The Christmas Kid

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.

Wishes

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.