"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.
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 think 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.
Silence stretched between them. Behind them, the knife-sharpener man's truck moved slowly away, the tinkle of its bells dimming.
"Why are you here?" John asked.
"This is where I belong," Billy replied.
"Why?"
Billy's face was blank.
"You'll live with the Becks for a while," John said, "but it won't last. They won't want you. No one will. They'll all be afraid of you."
"Are you?"
There was a sudden tight movement of John's Adam's apple, a nervous movement of his hands at his sides, that said more than his mouth could.
"I saw what you did to Jim Crane in the school yard that day," John said. There was a quiver in his voice. "I saw your eyes." Desperate anger rose in John's voice. "I knew Melinda liked you better than the rest of us. I saw that the day she brought you home. She told me once you needed her more. But I never believed that. I think you used her. I think you fooled her like you fooled everybody else. You fooled Marsh and Rebecca, too." He balled one of his fists and banged it against his side. A tear snaked down one cheek. His face was flushed. "You know where I came from? My father came home from work one day and kicked me out. He'd done the same thing to my mother. But now he had another woman, and he didn't want me around to remind him of my mother. He didn't even give me a chance to take anything with me. I had a baseball-card collection, and
. . ." Hot tears rolled down his face, and he wiped at them with his sleeve. He glanced quickly to see that no one else in the school yard was near them, before the unstoppable flow of his words, of what was in him, forced him to go on. "He didn't even let me get that! I had a glove, and my new sneakers, and . . ." He paused, calming himself before going on. "Most of it my mother had given me. When Melinda found me, I'd been eating out of garbage cans for a month. She took me in and people loved me there. Only my mother had ever loved me." His eyes filled with red anger. "And then you came. Everything they gave to me—Melinda, Marsh, and Rebecca—they gave to you. I thought I'd found a new home, and then you came.
"And now you're here, and you want to steal it all again. You couldn't stand to see that I got everything I ever wanted, so you followed me here. I wouldn't be surprised if you killed Melinda before you came here. I don't care what you are. You're not going to take everything away from me again."