A Yuletide Universe

by Brian M. Thomsen (ed)

  “What place?”

  The Yattering fumbled for the special word it had heard Beelzebub use.

  “Heaven,” it said triumphant. An ugly grin had come on to its face; this was the cleverest maneuver it had ever attempted; it was juggling theology here.

  Jack nodded slowly, nibbling at his bottom lip.

  The creature was probably telling the truth: association with it or its like would not be looked upon benignly by the Host of Saints and Angels. He probably was forbidden access to the plains of paradise.

  “Well,” he said, “You know what I have to say about that, don’t you?”

  The Yattering stared at him frowning. No, it didn’t know. Then the grin of satisfaction it had been wearing died, as it saw just what Polo was driving at.

  “What do I say?” Polo asked it.

  Defeated, the Yattering murmured the phrase.

  “Che sera, sera.”

  Polo smiled. “There’s a chance for you yet,” he said, and led the way over the threshold, closing the door with something very like serenity on his face.

  Icicle Music

  Michael Bishop

  * * *

  Chimes on the roof, like icicles being struck in sequence by a small silver mallet.

  Wind whistled away the icicle shards, hurled them back together somewhere above Danny’s bedroom, turned their disconcerting chimes into a hair-raising electronic drone, then boomed so fiercely over cottonwood grove and nearby river that he had to suppose he’d only imagined the eerie icicle music.

  Or had he? It was Christmas Eve, 1957 (to be exact, very early Christmas morning), and maybe those unearthly chimes were coming from another Soviet space shot, a beep-beep-beeping Sputnik passing over Van Luna, polluting Kansas’s atmosphere with Commie radiation and a sanity-sabotaging barrage of high-frequency sound pulses. Who could say?

  Danny got up. Careful not to rouse his mother (who ordinarily commuted thirty-plus miles, round-trip, to her job in personnel at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita), he crept barefoot into the boxy little house’s living room. He let the Christmas tree in the corner—light strings unplugged, foil tinsel agleam, fragile glass ornaments minutely rotating—emerge from the gloom.

  Had Santa come yet? Ha! Danny wasn’t misled. He was twelve, had been for more than a month. And even if he hadn’t just had his birthday, he hadn’t believed in Santa for three or four years. And he hadn’t really bought Jolly Saint Nick’s year-end gift-giving since the year Esther Jane Onions let him take her bubble gum in a “kiss exchange”—a double-dare-you bet with Freddie DeVore—in the bushes behind the grain elevator off Depot Street.

  Danny’d been, yeah, nine that year. The kiss exchange—Esther Jane’s breath smelling just like her last name—had made him feel really funny. He would never do that again. It had destroyed his faith in Freddie DeVore’s friendship, the inevitability of girls, and, in fact, the reliability of nearly everyone. (Even Ike, with that famous grin of his, for which his folks had voted in ’56, was probably a cheat in some ways, fudging golf scores and “forgetting” to report on his taxes all the money he’d won.) Anyway, E.J.’s breath, Freddie’s refusal to ante up the agreed-upon Eddie Yost baseball card, Ike’s secret sins, and three more disappointing years had forever numbed the kid in him.

  Nine Ten. Eleven.

  And—wham!—he was illusion-free, a twelve-year-old dreaming of his driver’s license, his first legal beer, and the full assumption of Daddy Pitts’s role as head of household and chief provider. The rotten skid-out. In fact, Danny hoped his dad was in jail somewhere this Christmas, or in a cardboard box over a steam grate in K.C. or Topeka, or even—sucks to him, anyhow—in a wooden one under a pile of gooey black Kansas dirt. It’d serve the bum right.

  Actually, “Santa”—Milly, Danny’s mom—had already come. His main present, unwrapped, lay on the green flannel tree skirt under the scrawny pine he’d chopped down on Mr. Arno’s place. It glinted there like the sword of a medieval Turk.

  It was the shotgun he’d begged for, a gas-operated “automatic” 12-gauge, the kind that absorbed some of its recoil instead of kicking back like a colicky mule. Even in the darkness, Danny could tell that it was beautiful. His mom must have set aside ten—no, fifteen—bucks a month for the better part of this past year to buy it for him. He approached the tree, lifted and cradled the gun, and let his fingers roam it from red velvet-edged butt plate to the evil-looking shark-fin notch of its front head, dumbstruck by the deadly power in his arms.

  Two small packages, wrapped, lay beside the shotgun, and Danny guessed that they contained shells. Kneeling and hefting one of these boxes, he confirmed his guess. Now he could go dove hunting with Brad Selley. Not now, of course—but in the morning, after he and Mom had had their Christmas together.

  His immediate problem was that morning, even if Mom got up at six or so, was still a good four hours away. The wall clock in the kitchen (designed to resemble the pilot’s wheel on an old-fashioned clipper ship) said so. Figuring himself safe for a time, Danny sat down Buddha style, the shotgun in his lap, and meticulously removed the slick red paper from one of the boxes of shells. Then, holding his breath, he loaded the gun, aimed it at the cockeyed angel atop the tree, faked pulling the trigger, and faked, too, the 12-gauge’s rumbling discharge: Ka-SHOOOOOOOM! An imaginary explosion sloshed back and forth in his mouth and throat.

  Then, upon lowering the shotgun, Danny heard the wind die. He heard a faint, panicky pawing overhead and the same dreamy icicle music that had called him from sleep. Dad had built their place near Van Luna’s riverside dump, on a muddy patch of land inherited from Mom’s grandparents. It was two miles from the city limits, a mile from their nearest neighbors, and the boy began to wonder if a crook—or a couple of crooks, a whole army of them—had cased their house, decided it was an easy hit, and showed up tonight (Christmas morning) to break in, hag up all their silverware and presents, and then skedaddle, booty-laden, into Arkansas or Oklahoma.

  Danny, holding the 12-gauge, got up and backed away to the door of his own bedroom. The popping icicle music continued, as did the agitated scrabbling on the rooftop shingles. Then both the chimes and the pawing ceased, and there was only a hushed curling of wind—and Danny’s heartbeat, like acorns falling into a rusted gasoline drum—to suggest that God had ever created sound waves or that the universe had ever before experienced them.

  The living room had a fireplace. Dad had built it (lopsidedly, Mom accused, and the catawampus fireplace supported this gripe) of river stones and second-rate mortar. He’d put in no damper. When it rained, huge drops whistled down the flue, hit the inner hearth, and splattered the living room rug with inky soot. Disgusted, Mom had stopped trying to use it. In fact, she’d stuffed the throat of the chimney with wadded-up sheets of the Wichita Beacon to keep the oily rain from further staining the hearth rug.

  Now, to Danny’s dismay, the crinkled ball of newspaper fell out of the chimney into the firebox. A second sheet cascaded down, and a third, and a fourth.

  Then a pair of booted feet appeared in the firebox, dangling down uncertainly, both boots as worn as harness leather. Whumpf! The boots crashed through the crumpled newspaper to the hearth. A pair of skinny legs in mud-fouled khaki materialized in the shadows above them. With a grunt and a muttered curse, a man in a heavy red-plaid coat kicked away the papers, ducked out of the firebox, and hobbled over to the tree, carrying what looked like a grungy World War II duffel bag.

  Santa Claus? wondered Danny. Father Christmas? Kriss Kringle? Saint Nick? Or just a chimney-shinnying thief?

  The man’s duffel looked empty. It hung down his back like a collapsed parachute. His greasy white hair squeezed out from under the roll of his red woolen sailor’s cap to tickle the frayed collar of his jacket. In spite of the darkness, Danny could see the man clearly, as if his unexpected arrival had triggered an explosion of ghostly amber light.

  Then, turning, the intruder looked straight at him.

  Danny
ducked out of sight. A moment later, though, he peered back around and saw that Klepto Kriss Kringle had a pale, stubbly beard and a pair of bleak, ever-moving eyes.

  What if he weren’t just a thief? What if he were a rapist or a murderer? What if he had his sights on the shotgun now in Danny’s arms? Assuming, as seemed likely, that he’d staked out their house and watched Mom bring it home. . . .

  Danny (Danny told himself), you’ve waited too long. You should do something. You’ve got the draw on him, don’t you? Why are you being so wishy-washy?

  “Hold it, mister!” Danny said, stepping out of the doorway and leveling the twin barrels of his shotgun on the intruder. Santa—no, the lousy burglar—twisted an ornament off the tree and hurled it all the way across the room. It struck the lintel over Danny’s head, showering pieces of feathery, mirror plastic. A flashing, quicksilver rain of tiny knives.

  Ducking, Danny thumbed the safety off and shot. The blast spat flames, a burst of orange and blue that knocked Danny backward into his bedroom.

  Klepto Kriss howled.

  The Christmas tree toppled, like a bombed pagoda bringing down all the bamboo chimes, hammered-tin animals, and folded-up paper fish hanging from its dozens of eaves. The noise was loud. The entire house shook. Had there been an earthquake?

  Golly, Danny thought, struggling to his feet. My shotgun’s a gas-powered job. It’s not supposed to kick.

  “Danny!” his mother shouted from her own bedroom. “Danny, hon, are you all right?” She sounded panicked, downright rattled. For a moment, Danny regretted squeezing off a pellet pattern in reply to a desperately flung Christmas tree ornament. But all he’d done was issue a command—a reasonable command, given the circumstances—and Klepto had tried to take his head off. If the 12-gauge had been in the other guy’s hands, Danny knew, he’d be dead now. Gut-shot by a stinking burglar on Jesus’s birthday.

  He met his mom outside their bedroom doors, which were across the hall from each other. At first, Klepto seemed not to be there any longer, as if he’d simply vanished, but then Mom saw a rotting boot dangling down from the throat of the chimney. “What’s that?” She grabbed Danny’s shotgun, rushed to the tree, kicked its fallen branches aside, found a box of shells, expertly loaded the shotgun, and ran to the fireplace.

  Danny was already there, reaching repeatedly for the toe of the visible boot, as if it were the persnickety beak of a cottonmouth. Each time he grabbed for it, it struck back. So Danny reached and pulled away, reached and pulled away.

  Who wanted to get booted in the kisser? And why (now that he thought of it) had Mom taken his shotgun? He had more right to it than she did. After all, blood dripping into the wadded-up pages of the Beacon proved that he’d hit his target.

  Then the boot withdrew, a storm of soot whirled from the smoke chamber above the missing damper, and both he and Mom were fitfully coughing, waving their hands and colliding with each other in their attempts to back away.

  When the soot storm subsided, Mom knelt and pointed the barrels of Danny’s shotgun up the angled flue.

  “Come down here, you snake! Who do you think you are, stealing our Christmas?”

  The burglar’s soot-dislodging climb went on.

  Mom, fiery-eyed, shouted, “Come down or I’ll shoot!”

  “Don’t do it,” Danny warned her. “You’ll hit him in the butt, maybe, but most of the pellets’ll come back on us.”

  That was good enough for Mom. Flicking on a light as she ran, she headed through the kitchen to the back door. Danny followed, still aching to get the shotgun back, but no longer conscious of the biting cold. Mom hit the porch light, ran down the steps into the yard, gimped barefoot over the brown grass to a spot from which she and Danny could see the black jut of the chimney, and reached out a hand to halt Danny beside her.

  Danny gaped.

  No moon sailed the indigo velvet of the Sedgwick County sky, but every star visible from the Northern Hemisphere had winked into being up there. He was dazzled. It was hard to make out if the smear on the roof—the bundled silhouette of the man he’d shot—was a living thing or merely a phantom of starlight, wind, and jittery shadows. Danny saw this figure hoist itself out of their chimney, stumble over a lofty plain of shingles, and fall atop a four-legged shape with a white flag for a tail and two black branches of horn for headgear.

  Unless he was imagining things, there was a deer on their roof, a buck with twelve to fifteen points. The guy who’d tried to steal their Christmas was mounting the jumpy creature. He encouraged it—“Up, Blitzen, up!”—to fly him to safety over both the riverside dump and the rooftops of their sleeping town.

  “Stop!” Mom shouted. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” She sounded just like a sheriff on a TV cowboy show.

  “No, Milly!” the man on the roof pleaded. “Don’t!”

  “Clifton?” Mom murmured. Then, louder: “Clifton?”

  The compact little buck ( a courser, Danny thought, like in “The Night Before Christmas,” which Mrs. French had read them on the day before their holidays) soared up from the house. It lifted like a dream creature, pawing the night air and defining both itself and its desperate, neck-clutching rider against a blowing purple scrim of stars. All Danny could do was marvel. There should have been seven other reindeer (if the words of that silly poem counted for anything), but one was about all Danny could handle.

  The deer—the courser—drew an invisible circle over their backyard. Mom and he looked up to see its glinting hooves and white belly. Then the thief sprawled across the deer took a shiny ball from the pocket of his coat and nearly unseated himself sidearming it with all his wounded strength at Mom and him.

  “Here’s something for you, Milly!” And the stolen ornament—a second one, Danny realized—shattered on Mom’s forehead.

  “Ouch!”

  “Merry Christmas to both you and the brat, bitch! And to all a good ni—”

  Mom brushed fragments from her hair, raised the shotgun, took aim at the departing courser, and fired. Rider and mount received the ripping impact of the pellets. A cry from the man. A brief, anguished bleating from the reindeer.

  The man fell headlong into the yard. The animal veered toward the dump, legs flailing, but crashed onto the barbed-wire fence Mom had put up to keep rabbits and stray dogs out of their vegetable garden. Its body crumpled the rusty strands of the fence, slicing itself open on the barbs.

  Meanwhile, Mom fought painfully up from the frozen earth. (The 12-gauge’s recoil had thrown her down.) She thrust the weapon into Danny’s hands and ran to the shotgunned intruder. Danny ran to see whatever he could see. The man—the would-be reindeer pilot—was dead, his neck broken and his head tilted away from his coat as if it wanted nothing to do with the hobo corpse to which it still so obviously belonged.

  “Clifton,” Mom said. “You stupid fool.”

  At his mother’s direction, Danny hauled the deer off the fence, gutted it, and spent the remainder of that unending Christmas dawn rendering the deer on the back porch. They could use the venison, Mom said, and if 1958 wasn’t any better than 1957 had been, they’d need a lot of it.

  Meanwhile, Mom dragged the dead man into the dump; planted him in the cottony guts of a hide-a-bed sofa; wrestled the sofa into a mountain of ancient tires, mushy cardboard boxes, splintered orange crates, and broken tool handles; doused the heap with lighter fluid from her Ronco and a gallon of gasoline siphoned from her pink-and-charcoal Rambler station wagon; and threw a burning Winston into all that jumbled trash to light it.

  The pyre burned all night, a surrealistic flickering that Danny could see through the screened-in porch on which he was processing the carcass of the flying deer. Later Mom helped him wrap all the different cuts of meat in smooth butcher paper—steaks, roasts, spare ribs, reindeer burgers. Then they washed their hands, limped into the living room, and sat down cross-legged next to the toppled tree to hunt for their presents.

  “Was that Dad?” Danny said, avoiding Mom’s eyes.

>   “Yeah.”

  “It didn’t look like him.”

  “He’d changed a lot.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him. Which, I guess, isn’t possible anymore.”

  “He called that deer Blitzen. It flew.”

  “Yeah, well, Papa didn’t always tell the truth.” Mom dug the boy’s only gift to her out from under the waterfall of tinsel, “Ah, this is great. How did you know I wanted a handmade ashtray? The way the colors swirl together—pretty.”

  “Thanks,” said Danny, rubbing his shoulder.

  “I’ll exchange the gun for one with less kick. You’ve got my word on it. Please don’t let it ruin your Christmas.”

  Mom leaned over and kissed Danny on the nose.

  Then she handed him his other presents: a complete set of the plays of William Shakespeare, and a book of poetry by somebody Mom called William Butler Yeats. Danny didn’t think he’d get to them very soon.

  * * *

  “I am—I mean, I was—the boy in that story,” Danny Pitts told Philip, the worried young man sitting next to his bed in a hospital room in Denver. The blinds on the only window had been hoisted; the icicles on the exterior cornice hung down like the barrels of a glassblower’s panpipe.

  “You don’t mean me to take it as true, do you?” said Philip.

  Once upon a time Daniel had known Philip’s surname. Tonight—Christmas Eve, 1987—he couldn’t recall it. His memory did better with events of a decade, two decades, even thirty-plus years ago. Ancient history.

  “Why not?” There were tubes in Daniel’s nose. The plastic bag of an IV drip hung over him like a disembodied lung.

  “Your mother killed an intruder, then burned his corpse in the Van Luna dump?”

  “Yes.”

  “O.K., Daniel, if you say so. What about ‘Blitzen’?”

  “See Moore, Clement Clarke. I didn’t name the creature.”

  “The creature’s name’s a red herring.” Philip grimaced. “What about its reality?”