“Hey!” said Jack. “That’s—”
He almost said, “That’s my party.” But then remembered he had never mentioned GFI’s invitation to Keeley or anyone else.
Keeley nodded absently. A moment later she began to snore, leaving Jack to stare at a video montage. GFI’s brazen airships in formation against an indigo sky; sturgeon slitted open so that their roe spurted onto dirty grey ice; a vault filled with ranks of champagne bottles; vintage limousines; a Japanese woman being outfitted in a stiffly embroidered kimono four times as large as she was; an aerial shot of some kind of arena, swelling out from one side of the Pyramid like a wasps’ nest and covered with workers and scaffolding and construction equipment. Then the arena faded, replaced by the shuffled images of two or three hundred people Jack assumed must be famous for something. He only recognized a few of them—the beloved sports figure disfigured by petra virus, a much-married millionaire Jack had thought was dead. And the ubiquitous Trip Marlowe, natch, dancing on one foot atop a Day-Glo Sphinx.
“… billing it as the most fabulous bash since King Tut partied on the Nile!” exulted the announcer.
The segment ended and another began, this one about millenarian cults like the Montana-based Cognitive Dissidents, who were planning their own mass suicide at the stroke of midnight, December 31. There was a commercial for telephone insurance. Then a few more worried-looking people speculated about the end of the world. Jack made a rude noise. He turned the volume off, but left the TV on—he was superstitious about turning it off—and went into the kitchen.
It was hard to believe that anything was coming to an end, except for Lazyland’s supply of coffee, which was dismayingly meager: only one vacuum-sealed bag remained. Leonard was their sole link with the world of such luxuries, but Leonard had not returned to Lazyland since he’d brought the Fusax. And Jack knew better than to hope that coffee would materialize on the shelves at Delmonico’s during one of his forays there for supplies.
Still, later that morning he was amazed to see what Delmonico’s could produce. Christmas was only a week off. Mrs. Delmonico had brought out the old cardboard decorations—Santas and elves and angels, all from Finnegan’s Variety Shops circa 1967—and strung up tired garlands. Like some old-time general store, the venerable Yonkers grocery had begun to exhibit delicacies of the season. Oranges in wooden crates, their knurled skins more green than orange, and fist-sized pomegranates wrapped in varicolored tissue. (The paper could be used for wrapping presents, Mrs. Delmonico advised Jack. Wasn’t it pretty?) White rabbits and evil-looking chickens dangled upside down from their feet above the butcher counter. There were boxes of handmade toys, cars and boats and rocket ships carved from Popsicle sticks, sock puppets, old Barbies whose plastic faces had been scrubbed and repainted with ballpoint ink, dressed in new hand-stitched clothes.
And one afternoon, beneath a churning claret sky, an ancient pickup truck pulled up in front of the grocery, its bed piled ten feet high with—
“Christmas trees!” exclaimed Jack.
A crowd was gathering, fellahin who camped at Getty Square and a few wary shoppers like Jack, who carried baseball bats and wore football helmets. A fellahin girl, dressed in shredded garbage bags, stood on tiptoe beside the truck to breathe in rapturously.
“I remember these!” she cried.
Jack smiled. He moved closer, lifted his surgical mask, and touched the soft boughs behind their protective plastic mesh. The trees were leggy, their limbs swept into torturous angles by the webbing. He ran a finger along one slender branch. Needles rained onto the truck bed—it was covered with needles, rust-colored and greenish yellow, and twisted pine cones like arthritic fingers, and scaly bits of bark.
But then Jack closed his eyes. Immediately darkness was there, the expectant predawn hush of a house buried in snow, whispers from his brothers’ bed and that smell, the holiest scent he had ever known: evergreen. To Jack that had always been Christmas. Not the toys, not the lights, not even the baby in the barn, but this: night and bitter cold, snow beneath and desolate stars above, a green tree in the wood that breathed in the darkness but breathed out spring.
“’Scuse me, ’scuse me, sir—”
He jolted from his dream, stood to let the driver and his lanky teenage son open up the truck bed. They unloaded the trees—white pine, he heard the driver say, lumber trees but they were harvesting them now, they needed the money too badly—and leaned them up against the storefront, hiding the plywood and sheet metal that covered its windows. Someone asked how much the trees were. Jack sucked his breath in at the price, but then thought of the money that would be coming from the sale of The Gaudy Book. Any day, maybe; besides which his credit was always good at Delmonico’s—a hundred years ago it had been his great-grandfather’s store, old Sabe Delmonico had bought it during the Depression but the Delmonicos considered the Finnegans part of their extended family, even now.
He bought a tree.
“Can you get that home by yourself?” Mrs. Delmonico eyed Jack dubiously, and before he could answer shouted out at the truck driver’s son. “Hey! YOU! C’mere, we got a job for you—carry this nice man’s tree for him, okay? Just a couple blocks. Tip him nice, Jackie, eh?”
She winked, turned to survey the fragrant benison that had befallen her shop.
So they brought the tree home, Jack and the boy. His name was Eben, he and his dad had driven down from New Hampshire, it took them three days.
“Truck kept breaking. We ran out of gas, then some guy tried to steal our tires, but my dad pounded him, hah!” The boy was thin but tall, exhilarated to be so far away from home. He smelled of pine resin and diesel oil. He shouldered the tree like a rifle and loped ahead of Jack, repeating over and over how he’d never been to New York and his father had promised they’d go to the city, after the trees were sold.
“My mom, she don’t like that!”
Jack shook his head. “I’m with her, Eben.”
At the gate to Lazyland Jack made the boy hand the tree over. “I can get it from here,” he explained. He wanted to bring the tree down to the house himself. “But wait, here—”
He held out a fifty-dollar bill. It wasn’t much, and for a moment he was afraid Eben would refuse to take it, or complain. But the boy only smiled, shook his head, and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“Hey, no sir, you just enjoy your tree, okay? Merry Christmas!” And he spun away, whistling to himself.
The tree was heavier than it had looked, for all that it was scrawny compared to Lazyland’s trees of yore. Jack dragged it down the driveway, looking back anxiously to see if he was leaving a trail of needles. Inside he was met by Keeley and Marz and Mrs. Iverson, who exclaimed and offered advice as to how to prop it up in the dining room until the old wrought-iron tree stand could be found.
“It’s like Charlie Brown’s tree!” Mrs. Iverson poked the tree where it leaned against the china cupboard, gazing disapprovingly at the needles that littered the carpet beneath.
“It’s beautiful, dear,” said Keeley. “Hush, Larena.”