The Christmas Megapack Read online

  “This is a part of the job I like,” I said.

  “Cutting little leaves out of green fake fruit?”

  “It’s citron.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s taking you longer to make these things than it will take us to eat them. They’ll disappear, Gyp.”

  “That’s the way cooking always works.”

  “I could snap them out, and you could have the rest of the afternoon off, do something more important or interesting.”

  “I want to be right here, doing this right now.”

  His frown deepened. I was afraid I had gone too far. Suppose he spelled me into living in the kitchen, baking endlessly until he was tired of the joke? Suppose he ignored me and snapped my cookies done anyway? Jasper could outspell everybody in the house except Mama, and she almost never interfered; “let them fight it out” was the LaZelle philosophy of child-rearing.

  When Jasper didn’t say anything, I leaned across the table and took one of my finished wreaths from the cooling rack. I held it out. He reached for it, his gaze still on my face.

  “This is my spell,” I said. I dropped the cookie in his hand, and the little wreath broke.

  For an unbearable moment, we stared into each other’s eyes. At last Jasper blinked, then turned away. “Thanks,” he muttered. He stalked out of the kitchen, the broken cookie in one hand, his helmet in the other.

  I pinched a ball off the chilled dough and tried to roll it into a snake. My fingers trembled too much. I got out the kitchen stool and sat down, staring at the floured surface of the butcher-block table, the leftover morsels of dough, the big ball, the little bit I had tried to work. Was I lying to myself? Was this work silly? Worthless? A waste of time?

  “I smell something burning.”

  I turned. Helmetless, Jasper stood just inside the kitchen door, his face haunted. I jumped up and looked into the oven. “Damn,” I said, and pulled out the sheet of burnt-bottomed cookies. I turned the sheet over the trash can and shook it till all the cookies fell into the trash.

  “All that work,” said Jasper.

  “Yes, well,” I said.

  “Can I—”

  I wiped the burnt bits off the non-stick cookie sheet with a paper towel. When Jasper didn’t go on, I glanced at him.

  “Can I try it?”

  So many things to say jumped into my mind, but I let one after the other pass unsaid. I brought the cookie sheet to the table and reached for my abandoned dough, then glanced over my shoulder at Jasper. After a moment, he came to join me. I gave him a piece of dough. “You roll it out, like this,” I said, and thought, thanks.

  JASPER’S CAROL

  I find it hard to be thankful for something I’m still suspicious of. Thanks for the cake (are you sure it isn’t poisoned?). Thanks for the toy (I think it’s broken). Thanks for my powers. (How come they work this way? How come Gyp’s don’t work at all?). They work really well. (When are you going to make me pay for them? If I use them wrong, will you take them away?). Merry Christmas.

  Mama told me I was to write the carol this year, an expression of praise and thanksgiving for a whole year given us by the Powers, Elements and Spirits, Lord and Lady, the Source, and of course, I should toss in a verse about hope and thanks for the year to come. I said I’d rather do any other Christmas chore than this.

  She said everything else was too easy for me now.

  But what if the carol wasn’t good enough?

  “It will be,” she said, and smiled her “or else” smile.

  I noodled on the piano and brooded about this year, wondering what had been good about it, and how I could express that in music. Art wasn’t like magic; I couldn’t just say, okay, gifts, here’s some notes, give me back a meaningful song that’ll make everybody cry and feel good at the same time. I might be able to work backwards, though; start with the feelings, and say, please supply the notes to make these feelings happen. Of course, I’d need to have the feelings first. Not very likely.

  What did we have to be thankful for? Gyp got a job tutoring English at the community college. I had a new girlfriend. Flint managed to stay alive, in spite of everything. Beryl retained most of her innocence. Opal was prettier than ever. Mama and Dad still loved each other, and Great Uncle Tobias hadn’t moved out. Those were all things we could probably agree to be thankful about. So how come I felt mad instead?

  I played the chords for anger, stomping doom chords, to get that out of my system. I thought about the Christmas carols I heard at the mall or on the radio, and tried making up something bright and gladdened, prancy and bouncy. That was easy, and incredibly unsatisfying. I started fitting words into the catchy melody I had come up with, and when I found myself rhyming “Presence” with “presents,” I slammed the lid down over the keyboard and stomped out of the living room. I had figured out where the anger came from. Mama wanted me to feel something I didn’t feel, thanks / glad / appreciate / love / return / blessing. Of all the sins I had committed, one I’d stayed away from was forcing anybody to feel something they weren’t feeling. I’d avoided that one without realizing it, and now I was trying to violate my own somewhat elastic code of ethics.

  I paced through the front hall, then through the dining room, the kitchen, the back hall, the study and the living room again. I nearly tripped over the cord to Flint’s lights as I stalked past the tree. The tree rustled at me, and I glanced at it, annoyed. It was a scruffy little oak tree, wearing Flint’s white electric lights if they were a pearl necklace. After a minute, I went over and collapsed on the couch, amid puffy squashed pillows that belched dust. I stared at the tree. “Look at me,” it said, “look at me!”

  “I’m looking,” I said.

  “I see you,” it said, its voice faint but joyous, and I thought about my trees. I had collected seven before Flint figured out how to tree-speak, and each year I’d been glad to go, because something happened in the course of finding a tree that made me feel like no matter what I was like, or who I was, I was doing something right. Trees didn’t care that I’d hurt my sisters or terrorized my little brother. Trees didn’t care that I was spiteful and mean at school. Trees just wanted to acknowledge that I was a human and they were trees and here we were, on the planet together, and it was nice to think about that at least once a year.

  “You are beautiful,” I told Beryl’s tree.

  “You are beautiful,” it told me.

  We stared at each other for a long time, and then I went to the piano and played what that felt like. It was a song with no words, and it wasn’t really about gratitude or anything like that. It just said we’re here together and I’m glad. I worked it over until it felt just right, then talked to the piano. It accepted the song. It liked it. It went on playing after I stood up, and I wandered out to the hall with my carol going on behind me. The house felt different. I ran upstairs and lay on my bed and fell asleep to the muffled sound of the carol seeping into the walls.

  OPAL’S ORNAMENT

  I held them all when they were babies, even Jasper. I remember when he was an infant and I was two and-a-half, I sat on the big couch and Mama put Jasper into my lap. I hugged him so hard he squeaked. Mama taught me to be gentler with my love. I adored them all, before they could talk.

  Something happens when babies start talking. I’m not sure what, but you just feel differently about them.

  I was thinking about my ornament. I’m sure Mama just gave me this assignment because she couldn’t think of something more useful for me to do. My gifts aren’t up to anything major; she’s already tested me on lights and Spirit invocation and fire, and I flunked them all. I’m not musical like Jasper, and even if it was all right for the eldest to tree talk, I never succeeded at that, either. So for the past six years I’ve made an ornament for the tree.

  Last year, all I thought about was how to make my ornament more beautiful than the ones I’d made before; that’s been my focus since I started. Beauty is something I understand. This year, though, I thought about babies in
stead of silver lace snowflakes inside iridescent bubbles, or mirror-bright stars with faint images of flowers etched into their surfaces.

  Babies, and traditions. If the heart of the Christmas tradition was love and thanks for the family being together, maybe I should try to illustrate that somehow. I thought about loving my family, and somehow it got all tangled up with babies—nontalking babies.

  I took some woodchips I’d stolen from the wood pile, and cupped them in my hands, and thought, gift me with the beloved image of Jasper, please, and there in my hands was a tiny baby with hazel eyes, wearing nothing but diapers.

  The same thing happened when I asked for the beloved images of Gypsum, Flint, and Beryl.

  I set the babies on the pink bedspread and studied them, and felt my heart melting. They looked wide-eyed, curious, wistful. Jasper reached up a chubby hand. Gypsum had her hands clasped over her belly. Flint was curled on his side, leaning on his fist. Beryl’s hands lay open at her sides. I loved them all.

  I took some more woodchips and asked for the beloved image of Opal, please. For a moment a tiny haze clouded my hands; when it cleared, I found the figure of a little blonde girl with wide violet eyes. She was sitting back on her heels, her hands flat on her thighs, and looking down. She wore a flannel nightgown with teddy bears on it. She looked about four. I felt like crying and didn’t know why.

  I set her among the others.

  I took a stick and asked for the image of the beloved Daddy. He looked just like he always does, shy, smiling, his hair a little mussed. The image of the beloved Mama made her look different: she wore a smile I couldn’t ever remember seeing on her face, so that she looked soft and pleased. The image of the beloved Tobias came out just like him, tense and relaxed at the same time, his smile broad.

  I thanked my gifts for their help. I set everybody on the bedspread and spent time arranging them, seeing who they’d be next to, logically. Mama and Daddy together, of course, standing to the rear, looking down at the children. After a hesitation, I put Gypsum and Jasper next to each other, because when they were babies, they were inseparable, though since transition it’s another story. I put Beryl on Gypsum’s other side, and Flint on Jasper’s other side. That left Great-Uncle Tobias and me as loose pieces. We didn’t fit together. I knew Great-Uncle Tobias loved Jasper and Gypsum the best. I asked my gifts to change him from a standing to a sitting position, and my gifts obliged. I set Tobias at Jasper and Gypsum’s heads, just in front of Mama and Daddy.

  And was left with me.

  I held my image in my hand and cried.

  After a while I rearranged everybody into a chronological spiral, Great-Uncle Tobias at the outer edge, Beryl in the middle. It satisfied my desire for order, but it looked stupid. I put everybody back the way they had been the first time, and then put me, kneeling at the babies’ feet, facing toward Great-Uncle Tobias and my parents. That, at last, felt right. I was a little outside, a little beyond, looking back at them. They were absorbed in each other.

  I gripped a stick of wood and asked my gift for a solid cloud big enough to hold my little beloveds, and a cloud formed in my hands, puffy and pearl-gray and strong enough to support a whole family. I set everybody on it the way I had planned. I hung it in the air and stared at it for a long time. Maybe everybody would laugh at it. They had all said they liked my earlier ornaments, but maybe that was the Christmas talking and not them. Maybe Jasper would hate being a baby. I listened to all these thoughts, and wondered if there was something better I could make, and decided there wasn’t. I took my ornament downstairs to the living room, where Beryl’s tree stood, garlanded with Flint’s lights. The music of Jasper’s carol was playing, coming from everywhere, not from the stereo. A big plate of Gypsum’s cookies sat on the piano.

  Daddy was alone in the room with all these things; he was sitting in his armchair, just looking. I walked over to him and held out my ornament. He accepted it. He studied it slowly, the way he looks at everything, turned it this way and that, looked at it from below and above, and at last he glanced up at me with bright eyes and said, “Oh, Opal.”

  He put my ornament on a side table and got up and then he hugged me so hard I almost squeaked. Then I knew everything would be all right, no matter what everybody else said.

  THE CHRISTMAS CRAZIES: A GRIFF & FATS STORY, by Gary Lovisi

  For most people Christmas is the best time of the year. For Fats and me, on the job back in the old days—it was the worst. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day—a time of peace, joy, happiness, and love. It’s also a time when more people kill themselves, shoot their fathers, stab their mothers, beat their brother to death, or go out on some damn killing spree and murder their entire family. We called it the Christmas Crazies. It was true back then, it’s truer today.

  Fats and I had our strangest case of the Christmas Crazies back on Christmas Eve in 1962.

  It all began when the kid came over to our car. We were parked. The engine off. It was mid-morning, Christmas Eve. A slow time. I figured, okay it’s cool, we’ll have an early night. Boy, was I wrong.

  I was sitting in the driver’s seat, trying to sip some of Jackie’s killer coffee. Fats was beside me, chomping down on a handful of donuts, guzzling a quart of real coffee from, of all things, a Thermos. I don’t know where he got a Thermos, I thought he loved Jackie’s old rot-gut brew. Meanwhile, my partner worked on his food like a bulldozer digging a trench. The donuts were soon gone and Fats began looking around with that hungry look upon his fat puss like he still had room in that big gut of his for more stuff to eat. Which I am sure that he did.

  I don’t know how he could eat an entire box of those damn greasy things but I figured he was just about to ask me to take another trip to the donut shop when the kid came over to the car. He was a real little guy, just four or five years old. I figured he must have been lost, couldn’t find his mommy or something, but he wasn’t crying and then I noticed some woman standing behind him. Patient, and obviously his mom, but not in real great control of the boy just then. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew I’d find out before too long.

  The kid tugged on my partner’s sleeve. Fats’ great ham of an arm rested on the open car window sill. The kid tried hard to get the Fatman’s attention.

  I was certain that whatever the kid had to say, it did not concern food, which I knew at that point was uppermost in Fats’ mind, so I gently gave my large partner a sharp shot to the ribs with my right elbow saying, “Hey, you big lug, I think the kid’s trying to tell you something.”

  Fats looked over at the kid with a blank look.

  The kid looked at Fats hard.

  It was stare for stare now.

  I thought, now this might be interesting.

  “You’re a cop?” the kid asked my partner. It wasn’t exactly a question. More like a statement of utter disbelief or astonishment. I couldn’t help laughing.

  Fats laughed too, said, “Sure, kid. I’m a cop. Now what can I do for you?”

  “It’s Santa Claus. He’s disappeared. My mom took me here to see Santa and now there’s no Santa. We looked all over. Do you know where he is?”

  Fats burped, not even trying to hide the sound from the kid and his mother. “Ah, you mean Santa’s missing?”

  They looked at Fats with incredulous eyes, and for a second I got the impression the wee tyke was thinking that my partner might have gobbled down Santa—red suit and all—in some kind of out-of-control eating binge. Fats was certainly big enough and hungry enough to eat a horse, so Santa wouldn’t be much of a problem. Fats was a giant-sized adult compared to the tiny kid. Lucky for the kid he’d never seen my partner on a real eating binge. It was not a pretty sight.

  The mother came over. She was a worn-out, worked-out lady, thin, pinched face, nervous eyes. She’d seen hard days. “My name is Gwen Smith, and this is my son, Robert....”

  “Bobby!” the kid corrected.

  Fats nodded, “You can call me Fats, Bobby.”

  Bobby smil
ed, said, “The name fits you.”

  Fats just broke out in laughter, said, “See, Griff, what I gotta put up with from some wisenheimer kid?”

  I nodded. I watched Bobby’s mother. She was concerned about something. Something that bothered her and didn’t seem right to her. I began to wonder about it, said, “So tell me, what’s the problem, Mrs. Smith?”

  She looked at me closely, then back to Fats, then to her son, Bobby, and said, “Every Christmas Eve they have a Santa on the corner of Dumont and Sixth. The Salvation Army Santa, you know? He rings his bell by a big black kettle set on a tripod. You know, for donations?”

  “Yeah, I know the corner,” Fats said. “I know the Santa there too.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Smith blurted, “He seems to have.... He’s not there any more.”

  I said, “You mean he walked off?”

  Fats laughed, “That’d be Jimmy McConnell. Remember him, Griff? He’s got a serious jones for the sauce. He probably took some of the cash and walked off for a quick belt. Or ten.”

  Mrs. Smith took Bobby aside, told him to wait for her at the other end of our car. Then she told us, “Santa was talking with a man. They had an argument. They went to the man’s car. The man’s car was parked a few spaces up the block and the man showed Santa something in the trunk. When Santa looked into the trunk, the man made a motion and Santa got into the trunk of the man’s car. Then the man closed the trunk lid on Santa and drove away. It was all very strange.”

  “Did the man have a gun?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. I didn’t see one, but he could have had one in his pocket, I guess. His right hand was in his pocket,” Mrs. Smith added, remembering.

  Fats said, “Did the man rob Santa?”