My Latest: A Christmas Story

 

    T’was the night before Christmas, and the mall was packed. Shoppers incandescent with fury and gall bumped and jostled as shopping season came mercifully to an end.

    No fury or gall for me, though. I was relaxed, carefree, guiltless, because my plan was executing perfectly: ignore my one assigned shopping role until the very last minute, then, with less than two hours to spare, head to the mall just prior to closing and dutifully choose the only gifts my wife, Elizabeth, would entrust in my care, her parents’.

    Gravesend Mall, as it was then, and will forever be, was a battle zone at Christmas, but I had the tactical advantage since I wasn’t operating under the same conditions as most of my hurried and harried fellow shoppers. Inertia is always on the side of the procrastinator. I’d stored up my shopping energy all season and now used it to effortlessly wend my way through banks of barely mobile seniors, gaggles of preening teenagers, and lone lumps of solitary husband out shopping for what, no doubt, they were told to go and buy.

    Gifts for Phil and Benita, who loved alcohol and books, were easy to find. As an accomplished drinker who liked to read, there was no mystery why I got this particular job, since my life skills—those life skills, at least—matched me perfectly with my in-laws’ holiday habits of being drunk and complaining that nobody knew how to write anymore.

    So this year, like every year since they’d unsuccessfully convinced their daughter to drop her college boyfriend for someone with more potential, I was on the hunt for booze for Benita and a book for Phil. All things considered, it was an easy task. Alcohol—“anything mixable and not too sweet”—for Benita, and a book—“something to do with crime, but he’ll be happy with anything as long as it’s American”—for Phil. Like all relations between sons-in-law and the people whose life choices grew into a wife, there was friction, and I wasn’t immune to the covert delights of matching alcohol to book based on the preferred poisons of authors who’d died from drink. Thus, in years when tensions were high, I (we, officially) gifted them gin and F. Scott Fitzgerald, more gin and Raymond Chandler, or vodka and Truman Capote, although that last one nearly gave away my game since everyone knew Phil was uncomfortable about Capote.

    He loved the Oscar Wilde, though, or so he told me over a delicious absinthe.

    Elizabeth disapproved of my petty little holiday pageant, but I believe she secretly enjoyed seeing me so happy at Christmas. It, and the absurd prequel of procrastination, had become holiday tradition. 

    We usually got along at Christmas, though, me and Phil, especially the last few years as the kids got older and more complicated to handle before, during, and after the holidays. In a wink they’d gone from being satisfied with a few popular tie-in toys and trinkets to demanding luxuries that would make a Tsar blush. At those moments when my face gave away my pain, Phil got to announce to me and the rest of the household that he’d been right all along, that the boys would grow into young men and decimate my bank account every Christmas with such predictable habits, habits he had cultivated in his own child. It seemed an endless cycle for that branch of the family, and the boys’ complicity, I suspected, was all designed to destroy any hopes I’d had for retirement—new iPhones, subscriptions to god knows how many video game platforms and streaming channels, enough hoodies to clothe a small country of sporty, college-bound boys. At Thanksgiving that year, Phil had quietly, and a little smugly, loaned me a few dollars to ensure another year of trust between father and sons. I was grateful for his generosity after a hard year financially, and determined that I would put a little bit of thought into his gift that year. 

    So it was that Christmas Eve, that, after chancing on a highly rated half-off Australian pinot noir for Benita, I found myself wedged into the new fiction section at Crabtree’s Books looking for “something to do with crime,” something American, for Phil, a task made somewhat harder since he’d seemingly gone through every one of the faced-out books on display.

    At a loss, I phoned Benita and read out every name on the first few shelves.

    “He's read it… read that one, too… oh, that one’s in the bathroom now… is that a women or a man author?”, and on and on until I’d reached the end of the bestseller list and Benita’s willingness to help me. Not to worry, though. I knew my way around Crabtree’s like a pro and could always reliably choose a good book. Nothing to worry over.   

    At the back corner of Crabtree’s, in the Mysteries and Thrillers section, it was just me and another man standing so silent and still, it startled me when I rounded the corner.

    “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said, smiling weakly.

    He was curiously even more relaxed than myself. Not only did he seem unconcerned about which book to get, he didn’t even seem to be shopping, just standing there poised for conversation by a little table stacked with multiple copies of the same glossy hardback and an oversized promotional poster featuring the book cover and author photo.

    Which, governed by my lifetime of luck, looked just like him.

    Great. The author wishes to sell you his book. My favorite.

    He smiled at me, and I at him, and then I looked down at the table of books, each one destined for the remainder shelves in another month or two. I looked at the table again and saw that an industrious bookseller inclined to dour Victorian tastes had festooned it like a shrine to morose Christmas memories with a sad little candle and a wreath they wouldn’t dare put out near the new fiction at the front of the store.

    I turned my back on the depressing little display and began my hunt. I’d indulged local authors, unknowns, and even a few refugees from the world of literary fame before, but it was just bad timing—and, frankly, bad form—to do this to a customer pecking for gold among the corn on Christmas Eve. Under normal circumstances, I’d have been happy to throw a needy writer some attention this time of year. This is how they got known, after all, handselling being the heart of the business, and all of that. But. Just not today, ok, pal? You’re not why I’m here. I’d like to help you out, really, but not this time.

    I could tell I wasn’t the first person to make their way to Mysteries and Thrillers that day, as he quietly stood there, peripherally idling near G through L. When I edged closer to him, however, I felt his presence ever more forcefully, as if willing me to ask him to please move so I would have to face him once more and he could triumphantly waltz in through that conversational opening and ask if I might be interested in a new kind of crime story, or whatever the marketing line was in those days.

    But I resisted the pull of this pathetic man and carried on with my business.

    As I knelt down and attempted to move by him at shin level, he asked me in a quiet voice, “Have you read my latest?”

    Sometimes, you just have to be nice—Christmas Eve, especially—so I did what I had to do given the situation and jerked myself upright, shrugged in as annoyed a manner as possible without hurting my neck, huffily grabbed off the top of the stack a fresh, crisp copy of something something Die, and said, “No.”

    I hadn’t, although his name, John L. Hampton, rang a bell.  

    “My latest,” he repeated apologetically. I turned the book over and there he was, a smaller version of his pathetically eager face staring back at me. The real thing in front of me was him alright, but maybe a little less lively. The author photo was him on a good day, obviously with some help from professional lighting, the attentions of a part-time publicist, and visions of book advances dancing in his head. The man in front of me was older, sadder, grimmer around the mouth and eyes, which were set in so far I felt like recommending to him the same concealer Elizabeth wore when we had to be social with people our age.

    I glanced at the promo poster and scanned for the few key attractors I employed when shopping for Phil—"award-winning,” a recognizable publisher, not a local author (he hated it when you got him someone local, a sure sign to him that the author was foisted on the general reading public in an act of writing industry charity), and, importantly, an endorsement from Stephen King—and decided maybe this was what I was looking for. I had a passing skill with crime fiction but had never gotten in deeply enough to know some of the also-rans like John L. Hampton.

    “Is it any good?” I asked. I knew it was a terrible, nasty thing to ask as soon as I asked it, but it was nearing 8:00 and I was never all that polite after 7:00 on a good day. “Sorry.”

    John L. Hampton grimaced. “It’s actually quite terrible,” he said, and I laughed at his temerity. “’He obviously wrote this one in memory of the good ones,’ so said one critic, and he wasn’t wrong!”

    We both laughed at that.

    I liked John L. Hampton and turned the book over to see if the cover could provide any argument for not buying his book. Unfortunately, the front cover was as generic as anything I’d seen on the shelves. The critic seemed to be on to something. In bold, slanted capitals, the generic title Last One to Die overlay a sepia, brackish, spooked woods that could be anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. A lump of dead body lay across the bottom edge as a small trickle of crimson oozed its escape to the bottom right corner. I opened the book to the first page, a prologue written in the killer’s voice. How delightfully original, I thought.

    “Looks interesting,” I lied. It looked and read like every other crime novel published in the last decade. 

    “It isn’t,” he said. “Try one of the older ones. I could still write up to a couple of years ago. I got an Edgar, so they can’t all be bad.” He was right. I turned and scanned the shelves behind me for more of his books and found the first in what looked to be a noirish trilogy featuring a hard-living former alcoholic with a proclivity for making bad sports bets and endless trips into the dark underworld of Miami. Phil liked Miami, so that was hopeful. Plus, they all had the ringing endorsement of Stephen King, a sure thing. I decided John L. Hampton deserved a wider readership, and meant to tell him so, but when I turned around to ask him if he’d mind signing copies of the books, he was gone.

    The thought that his face was familiar continued to nag at me. Maybe I had seen one of his books lying around their living room (or on the back of the toilet), so I called Benita to make sure before getting away from the mall for another year.

    “What’s his name again? John…”

    “John L. Hampton.” I said, looking down at the trilogy in my hand. “Pieces of the Heart? Last One to Die is his newest one,” I said. “Used to be big, apparently.”

    “Oh. John L. Hampton. He died a few weeks back. Good writer.”

    I looked around the bookstore, scanning the faces of shoppers and tired clerks, certain she was mixed up from her after-dinner quart of spirits. “Are you sure? He died?”

    “I’m sure of it,” she said. “We heard he was going to sign books, but then he died. I think he had a heart attack or something. Died right there in the mall.”

    I hung up the phone and looked closely at the signing table. The black wreath. The candles. The silence. I opened the book and turned to the inner sleeve at the back. “John L. Hampton was a master of suspense,” it read.

    “Was?” 

    “I died in October, just in time for them to use it in the adverts. Nice of the staff to keep a little memorial of me to boost sales, don't you think?” He was there again, standing just out of my peripheral vision. I turned to look, this time, really look, and saw the dread in John L. Hampton’s meek little smile. He said, “I see you found the older ones. Good. Those were me at my best.” Ice water ran down my back and froze me where I stood. Then the author dissolved and left me to absorb the unthinkable.

    As I sat in the driver’s seat, rapt by the experience, staring out at the lights ahead, I looked over at the bag of books in the passenger seat, forcing myself to remember every word we’d said so I could tell Elizabeth about it and she could tell me what a liar I was. Getting out of the mall parking lot on Christmas Eve was usually hellish, a necessary side effect of my procrastination, but that year I was aware of nothing else but the fact that I had spent ten minutes in conversation with a ghost. A talented one at that. Phil had better like this gift, I thought.

    “Do you think he’s read my latest?” asked John L. Hampton from the backseat.     

 © Craig Belanger 2020