The Christmas Kid

A Death in the Family

HEROIN ARRIVED IN THE neighborhood during Eddie Devlin’s first winter in the navy. He went off to boot camp in Bainbridge on the day after Labor Day and came home to the snows of Christmas and, by then, all his friends were riding the white horse. They came up beside him in the bars, while Christmas music played on the jukeboxes, and offered him junk. When he said no, they moved away and smiled thin, superior smiles and left him to the beer drinkers. A line had been drawn.

“When did this start?” Devlin asked his brother Liam, who was two years younger, in his second year of high school. “Who brought this crap around?”

Liam didn’t know, and Devlin’s mother didn’t know. His father, who was a good cop, might have known, except that Devlin’s father was dead. But others knew who brought heroin around, and they told Eddie Devlin. His name was Joe Tooks, a bone-thin, dark-haired man who drove a white Cadillac as he moved around the neighborhood. One snowy afternoon during Christmas leave, Devlin saw Joe Tooks get out of the Cadillac in front of the Athenia movie house, where the tough guys from the Leopards hung out in the summer. Joe Tooks looked immaculate in a long gray cashmere coat and matching gingerella hat, tapered dark pants, polished pointed shoes. Some of the old tough guys came over, but it wasn’t summer for the Leopards anymore and they would never be tough guys again. Joe Tooks smiled and listened and shook his head. When he drove away, the old summer tough guys looked forlorn and lost.

“Stay away from the crap,” Eddie Devlin told his kid brother on the day the Christmas leave was over. “And stay away from Joe Tooks.”

Eddie Devlin was assigned to Florida, going to school for three months in Jacksonville, then working as a helicopter mechanic in Pensacola. For a while, he boxed on the base team, going from 165 pounds to 182, all of it muscle, and then had to quit. He was too big to box 175-pound light heavyweights and too small for the heavyweights. He worked hard as a mechanic and talked about going to college when he was discharged and becoming an engineer. He listened to Hank Williams now and Webb Pierce instead of Sinatra and Crosby; his best friend was from a town in Kentucky with a total population of 127, less than half of his tenement block in Brooklyn. When he had a summer leave due, he went to Key West instead of New York. The neighborhood seemed a long way away.

“I don’t know anybody there anymore,” he’d say when asked why he never went home. He didn’t talk much about the letters from home, which read like reports from a distant battlefield. Charlie Barrows was dead. Sammie Pilser had died. The body of Danny Collins was found on a rooftop. Coconut was dead, too, and Jimbo Elliott and Frankie Flanagan and Junior Vittorino. There was a plague at home and the plague was called heroin. If the neighborhood was a kind of family, then the family was dying. Eddie Devlin would read the latest letter, shake his head sadly, and turn to the simpler, cleaner world of machines.

Then one December morning he was told to report immediately to the executive officer; there was a phone call from New York. He washed his hands and left the hangar, and as he moved across those tame green lawns, past the drooping date palms and the silent morning barracks, his mind filled with the spiky calligraphic images of fire escapes and gaunt tenements and the faces of the neighborhood. His stomach tightened and coiled; nausea made its move. It’s Liam. Something terrible has happened to Liam.

And he was right.

A cold steady rain was falling in New York when Eddie Devlin arrived at Floyd Bennett Field, after hitching a ride on a navy transport plane. He went straight to the funeral parlor. At the wake, nobody mentioned heroin; there had been too many deaths and too much shame. But Eddie Devlin knew, looking down on his brother’s ravaged face, and his mother knew, trembling among the sweet dying flowers and the ruined candles.

“The poor boy,” his mother said. “The poor little boy.” In the afternoon of his second day home, Eddie Devlin went off to Prospect Park, to look at the place where they’d found Liam’s body. He stood for a long time in a grove of ice-polished trees and knew what he had to do. It began to snow.

They found Joe Tooks two days later, under deep snow in the backyard of his apartment house. He was not pretty to look at. His elbows had been shot off. His left knee was gone. So was the back of his head. Most of the rest of him had been broken in the fall from the roof.

“Someone really did a job on this bum,” one of the cops said, looking up at the faces in the back windows of the surrounding buildings. “I’d say we got about four thousand suspects.”

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.