Already there was about an inch of snow on the ground when we left. The storm picked up while we climbed a tree outside the clubhouse. We waited there while the party began to die down. I could see my parents’ friends dancing, and Sheriff Travis standing on tables and gesticulating, or turning somersaults, or dancing with two ladies at once. Music and laughter drifted through the blowing snow every time someone opened the door to the hall. I got sleepy listening to the sounds of adult amusement, just like Colm and I always did when our parents had one of their dinner parties, something they did often back before he died. With our door open we could hear them laughing, and sometimes someone playing the piano, and I always fell into the most peaceful sleep listening to that noise.
I fell asleep in the tree, with my head on Molly’s shoulder. We were wedged close together, so I was warm. It was snowing heavily when she jabbed me with her elbow and said, “Wake up, it’s time to go.” She climbed down the tree and hurried off. I jumped down, knocking snow from where it had accumulated on my back and shoulders, and I hurried after her. She was moving back toward our houses, toward the tee of the seventh hole. When I caught up with her I could see another vague shape stumbling through the snow, about thirty yards from us. We had to get closer before I could make out the distinctive silhouette of the Santa hat. Sheriff Travis was famous for refusing a ride home every year. He was very proud of the fact that, no matter how drunk he got, he always found his way home. He lived down by the river, in a modest cottage that I imagine must have been lonely, because his children were gone and his wife was dead. He was taking a short cut across the golf course. I knew he would cross through the woods beyond the green to Beach Road.
But we had caught up with him by then. He was singing “Adeste Fideles” in a loud voice and did not hear us come up behind him. Molly Pitcher, when we were about ten yards away, had taken out her dagger and handed me a short length of lead pipe. “Be ready,” she said. When we were closer, she suddenly ran at him, looking slightly ridiculous trying to run through the deepening snow with her short legs. But there was nothing ridiculous about the blow she struck, just above his wide black belt, about where his left kidney must be. He fell to his knees, and she struck again, this time at his back, almost right in the middle, and then again at his neck as he fell forward. He screamed at the first blow, just like I thought he would, a great, raw scream like the one my father let go in the hospital room when Colm finally stopped breathing. She stabbed him one more time, in the right side of his back. In the dark, his blood was black on the snow. He lay on his face and was silent. I stood in the snow, clutching my pipe and wondering if I should hit him with it.
Molly grabbed my hand and dragged me after her. She ran as fast as she could, through the woods, then along Beach Road to a point just below our houses. “I got him,” she was saying breathlessly, in a high voice. “I got Santa.” Twice we had to crouch down behind tree trunks because of the approaching headlights of the last few stragglers headed home from the party. We tore up through the ravine, past Gulliver’s headstone, and she gave me a push up the tree, saying only, “Put your coat back downstairs!” before running off to her own house. I did as she said. I would have, anyway. It grated that she thought I would be careless. I still had the pipe. I hid it deep in my closet, where the Spider-Man toys were still piled.
Back in bed, I looked out my window at the storm, which was still gaining strength. It would be almost a blizzard by morning. School would be canceled. I lay watching the snow that I knew was covering our child-sized footprints, covering Santa Travis’s body. I thought of him dying, the coldness of the snow penetrating in stages through his skin and his muscle and his bone, a light veil falling over his sight like somebody was wrapping his head in layer after layer of sweet-smelling toilet paper, like Colm and I used to do when we played “I am the mummy’s bride,” or “the plastic surgeon just gave me a new face.” I imagined Colm, waiting patiently by the door and suffering the snow to blow through to where he was suffering it to collect on him, or in him, waiting and waiting, peering at the slowly approaching figure.
Sheriff Travis did not die. A concerned citizen, worried because of the storm, had called his house. When he didn’t answer, people went looking for him. They found him where we left him. He had not moved an inch, but he was alive. At the hospital my father took him to surgery to repair his lacerated kidney and fret over his hemisected spinal cord.
When he woke up he said he remembered everything. Despite the darkness of the night, and the snow, he gave fairly detailed descriptions of his two attackers. Two large black men had done it, he said, one holding him while the other stabbed him and called him “Honky Santa.” Police visited the community just outside the Severna Forest gates, and two men were arrested when Travis identified them in a lineup. I saw them in the paper.
Molly was furious that Travis hadn’t died. I had never seen her so angry as when she stood in my room, kicking my bed so hard that the wall shook and the “First Mate” sign fell down with a clunk.
“Why?” she said in a loud voice. “Why couldn’t he have died? I needed him to die.” I thought about her hungry blue stone while she kicked my bed some more, until my father came to the door and said, “Everything okay in here?”
“Yes sir,” she said. “We were just playing kick the bed.”
“Well, please don’t.”
“Yes sir,” she said, blushing. I looked at the sunlight on the carpet and wanted my father to shut up and go away. Don’t make her angry, I was thinking. I didn’t want her to get him.
When he was gone, she said, “It’s just not fair.”
I thought it would be many more months before she returned for me at night. I thought we would lie low, but she came back soon, after only two weeks had passed, at the beginning of the second week of January. She had been gone, down to Florida with her grandparents over break, but she came for me the first night she was back. While she was in Florida, bitter cold had descended over the Atlantic coast from New York to Richmond. The river and even parts of the Chesapeake were frozen over.
When we went down the ravine to Beach Road, I thought for sure we were going to Travis’s house, to finish him off. But when she got to the road she crossed it and stepped over the riverbank, onto the ice. She turned back to me. “Come on,” she said and went sliding over the ice in her rubber boots. She went past the pier and the boat slips, out into the open water. Her voice came drifting back to me. “Don’t be such a slowpoke.” I hurried after the place where I thought her voice was coming from, but I never caught up with her — perhaps she was hiding from me. It was a clear but moonless night, and she was wearing a dark coat and a dark hat. I stopped after a while and wrapped my arms around myself. I was cold because my parents were both home and I did not dare go down for my coat. Instead I had worn two sweaters, but they weren’t enough to keep me warm. I knelt on the ice and looked down at it, trying to catch Colm’s image. I heard her boots sliding over the ice out in the dark, and I thought about a story people told about the ghost of a girl who drowned skating across the river to Westport, to see her boyfriend. On nights like this you were supposed to be able to see her, a gliding white figure. If you saw her face it meant you would die one day by water. I looked downriver, searching either for the ghost or Molly, but seeing only the lights of the bridges down past Annapolis. There was a flash, and for a moment I thought it was the winter equivalent of heat lightning until I heard the Polaroid whirring and realized she had just taken my picture.