A Yuletide Universe Page 6

  The boy stopped. “Mom,” he said, loud enough for only his mother to hear. “May I sit on his lap?”

  She gave an impatient sigh. “Oh, Alan . . .”

  “Please?”

  “Honey, do you really want your picture taken with . . . ?”

  “I don’t want a picture. I just want to sit on his lap.”

  “No, sweetie,” she said, looking at the man looking at the boy. “I don’t think so.”

  They were in the parking lot by the time she looked at her son once more. To her amazement, huge tears were running down his face. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “I wanted to sit on his lap,” the boy choked out.

  “Oh, Alan, he’s not Santa, he’s just a helper. And not a very good one either.”

  “Can’t I? Please? Just for a minute . . .”

  She sighed and smiled, thinking that it would do no harm, and that she was in no hurry. “All right. But no picture.”

  The boy shook his head, and they went back inside. The man in the red suit smiled as he saw the boy approach without hesitation, and patted his thigh in an unspoken invitation for the boy to sit. The man in the cowboy hat stood up, but before he could bring the camera to eye level, the boy said, “No picture, please,” and the man, with a look of irritation directed at the boy’s mother, sat down again.

  The boy remained on the man’s lap for less than a minute, talking so quietly that his mother could not hear. When he started to slide off he stopped suddenly, as though caught, and his mother saw that the metal buckle of the boy’s loose-hanging coat belt had become entangled in the white plush of the man’s left cuff. The man tried unsuccessfully to extricate it with the fingers of his gloved right hand, then put the glove in his mouth and yanked his hand free. With his long, thin fingers he freed the boy, who hopped smiling onto the floor and waved a hand, enclosed in his own varicolored mitten. When he rejoined his mother, he was surprised to find her scowling. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she answered. “Let’s go.”

  But he knew something was wrong and found out later at dinner. “I think he must have been on something.”

  “Oh, come on,” his father said, taking a second baked potato. “Why?”

  His mother went on as though he were not there. “He just looked it. He had these real hollow eyes, like he hadn’t slept in days. Really thin. The suit just hung on him. And, uh . . .” She looked at the boy, who pretended to be interested in pushing an unmelted piece of margarine around on his peas.

  “What?”

  “His hand. He took off his glove and his hand was all bruised, like he’d been shooting into it or something.”

  “Shooting what?” the boy asked.

  “Drugs,” his father said, before his mother could make something up.

  “What’s that? Like what?”

  His mother smiled sardonically at his father. “Go ahead, Mr. Rogers. Explain.”

  “Well . . . drugs. Like your baby aspirin, only a lot stronger. People take some drugs just to make them feel good, but then later they feel real bad, so you shouldn’t ever take them at all.”

  “What’s the shooting part?”

  “Like a shot, when the doctor gives you a shot.”

  “Like Mommy’s diabetes.”

  “Yeah, like that. Only people who take too many bad drugs have their veins . . .” He saw the question on the boy’s face. “. . . their little blood hoses inside their skin collapse on them. So they might stick the needles in their legs, or in the veins in the backs of their hands, or even their feet or the inside of their mouth, or . . .”

  “That’s fine, thank you,” his mother said sharply. “I think we’ve learned enough tonight.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” the boy said. “He was too nice.”

  His father shook his head. “Aw, honey, you never know. Nice people can have problems too.” And then his mother changed the subject.

  The next day the boy told his mother that he wished he could see Santa Claus again. “Santa Claus?” she asked.

  “At the market. You know.”

  “Oh, Alan, him? Honey, you saw him yesterday. You told him what you wanted then, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t want to tell him what I want. I just want to see him because he’s nice. I liked him.”

  After the boy was in bed, his father and mother sat in the living room, neither of them paying attention to the movie on cable. “He say anything to you about Santa today?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “Couple of times. You?”

  “Yeah. He really went for this guy, huh?”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “Oh, Alan can be so compassionate—probably felt sorry for the guy.”

  She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t like that. He really seemed drawn by him, almost as though . . .” She paused.

  “As though he really thought the guy was Santa Claus?” her husband finished.

  “I don’t know,” she answered, looking at the car crash on the TV screen but not really seeing it. “Maybe.”

  She turned off the movie with no complaints from her husband, and began to go over the final list of ingredients for their Christmas dinner. “Uh-oh,” she murmured, and went out to the kitchen. In a minute she returned; frowning lovingly at her husband. “Well, it’s not that I don’t appreciate your making dinner tonight, but I just realized your oyster stew used the oysters for the Christmas casserole.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.” She was amused to see that there was actually panic in his face.

  “What’ll we do?”

  “Do without.”

  “But . . . but oyster casserole’s a tradition.”

  “Some tradition—just because we had it last year.”

  “I liked it.”

  “And where are we going to find oysters on a Sunday?”

  “It’s not the day, it’s the month. And December has an R in it.”

  “Sure. But Sunday doesn’t have oysters in it. The IGA’s closed, Acme, Weis . . .”

  His face brightened. “The farmer’s market! They have a fish stand, and they’re open tomorrow. You could run out and . . .”

  “Me? I didn’t cook the oyster stew.”

  “You ate it.”

  She put her left hand over his head and pounded it gently with her right. “Sometimes you are a real sleazoid.”

  “Now, Mrs. Scrooge,” he said, pulling her onto his lap, “where’s that Christmas spirit, that charity?”

  “Good King Wenceslas I ain’t.”

  “How about if I vacuum while you’re gone so my mother doesn’t realize what a slob you are?”

  “How many pounds of oysters do you want?”

  It started to snow heavily just before midnight and stopped at dawn. The snow was light and powdery, easy for the early morning trucks to push from the roads. The family went to church, then came home for a simple lunch, as if afraid to ingest even a jot too much on the day before the great Christmas feast. “Well,” the boy’s mother said after they’d finished cleaning up the dishes, “I’m off for oysters. Anyone want to come?”

  “To the farm market?” asked the boy. His mother nodded. “Can I see Santa?”

  His father and mother exchanged looks. “I don’t think so,” she replied. “Do you want to go anyway?”

  He thought for a moment. “Okay.”

  The parking lot was still covered with snow, although the cars had mashed most of it down to a dirty gray film. Only the far end of the parking lot, where a small, gray trailer sat attached to an old, nondescript sedan, was pristine with whiteness. It was typical, the boy’s mother thought, of the management not to pay to have the lot plowed—anyone who’d hire a bargain basement Santa like that one and then charge three bucks for a thirty-five-cent picture with him.

  The seafood stand was out of oysters, but its owner said that the small grocery shop at the market’s other end might still have some. “Could I see Santa?” the boy aske
d as they walked.

  “Alan, I told you no. Besides, he’s probably gone by now. He’s got a busy night tonight.” She knew it sounded absurd even as she said it. If that Santa was going to be busy, it wouldn’t be delivering toys—it would probably be looking for a fix. Repulsion crossed her face as she thought again of those hollow eyes, that pale skin, the telltale bruises on his bare hand, and she wondered what her son could possibly see in that haggard countenance.

  She thought she would ask him, but when she looked down, he was gone. In a sharp, reflexive motion, she looked to the other side, then behind her, but the boy was not there. She strained to see him through the forest of people, then turned and retraced her steps, as her heart beat faster and beads of cold sweat touched her face. “Alan!” she called, softly but high, to pierce the low, murmuring din around her. “Alan!”

  It took some time for the idea to occur that her son had disobeyed her and had set out to find the market’s Santa Claus on his own. She had not thought him capable of such a thing, for he knew and understood the dangers that could face a small child alone in a public place, especially a place like a flea market that had more than its share of transients and lowlifes. She told herself that he would be all right, that nothing could happen to a little boy the day before Christmas, that someone she knew would see him and stop him and take care of him until she could find him, or that he would be there on Santa Claus’s lap, smiling sheepishly and guiltily when he spotted her.

  She was running now, jostling shoppers, their arms loaded with last-minute thoughts. Within a minute, she entered the large open area between the markets. The chairs and the sign were there, the Santa and his photographer were not. Neither was her son.

  For a long moment she stood, wondering what to do next, and finally decided to find the manager and ask him to make an announcement on the PA system. But first she called her husband, for she could no longer bear to be alone.

  By the time he met her in the manager’s office, the announcement had been made four times without a response. The boy’s father held his mother, who was by this time crying quietly, very much afraid. “Where was he going?” the manager, a short, elderly man with a cigarette in one hand and a can of soda in the other, asked.

  “I thought it was to see Santa, but he wasn’t there when I got there.”

  The manager nodded. “Yeah, he quit at noon. I wanted him to work through five, but he wouldn’t. Said he hadda meet somebody.”

  The boy’s father looked at the manager intently over his wife’s head. “Who is this guy?”

  “Santa? Don’t know his name. Just breezed in about a week ago and asked if I wanted a Santa cheap.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know his name? You pay him, don’t you?”

  “Cash. Off the books. You’ll keep that quiet now. And Riley, my helper, he got a Polaroid, so we made enough to pay him outta the pictures.”

  The boy’s father took his arms from around his wife. “Where is this guy?”

  “He’s got a trailer the other side of the lot.”

  “All right,” the father nodded. “We’re going to talk to him. And if he can’t give us any answers, we’re calling the police.”

  The manager started to protest, but the couple walked out of the office and down the aisles, trying hard not to run and so admit their panic to themselves. “It’ll be all right,” the boy’s father kept saying. “We’ll find him. It’ll be all right.”

  And they did. When they walked into the open area where Santa had been, their son was standing beside the gold aluminum Christmas tree. He smiled when he saw them, and waved.

  They ran to him, and his mother scooped him up and hugged him, crying. His father placed a hand on his head as if to be certain he was really there, then tousled his hair, swallowing heavily to rid his throat of the cold lump that had been there since his wife’s call.

  “Where were you?” the boy’s mother said, holding him ferociously. “Where did you go?”

  “I wanted to see him,” he said, as if that were all the explanation necessary.

  “But I told you no. You know better, Alan. Anything could’ve happened. We were worried sick.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I just had to see him.”

  “But you didn’t,” his father said. “So where were you? Why didn’t you answer the announcements?”

  “Oh, I saw him, Dad. I was with him.”

  “You . . . where?”

  “He was here. He said he was waiting for me, that he’d been hoping I’d come again. He looked really different, he didn’t have on his red suit or anything.”

  His mother shook her head. “But . . . I looked here.”

  “Oh, I found him here okay. But then we went to his place.”

  “What?” they both asked at once.

  “His trailer. It’s sort of like the one Grandpa and Grandma have.”

  “Why . . . did you go out there?” his mother asked, remembering the trailer and the car at the end of the lot.

  “He asked me to.”

  “Alan,” his father said, “I’ve told you never, never to go with anyone for any reason.”

  “But it was all right with him, Dad. I knew I’d be safe with him. He told me when we were walking. Out to his trailer.”

  “Told you what?”

  “How he always looks for somebody.”

  “Oh, my God. . . .”

  “What’s the matter, Mom?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. What else did this . . . man say?”

  “He just said he always comes back this time of year, just to see if people still believe in him. He said lots of people say they do, but they don’t, not really. He said they just say so because they want their kids to believe in him. But if he finds one person who really believes, and knows who he really is, then it’s all gonna be okay. Till next Christmas. He said it’s almost always kids, like me, but that that’s okay. As long as there’s somebody who believes in him and trusts him enough to go with him.”

  The boy’s father knelt beside him and put his big hands on the boy’s thin shoulders. “Alan. Did he touch you? Touch you anywhere at all?”

  “Just here.” He held up his mitten-covered hands. “My hands.”

  “Alan, this man played a mean joke on you. He let you think that he’s somebody that he really isn’t.”

  “Oh no, Dad, you’re wrong.”

  “Now listen. This man was not Santa Claus, Alan.”

  The boy laughed. “I know that! I haven’t believed in Santa Claus for almost a whole month!”

  His mother barely got the words out. “Then who . . . ?”

  “And you were wrong too, Mom. He didn’t have any little needle holes in his hands. Just the big ones. Straight through. Just like he’s supposed to.”

  Her eyes widened, and she put her fist to her mouth to hold in a scream. Her husband leaped to his feet, his face even paler than before. “Where’s this trailer?” he asked in a voice whose coldness frightened the boy.

  They strode out the door together into the late afternoon darkness. Street lights illuminated every part of the parking lot. “It . . . was there,” she said, staring across at white emptiness.

  “The bastard. Got out while the getting was good. He . . .” The father paused. “There?” he said, pointing.

  “Yes. It was right over there.” The boy nodded in agreement with his mother.

  “It couldn’t’ve been.” He started to walk toward the open space, and his family followed. “There are no tracks. It hasn’t snowed. And there’s no wind.” He looked at the unbroken plain of powdered snow.

  “Hey! Hey, you folks!” They turned and saw the manager laboring toward them, puffs of condensation roaring from his mouth. “That your kid? He okay?”

  The boy’s father nodded. “Yeah. He seems to be. We were trying to find that man. Your Santa Claus. But he’s . . . gone.”

  “Huh! You believe that? And I still owe him fourteen bucks.” He turned back toward the warmth of the market
, shaking his head. “Left without his money. Some people . . .”

  “Never mind,” his wife said. “He’s all right. Let him believe.” She touched her husband’s shoulder. “Maybe we should all believe. It’s almost easier that way.”

  When they got home, the boy took off his mittens, and his father and mother saw the pale red marks, one in each palm, where he said the man’s fingers had touched him. They were suffused with a rosy glow, as if the blood pulsed more strongly there. “They’ll go away,” the boy’s father said. “In time, they’ll go away.” But they did not.

  It’s a Wonderful Miracle on 34th Street’s Christmas Carol

  Brian Thomsen

  * * *

  The shrink on the golf course said . . .

  The elf said . . .

  Then this elf said . . .

  So this other shrink says . . .

  The portly patient continued with his protestations, but eventually lay back on the couch and tried to relax, nervously stroking his snow-white and bushy beard.

  “I know you’re a bit uncomfortable,” Dr. Ahmet offered. “Most people are on their first visit.”

  “I guess I never thought I would wind up on some Upper East Side shrink’s couch,” Kris replied, quickly adding, “No offense intended. Over the ‘shrink,’ I mean.”

  “None taken. So why don’t you tell me why you are here?”

  “Beyond the fact that you’re covered by my HMO?” Kris kidded with a chuckle.

  “Yes, beyond that particularly rewarding reason.”

  Kris sighed and began his confession.

  “I guess I’m just having a problem dealing with who I am now.”

  “As compared to who you were?” Dr. Ahmet inquired.

  “Yes.”

  “And that was?”

  Kris fidgeted and sat up, and replied with a sigh, “Kris Kringle.”

  Dr. Ahmet was puzzled. He didn’t recognize the name.

  “Come again,” he re-inquired.

  “Kris Kringle.”