Shoulders drooping, Scarlett turned and padded back to the stairs.
Buck was glad to know from his mother’s call that his sister and the kids were fine, and that her husband was diagnosed, now, with a concussion and not the skull fracture they’d all feared. As soon as he hung up, though, the telephone rang again.
Buck snatched it up. He was dog-tired and wanted to go to bed but it seemed like half the town of Nancyville had to talk to him. It had been that way since six o’clock. This time his caller was the mayor. “Yeah, Harry,” Buck said wearily.
“Buck, listen,” the mayor said. The evening’s constant talking had reduced his voice to a rasp. “As you know, most of the city council are still here at my house, with the exception of Steve Morrisey and Britta Jergensen – Britta had to go home and let her babysitter go. But we’ve been looking over some of the counteractive measures that have been suggested, and we’ve decided to – ah, commit to a few.”
“We don’t need any of that, Harry,” Buck said. “In spite of what you think you heard on television, the sheriff’s department of Jackson County is not going to be down at the courthouse tomorrow night with a cadre of deputies to use force on any living manger scene. Because there isn’t going to
“Now, you don’t know that, Buck,” the mayor said quickly. “There were a lot of people looking at Channel Ten tonight, and they heard what you said.”
“That was just something dreamed up by those Atlanta news people,” Buck maintained. “Nobody had said anything about a manger scene or using deputies until the TV people showed up. Harry, that team would have been happy as hell if they’d gotten me to say that I was going to run Joseph and Mary and the kid that won the Best Baby Jesus contest off the courthouse lawn at gunpoint!”
“That’s just the problem,” the mayor said hoarsely. “Junior Whitford came over here a little while ago with most of his Committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas, and they’d been watching Channel Ten, too. I’ll say it to you, Buck, although I won’t say it to them – that damned committee’s got their heads turned by all the publicity. They’ve decided they’re going to have a manger scene after all!”
Buck surveyed the wall before him bleakly. “They can’t. There’s a court order.”
“Court order, fiddle-faddle!” the mayor burst out. “They think they’re going to storm the courthouse! They’ve already called Channel Ten, Junior tells me, to tell them what they’re going to do.”
“We had to put on our thinking caps,” the mayor went on. “There we were, except for Britta and Steve Morrisey, trying to come up with a new approach.”
Buck said cautiously, “You’re not thinking of those damned fireworks, are you?”
The council had learned that in a pinch they could use the leftover supplies of fireworks from the last municipal Fourth of July celebration, which was not as strange as it sounded: fireworks were a part of southern Christmases, even though the custom was dying out somewhat.
“Well, I think we ought to go with the fireworks,” the mayor was saying, “although I know you don’t like them, Buck. But the idea is to provide so much entertainment tomorrow night that – uh, people won’t look kindly on any interruptions from Junior and folks I won’t mention. We’ve just had an offer from Ronnie Dance, who runs an outfit that specializes in dropping Santa Clauses during the holiday season.”
“Dropping Santa Clauses?” Buck straightened up, surprised in spite of himself. “What the hell’s that?”
“The big operators bring their Santa Clauses in by helicopter, Buck,” the voice on the telephone explained a little apologetically. “You know, Santa just steps right out of the chopper in the parking lot and into the nearest J.C. Penney’s or what have you. Ronnie doesn’t have a helicopter, he runs a skydiving service in the summertime out of a Cessna 206. Santa Claus-dropping is just his off-season business. But he can drop a skydiver in a Santa uniform onto a circle that’s been already drawn on the asphalt at the shopping mall. Most of Ronnie’s Santas used to be paratroopers; they kind of look for that target.”
“Harry,” Buck said, keeping his voice even with an effort, “we don’t need a skydiving Santa at the Living Christmas Tree tomorrow night. There’s going to be enough going on.”
“Buck, I can’t refuse it!” the mayor rasped. “Ronnie’s offered it free, after Santa does his jump up at the K Mart in Toccoa. It’s a good thing the Living Christmas Tree’s at sundown. Ronnie says he can just squeeze Santa in as the last jump of the day, and it won’t cost us a dime.”
“Harry,” Buck said, his temper beginning to slip, “you and the city council just consider that I’m responsible for maintaining law and order in this county, and I don’t know about being able to do that if you’re going to encourage anybody to stage their own demonstrations tomorrow night -”
“Nobody encouraged Junior and that damned committee,” the mayor shouted, “that was his own idea!”
“- and pile a fireworks display and a Santa jump from a Cessna on top of it, while the people who worked hard on all this are trying to give the Living Christmas Tree their concert.”
The mayor made choking noises, trying to interrupt, but Buck went on. “Harry, it’s going to be pure hell if the council does even half this stuff, and then you want to throw the whole enchilada right in my lap! Now, you just tell those people you got in your house thinking up these bright ideas to go home and get some sleep.”
“Dammit, I’m not going to do that!” the mayor fired back. “Those people, as you call them, know there’s a need to show we got some civilizing influence up here, and that we’re not a bunch of jerks and hillbillies like they tried to show tonight on TV. As for you, Sheriff Grissom,” he said sarcastically, “
“Now just a damned minute,” Buck said.
But the mayor had hung up.
Buck put the telephone back in its cradle with a groan of pent-up exasperation. The city council and the mayor had panicked, egged on by all those Nancyville citizens who had kept the telephone lines hot that night. The town had gotten upset enough about the original injunction over not having the living manger scene downtown. Now he knew his remark on TV, which seemed to say he would have deputies holding off any illegal Mary and Infant Jesus at the courthouse, had struck a nerve.
Damn, Buck thought, massaging the back of his neck furiously, he was beginning to hate Christmas!
He turned off the television in the den. The Scraggs dog got out from behind the couch and followed him as he went down the hall to the parlor to put out the lights on the Christmas tree. “I see you’re with me once more,” he told it.
The dog trotted along beside him, wagging its tail.
Buck stood gazing at the huge winking, glittering spruce for a long moment, suddenly realizing that since the Scraggs sisters were going to be with him for Christmas, somebody had to buy them presents.
What could you buy for the lock-picking little sister? he wondered. The contents of the Nancyville Hardware Store’s security department, so she could practice? A Rubik’s cube?
That didn’t sound like such a bad idea. Buck bent to finger a crayoned, cotton- bearded paper Santa Claus he remembered from the second grade.
And clothes. Farrie seemed to like clothes, the stranger the better. At least he could get both of them more than one pair of shoes.
And Scarlett?
Ah,
