“Sure,” Chaz said, with as much enthusiasm as he could rally.
Ray pulled open a drawer and ripped into a small bag of chips. “Are you from here?”
Chaz shook his head.
“Where’re you from?”
“I’ve moved around a lot.”
“Army brat?”
“No.”
“Where were you originally from?” Ray asked. “Where do your parents live?”
“My parents are dead.”
“I’m sorry, man. You got brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
“No wonder you move around a lot.” Ray handed Chaz a uniform. “Maybe you’ll find something to keep you here for a while.”
Chaz forced a smile but knew he wouldn’t stay here, either.
Early that evening Chaz unloaded a bag of groceries onto the kitchen counter and pulled out a case of beer, opening one can. He’d taken his first drink when he was fourteen at a neighbor’s house down the street. He drank what he could get away with in high school but that wasn’t much; his mother had been a watch-dog. She told him he was bent for self-destruction but he ignored her; he got to the point where he ignored everything she said. Once he was out of the house it was easier to party and he eventually found himself thinking about when, where, and how he’d get his next drink. He once worked with a guy who told him he drank too much and Chaz had told him to go to hell. He drank cheap beer, no hard liquor, and a few beers made him feel ten feet tall inside and helped him forget what he’d done. Something had to make him feel good about what he’d become. He looked at the stark walls and sank into the cushions on the futon. His father once said that we all have wild horses deep inside us. As a child, Chaz was unsure of what he meant, but over the years those horses had driven him to do things he never imagined.
When he was a boy in third grade Chaz sat with his class and watched a film about researchers sifting through the debris of Mount Saint Helens. When the volcano erupted in 1980, the lava actually melted away the soil. Naturalists wondered how long it would take before anything would ever grow there again. Then one day a park employee stumbled across a patch of grass, ferns, and wildflowers in the shape of an elk. “They were growing right out of a dead animal,” Chaz had told his parents. “Isn’t that gross?”
“I think it’s amazing,” his father had said. “Shows that life always makes a way.” Chaz held firm that what happened on Mount Saint Helens was eerie and disgusting, but his parents rarely ever saw the repulsive side of something: It seemed they were always looking for signs of life, and that annoyed him to no end.
Days later, Chaz found himself still talking about the flowers. “God’s in the smallest detail,” his mother had said as he helped her decorate the tree. “We see something as the end but He sees it as the beginning.”
“Beginning of what?” Chaz had asked.
“New life,” his mother had said, stretching to hang a bulb at the top of the tree. “God’s in that market, you know, but a lot of times we forget that.”
“Why do we forget?”
She wrapped a strand of gold garland around the top of the tree. “Oh, I don’t know. Blurry vision, I guess. It’s easy to lose our vision when we get bogged down in everyday stuff. We just get in a rush and without really knowing it we leave God behind.”
“Then why doesn’t He get closer?”
“We’re the ones who move,” she had said. “God never moves.” She leaned over and bent her head close to his ear. “Don’t forget that.”
“I won’t forget,” he had said.
But he did. Chaz pushed aside the memories and meaning of Christmas until there wasn’t anything left but him and he found himself dreading the season that his parents had loved. “It’s just a bunch of people pretending,” he would say. Who knows when he made the leap from innocence to disbelief, but it had happened.
Perhaps if his parents had been with him he wouldn’t have lost his way, but without them he had no compass. He convinced himself that peace on earth and joy to the world existed only in sappy songs, not in the real world. In the real world there was rape and murder, disease, and child hunger. Not even Christmas, with its promises of goodwill to all, could fix its multitude of problems.
He took a long drink. Outside the door he heard a couple with a small child maneuvering a Christmas tree through the breezeway. “Wait, wait, wait,” the woman shouted. “I can’t go that fast!”
The man bellowed a laugh and the child giggled. “What are you doing back there?” the man said.