'Twas the Night Read online

  “Hold on a minute.” George could be heard talking to a female in the room with him. Probably his fiancée. Finally, he came back and informed Sam excitedly, “Molly came up with a perfect solution for you.” He paused in a ta-da manner before suggesting, “You can hitch a ride on the Santa Brigade bus.”

  “What the hell is a Santa Brigade?” Almost immediately, he added, “I beg your pardon, sir.” Old habits died hard. George never tolerated bad language.

  “The Santa Brigade is a troupe of volunteers from Winter Haven. And they’re headed back up this way any day now. They better be. They’re all invited to the porchbreaker of a weddin’ celebration we’re planning.”

  “Winter Haven? The retirement community?” Good Lord! What did a retirement community have to do with him?

  “Yep. For years, a bunch of the residents have been dressing up as Santas, entertainin’ kids hereabouts with magic and stuff. Then, three years ago, they rigged up this special bus so they could travel down the eastern seaboard visiting homeless shelters and such for a couple weeks before Christmas. They’re famous, boy. Haven’t you ever heard of ’em?”

  He paused to listen to the female in the room again. Before finishing. “Molly just reminded me. They were on Good Morning America a few years back. Dint’ja see ’em? Diane Sawyer sat on Morey Goldstein’s lap. That old fart’s gonna have a head so big when he gets back here his hat won’t fit. You remember Diane Sawyer. She passed out in a Blue Angels plane ’bout the same time. I saw it myself on the TV.”

  Sam braced an elbow on the table and put his forehead in his palm. Between George’s rambling and the approaching snow storm, Sam felt the mother of all headaches beginning to throb behind his eyes. “George, what do all these geriatric Santas have to do with me and my cancelled flight?”

  “Be careful how you use that word geriatric, boy. I’m in that category now, too.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Those geriatric Santas, as you call them, are the answer to your prayer, Samuel.”

  What prayer? Call me crazy, but I don’t recall praying for a long time . . . probably since the time my mother told me she was abandoning me when I was ten. Sam shook his head, hard, to clear it. He was becoming way too maudlin today.

  “At this moment, they’re at the Good Shepherd Shelter in Allentown, Pennsylvania. That’s right down the road from you.”

  “I hate to tell you this, but Allentown isn’t down the road from Philadelphia.” Andy whispered some specifics to him. Then Sam informed George, “It’s a two-hour drive under good conditions.”

  George was talking right over him. “Molly’s ringing up their bus driver right now. You remember Betty Morgan.”

  “Betty Morgan is the bus driver? The Betty Morgan? I thought she was a Marine.” Betty, nicknamed Betty Bad-Ass by him and his buddies, had caught him necking one time behind her father’s garage with Sally Sue Simpson. She’d given him a lecture that day, complete with blue language that still turned his face red in memory, on the need for always carrying proper rubbers. And she hadn’t been referring to boots, either.

  “Retired. Now she’s a NASCAR mechanic . . . famous, actually . . . and a bus driver for the brigade on her off-time. Orders everyone around like a drill sergeant. What’s that you say, Molly? Oh, Betty wants to know if you can be in Allentown by fifteen hundred hours?”

  “I can’t be there in one hour,” he replied testily, glancing at his wrist watch and making some quick mental calculations. “It’s already two o’clock. I have no means of transportation handy. There’s not enough time. And the weather’s getting bad.” Besides, I have no desire to ride for a day or more in a crowded bus with a bunch of senior citizen Santas through a blizzard. Not to mention Betty freakin’ Bad-Ass Morgan. She’d probably give me a more up-to-date lecture on condoms.

  George ignored all his protests, and was giving him the number of Betty’s cell phone, which Sam jotted down on a napkin.

  “Don’t let me down,” George said then. The wily old fox was manipulating him to his will, just like he always had.

  “I’ll try to find a way to get there in a day or two, George, but I’m not coming on a Santa bus,” he pronounced firmly.

  “Now, don’t rule it out. There are no guarantees that the storm won’t get worse, and you’ll be stuck in Philadelphia through Christmas. Talk to Betty. See what you can arrange.”

  “I’m not coming on a Santa bus.”

  “Maybe you could hire a taxi to Allentown.”

  A taxi? Is he nuts? “I’m not coming on a Santa bus.”

  “Oh. Molly just reminded me about somethin’. The director of Winter Haven is on that bus, too.”

  So? “I’m not coming on a Santa bus.”

  “You know who that is, dontcha?”

  I don’t care if it’s Julia Roberts. “I’m not coming on a Santa bus.”

  “Reba Anderson.”

  The wind was knocked out his stomach, and his heart raced wildly. Jet pilots and astronauts, and especially Blue Angels who performed tight maneuvers fighting gravitational pull, were taught to lift weights regularly and learn how to tense their abdominal muscles as if to prepare for a stomach punch. It was called “hooking.” Without it, they might lose consciousness. In essence, the news about Reba hit Sam like a lethal G-force, and he’d had no chance to “hook.”

  Through discipline and occasionally alcohol, Sam had kept thoughts of Reba banked in the recesses of his memory. Now, they all came rushing forward, like a burst dam.

  Reba . . . Reba . . . Reba . . .

  “That was a low blow, George,” he said when he could finally speak with a modicum of calmness.

  “Huh? All I said was that Reba was on the bus. I know you had a crush on her when you were kids.”

  Yep, George is manipulating me, bigtime. “A crush? I was crazy about her.”

  “Well, ya mighta told her that . . . before you skipped town like a cat with its tail on fire.”

  “That was fourteen years ago. I was headed for the Naval Academy,” he pointed out, then took several deep breaths to control his temper, before adding, “She’s married, George. Why rake up dead ashes?”

  George gasped. “Samuel H. Merrick! You are ten kinds of a fool. Reba Anderson got divorced more’n ten years ago. I don’t think she was married for six months before she discovered that Whitby boy was light in the loafers.”

  Reba isn’t married? he marveled. Thank you, God! Apparently, he hadn’t forgotten how to pray, after all.

  The most incredible feeling swept over Sam then. It took him several moments to realize that it was happiness, the kind of happiness a little kid experiences, awakening on Christmas morning, when he believes that everything is possible.

  He caught himself smiling like an idiot before he spoke into the phone again, “It appears I’ll be riding on the Santa bus, after all, George.”

  A burst of static erupted in the phone, and just before the line went dead, Sam thought he heard George murmur, “I thought you would, son. I thought you would.”

  Reba? After all these years, I’m going to see Reba again?

  I wonder if she’s changed. I wonder if she’ll think I’ve changed. Will she be happy to see me?

  Does she still care?

  Do I still care?

  Apparently, he did. Why else would he be feeling so goofy? His heart swelled and almost burst from his chest. His brain raced at shutter-speed with images of him and Reba over an eight-year period, from the time he first arrived, mid-year, to be a reluctant student in the Snowdon, Maine, public schools, while residing at the White Mountain Home for Boys. Reba had befriended the cocky ten-year-old he’d been then, somehow sensing that he’d been shaking on the inside.

  Whereas he’d been self-confident, at least on the outside, and popular, Reba had been self-conscious and shy. Always on a diet, she’d claimed to be perpetually twenty pounds overweight. She was tall . . . at least five-foot-nine; so, it never showed as far as Sam could tell. He’d always tho
ught she was just right . . . rounded in the right places. And soft.

  “Hey, Slick, come here!”

  Sam was jarred out of his reverie by Andy who was in the corridor outside the coffee shop, talking to two men carrying camera equipment emblazoned with the WBZ-TV logo. After placing a few dollars on the table, Sam walked outside.

  Andy introduced everyone all around. It turned out one of the fellows, Larry Bassinger, had been a frat brother of Andy’s when they were in Lafayette College together a few years back.

  “I heard you talking on the phone about needing to connect with The Santa Brigade in Allentown,” Andy explained.

  “Yeah,” Sam said hesitantly.

  “Well, guess what? Larry just told me, they did a feature story on those cuckoo-birds last night when they were in Philly.”

  Larry nodded. “Our phones have been ringing off the hook all day. People want to know more about them.”

  “Soooo?” Sam addressed his question to both Andy and Larry, the whole time watching out of his side vision as the other guy, Frank Butler, was setting up his microphone equipment, as if to begin an interview.

  “So, they have a helicopter, ready to take off. They’re supposed to be doing some weather shots, but what the hey!” Andy threw his hands up in the air as if he’d just produced a miracle.

  Why is everyone rambling around me today? Can’t anyone just get to the point? He folded his arms across his chest, a clear sign of impatience.

  Andy continued to beam at him. “They’re willing to help you, and in return you help them.”

  “That’s about as clear as pea soup in a ship’s galley.”

  “You give them a feature story, and they get you to the Santa Brigade in Allentown.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m thinking we should title the piece, `Blue Angel Drops Out of the Sky’,” Frank told Larry.

  “That would be good, that would be good,” Larry said. “Or how about Santa Gets a New Helper.’”

  As understanding began to dawn, the only thing Sam could say was, “Oh . . . my . . . God!”

  “Geez, Sam, now that I think about it, this is not a good idea. Really, you could get in serious trouble with the Navy, not to mention the FAA, and any number of local agencies.” Andy was frowning with concern.

  “Yeah,” Sam agreed, but all he could do was grin. Man, oh, man, did he love a challenge!

  But this was a helluva dilemma. Was he really going to parachute out of a news helicopter to join a wacky Santa group wheeling up the highways to Maine in the middle of a snow storm?

  Hmmmm.

  It would be really dangerous.

  I’ve done crazier things in my lifetime . . . lots crazier.

  I could be risking my career, just like Andy said.

  Been there, done that, what’s new?

  I might be making a fool of myself.

  Damn straight.

  Reba Anderson is there.

  He smiled to himself then.

  Santa Brigade, here I come!

  Reba Anderson was one happy camper . . . well, Santa Claus.

  Even with snowflakes the size of cotton balls drifting around her, Reba couldn’t feel anything but happy. She and her nine fellow Santas had just provided some much-needed holiday cheer to thirty-one homeless adults and children at the Good Shepherd Homeless Shelter in Allentown, Pennsylvania—their twenty-eighth entertainment program of the holiday season. They had only six more to go before returning to their homes in Maine on Christmas Eve, four days from now.

  Dressed to the gills in St. Nick attire, she stood near the fold-down steps of the souped-up Santa Brigade bus, hitching up her Santa belly. Smiling to herself, she recalled a time when she was so self-conscious she never would have donned a fattie outfit, too worried over what others might think. Although she had never been fat, she was proud of her now svelte figure—one which she’d maintained for ten long, jogging-filled years. It was a sign of her growing self-confidence and contentment, she supposed, that she no longer cringed over her appearance . . . or that of the bus which sported a bright, fire engine red paint job and a hokey Rudolph hood ornament.

  She was checking off on her clipboard each member of the outrageous, endearing, senior citizen Santa troupe as they emerged from the shelter—actually, a church annex—and made their way carefully through the cascading snow and over slick sidewalks to their mobile home-away-from-home, which was parked in the empty church parking lot.

  Reba’s heart swelled with pride as she watched the members of her group chat and laugh together about the act they’d just completed. Truly, they’d become like a family. A family of Santas.

  Maudeen Livingstone, who was known affectionately as Cyber Granny because of her fascination with computers, stuck her head out of the bus window and informed Reba, “I just got an email from a dollar store in Scranton. If we can stop there on the way to Poughkeepsie, they have a load of gifts for us, including,” she chuckled gleefully, “. . . a couple dozen more Chia pets.” The seventy-five-year-old Maudeen was a wiry, irascible grandmother who had operated Snowdon’s one and only hair salon/barbershop for many years, Clip ’n’ Curl. She had a penchant for ever-changing hair-do’s. Today her hair was fiery red and curly.

  Reba joined Maudeen in chuckling. Their beloved Cyber Granny used her computer like an industrial clearing house for donations and requests for help, matching supply with demand. At any one moment, she could tell you exactly how many fruitcakes they had on hand, or Lincoln Logs, or doll babies or whatever. The Santa Brigade relied almost totally on donations from private and business concerns. And they weren’t picky, either. Nosirree. The first time someone had donated Chia Pets, they had all groaned, figuring only idiots would want those cornball items. But it turned out they were very popular in the mostly colorless homeless shelters, which were bereft of any greenery.

  Sometimes business concerns were devious in their donations, just looking for tax write-offs for bad merchandise, like The Budget Bazaar which gave them twenty-five wreaths with hidden motion detectors that were supposed to play “Jingle Bells” when someone passed by, but instead played, “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” The only time Reba had refused a donation was when Good Times Haberdashery in Newark tried to pawn off three dozen samples of “The Real Man’s Christmas Belt.” Mistletoe hung from the belt buckles.

  “Scranton wouldn’t be too far out of our way,” Maudeen said, interrupting her preoccupation.

  “Talk to Betty about any stops you want to make. You know the approaching storm is a concern.” Betty, a retired Marine officer and current NASCAR mechanic, was their bus driver.

  “Yep,” Maudeen agreed. “We’ve gotta get back to Snowdon by Christmas Eve, guaranteed. Don’t want to miss George’s wedding. Plus, my grandkids are coming in from Boston that night.”

  Even as they talked, Betty completed a second check of the air pressure in the huge tires and was now flipping up the hood of the bus . . . not an easy feat for most women of her diminutive size. But Betty was not like most women. The feisty, no-nonsense woman, with the CB handle, “Tough Cookie,” had trucker and police connections all over the eastern seaboard to make sure their Santa troupe would get where they needed to go.

  “Should we be worried about the weather conditions? Maybe we should stay overnight here in Allentown.”

  Betty slammed the hood of the bus shut, after having checked the oil and antifreeze, then addressed Reba. “We’ll be fine . . . for now. I want us to make as good a time as possible today, though, hopefully to Poughkeepsie, do the show there, and move on northward. I don’t think the blizzard will affect us, seriously, ’til we cross the Vermont line. I’m not saying we won’t have to take it easy, but I can handle a little snow.”

  Reba nodded, more than willing to leave all the transportation worries in Betty’s capable hands. She turned to check off the last of her passengers. That’s when she noticed that Betty was staring with amazement toward the sky. It took a lot to amaze Betty.
r />   “Look! Look!” Several of the Santa Brigade members had rolled down the windows of the bus and were pointing to the sky.

  Reba joined them in gazing skyward where the thwapping sound of a helicopter was clearly audible overhead, and visible, even through the thickening shower of snowflakes. It was one of those news helicopters . . . the type that did traffic and weather reporting . . . in this case, WBZ-TV. But that wasn’t what had excited her senior Santas, or the people streaming out of the homeless shelter to gawk at the heavens. There was a man parachuting out of the helicopter . . . no, two men. The first was wearing some kind of military uniform. The other was obviously a TV cameraman who had his lens pointed at the other person and at the gathering crowd below.

  “Maudeen!” Reba yelled.

  Maudeen jumped in her window seat near the front where she’d been continuing to work with her laptop.

  “Did you arrange another publicity stunt?”

  Maudeen craned her head out the window and looked up to the sky. Even in those few seconds, snowflakes were covering her curly red head. “Nope, but I woulda, if I’d thought of it. There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” she pronounced and ducked back inside with a decided shiver.

  Reba wasn’t so sure about that. It wouldn’t be good PR for their Santa Brigade if one of these yahoos broke a neck skydiving. And, really, they didn’t have time now for another interview, although God bless the media, big and small, who had covered their trips the past few years. The exposure they gave them brought in the gifts and monetary donations that made this charitable endeavor possible.

  “Oh, for Pete’s Sake! I think I recognize that fellow in the uniform,” Betty declared with a sniff. She was staring up at the sky with a pair of binoculars . . . one of many that had been donated by a bankrupt sporting goods chain. “Isn’t it just like him to pull such a stunt?”

  “Huh?” Reba said. “Let me use those.” With the aid of the binoculars, she squinted upward at the figures who were rapidly approaching the parking lot. Suddenly, a prickling sensation tickled the back of her neck. No! It isn’t possible. He wouldn’t show up here, of all places. Not now. Not after all these years.