Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

They left the park at Eleventh Avenue.

“Come on over later, eat something, Harry,” Keegan said. “I don’t like it that you’re living alone. You’re what? Sixty? That’s a young guy nowadays, Harry. You should—”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Charlie.”

I lay behind two bodies while the machine guns hammered. I could see two battleships and a couple of cruisers, and someone was screaming off to the left, and mortars exploded in the sand, and there was blood on my face and hands and my carbine and none of it was mine. The noise was ferocious, shells screaming in from the Texas, metal and rocks breaking and splintering, rifle fire and machine guns hammering and mortars and my face in the sand, and then I turned and saw two cans racing in near the shore, unloading their five-inchers, and a whumping sound, and more screaming, and one of the guys I was huddled behind was whimpering. And then someone shouted that we better get up or we’d die on the damned beach, and I waited, and then got up, and started to run, and then I was down and I could see planes overhead and my leg burning and when I tried to move I couldn’t and I looked at the sky again and thought, that’s it, it’s over, I won, that’s my war, I thought. That’s it, Helen. I thought, it’s June 6, 1944, 6/6/44, and I just got my ticket home.

EVERY NIGHT, IN HIS room at the Hotel Lotus, Red Dano would try desperately to sleep. He would lie in the dark on the sagging bed, logy with beer, listening to the murmur of the street. He would shift position, lying first on his left, then on his right. But sleep wouldn’t come.

There was no television in the room, but pictures moved constantly through his brain. He saw the cell at Dannemora. The yard at Green Haven. He saw a thousand faces, a hundred scenes, the debris of meals, and iron corridors: the jumbled, detailed scrapbook of nine years in prison. Sometimes other pictures forced themselves onto Dano’s private screen, and then he would get up and walk to the window and part the slats of the venetian blinds and stare into the street to verify that he was truly there.

“Corinne,” he sometimes said aloud, as if uttering the name would grant him forgiveness, and forgiveness would grant him sleep. “I’m sorry, Corinne. I’m very, very, sorry, Corinne.”

But there was nobody present to forgive him, and he walked around the room, his damp bare feet making a peeling sound on the linoleum, a million miles from Brooklyn. And then, long after midnight, when the Spanish restaurant was closed downstairs, and the street wheeze of the crosstown bus came less often, and even the hookers and junkies had retired for the night, Dano would sleep.

Working through the day, exhausted from the sleepless nights, he loaded and unloaded trucks for Sherman and Dunlop, and felt old among the hard young kids beside him. He told them nothing about himself, but they seemed to know, without being very interested. “Bet you didn’t work this hard in the can,” the one named Ralph said one morning, as they loaded canned peaches. Dano grunted his agreement, and Ralph then turned his attention to the troubles of the Yankees. The young man’s indifference was to Dano at least one small consolation: after eleven weeks on the outside, he was finding a small place in the city he’d lost for nine long years.

“I hear you killed someone,” Ralph said when they stopped one Friday evening for beer after a Hunts Point run. “That true?”

“Yeah.”

“I hear you killed your girlfriend.”

“True.”

“Amazing. I never met anyone killed anyone. Except guys who were in the army.”

“It’s nothing to be proud of, kid.”

“Ah, well, some of them deserve it.”

“She didn’t.”

Later that night, Dano went to a movie. Burt Reynolds. Fat sheriffs. Car crashes. Then he stopped in the Oasis, a bar near the hotel. The news was on TV: marines killed in Lebanon, a big shot quits a subway job, a woman jumps off a building. None of it mattered to him, and he nursed a beer in silence. A few stools away, a toothless old drunk mirthlessly repeated a line from a song: “Pack up yer troubles in yer ol’ kit bag an’ smile, smile.…” The drunk stopped, sipped his beer, began again, while the bartender shook his head and watched the ball game. Dano glanced at himself in the mirror: the red hair now gray, face lean and white and pasty; thinking, I’m old. She would be twenty-three forever. Corinne. But I’m walking around with her inside of me still, and I’m old.

A pudgy, dark-haired woman came in the open door, her hair ruffled by the huge fan, and the bartender looked up.

“No trouble, Mary,” he said in a kind of warning.

“What do you mean? I’m sober. I never been in trouble when I’m sober.”

“No. But then you get drunk, Mary. Then you throw things. Ashtrays…”

“Shut up, Harry,” the woman said. “Who ast you?”

“Pack up yer troubles in yer ol’ kit bag an’…”

Dano wondered if he’d ever be able to sleep with a woman again. On his third night out of prison, he’d tried, with a kid from West Street, but it hadn’t worked. Maybe that’s how I’ll pay, he thought. I’ll just live in a little prison of my own, forever. He glanced past the singing drunk at the pudgy woman, wedged now on a stool, a whiskey in her small, thick-fingered hand. Thirty, maybe. A shiny black dress. Dark stockings, high-heeled maroon shoes. Her face was almost pretty, with liquid brown eyes, a short nose, hair piled in curls, a dirty laugh. Come with me, Dano thought. But he said nothing. Come, we’ll have dinner somewhere and tell each other lies and then go to my room and you can help me sleep. But he did nothing. He glanced at her, then picked up his change and walked into the night.

He had his key in his pocket and walked through the bright, cramped lobby without stopping at the front desk. He felt very tired as the elevator groaned to the fourth floor. He walked down the corridor to room 411, stopped, unlocked the door, and reached for the light switch.

There were three of them waiting for him in the room. One was at the window, his foot up on the radiator. Another was in the chair and the third was sitting on the bed. They didn’t move. Dano knew the one at the window, the lean gray man holding the gun.

“Hello, Charlie,” Dano said.

Charlie gestured with the gun in an offhand way. “Close the door, Red.”

“You put on a little weight, Charlie,” Dano said, closing the door behind him. The one on the bed came over and patted him down, shrugged, looked at Charlie, went back to the bed. “Ten pounds?”

“Ten years, ten pounds,” Charlie said. “Not too bad.”

“You still in Brooklyn?”

“Same street, same house, Red. Except my mother ain’t there. She died, Red.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“She never got over Corinne, Red.”

“I understand.”

“You better, Red. You broke her heart with what you did to my sister.”

“And I paid for it, Charlie.”

“Not enough.”

Charlie took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lit one with a cheap lighter, reached out, and offered the pack to Dano. He held the gun casually at his side. Dano took a cigarette from the pack, fighting to control the shaking of his hand.

“Ma used to wake up in the middle of the night, Red. Shouting Corinne’s name. We’d go to her and she’d be shaking and crying and all and cursin’ you, cursin’ you for ever livin’, for comin’ into Corinne’s life, into our lives, cursin’ your fancy talk and your big-shot smile. Ma never forgot you, Red.”

Dano leaned in for a light without looking at Charlie’s eyes. Charlie raised the gun and snapped the lighter into flame.