THE BOY AND THE BACKPACK
JON LAND
The boy entered the bar dragging the storm behind him. The cold wind chased him all the way inside, drawing a shudder from the few patrons closest to the door before it swung closed. The boy flipped back his hooded sweatshirt to reveal long brown floppy hair stained dark at the tips by melting snow. His faded, frayed jeans, too, were storm blackened in splotches, and his worn motorcycle boots featured a broken buckle that dragged along the floor like a Christmas bell.
Fitting, thought Ray Dunwoodie from his customary spot in a back booth between sips of house scotch, since this, after all, was Christmas Eve. Rare for Dunwoodie to look up from the BlackBerry that sat next to his glass, daring the ring of condensation to reach it. Rarer still for him to notice anyone entering or leaving the bar he frequented every night. He could tell you the man passed out at a center table beneath a perpetually flickering light bulb drank away his monthly welfare check, but that was about it.
Except for a single plain wreath hung outside the entrance, the old bar showed no signs of the season. It had been a much more central haunt when this part of the city had been home to industry and hope now lost behind buildings awash in FOR SALE signs. One of these hung not far from the wreath, its letters cracked and storm-blasted while inside four patrons who called themselves regulars sat amidst peeling paint and rotting floorboards.
The boy’s boots clacked atop these as he strode beneath the dull, dusty lighting for the bar and took a stool. His shoulders sagged from the weight of a backpack that seemed ready to pull him over at any moment. The jacket that covered his gray sweatshirt had once been black leather before much of what was black, and leather, were lost to age and too many storms like the one that had descended on the city tonight. He swept the bangs of his matted hair from his forehead and it swept right back.
“You got an ID?” Celia the bartender asked him, hefty arms crossed menacingly before her. She might have been a woman, but the baseball bat kept always within reach knew no gender. Her dingy fell hair limply past her shoulders, and she smelled of dishwasher solvent and stale beer.
“Oh.” The boy smiled. “I’m not drinking.”
And with that, he unslung a backpack, so overstuffed the seams looked to be tearing from his shoulders. It looked frightfully old and tattered; wisps of fabric sticking up in some places, thinning patches in others, and downright rips in still more. Looked as if it might burst as soon as he set it down, but it didn’t.
“This is a bar, son,” Celia noted in a far from motherly fashion. “That’s what people do here. Drink.”
“Give the kid a break, Ceil,” came a voice from the far end of a bar. It belonged to a man named Hank Waggoner, unlit cigarette dangling in his hand even though he’d quit smoking a dozen years back. “Can’t you see he’s hungry?”
Celia regarded the boy again. He looked no more than sixteen, seventeen at the most, and was practically licking his chops now. On the bar’s scratchy television, It’s a Wonderful Life was playing for the millionth time, Jimmy Stewart dancing through Bedford Falls having recovered his will to live. No one was watching.
“That true, kid?” Celia the bartender asked.
The boy looked at her with wide, puppy dog eyes. “Starved, actually.”
“Cook went home. But if you wait a bit, I’ll see what I can fix you up.”
“That be great. Got a remote?” the boy asked, following Jimmy Stewart’s prance down Main Street.
“Got a name?”
“Guess.”
“Guess?”
“Guess.”
The bartender sneered but answered anyway. “Okay. Trevor.”
The boy slapped the bar with a palm. “See, you guessed right.”
Celia laid her two flabby hands down on the counter, wondering how exactly she’d come up with that name. “Well, the remote’s been missing for a month now. Last time the channel was changed was the night before Thanksgiving.”
“Then it’s a good thing I brought you a gift,” Trevor said, leaning low enough off his stool to reach down and unzip his bulging backpack. After a few tries it finally opened with a slight tearing sound. “Here you go.”
Spoken as he sat back up with a small, neatly wrapped and bowed present he handed to Celia. She eyed it suspiciously at first, then set to stripping the paper off while never once taking her eyes off the boy until she’d finished the task.
“You kidding me?” she said, the open box revealing a universal television remote control, sleek and black.
“Batteries installed and already programmed.”
Celia was too busy flipping through the channels to ask how the boy had managed that. Something made her stop on an old nostalgia station that was playing an ancient Andy Williams Christmas special, Andy just breaking into White Christmas as fake snow with the texture of cardboard rained down upon him.
“Roget Ellis hates that dang song,” came a voice four stools down from the boy, belonging to an old black man with white hair that looked like thick cotton woven to his scalp.
“Who’s Roget Ellis?” Trevor asked.
“Him,” said Hank Waggoner from the other side of the bar. “Old Roget likes to talk about himself in the third person.”
“It’s Ro-jay,” the old man corrected. He pointed at the screen as Andy Williams cruised into the chorus. “Bing Crosby sang it for the first time Christmas Day 1941 on his NBC radio show The Kraft Music Hall. But the recording was lost forever. Know how Roget Ellis knows that? ‘Cause he was there.” Ellis was focusing on the boy now with droopy, bloodshot eyes suddenly bursting with intensity. “Part of the band. Played the saxophone and man, was Roget good. His very last gig until he shipped out to boot camp at Fort Dix. Came back from the war with this …” Here, the old man used his left hand to help raise his right, pretty much a gnarled and useless appendage with two of the fingers missing. “Land mine killed Roget’s arm and his career on May 29, 1942, the same day Crosby recorded ‘White Christmas’ with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra. Oh well,” he said, plopping his dead arm down and lifting a glass of whiskey in its place, “least Roget Ellis got his memories.”
Saying nothing, the boy dropped down from his stool and fished a second present from his still unzipped backpack. This one was flat, rectangular and thin, but equally well wrapped. He walked down to Roget Ellis and handed it to him.
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Ellis.”
The old man took it with a suspicious smile, the boy already back on his stool by the time he finished peeling off the wrapping with his one good hand to reveal an unmarked sleeve and pristine record. “What is…”
“Turns out that original recording of White Christmas wasn’t lost at all,” Trevor told him. “Just missing for a while.”
The old man used his good hand to slip an old 78-rpm recording disc from the album sleeve. His eyes misted up, holding the record in disbelief.
“Tell Roget this is what he thinks it is! Tell him that!”
Trevor grinned broadly. “I’m a sucker for a sax, sir.”
And as Roget Ellis clutched the record like it was a newborn babe, the boy ducked his hand back into his seemingly bottomless backpack. “And I’ve got something for you too, Mr. Waggoner.”
“Ain’t had nothing to mattered to me since longer than I can remember,” Waggoner said, studying the knobby fingers of his workingman hands. “I don’t give up the smoke when I do, maybe I’m dead now.” He gazed at the unlit cigarette as if it were a lost love. “Guess maybe I never should’ve quit.”
Trevor used the new remote to switch the channel again, this time in a swift motion to the Major League Baseball channel that was showing World Series highlights held forever in grainy black and white. Waggoner’s eyes widened as Trevor slid a small, equally well-wrapped box his way.
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Waggoner.”
Waggoner resisted at first, trying to place exactly when he’d told the kid his name, then yanked at the small box with feigned disinterest until its contents were revealed. “Topps Baseball Cards. Why this looks just like …” His eyes snapped outright, seeking the boy out with suspicion. “How’d you know? Who told you?”
“Told me what?”
“My baseball card collection,” he continued, opening the box as if something might jump out. “My dad and I, we collected them together. Then he died and I was so angry and bitter I tossed them all out. Still remember chasing the garbage truck down the street after I changed my mind, but I never did catch ...Oh my,” he said suddenly, flipping through the box’s pristine contents. “Mickey Mantle, Willy Mays, Stan Musial, Ted Williams!” His grateful gaze sought out Trevor anew. “They’re all here, all brand spanking new! How did you, how could you ...” Again Waggoner’s words drifted off, attention returned to his bounty.
“Whatcha got in there for me, punk?” an angry voice demanded. “Gotta be something in there for me!”
“Oh boy,” muttered Ray Dunwoodie, recalling that the nameless man who drank away his welfare check was prone to fits that had drawn Celia on more than one occasion to take baseball bat in hand.
“There is,” Trevor replied, holding a small box as his boots click-clacked toward the man.
The man’s eyes looked red and wild in the light flickering over him, his hair a thinning mess of tangles and ringlets aimed in all directions at once. Dunwoodie could almost smell the stench washing over him. Closest thing the man had to a shower was a soaking rainstorm few and far between this time of year. Funding deficits had forced off the hot water in the shelter where he lived.
“Better be, I say, better be!” he blared, rising to his full height, which looked enormous in the shadows but barely passed for average.
Trevor extended the box toward him and didn’t so much as flinch when the homeless man tore it from his grasp. He went at the wrapping like a piranha, emerging with a prepaid cell phone.
“This some kind of joke?” the homeless man shouted at the boy. “That what it is? Like I got someone to call?”
“You do?”
“Huh?”
“Your son,” Trevor told him.
The man’s face got red, his teeth starting to bare enough for Celia to remember the baseball bat. Then he simply sighed, all the air seeming to drain out of him. “Like I know where he is.”
Trevor looked unruffled, the flickering light making his features seem more liquid than solid. His eyes aimed toward the box the homeless man still held in his grubby hands. “His number’s preprogrammed. Just turn the phone on and press ‘1.’”
“But how could …
That’s as far as the homeless man got, his shoulders sagging to make him look very small and not nearly as scary. No one seemed to notice that the light over him had stopped flickering. Behind the bar, Celia took her hand off the knob of the bat, unable to similarly take her eyes off the boy. She wanted to say something, couldn’t.
The whole room, in fact, had gone dead quiet. The television was back on the old Christmas special, Andy Williams singing Silent Night now. Everyone’s eyes rotated between the various gifts Trevor had come bearing and the boy himself. Paying them little heed, Trevor zipped his backpack back up and shouldered it.
“Guess I won’t be needing that meal,” he told Celia. “But thanks all the same.”
He retraced his steps down the center of the bar. Almost to the door before he turned and took a few steps toward Ray Dunwoodie.
“Unless there’s a publishing contract in there, don’t bother, kid.”
“Thought I recognized you,” Trevor told him. “Raymond Dunwoodie. I’ve seen your books. How come you stopped writing?”
“I didn’t. Publisher stopped buying.”
“Sorry.”
“Perfect word to describe my sales, kid,” Dunwoodie said, seemingly unfazed by all he had just seen. His eyes fastened on the kid’s backpack. “Wouldn’t happen to be carrying around a great story in there, would you? Something original that I could sell for sure?”
The boy eyed the backpack slung behind him. “In this? No.”
“Well, if you find one in your travels, you know where to find me.”
“I’m headed south. Little place just like this, only with warmer weather.” Trevor pulled a scrunched-up piece of paper from the pocket of his jeans and handed it to Dunwoodie. “Give them a call. Tomorrow, maybe the day after. Ask for me.”
Dunwoodie held the paper without straightening it, as Trevor flashed his gleaming smile, straightened his shoulders and aimed himself for the door again.
“Merry Christmas, everyone.”
For a time anyway, the backpack had seemed thinner. As Trevor slid back into the storm, though, it suddenly looked as crammed and stuffed as ever.
“Merry Christmas,” five voices said back to the boy, but the night had already reclaimed him.
*
The kid wasn’t dressed for the weather, not wearing a bulky jacket and sweatshirt on the warmest Christmas Eve on record, the bartender thought as he watched the floppy-haired boy take a seat at the bar.
“You better have an ID, son.”
“Oh,” the boy said, pulling an overstuffed backpack from his shoulders, “I’m not drinking.”