by Jim Shepard
His father’s Buick pulled in a few spaces down. He held up one finger and went into the building nearest him.
“I don’t know how your father ends up doing things like this,” his mother said idly. “Mr. Nice Guy. They must have messengers or something. Fourteen years he works at the company, and he’s picking up mail.”
His father opened the door and Biddy almost toppled out. “Shove over,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“You going to leave your car here?” his mother said.
“Sure. Otherwise we both go all the way home and all of that. … I’ll pick it up on the way back. It’s all right here. What is this, the South Bronx?”
They pulled out of the parking space and stopped at the gate for a break in the traffic.
“Someday I’ll show you around,” his father said. “It’s a shame, we got the airport right here and you don’t take advantage of it.”
Biddy peered over his shoulder at the hangars, the wind sock in the distance, the planes. “We can come back,” he said, feeling more and more as if the Cessnas were a kind of frightening, exhilarating last chance, or best chance. “I can find out more.”
“Railroad Salvage,” his father said when they arrived. “What are we doing at Railroad Salvage? What kind of chiboni shops for Christmas presents at Railroad Salvage?”
“Hibachis,” his mother answered, shutting the car door. “They’ve got triple hibachis on sale. I thought we’d get one for Michael and Sandy.”
“Hibachis.”
“That’s right.” She walked ahead of them. “You didn’t have any ideas.”
“Hibachis,” his father repeated. They went inside.
Railroad Salvage was a cavernous warehouse piled high with great stacks of odd items that had flimsy red-and-green “Sale” signs perched over them. Merchandise was arranged as if it had been unloaded randomly from trucks: peanut butter next to snow tires, Fort Apache Play Sets beside cutting boards. Red-and-green streamers hung between steel beams on the roof. Above him a sign read CHRISTMAS CARNAVAL. It depressed him when adults couldn’t spell.
His parents had threaded their way to the hibachis and were handling one, moving the grills to higher and lower slots. They decided to get it.
The line at the cashier was discouragingly long. The woman in front of them had twelve jars of apricots and a wrench set. His mother wandered off and after a few minutes his father did as well. Biddy stood holding the hibachi with both hands, seeing with perfect clarity his eventual confrontation with an impassive cashier, his parents still missing and the line behind him growing restive and angry.
He could faintly hear a Christmas carol piped in above him, lost in the great noisy space of a giant metal box filled with bargain hunters. His mother reappeared beside him. “Where’d your father go?” she asked. “We still have to get something for Cindy. Then we’re through. There’s Ginnie.”
Ginnie was waiting in a line two rows down. She waved and hesitated, then relinquished her place in line and came over. She said something about the last minute.
“It’s terrible,” his mother said. “Every year I say I’m going to finish early, and there’s always someone you forget.”
“I was looking for a vaporizer for Dom’s mother,” Ginnie said. “Of course they sold out. They probably had two.”
“How’s Cindy?”
Ginnie rearranged the packages in her arms. “They have some sort of bug up their ass. Every time I turn around, they’re not talking or one of them’s mad about something. They’re supposed to be getting married in a few months. You figure it.”
“Well, you get nervous. It’s a big step.”
“I don’t know. I thought you were supposed to fight after you got married, not before.”
He attempted to be as inconspicuous as possible, seemingly absorbed in the gums along the checkout counter, but they changed the subject. He hefted the hibachi higher, against his chest.
His father arrived after they’d checked through and said hello and goodbye to Ginnie, ushering them to the car. They drove to the Trumbull shopping mall. “So what are we going to get her?” his mother said.
“What about a chain?”
“She’s got a lot of chains,” Biddy said.
“How about a nice sweater?”
“She said she doesn’t need a sweater.” They both looked at him. “When we were looking for a sweater for Ronnie.”
“Okay.” His father fiddled with the radio. “You’re in charge then, if you’re the expert on Cindy. Check Read’s first and pick out something and show us. I want to show your mother something anyway.”
When they arrived, his father gestured vaguely at the front of the store, saying to meet them in Housewares, and to see if he could stay under twenty dollars.
He wandered through Ladies Lingerie, the For Her Shop, and Junior Miss, sure that in his ignorance he was bypassing perfect gift after perfect gift. He finally stopped at the perfume counter, drawn to the octagonal island terraced with colored bottles. He peered at the yellow Chanel bottles.
“Can I help you?” a woman said.
He found his parents twenty minutes later, eyeing a sink.
“What’d you come up with?” his father said. “Perfume?”
His mother took the red case in her hands. “Cinnabar? That’s nice.”
“You don’t give a girl perfume,” his father said. “That’s like something Ronnie would give her.”
“A sales slip,” his mother said. “You already bought this?”
“I had some money,” he said. His parents looked at each other, and his mother shrugged. “Well, we’ll pay you back, that’s all. Unless you want to give it to her all by yourself. Then we still have to get her something.”
“Perfume,” his father said. “We’ll give her something from Frederick’s of Hollywood next.”
“Oh, leave him alone,” his mother said. “I think it’s nice.”
When they got home, he finished putting tinsel on the tree, a job his parents always considered his and his alone, in some sort of effort, he sensed, to pretend he was capable of separate but equal responsibilities: Dad cuts the tree, lays in the wiring; Biddy hangs the tinsel. Still, he enjoyed it—he enjoyed any sort of work on the Christmas tree, except stripping it—and he stood beside it, hanging the thin, fluttering silver strips from branch to branch, the main body of tinsel he was drawing from draped over his arm like a maître d’s linen.
The sun was going down, the sky gray and blue with a bit of orange showing behind the houses to the west. His sister was out. His parents were in the den and the bedroom. More Christmas carols were on the stereo: Nat King Cole soothing his way through “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” The dog lay sprawled on its side near the tree, rear legs twitching occasionally to the rhythms of a dream. And Biddy was luxuriating in the silence and the time it took to insure an even distribution of tinsel on a Christmas tree. By the time he was finished, he was standing in a thick gloom, the windows liquid with the twilight, and he paused to survey the tree in its lesser glory, shimmering feebly in the darkened room, before crouching low and plugging in its lights.
The effect was, as it was every year, breathtaking. The silver strips became filaments of chrome reflecting, refracting, quadrupling the orange, red, blue, and green lights. The tree was a masterpiece of decorative symmetry, of warmth, and of as much tradition as a thirteen-year-old could invest it with. He sat back on the sofa slowly, a celebrant, his eyes on the tree, its lights mirrored in the darkened glass of the picture window behind it. Stupid shook and drooled.
He listened to “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” the notes of the melody ringing soft and clear on the stereo. He was happy, and knew enough by now not to question it. He realized with some surprise that the Vikings had made a run at the playoffs and fallen short almost without attracting his notice. He’d picked up the sketchy outline of what had happened here and there, and it hadn’t bothered him. They seemed very distant, as if, like the Orioles, they were out of sea
son. At times during the days right before Christmas, the world didn’t seem to be pushing in on him as much, and such things as the Vikings were not as necessary or important.
The kind of respite the Christmas season afforded, he was beginning to realize, was something he counted on, and could count on every year. It was as important as ever this year, if not more so, since talismans as disparate as Cindy and Louis and the Vikings were threatening to lose their power, and the alternatives he would be left with frightened him. Sports would not be enough, he knew, even as he knew Christmas would not last forever. Beyond the end of his street he could imagine the lights of the airport, twinkling cold and clear in the darkness.
“Clean up some of the mess on the floor,” his father called from the bedroom. “The Carvers are coming over later.”
The silence hissed and crackled on the stereo. Mr. Carver was coming to answer all questions and keep the answers preeminent in his mind, to dog him through whatever hesitations or barriers he threw up, to penetrate the charmed circles of Advent and Christmas.
His books were upstairs, dog-eared and marked heavily with underlinings and marginalia. Mr. Carver was coming. Questions that had been problems would be dealt with. On his hands and knees he raked the loose tinsel from the rug, piling it with the unused portion, turned off the tree, and went upstairs to prepare.
Put the book away and come say hello to the Carvers, his father told him. And call his sister.
The Carvers were having a drink in front of the tree when he brought her down.
“It’s a beautiful tree,” Mrs. Carver said.
It had a nice shape to it, Mr. Carver agreed.
His father opened the interview for him. “Bill, you still taking the Cessna in to work, or what?”
“Very, very rarely in the winter.”
“I can’t imagine coming to work by plane every day,” Biddy’s mother said.
It wasn’t that expensive, Mr. Carver said. And the time difference was significant.
“How long’s it take to drive?”
“Three and a half hours. That’s opposed to a ten-minute flight.”
“That’s right,” his mother said. “He has to go all the way into the city and back out.”
“You take the Long Island Expressway?” his father asked.
“The L.I.E. to 95, yes.”
“I just think it’s quite a way to begin and end a day, flying,” his mother said.
Carver nodded and sipped his drink.
“When will you be flying again?” Biddy asked.
Mr. Carver peered over at him, mildly surprised at what Biddy realized was an interruption of a sort. “Oh, I expect I’ll be going again when the weather gets better.” He shifted comfortably in his chair. “The cold I don’t mind, but there’s no sense fighting everything else.”
He pressed ahead into the silence, feeling incautious but emboldened by his earlier, still resonating impression of having glimpsed a mechanism of events beginning to take shape. “Which is harder, taking off or landing?”
“Oh, landing,” Carver said without hesitation, and didn’t elaborate. The conversation drifted to other things and dinner was announced. The beef was praised lavishly, though he saw nothing special in it. Afterward the adults slumped in their chairs, lazy with four courses, after-dinner drinks, and coffee. Carols played quietly on the stereo.
He sat at Carver’s feet at the base of the tree. His father seemed lost in the songs, a drink on his thigh; his mother spoke quietly with Mrs. Carver across the room. He asked about the takeoff checklist. He asked about yaw and cruising range. And finally, when he sensed Carver’s attention focusing on the glitter of the ornaments spread before him like the watch fob of a hypnotist, he asked about airport security.
The adults’ argument over nuclear war later that evening raised the possibility in his mind that in fact what he had been doing was simply stockpiling all this information, and although it was being stockpiled there was no inevitability, necessarily, in its ever being used. He drew a double line under the last of the questions that had been answered and shut the note pad and put it away, the Cessna closer than ever and having to wait for the weather. He released the image from his concentration, resolving halfheartedly to give Christmas its chance.
The next night, Mickey was his official guest. The visit wasn’t his idea; they hadn’t said more than a few words to each other since Thanksgiving. Mickey had never explained his earlier behavior and Biddy had long since lost the energy to press for an explanation. Dom and Ginnie were making an annual Christmas trip to Pittsfield to visit friends. Mickey, who hated the trip, was being allowed to stay with the Sieberts, who, Biddy was sure, had only occurred to him in a moment of desperation. Cindy had gotten out of the trip as well, he’d related indignantly to Biddy over the phone, claiming she had other friends to see upstate, near Hartford, so there was no reason he should have to go. Louis alone was going. Long car trips never bothered him, and he bore all strangers and distant relations with equanimity.
They played Nerf Basketball and War and Sports Illustrated Football and then, although he’d never shown anyone else the game and hadn’t touched the dice in months himself, he tried dice baseball. Mickey was bored in minutes and lost interest by the fifth inning.
“This game sucks,” he said. “You got anything else? You got Atari?”
Biddy shook his head. There was nothing on television, either.
“I got Stratamatic Baseball,” Mickey said, without enthusiasm. “Wanna play that?”
Biddy felt himself a host, his guest’s happiness his responsibility. Mickey’s boredom was his failure. “Sure,” he said.
It was at his house. Biddy protested his parents would never let them out so late, but Mickey interrupted impatiently that they would just say they were going out in the yard, to build a snow fort or something. Biddy relented, and after some discussion his parents did as well.
They walked along the road in single file, the wind cold and the snow crunching in the moonlight. The sky seemed a deep blue curtain in the distance over the airport. The plan was to pick up the game and return, pretending Mickey had had it all along.
There seemed to be no cars on the road, nothing stirring.
“It’s so quiet,” he murmured.
“Yeah.” Mickey took it as a complaint.
“Won’t your door be locked?”
“There’s an extra key in the garage.”
They scraped on in silence. Powdery snow drifted across ice and pavement like sand on a dune. They could hear the hiss of snow tires on a nearby street. He was bundled and secure in his coat.
They turned onto Ryegate Terrace and Mickey said, “Someone’s home.”
A warm, feeble light was visible in the downstairs bedroom.
“Ronnie’s here,” Biddy said. His car was behind Cindy’s.
“My sister, too. What a liar.” Mickey wiped his nose with a mitten, the smear across it shining under the streetlight. “We should spy on them.” He seemed to have no interest in the idea.
They came up the driveway quietly and Mickey tested the door. “It’s unlocked,” he said. He creaked it open. It occurred to Biddy while he waited that something shameful or illicit or exciting might be going on, but the door was swinging open and he followed Mickey in.
They could make out Ronnie at the kitchen table, his finger to his lips. He wasn’t moving.
“What are you doing in the dark?” Mickey whispered, quieted more by the lack of light than by Ronnie’s gesture.
“Be quiet,” Ronnie said. A radio was softly playing in another room. They came into the kitchen soundlessly. Ronnie still hadn’t moved, frozen in his chair. His voice came out of the darkness like a recording. “What’re you doing here?”
“Came to get a game,” Mickey said faintly. “Where’s Cindy?”
“Go get it. Go upstairs. Don’t make a sound.”
Mickey edged past him into the hallway and disappeared.
“You too,”
he said. Biddy couldn’t see his eyes. “Get out of here. Go upstairs.”
“What’s wrong?” The whispering, the sitting in the dark, the tone of Ronnie’s voice scared him.
“Go upstairs.”
Biddy slipped past him through the hallway and into the living room, shrinking into the shadows against the wall. He could make out other noises in the bedroom as well as the radio, but they were muffled and intermittent.
Ronnie was still perfectly silent. The pendulum of the clock near him clicked steadily. Finally there was the slightest noise, of the chair on the linoleum floor, and the faint clatter of the cutlery drawer being opened. Something was slid out, the sound like that of a single stroke of a knife on a sharpening steel.
Biddy waited, the only sounds coming from the bedroom. When he couldn’t bear it any longer he eased forward and was about to peek around the corner into the kitchen when Ronnie moved noiselessly past, their faces only inches apart, with the wall between them. He disappeared down the hall. After a moment Biddy followed, amazed at himself. The hall closet door was slightly ajar and he slipped behind it, his feet nudging aside clothes baskets and boxes of detergent on the floor. He edged in until, leaning on the inside wall, he could peer out of the crack under the hinge between the door and the jamb.
Ronnie stood framed in his vision, pausing at the bedroom door. His hand was closed around the knob. The noises inside were more distinct now and Biddy could distinguish Cindy’s murmurs. Ronnie had a knife in his hand.
He realized it with a shock—Ronnie had a knife in his hand, ten inches, twelve inches long. Leaning there in the dark, with an eye screwed to the crack between door and wall and one foot on the other to avoid moving anything else on the floor, he had a sudden horrifying sense of something inconceivable about to happen, and before he could cry out or even react fully Ronnie turned the handle and threw the door open, the light flooding into the hall until he moved into the doorway to block it.
“Oh, my God,” Cindy said.
There was no other sound. The radio was switched off. Ronnie was perfectly still. Biddy strained to see what was going on, moving his eye up and down the crack in terror and suspense.
