The Christmas Kid

by Pete Hamill

  “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.”

  The Men in Black Raincoats

  IT WAS CLOSE TO midnight on a Friday evening at Rattigan’s Bar and Grill. There were no ball games on the television, old movies only made the clientele feel more ancient, and the jukebox was still broken from the afternoon of Red Butera’s daughter’s wedding. So it was time for Brendan Malachy McCone to take center stage. He motioned for a fresh beer, put his right foot on the brass rail, breathed in deeply, and started to sing.

  Oh, the Garden of Eden has vanished, they say,

  But I know the lie of it still,

  Just turn to the left at the Bridge of Finea,

  And meet me halfway to Cootehill…

  The song was very Irish, sly and funny, the choruses full of the names of long-forgotten places, and the regulars loved Brendan for his quick, jaunty singing of it. They loved the roguish glitter in his eyes, his energy, his good-natured boasting. He was, after all, a man in his fifties now, and yet here he was, still singing the bold songs of his youth. And on this night, as on so many nights, they joined him in the verses.

  The baby’s a man now,

  He’s toil-worn and tough,

  Still, whispers come over the sea

  Come back, Paddy Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff

  Come home, Paddy Reilly, to me.

  Outside, rain had begun to fall, a cold Brooklyn rain, driven by the wind off the harbor, and i
t made the noises and the singing and the laughter seem even better. Sardines and crackers joined the glasses on the bar while George, the bartender, filled the empties. And Brendan shifted from jauntiness to sorrow.

  If you ever go across the sea to Ireland,

  Then maybe at the closing of your day…

  The mood of the regulars hushed now, as Brendan gave them the song as if it were a hymn. The bar was charged with the feeling they all had for Brendan, knowing that he had been an IRA man long ago, that he had left Ireland a step ahead of the British police, who wanted him for the killing of a British soldier in the Border Campaign. This was their Brendan: the Transit Authority clerk who had once stood in the doorways of Belfast, with the cloth cap pulled tight on his brow, the pistol deep in the pockets of his trench coat, ready to kill or to die for Ireland.

  He was singing now about how the strangers came to Ireland, the bloody Brits, and tried to force their ways upon the Irish, his voice was a healthy baritone, a wealth of passion overwhelming a poverty of skill, and it touched all of them, making the younger ones imagine the streets of modern Belfast, where their cousins were still fighting, reminding the older ones of peat fires, black, creamy stout, buttermilk in the morning. The song was about a vanished time, before rock and roll and women’s liberation, before they took Latin out of the Mass, before the blacks and the Puerto Ricans had begun to move in and the children of the Irish had begun to move out. The neighborhood was changing, all right. But Brendan Malachy McCone was still with them, still in the neighborhood.

  A little after midnight two strangers came in, dressed in black raincoats. They were wet with rain. They ordered whiskey. Brendan kept singing. Nobody noticed that his voice faltered on the last lines of “Galway Bay,” as he took the applause, glanced at the strangers, and again shifted the mood.

  Oh, Mister Patrick McGinty,

  An Irishman of note…

  The strangers drank in silence.

  At closing time the rain was still pelting down. Brendan stood in the open doorway of the bar with Charlie the Pole and Scotch Eddie, while George the bartender counted the receipts. Everyone else had gone home.

  “We’ll have to make a run for it,” Charlie said.

  “Dammit,” Scotch Eddie said.

  “Yiz might as well run, cause yiz’ll drown anyway,” George said. He was finished counting and looked small and tired.

  “I’ll see ya, gents,” Charlie said, and rushed into the rain, running lumpily down the darkened slope of 11th Street to his home. Eddie followed, cutting sharply to his left. But Brendan did not move. He had seen the strangers in the black raincoats, glanced at them in the mirror for a while as he moved through the songs, saw them leave an hour later. And now he was afraid.

  He looked up and down the avenue. The street lamp scalloped a halo of light on the corner. Beyond the light there was nothing but the luminous darkness and the rain.

  “Well, I’ve got to lock it up, Brendan.”

  “Right, George. Good night.”

  “God bless.”

  Brendan hurried up the street, head down, lashed by the rain, eyes searching the interiors of parked cars. He saw nothing. The cars were locked. He looked up at the apartments and there were no lights anywhere and he knew the lights would be out at home, too, where Sarah and the kids would all be sleeping. Even the firehouse was dimly lit, its great red door closed, the firemen stretched out on their bunks in the upstairs loft.

  Despite the drink and the rain, Brendan’s mouth was dry. Once he thought he saw something move in the darkness of an areaway and his stomach lifted and fell. But again it was nothing. Shadows. Imagination. Get hold of yourself, Brendan.

  He crossed the avenue. A half block to go. A ways off he saw the twin red taillights of a city bus, groaning slowly toward Flatbush Avenue. Hurry. Another half block and he could enter the yard, hurry up the stairs, unlock the door, close it behind him, undress quickly in the darkened kitchen, dry off the rain with a warm rough towel, brush the beer off his teeth, and fall into the great deep warmth of bed with Sarah. And he would be safe again for another night. Hurry. Get the key out. Don’t get caught naked on the stairs.

  He turned into his yard, stepped over a spreading puddle at the base of the stoop, and hurried up the eight worn sandstone steps. He had the key out in the vestibule and quickly opened the inside door.

  They were waiting for him in the hall.

  The one in the front seat on the right was clearly the boss. The driver was only a chauffeur and did his work in proper silence. The strangers in the raincoats sat on either side of Brendan in the backseat and said nothing as the car moved through the wet darkness down off the Slope, into the Puerto Rican neighborhood near Williamsburg. They all clearly deferred to the one in the right front seat. All wore gloves. Except the boss.

  “I’m telling you, mister, this has to be some kind of mistake,” Brendan said.

  “Shut up,” said the boss without turning. His skin was pink in the passing lights of street lamps and his dark hair curled over the edge of his collar. The accent was not New York. Not Belfast. Maybe Boston. Maybe somewhere else. Not New York.

  “I don’t owe anybody money,” Brendan said, choking back the dry panic. “I’m not into the bloody loan sharks. I’m telling you this is—”

  The boss said, “Is your name Brendan Malachy McCone?”

  “Well, uh, yes, but—”

  “Then we’ve made no mistake.”

  Williamsburg was behind them now and they were following the route of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway while avoiding its brightly lit ramp. Brendan sat back. From that angle, he could see more of the man in the right front seat: the velvet collar of his coat, the high, protruding cheekbones, the longish nose, the pinkie ring glittering on his left hand when he lit a cigarette with a thin gold lighter. He could not see the man’s eyes but he was certain he had never seen the man before tonight.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  The boss said calmly, “I told you to shut up. Shut up.”

  Brendan took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly. He looked to the men on either side of him, smiling his most innocent smile, as if hoping they would think well of him, believe in his innocence, intervene with the boss, plead his case. He wanted to tell them about his kids, explain that he had done nothing bad. Not for thirty years.

  The men looked away from him, their nostrils seeming to quiver, as if he had already begun to stink of death. Brendan tried to remember the words of the Act of Contrition.

  The men beside him stared out past the little rivers of rain on the windows, as if he were not even in the car. They watched the city turn into country, Queens into Nassau County, all the sleeping suburbs transformed into the darker, emptier reaches of Suffolk County, as the driver pushed on, driving farther away, out on Long Island, to the country of forests and frozen summer beaches. Far from Brooklyn. Far from the Friday nights at Rattigan’s. Far from his children. Far from Sarah.

  Until they pulled off the expressway at Southampton, moved down back roads for another fifteen minutes, and came to a marshy cove. A few summer houses were sealed for the winter. Rain spattered the still water of the cove. Patches of dirty snow clung to the shoreline, resisting the steady cold rain.

  “This is fine,” the boss said.

  The driver pulled over, turned off the car lights, pulled under some trees, and turned off the engine. They all sat in the dark.

  The boss said, “Did you ever hear of a man named Peter Devlin?”

  Oh, my God, Brendan thought.

  “Well?”

  “Vaguely. The name sounds familiar.”

  “Just familiar?”

  “Well, there was a Devlin where I came from. There were a lot of Devlins in the North. It’s hard to remember. It was a long time ago.”

  “Yeah, it was. It was a long time ago.”

  “Aye.”

  “And you don’t remember him more than just vaguely? I mean, you were best man at his
wedding.”

  Brendan’s lips moved, but no words came out.

  “What else do you vaguely remember, McCone?”

  There was a long pause. Then: “He died.”

  “No, not died. He was killed, wasn’t he?”

  “Aye.”

  “Who killed him, McCone?”

  “He died for Ireland.”

  “Who killed him, McCone?”

  “The Special Branch. The British Special Branch.”

  The boss took out his cigarettes and lit one with the gold lighter. He took a long drag. Brendan saw the muscles working tensely in his jaw. The rain drummed on the roof of the car.

  “Tell me some more about him,” the boss said.

  “They buried him with full military honors. They draped his coffin with the Tricolour and sang ‘The Soldiers’ Song’ over his grave. The whole town wore the Easter Lily. The B-Specials made a lot of arrests.”

  “You saw all this?”

  “I was told.”

  “But you weren’t there?”

  “No, but—”

  “What happened to his wife?”

  “Katey?”

  “Some people called her Katey,” the boss said.

  “She died, too, soon after…the flu, was it?”

  “Well, in the family, there was another version. That she died of a broken heart.”

  The boss stared straight ahead, watching the rain trickle down the windshield. He tapped an ash into the ashtray, took another deep drag, and said, “What did they pay you to set him up, Brendan?”