Absent Friends

BOYS' OWN BOOK

Chapter 2

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Abraham Lincoln and the Pig

October 30, 1968

Eleven years old: Four boys, three girls, and they weave through each other's lives the same as through the open doors of the houses up and down the street. These kids know one another the way they know these blocks, the trees and sidewalks and everyone's backyard. Jimmy can't remember—no one remembers—a time when the other ones weren't there.

When they were little, their moms brought them to the park or to each other's houses; on Saturday their dads took the whole bunch to the beach, to the zoo. It's different now that they're bigger, now that they go to school: Jimmy—with Markie, Marian, Sally, Vicky—is at PS 12; and the Molloys, Tom and Jack, go to St. Ann's, study with the nuns. It doesn't change who they are to each other; it's just, this way, some things about each other are stories, legends almost: only some of the kids see, but everyone knows.



Like the story (it got to be a legend) about Paulie Testa, and Eddie Spano, and Tom's smart idea.

Paulie's at St. Ann's, too; his father has the fruit stand on Main Street. He's little, Paulie, and right after school starts in the fall, there go the Spano brothers knocking him down, taking his lunch money. It happens a couple of times. It's not like Paulie says anything to any of the kids, it's not like they say anything to Paulie; after all, he's from the other side of the parish; after all, he's Italian. And the Spanos are Italian, too. In Pleasant Hills people take care of their own.

But all the kids like Mr. Testa. Sometimes he gives you an apple or a peach for free; says they're bruised, he can't sell them, though no one ever finds a brown spot on one.

And weeks go by, and no one, meaning none of the Italians, stops the Spano brothers from beating on Paulie. Tom tells this to Jimmy, they both agree it's bad.

If he was bigger, Tom says, if he could look out for himself. But Paulie, he's just a shrimp, like Markie.

This makes Jimmy mad, the Spanos beating up on a scrawny kid. Paulie can't help it, or Markie, either, if they're not big; and Jimmy's had to get Markie out of trouble more than once that he got in just for being small.

Because of who their dad is, says Tom. That's why, because everyone's scared.

Jimmy knows that's right. Al Spano is a frightening man; being scared of him isn't stupid, it's smart. What should we do? Jimmy asks.

Tom says, Not you, Jim, just me.

Alone? Jimmy says.

Tom's not scared like everyone else, not afraid to go up against the Spanos. Jimmy knows why: because of who Tom's dad is.

But not being scared still doesn't mean Tom can take both Spano brothers on.

I don't think I'm gonna fight them, says Tom. I have an idea. He grins, and Jimmy does, too.

Like always, Jimmy says.

But if it doesn't work? If I need help? You got my back?

Like always, Jimmy says.



This is the way it is with Tom. Like because of who he is, he has things he has to do. All the kids have things they're supposed to do: clean your room, do your homework, do the dishes, go to church. Some kids, that's how you get your allowance: you do your chores. Tom, he has this extra job: take care of people. The kids aren't sure what he gets for doing that, but chores come from grown-ups and so does whatever you get, and Tom's father is Mike the Bear.



So one day Eddie Spano, the older brother, he's in fifth grade, Tom's grade. It's morning, the kids out on the playground before school, everyone running, yelling, the boys throwing balls, the girls jumping rope. Sister Agnes blows the whistle, the kids all run to get their bookbags and line up to go in. Eddie Spano at first can't find his bookbag. It's not where he left it, but he spots it off to the side. Goes over to get it, and it stinks. The thing's soaked in gasoline. All Eddie's books, notebooks, his history report, drenched in gasoline, everything reeking and ruined. A book of matches on top, a note in the matchbook: Lay off Paulie Testa, or next time its you. The kids are lined up, girls on one line and boys on the other, and Tom, from his place in line, is staring at Eddie, not looking away.

That's Tom, that's his way. He could have fought the Spanos, sure, could have collected his brother Jack, and Jimmy—Jack's a year older, a lot bigger, but Tom's always in charge—and stood on the sidewalk around the corner from the schoolyard, where the Spanos had to pass, where the nuns couldn't see. Jimmy would have done it; Jack would have loved it. The Spanos would have lost.

Why didn't he?

What I wanted, I wanted them to stop beating on Paulie. That's what Tom says to the six kids sitting on the stoop, eating Heath bars and waiting to hear the story again. Marian says, Couldn't you tell a teacher? Tell someone so they'd make Eddie stop, so nobody has to get into a fight?

Vicky rolls her eyes. She's sitting next to Tom, the place Vicky usually sits, on the top step. Anyway, Vicky says to Marian, they didn't get into a fight. Tom knows what he's doing. Vicky scoops up some crackly fall leaves, tries to braid their stems into a bouquet, but they crumble.

Well, I didn't want to do that, have a fight, Tom says. I mean, suppose we did, suppose Jimmy and Jack and me beat the crap out of them?

You would've, Tom, Markie chimes in, you would've demolished them. Terminated them. Markie's using big words, the kids ooh and ah; except Sally, she giggles and pushes Markie, and Markie grins and tries to tickle her.

Yeah, says Tom, for sure.

Yeah, says his brother Jack, for f*cking sure, and I f*cking wish we had, man. Jack says this, though he's also been heard to say, That little runt Paulie, he looks like a worm from his father's apples.

Yeah, Tom says; and the kids know there's no question in his mind who'd have won, if that's how it had gone. But, he says, but then they get some other a*sholes, come back and call us out. We get some other a*sholes—here he pokes Markie with his sneaker, and Markie grins again—and we call them out. Guineas and micks, in the middle of Main Street! World War Three!

Tom's saying words the kids aren't supposed to say. They're not dirty words, not exactly, or swearwords, like saying Jesus when you're not praying. There are other ones, too, spic and chink and kike and nigger, they're not nice. The moms don't want the kids to say them, though sometimes the dads, if they're talking to each other, they'll let one pop out, especially if they don't know you're listening. But not the kids, they're not allowed. Those other words, the kids don't know anybody to say them to anyway. But guineas, you better believe they know who the guineas are in Pleasant Hills. And the micks, that's them. It's not a nice word, but it's a good thing to be. All the kids know.

So, says Tom, so the next thing that happens, we have this big fight, and then Sister Joseph calls out my dad, and their dad. And your dad, Jimmy.

The kids all laugh, seeing Sister Joseph, a dried-up prune, standing on the sidewalk waiting to mix it up with Al Spano, with Brendan McCaffery and Mike the Bear. Jimmy laughs, though Jimmy's not really sure what odds he'd give on Mr. Molloy and Mr. Spano, or even on his own dad, if it came to that.

My way, Tom says, nobody gets hurt. Meaning, he adds, me and you a*sholes. Them, who gives a shit?

Tom talks dirtier than the other kids, except not dirtier than Jack. This is a privilege of rank; all the kids understand that.

Yeah, Markie pipes up. And I heard Eddie's dad beat his butt.

Tom nods. This is expected, but Markie's is the first report. That's expected, too: Markie's always hearing things, bringing the kids interesting information. Probably this is because no one—grown-ups or kids—really pays much attention to Markie. No one notices him much, who cares what he sees or hears?

Markie says, Mr. Spano, he's making Eddie buy a new math book from his f*cking allowance.

Now Markie's using a word Tom saves for when he really needs it. Tom acts like he doesn't hear. Jack's eyes narrow, but he says nothing.

Markie goes on: And what else I heard, I heard Eddie told his dad he didn't know who did it, poured the gasoline. Even no matter what his dad did to him, he wouldn't tell.

Sally's green eyes get wide; Marian moves a little closer next to her and pats her hand. Everyone's quiet for a moment. The kids are all thinking about what Mr. Spano, a red-faced explosion of a man, might have done to Eddie, and about Eddie not telling.

Al Spano is just plain mean, for no reason, like his two sons. The Italians, the kids all think they're weird anyway. They wave their hands around and listen to music that you can't understand the words, and the old ladies wear black. But this kind of meanness, it's not from being Italian. All the kids keep away from Al Spano, all the kids cross to the other side of the street on the block where the Spanos live; all except Jack, who walks on that side on purpose, staring right into the windows of their house. No question Al Spano would tear out and break the arm of any man whose son was messing with his son. Even Mike the Bear: any man. But going up against Mike the Bear, that would be the end of Al Spano. Eddie Spano must know that, everyone knows that. So Eddie has to say he doesn't know who poured the gasoline.

Eddie's doing what he has to do. The kids are still scared of him, they'll never like him, and he deserves whatever he's getting; but his silence, they respect. Only Marian looks sad.

Sitting there on the stoop, everyone quiet, Jimmy's thinking, like the other kids, about Al Spano and the beating Eddie must have taken. But he's thinking about something else, too: what would happen if the Spano brothers snatched little Paulie's lunch money again tomorrow.

He sees it: Eddie Spano howling, rolling on the ground, eaten alive by flames.

He knows it won't be like that: the Spanos will never go near Paulie again. But if they did? Jimmy watches Tom, Tom's hands peeling the bark from a stick, digging with his thumbs where it doesn't want to come off.

But if they did, Jimmy thinks. Whose job would it be, then, to put that fire out?

Tom looks up at Jimmy, almost like Jimmy said what he was thinking out loud. Looks at him, but doesn't answer the question.

Tom snaps the stick, throws it away. Anyhow, he says. This way Paulie gets to keep his lunch money. The only one in trouble is Eddie, and he started it. The important thing—and now he grins, that great grin that makes them all feel good, all feel part of everything—the important thing, Dad don't get smacked by Sister Joseph.

The kids all laugh.

But there's something else Jimmy sees, sees and doesn't forget. What Tom wanted was to make the Spanos stop. Tom makes Jack part of it, what Jack will want is to beat the crap out of anything that moves. Kids fight, it's no big deal, not big enough for Sister Joseph to call anyone out. Except the way Jack fights. Jack gets in there, everything blows up, everyone's in trouble.

Tom looking out for little Paulie the way he did, Jimmy knows, that way instead of a different way, is also Tom looking out for Jack.

From the New York Tribune, October 24, 2001

A HERO'S LEGACY

by Harold Randall

Today was a happy day in Pleasant Hills.

This Staten Island hamlet of modest homes on sloping, tree-shaded streets is a town that lives up to its name. Kids ride bikes past well-tended flower beds on their way to the schools their parents went to. Main Street runs a short three blocks, lined with mom-and-pop shops. The Post Office is on the eastern end of Main Street, and the parish church of St. Ann's anchors the west. Between them, in the symbolic heart of Pleasant Hills, stands Engine 168, one of the first firehouses on Staten Island and still in use.

The purple and black bunting draped above the red doors of Engine 168 and the flags at half staff all over town suggest that Pleasant Hills hasn't had many happy days lately. Engine 168 lost two men on September 11, men who lived here, who were neighbors, fathers, and friends. The town also lost four other residents: two who worked in the World Trade Center, and two who were firefighters with other FDNY companies. And Pleasant Hills is also mourning a native son, a man who left this town 20 years ago but will always be one of their own: Capt. James McCaffery, one of the most decorated firefighters in the history of the FDNY. Capt. McCaffery died in the collapse of the north tower along with three other members of Ladder 62, the Manhattan company he commanded.

But today was a happy day in Pleasant Hills, because another native son, a little worse for wear, maybe, but alive and whole, came home.

Kevin Keegan was a probationary firefighter with three months' experience under his belt when the bell at Engine 168 rang on September 11. His shift was over; he didn't need to be there. But Keegan could often be found in the firehouse after his shift was over. Or before it began. Or on off-duty days. He liked the place: the kidding around, the stories, even the food.

“Kevin grew up here,” Owen McCardle told the Tribune. The gray-mustached Pleasant Hills resident spent his entire career at Engine 168. Though he left the job over a decade ago, McCardle is still a part of the firehouse family; in the FDNY, that's how it works. “Jimmy McCaffery was here then,” McCardle said. “He used to bring Kevin around to the firehouse after his father was gone. When Jimmy transferred out, he asked us to look after the kid.”

“We made him like the prince of the firehouse,” confirmed Peter Connell, recently promoted to captain and given the command of Engine 168. 168's former commander, Bill Small, is one of the men this company lost. “Kevin was two when his father died. We sort of adopted him. No kid should have to grow up without a father.” Captain Connell looked back through the open firehouse door to the apparatus floor. Engine 168, damaged in the maelstrom that was September 11, has been repaired and repainted. The captain said, “I guess there are going to be a lot of kids to adopt now.”

When the call came in to Engine 168 on September 11, off-duty firefighter Kevin Keegan asked Captain Small for permission to ride along. By then the extraordinary nature of the event was clear, though not yet its true and terrible extent. With the other members of the company, Keegan rode the engine into a cataclysm for which no level of experience could have prepared anyone.

“They had the bridge open for emergency vehicles, but it was slow going.” In an interview last week, Keegan sat with a visitor at a picnic table on the rolling grounds of the Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains. “By the time we got there, the second plane had hit. The fires were burning pretty bad.”

Keegan is a cheerful red-haired, freckled young man. But when he speaks of the events of that day, he turns his gaze away. He peers across the distant hills like a man hoping for the first glimpse of travelers returning home.

“Everything was chaos,” Keegan said. “Girders crashing down, glass breaking. People on fire falling from the sky. It was unbelievable.” Here in the green serenity of the hospital grounds, it did seem almost unbelievable that such horrors had ever been real.

“They sent us to the north tower,” Keegan went on. “We were massing to go in—there was a chief there, I don't know which chief, but my captain reported to him. And there were, I think, four other companies. And we were getting set when part of the building just came twisting out of the sky. Someone shouted, and some guys ran, but some guys didn't have a chance to run.”

Keegan was seriously injured by the falling debris, receiving a concussion and second-degree burns; but it's clear he knows how much luckier he is than many of the men with whom he stood.

“I lay there with something heavy on top of me. I knew I was being burned, but I couldn't move. I thought, I'm going to die. But, okay, at least I'm on the Job, I'll die as a firefighter. That was okay, you know?”

Whether or not that would have been okay is a judgment the visitor is glad he does not have to make.

“Then I heard Uncle Jimmy calling me.”

Uncle Jimmy, of course, is Capt. James McCaffery, who stepped in and helped raise young Kevin Keegan after the death of his father. “There was smoke and dust everywhere, you couldn't see anything, but Uncle Jimmy told me to go left. He said it was my coat that was pinned, not me, and to take it off and stay low and head toward daylight on the left.

“So I did. I peeled out of the coat, and I could move. It was slow going, but Uncle Jimmy kept saying just a little further, he was right there waiting. I could see the daylight he meant. I got there, to a kind of hole, and saw guys up there, yelling and digging. I called to Uncle Jimmy. I figured that's where he was, that I'd made it to the right place. A couple of guys yelled back. One guy jumped down into the hole. A guy I didn't know.” Keegan shook his head, clearing out memories of smoke and dust, fire and darkness. “I asked where Uncle Jimmy was, but he just kept telling me I was okay, and they got me out.

“That's the last thing I remember until I woke up in the hospital the next day. Some of the guys were there sitting in the room, the guys I rode with. They told me about Dave”—firefighter David Schwartz, the second member of Engine 168 to die that day—“and Capt. Small. I asked about Uncle Jimmy. They told me about him, too.

“The thing is”—Keegan turned his clear green eyes back to his visitor, giving up his search of the horizon for absent friends—“I reconstructed it. Over and over, in my head. Uncle Jimmy was already up in the tower when we got to the location. Thirty, forty flights up. That's where he was when it fell—on forty-four. He was nowhere near where I was. Nowhere near.”



Today in Pleasant Hills a breeze ruffled the bunting above the doors of Engine 168, and the carved salamanders, legendary lizards that cannot be destroyed by fire, seemed to wink. And Probationary Firefighter Kevin Keegan walked, slowly, on crutches, but unaided, back into the firehouse where he grew up.

“Jimmy saved him.” Keegan's mother, Sally, has no doubt in her mind about that. “Jimmy's been taking care of us all our lives. Since we were all kids. Kevin's dad . . .” Sally Keegan smiled. It was a day for smiling. “You had to know Markie. My husband was the sweetest man who ever lived. But he got into trouble all the time. Jimmy was always getting him out. One of the worst things for Jimmy, I think, was when he couldn't help Markie that one last time. But he's been doing things for Kevin and me ever since. And look what he did for us now.”

You don't have to believe in ghostly voices to see the ways in which Captain McCaffery is still taking care of his friend's son. Kevin Keegan's FDNY health insurance paid for his stay at Burke. Jimmy McCaffery's FDNY life insurance named Keegan as beneficiary and has paid for the extras: the private room, the private nurse, the hours of physical therapy demanded by a young man eager to push himself, anxious to get back on the Job.

But even before that, years before, Jimmy McCaffery always did what he could.

Mark Keegan, Kevin Keegan's father, died in prison, according to Marian Gallagher, director of the More Art, New York! Foundation and Kevin Keegan's godmother. “Markie killed a man in self-defense. He was never charged in the killing. But his gun was unlicensed, and he went to prison for that. It was a short sentence, but he got into a fight there and was killed.” Marian Gallagher's face saddened. “We were all so young. . . .”

After Mark Keegan died in prison, Jimmy McCaffery looked after Keegan's young family. “Uncle Jimmy said we should sue the State,” Kevin Keegan tells the visitor. He leans on his crutches, the center of the happy chaos echoing down Main Street. “Mom and Aunt Marian thought he was nuts. Even Uncle Phil did.” Keegan grins. He pokes the ribs of a tall man standing beside him. This is Phillip Constantine, Mark Keegan's court-appointed attorney. Over many years he has remained a friend of the Keegan family. He grins also and tells the visitor, “Once in my life I was wrong, and he can't forget it.”

“But Uncle Jimmy insisted,” said Keegan. “So we sued. And the State settled.”

All of that, of course, is family lore: Kevin Keegan was too young to remember. His mother remembers, though. “Yes, it was Jimmy's idea. No one thought it would work, but it did. That was Jimmy—just going ahead with something he believed in, no matter what anyone said. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but it came every month. I didn't have to work when Kevin was little. That made all the difference.”

Sally Keegan's eyes, clear and green like her son's, broke off from her visitor's and gazed down the street, as though someone had called her name.

And Main Street suddenly seemed crowded. Not just with Kevin Keegan's friends and well-wishers, people giddy with good news in a season bleak with tragedy. Ghosts were also shimmering in the morning air. Jimmy McCaffery. Markie Keegan. Bill Small. David Schwartz. The four others that Pleasant Hills lost on a day which changed us all forever. All were there, to welcome Firefighter Kevin Keegan home.