The Fat Man (3 page)

That’s just how it is some days. It’s not all lollipops and root beer. We’ve got baggage. You need to understand that, stomach it. If you don’t think you can take knowing that some of your holiday buddies occasionally pull on the cranky pants, you need to stop reading pronto. If you’re too sentimental about the characters you’ve heard about since you were in footie jammies, then this tale ain’t gonna be your cup of cocoa. It gets ugly. It will shake your snow globe.

On the other hand, it’s a great yarn, even if I do say so myself.

Last warning.

Okey-doke, let’s go to school.

I
owe Black Pete. The old Zwarte-Master took me under his wing at the beginning and practically raised me as his own. When I shuffled into Comet Hall that morning at the North Pole, I was a down-on-my-luck kid who just fell off the turnip wagon, and was more than a little lost. Santa, who has a soft spot for just about everyone, put his arm around me and said, “Gumdrop, I believe your slight frame carries a great prize inside, but we need to build you up a smidgen to help you lift. My friend Black Pete can help you, I think. He may growl like a polar bear, but I have a feeling Zwarte Piet is just what you need.” With that, Santa escorted me over to his gnome commando.

My first look at Black Pete made me swallow my gum. He was a couple of bumps above four feet tall, a giant in the elf world, and as solid as a Yule log. Pete had lost an eye as a young doughboy in the great Pixie Coup of 17 A.D., so his patch and the rest of the scars let you know that crossing this elf was the wrong way to dance. Black Pete would focus his good eye on your sorry self, twist you like a pretzel with a glare and find your every flaw. He’d snort and huff like he hated the sight of you. “What’s this, Kris?” he asked Santa while he glowered at me. “You taking out the trash?” Black Pete’s voice sounded like a hurricane waking up on the wrong side of the devil.

“Now, Pete,” Santa said. “Holly Jolly, please. Black Pete, I’d like you to meet Gumdrop Coal. He arrived today and I think he just may have a place with us here.”

The old musketeer cocked another cold stare my way and spit. “It ain’t the time to be taking on charity cases, Kris. We need elves that are ready to work now. I ain’t got time to babysit some fool pumpkin roller.”

At that moment, Black Pete sounded like an echo from home and my spine went straight. “I don’t know what you think you see with that lonesome peeper of yours, mister, but I can take anything you care to dish out and then some,” I said before I thought better of it.

Black Pete rolled the plug of gingerbread chaw around his cheek and studied me, trying to ignore the twinkle in Santa’s eye. Black Pete shot a stream of reddish ooze at my shirt, but I didn’t move a muscle. I knew what he was doing. Then Black Pete smiled. A big smile, like a sunrise. He put a huge arm around me and said, “Kris, let me see what I can make of this boy. Follow me, son.”

That’s exactly what I did. I followed Black Pete like a son, letting him be the father I always wanted. I sponged every lesson he spilt, listened to every word he said. He never went soft on me. He worked me harder than any other Zwarte Pieten cadet, but when I pulled the blanket up to my chin at the end of the day, sore and beat, I knew I was cared for. And that made for easy dreaming.

I won’t kid you, Zwarte Pieten training was rough as a scab most days, but without it, I wouldn’t have gained a father, a purpose, or my best friend—Dingleberry Fizz. Dingleberry Fizz and I met that first week of boot camp. Black Pete was trying to teach us how to fly by putting us at the bottom of an avalanche. The old man stood at the top of a mountain and kicked boulders down the hill until they started to take some of their friends with them. About six of us stood quaking in our curled boots at the bottom of the mountain as rocks the size of battleships rolled down on us. Elf flying is all about willpower and focus, seeing yourself in the air. Black Pete trained you by giving you the choice of seeing yourself getting squashed like a bug by a rock or soaring above it. As the first boulder approached, our unknown instinct kicked in and all six elf cadets went to the air. It was more like a big jump rather than a launch, but Black Pete knew that as he pitched rocks at us, we’d either get the hang of flying or we wouldn’t, so he pitched rocks at us with deadly accuracy.

So there I am dancing just above the avalanche, trying my best to overcome the notion of gravity. After half a minute, I was exhausted, my brain already sapped from trying to focus on flying. I was flapping in the air, but could feel myself drifting down. I looked up and a stone as big as the moon was coming straight toward me. I thought I was a goner, but suddenly something snatched my hand and yanked me up over the big stone and high above the rumble of the avalanche. My rescuer was a fair-haired elf with a long, straight nose and the reddest cheeks I’d ever seen. He had bright blue eyes and a kind of crooked half smile. “Squeeze your hinder,” he said to me.

“What?”

“When I squeeze my hinder together, it helps me concentrate on flying better,” he said. “I don’t know why, but it does.” Just to prove it, he darted straight up in the air, looped upside down and cruised back beside me pretty as you please. I could feel myself drifting back down, so the elf gave me a small kick in the behind and said, “Try it.”

The kick helped. I squinted and kind of folded my backside into itself. It was a different sensation, though not a completely uncomfortable one. My mind wandered into trying to figure out the reason you’d want to do such a thing with your body, when suddenly I started to fly. I mean, I really flew. The guy was right; twisting up your cheeks kind of cleared your mind and then your inner pilot was allowed to take the controls. Suddenly, flying was as natural as falling off a log, and I skipped across the sky like a dove, my new friend right beside me.

“Thanks,” I said, extending a hand. “I’m Gumdrop Coal.”

“Dingleberry Fizz,” he said. “Don’t mention it. It’s why I’m here.”

That simple statement is what best describes Dingleberry. He is the sweetest soul I know. You can’t get him down, can’t make him mad. The light is always on. The first thing Dingleberry thinks about when he wakes up in the morning is helping somebody out. He can’t wait to get started, either. He usually is up and at ’em at the crack and ready to go without a drop of coffee. You’ll be kidnapped from a dream by Dingleberry standing at your bunk, shaking you and smiling. “Hey, wake up! Slingshot Ruthie needs a new coat of sprinkles on her house! Want to go with?” he’d ask, all excited. If you rolled back over, Dingleberry didn’t judge. He’d be back in an hour or so as you pried your eyes open. “Now that you’re up, let’s go learn how to make doll heads, so we can help when the girls get behind.” Even when I got into one of my foul moods and growled that I had my job to do and didn’t have time or even the inclination to help someone else, Dingleberry just smiled patiently. “You don’t mean that, deep down,” he’d say, believing it. “You’re just tired. Just try and think Holly Jolly thoughts and you’ll be OK.”

It was hard to stay mad at the world with a friend like Dingleberry Fizz. He is the elf I’ve always wanted to be. I asked him once what made him so happy and he blushed and said, “You promise not to laugh?”

I promised and Dingleberry shyly pulled out a copy of Kringle Comics from his vest pocket. “Him,” he said. “I want to be like my hero.” He held the comic book so I could see the cover, where a strapping beanpole of a man swung out of the shadows of a dark street lassoing a cloaked figure with one hand and ringing a small bell with the other. In big letters, the title screamed:

Despite the danger, the hero had a sunny disposition and the word balloon coming from his smiling face read,
“Dog-gone it, Potter, ring the bell why doncha?! Why we give out wings all the time back in Bedford Falls!”
Without thinking about what I was saying, I asked Dingleberry, “You read this junk?”

Not only did Dingleberry read
By George Adventures
, the derring-do exploits of the old Building and Loan pal turned swashbuckler were what Dingleberry lived for. He kept each comic book issue sealed in plastic. He had action figures. He organized comic conventions and costume contests. Dingleberry was a one-man
By George
fan club. Dingleberry even believed the George tales were real. No one had seen old moth-back George in years. Back before my time, George was a regular in Kringle Town, but now he was long gone and probably dead. There were a lot of stories, but that was all. To a lot of us, George was no more real than his statue in Kringle Town Square. It’s hard to believe in a legend covered with partridge poo, but that didn’t stop Ding and the legion of “By George-a-teers” from chasing down every rumor of their hero’s existence. There were hundreds of books on the subject, some claiming that George was a super spy or was fighting monsters over in Halloween City. Elves called into late-night radio shows and whispered that they had seen George flit by in the shadows, dashing off somewhere to protect Christmas spirit and the wonderful lives it inspires. Because of these yarns, Ding believed and tried every day to be as brave and happy and selfless as his hero. It was crazy, but I couldn’t help but love Dingleberry more for it.

Dingleberry and I remained best pals, even though our jobs took us in different directions. The first few hundred Christmas Eves were no big deal. The world was smaller then and no one, especially kids, had much to speak of. It was pretty simple for Santa to swoop in and out and leave a loaf of bread or a bag of potatoes at the door. Then Nick would leave a piece of candy for the kid and everybody was happy. A few centuries later, Santa got the idea to give the kids toys, and that’s when the elf corps started to grow. Santa needed elves to find the really deserving kids, the ones with good hearts, and who better than Dingleberry Fizz? Pretending he was costarring in an issue of
By George
, Dingleberry could go into the worst slum in the world and find a kid so good, so perfect, elves fought over who would actually get to make the toy for the kid. Dingleberry had a nose for good.

Me? I was different. It bugged me when kids tugged on Santa’s beard like Quasimodo ringing for chow. I got steamed when they whined about what they didn’t get. Every sass, fit and eye roll made me grind my teeth. I thought the kids were greedy and playing Santa for a sap. I had to do something.

I started the Coal Patrol.

CHAPTER 4

I
guess the idea of naughty kids stuck in my craw from way back. Santa and the elves were busting it to make and deliver gifts to kids, even if they didn’t deserve them, but the Fat Man would still keep them in the system. The Kringle Town network makes Big Brother look like small potatoes. We really can see everything. All year, we’d watch little Johnny give the devil to parents, teachers and siblings, but come Christmas morn, the squirt got a king’s ransom in toys and candy, rewarded for the headaches he passed out during the year. It burned me, especially when kids started asking for more, expecting it. I thought they were getting a little big for their britches, so I had a heart-to-heart with Santa.

“Boss, I think we can teach these bad nippers a lesson if all we give them is a lump of coal for Christmas,” I said. “Sort of fire a shot across the bow that they had better shape up.”

Santa studied his cup of cocoa for a moment. “That seems a little cruel, Gumdrop,” Santa said. “Some children simply don’t know any better. They live in a hard world; they don’t know another way to behave.”

“Yeah, that’s what Dingleberry says too,” I answered. “He calls it ‘context.’ I guess he reads more than comic books. Anyway, I call it ‘excuses.’”

“It may be an excuse, Gumdrop, to be sure. But do you really want to rob a child of a moment of joy? Do you want them to believe that there is nothing good? The Child we celebrate with our deeds grew up to hang out with some pretty despicable people just so He could show them how to believe in good,” Santa said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “And look what happened to Him.”

“I do look at what happened to Him,” Santa said seriously. “It caused something wonderful to happen to the world. What happened to Him resulted in hope for every one of us.”

“Sorry, I stepped over the line, Santa,” I said. “But even His book preached, ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child.’ I think my plan is kind of a gift too, Santa. It gives them the gift of knowing that they just can’t do what they want. They will discover that what they do touches other people. Then they will learn they can make a difference, a good one. Learning that changing your ways is a gift to yourself and others is really something special, don’t ya think?”

Santa nodded. “But why coal?” he asked with a smile.

“My name had nothing to do with it, I promise you. I just figured that coal is dirty and nasty, not a lot of fun, but the family could use it to keep warm.”