• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Uncle Billy discovered me all over again. “Who are you?”

“Gumdrop Coal. Kringle Town.”

“Has the circus come to Kringle Town?” Uncle Billy asked. “Are you one of the magical midgets? Let’s see a trick!”

“Not until I see Potter,” I said.

“Ohhhhhh! You want to see Potter!” Uncle Billy said. “Of course you do, of course you do. Do you know where he is?”

Somewhere, deep inside of me, I heard a nerve say, “I’m all you got left and the crazy man is on it!” I took a breath and said, “No. Can you help me?”

Uncle Billy smiled like it was his birthday. “Oh boy, I might indeed, indeed I might. I know just the place to look!”

Uncle Billy may have been old and I would have hated to be hanging since the coot was sober, but he was as strong as an ox. He picked me up by the scruff of the neck and carried me down the hill to the road that led to the sad glow of Pottersville.

Uncle Billy’s grip was pretty tight, so I didn’t fight him. Being a passenger also gave me the chance to study the lay of the land in case I needed to plot an escape or hiding place. What I saw was a pretty sad sight. Most of the houses were dark shacks with broken windows and peeled paint. The yards were purgatories for junk and rotten trees.

As we tromped closer to town, I started hearing the screams. That mean wind carried the sounds from every direction, roars of pain, sobs of regret and helpless shrieks. You could even hear the hushed weeping of despair and that was the worst of all. Kringle Town didn’t have these sounds. When I delivered coal to the naughty, I admit part of me enjoyed the crying and the fits. But I really loved when those temper tantrums were later replaced by stiff upper lips and sturdy promises to do better. The joy of the season always overcame darkness; there was no stopping it. But for some reason, it was always midnight in Pottersville, an hour as lonesome and low as a lost dog.

As bad as the screams were, the racket of downtown Pottersville was worse. Uncle Billy turned a corner onto Potter Avenue to a jangle of loud music, yelling and car horns. Everywhere you looked, neon lights screamed empty promises of pleasure, like Dance of the Sugarplum Starlets, Ice Cold Holiday Cheer and Beer, Mistletoe After Dark. Pottersville citizenry rumbled through the streets looking for a fight or just coming from one. Your ears couldn’t go a second without hearing a threat shouted across the sidewalk or the crack of fists and bones. The mob was a hurricane, tornado and flash fire all rolled up into one, spitting out little dark clouds of trouble to picnic on each other. I could feel the anger in my soul like a tribal drum. I could taste blood. If Santa died, I could survive here, I thought.

Then, I hated myself for thinking all over again.

As tough as the rabble on the street was, they made a path for Uncle Billy. Holding me like a football, Uncle Billy chugged through the crowd like the loco locomotive he was. The criminal class gave me the stink eye as we hustled by and, had I not been in the company of the town’s nut uncle, I most certainly would have been fertilizing Potter’s Field. But even the toughest hombres backed away from Uncle Billy. He was Potter’s pet, dangerous as a rumba in a minefield. I was between a rock and a hard place, and it was about to get even less cozy. Uncle Billy pulled me close and opened the door to Potter’s.

As soon as the door closed behind us, the ruckus of Pottersville switched off like a light. Potter’s sanctuary had walls as thick as mountains, and the windows and doors must have been just as hardy because inside you couldn’t hear a thing except the ticking of a slow clock somewhere. The floors were marble and walls paneled with huge slabs of dark, fancy woodwork. It reminded me of a coffin.

“What are you doing here?” Uncle Billy asked me. I touched one of the strings tied around his fingers and said, “You brought me to see Potter.”

Uncle Billy smiled like an idiot. “So I did! So I did,” he said and shuffled over to a set of doors just off the foyer. He turned