The Fat Man (7 page)

Raymond married Cynthia, a college sweetheart who didn’t focus on Raymond’s shortcomings because the monkey on her back kept her eyes blurry. Together, they birthed Little Ray. Raymond’s interest in his son ended at the first dirty diaper, causing the poor kid to grow into a completely charmless cherub who deserved to be beaten every day like a rabid piñata. If I did my job right, Raymond would wake up and put on his papa pants. Even a hard-boiled elf like me can see if a kid has potential and, if his father gave half a damn, Little Ray had a chance of being a decent person. That was the plan.

At the Don’t Hang Up headquarters, Raymond surrounded himself with a bunch of toothy cronies, grinning yes-men who knew a good seat on the gravy train when they saw one. Keeping the boss man happy kept their hands in the cookie jar, so several of them spent their entire days trying to think of a way to curry favor with the king. Years ago, one suck-up thought it might be clever to honor Raymond and his Don’t Hang Up legacy with an old-fashioned telephone. He presented Raymond with a sleek, gleaming beauty with a rotary dial; it was as big as a boulder. Raymond loved it and rewarded the fellow with a promotion and a fat raise, so that started a tradition of who could find the boss other swell telephones. These eggs scoured flea markets and antiques shops across the globe coming up with every kind of ringer you could imagine—foreign jobs, spy phones, phone relics, the phones that belonged to gangsters and movie stars and stupid phones shaped like windmills and wiener dogs. Raymond loved them all and created a special room in his mansion for his collection. It was in that room that I would pay my own call to Raymond Hall.

None of the telephones were wired, but that’s not a problem for an elf with a little magic up his sleeve. I slipped into Raymond’s house about midnight and ambled into the phone room. Not a creature was stirring. The Halls were nestled all snug in their beds while visions that I didn’t give a flip about danced in their heads.

Each phone stood like a statue in its own pool of light, and there must have been about fifty or sixty phones on shelves lining the walls. That made the middle of the room as dark as the inside of a cow, so that’s where I took a chair and decided which telephone was going to ring first.

Raymond didn’t exactly wake with a clatter. There was a cuckoo-clock phone on one of the higher shelves, so I threw a little elf spell its way. The bell was just barely a chirp, but then a little bird popped out. “Cuckoo-Cuckoo,” it sang after each ring in a pitch not quite meant for any ear. In most of the homes in your world, I’m pretty sure this phone would have been the last noise someone heard before they started a killing spree with a dull ax. Next, I sent some hocus-pocus to a telephone that was as round as a stump with a ring like Judgment Day. It would rattle the teeth out of your head. Because something still seemed to be missing, and because I am a bitter stalk of rhubarb, I also got one more telephone going. This one replaced the ring with yodeling.

The room sounded like Lucifer’s switchboard.

Raymond Hall entered the room half-asleep. The half that was awake had a “what the?” look that was taxing Raymond’s medulla oblongata beyond its normal calculations. He turned his head between the different sounds as if they were trying to tell him something, but he didn’t speak their lingo.

Standing there in his King Kong boxer shorts, cocking his head back and forth, Raymond looked like he had just escaped his rubber room. Finally, Raymond got his wits and decided he was mad at the stump telephone. Inspired by his underwear, Raymond took his mighty paw and swiped the contraption into the floor. The crash sounded like an accident at a munitions factory. Then, with the typical Raymond Hall temper, he grabbed the poker from the fireplace and started to beat the stump telephone like it had just soiled the rug.

I let Raymond think he killed the thing and stopped the ringer.

Raymond threw the poker like a spear in the Bavarian phone’s general direction, and, again, I shushed the bell.

“I hate yodeling!” Raymond screamed and threw the nearest knickknack at the telephone. There was a crash and then quiet except for Raymond’s panting. Big boy needed to hit the gym.

“Knock knock,” I said. I was still invisible.

Raymond jumped a mile. All the color drained from his face and his eyes were as big as canned hams. He searched the dark room in a panic, but he was too scared to move, a statue in King Kong bloomers.

“Knock knock,” I said with a little bit of a growl.

“Who’s there?” Raymond said. He wasn’t playing around; he really wanted to know.

“Little old lady,” I said.

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘Knock knock,’ you said, ‘Who’s there?’ Little Old Lady. Now it’s your turn,” I explained.

Raymond took a step toward the direction of my voice, peering in the dark. “Little Old Lady Who?”

“I thought you said you hated yodeling,” I said as I popped visible in front of him.

At the sudden sight of me, Raymond gripped his chest as all breath leaped from his lungs. He stared at me with an open mouth and eyes filled with terror. I smacked him across the face, hard, and sent him to the floor. “Take a picture. It’ll last longer,” I said.

Raymond spit out a tooth and a little blood. He looked like he was going to cry.

“It’s not your night, Raymond Hall,” I said. I turned a flip in the air, landed behind him and gave him a tough kick in the rump. Raymond went to his belly with a splat and a groan. “You’ve needed a good belting since you were a kid, so tonight you’re going to take it and like it.”

I picked Raymond up, spun him on his back and put a curled boot on his throat. He stared at me with bulging eyes, like I was a freight train with teeth. “Who are you?” he managed to gasp.

“Believe it or not, Ray, I’m one of Santa’s elves,” I said. Raymond curled his lip slightly, like he could feel a wave of bravery coming, so I gave that lip a kick just so Raymond would know that I wasn’t trying to be cute. “You ready to listen?”

Raymond wasn’t, but he jerked his head yes.

“Like I was saying, kid, I’m an elf and we help Santa decide who’s naughty and who’s nice. All those lumps of coal you got over the years came from yours truly, but you never did learn, did you?” Raymond was speechless. “What did you do with the lumps of coal, Raymond?”

Raymond moved his lips to speak, but only managed a little croak, like a screen door. I had him on the ropes. For the first time in his life, he was scared.

“What did you do with the coal, Ray?”

“I don’t remember!” he said just like any other guilty kid.

I gave him a kick in the King Kong. As he curled up into a little pathetic ball, I leaned in real close and screamed into his ear. “Wrong, Raymond! You do remember. One year, you threw the coal through the neighbor’s living room window. The next year you picked off a bird’s nest full of eggs. Another year, you bounced a coal rock off a little girl’s head. She had to get stitches. Sixteen, if memory serves.”

“Please!” Raymond said. He was drowning in Guilty River.

“You never learned your lesson, Raymond!”

“I was a kid,” Raymond said. He was sobbing, the brat.

“That’s no excuse,” I said. “You’re a big cheese now, and you’re still breaking the rules, being bad. You still don’t get it.”

Scared and desperate, Raymond lost his head for a second, scrambled to his knees and took a wild swing at me. That was a mistake. I flew a telephone as solid as a bank safe right into Raymond’s nose. “It’s for you,” I said.

Raymond crumpled to the ground in a heap. He was half-naked, bloodied and bruised, shamed to the bottom of the barrel. For a split second, I thought I went too far, but reminded myself that the beaten man in front of me could be Santa if greedy kids got their way.

“Dad?” It was Little Ray. He went white when he saw his father kiss the rug again. The kid looked at me like I was the boogeyman.

Raymond Senior managed to get up and put himself between me and the boy. “Son, get out of here!” Raymond screamed. “Call the cops!”

“No, Little Ray,” I said. “I’m on my way out, but you need to hear this. Your dad’s gonna tell you how important it is for you to be a good boy. To mind your mother and your teachers and be good to your friends. He’s gonna teach you why it’s important to think of others before yourself and to have a smile for someone, even strangers. You’re gonna eat your peas and do your homework. Your dad will tell you why, right, Dad?”

“Yes, sure,” Raymond said with a split lip. “I’ll do whatever you ask, just don’t hurt my son. Please, just go.”

To make sure the lesson rang true, I cracked my knuckles and every telephone in the room, dozens of them, exploded into smithereens. When the echo of bells died away, Raymond had aged into a man, Little Ray had a chance at becoming something and I was feeling pretty full of myself. I mean, you know what they say: every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.

I walked to the window with a smile on my face, turned to Hall Senior and Junior and said, “Now be good for goodness’ sake.”

CHAPTER 8

The article didn’t bother me. Much. I was a little sore, though, about how Cane took a sledgehammer to the Coal Patrol I had built. I was sure he was telling a tall one about Santa’s health, but I also knew there was nothing you were going to do to change St. Nick once his mind was made up. This new approach was just going to have to run its course and, in the end, Santa would decide if giving toys to every kid was right and fair. My mind was made up about that too. And I decided not to try and read between the lines on the subject of Cane and Rosebud. If she wanted to hang her stockings at Candy Cane manor, let her. What was it to me? Nothing, that’s what.