The Fat Man (6 page)

“I don’t think he’ll do much,” I answered. “I think he’ll give kids, good and bad, what they want, and that Santa will kill himself trying to please everyone, but that’s just how Santa is.”

Zsa Zsa stopped with the dough and gave me a level look. “Do you tink Candy Cane is trying to get Santa out of zee vay?” she asked. Rosebud asked more or less the same thing. Folks had way too much time on their hands, too much time to think.

“Not that I can tell,” I said. “Why does everyone seem to think that Santa is in Cane’s sights?”

“’Cause I hear that Cane heads up the Misfit Mafia,” Sherlock said. I thought he had been asleep.

“What’s the Misfit Mafia?”

“Rubbish,” Zsa Zsa said, smacking Sherlock in the head with a rolling pin. “Sherlock, here, tinks he stumbled on a couple of Misfits who are planning to take over zee world vit dark, evil plans. Vhat he found vas a couple of Goodfella action figures throwing darts at a picture of Santa. Sherlock should take more naps.”

“They told me Cane would get me if I tried to rustle them in,” Sherlock said. “I believed them.”

“Humbug!” Zsa Zsa said, smacking him again.

“So why were these toys throwing darts at Santa’s pic?” I asked.

“Because der a couple of Misfits,” Zsa Zsa said, shaking her head. “Ve all feel like dat from time to time. Santa vill never understand how much it hurts to be on zis island sometimes. He can see it vit kinder, lumping bad in vit good, but not vit toys. Sad, it is.”

“Is that what you think he’s doing by getting rid of me?” I asked. “Making bad children the same as good?”

“Ya, maybe.”

“I never thought of it that way,” I said, helping myself to a sausage. “And I don’t like thinking about it that way, either.”

“No?”

“No,” I said. “Good kids aren’t the same as bad kids and bad kids shouldn’t get rewarded like they’re good. Where’s the justice in that? I don’t like it.”

Sherlock leaned in close and whispered, “I deduce that you’re gonna do something about it, Bumdrop. Am I right?”

“Maybe.”

Zsa Zsa gave the dough another lethal twist. “Be careful my vittle Gumdrop. Just be careful.”

CHAPTER 6

I
stayed with Sherlock Stetson and Zsa Zsa for a couple of weeks, spending most of my time eating, refereeing their skirmishes, and trying to avoid being alone with Zsa Zsa. “I could make vittle Gumdrop happy,” she said one night in the kitchen. I couldn’t help but notice she was charring the bratwurst—or that Sherlock was sitting three feet away trying to grasp the idea of a yo-yo.

“You have a husband, Zsa,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “And I’m sure I would disappoint you.”

“Sherlock, bah,” Zsa Zsa said. “I’d rather have a Lincoln Log. Let’s run avay from zis Misfit place, Gumdrop. Even if I am a toy, I am all voman—no assembly required, eh?”

I left right after dinner that night.

When I got home, I found Dingleberry pacing in front of my door, in a dither. “Where have you been?” he said. I could tell the old boy had been crying. “You said you would call! You didn’t call! I thought something bad happened to you!”

“I’m fine, Dingleberry,” I said, motioning him in from the cold. “I spent some time over on the Misfit island. I just needed to get away. Thanks for worrying, though. What’s the news here? Has Candy Cane conquered the world yet?”

Dingleberry’s lips disappeared and his pupils got glossy. “He told me that he was keeping an eye on me. He doesn’t know if he can trust me because ...” Dingleberry was scared to say more. I said it for him.

“Because of me. I’m sorry you got dragged into this, Ding. What happened?”

Dingleberry stared at the floor, ashamed to look at me. I guess he thought I would clobber him. I gave him a pat on the arm and made him look me in the eye so he would know everything was jake between us. “I don’t know what happened,” he said finally. “I went to see him about his toy reviews, and he started saying things like he had to be sure that he could trust me. He said he knew we were buddies, but that I had to put him and the mission first. Cane said if he ever felt that he couldn’t trust me, he would fire me! Why would he say that, Gumdrop? Why? I
want
kids to have toys, as many as they deserve! I don’t want any kids to get coal. No offense.”

“None taken,” I said, smiling and trying to calm Dingleberry down. “Did you talk to Santa?”

“I can’t get a minute alone with him,” Dingleberry said. “There have been threats, so Santa’s surrounded by some of Cane’s bodyguards. Plus, Santa’s either creating new toys, building prototypes or recalculating his flight plans. He’s too busy to talk to me.”

“How’s he look?”

Dingleberry was going to tear up again, so he turned away and didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

“Tell me something, Dingleberry, be honest,” I said. “Do you think giving the naughty boys and girls toys makes them good little boys and girls? Makes everybody even?”

“I don’t know, Gumdrop,” he said. “That’s one way to look at it.”

“Another way to look at it is that it brings everybody down,” I said. “There’s no reward for good behavior. Anything goes. The kids who listened and did their homework are treated just the same as those who were throwing rocks at little old ladies. I don’t think that’s fair.”

“There are a lot of things that aren’t fair,” Dingleberry said.

“Like you getting lumped in with me,” I said.

Dingleberry shook his head. “No, that’s different. Cane is doing that. He’s being a bully. But I can’t get fired, Gumdrop! I can’t. If I don’t get to give out toys I don’t know what I’d do.”

Dingleberry would curl up into a ball and roll away is what he’d do. I wasn’t going to let him take the fall for me. “You’re not going to get fired because you and I are no longer friends.”

“Gumdrop!”

“We’re no longer friends in Cane’s eyes,” I said. “Tomorrow night, you and I are going to have a big fight at the Blue Christmas. You’ll give me the gate, but it will all be just for show, Ding, just for show. I will still love you like nobody else, but this spat will be our little secret, OK?”

The famous Dingleberry smile returned. “You mean like a game? Just like in
By George and the Adventure of the Tattoo Statue Switcheroo
! George let the Cannonball Cabal think they had stolen the famous, powerful statue Bisboo to give to the evil Potter, but George switched it!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just like that. And we’ll play the game until everything calms down. Meanwhile, I want to see if I can find out how Cane’s going to deal with naughty kids.”

“Please be careful, Gumdrop,” Dingleberry said. “I am not your father, so I can’t tell you what to do, but please let Candy Cane deal with naughty kids. Cause trouble for Cane and other elves, but leave kids alone. Just stay away from the kids.”

“Say that again!” Dingleberry did, word for word.

Bam! Dingleberry just delivered my Christmas present early, and it was exactly the right size. “Dingleberry, thank you. You have just given me a wonderful idea!”

“Oh, no!”

“Oh yes! And don’t worry. I’m not going to mess with the kids.”

 

M
aybe it was how I should have been approaching things all along. On most of the Naughty List, the kids weren’t the problem, the parents were. Dingleberry and Santa were right when they said that most kids couldn’t help being bad. That’s because Mom and Pop didn’t know how to keep a kid in line or simply didn’t care. Yeah, maybe they were just doing the same thing their parents did to them, but son of a blitzen, they were old enough to know better now. And if they still didn’t know, well, I decided I was going to change that.

The naughty kids who grew up to be naughty adults and raise more naughty kids were about to get a crash course in responsibility from the new, secret Coal Patrol.

I didn’t need any help. I had elf superpowers, top-shelf Zwarte Pieten training and the freedom of not giving a damn. It was the only way I could save Santa from wearing himself out. It was the only way to preserve Christmas present justice. I figured it would stop any harebrained idea Candy Cane had and keep Dingleberry in the clover. If I couldn’t teach the kids a lesson, I’d teach it to their no-good parents and make sure the lesson got passed on. That’s the way it should have been in the first place.

Christmas Eve was still a few weeks away, so I had plenty of time. If Santa was going to deliver gifts to every kid, they were going to be good kids—their parents would make sure of it. The more I thought of the idea, the more I liked it, though I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. Dingleberry would worry himself sick, Santa wouldn’t approve and Cane would hang me like a stocking for such an idea, so I was going to keep my sweet little notion to myself.

I didn’t need to look at the Naughty List to know which parent was going to get a house call first. He had been a lousy kid and, as a father, he wasn’t giving his son a chance to be better. The coal warning I had delivered last year to the little squirt was forgotten by Groundhog Day when Raymond Junior celebrated the holiday by setting an actual groundhog loose during a ballet recital, turning
Swan Lake
into an ugly duckling quicker than you could say
tutu
. And Raymond Senior didn’t even say a word to his son.

It was time to deck the Halls.

CHAPTER 7

A
fter everything I had been through with Little Raymond, Raymond Hall Senior was the obvious choice for a visit. Big Ray was not going to win any parenting awards, because he had been such a rotten kid himself. When he was little, Raymond broke a bat on Johnny’s head; somebody snitched on him. He hid a frog in his sister’s bed; somebody snitched on him. With each sin, somebody stooled on Raymond, and, every Christmas morning, Raymond had more coal in his stocking than a West Virginia miner. But Raymond didn’t learn. As he got older, his crimes went beyond putting tacks in the teacher’s chair and tying knots in Susie’s hair. Raymond got into cheating on exams, putting sawdust in the gas tanks of enemies and slipping Mickeys into a coed’s beer. Raymond’s sins continued when he became a titan of industry, pioneering the on-hold messaging business. Not only did he send up the blood pressure of anyone who had ever been put on hold and had to listen to some canned ad of baloney instead of a live person, Raymond ran Don’t Hang Up with the scruples of a raccoon. Profits were high, wages were low and dames in the office had more fingerprints than the glass on a candy case.