Canine Christmas (19 page)

“That's why I took the bag,” Chabo explained. “I knew nothing less than magic could set things right. It's gone too far, you know. Santa let it go too far. Sometimes changes take on a life of their own.”

His desperation was understandable, but his methods were indefensible. “What did you expect to get from the bag?” I asked. “A time machine to take us back to the Good Old Days?”

“I didn't expect anything,” Chabo said irritably. “That bag belongs to Claus. I was surprised it worked for me at all. As you can see, it produced junk. Just worthless junk.”

I took a closer look at the objects on the floor: a set of Tinker Toys, a baseball glove, two Chatty Cathys … a collection of outdated toys from the bag of an outdated Claus.

Reaching underneath the bed, I slid the bag out gently so as not to disturb Jericho's long overdue nap. “Let's tell Santa,” I said firmly. “We'll figure out the rest of it later.”

Santa sat while Chabo related his sins. Santa
had
to sit; standing caused excruciating pain behind his eyes.

“For what it's worth,” Chabo finished, “I thought I could help you. I'm sorry.”

Santa rubbed his blotchy face with his hand then sighed heavily. “It was kindness, Chabo. I understand and I'm sorry I don't deserve it.”

“Look, Santa.” I still had Jericho and the bag in my arms. “Chabo will explain to all the elves that he assaulted Hemmit and then—”

The Boss held up a hand to stop me. “Let it go, Grady.”

“But you can't—”

“Grady,” Santa said sternly, “there comes a time when one must surrender to the demands of the majority. However imbecilic they may be.”

Chabo hung his head, fully resigned to the demise of Santa's reign. I wanted to protest, to scream and shriek and by the very force of my heart bring back the wonderland of our youth. Instead I carefully pulled sleeping Jericho from his dark womb and held the bag out to the pathetic figure of a Claus before me.

Santa took it, running his stubby fingers over the soft, faded velvet. I could see memories etched on his wan face as he recalled the centuries of magic that he and the bag had shared. “Like a part of me,” he said apologetically. “I wish I could set it all right again.”

He closed his eyes and smiled a sad little smile, then reached inside. For a few seconds his hand lingered, reluctant to bring an end to the fantasy. Finally he withdrew a tightly clenched fist … but not an empty one.

“What's this?” Santa asked with surprise.

Chabo and I leaned in for a closer look. “Another bag?” Chabo suggested.

It was nearly identical to the bag in Santa's other hand, only newer and brighter, smelling of fresh snow and pine needles.

Jericho woke suddenly, no doubt disturbed by my gasp. The puppy wiggled free of my hold and confidently grabbed the old bag between his teeth. Santa watched as Jericho tugged the bag. “Here, pup. This one's all yours now. Hemmit can use the new one.”

This arrangement suited Jericho just fine. He dragged his private sleeping quarters across the floor to a corner of Santa's room, pushed and pawed at it until the lumps were finely tuned, then curled up in the middle of the bag and fell asleep.

“Well,” Santa said, “at least someone's happy.”

I looked from Chabo to the Claus and back again. “Don't you get it? It's a new bag!”

“Yes,” Chabo said, bewildered by my excitement. “What of it?”

“Santa pulled a new bag from his bag!” I spoke slowly, as if explaining a difficult concept to children. “When Santa Claus reaches into his magic bag, out comes exactly the right gift.”

“But I wasn't trying to bring out a gift,” Santa insisted.

“Weren't you? You said you wished you could set things right, and out came a new bag. With a fresh supply of Christmas magic. It's a second chance, Santa! You can take back your throne from Hemmit!”

“Oh, no.” Santa folded the new bag over his arm, instinctively stroking it smooth. “The time has passed—”

I stuck my forefingers in my ears to block out his denial and chanted, “I believe, I believe, I believe.”

After a few seconds Chabo followed suit and we chanted in unison. Then Jericho woke up and chimed in declaring, “Yip yipyip, yip yipyip.”

The elves were assembled in the gym, curious to learn why they'd been called away from their work during the busiest season. A ladder stood in the middle of the ring, with the new Christmas bag suspended from the ceiling above it.

As Santa took center stage, a legal document in one hand and a microphone in the other, the room fell silent. Santa gazed out over the crowd, spotted Hemmit in the audience, and grinned at him.

“Hemmit Elf!” he screamed into the mike. “You got a big mouth! You been talking trash‘bout me, saying you can take my place. Well, I'm givin’ you a chance to prove just how wrong you are!”

Hemmit and his gang snickered nervously.

“You think you can run the Pole? Huh?”

From the audience Hemmit answered with his usual arrogance. “Anything you can do, I can do better and twice as fast.”

Santa feigned admiration. “Ooooh. A brave elf! Well, a talented upstart like yourself, you wouldn't be afraid to put that claim in writing. I've got a contract right here.” Santa shook the paper at Hemmit. “You want a chance at the Pole? All you gotta do is sign this contract. Just agree to fight me in a ladder match. Whoever gets the bag”— Santa looked up at the prize— “gets the job. And the loser leaves the Pole forever.”

“That's ridiculous,” Hemmit muttered.

“Maybe,” Santa allowed. “But it's the only way you'll get rid of me.” Again he held up the contract, showed a mouthful of teeth to his nemesis, and hissed, “To be the Claus, you gotta beat the clause!”

I watched with satisfaction as Hemmit's face changed colors—red, magenta, purple. Santa had called him out, and if he didn't accept the challenge he'd show himself to be a cowardly blowhard. Quaking in his pointy shoes, Hemmit shuffled toward the ring.

Whatever the outcome, this would be a different sort of Christmas, the tone of which would be determined by the nature of the ruling Claus. There was no guarantee The Boss would be able to retain his title against a wily elf like Hemmit, of course. I was nervous, yes, but my optimism swelled as Hemmit climbed the steps to the ring.

I believe what happened next was an omen. Charged with excitement, Jericho dashed forward to meet Hemmit, who foolishly halted his ascent just long enough for the Christmas pup to prop a hind leg on the traitorous elf and …

Midnight Clear

Jane Haddam

JANE HADDAM is the author of sixteen Gregor Demarkian mysteries. (The most recent installment is Skeleton Key.) Married for thirteen years to three-time Edgar Award winner, the late William L. DeAndrea, she lives with her two sons in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Once, when she was very young, Carolanne Tierney had believed that she was changed. That was her First Holy Communion, at Sacred Heart Church, on East Main Street. In those days, East Main was a major thoroughfare, a street full of clothing shops and bakeries, and the side streets that surrounded it were where good people lived. Carolanne remembered the Murphys and the Kellys and the Bohrs.

In those years before the subdivisions were built in Bunker Hill and Robin's Wood, everybody lived in threedecker houses with stacked porches and renters on the top floor—except, of course, that Carolanne and her mother
were
renters. That was because Carolanne's father had disappeared, nobody knew where. Carolanne's mother said he was dead and went every week to light a candle for the repose of his soul. At school, the nuns taught Carolanne to say the rosary and make First Friday devotions in honor of the Sacred Heart.

Even then, Carolanne knew that there was something wrong in the way they lived. Nobody else's mother locked herself in the hall closet for hours at a time, crying and praying at once. Nobody else's dinner came down to nothing but bread and margarine at least two days a week. There was more wrong there than that, but Carolanne had a hard time explaining it in words, even to herself.

There was something wrong with the way she was. Somehow, she never seemed to understand what people were talking about or when they were making jokes. Somehow, she could never be like the girls who walked down the steep hill to school with her. Years later, when all those people had moved away and there was nobody left on the street for her to talk to, Carolanne would be able to close her eyes and see just how very awful she had been. Fat. Slow. Stupid. Shabby. Maybe her soul had been transfigured, that First Holy Communion day. Her body had not been. In the elementary school pictures she still kept tucked into the top drawer of her bedroom dresser, she was the square, dark, ugly one, shoved into the back row with the boys. In the First Holy Communion picture she kept in a frame on top of her television set, she was barely visible at all.

It was visibility Carolanne was thinking of, that third day of December, when she saw Lucy Blackthorne for the first time in thirty years. Actually, she didn't see Lucy Blackthorne at all, not at the beginning. It was cold for that time of year in Waterbury, hard cold, as if the air itself had frozen into glass. Across the street, in the green and white house where the Kellys had once lived, the second floor tenants had put tinsel garlands all around their front porch. Downstairs, in Carol-anne's own house, somebody was playing “Nasty As They Want to Be.” One of the boys down there had a new tattoo and other boys from the street had come in to admire it. Every once in a while, there was the sound of breaking glass. Every once in a while—more rarely still—there was the sound of a toilet flushing. They took dope down there, and sold it, too, when anybody in the neighborhood had the money to buy it. Carolanne sometimes bought marijuana from them when she was feeling very bad.

That morning, she was thinking about Christmas decorations and what it would mean if she put some up. She had bought a silver tinsel garland and a string of red and blue lights. She wanted to wind them around the pillars on her porch and hang a tinsel flower at the center, to show people that she was one of the few people who still believed in God, who still went to church. The problem was that she was the only white woman left on the street. They talked about her already: about the way her coats always looked worn at the elbows and not the right size, about the way she went to work every day even though the job she had paid less than welfare, about the fact that she had nowhere to go for Christmas but the party that the parish gave. One or two of the older women had tried to befriend her. They'd come to her front door with casseroles in covered dishes and big loaves of bread. All Carolanne had been able to do was sit at her kitchen table with her hands folded, mute. It was the same kitchen table where she had eaten her breakfast on the day of her First Holy Communion. Nothing had changed, except that the kitchen now needed paint.

“You keep this up, you're going to end in the nuthouse,” Mrs. Jackson had said, putting a tuna, noodle, and cream of mushroom soup dish in Carolanne's refrigerator. “A person needs someone to talk to. A person needs someone to love.”

“I'm all right,” Carolanne had told her.

“The people at that church of yours don't know how to behave,” Mrs. Jackson had said. “The people of my church would never leave a body alone like this. They'd never let you live without even a telephone.”

Downstairs, “Nasty As You Want to Be” changed to something else, to rap, a driving beat with no words behind it that Carolanne could make out. It was too hard to lift her arms when she was wearing her coat. She took her coat off and laid it down on the floor of the porch. There used to be a wicker chair out here, but it had disintegrated into twigs. She picked up the silver garland and went to the porch balustrade to begin to wind it around the column. Visibility, that was the problem here. How visible did she want to be?

She was putting Scotch tape on the end of the garland when she looked over the wall at the street and saw the dog, the most amazing dog in the universe, pure white and enormous. She stopped what she was doing and looked up and down the sidewalk. The dog was on a leash. No dogs in this neighborhood were ever on leashes. No dogs were ever pure white. If they started out that way, they got dirty, and nobody would clean them.

Carolanne looked at the other end of the leash. The woman holding on to it was tall and thin and dressed in a good camel's hair coat, the kind of coat women wore on the covers of fancy magazines like
Vogue
and
Town and Country
. Her hands kept going up to her face and rubbing it against the side. It was a gesture Carolanne had seen a thousand times, that meant that this woman was out of cocaine and needed not to be.
If she keeps it up, she'll smear her makeup
, Carolanne thought.

Then the woman turned her head and shook out her hair, and swivelled around on the backs of her stackheeled boots. The sun came out from behind a curtain of clouds. The woman's large square-cut diamond and flat gold wedding rings gleamed in the light. Carolanne put her tinsel garland down and leaned over the porch balustrade to get a better look.

That was Lucy Blackthorne down there, who had the best veil in Carolanne's First Holy Communion class. That was Lucy Blackthorne down there, who had been the first to move away to a subdivision and the first to buy her clothes at Lord & Taylor and the first to announce that she was going away to college somewhere real, at Smith, which was too expensive a place for most of the people in Waterbury to go.

Carolanne picked up the garland again and threaded it through her hands. Any moment now, one of the boys on the street would notice this woman. He would see her rubbing the side of her face and know what she was looking for. Then Lucy would have her cocaine and she would take away her dog, and that would be the last Carolanne ever saw of either one of them.

The dog was leaping and prancing in the light, running in circles, barking happily. Every time it barked, Lucy Blackthorne seemed to wince.

It was one of the boys from the ground floor who came out to give Lucy Blackthorne what she wanted to buy. He was more cautious about it than she wanted to be, and drew her up on the ground floor porch in order to make the deal. Carolanne came out the front door to find them standing together, huddled, while Lucy counted out money. The dog was sitting still at Lucy's side, but looking as if it wanted to run. When the door opened, the two of them jumped. Then Miguel saw that it was only her and went back to what he was doing.