Uriah was sure he saw Santa Claus working on a road crew; he was the one holding the two-sided sign that read SLOW or STOP. Uriah passed him by when the lane opened and the line of cars he was near the back of was allowed through; at first, the inconvenience of the delay annoyed him. But once he thought he saw Santa Claus, he wanted to turn around and be sure.
Turning around was no easy task. Although the road was a main artery, it was still only a two lane state route. It ran almost the length of the state and was parallel with the Mississippi River for nearly the entire distance. It ran through several small towns and wound its way up and down the edge of the state, much like the Mississippi wound its way through the continent down to the Gulf of Mexico. Uriah knew to stick with the river and eventually it would take him where he needed to go. He didn’t have a map and didn’t own one of the fancy GPS screens like people had. He traveled the way he always traveled – with a vague notion, the memory of where he had gone, and a little common sense. His father had been a traveling salesman and since Uriah’s mother deserted them, he went with his father. Uriah had no diploma to prove he was educated; but he had learned to read on diner menus, practiced on Gideon Bibles in cheap motel rooms, learned math adding up his father’s sales, and learned to write from filling out order forms. His father taught him how to drive in the middle of Nebraska.
What he couldn’t learn any other way, Uriah learned in libraries; sometimes, his father let him sit in the library reading books all day while he made sales calls, if they were in a town with a decent library. Because salesmen travel set routes in the same way the planets orbit the sun – at least that was the way Uriah’s father explained it to him, and he saw no reason to contradict it – eventually people along way stored up books for young Uriah, and saved them for him for when he and his father were back in town. Sometimes they saved toys for him, too, or a new pair of pants or shoes. Especially the women. He realized later that the waitresses and librarians and preacher’s wives all felt sorry for him and for his dad, and that some of them – some of the waitresses and nearly all of the librarians – wanted him and his dad to settle down and live with them. But Uriah didn’t feel sorry for himself. Not usually. The only time he wished he had a normal dad with a normal job was around Christmas time. They’d drive through towns all over his dad’s orbit that were decorated with lights and ornaments and fake icicles and manger scenes. The manger scenes were Uriah’s favorite, because he thought he understood how Jesus must have felt, having to stay in a barn like that. The pictures of Santa Claus were his other favorites… and the men dresses as Santa who listened to other kids’ Christmas wishes. He even sat on a Santa’s lap once; but the beard wasn’t real and so Uriah knew it wasn’t the real Santa Claus.
But Uriah was a man now and realized that Santa Claus wasn’t at all real; it was one of those stories normal parents told normal children. His dad told him, too… but only because he probably felt bad about not being normal.
It was more than ten miles before Uriah found a decent place to turn around; he didn’t like to turn around in people’s driveways and avoided U-turns on narrow roads like that one. Especially if there wasn’t much space on the edge of the road. He almost didn’t turn around; but he saw an empty parking lot up on the right. The parking lot was in front of an empty building that had once been a bait and tackle shop. As he turned around in the gravel lot, Uriah wondered briefly if the inside still smelled of fish and old men and pipe smoke, the way he remembered it when he had been very young. He wondered how the man who had ran it died, and wondered why his son didn’t keep it open. Sons follow the orbits of their fathers, like the planets around the sun. It didn’t make sense to him that the bait shop owner’s son wouldn’t be a bait shop owner. Then again, he thought, it didn’t make any sense that Santa Claus would work for an Illinois road crew when it isn’t Christmas.
