house up the block from the Store. He wanted to live there until the end of his life. In a way, the Store
was
his life. For more than twenty years, starting in the Depression, the Store was his father’s, and from his first moments of consciousness, Sonny lived in that plump, full world of tomatoes, cantaloupes, lettuce, potatoes, and garlic, inhaling the smell of fresh basil, or summertime apples, or ripe onions. When his father dropped dead one morning, unloading a crate of watermelons, the Store went to Sonny. There was no real choice: his mother was long dead, his brother, Frankie, had been killed at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. If Sonny didn’t take over the Store, it would close.

So at nineteen, Sonny moved into the world of men. This was no easy matter, for Sonny was a leader of the Cavaliers. With Nit-Nat, Wimpy, Stark, and Midnight, he was one of the toughest street fighters in that part of Brooklyn, a defender of the holy neighborhood turf against the incursions of marauding vandals. When he was in what he called the hitter bag, he could beat you with his hands, cripple you in a wrestling match, or confront your ball bats with an iron pipe. In that neighborhood, his ferocity was legendary; so was his ability to absorb punishment.

“That’s it, guys,” he announced at his father’s wake when the other Cavaliers came to console him. “I’m giving up the hitter bag. I got a business to run.”

The Cavaliers did not long survive his retirement. Some went into the army, a few joined the police department, five fell to heroin. Most of the others married and moved away. And after a decade, Sonny Marino realized he was the last Cavalier left in the neighborhood. When he showed pictures of himself and the others to his daughters, they giggled at his “Duck’s Ass” hairdo, his tight, pegged pants, his T-shirts rolled high on the shoulders with a cigarette pack tucked in the roll. They didn’t understand how people could dress that way or do the things Sonny said they used to do when they were young and tough, feared and respected.

“Things aren’t like that anymore, Dad,” the oldest one, Rose, said to him. “The world is different now.”

“I hope you’re right,” he said. “Go to college. Get a career. Maybe you’re right. I hope so.”

Occasionally, one of the old Cavaliers would show up in the neighborhood and Sonny Marino would be joyful. Nit-Nat saw his mother once a year, on her birthday. Stark drove in from Sayville with his kids to eat pasta at Monte’s on Fifth Avenue. Midnight would come up out of the subway alone and pop a beer at the Store on his way to his sister’s house. They always talked about old times, of course, the way soldiers do who once have shared danger and have survived. Sonny’s wife, Maria, who was much younger than the Cavaliers, was amused; the girls always giggled. Sonny would turn to Nit-Nat or Stark and laugh at himself and say, “Hey, whatta they know?”

The neighborhood gradually changed, and so did Sonny. He had less hair and more paunch. He hired a Puerto Rican kid who could speak to some of the new customers. He learned a little Spanish himself. He added fresh
yames
to the vegetable section, cans of Goya beans to the shelves. He realized that the new people were not any different from his father’s people, struggling with a language that was not their own, scrambling to make a living and raise their kids in a hard world.

Then a new gang began to form. They called themselves the Savage Lords and wore shiny black jackets and dungarees studded with metal. There were only a half dozen of them at first, but through one long, snowy winter they grew in numbers, and by summer there seemed to be fifty of them, maybe more. Most were Latinos, but there were some Irish in the gang, too, and the last of the Italians, and when Sonny Marino saw them moving together along the avenue, like some black-jacketed army, he felt uneasy, even afraid.

But he couldn’t really judge them. He would look at the Savage Lords walking in their own version of the diddy bop, the weight heavy on one foot, the second swinging along loosely behind it, and he remembered the thrill of old summer evenings, the sense of power that came from being part of a large, hard group like the Cavaliers, afraid of nothing, makers of fear themselves. But looking at these young men, Sonny Marino, out of shape and growing older, couldn’t rid himself of his fear. The Cavaliers were long gone, but this was the new guerrilla army of the neighborhood, and he knew that eventually he would have to deal with them. And he was alone.

“Did you hear what happened?” his wife said one morning. “They took over a building over Twel’ Street. One of the abandoned buildings. They’re movin’ into the place. It’s their headquarters, they say.”

Almost every day after that, she would ask the same question of Sonny Marino: Did you hear what happened? The Savage Lords had wrecked Canavan’s Bar, because the owner wouldn’t serve them. They’d broken the doors off the emergency exit in the subway because the man in the token booth asked them to pay. A neighbor told them one night to stop playing disco music at two in the morning, and they set his car on fire. Harry Perez came into the Store, heartsick and desperate, to say that his daughter was forced to live with them in the headquarters, and when he came to take her home, they threw him down the stairs. The cops came around and made them move along in the evenings, but the cops couldn’t watch them all the time.

In midsummer, Sonny Marino first heard about the “Lords Insurance Company.” They were working their way through the neighborhood, explaining to the shopkeepers that for fifty dollars a month they could guarantee the safety of a store. “You know what that is?” Sonny Marino told his wife. “That’s an old-fashioned protection racket.” She looked at him gravely and said, “What are you gonna do about it? Go to the cops?” Sonny shrugged. He wasn’t raised to call the cops.

The young insurance men came to the Store late one Saturday. Three of them: two were large, beefy, muscle-bound; the third was a short wiry kid with glasses. All wore black jackets. The short kid did the talking. “So that’s the deal,” he said. “Fifty a month and you’re safe.”

“Get out of here,” Sonny Marino said, in a low, hard voice.

“Whajoo say?” the short kid said.

“I said get outta here before I break your head.”

The short kid’s face went blank, and then he turned on his heel and walked out, with the two muscle boys behind him. The short kid helped himself to an orange.

That night, it started. Three shots were fired from a car and shattered Sonny’s plate-glass windows. A carpenter replaced the glass with plywood boards, and they came by again and shot out the glass pane in the door.  Milk deliveries were smashed; stink bombs hurled into the Store; a fire started in the cellar. Sonny broke his own code and called the cops; they explained about budget cuts, undermanning, asked him to press charges if he saw the kids who did it. After the cops left, Sonny went out to his car and found all four tires slashed. At the end of ten days, he got a phone call at home. A young voice asked: “You ready for a deal?” Sonny Marino screamed something into the phone about the young man’s mother and hung up. That night, his daughter’s boyfriend dropped her off, and then was grabbed on the stoop. They took him to the park, stripped him, tied him to a tree, and painted him with glossy red paint. Next time, they told him, they’d set him on fire.

His daughter cried, his wife talked about closing the Store and moving to Florida. But Sonny Marino said nothing. When they had all gone to bed, he sat alone in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. And then he knew what he had to do. He reached for the phone.

Early on Sunday morning, before the rising of the sun, strange cars started appearing in the neighborhood. They had come from all over, from Long Island and Jersey, from the far reaches of Brooklyn, from the upper Bronx. One was driven all the way from Philadelphia. The drivers and passengers were all middle-aged. They parked on the empty streets around the factories, and when they got out, they were hefting baseball bats, tire irons, slabs of metal. They embraced each other, patted their stomachs, laughed, smoked cigarettes.

Then, with Sonny Marino in front, the old Cavaliers started moving through the dark, empty streets. Ahead of them was the headquarters of the Savage Lords, the old tenement where the young hard guys slept. On the top floor, a light burned. In front of the building, Sonny looked at the others, at Nit-Nat, Stark, Wimpy, and the rest, feeling the old summer thrill, then turned and kicked in the front door. The Cavaliers came rushing in, and Sonny shouted up the stairs: “All right, tough guys! Let’s rumble!”

The hospitals in that neighborhood had never before seen so many damaged people on Sunday morning. The fire department said later they could not save the old tenement and let it burn out. Sonny Marino opened for business as usual on Monday morning, his hands hurting, his body aching, a bandage across his left eyebrow. His wife murmured that maybe they should still sell and move to Florida. “Are you kidding?” Sonny Marino said. “I’m gonna live here the rest of my life.”

WHEN LIAM DEVLIN TRUDGED
to the door of Rattigan’s that Saturday night, the windows were opaque with steam. It was after midnight, and he was exhausted from a long shift delivering the fat Sunday newspapers. He hesitated for a moment. He could go and eat eggs at the Greek’s, read the paper, then just collapse in bed. But he wanted a beer. One or two, really, and a little television, maybe some music on the jukebox. He opened the door. There were only three customers in the dark, warm saloon, but right away, Liam Devlin wanted to leave. The reason was simple. Jack Parker was drinking at the bar.

“That Parker is a real magician,” the bartender, George Loftus, once said. “He opens his mouth and he makes customers disappear.”

On this night, Jack Parker was drinking alone, facing the beer taps, hatless, a thick mug in his fat pink hand. He didn’t look up when Devlin came in. This was itself unusual. Jack Parker was a cop, and a bully; the bullying was done entirely with words, with wisecracks and scathing remarks. But when he had goaded people to the point where they wanted to break his face, Jack Parker retreated behind the gun. He never used it. But everyone knew he carried it.

“Fleischmann’s and beer,” Devlin said softly to Loftus. “You been busy?”

“Look around,” the bartender said. “It’s like the plague broke out here.”

As always, Devlin started reading the Sunday
News
from back to front, absorbed in the stories from spring training. He sipped his Fleischmann’s, and drank half the beer. Two old men drank in silence at the far end of the bar. The wind made a whining sound outside. Then Parker spoke.

“Who are you?” he said.

Devlin turned and saw Parker looking at him, a wet smile on his loose, florid face.

“Nobody,” Devlin said. “I just walked in that door.”

“George, you let anyone in here these days.”

Loftus said, “Don’t start, Jack.”

“I mean, lookit this guy,” Parker went on. “Those pants haven’t had a crease in them since the Dodgers left Brooklyn. The jacket’s like something outta Catholic Charities. And the shoes…”

“We can’t all be fashion plates,” Devlin said.

“And the hair,” Parker said. “You let your hair grow down to your belt, I bet. Like Deanna Durbin.”

Devlin said, “What are you? Fred Astaire?”

Loftus rubbed the back of his neck and leaned forward on the bar. “Hey, we don’t need this, Jack. You understand? We don’t need this. So Jack, leave the kid alone. And Liam, read your paper.”

Parker downed his beer, nodded to Loftus to bring him another, and then stared for a while at himself in the part of the mirror visible behind the whiskey bottles. Devlin walked over to the jukebox. There were Irish songs by the Wolfe Tones and the Barleycorn, some tunes by Sinatra and Johnny Mathis, and a few rock-and-roll songs. He played “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. The first chords boomed through the bar, and Parker spun around.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Shut that off.”

Devlin ignored him and walked to the bar. He said to Loftus, “Hit me again.”

“I said I don’t want to hear that crap!” Parker said. “Turn it off!”

“He put a quarter in, Jack,” Loftus said. “He can play the jukebox he wants to.”

“I’m tryin’ to
think!
”

“I could tell,” Devlin said. “You got a real pained expression on your face.”

“You wise bastid!”

He whirled, his eyes wild, while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards drove the Stones.

There was a gun in Parker’s hand.

“You want noise?” Parker said. “I’ll give you noise.”

He walked over, very casually, and shot at the jukebox. The glass face shattered, the record scraped and died. Then he fired again. The shots were very loud. At the far end of the bar, the two old men looked up. Parker turned to Devlin.

“There,” he said. “How do you like that?”

Devlin didn’t answer. His hand trembled.

“You want rock and roll? I’ll give you rock and roll,” Parker said, and walked back to the bar. “Didn’t you read in the paper? Rock and roll is dead.” He placed the gun beside his beer mug. Loftus gave Devlin a look that said: Don’t move. Then he went to Parker.

“That’s enough, Jack,” Loftus said. “I think you oughta head home.”

“Home? What home? What do I got at home? What’s that mean,
home?
Answer me that, George.”

“You got a wife at home,” Loftus said. “A nice lady. You got kids. You got a nice warm bed. Go home.”

“I had a wife,” Parker said. He turned to Devlin again. “What are you lookin’ at? This is none of your business, shmuck.”

Devlin came at him in a rush, reaching for the gun, hurtling at the older man as quickly as he could. It was not quick enough. Parker grabbed the gun, spun, and slammed Devlin on the skull with the butt. Devlin fell, and then Parker kicked him. The two old men headed for the door.

“Stop right there!” Parker said. “You’re not going nowhere.”

They shuffled back to the bar. Devlin pulled himself up, climbing a stool rung by rung, as if it were a ladder. Parker faced him, an elbow on the bar. The gun was beside the beer mug.

“All right, punk. Now, I want an apology.”

Devlin touched his head, and his fingertips came away red. “Apology for what?”

“For livin’, punk.”

“Go to hell,” Devlin said.

Parker picked up the gun, his eyes wild now, and fired a shot into the ceiling.

“You better apologize, or you’re a dead man.”

Loftus leaned in. “Jack—”

Parker whirled and backhanded the smaller man.

“You shut up, George. This is between me and him. Me and this punk!”

Loftus said, “You’re gonna get in trouble, Jack.”

“Oh, yeah?” He waved the gun as if it were a toy. “Trouble, huh?
Trouble!?!
”

He fired at the TV set and missed. Then he stared at the mirror and the bottles, extended his arm, and fired two more shots. The mirror smashed and fell in huge jagged shards. Bottles broke, tipped over, bounced on the floor. The noise was ferocious. And then the bar was silent.

“Trouble,” Parker said to himself in a flat voice. “Trouble.”

His eyes were now blank. His body sagged. The gun hand hung straight at his side. He looked at Devlin as if he’d never seen him before, and then turned around and walked to the door, shoving the gun into his side pocket, and went out into the night.

“What the hell…” Loftus said. The two old men hurried to the door and left without a word. Loftus looked at the smashed mirror and started straightening the bottles.

“That guy should be in a nuthouse,” Loftus said.

“Give me a dime, George,” Devlin said. “That bum shouldn’t be walking the streets with a gun.”

“I don’t have any dimes,” Loftus said. “I don’t have any nickels, either. The change is all gone. Go home, Liam.”

Devlin went out. The wind was driving harder off the harbor. He went home for a while and then decided he couldn’t sleep while Parker roamed the streets. He dressed again and walked to the precinct house, ten blocks away, his face frozen, his feet without feeling, the soft swollen patch on his skull beginning to throb. He hurried up the steps of the precinct house. He stopped at the desk and explained to the desk sergeant that he wanted to file a complaint against a cop. A cop named Jack Parker.

The sergeant looked at some papers. “Jack Parker? Forget it, sport. You’re too late. They just found him on his wife’s stoop, up there by the park. With a hole in his head.” He shook his head sadly. “Seems like he eighty-sixed himself.”

Devlin bounced a fist off the rail in front of the desk.

“That bum,” he said. “He really did have trouble.”

“The worst trouble of all, sport.”