Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

He played with the coffee, and then asked me a lot of questions about my life, and I talked about accidents and luck, kids and a marriage, disappointments and mistakes. We finished our coffees and paid and went out into the cold morning.

“It’s gonna snow soon,” he said. “I can feel it in my bones.”

“Yeah.”

“I love a snowstorm,” he said. “I love how quiet it gets. I love the way everything stops. I love the way all the dirt and the garbage gets covered up, and we got this great big beautiful white city all around us. I always used to take the kids for walks in the snow. Show them how the trees looked and the way the wind makes these sculptures, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do.”

We walked toward Seventh Avenue, where the sanitation truck was waiting. He had made a life of cleaning up the mess left behind by humans, and I wanted to thank him, but didn’t know how.

“You know this guy Yeats?” he asked. “The greatest, isn’t he? I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree… I used to read him to the kids when they were little. I’d turn off the TV and then I’d read Yeats. I’d make them repeat the lines. I’d try ta explain what the guy was gettin’ at, even when I didn’t understand myself. I’d say, it’s like a song . It’s like music . Like some beautiful music . And you know something? They loved it.” He laughed. “They loved me standin’ there and readin’ that Yeats. Oh, wow, did they love that.”

I realized suddenly that his eyes were brimming with tears. “I gotta go,” he said quickly. “Someone’ll say I’m, you know, malingering.” He hurried away, and climbed up on the truck, waved, and was gone with a rumble and a clanking of gears. A cold wind blew in from the river. The sky was the color of steel. It felt like snow, all right. I walked quickly to the west through the crowds, thinking of Sonny Rosselli and his lost gift, his poet’s lovely heart, and the astonishing gifts he gave his children. It began at last to snow and the city huddled in the great white silence.

CAVANAUGH BOUGHT THE CAR at a city auction on Atlantic Avenue. It was a pale-blue two-door 1979 Chevy with only 21,000 miles on it, and the $800 price was a bargain. After finishing the paperwork and paying cash, he drove the Chevy to a car wash, had it cleaned inside and out, and then went home to Bay Ridge. That night, after dinner, he stood up and faced his wife, Marie, and his daughter, Kelly, and with a grand flourish handed the younger woman the car key.

“Oh, Daddy,” Kelly said. “I don’t be lieve it.”

“With an A average at Hunter,” he said, “you deserve it. Besides, I don’t like that you have to use the subway. All I ask is you drive safe, you use the safety belt. No drinking, you know. No speeding.”

“Daddy, I’m twenty years old,” she said, trying to smother her irritation. “I’m not a kid.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “But you never know what happens you get some numskull in the car. Come on, take a look.…”

The three of them pulled on coats and went outside and down the block. The car was parked in front of a grocery store, and it gleamed in the light.

“I love it!” Kelly said. “I want to drive it, right now .”

“It’s late,” Cavanaugh said. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Take it out tomorrow. A nice long drive. Out on the Belt. Jones Beach, someplace like that.”

“He’s right, sweetheart,” her mother said. And that settled it. They went home, and Kelly called her boyfriend, Mike, and made a date for the morning. She said, “You’re gonna love it, Mike.” He said, “I’m sure I will.”

The next day Kelly and Mike took turns driving the car. They went to Coney Island for hot dogs; they strolled in the bright cold sunshine on the winter beach at Riis Park; they drove into Nassau County, stopped for coffee at a Howard Johnson’s, drove back. Before dinner, they sat in the car and necked. They agreed to meet later that night and go to a movie. Kelly said she wished a drive-in was open. “I’ve never been to one,” she said. “I just see them in movies.”

“We’ll go every weekend next summer,” Mike said.

That night, driving home from Manhattan, where they’d seen Terms of Endearment and Kelly had spent three full minutes crying in the lobby, they first noticed the smell.

“What’s that smell, anyway?” she said, opening the window. “It’s like Starrett City in here.” She checked the emergency brake; it wasn’t engaged. “Wow…”

“That smell isn’t rubber,” Mike said. He was driving now. “It smells, I don’t know, disgusting .”

The smell was loamy, decaying, rotting. They opened both windows and let the cold winter air blow around them. Mike turned off the heater. The smell remained.

“It’s like maybe an animal is caught in the engine or something,” he said. “Maybe a rat or something.”

“Well, pull over and let’s look.”

They stopped on Fourth Avenue and Mike got out and opened the hood. He peered into the engine, tried to look under the chassis, saw nothing. He opened the trunk. It was empty.

“I don’t know what the hell it is,” he said. “Tomorrow, when it’s light, we’ll go over it with a fine-tooth comb.”

The next day, the smell was gone, but Kelly and Mike examined the car in a gas station run by one of Cavanaugh’s friends. There were no traces of dead animals, no forgotten fruit or plant that might have rotted or decayed. The engine was clean, the chassis in good shape. On the floor of the trunk there was a faint outline of a stain, but it gave off no odor. Kelly wet her fingers from the station’s water fountain and rubbed them in the stain. There was no smell.

“Jeez,” Mike said, “maybe it was me .”

Kelly laughed. “Get out the Right Guard.”

“I guess I better.”

Kelly reported all of this to Cavanaugh, who smiled and dismissed the problem with a small wave of his hand. “Maybe it was one of those inversions you read about,” he said. “You know, from the stuff they’re always burning in Jersey and it floats over here and gives us diseases? Otherwise, how does it drive?”

“Like a dream,” Kelly said. “A real dream, Daddy.”

That night, as Kelly and Mike drove from Brooklyn to a party in Manhattan, the smell returned.

“Oh, God,” Kelly said. “What’ll we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ve gotta do something, Mike!”

“Hey, don’t get mad at me, Kelly. Okay? I didn’t make the thing smell. And it’s your car!”

“But what if the smell sticks to us?” she said, her voice rising as Mike drove the Chevy across the Brooklyn Bridge. “What if it gets into us? And we sit at dinner tonight with these people, and we stink ?”

“Just say we’re from Brooklyn,” Mike said, smiling.

“It’s not funny!”

He slammed the dashboard with an open palm. “Stop! Okay? No more! I don’t want to hear about it! If you’re worried, we’ll park and grab a cab, take the subway. Okay? But stop talking about it!”

They drove in silence to the party, and Kelly remembered a year when she was small and her father had taken then to Florida, and one night they drove on a road through a swamp, and the swamp smelled like this, too: rotting, dense, fetid, full of slimy things that died in the dark. Somehow…corrupt.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as they parked on an industrial street in SoHo. The party was in a loft down the block. “I just…It’s such a nice car. I wanted it to be perfect.”

“Look, Kelly, let’s forget it, okay? I don’t want to discuss it.”