Skipping Christmas (14 page)

It was a quarter to five. His daughter and her brand-new fiancé would land in an hour and fifteen minutes. The drive to the airport took twenty minutes, plus more for parking, shuttling, walking, pushing, shoving.

Luther wanted to give up and start drinking.

But he pulled the rope tight around the chimney, and Frosty started up. Luther climbed with
him, up the ladder, worked him over the gutter and onto the shingles. Luther would pull, Frosty would move a little. He was no more than forty pounds of hard plastic but soon felt much heavier. Slowly, they made their way up, side by side, Luther on all fours, Frosty inching along on his back.

Just a hint of darkness, but no real relief from the skies. Once the little team reached the crown, Luther would be exposed. He’d be forced to stand while he grappled with his snowman and attached him to the front of the chimney, and once in place, illuminated with the two-hundred-watt, old Frosty would join his forty-one companions and all of Hemlock would know that Luther had caved. So he paused for a moment, just below the summit, and tried to tell himself that he didn’t care what his neighbors thought or said. He clutched the rope that held Frosty, rested on his back and looked at the clouds above him, and realized he was sweating and freezing. They would laugh, and snicker, and tell Luther’s skipping Christmas story for years to come, and he’d be the butt of the jokes, but what did it really matter?

Blair would be happy. Enrique would see a real American Christmas. Nora would hopefully be placated.

Then he thought of the
Island Princess
casting off tomorrow from Miami, minus two passengers, headed for the beaches and the islands Luther had been lusting for.

He felt like throwing up.

Walt Scheel had been in the kitchen, where Bev was finishing a pie, and, out of habit now, he walked to his front window to observe the Krank house. Nothing, at first, then he froze. Peeking over the roof, next to the chimney, was Luther, then slowly Walt saw Frosty’s black hat, then his face. “Bev!” he yelled.

Luther dragged himself up, looked around quickly as if he were a burglar, braced himself on the chimney, then began tugging on Frosty.

“You must be kidding,” Bev said, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Walt was laughing too hard to say anything. He grabbed the phone to call Frohmeyer and Becker.

When Frosty was in full view, Luther carefully swung him around to the front of the chimney, to the spot where he wanted him to stand. His plan was to somehow hold him there for a second, while he wrapped a two-inch-wide canvas band around his rather large midsection and
secured it firmly around the chimney. Just like last year. It had worked fine then.

Vic Frohmeyer ran to his basement, where his children were watching a Christmas movie. “Mr. Krank’s putting up his Frosty. You guys go watch, but stay on the sidewalk.” The basement emptied.

There was a patch of ice on the front side of the roof, just inches from the chimney and virtually invisible to Luther. With Frosty in place but not attached, and while Luther was struggling to remove the nylon rope and pull tight the electrical cord and secure the canvas band around the chimney, and just as he was to make perhaps the most dangerous move of the entire operation, he heard voices below. And when he turned to see who was watching he inadvertently stepped on the patch of ice just below the crown, and everything fell at once.

Frosty tipped over and was gone, careening down the front of the roof with nothing to hold him back—no ropes, cords, bands, nothing. Luther was right behind him, but, fortunately, Luther had managed to entangle himself with everything. Sliding headfirst down the steep roof, and yelling loud enough for Walt and Bev to hear
indoors, Luther sped like an avalanche toward certain death.

Later, he would recall, to himself of course, that he clearly remembered the fall. Evidently, there was more ice on the front of the roof than on the rear, and once he found it he felt like a hockey puck. He well remembered flying off the roof, headfirst, with the concrete driveway awaiting him. And he remembered hearing but not seeing Frosty crash somewhere nearby. Then the sharp pain as his fall was stopped—pain around the ankles as the rope and extension cord abruptly ran out of slack, jerking poor Luther like a bullwhip, but no doubt saving his life.

Watching Luther shoot down the roof on his stomach, seemingly in pursuit of his bouncing Frosty, was more than Walt Scheel could stand. He ached with laughter until he bent at the waist. Bev watched in horror.

“Shut up, Walt!” she yelled, then, “Do something!” as Luther was hanging and spinning well above the concrete, his feet not far from the gutter.

Luther swung and spun helplessly above his driveway. After a few turns the cord and rope were tightly braided together, and the spinning stopped.

He felt sick and closed his eyes for a second. How do you vomit when you’re upside down?

Walt punched 911. He reported that a man had been injured and might even be dying on Hemlock, so send the rescue people immediately. Then he ran out of his house and across the street where the Frohmeyer children were gathering under Luther. Vic Frohmeyer was running from two houses down, and the entire Becker clan from next door was spilling out of their house.

“Poor Frosty,” Luther heard one of the children say.

Poor Frosty, my ass, he wanted to say.

The nylon rope was cutting into the flesh around his ankles. He was afraid to move because the rope seemed to give just a little. He was still eight feet above the ground, and a fall would be disastrous. Inverted, Luther tried to breathe and collect his wits. He heard Frohmeyer’s big mouth. Would somebody please shoot me?

“Luther, you okay?” asked Frohmeyer.

“Swell, Vic, thanks, and you?” Luther began rotating again, slightly, turning very slowly in the wind. Soon, he pivoted back toward the street, and came face-to-face with his neighbors, the last people he wanted to see.

“Get a ladder,” someone said.

“Is that an electrical cord around his feet?” asked someone else.

“Where is the rope attached?” asked another. All the voices were familiar, but Luther couldn’t distinguish them.

“I called nine-one-one,” he heard Walt Scheel say.

“Thanks, Walt,” Luther said loudly, in the direction of the crowd. But he was revolving back toward the house.

“I think Frosty’s dead,” one teenager mumbled to another.

Hanging there, waiting for death, waiting for the rope to slip then give completely and send him crashing down, Luther hated Christmas with a renewed passion. Look what Christmas was doing to him.

All because of Christmas.

And he hated his neighbors too, all of them, young and old. They were gathering in his driveway by the dozens now, he could hear them coming, and as he rotated slowly he could glimpse them running down the street to see this sight.

The cord and the rope popped somewhere above him, then gave, and Luther fell another six
inches before he was jerked to another stop. The crowd gasped; no doubt, some of them wanted to cheer.

Frohmeyer was barking orders as if he handled these situations every day. Two ladders arrived and one was placed on each side of Luther. Ned Becker yelled from the back patio that he’d found what was holding the electrical cord and the nylon rope, and, in his very experienced opinion, it wouldn’t hold much longer.

“Did you plug in the extension cord?” Frohmeyer asked.

“No,” answered Luther.

“We’re gonna get you down, okay?”

“Yes, please.”

Frohmeyer was climbing one ladder, Ned Becker the other. Luther was aware that Swade Kerr was down there, as were Ralph Brixley and John Galdy, and some of the older boys on the street.

My life is in their hands, Luther said to himself, and closed his eyes. He weighed one seventy-four, down eleven for the cruise, and he was quite concerned with how, exactly, they planned to untangle him, then lower him to the ground. His rescuers were middle-aged men who, if they
broke a sweat, did so on the golf course. Certainly not power lifting. Swade Kerr was a frail vegetarian who could barely pick up his newspaper, and right then he was under Luther hoping to help lower him to the ground.

“What’s the plan here, Vic?” Luther asked. It was difficult to talk with his feet straight above him. Gravity was pulling all the blood to his head, and it was pounding.

Vic hesitated. They really didn’t have a plan.

What Luther couldn’t see was that a group of men was standing directly under him, to break any fall.

What Luther could hear, though, were two things. First, someone said, “There’s Nora!”

Then he heard sirens.

      Eighteen      

The crowd parted to allow the ambulance through. It stopped ten feet from the ladders, from the man hanging by his feet and his would-be rescuers. Two medics and a fireman jumped out, removed the ladders, shooed back Frohmeyer and his cohorts, then one of them drove the ambulance carefully under Mr. Krank.

“Luther, what are you doing up there?” Nora yelled as she rushed through the crowd.

“What does it look like?” he yelled back, and his head pounded harder.

“Are you okay?”

“Wonderful.”

The medics and the fireman crawled up on the hood of the ambulance, quickly lifted Luther a few inches, unraveled the cord and the rope, then eased him down. A few folks applauded, but most seemed indifferent.

The medics checked his vitals, then lowered him to the ground and carried him to the back of the ambulance, where the doors were open. Luther’s feet were numb and he couldn’t stand. He was shivering, so a medic draped two orange blankets over him. As he sat there in the back of the ambulance, looking toward the street, trying to ignore the gawking mob that was no doubt reveling in his humiliation, Luther could only feel relief. His headfirst slide down the roof had been brief but horrifying. He was lucky to be conscious right now.

Let them stare. Let them gawk. He ached too much to care.

Nora was there to inspect him. She recognized the fireman Kistler and the medic Kendall as the two fine young men who’d stopped by a couple of weeks ago selling fruitcakes for their holiday fund-raiser. She thanked them for rescuing her husband.

“You wanna go to the hospital?” asked Kendall.

“Just a precaution,” said Kistler.

“No thanks,” Luther said, his teeth chattering. “Nothing’s broken.” At that moment, though, everything felt broken.

A police car arrived in a rush and parked in the street, of course with its lights still flashing. Treen and Salino jumped out and strutted through the crowd to observe things.

Frohmeyer, Becker, Kerr, Scheel, Brixley, Kropp, Galdy, Bellington—they all eased in around Luther and Nora. Spike was in the middle of them too. As Luther sat there, nursing his wounds, answering banal questions from the boys in uniform, practically all of Hemlock squeezed in for a better view.

When Salino got the gist of the story, he said, rather loudly, “Frosty? I thought you guys weren’t doing Christmas this year, Mr. Krank. First you borrow a tree. Now this.”

“What’s going on, Luther?” Frohmeyer called out. It was a public question. Its answer was for everyone.

Luther looked at Nora, and realized she
wasn’t about to say a word. The explanations belonged to him.

“Blair’s coming home, for Christmas,” he blurted, rubbing his left ankle.

“Blair’s coming home,” Frohmeyer repeated loudly, and the news rippled through the crowd. Regardless of how they felt about Luther at the moment, the neighbors adored Blair. They’d watched her grow up, sent her off to college, and waited for her to come back each summer. She’d babysat for most of the younger kids on Hemlock. As an only child, Blair had treated the other children like family. She was everyone’s big sister.

“And she’s bringing her fiancé,” Luther added, and this too swept through the onlookers.

“Who’s Blair?” asked Salino, as if he were a homicide detective digging for clues.

“She’s my daughter,” Luther explained to the uninformed. “She left about a month ago for Peru, with the Peace Corps, not going to be back for a year, or so we thought. She called around eleven today. She was in Miami, coming home to surprise us for Christmas, and she’s bringing a fiancé, some doctor she just met down there.” Nora moved closer and was now holding his elbow.

“And she expects to see a Christmas tree?” Frohmeyer said.

“Yes.”

“And a Frosty?”

“Of course.”

“And what about the annual Krank Christmas Eve party?”

“That too.”

The crowd inched closer as Frohmeyer analyzed things. “What time does she get here?” he asked.

“Plane lands at six.”

“Six!”

People looked at their watches. Luther rubbed the other ankle. His feet were tingling now, a good sign. Blood was flowing down there again.

Vic Frohmeyer took a step back and looked into the faces of his neighbors. He cleared his throat, raised his chin, and began, “Okay, folks, here’s the game plan. We’re about to have a party here at the Kranks’, a Christmas homecoming for Blair. Those of you who can, drop what you’re doing and pitch in. Nora, do you have a turkey?”

“No,” she said sheepishly. “Smoked trout.”

“Smoked trout?”

“That’s all I could find.”

Several of the women whispered, “Smoked trout?”

“Who has a turkey?” Frohmeyer asked.

“We have two,” said Jude Becker. “Both in the oven.”

“Great,” said Frohmeyer. “Cliff, you take a team down to Brixley’s and get his Frosty. Get some lights too, we’ll string ’em along Luther’s boxwoods here. Everybody go home, change clothes, grab whatever extra food you can find, and meet back here in a half hour.”

He looked at Salino and Treen and said, “You guys head to the airport.”

“For what?” asked Salino.

“Blair needs a ride home.”

“I’m not sure if we can.”

“Shall I call the Chief?”

Treen and Salino headed for their car. The neighbors began to scatter, now that they had their instructions from Frohmeyer. Luther and Nora watched them disperse up and down Hemlock, all moving quickly, all with a purpose.