Lost At Sea Part 23

Although this is late October, Jessie's house is extremely Christma.s.sy. Her parents, Mike and Edith (a former Miss Alaska), are great fans of Christmas.

"Did you see my Christmas b.a.l.l.s up front?" Edith asks me. "The nicest thing about living in North Pole is that you can leave your Christmas decorations up all year."

"Are there people in North Pole who don't like Christmas?" I ask.

"I don't know any," says Mike.

I glance at Jessie. She's sitting cross-legged on the floor at their feet, displaying no emotion.

Mike shows me the mounted head of a sheep he once shot. It's wearing tinsel.

"You never think that having decorations up all year round is too much Christmas?" I ask.

Edith shakes her head.

"No," she says firmly. "No. I love Christmas. It's my favorite time."

"Jessie," I say. "Will you show me your gun?"

"Sure," she says.

I tell Mr. and Mrs. Desmond that it was lovely to meet them, and I walk with Jessie down the corridor. We pa.s.s a row of paintings depicting Santa in various festive settings, in front of log fires, etc. Across the corridor is Jessie's bedroom. It is free of anything Christma.s.sy.

"Does your mother know ... ?" I begin.

"That I don't like Christmas?" says Jessie.

I nod.

"I've told her," she says. "But I don't think she believes me." She rummages around her wardrobe and pulls out her revolver.

"You're the first person to see it," she says.

She straightens her arm like in a police movie. She says she sometimes pretends to kill the kids who bullied her in middle school. "I walk up to them when no one is around and I bop them over the head and shoot them!" she says. "Ha-ha!"

Jessie says the person I should really ask about the plot is Jeff Jacobson. He teaches sixth grade at the middle school. He must have known the boys. Plus Jeff was mayor of North Pole until last week. If anyone who knows is willing to tell, it's Jeff, Jessie says.

I leave Jessie's and call Jeff Jacobson. He says I'm welcome to visit him tomorrow at the school during the lunch period.

Dusk is settling. One of the town's two giant Santa sculptures-the one outside the RV park-lights up. It's lit from below, which gives Santa's eyes a hollow, creepy look, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

TUESDAY MORNING. Apparently the kids who were plotting the shootings were Goths. Earl Dalman, the owner of the permanently Christmas-decorated Dalman's Family Restaurant, the most popular restaurant in town, tells me this. Just about everyone who lives in North Pole eats breakfast at Dalman's. It has a lovely, festive, community feel, even if the decorations are looking frayed.

There's Debbie-Twinkle-who looks like she's been up all night opening letters to Santa. There's Mary Christmas, who runs the Santa Claus House gift shop. That's her real name. It's on her birth certificate. And there's Earl Dalman, the owner of the diner. We get to talking.

"Do you know anything about that shooting plot over at the middle school?" I ask him.

"The kids were Goths," he says.

"Really?" I say.

Earl gives me a look to say, "Well, of course they were Goths. What else would they be?"

"Where I come from," I explain, "Goths aren't dangerous."

"Really?" says Earl, surprised.

"Goths don't do anything bad in the UK," I say. "They're a gentle and essentially middle-cla.s.s subculture."

"Huh!" says Earl.

"I suppose the difference is that the Goths in Britain aren't armed," I muse. "They're so death-obsessed, it's probably good to keep them away from guns."

Earl gives me a look as if to say, "There's nothing wrong with gun ownership."

Then he tells me that-as a result of the shooting plot-his daughter has pulled her kids out of the middle school. The Dalman kids are being homeschooled instead now.

"It shook everyone up," says Earl.

I have a few hours to kill before I get to go inside the middle school and meet Jeff Jacobson, and so I visit a sweet, twinkly-eyed lady called Jan Thacker, local columnist and author of the book 365 Days of Christmas: The Story of North Pole, Alaska, the Little Town That Carved Itself Out of the Alaska Wilderness and Became Known, Worldwide, as the Home of Santa Claus.

Her book begins, "So does he? Does Santa really live in North Pole? ... The police chief believes it, and who is more honest than the chief of police?"

Jan and I chat for a while, and then she takes me into her back room, which is full of guns-a glinting rack of them-and a number of stuffed wolves she's killed.

The stuffed wolves have ferocious facial expressions. They're snarling, their teeth bared, their eyes aflame with hatred, ready to pounce.

I tell Jan she must have been very brave to shoot those terrifying wolves.

"Were they pouncing like that when you shot them?" I ask.

"No," Jan says.

Then she explains: The local taxidermist, Charlie Livingston, tends to give the wolves ferocious expressions however they were behaving at the moment of their death-even if they were just wandering around all doe-eyed, looking for a pat and a play.

It's surprising to see such a twinkly-eyed old lady so heavily armed, but this is normal for North Pole. It solves the mystery of where the plotters would have got the guns. There are guns everywhere.

This is mainly because of all the bears. There are bears everywhere, and moose. I suspect this is why the town is so Republican. There are virtually no liberals. When you've got that many bears, you're not going to be liberal. You know what liberals are like with bears. We just scream. We let out a high-pitched scream and run away, our arms in the air.

It is all the more surprising, then, that Jeff Jacobson is a gentle-hearted liberal, a card-carrying Democrat. I've been told that sometimes, at night, Jeff can be seen driving around North Pole, quietly putting up decorations in underprivileged parts of town. Now it is lunchtime, and Jeff is putting up decorations in his math cla.s.sroom. He's wearing a Santa hat and a tie covered in snowmen. We talk a little about how much he misses being mayor.

I don't think Jeff gets on with the new mayor, Doug Isaacson, who's apparently a steely-eyed, shaven-headed staunch Bush Republican. Doug Isaacson's big idea is apparently to get all the shopkeepers in town to wear elf costumes as a means of generating increased tourist revenue. Jeff feels this is just window dressing, and what's on the inside is what counts, Christmas-wise.

Jeff tells me this is a good week for me to be in North Pole. Tomorrow his sixth graders will get their first-ever batch of Santa letters to answer. They'll give themselves elf names and write back on Santa's behalf.

"We live in a world of text messaging and video games," Jeff says. "Being a Santa's elf connects us with real people all around the world."