Lost At Sea Part 26

"Maybe," he says.

North Pole has been hit hard by Iraq. At the end of September, two soldiers in full-dress uniform arrived at the home of one of Joe's neighbors, Donna Thornton, to tell her that her twenty-four-year-old son, James, had recently died from cardiac arrest in Baghdad.

James had been at the middle school, a year or two ahead of Jessie.

And there have been others. Joseph Love-Fowler-who was twenty-two and in the same year as Jessie-was blown up by a roadside bomb in Balad in April. North Pole has a smallish military base, Fort Wainwright, on its borders. Fort Wainwright has so far lost twenty-six soldiers in Iraq.

Or maybe being thirteen, and being picked on, was reason enough. Everyone behaves irrationally when they reach thirteen. I suppose it is a statistical inevitability that some bullied thirteen-year-olds, somewhere, will be plotting a school shooting. (Although I don't have much sympathy for the bullying motive. There were six ringleaders, and nine others with knowledge of the plot. That makes fifteen. So they can hardly call themselves bullied outcast loners. Fifteen is more friends than I ever had.)

Joe often wonders what might have happened had the guns reached the school. This is the only reason why the plot failed: The boy who was supposed to bring the guns didn't turn up.

Apparently, Jack behaved perfectly normally over breakfast that Monday morning. He was joking around as usual, even though he believed that within a few hours he was to commit ma.s.s murder.

Joe looks around the cafeteria.

"His sister goes here," he says. "I said to him, 'Did you tell her, so she could get out when the shooting started?' And he said, 'No.' I said, 'What if your sister heard the shooting, worried about you, ran to see what you were doing, and one of the kids shot her?' And I could see from the look on his face that those thoughts had never crossed his mind. He said to me, 'We were just going to shoot the bad kids.' And I said, 'Bullets don't care who they hit or who they kill. They go through people. They tear flesh and they go through. It doesn't matter who's on the other side.' He had not thought about that. It was not in his thought process."

Then Joe mentions the ill-thought-out escape plan-how the kids were going to start new lives in Anchorage.

"To even think they were going to get out of the school without being killed by the police ..." he says.

IN THE END, Jack got off lightly: two years' probation, a five-thousand-word essay on the effects of school shootings across America, a hundred hours of community service, some anger-management therapy.

Joe says he's pleased and relieved n.o.body has thrown a brick through their window.

"I don't want people taking the law into their own hands," he says, "because I have an obligation to protect my son and the rest of my family. So if they push, I'm going to have to push back. And if that happens, it's not going to be pretty."

But he's sending his son back to school next year: "I told him, 'You have to face this. You have to face the kids on that list.'"

Joe takes his son out running each morning. Back in April, Jack could barely run half a mile. Now he's running a mile and a half.

Joe looks proud when he tells me this.

There's a school for excluded children on the edge of North Pole. The kids who-for whatever reason-don't fit into the middle school end up studying here. It's quite possible that some of the plotters will join the school next April, when their year's expulsion from the public school system is up. It seems a great place: small, bright, open-plan cla.s.srooms and lovely teachers, like Suze, who shows me around. Suze is another rare liberal in a town full of staunch Republicans. I notice that this is one of the very few buildings in town that hasn't any Christmas decorations whatsoever.

"We're a respite from Christmas, I guess," Suze explains. "Our kids are all Christma.s.sed out."

Then I ask Suze a question I've been asking everyone this week. "Do you happen to know," I ask, "where Kris Kringle is?"

BEFORE I ARRIVED IN TOWN, I kept hearing stories of an amazing North Pole resident who looks just like Santa and has changed his name by deed poll to Kris Kringle. I heard he was in permanent residence as the in-house Santa at the local Santa Claus House gift shop. But when I visited the place on Monday, I saw that his chair was empty. Since then, I've been asking everyone: Where is Kris Kringle?

Jeff Jacobson said he thought Kris Kringle had had some recent falling-out with Santa Claus House-"I think he was demanding more hot chocolate and cookies," he said-and he is now a kind of roving Santa around town, surprising children in diners and so on with cries of "Ho! Ho! Ho!"

Gaby, who runs the Lotto scratch-card and cigarette shop, said, "He comes in occasionally, so he might surprise us. He could pop in at any time."

"Does he gamble?" I asked.

"Yes," said Gaby.

James at the Pizza Hut said, "He was up working at the hot springs last time I heard."

But the people at the Chena Hot Springs Resort said they hadn't seen him.

Charlie Livingston, the taxidermist, told me he got hit by a car but he's fine now.

My hunt for Kris Kringle was proving fruitless. People kept telling me they'd just seen him, and he was a wonderful man, but I never saw him. I began to wonder if he even existed. And then I visit the school for excluded children on the edge of town.

"Do you know where Kris Kringle is?" I ask Suze, the teacher.

She looks a little awkward and shuffles uneasily on her feet.

"Have you looked him up on the Internet?" she says.

"No?" I say.

"I think he-uh-died," says Suze.

"No," I say. "That's impossible. People keep telling me they just saw him."

"I'm sorry to break it to you," Suze says, "and it might be the absence of Christmas decorations that allows me to say this, but I think Santa is dead. He pa.s.sed away this summer."

There is a silence.

"Well, the taxidermist did say he was. .h.i.t by a car," I say. "But he also said he recovered fine." I pause. "Does everyone know and they're not saying?"

"They might know and they don't want to say," Suze says, nodding.

"Like a town-wide conspiracy?" I say.

"Maybe," says Suze. She looks a little embarra.s.sed.

"I am amazed," I say. "All this week people I've become good friends with have been looking me in the eye and saying, 'I'm sure I saw him a couple of days ago.'"

"I can't believe I'm the only person to have owned up to it," says Suze. She sighs. "The one that burst the bubble. I hope they don't ride me out of town."

In the end I go to the library and find conflicting reports from the local paper. One report says Kris Kringle survived a car crash this summer and moved south. The other report says he died in the car crash. I never do find out for certain whether Kris Kringle is alive or not.

IT IS SUNDAY, my last day in North Pole. Today, finally, a new Santa will be occupying the vacant seat at Santa Claus House. He is a fantastic Santa. He looks just as Santa should. The setting is perfect: a red velvet chair, presents piled up under the tree, etc. Santa's helper Cerys the elf is here, too, in a pink elf suit, with pink circles painted on her cheeks.

I introduce myself to Cerys. My plane home is in a few hours, and so Cerys is my last chance of finding out whether Kris Kringle is alive or dead. She'd know, because she would have been his elf when he used to work here.

"Cerys," I say. "Do you know where Kris Kringle is?"