Rudolph! (29 page)

"The stories skip over a lot," Rudolph said. "Like what happened to me." His eyes darkened slightly. "I lost some close friends."

"Prancer?"

He shook his head. "Yes, him too. There was an accident. A long time ago. The rest of the team didn't make it."

Her eyes were bright and she didn't remove her hand. "It's hard to lose someone, isn't it?"

"You never lose them," Rudolph said. "And that is what makes it hard when they aren't there any more." He dropped his head and nuzzled her cheek, catching a tear as it fell from her eye.

December 12th

"S
top! Stop! Stop!" Nancy jumped out of her chair, waving her hands
at the dancers. "I need more arms. Just because you're miserable doesn't mean you can't lift your hands above your heads. Come on, people, give me arms."

The Chorus of the Wretched had the good grace to shamble quickly back to their starting places as she clapped her hands. She counted off quickly and then mirrored their performance from the empty floor of the orchestra. She was wearing neon colors that showed up quite clearly in the dim theater. A dancing lightning bug.

Henrik's assistant—now Nancy's—stood with me at the back of the house. She wasn't trying to throw me out this time. In fact, she hadn't given any sign that she knew I was standing there. She watched the rehearsal, rapt. Her name was Kath. No "i" or "y" or "ee." Just Kath. I had been tempted to go with just "Bern" with her but thought better of it. We were actually getting along.

"It's looking pretty good," I said.

Kath started at the sound of my voice.

"Oh, it's you," she said. "Yes, she is. She's marvelous. In just a few hours, she's made them so much better."

"So much for French avant-garde," I said.

"Chaos isn't functional," Kath said, and I felt like she was quoting something Nancy said before my arrival. "No team ever won because its movement were chaotic. No cheer ever brought spirit to the field by being unfocused."

"No," I said. "Of course not. Unity is action." I raised my fist for her to bump.

"Unity wins," Kath said, Kath said, nodding her head. Oblivious to the sarcasm in my voice.

She tapped her fist with my own, and then launched into some complicated secret post-fist bump thing that involved elbows and rocket ships and maybe even a cuttlefish or something. I got lost after the second elbow, and was spared further embarrassment by one of the interns we had working in the back.

The young man peeked in from the lobby, caught sight of me, and beckoned me over. I extricated myself from Kath's grand unification fist bump and wandered over to the hand-waving young man. "What is it?" I whispered.

"There's a truck here for you," he said.

"From Ohio?" I asked.

"I suppose so," he said.

"You're not sure?"

"Well, it's not . . . the top of the truck is missing, and there's, well, a bunch of
antlers
sticking out . . ."

"It's definitely the Ohio truck then." I held out my fist for the intern to bump, and he merely stared at it. "What's your name?" I asked.

"Gary," he said.

"Okay, Gary. Just tell him he's late. I wanted the chairs off the truck yesterday, so—" I patted Gary on the shoulder and indicated that he should lead the way.

Gary was right about the top of the cab. It had been peeled off like a skin from an orange, and Donner's impressive rack poked through the hole. He stood up when he saw me so he could look out over the open top. It was easier than trying to fit his antlers through the window.

"You couldn't back it in?" I asked. The front of the truck was pressed up against the rubber stop at the edge of the dock.

"I couldn't find reverse," Donner explained. "Hey," he nodded to my left. "That kid all right?"

I looked over. Gary had fainted. "You're scaring the workers."

Cupid managed to get his antlers through the passenger window and leaned out. "That's nothing," he said. "You should have seen the State Troopers in eastern Washington."

"You're late," I said. I didn't really want to hear what had happened on the other side of the Cascades. "You were supposed to be here yesterday."

Donner jerked his head at Cupid. "Leadfoot here got us in trouble in North Dakota."

"How much trouble?"

Blitzen dropped out of the sky, swooping under the eaves of the loading area, and landed gently on the dock's concrete pad. "Don't ask," he said. He glanced down at Gary's unconscious body. "Is this guy all right?"

"Traumatic reindeer sighting," I said. "You guys are frightening the locals." I did a quick count and came up a reindeer short. "Where's Ring?"

Blitzen looked a little uncomfortable, like he had discovered bugs in his teeth. I repeated my question. Cupid disappeared back into the cab of the truck. "He, uh, he was the diversion," Blitzen explained.

"He's very good," Donner added.

"You just couldn't do this quietly, could you?" I asked.

Blitzen snorted. "How could we? You know how many chairs are in that truck? What were we supposed to do? Carry them on our backs? Do we look like pack animals?"

I held up my hands. "Okay, point taken. Tell me at least that you kept to the back roads and only drove at night."

"Sure, I'll tell you that," Blitzen agreed. "No problem."

I stared at the huge truck with its ruined cab and reindeer crew. I sighed. "I don't even want to know how you got gas for that thing."

Donner nodded sagely. "Yeah, you don't want to know."

Ring showed up about halfway through the dress rehearsal. Rudolph, Barb, and I were watching the show from the mezzanine. Ring navigated down the steep stairs and leaned over to lick my ear. I reached up and grabbed his lower lip without taking my eyes from the stage. "Hey," he squealed.

"Tell me you didn't embarrass me in North Dakota," I whispered.

He pulled free with a wet pop. "Where?"

"Does the phrase ‘I'm the diversion' ring any bells?" I asked, looking at him.

Ring glanced from me to Rudolph. "Oh, there," he said. "Nope. Didn't embarrass you. Didn't embarrass myself either. No one saw me."

"How could you be the diversion if nobody saw you?" Rudolph asked.

Ring scrambled. "Well, I mean, nobody saw
me
. They saw something, but they didn't know it was me. You know? It's ‘cause I'm fast. Real fast. Faster than lightning. That's me."

"Fast talking is more like it," Rudolph interjected.

Ring looked hurt, his ears drooping. "Nobody saw me," he repeated plaintively. "I know the rules."

It was my turn to be the big softie, and I held out a hand to Ring. "Come here," I said, and he leaned over me. I scratched the side of his head, just behind the base of his horns. "Just be careful, will you? You're Lead Deer. Don't get hurt. Okay?"

He leaned into my fingers. "Okay," he purred.

I slapped him gently on the neck. "Keep an eye on the others. Make sure they stay out of trouble."

"Okay boss." He leaped happily up the stairs, missing the top one and stumbling, nearly cracking his skull on the arm of a chair. He recovered quickly enough and vanished before I could remind him about injuries.

Rudolph tried to look stern when he noticed Barb was looking at him, a smile tugging at her lips. "I was never that goofy," he said.

"Of course not," she replied. Her smiled widened, and she gave him a very big-eyed, innocent look.

Rudolph glared at me next, daring me to disagree. I ignored him. I was too busy watching the show.

Dress rehearsal. This was our last chance.

The chairs had arrived. We were going to make it.

Rudolph might not have ever been that clumsy or goofy, but this musical certainly was. And I hoped it was goofy enough, because there is nothing more unfunny than satire that doesn't swing for the fences.

And then it was midnight. The last touch-up rehearsal had been worse than the previous practice, and I knew we had gone far enough. No one had anything left. It was time to sleep, dream of sugarplums, and hope for the best.

I repaired to my hotel, filled up the bathtub with expensive bubbly stuff, and submerged myself to the ears. Rudolph was in the other room, sprawled on the bed, watching Pay-Per-View. We were both exhausted. The show was going to open tomorrow. We hadn't had time to do a final dress rehearsal with press and guests in attendance. Everyone was going to see it for the first time tomorrow night, and it would either work or not. There was no intermediate position.

I still wasn't sure which way it would go.

The show was still darker than the inside of a kitten in a box. I could tell Rudolph wasn't pleased by the way he kept grinding his teeth. One of the crew had already come to me about missing tools, and it had been easier to promise the kid a new set than explain that the fired steel of a good wrench did a lot to calm an irradiated reindeer's stomach. And one of the reindeer dancers had twisted her ankle during the last run-through. She had assured me that she'd be all right by the first show—it wasn't anything that a lot of ice, some aspirin, and an ankle wrap couldn't fix—but it was just the sort of little accident that popped up to remind us that we didn't have much of a safety net. Random chance could still make for a lot more excitement and panic than we needed right now.

I made a shark with my hand and swam through the layers of bubbles. I had done everything I could. The seating from Ohio had arrived, and we managed to get it all bolted down. I was assured by our carpenter that the molding would all be in place by the time we got back to the theater in the morning. The company was starting to move like a unit on stage, and Bucky had gotten over his annoyance about the floppy reindeer suit. And the show was starting to elicit laughs in a few spots. It was like the last three hours before Zero Hour at the Pole. There was nothing else that could be done. All that was left was the waiting, and even after all these years, I was bad at waiting.

Rudolph poked his head into the bathroom. "There's nothing on," he said. "You want to disable the parental lock on the porn channel?"

"No," I said.

"Why not?" he asked. "It's not
that
expensive."

"How about room service?" I offered, changing the subject. "The flatware in this hotel is really nice."

"I'm not hungry," he said as he clopped into the bathroom and arranged himself on the tile floor. He leaned up against the tub, and tasted the bubbles.

I retreated to the far side of the roomy bathtub.

"You ever wonder if we're doing the right thing, Bernie?" he asked, a splotch of bubbles on his nose.

"What do you mean? We're saving Christmas. We're getting pretty good at it, don't you think?"

"Yeah, but at what point are we just making more trouble than we're fixing? I mean, when do we become part of the problem?"

"Like this is somehow all our fault?"

"Isn't it?" he asked. "Didn't all of this start because we went to purgatory after that soul?"

I frowned and made more shark movements through the bubbles. "I suppose you could see it that way," I said. "Sure, if we hadn't gone after David Anderson, then maybe Satan wouldn't have come after Santa, and so on and so on. But that's the
What If?
game, and come on, you know better than to get caught up in that."

This was the worst part of waiting. Those last hours when all you had left was time to think. Time to doubt yourself.

"You think maybe we've been trying so hard to save Christmas these last few years that maybe we've forgotten what it's all about? That we've gotten so worked up about what's wrong with it that we can't see what's right anymore."

"Like that time in Boston?" I asked. I didn't really want to bring it up, because I knew better. You don't feed the doubt in the last hours. You focus on happy thoughts, like puppies and kittens, sliding down rainbows. But the words came out of my mouth before I could stop them.

He licked the edge of the tub a few times and tapped his teeth against it. "Maybe," he said finally. "It was the moose comment, you know. That's what set me off."

"I know," I said. "He was a piece of work."

"I get it," Rudolph said. "Culpepper had lived in the city all his life. Probably had never even been to one of those publicly funded animal prisons. But it doesn't really matter. He was trying to piss me off, and I let him get to me. And it wasn't that comment, really. I remember thinking that we couldn't let this guy win. We couldn't let him smear Christmas like he wanted. Nothing else mattered."

"We could have hurt him," I said.

Rudolph kept tapping the porcelain like he was searching for a weak spot. "I know," he said finally. I waited for him to add something, and after a few moments of silence he looked up at me. "What?" he asked.