The Boy With Penny Eyes

by Al Sarrantonio

  The tree. There, in the darkness, it looked like a sentinel over Christmas, with a smell like nothing else, grabbing the nose like outdoors, indoors. Outside, a balsam was a tree; inside, it was Christmas.

  "Can you see anything?" Bobby said anxiously. He was behind his two older siblings, pushing against them, trying to peer into the room.

  "Wow," Potty said, still lost in the smell of the tree. But his eyes were beginning to adjust to the outlines of what lay in the treasure room.

  Outlines. Silhouettes, piles of dark boxes set against the barely dawning sky that leaked through the big windows. His eyes ran over this mountain range of Christmas presents: odd angles of the unknown, the faintly made-out profile of an asked-for gift, a contour that might be the sled Potty had asked for, or the wagon Bobby wanted, or might be something else entirely, wonderful on its own.

  They stood in the entranceway, three short steps down into Wonderland—three abreast with their eyes straining, noses still sniffing tree smell. Still, they wouldn't take that step. Still, Potty wanted it all to go on.

  Dawn grew a little bit lighter, sent the mysterious mountains into almost three dimensions, made faint letters appear on boxes, gave corners to others, made the sled into what had to be a sled, runner nearly visible.

  "That one's mine!" Bobby cried suddenly, running past the other two, jumping down the short steps to run across the room to where his presents lay stacked on a stuffed chair.

  "That's for me!" Marian shouted a moment later, then she, too, was down into the room, slippered feet hurrying her to another stack on the couch and to a neighboring rocking chair, with recognizable Marian-type things on it.

  Still, Potty hesitated. Why does it have to end!

  He stepped down.

  And then the sun came up, and the coffee went on, and sleepy Mom and Dad were there, and everything was opened, and . . .

  The magic bled away.

  Bottles chimed one against the other.

  Potty smiled. He pulled his wire rack from the truck, thinking about how lucky he was to be a milkman, one of the few left. Milkmen coming with glass bottles was something else he remembered from his youth. He knew he was a romantic. Actually, being a milkman was pretty tedious, but the fact that he worked at a time of day when he could think about all these things, and was not bothered with other people, made it bearable.

  He felt something cold and wet on his neck. He looked up, and it was . . .

  Snowing.

  "Holy cats." This was not just a chance dusting. There were big fat flakes coming down, dancing around one another and laying themselves like sleepers on the ground around his feet. And suddenly there was a smell in the air like snow—not like the first snow of the year but as of a particular snowfall, a special one, and suddenly it smelled like . . .

  Christmas.

  "Jumping cats," Potty said. The sky was now filled with snow. It was building up around his feet. Unbelieving, he stepped back and sat on the bumper of the truck, putting the milk bottles down. They clinked. He watched as snowflakes clung to the sides of the milk bottles, white against white. A few melted, running down the glass, but the others kissed the bottles, sticking to them.

  There was a lot of snow falling, and Potty tried to remember if the sky had been clear when he'd set out on his rounds. After all, it was only the beginning of October. It wasn't even Halloween yet. Had they ever had a snow this early? He couldn't remember it ever happening. Usually the first snow came around Thanksgiving, and usually it was a powdering that he would watch from his schoolroom window. It would remind him of the coming holiday, with the parades on TV with Santa at the end, which meant that Christmas was on the way. Heck, hadn't the stars been out when he left the plant? Hadn't he watched the first orange of dawn push up at the horizon after he'd made his first couple of stops?

  The snow was ankle-deep.

  What's going on?

  Then he knew.

  The sound came from above him, high in the swirls of snow. He remembered one Christmas Eve when it had snowed like this. That was the special snowfall he'd remembered. He'd been out in the fields at the edge of town with Bobby and with Luke Marple, talking about the next day, all of them hoping it would snow like the radio said it might. And, just as they started for home, it had begun to snow. Big flakes, just like this. They'd begun to whoop and dance around one another as if a prayer had been answered.

  But he hadn't heard this sound then.

  He heard it now. God, it can't be. It was up there, high in the snowy clouds, part of the snow, belonging to it, just like he'd thought about it that same night when he and Bobby and Luke had seen the snowfall start. He'd lain in his bed that night, knowing the magic hour was not far off, waiting for sleep, listening through the snow for that sound, that wonderful sound.

  He reached down and picked up his wire basket of milk bottles, and made the sound along with it.

  "Bells!" he shouted. "Sleigh bells!" He stared up, one arm moving the basket of milk bottles, clinking them in time with the sound above, the other arm waving over his head as if in signal. "Here!" his arm was saying. The sleigh bells grew louder. He could hear the individual tap of them against the reins, the swish of something large drawn through the air—he could hear, just hear, a muffled cry and a faint, faint laugh. The snow was up to his shins, but he danced and danced and shouted into the maelstrom, "Here! Here!"

  He knew it was descending. In the snow his eyes were a blind man's, but so were his ears. He could sense each movement in the naked air. He felt a swish past him. Then he gasped and shouted, his mouth open with pleasure as he saw, just poked out of the snow clouds over his head, the long cool line of a sleigh runner and the flat bottom of a hoof. It pulled up and away, and he heard and felt it circle before it landed. He heard a loud bump and a laugh behind his milk truck, then the snorting of reined animals.

  He felt the weight of something heavy out there in the snow.

  "Is it you?" he cried. "Is it?"

  Someone laughed the right laugh.

  "It can't be," Potty Johnson said. He knew it couldn't be. But it was. Why? But why not? Each morning he had relived the happiest time of his life, pushing from his mind the fact that his brother, Bobby, had been killed in Lebanon by a suicide bomber; that Marian, whom he hadn't seen in three years, was unhappily married in California to someone everyone could see right from the beginning would be no good to her, to someone she had fought with them about, had run away and married, and now didn't even send Christmas cards, trapped at home with a child she didn't want and two-thirds an alcoholic; that his parents had divorced when he was fifteen and his brother and sister were only twelve and ten; that the happy life he had thought they'd always have had gone to ashes in the space of three short months, when his mother couldn't take the fact that his father had been cheating on her with various women for ten years and just got tired of taking it, tired of trying to wait until all the kids were grown and out of the house, so she just left and let the lawyers do the rest. He had been able to forget it all every morning, what his own life was: thirty-five, divorced, full of the memories of his fights with his wife over having kids, since she didn't want to have any and he did, remembering what it was like to be a kid, the things he could give his own kids, the Christmases he could give them. "Big baby," Janice had called him, with affection when they'd first married, later in derision, and finally in hate. "You dream about something that probably never really existed," she spat at him that last time, when she'd moved out of the house, not back to her mother like she'd said, but to live with the guy she'd worked for as a secretary, whom she'd probably been screwing for a year or two . . .

  The sleigh bells jangled.

  He heard that laugh again. And now he didn't care. It had to be real because sometimes your dreams come true, just like Walt Disney said. Here was his dream coming true. He was back in his childhood, it was Christmas, and Santa was here. "Ho-ho!" he heard out in the swirling snow, on the other side of the truck. One of th
e reindeer snorted. And then he heard his name. "Potty!" Santa called, his bass voice filled with mirth. "Potty, where are you?"

  "Here!" he said, and then he was up on his feet, stumbling over the milk bottles ("Ching! Ching!" they answered) and moving around the truck into the clouds of snow. It was nearly up to his knees. He plowed through, feeling it soak through his pants to his skin.

  "I'm coming!" he shouted, and in answer he heard Santa laugh.

  He was surrounded by a fog of white. He began to shiver. He was aware of how cold it must be if it was snowing like this. There were snowflakes sticking to his eyelids, pushing against his face, making it difficult to see. He heard more laughter, and he moved toward it. He was very cold. He shivered, like the time when he'd gone swimming one summer night, forgetting to bring a towel, just peeling off his clothes while his brother watched, and when it suddenly turned cold and the chill night air got to him, he felt the way he did now.

  "Potty, where are you!" the chuckling voice called.

  "Here! I'm coming!" Potty shouted breathlessly. He fell, but his hand brushed across something thick and solid, and when he grabbed it, he knew it was the runner of the sleigh.

  "Santa?" he asked, standing up. His hand moved over the smooth cherry-red surface of the sled. It was trimmed in polished gold, a thin perfect line of fresh-cut holly laced around it. His bare hand touched the reins, brown leather as supple as a baby's skin. The front was hollowed wide for its single passenger, lined in green brocade. He put his hand out into the blinding snow and found the warm flank of a reindeer, hard and bristle-haired. The animal moved from side to side and chuffed breath from its mouth. "Santa?" he called into the snow.

  "Potty? Back here!"

  "Yes!" Potty said. He stumbled to the rear of the sleigh. He saw a flash of moving red and then everything was swallowed up by whipping snow. His hands found the sleigh and he moved alongside until he felt something made of burlap, stretched tight and filled with jutting objects. He felt as high as his hand could reach, standing on the runner of the sled, but still he couldn't reach the top of the bag. As he moved around behind the sleigh, the bag only grew in dimension.

  He said, "Wow," just as he had on Christmas mornings so long ago.

  An old feeling came to him: he didn't want this to end. He knew he was coming to the open end of the bag. When that happened, the surprise would be gone. All the toys would spill out around him, and Christmas would be over. He felt things under the folds of the bag—curves that told him he was touching a boat, a box that felt like a model airplane, a dog with button eyes, a baseball bat, a wagon. Was this the wagon he had asked for that Christmas and not gotten? Though he was nearly sightless, he had touched the open rim of the bag, his searching fingers finding the long black handle of the wagon.

  "Potty," a voice said from behind. He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. The hand was black-gloved below, a rim of rich white fur bordering a velvet red sleeve. Potty blinked, and could just make out the white beard, the red-apple cheeks, the shining blue eyes and napped red cap inches from his own face.

  "Potty, it's all for you." The voice was his father's voice the way Potty wanted it to be. It was Santa Claus's voice, every day of the year. This voice never got mad for no reason, never said things it didn't mean; didn't order him to his room, taunting him with his nickname, telling him that they'd called him that because he hadn't been potty-trained until he was nearly six, that he'd wet the bed nearly every night and spent endless fruitless hours on the toilet seat trying to learn; this voice never yelled at his mother, calling her a frigid slut and screaming that he was sick of them all.

  "All for you, Potty." The smiling, white-bearded man gently pressed Potty's shoulders, so that he would turn around to the bag. He didn't want to yet. He wanted to wait, to savor it. But he turned because Santa wanted him to. He looked into the bag. It was dark, so long and so deep he couldn't see anything at first. Then, down at the bottom, he saw something. There was a pile of boxes down there, all angles and bright colors and wrappings. His presents were stacked a mile high on top of his red wagon. There was everything he'd ever wanted down there—the microscope, the butterfly kit, the ant farm, the rock polisher, the autograph model Harmon Killebrew glove, the six-foot glider made of white Styrofoam, the radio-controlled boat.

  But it was all so far away.

  "Santa," he said, and when he turned, Santa's face was there in front of his, the snow forming a halo behind it. Santa's face was bright and merry, and his beard was fluffed and his cheeks were red. But his eyes had turned from twinkling blue to bright sun, the color of summer days far from Christmas.

  "Santa," Potty said, and Santa smiled and once again turned him around by the shoulders. Potty saw the bag open wide as he fell down into it, the presents down there getting closer, rising toward him. Then all the sharply angled new boxes and brightly colored wrappings, the bows on top, the spanking new wagon with red hub capped wheels and black enameled handle, the one he wanted so badly—all of it was gone, and where everything had been, where his wagon had been, was only a hard shiny thing, a laughing flat face with huge copper eyes and red flaming cheeks and a laughing mouth filled with rows and rows of sharp grinning teeth and he fell at the horrid laughing thing that became the ground.

  14

  Again, a routine was established. Each morning Billy rose at six-thirty and, after making his bed and straightening his room, went down the long stairway to breakfast. Breakfast was different here than it had been at Melinda's; though everyone met at roughly the same time, there was not the same feeling at the table as there had been at Melinda's house. Everyone here was preoccupied with their own day's beginning. Reverend Beck was still half asleep at this time of the morning (except on Sundays when he’d been up all Saturday night working on his sermon and hadn’t slept at all), and what little wakefulness he was able to muster went toward concentrating on his day’s duties ahead. Mrs. Beck was busier serving breakfast than anything else. She usually sat down to eat when the others were about to get up and leave. Only Christine was on the same schedule as Billy, but her initial interest and curiosity in him had cooled. The two of them were at a stalemate. She ignored him unless she had something specific to deal with.

  “Christine, did you finish that math homework last night?” Jacob Beck asked, putting down the copy of Time magazine he’d been peering at.

  “Yes,” she said, looking at her plate.

  “All of it?”

  “Most.”

  Jacob leveled his gaze at her.

  “I finished almost everything,” Christine protested. “There were a couple of problems I couldn’t get. I’ll do them in homeroom.”

  “Billy, did you finish your work last night?” Jacob asked.

  “Yes,” the boy answered.

  “If Billy could . . . ” Jacob began but Christine pushed herself away from the table.

  “Because I’m not Billy,” she said angrily, getting up and stalking to the front hallway. She threw on her coat, and a moment later stormed out the front door.

  From the kitchen, Mary Beck gave her husband the hard, changed look she had been giving him often lately.

  When Billy left the house, Christine turned away, facing down the block so that the full back of her jacket was to him. The morning was chilly and crisp. Leaves that had danced in the wind the night before now rested quietly on the sidewalks and in the gutter. They showed the first not-quite bright colors of early autumn; their cousins to follow would be riotous compared to their serenity.

  The bus was late. Christine moved the toe of one sneaker nervously back and forth through the leaves. She looked up the block for the bus, and switched her schoolbooks from arm to arm. Finally, she turned to face Billy. "You were staring at me!" she screamed. "What is it with you? Why don't you go away, back to your parents or wherever you came from!"

  Billy was silent.

  "Why did you have to come here?" she said. "You've got my father eating out of your hand, but don't thin
k that's going to get you anywhere. You're a creep, just like they say you are. Everybody knows it."

  At that moment the bus appeared, huffing to a stop at the curb.

  "Stay away from me!" Christine said, moving ahead of him onto the bus, threading her way to a back seat and looking behind to make sure he didn't follow.

  Billy climbed quietly into the vehicle and sat in the third seat from the front behind the bus driver, near the window. It was always empty for him. The seat next to him would remain unoccupied all the way to school, even if the bus was crowded and some of the others had to stand in the aisle.

  Billy's day wore inevitably on, through English and geography, a study period and then math. In math class, Christine sat only two seats in front of him, and she squirmed when Ms. Bates, the teacher, asked them to turn in their written homework.

  The lunch bell rang. There was an avalanche of children into the halls, through the cafeteria and out into the school yard.

  Billy went to the corner where he always sat, with his lunch bag beside him and his back against an oak tree. Sometimes he faced the school yard, watching the games of tag and stickball. Today, he faced the other way, toward the chain-link fence that separated the school from the rest of the world. He watched the trucks go by, the mothers with strollers, the occasional hooky-playing student sneaking out the front gate to Miller's deli or to have a smoke in an alley across the street. Today there was the slow progress of the knife-sharpener man's truck as it rolled smoothly up the road. Its tinkling bells announced its arrival, and the huge open window on the wooden side of the ancient truck announced that it was open for business. No one stopped it.

  From behind, someone said Billy's name. It was a statement, not a question. Billy turned his head. He put his sandwich down carefully on its wax paper next to the other half.

  It was John, from Melinda's house. The same John he had seen in Jacob Beck's church, staring up at him from the pew below.