“If you’d wanted a pet,” the doctor interrupted, “I could have fixed you up with a nice Yorkie male pup. Six weeks old, papers, and all shots. My wife’s little bitch just had a fine litter.”
“Pet?” Buck turned to glare at the dog on the office carpet. “That thing’s no damned pet. It acts like it’s going to tear your throat out if you try to make it do something it doesn’t want to do.”
At the sound of Buck’s voice, Demon lifted her head, wagged her tail, and gave a soft, loving moan.
“Looks pretty friendly to me.” The doctor leaned over and slipped a blue and white canvas sling over Buck’s head. “Don’t turn down a trusting animal’s love,” he advised as he guided Buck’s hand through the opening. “Believe me, the wholehearted devotion of a dog is one of the few genuine gifts a man gets in this corrupt and unhappy world. Nelly and I wouldn’t give a million dollars for our family of Yorkies.”
Buck lurched to his feet. As he did so, Demon got up from the floor and with its huge tail wagging swept a stack of medical magazines from the doctor’s desk.
“You see what I mean?” Buck reached for his wide-brimmed sheriff’s hat with his left hand. “It eats my lunch, I can’t get a sandwich halfway to my mouth before it gulps it down, Saran Wrap and all. Then it leans all over me when I’m trying to drive, and if I try to shove it out of the Blazer it acts like it’s going to take my hand off.” He twisted his elbow unhappily, looking down at the sling. “I don’t know if I can take this for ten days,” he said, turning to go. “I’ve got to take it off sometime. This is my gun arm.”
“Suit yourself, boy,” Dr. Halliwell called after him. “But that shoulder’s not going to get better unless you give it a rest.”
Giving it a rest, Buck found as he made his way out to the clinic parking lot, was easier said than done. And getting into the Blazer with only one hand was a challenge. Once inside the dog hunkered up next to him and rested her big head on his right shoulder, making Buck yelp in sudden pain. The fact that he was backing out as this happened, the steering wheel held only by his usable hand, made the Blazer veer in the same direction. With the result that the vehicle narrowly missed scraping the length of Dr. Halliwell’s Fleetwood Cadillac parked next to it.
Buck sat muttering under his breath, not only from the sharp twinge in his shoulder, but from the disaster that had almost overtaken him. Dr. Jerry Halliwell loved his brand-new 1994 Fleetwood Caddie almost as much as he loved his Yorkies.
Buck slipped his arm out of the blue and white canvas, gritting his teeth against the pain. He had thought to experiment with driving without the sling, but he’d promptly put it back on when he saw his hand, his fingers the color of smoked sausages.
It was going to be some holiday.
“Sit down over there,” Buck snarled at the dog. For once it obeyed, moving to its side of the front seat, looking at him reproachfully.
It was beginning to rain as they took the highway back to town, another sleety assault from the mountains to the north that made the road treacherous, especially driving with one hand. Buck had to hook his right elbow against the steering wheel to help turn it.
Both sides of the road were lined with the brightly colored local product: handmade chenille bedspreads now flapping in the wind. Making chenille bedcoverings had been a cottage industry for decades in the Georgia mountains. Most of the families along State Road 12 made money in the summer and fall when the tourists were around. Now it looked as though they were trying for some Christmas money.
In spite of bad weather, the clotheslines were hung with spreads with designs of peacocks, Florida flamingos and palm trees, and in honor of the season, outsized chenille Santa Clauses.
The Last Supper bedspread, Buck was relieved to see, was not as popular as it once had been. The local God-fearing mountain people had never seen anything objectionable in rendering Jesus and his disciples for sale in cotton tufts in primary colors. But the thought of actually sleeping under one of the Last Supper bedspreads, Buck had always felt, was more than a little daunting.
The radio suddenly came on. “Sheriff,” the county police dispatcher said, “can you pick up?”
Buck propped his elbow on the steering wheel to hold it and lifted the receiver. “Yeah, George.”
“Do you,” the dispatcher wanted to know, “care to answer a call from the Committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas? The chairman, Junior Whitford, has been calling you again about the music. He says the committee ain’t approving ‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town’ for the Living Christmas Tree to sing as it celebrates a pagan ritual.”
At that moment the Blazer entered Nancyville’s downtown. There were only a few shoppers on Main Street and they hurried along under umbrellas. Overhead, the whirling aluminum garlands said Joyous Noel, and Happy New Year.
Buck was suddenly reminded that he didn’t have a date for New Year’s Eve. Didn’t, actually, have any place to go. In years past he had always dated Susan Huddleston, and Susan had made the arrangements. Now he found the prospect of an unplanned New Year’s Eve surprisingly depressing.
He clicked on the Blazer’s radio. “I must have been celebrating pagan rituals all my life,” he told the dispatcher, “because I’ve been singing ‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town’ since I was in kindergarten. The head Druid, Mrs. Brown, taught it to all of us.”
Buck, too busy maneuvering the Blazer to get more than a glimpse of the wooden structure in front of the courthouse, was reminded that Cyrus Ravenwood, the high school band teacher, had guaranteed the Living Christmas Tree was the answer to their problems: a totally secular entertainment that had been successful in other places faced with similar court orders.
Buck hoped Ravenwood knew what he was doing. But he had his doubts. Right now even “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” was under fire.
“George, have we heard from any truckers?” He didn’t want to forget about their major problem. The department was averaging one call a day from local truckers asking what they were doing about the hijackings.
“All quiet so far,” the radio told him. “You got a call from Inspector Byron Turnipseed at the Georgia CID, that’s all.”
Buck signed off. The state’s criminal investigation department could wait until tomorrow; any help Byron Turnipseed offered with their hijackings was limited by a skimpy state budget. Small north Georgia counties’ law-enforcement departments usually had to shift for themselves.
Following that line of thought, he remembered the Scraggs sisters. For the first time he felt what could only be a rush of reluctant sympathy for Devil Anse’s offspring. The old outlaw came rightly by his name. Who else but a devil would think of selling off – there was no other word for it – his own flesh and blood? “Free trial offer” be damned!
Then there was the strange little elvish child. There was no telling what was wrong with her, a variety of birth defects, probably, from the look of it. The kid needed medical attention. Probably for the first time in her life.
And the other one. Scarlett.
Instead of coherent thoughts a series of fleeting images raced through Buck’s head. The screaming hoyden in the dirty pink underwear panties Moses Holt had dragged across the floor of the jail, yelling her defiance. Scarlett standing with her arms wrapped tightly around her in his mother’s driveway, black hair streaming in the wind. A few minutes later holding her sister in her arms and stroking the child’s hair, her face transformed with tenderness.
Buck stopped in the middle of his thoughts, astonished that he was even thinking about Scarlett O’Hara Scraggs. As an antidote he quickly tried to picture Susan Huddleston.