Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

She got out and slammed the door hard. “You are a real ass.…”

“Hey, why don’t you go to this party on your own? Okay? They’re your friends and it’s your car, and maybe without me around you won’t have to worry about the stink !”

She leaned on the fender and started to cry. Mike put his arm around her. “I’m sorry, baby. I really am. I am. Let’s just…We’ve gotta get rid of this car.”

But Kelly Cavanaugh didn’t get rid of the car. The next day she had it scrubbed again, steamed, cleaned. She had the mat removed from the trunk, replaced with a new one; there was some kind of stain on the metal beneath the mat, as if a chemical had burned its way into its surface; but nothing that should create an odor. Driving away, the car smelled fresh and clean.

And then at night, the fetid breath of the swamp once more engulfed her.

She went to her father and told him. He laughed, she protested, then he promised to see what he could do about getting rid of the odor.

“It’s not a matter of cleaning, Daddy,” she said. “There’s something else wrong with the car. It’s like it’s, I don’t know…cursed.”

Cavanaugh blinked. “I’ll check it out.”

The next day he called the city auto pound, trying to learn the history of the car, and got nowhere. He called a cop friend, gave him all the relevant numbers, said nothing about the smell, told a few jokes about firemen, laughed, hung up, and went about his work. Late in the afternoon, the cop called back. He had the history.

“The weird thing is this,” the cop said. “The car was found out at Kennedy Airport in the fall. No plates, no ID marks. Probably stolen somewheres, out of state. Dropped off here. But here’s the thing: there was a guy in the trunk. With three bullets in the head. A doper, they figure. He’d been there maybe a week, so I guess he was a little ripe.”

Cavanaugh thanked him and hurried home. He was watching the news when Kelly arrived from school. He turned down the sound.

“We’ll sell the car tomorrow, honey,” he said. “And get a new one.”

She looked at him and smiled. He turned back to the news.

“I mean, what do you need with a car that smells, right? We’ll get another one.” He hadn’t smoked for four years, but he patted his shirt pocket, looking for cigarettes. “So how was school?” he said. “How’s everything going?”

FACTS MCCARTHY KNEW EVERYTHING. He’d meet you in the street and ask which continent was the largest, and you’d hesitate, and he’d say triumphantly: “Asia! It’s seventeen million, one hundred and twenty-nine thousand square miles, twenty-nine point seven percent of the world’s land. You could look it up.” You’d light a cigarette and he’d tell you that the geographical center of the United States was near Castle Rock, South Dakota, and Gaborone was the capital of Botswana, and 116,708 Americans died in World War I.

“Who led the American League in home runs in 1911?” he asked one night in Farrell’s Bar in Brooklyn. “Don’t even try to answer. It was Franklin ‘Home Run’ Baker. But here’s the beauty part; how many did he hit?”

“Er…uh…thirty?”

“Eleven!” Facts McCarthy shouted. “He led the whole league with eleven home runs! Can you imagine? Look it up!”

Information was a kind of sickness for Facts, and the infection began in the sixth grade. That was when he discovered he could memorize entire chapters of geography books, most of the Latin Mass, great swatches of the Baltimore Catechism. In the Catholic school that Facts and I attended, such prodigies of memory were always rewarded, and Facts became an A student. As an A student, he was a kind of star, acknowledged to be superior, his memory overwhelming certain weaknesses in the essay form. Nobody had a happier childhood.

But later, when Facts left school and ventured into the real world, he swiftly discovered that his talent was not so universally acknowledged. The world did not, after all, usually give out grades; the world was more of an essay than a multiple-choice exercise, and Facts did not do well in the face of the world’s chilly indifference. Eventually he made his accommodation. He worked in the post office, and, in his spare time, devoted himself anew to the acquiring of information.

“Who ran with Tom Dewey on the 1944 Republican ticket?” he’d ask. “John W. Bricker! One of the all-time greats!”

The information would come in a great flow. The name of Richard Nixon’s wife is really Thelma; she picked up “Pat” from her father. The most common name in the United States is Smith, which belongs to 2,382,509 people, followed by Johnson. The birthstone for August is peridot. Savonarola was burned at the stake in Florence in 1498, the same year that Leonardo da Vinci finished The Last Supper in Milan. Babe Ruth was given the most bases on balls in major league history, 2,056 over twenty-two seasons, and the planet Jupiter has sixteen moons. Facts was almost always right, although a lot of bars had to buy almanacs and the Guinness Book of Records just to be certain. But as he moved from his twenties to his thirties and then into his forties, the mass of information became denser and more impacted. Running into Facts McCarthy was like running into a black hole.

Naturally, he lived alone.

“Women just don’t understand an intellectual like me,” Facts said modestly one winter night. “Women are emotional, intuitive, know what I mean? They don’t understand facts. They never let facts get in the way of their opinions. I mean, they’re nice to look at. But, hey, I’m not missing anything.”

This could be dismissed as a carryover into adult life of his weakness in the essay form. But it was more than that. The truth was that no woman would have him. In a bar it was easy to put up with a man who said hello by asking you the name of the largest glacier in the world. You can always leave a bar. But it isn’t so easy to leave a marriage.

And there was the added impediment of the Facts McCarthy Memorial Library. In the four-room flat that Facts kept after his mother died, every surface was covered with sources of information: all editions of every almanac, three different sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica (marked with yellow markers), an almost complete set of National Geographic, complete runs of Facts on File and Current Biography, sports, science, business and political yearbooks, and almost eight thousand other books, not one of which was a novel.

“Being me,” said Facts McCarthy, “is a full-time occupation.”

And then Mercedes Rodriguez moved into the flat downstairs with her widowed mother. Mercedes was a twenty-two-year-old blonde from the Dominican Republic, and when Facts saw her that first day, unloading a Chevy filled with household goods, he thought he had never seen anyone more beautiful. When he should have been studying the 1963 Information Please Almanac, he found himself watching her walk up the block to the grocery store. He mooned over her. He sighed a lot. In the bars he was even silent. And then he decided it was time to act. He had to talk to her, and one day, in the vestibule, they found themselves facing each other.

“Hi,” Facts said, with his great gift for small talk. “Do you know how many books there are in the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore?”

“What?”

“In 1978, there were two million, three hundred and seventy-five thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one. You could look it up.”

“What’d you say?” Mercedes asked, and laughed out loud.

This was obviously love at first sight. Two days later, Facts was sitting with her in Loew’s State in Times Square, blitzing her with information about past Academy Award winners. Later he took her to Coney Island, and he rolled on, and Mercedes listened, nodding, offering no resistance. On the weekend, with her mother as chaperone, and Facts as a tour guide, she visited his apartment. The mother sighed a lot, saying, “Ay, bendito,” fanning herself with an Editor & Publisher International Year Book . Facts left them in the former living room and went to the former kitchen to make coffee.