The First Christmas and The Black Rider

Monochrome expanse stretched out in every direction. Horizons were imperceptible. Sky and earth fused together in muddy gradients of gainsboro, mortar, and shady lady. Save the occasional naked tree, or green sign designated to announce the presence of West Texas highway towns long enough for them to disappear behind you, winter hung about in its solemn grey cloak. 

One defiant yellow seam ran up the belly of the fragile scene as long haul trucks and anonymous sedans slid past each other on their appropriate side. Our car was white. A four door midsize whispering through the murk toward the place where our beds and clothes were, but home was a sentiment hollowed out over the last few, tumultuous months.

My sister, Mia, was the driver. A slight figure who to a passerby might seem little more than a permanent and a suede leather jacket operating a vehicle at 63.75 miles per hour. My brother Samuel was genetically predisposed to co-pilot, so I spared both of us the one-sided debate for front seat. Besides, I liked the the view of my soon-to-be-misspent youth from the back seat of cars. I was scoops of cookie dough packed in a magenta sweater, stone washed jeans, and all orthodonture from the neck up. Me and the back seat belonged together. And Sam looked so at home--his inky hair combed tight against his head, his obsidian eyes planted in his flush cherubic cheeks--staring down the miles of well rehearsed highway from shotgun. Master of his limited control panel, the volume on the stereo was adjusted just so, and the pigtail plug for the bag phone at his feet stayed out of the way, but the heater was his slave.  

Hot breath poured from the ugly, slotted mouth until the car brimmed with morbid heat. I choked as my puny lungs saturated with stale, scorched air. I longed to be of the cold natured set as my captain and her co-pilot, but instead, my belly was swollen with hundred ten degree blood. My only respite was the laminated porthole set next to my head. I pressed my exposed skin against the cold window. My forearms  quivered against the glass. My engorged ears drank the icy sweetness. I would kiss the frigid casement, because I was a young man who wanted to kiss. Greasy smudges marked where my forehead would roll back and forth until my skin had stolen the chill. Then, I would sit back as the wind fell away from the car's aerodynamic design until my fingertip cast a ghost of heat on to the glass.

No one had said anything for miles. It would be easy to implicate the Christmas left miles behind us. This "Brenda" set up to be some ready made mother, the tension filled rooms more than one person left with the entrails of tears strewn on their face, the stink of sublimated rage thick on the phone call with my mother, but these things were for the grown-ups table. These things were for show. The road simply swallows conversation after so many miles. Music, and road noise, and the heater's throaty belch aggregate into a tonal morass that's more asphyxia than silence.  

But  over the next rise, the highway held a terrible secret.

The final act of a tragedy sealed with a fatal kiss; a black motorcycle and the steel blue front end of a Buick locked in wanton embrace. A moment paralyzed in time. A white sedan crawled to a stop. An old couple staged on their marks. A black rider face down on the highway.

The asphalt was cold and bloodless, and we were the only ones who knew, the old couple and ourselves. The man in black didn't know anything. His arms were at perfect 90-degree angles, his legs crossed at the ankles, and his head laid tenderly to side. The ominous black clad reflection bent around the contours of the window as my pitiless eight-year-old face looked down on his remains laid on the blacktop cooling board. His head was shrouded in black tint, but I knew there was nothing in there. He was a prop. This was what had been left behind.  

Sam rolled down the window and the car inhaled a gelid breath...

"Oh my God! We have a phone!"

"Go! Go Away!" the old man yelled. He was perched over the black rider on hands and knees. One arm was outstretched toward us, palm open.  The old woman wore a white sweater flocked with glittered paint and plastic beads. It's stood out against the ashen winter day like an obscenity. She shielded her face with both hands. Our car limped past.

We sat motionless, rapt with stoned silence. My sister put her foot back on the gas pedal and somewhere around 30-45 MPH, she shuddered and loosed a heavy sob. Sam reached in to comfort her. Mia waved him off, shook herself free of the moment, and never broke stride back up to the speed limit.  

When we arrived home, the house was unlit. Inside, there was no Christmas tree and the porcelain manger scene had stayed boxed up in the attic. Those were the vestiges of the old regime culled from public display by our father. We didn't turn on any lights. We placed our modest luggage on the living room floor, fell into the couch, and turned on the television. The comfort of ritual, the warm flicker danced across our content faces.

After what was collectively deemed far too long, the other car arrived with a clamor of doors and muffled voices. The back door flew open. 

"Goddamnit. Mia, who put all those smudges on the back window of your car?" Dad asked one foot inside the door. Mia shrugged. Dad huffed and placed his hanging bag on the old blue recliner. Our family was home. 

Soon our house buzzed with the sort of activity seven people pump into a four bedroom single family dwelling. The din of children freed from a four hour car ride and the murmur of some terrible accident on the road bounced off the walls until my father's stentorian voice reconvened order.

"All right, everybody gather round."

Dad collected his horde of five children around the wooden table in the kitchen. We sat anxious and uncertain as Dad and Brenda disappeared into their bedroom. They returned with an oversized pink sack as stuffed with innuendo as it was holiday bounty. Brenda strapped a vague smile across her face. Dad stuck his hand in the bag and said, "Merry Christmas guys…Oh, and thank your stepmom. I wasn’t going to do presents this year."

He plucked the first unwrapped gift from the bag. He turned it toward him, looked at it befuddled, then displayed it to his children and said, "Okay...whose is this?"

The presents were issued one by one without a modicum of ceremony. Brenda, still just a vassal to my father and not yet a mother, stood on. Already the outsider, so anxious to please, a look of shame and disgust took her face as the paperless Christmas was doled out.

I didn't care at all. My gift--the piece of plastic pulled from it's cardboard packaging that would complete me--was in my covetous hands. It was a mechanized mouse set on two feet, part of a larger collection of toys.  He had a peg stuck out from his side used to wind him up. On a full turn, he would march and clomp his grey plastic jaw open and shut. He couldn't stay upright on the carpet, so I used his box as a flat plane. Even still, the weave in the carpet would tilt the surface too far this way or that, so I used the piano bench in the living room instead.

I would twist the peg at least a half-turn past the point it wouldn't go any further. I wound it six times, and on the seventh it broke.

So I wept. I cried horrible, dime-sized tears.