Double Deck the Halls

by Gretchen Archer

  She made a questioning noise.

  Like she was asking me something.

  A one-word question. Over and over.

  “I’m telling you this so you can relax a little and not blow us up,” I said. “Just like the dandelions aren’t all over the yard, the marks aren’t all over you. They’re not on your face. Or your arms or legs. You need to be still just where your tomatoes are. Get those shoulders down and relax that jaw before you break your face.”

  I must have said the magic words, because Bianca let out a sigh she’d been holding for a long long time. I guess she didn’t want her face to break.

  “See?” I said. “We didn’t blow up.”

  Something something something through the scarf. I heard, “eee eee eee.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m Granny. Granny Dee. And I’m going to get us out of this pickle.”

  In my life, I had yet to make a promise I hadn’t kept.

  “We probably don’t have long,” I said. “So I need to get to work.”

  She nodded. Not much of a nod. But a nod.

  “I’m going to call for help.”

  Bianca liked that.

  Where was my phone?

  I started patting my pockets.

  Where was my Jitterbug phone?

  Beside me, I could feel Bianca fidgeting. I guess she’d been tied up with a bomb on her for the better part of an hour and she was about done with it. Her patience was running low. I hurried a little faster.

  “You lean back and relax, Bianca,” I told her. “Granny’s here.”

  She wild-eyed me.

  “I mean it,” I said. “You’ve got veins popping out on your neck.”

  She didn’t like that news a bit.

  “Lean your head back.”

  She carefully tipped her head against the velvet, and down came those tight shoulders.

  “Unclench your hands, Bianca. They’re not in your marked-off space.”

  Her fingers uncurled.

  “Now close your eyes and rest.”

  She did, and two tears squeezed out.

  “No crying,” I said. “Granny Dee’s here. We’re going to be okay. We’ve been through worse. Just remember that.”

  I couldn’t remember being through worse, I doubt she could either, and I couldn’t remember what I was doing.

  My phone.

  Calling for help.

  That was it.

  My Jitterbug wasn’t in my top pocket. I found my travel tube of Fixodent and my Medicaid card in my top pocket. I pulled them out and put them on my lap. From the pocket underneath, I found my two hundred dollars, my Chap Stick, and my Gold Bond Healing hand cream. I was forever trying to get Cyril to use my hand cream—you should see the dried-up claws on that man—and he said he wasn’t about to grease up his hands with my Gold Bond. He said it was slicker than owl snot and he’d just as soon dip his hands in lard, and I said that was because you had to give it time to sink in. If I didn’t use my Gold Bond I wouldn’t even know my own hands. I’d washed a million dishes in my day. The same dishes in the same sink a million times. And dishwashing will take its toll on your hands.

  What was I looking for?

  My Jitterbug.

  I went to the other side pockets where I got my extra glasses, the ones with the headlights and magnifier, my portable EZ Grabber—As Seen on TV—and my coin purse. It was shaped like a pineapple, with a small zipper across the crown. From the underneath pocket, I got my Juicy Fruit, my three-day pill organizer, and finally I found my Jitterbug flip phone.

  “Ah-ha!” I showed it to Bianca. “Help is on the way!”

  She nodded fast. I could see the relief in her green eyes.

  I flipped open my Jitterbug and went straight for the 5-star button. It’s big, it’s red, and it’s for emergencies only. I’d never used it. I’d never needed to.

  I needed to.

  I pushed that button and then got the phone to my head, not even worried about my hair I’d had set last Tuesday. “Hello?”

  I made sure to say it loud enough for the person at the other end to hear.

  “HELLO?”

  There was no one there.

  I tried it again.

  Nothing.

  I pushed that big red button eleventeen times.

  My phone didn’t work.

  “Bianca,” I said, “we’re going to have to figure something else out. I guess if that elf was smart enough to put himself on your television, he was smart enough to stop the phones from working. While I’m figuring, I’m going to ease out of my jacket.”

  I’d worked up a hot. Sitting next to a lady in her pajamas wearing a bomb will do that to you.

  First I had to move everything out of my lap. I had plenty of room because that chair was big enough to hold me and a week’s worth of groceries. I scooted everything onto the cushion. I started with my right arm, the one closest to the Bianca, and I could tell it was making her nervous, me wrangling out of my jacket.

  I had to keep her calm.

  “Let’s sing, Bianca.”

  She started up with the whimpering again.

  She was going to have to let up or scare herself to death.

  Then the bomb would go off.

  And we’d be gone.

  I hummed what I believed to be a middle C. I started out soft. “Si-i-lent night.”

  I sang in the Pine Apple Baptist choir for thirty-seven years. Tuesday night practice and Sunday morning worship. For thirty-seven years.

  “Ho-o-ly night.”

  Along about my fifties, we got a new whippersnapper Minister of Music. He was about twelve. He threw out all the standards—“How Great Thou Art,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “He Arose”—and started up with Jesus rock and roll. Within six months, me and the rest of the alto section quit. That mess hurt my ears listening to it; I wasn’t about to sing it.

  “All is calm—”

  Then through the quiet of the white room with the red bomb, I barely heard Bianca hum the tune to the next line, “All is bright.”

  “That’s beautiful, Bianca. You have a nice humming voice. Keep going.”

  She kept going. She was about at “Holy infant so tender and mild,” her humming shaky, and she’d changed keys a few times, when I finally got out of my jacket.

  That was better.

  I can’t think when I’m hot.

  But somehow I’d accidentally turned Rudolph’s nose on.

  Now the white room was red.

  Oh, boy.

  Cyril was right. Rudolph’s nose could blind someone.

  Bianca stopped humming and started fast breathing again.

  “It’s okay, Bianca. I’ll turn it off.” I fumbled with my jacket trying to find the pocket with the battery. “Just hold on, Bianca. It’s here somewhere.” She was making huffing noises. “Close your eyes,” I told her, and there went my pineapple coin purse, off the chair and into the floor. I flipped my jacket over and spread it across my lap so I could get to the front pockets easier and there went my Fixodent.

  “HEY!”

  I looked up at the television. The elf had a hand over his big square eyeglasses.

  “Turn that spotlight off, old woman! I can’t see.”

  Rudolph’s nose was on my left knee, pointed straight at the camera on top of the chifferobe.

  “TURN THAT LIGHT OFF, BLUE HAIR!”

  It got real quiet. Then in a minor key, low and slow, Bianca hummed the tune to “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

  The elf said he’d be right back. He was going for his prescription sunglasses.

  This was after he told me he’d been to Davis’s house and Davis wasn’t there. He asked me where she was twenty times and I told him twenty-one times I didn’t know.

 
“You’re never going to find her, short stuff.”

  “You’d better hope I do, old bag.”

  “You’re rude.”

  “You’re a fossil.”

  “Yeah? You’re a knee-high squirt to a squirt grasshopper.”

  “Yeah? Squirt this, old woman.”

  One of Bianca’s legs jumped. At the same time, her fists clenched up again.

  “You’d better hope I find your granddaughter soon. That safe is coming open. The easy way or the hard way. Doesn’t matter to me.”

  The television went dark and the bomb lit up.

  With numbers.

  Bianca must have felt it.

  The little square in the middle lit up with numbers. It was a clock. It said 29:42, then 29:41, then down and down.

  Bianca didn’t dare move her head far enough to look down, so she couldn’t see the numbers.

  She was making fast noises. Wondering what she felt, I’d bet.

  “Don’t you worry about it, Bianca,” I told her. “It was nothing.”

  Oh, boy.

  “Let’s me and you get back to work.”

  And fast. Because we only had twenty-nine minutes and four seconds to work with.

  It would be easier to figure out what to do next if I could reach over and untie the scarf so she could talk to me. But I was too afraid of moving inside the red dots so close to her neck, then, like the elf said, boom boom. I’d have to figure something else out.

  “I wish you could tell me what was in that safe, Bianca.”

  I could see her thinking. Then she hummed, “Silver and Gold.”

  Burl Ives. To me, he’s the voice of Christmas. Him and Bing Crosby.

  “Do you know how to get in it?” I asked her.

  She looked at the ceiling in deep thought, then hummed, “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.”

  Was this about those little Christmas chipmunks?

  We didn’t have time for chipmunks.

  She hummed it again, putting the weight on two.

  “It takes two people to open the safe?”

  She nodded yes.

  “Well, I’m not the other person.”

  She nodded no.

  “But Davis is.”

  Bianca blinked yes.

  It was time for me to put my thinking cap on, because I didn’t want Davis anywhere near where we were. We needed this mess over and done with. And the quickest way to get it done with was to get out. There were four little red dots on Bianca keeping us in.

  Those dots needed to go.

  And I had twenty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds to get rid of them.

  I could see where they were coming from.

  When the little dictator with the big chip on his shoulder turned on the countdown clock, the whole square lit up. I didn’t see it before, but now I could see thin lights aimed on Bianca were coming from the corners of the clock. Two pointed up and two pointed down. The lines were coming from the edges. There were no lines covering the black square of numbers in the middle. That said to me there was a small space on the bomb I could get to without blowing us up. And maybe if I could get there, I could do something. Like plug up the lights. If I could plug up those lights, the sensors wouldn’t work, and Bianca could move. If Bianca could move, we could get the bomb off her and get out of here.

  It would be close—that square was little—but I knew all about close. Me and Close were good friends. You don’t live as long as I have without cutting it close a few times.

  I remember one time I was ironing sheets—there’s nothing more boring than ironing sheets—on a crisp March morning. I was looking out the kitchen window, ironing back and forth, the whole kitchen smelling like hot cotton, wondering if my Brandywine crabapple tree was blooming too early. It was barely March. I was sure we had another cold snap and for sure some spring storms headed our way, and I was thinking if we got another frost I wouldn’t get a good crabapple crop, which would mean I wouldn’t get a good batch of jelly, and I was ironing sheets and thinking about jelly when my husband Quinton scared the daylights out of me, sneaking up from behind and goosing me. Not even half an hour after he walked our Samuel, who was a little fella then, to grade school. I about jumped out of my skin. Quinton took my sprinkle bottle out of my hand, unplugged that iron, and swept me off my feet.

  I felt like a feather in his arms.

  He said, “Dee, me and you are playing hooky today.”

  We had a nineteen-foot Chris-Craft Capri—they don’t even make furniture today with mahogany as pretty as the mahogany on that boat—docked on Miller’s Ferry lake, which turns off Alabama River, and we’d gone a whole winter without playing hooky on the lake, just me and Quinton, a picnic basket, Skinny Dip Slough, and a quilt.

  He didn’t have to ask me twice.

  Skinny Dip Slough was hard to get to.

  But you can probably tell by the name, it was worth it.

  Problem was, Skinny Dip was more than beautiful and private. It was also home to striped bass the size of loaves of bread.

  We weren’t on the lake ten minutes before we ran into Conroy Haney in his fishing boat and Burk Nettermall in his runabout.

  They were playing hooky too, and they were headed to Skinny Dip for striped bass.

  That was a disappointment.

  Quinton made a deal with them. If we got there first, we got the slough. If they got there first, they got it.

  We took off.

  I had long auburn hair then. It was flying.

  We were ahead—that Chris-Craft sliced through the water like a knife—when out of nowhere two spring storms popped up. Not one, but two. One minute the sky was clear and blue, the next minute we had black clouds and lightning to the east and green skies and forty-mile-an-hour winds coming at us from the west.

  March. In like a lion.

  The storms looked to be headed for each other, and I wondered what would happen when they met up.

  The race was over.

  Conroy and Burk pulled their boats up to ours. The men talked. Conroy and Burk decided to keep going for Skinny Dip, wait the storms out there under the cover of the sycamores. Quinton said we were turning for home.

  Which was straight into the storms.

  If it’d been up to me, I’d have gone for the slough, because it was closer, and those storms were coming up fast. But I trusted Quinton with all my heart.

  “You’re never going to outrun it,” Conroy said to Quinton.

  “Think about your boy, Quinton, and your wife,” Burk said. “Come on with us to Skinny Dip.”

  The first hard pelts of rain hit us like needles.

  The tree tops were wailing out a warning.

  The air smelled like copper.

  “Quinton?” I put my hand on his arm.

  “You see that, Dee?” He pointed. “You see that clear line between the storms?”

  I could see one slice of clear. It didn’t look even as wide as the boat.

  Quinton gunned the motor.

  “That’s our little window of opportunity,” he said. “It’ll be close, but we’re going to make it back between the storms and get back home to our boy. Hold on.” Then he took a minute we didn’t have to look into my eyes and say, “You’re my girl, Dee. Forever.”

  We tore across that choppy water.

  We made it.

  Conroy Haney and Burk Nettermall died in Skinny Dip Slough that day.

  And lightning got my Brandywine crabapple tree. Half of that tree came through the kitchen window and split my ironing board in two.

  We had a chance and we took it.

  If we hadn’t, we’d have died.

  I looked at the black square on the bomb. It was my chance, my window of opportunity. I had to take it or me and Bianca would die.


  I didn’t have much to work with.

  And I only had twenty-six minutes and ten seconds to work.

  The first thing I did was trade my trifocals for my magnifiers that lit up.

  While I was doing that, I dropped my trifocals.

  Bianca started huffing.

  “It’s okay, Bianca. I’m just trying to see better.”

  Neither one of us could see anything but Rudolph.

  I didn’t want to turn him off, because it would be too much trouble to turn him back on if that twerp elf came back.

  I needed to cover him up.

  With my Medicaid card.

  That helped, until it slid off.

  I unwrapped a piece of Juicy Fruit, chewed it good, then used it to stick my Medicaid card to Rudolph’s nose.

  That was better.

  Now I could half see.

  Bianca was about to rip the arms off her white chair.

  “Just hold on, Bianca.”

  I looked down at my feet, where my trifocals had fallen, and saw my pineapple coin purse and my Fixodent. I just have a partial. Upper left. The rest of my teeth were my own. I’ve got news for you young people: take care of your teeth if you want to keep them. Cyril didn’t have a tooth in his head that didn’t sleep in a water glass. And his plates were loose, slipped and slid, because he wouldn’t use Fixodent. He said it gummed up too bad.

  Gummed up.

  I had an idea.

  I was sitting by a bomb that needed to be gummed up.

  The dots on the bomb needed to be gummed up.

  First, I’d have to get my Fixodent.

  I could bend over and reach it, but getting back up wouldn’t be any fun.

  I could get up and get it, but that’d take ten minutes.

  And for reasons just like those, I never went anywhere without my EZ Grabber Mini. It was a bonus gift when you bought a big EZ Grabber. This was on the QVC channel. Usually late at night. Used to when I couldn’t sleep, I’d watched Johnny Carson. What a hunk. Now when I can’t sleep I watch the QVC. Which was where I got my EZ Grabber and my bonus gift, the Mini. It folded up to the size of a deck of cards. It was lightweight and portable, for “exceedingly good grab on the go.” It was made of hard plastic and it looked a lot like a back scratcher when it was all the way open. It clicked out, one link at a time, and stretched to a full three feet. At the bottom it was split in two, and when I squeezed the button at the top, the two parts at the bottom closed in on what I needed to pick up.