A Storied Man

(To go back, see Part Three)

Chad slowly reached out with both arms and pushed open the swinging doors. In the center of the room was a mountain, complete with ski lift, and a train running around a shelf on the surrounding walls. Eight tiny reindeer pulled Santa and his sleigh, apparently suspended by fishing line or something like it. Nearby were two Christmas trees decked out in holiday glory. In the air was snow like he had seen when he and Elena took Dysan to see a shopping mall Santa.

“Daddy!” came Dysan’s voice from his left.

Chad saw his son sitting at a bar, his tiny hands wrapped around a clear glass mug nearly full of brown liquid. Dysan broke his smile just long enough to blow on the steaming beverage, then leaned in to take a sip.

“Dysan! Wait!” Chad shouted. He didn’t know the man who had served the drink, and had no idea what was in the mug.

“It’s okay, son. It’s just apple cider,” the old man said.

“Daddy, this is my friend, Hubert. Hubert, this is my friend, Daddy,” Dysan said.

Chad walked over to the bar and grabbed the mug from Dysan. He sniffed it. It smelled strongly of cinnamon and apple, and it was scalding hot. He breath made small ripples on the surface as he tipped the mug up for a small sip.

He pulled the cup from his lips. “This is the best cider I’ve had,” he said.

“Should be. I mix it up myself, just like my father taught me,” Hubert said.

Chad set the mug down on the bar and extended his hand. They shook. The old man had a firm handshake that he held just long enough to make Chad feel welcome.

“Okay, Mister Blister, take a few more drinks of that and then we’re going back out to see Mommy,” Chad said.

Dysan eagerly accepted the hot cider and slurped a few swallows. He climbed down from the barstool and looked up at Hubert. “Mr. Hubert, I’m glad you’re a bidduvamisnomer.”

“What did you say?” Hubert asked.

Chad let go the chuckle he had stifled. “Oh, nothing, really. I might have casually told him that people without lights in their front yards at Christmas time are scrooges. Long story, really.”

Hubert laughed and tussled Dysan’s hair. “Oh, that’s alright. I’ve been called worse,” Hubert said. “Before you go, I ask only one thing.”

“What’s that?” Chad asked.

“Keep this room a secret. It started out a special place known only to those who see it, and I’d like for it to stay that way.”

“We can do that, right, Dysan?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Chad and Dysan exited through the saloon doors and made their way down the hall to the living room and kitchen. The ladies still were seated at the kitchen table. This time, however, two EMT workers were there. One knelt down to inspect Elena’s wound while the other asked her questions.

“Son, you stay here in the living room while they work to help Mommy,” Chad said. “I’m going to see what’s happening.

“Is mommy okay?”

“Yes, she’ll be fine.”

The EMT’s bandaged Elena and said she should go to the hospital. It was a superficial wound, but gunshot injuries had to be reported. “You don’t have to ride in our vehicle, though,” said the one sitting next to her.

Back in the minivan, now sporting a spare tire Chad installed using Hubert’s jack and tire tool, Chad got behind the wheel. Elena lay in the third row while Sue Bee and Dysan took up the second.

“Dysan, sweetie, I’m so sorry our trip got cut short,” Elena said. “I really wanted you to see the best Christmas lights ever.”

Chad glanced back at Dysan, who smiled knowingly. Then, loud enough for Elena to hear him in the back, “Let’s just worry about you right now.”

The End

(click here to go back to Part Two)

Chad saw a phone on the wall and dashed across the kitchen to dial 911.

——-

Dysan sat watching a show about a man who swings through the jungle on vines. Monkeys liked the man, and he liked them.

The old man, who sat in a rocking chair, turned to Dysan and said, “So, your daddy called you ‘Dysan.’ Is that your name?”

“Yes,” Dysan said. He didn’t look away from the TV screen.

“I’m Hubert. How old are you?”

Dysan wished the old man would stop interrupting the show. Instead of talking, he held up his right hand, with his thumb and first finger pinched together, the other three sticking up.

“Oh, three. That’s a good age,” Hubert said. He leaned toward Dysan. “I haven’t been three for a very long time. But I remember when I was your age, my old grandfather showed me somethin’ I’ll never forget.”

Hubert picked up a large remote control from the coffee table and pressed a button. The TV went black. Dysan turned to look at him.

Old man Hubert had a big head. His face was wrinkled up more than Dysan’s granddad’s, and his ears were bigger. He didn’t have a beard, but gray hairs stuck out of his nose and he had very thick, gray eyebrows. The hair on his head was dark brown and smooth. It covered everything but his forehead.

“I want to watch that man swinging,” Dysan said.

“Well, I have somethin’ to show you that I bet you’ll remember until you’re as old as me. You like Christmas, right?”

Dysan forgot about the TV. “Yes. I yike Christmas a yot.”

Hubert stood slowly and grunted. “Whoo. Got a hitch in my git-along.” He started walking away, still not quite standing up straight. He stopped and looked back at Dysan. “Well, you comin’, or aren’t you?”

Dysan jumped down from the couch and followed. They walked past the TV and turned down a long hallway. It was dark, but Dysan wasn’t scared. One of the rooms they passed was a bathroom with a seashell nightlight on the wall, and the other was a bedroom with a bright lamp on a little table.

At the end of the hallway they came to a set of doors. Hubert pushed them open like cowboy doors and stepped inside the room. He turned and held one of the doors open.

“I yike those doors,” Dysan said.

“Well, if you keep it movin’, I think you’ll keep on likin’ what you see.”

Dysan took a few more steps, through the open door.

“Welcome to the Christmastime Saloon.”

——-

“They’re on the way, honey,” Chad said.

While he was on the phone with 911, Sue Bee and the old lady had seated Elena on a folding metal chair at a small kitchen table. She clutched a kitchen towel against her side.

Chad walked over to her. “Hey, how do you feel?

“Hurts pretty bad, but it’s not bleeding as much now,” Elena said. “Where’s Dysan?”

“Watching TV in the living room,” Chad said.

Sue Bee furrowed her brow and craned her neck. “I don’t hear anything.”

Chad turned to look. The couch and the rocking chair were empty, and the TV was off. He walked into the living room and looked in the dining room off the entryway. Nobody was in there, either.

His boy was alone in the house with a stranger. Or was he even in the house? He called out. “Dysan!”

——-

The first thing Dysan noticed was the train. It ran on a track way up on the walls, all the way around the room. The tiny conductor was a toy Santa, and his elves crowded the passenger cars. Coal cars and circus animal cars, painted green, red and blue, filled the space between the black locomotive and the little red caboose.

In the middle of the room, a mountain reached above where the train ran. A thin wire ran from a small building on the peak, down to another building at the base. Dysan watched as a tiny bench moved down along the wire, through the bottom building, and back up.

Another toy Santa guided a sleigh and eight reindeer in flight around the mountain. Dysan squinted to get a better look at several wires leading up into darkness. He couldn’t see the ceiling, so he couldn’t tell where the wires went.

“Watch this,” Hubert said. He flipped what looked like a light switch.

Snow started falling from the black space above. Dysan held his arms straight out and spun around slowly. It didn’t snow much in the Dallas area.

Two Christmas trees stood on one side of the room. Popcorn strung in rings around the trees took on the varied colors of adjacent blinking bulbs. From the branches hung silver balls. Dysan walked up to one and saw a distorted reflection of his face surrounded by the room behind him.

He turned around to see a bar. Behind it were large wooden barrels on stands.

“What’s in those?” Dysan asked.

Hubert laughed. “Why, apple cider, of course,” he said. “Would you like some?”

“Yes!” Dysan said.

——-

Chad ran through the living room and turned down a dark hallway. “Dysan!” he called.

He came to a set of saloon doors. Snowflakes floated from the other side and into the hall. “Snow?” he said aloud.

(continue to the end)

(click here if you still need to read Part One)

Chad worked to open a panel in the floor of the minivan. He knew the tire was under there, but the latch was giving him trouble. The CD player kept pushing the music of the Nutcracker Suite out of the speakers.

“Daddy?” Dysan said.

“Yes, son?”

“Why don’t those people have yights?” Dysan had a little trouble saying his “L” sound, so sometimes “lights” came out “yights.”

“I guess they’re just Scrooges, son.”

“What are Scrooges?”

“Scrooge is a man who didn’t like Christmas,” Chad said. He grunted as he lifted the floor panel. “But mainly he did mean things to people. So, the way I used it is a bit of a misnomer, really.”

“What’s a bidduvamisnomer?”

“It’s when something has the wrong name. Like…” he started to say, until his eyes adjusted to the dark inside the floor compartment.

The spare tire was there, but the jack wasn’t. He couldn’t raise the minivan to take off the flat tire and replace it.

“Well, that’s a real nutcracker,” Chad said. “I’ll be right back, son.”

Chad slammed the panel down and crawled backward out the door. He stood, brushed off the knees of his pants, and thought about their options. They had mobile phones, so they could call Sue Bee’s husband, who had stayed home. Chad didn’t like that idea, because it would take Henry at least an hour to get to them. There were service stations nearby, but that would cost a lot of money.

As he walked around to the right side of the minivan and looked at the house with no lights, Chad saw a bulb on the front porch light up. A woman came out the front door and walked down the steps. Chad noticed that Sue Bee and Elena were watching the woman, too.

“How’s our son?” Elena asked.

“Fine. He sure asks a lot of questions,” Chad said.

“Welcome to my world,” Elena said. She always stayed at home with Dysan on the days Chad went to work.

“So, is this lady coming to shoo us away?” Chad asked.

“We don’t know that. Let’s just wait and see,” Sue Bee said.

——-

Back in the minivan, Dysan watched an old lady walk up to his mommy, daddy, and gramma. “Who’s that yady, Daddy?” he asked, but nobody could hear him with all the windows and doors closed.

He heard a sound that made him pancake his hands against his ears. He started counting after the first one, and got up to six. Then, even though the sound was over, he counted in Spanish. He got to diez.

He heard his daddy yelling, “Get down! Get down!” as they all lay on the ground on their stomachs.

At the house with no lights, an old man rushed out of the front door and pointed a long gun toward the street. Dysan knew what it was because his granddad had one over his fireplace. He knew he should never aim a gun at people.

Dysan turned to see where the man was aiming. A car rushed by and sped down the street. The old man moved his gun to keep it pointed at the car.

“Daddy! Mommy! What’s happening!” Dysan cried.

The door opened and Dysan’s daddy quickly unstrapped him from his seat. “Where are we going?” Dysan asked.

“Inside.” He hugged Dysan close and put his hand behind his head.

“Inside the house with no yights?” Dysan snuggled his face against his daddy’s shoulder.

“Yes, son. No yights. Okay, gotcha. Here we go.” He pulled on the minivan’s door handle to start it closing.

His daddy ran across the yard. The ladies already were running through the front door, and the old man was waving his hand for his daddy to hurry up. Dysan’s lip bumped against his daddy’s hard shoulder at least three times before they got up the steps.

The strong smell of cinnamon hit Dysan’s nose as they reached the entryway. His daddy walked through a room with a TV in it, and into the kitchen. His mommy and gramma stood with the old lady, facing the sink. The water was running.

“She’s bleeding a lot,” the old lady said. She turned and saw Dysan and his daddy. “Oh, sorry, dear, I didn’t know you had him in here,” she said.

“She’s been shot?” his daddy asked. The old lady nodded her head.

——-

Chad turned and walked quickly back to the living room, where he set Dysan down on the couch. “Son, you stay here and watch TV with the nice man, okay?”

“But you said he’s a scrooge, Daddy, and they’re mean to people.”

“Well, I was wrong. Just do as I say, Dysan. I need to go check on Mommy.”

“I want to come with you.”

“No, son, you have to stay here right now. See? There. He’s turned it to Disney Toons Channel for you.”

Chad walked back into the kitchen. Elena was leaning over the sink. “It hurts. Oh, God, it hurts,” she said, wincing between breaths.

“Where was she shot?” Chad asked.

“Near her ribs, but it just caught the skin,” the old lady said.

“Honey, do you need to sit down?” Sue Bee asked.

“No, Mom, I just need to not move right now.”

“I knew we shouldn’t have come to the city,” Chad said. “This neighborhood’s just a few blocks from downtown. Ripe picking for gang members and God knows what else.”

“That’s not helping, son,” the old lady said.

Chad noticed a hint of cinnamon in the air. The house smelled like Christmas.

(continue to Part Three)