The Christmas Kid

The Hitter Bag

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.”