The Boy With Penny Eyes (10 page)

In the cold of an orange dawn, Potty Johnson whistled "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." He always started the day with that, or some other Christmas carol, "Joy to the World," or "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," or, sometimes, "Silver Bells." The fact that the holiday was nearly three months away didn't matter; it could be the Fourth of July and he'd still start the hot muggy morning with "White Christmas" or "The Christmas Song" or whatever else came into his head.

It was the clink of milk bottles that made him think of Christmas. They sounded like sleigh bells. That and the fact that he started working when the sun was not yet up, at the time he always used to get up on Christmas morning with his brother and sister when he was a kid. Every morning when he loaded the cages of bottles into the truck and they began to jingle, in the hour before dawn, no matter what day it was, winter or summer, it was cold outside, and he could close his eyes at that magic moment and pretend that he was back there in his childhood skin, with his brother and sister, in his father and mother's house, and that the tree was waiting -in shadow downstairs, with dark outlines of presents all around, in neatly stacked piles, the smell of balsam hitting their nostrils—he in front, Bobby and Marian butting up against him from behind, whispering to him to hurry up. But he would take only one step down at a time, knowing that this was the only time during the whole year you could do this—that an hour from now it wouldn't be the same, all the presents would be opened, and Mother and Father would be yawning their way into the kitchen to make coffee (that alone, the coffee, would dull the balsam smell), the lights would be on, the sun coming up. (Was there snow this year? Yes!) In short, it would all be over. This was the moment to kiss, the moment when it was all still ahead, each step a step closer in anticipation, the rising excitement, the glowing single moment of each year just ahead, a step closer, step closer . . .

"Come on, Potty!" Marian would finally say, moving past him followed by their brother. But still he would linger, not wanting this moment to end, wanting it to go on forever. He would leave all the rest—the presents and the hugs and the thank you's and Father opening a box with the same ties in it—he would give it all up—the presents, even, for this supreme moment to last always. Another step down, he heard Bobby and Marian around the corner in the hallway, themselves lingering, waiting for him to catch up, not wanting to go in just yet, maybe afraid to go in without him, afraid that somehow the spell would be broken since this was the way they always did it. Another step, hand on the railing near the bottom, brushing past the three long barber-pole-striped stockings that hung between the iron of the railing, something heavy at the bottom of the first one (it had to be an orange in the toe—there was always an orange in the toe), then a light brush of the other two stockings—which would wait till the end for exploration, since they were always of secondary importance to what waited in the living room.

"Potty, come on!" Bobby whisper-shouted to him. And with a sigh he suddenly found that his unslippered foot was off the carpet of the stairs and on the cool-cold floor of the tiled hallway.

"Coming," he whispered back.

Still he lingered at the bottom of the stairs, his hand on the railing, looking up at the darkness above from which they had descended. He almost wanted to go back up, start all over again . . .

Hearing the impatient groans of his brother and sister, he let go of the railing and followed them into the mouth of the kitchen.

No coffee yet. There was only the smell of a kitchen cleaned the night before in anticipation of a holiday. There was the clean odor of Comet in the sink, and the faint smell of fruit. That was from Mr. Antonela's basket, the one he came over with every Christmas Eve from his own fruit market. There were things in there they never ate any other time: dates and figs, golden raisins as big as knuckles, damson plums from the Mideast, oranges so huge they wouldn't fit in the toe of any stocking, apples shined so red they hurt the eyes, two kinds of pears—skinny pale and fat green—figs on strings like necklaces, grapefruit ready to explode.

They stuck their heads in a little farther, past the kitchen smells, past the fruit . . .

There. From the family room just to the left, an odor that slapped at them, made them dizzy. Their fingers buzzed with anticipation at the smell of . . .

The tree. There, in the darkness, it looked like a sentinel over Christmas, with a smell like nothing else, grabbing the nose like outdoors, indoors. Outside, a balsam was a tree; inside, it was Christmas.

"Can you see anything?" Bobby said anxiously. He was behind his two older siblings, pushing against them, trying to peer into the room.

"Wow," Potty said, still lost in the smell of the tree. But his eyes were beginning to adjust to the outlines of what lay in the treasure room.

Outlines. Silhouettes, piles of dark boxes set against the barely dawning sky that leaked through the big windows. His eyes ran over this mountain range of Christmas presents: odd angles of the unknown, the faintly made-out profile of an asked-for gift, a contour that might be the sled Potty had asked for, or the wagon Bobby wanted, or might be something else entirely, wonderful on its own.

They stood in the entranceway, three short steps down into Wonderland—three abreast with their eyes straining, noses still sniffing tree smell. Still, they wouldn't take that step. Still, Potty wanted it all to go on.

Dawn grew a little bit lighter, sent the mysterious mountains into almost three dimensions, made faint letters appear on boxes, gave corners to others, made the sled into what had to be a sled, runner nearly visible.

"That one's mine!" Bobby cried suddenly, running past the other two, jumping down the short steps to run across the room to where his presents lay stacked on a stuffed chair.

"That's for me!" Marian shouted a moment later, then she, too, was down into the room, slippered feet hurrying her to another stack on the couch and to a neighboring rocking chair, with recognizable Marian-type things on it.

Still, Potty hesitated.
Why does it have to end!

He stepped down.

And then the sun came up, and the coffee went on, and sleepy Mom and Dad were there, and everything was opened, and . . .

The magic bled away.

Bottles chimed one against the other.

Potty smiled. He pulled his wire rack from the truck, thinking about how lucky he was to be a milkman, one of the few left. Milkmen coming with glass bottles was something else he remembered from his youth. He knew he was a romantic. Actually, being a milkman was pretty tedious, but the fact that he worked at a time of day when he could think about all these things, and was not bothered with other people, made it bearable.

He felt something cold and wet on his neck. He looked up, and it was . . .

Snowing.

"Holy cats." This was not just a chance dusting. There were big fat flakes coming down, dancing around one another and laying themselves like sleepers on the ground around his feet. And suddenly there was a smell in the air like snow—not like the first snow of the year but as of a particular snowfall, a special one, and suddenly it smelled like . . .

Christmas.

"Jumping cats," Potty said. The sky was now filled with snow. It was building up around his feet. Unbelieving, he stepped back and sat on the bumper of the truck, putting the milk bottles down. They clinked. He watched as snowflakes clung to the sides of the milk bottles, white against white. A few melted, running down the glass, but the others kissed the bottles, sticking to them.

There was a lot of snow falling, and Potty tried to remember if the sky had been clear when he'd set out on his rounds. After all, it was only the beginning of October. It wasn't even Halloween yet. Had they ever had a snow this early? He couldn't remember it ever happening. Usually the first snow came around Thanksgiving, and usually it was a powdering that he would watch from his schoolroom window. It would remind him of the coming holiday, with the parades on TV with Santa at the end, which meant that Christmas was on the way. Heck, hadn't the stars been out when he left the plant? Hadn't he watched the first orange of dawn push up at the horizon after he'd made his first couple of stops?

The snow was ankle-deep.

What's going on?

Then he knew.

The sound came from above him, high in the swirls of snow. He remembered one Christmas Eve when it had snowed like this. That was the special snowfall he'd remembered. He'd been out in the fields at the edge of town with Bobby and with Luke Marple, talking about the next day, all of them hoping it would snow like the radio said it might. And, just as they started for home, it had begun to snow. Big flakes, just like this. They'd begun to whoop and dance around one another as if a prayer had been answered.

But he hadn't heard this sound then.

He heard it now.
God, it can't be.
It was up there, high in the snowy clouds, part of the snow, belonging to it, just like he'd thought about it that same night when he and Bobby and Luke had seen the snowfall start. He'd lain in his bed that night, knowing the magic hour was not far off, waiting for sleep, listening through the snow for that sound, that wonderful sound.

He reached down and picked up his wire basket of milk bottles, and made the sound along with it.

"Bells!" he shouted. "Sleigh bells!" He stared up, one arm moving the basket of milk bottles, clinking them in time with the sound above, the other arm waving over his head as if in signal. "Here!" his arm was saying. The sleigh bells grew louder. He could hear the individual tap of them against the reins, the swish of something large drawn through the air—he could hear, just hear, a muffled cry and a faint, faint laugh. The snow was up to his shins, but he danced and danced and shouted into the maelstrom, "Here! Here!"

He knew it was descending. In the snow his eyes were a blind man's, but so were his ears. He could sense each movement in the naked air. He felt a swish past him. Then he gasped and shouted, his mouth open with pleasure as he saw, just poked out of the snow clouds over his head, the long cool line of a sleigh runner and the flat bottom of a hoof. It pulled up and away, and he heard and felt it circle before it landed. He heard a loud bump and a laugh behind his milk truck, then the snorting of reined animals.

He felt the weight of something heavy out there in the snow.

"Is it you?" he cried. "Is it?"

Someone laughed the right laugh.

"It can't be," Potty Johnson said. He knew it couldn't be. But it was. Why? But why not? Each morning he had relived the happiest time of his life, pushing from his mind the fact that his brother, Bobby, had been killed in Lebanon by a suicide bomber; that Marian, whom he hadn't seen in three years, was unhappily married in California to someone everyone could see right from the beginning would be no good to her, to someone she had fought with them about, had run away and married, and now didn't even send Christmas cards, trapped at home with a child she didn't want and two-thirds an alcoholic; that his parents had divorced when he was fifteen and his brother and sister were only twelve and ten; that the happy life he had thought they'd always have had gone to ashes in the space of three short months, when his mother couldn't take the fact that his father had been cheating on her with various women for ten years and just got tired of taking it, tired of trying to wait until all the kids were grown and out of the house, so she just left and let the lawyers do the rest. He had been able to forget it all every morning, what his own life was: thirty-five, divorced, full of the memories of his fights with his wife over having kids, since she didn't want to have any and he did, remembering what it was like to be a kid, the things he could give his own kids, the Christmases he could give them. "Big baby," Janice had called him, with affection when they'd first married, later in derision, and finally in hate. "You dream about something that probably never really existed," she spat at him that last time, when she'd moved out of the house, not back to her mother like she'd said, but to live with the guy she'd worked for as a secretary, whom she'd probably been screwing for a year or two . . .

The sleigh bells jangled.

He heard that laugh again. And now he didn't care. It had to be real because sometimes your dreams come true, just like Walt Disney said. Here was his dream coming true. He was back in his childhood, it was Christmas, and Santa was here. "Ho-ho!" he heard out in the swirling snow, on the other side of the truck. One of the reindeer snorted. And then he heard his name. "Potty!" Santa called, his bass voice filled with mirth. "Potty, where are you?"