Naughty Nine Tales of Christmas Crime (26 page)

Now, obviously, he ain't a trucker in your literal, Biblical sense. The man don't drive a rig and he ain't a Teamster—at least, far as I know. But he's the fella who gets the goods from point A to point B. The elves, they're the manufacturers. And the kids, they're the customers. And Santa's the man who brings 'em together. Just like a trucker.

You know, I even pulled a Santa one year. Worked a real Christmas miracle for the children of River City. Well, for a toy store in River City, really. And for myself. But it's a whopper of a Christmas tale all the same. They oughta make one of them cartoon shows about it, like the ones they show on TV every year. Fetch me over a plate of them nachos and another beer, and maybe I'll tell it to you.

Thanks.

So now let's say you and me climb in my magical time machine and go waaaaaaaaay back to that ancient year nineteen and eighty three. I had it pretty sweet in them days. My wife Bootsie, God bless her, she pulled in good money at the Lawn Devil plant. That was before they packed it all up and shipped it to Mexico, you understand. Back then, Lawn Devil brought good money into River City—and into our house. I owned my own rig, didn't work for nobody but myself, could do a job or not do a job as I pleased, more or less. Not many truckers have things that cushy. This was years before Bootsie got sick.

We were all set for our usual Christmas Eve. Bootsie's momma was gonna come over with a ham, we would give each other presents, the boys would get in a fight about who got what record album and who got what poster and who got what T-shirt and what all. Then Bootsie and her momma and me would sip on some Fuzzy Navels and sing along with Johnny Mathis and Elvis while the boys sneaked out back to go kill a six pack with their friends behind the garage.

It don't sound like much, does it? But, boy, I miss it.

I missed it this year I'm talking about, too. Because the day before Christmas I get a call from Ivor Boraborinski. He and his brother Basil, they used to run a small transport company down around Evansville. Still do, now that I think of it. They're a bit on the seedy side, but not what you'd call outright shady.

Now whenever I got a call from a Boraborinski, I knew it was gonna be something interesting, because them two boys never stuck their noses into anything that wasn't. Every job with them was a double-rush long-haul ask-us-no-questions-we'll-tell-you-no-lies kind of deal, and it always ended up being a story. You listen real good to this one, maybe I'll tell you about the time they had me drop off a whole herd of reindeer at a danged
mall
!

So anyway, there it was Christmas Eve, and Ivor calls up and says, "I got a job for you, Bass."

"Uh-huh," I say.

"You'll probably want to leave right away," he says.

"
Uh-uh
," I say. But that doesn't faze Ivor.

"You'll have to be back by ten a.m. tomorrow," he says.

I don't even bother with an "Uh-uh" this time. Remember now—"tomorrow" is Christmas Day.

"Round trip's about a thousand miles," Ivor says.

I could've whistled or groaned or asked him just how much Jack he'd put in his eggnog, but I stayed quiet.

And then he mentioned how much he'd pay.

Bootsie heard me gasp from the kitchen and hustled over, looking worried. She probably thought somebody'd died or the church had burned down or one of the boys had got himself arrested again. I gave her a don't-worry shake of my head, but my words didn't comfort her much.

"You know I don't haul drugs or guns, Ivor," I say.

"I'm not asking you to," he says.

"Well, I don't get it then," I say. "Cuz that figure you just mentioned is obb-scene. If it was a movie, Jerry Fallwell'd tell me to boycott it."

And then he said something that
really
made me think he'd gotten carried away with the Christmas spirits that day: "You ever heard of a Cabbage Patch Kid?"

Well, I hadn't. I look at Bootsie and roll my eyes and do that little finger-circle-around-the-ear crazy sign. I figure I'm talking to a loony tune.

"No, I have not," I say, getting ready to hang up before he asks me whether I believe in the Abominable Snowman.

"They're dolls," he says. "Ask your wife about 'em. She'll know. Everybody's crazy for 'em this year. Stores can't keep 'em on the shelves. You got people practically killing each other for the chance to buy one. There've been fights, riots, you name it."

"Over a doll?" I say. I still don't exactly believe him at this point, but he's starting to make some kinda sense.

"Over a doll," Ivor says. "And right now in River City, you can't buy a single one of 'em. Sold out. On Christmas Eve."

"Uh-huh," I say.

"The company that makes 'em is working around the clock to crank out more," Ivor says. "The folks at Monkeyberry Toys have a consignment on order that'll be ready tonight at midnight. Six hundred dolls. And they know they can sell every dang one of 'em—if we can get 'em back to River City on Christmas Day."

"Uh-huh," I say. "Can you hold on a minute?"

Ivor grunts at me, and I slap a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

"Bootsie," I say, "Ivor Boraborinski wants me to do a special haul for him. Like right now. About a thousand miles."

"Uh-huh," says Bootsie, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I drop it: I tell her how much they'll pay.

"You want Pepsi or Mountain Dew this trip?" she says.

"Mountain Dew," I tell her.

Ivor overhears that and knows what it means. He starts telling me where to go to get the dolls.

Now usually, Ivor'd have me pick up a load of this or that on my way out of town. In the trucking business, it don't pay to go nowhere with an empty trailer. But Ivor just tells me forget it, this is rush-rush stuff and the Monkeyberry folks couldn't get anyone else to do it and the profit margin is covered
but good
. I've just gotta grab them toys and get 'em back to River City by Christmas morning.

See? Just like Santa Claus.

So less than thirty minutes later, I'm headed east on I-70. Pennsylvania, here I come. Turns out them "kids" didn't grow in any cabbage patch. They were made in a factory in a dumpy little industrial park outside Pittsburgh. This was back when you could actually find a doll that didn't have MADE IN CHINA tattooed on its keister, you understand.

They may as well have come from the North Pole, though. Whammy! The second I hit the road, here comes the snow. It starts off all slow and pretty and I've got my Johnny Mathis on the tape deck singing "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow" and it's real cute. But darn it all if Mother Nature don't take Johnny serious. The snow just don't stop. It didn't take long to go from cute to a pain in the butt to downright dangerous. And I've got hours and
hours
to go.

That's where the Mountain Dew comes in. Load me up with a couple cases of that stuff and I could drive to the moon and back without making a pit stop. When one can wears off, I pop open another. And when I get tired of that, I start tossing Lemonheads in my mouth to give it an extra kick. A man can't live on caffeine alone, you know. He needs sugar, too.

So by the time I get to the factory, here's what I've got on my bodily odometer: fifteen cans of Dew, two jumbo boxes of Lemonheads, God only knows how many cigarettes, enough beef jerky to start my own cattle drive and about five hundred close calls with ice, snow, deer, state troopers and cars driven by drunks and pinheads. And I've got to face that all over again on the way back, all without a single wink of sleep. Which is not exactly legal, but you know how it is. A trucker's logbook's got more fairy tales per page than Mother Goose.

When I finally get to the factory, it's something like eleven forty five in the p.m. Right on schedule—on my part, anyway. But it turns out I'm the twentieth truck in line. They've got people in the factory working quadruple overtime, those dolls are breaking the sound barrier as they come flying off the assembly line and
still
they're behind schedule. The demand was just too huge. So I'm told to sit down, shut up and wait my turn.

Which I do. But not 'til after I've gotten me my first gander at them dolls. They're in boxes all pushed together by the hundred and wrapped up tight in industrial plastic. But if you get up close and squint you can see their pudgy faces back there, like row after row of chubby little mummies staring out at you through their shrouds.

"Holy Cheez Whiz," I say. "That's what all the fuss is about? Looks like somebody busted these babies in the face with a baseball bat. Any kid with one of those in her bed's gonna wake up screaming for sure."

The toy people aren't exactly amused by this, maybe because they're just as tired as me. So I shut my trap and climb into my cab and turn up my Elvis Christmas tape real loud. But I'm off my stride with the Mountain Dew, and nature takes its course.

One minute Elvis is singing about having a blue Christmas without you, the next he's telling me to run for my life cuz them Cabbage Patch Kids are the unholy spawn of Satan. I even see one peeking at me in the rear-view mirror, its beady little eyes glowing in the dark, blood trickling from its nasty puckered mouth. I try to yell for help but nothing comes out. The little monster's pulling at the handle of the door and there's something pink and pulpy caught in its sharp teeth and I hear it say "I'm hungry, Daddy" and I can't move a muscle and
knock knock knock
. Suddenly some bossy foreman's telling me to wake the heck up cuz it's my turn to load.

First thing I do, of course, is pop open another soda. Then I take a peek at my watch—and nearly give myself a Mountain Dew shower, I jump so bad. It's almost two in the zippity doo-da morning! Those unmentionable so-and-sos let me sleep for two blankety-blank hours!

I rev up my rig and whip around to the loading dock and back up at fifty five miles an hour and hop out and start tapping my foot and staring at that loading crew so hard my eyes are about to pop out of my skull. They get the message, too.

"Take it easy, fella," the foreman says to me. "We know, we know. We've got families to get home to, too."

"Yeah, but mine's five hundred miles away," I say.

"O.K., O.K.," the foreman says all irritable like, but he and his boys work fast. Twenty minutes later he's sticking a form under my face saying, "Alright, fella, sign it and haul."

I look in the trailer and don't like what I see. The thing's more than half empty.

"That's six hundred dolls?" I say.

"Hey, they're dolls—not TVs or hogs or whatever you're used to hauling." He slaps the paper he's trying to get me to sign. "Six hundred. Just like it says in the order."

"Alright," I say. "You know your business."

"Damn straight," the foreman says—and pardon my French for saying it now.

I sign and I haul.

The snow's still coming down as I pull out. There's maybe eight inches on the ground at this point, and it's starting to drift. It don't look good. But I'm in a fine mood cuz I'm finally on my second leg, so it's just one more big push and I'm home. The factory's about five miles off I-71. All I've gotta do is get on the interstate, crank up the Christmas tunes and let the Dew do the rest.

I'm about half-way to 71 on this dark little two-lane stretch through the woods when I see a big orange sign propped up in the middle of the road. "Detour," it says. There's a black arrow pointing off onto something that looks about half a step up from a deer trail. But the weather being so bad and all, I just figure it's drifting up ahead, and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation must know what they're doing, right? I turn onto the detour road.

Now this isn't one of your classic straight-as-an-arrow roads mapped out by a cartographer with a degree from a big state school. It follows a creek bed. It twists and it turns and it doubles back on itself until you don't know if you're headed east, west, north, south or straight down. I was out of sight of the main road before I'd gone thirty yards. By the time I'd gone a hundred, I was beginning to think about turning around—if I could ever find a spot to do it. Eighteen wheelers aren't exactly known for their maneuverability.

Of course, I'm none too happy about what this is gonna do to my ETA. And "none too happy" becomes "downright p.o.ed" when I see a fella in the middle of the road up ahead waving his arms. A few yards behind him there's a rusty old Buick half-on half-off the road at a cock-eyed angle. Looks like some Bud-happy yahoo couldn't handle the snow, and now it's up to old Bass to save the day . . . while ten a.m. Christmas morning gets closer and closer.

I'll admit it: There was a part of me that wanted to just keep on truckin'. But I guess all that "joy to the world" spirit of Christmas stuff was sloshing around in my head along with the Mountain Dew. I stopped.

I roll down the window and lean out and say, "What's the trouble, buddy?" To which the fella in the road has two interesting responses. One, he rolls down the stocking cap on his head so it covers his face. Turns out it's a ski mask. And two, he reaches under his coat and pulls out a revolver, which he proceeds to point in the general direction of my head as he walks over to my truck.

"No trouble here, 'buddy.' Unless you make some," he says.

I'm usually pretty good with the snappy comebacks, but this time I'll admit I wasn't up to the challenge. All I could get out of my mouth was something none too snappy like "Wha'?" or maybe "Huh?"

"Out," the fella says, waving the gun with three quick little jerks of his wrist. "Out out out."

Now I don't know about you, but my first inclination is to do what people pointing guns at me tell me to do. But just as my hand wraps around the door handle and I'm getting ready to climb down from my rig, I see lights flashing over the snow. Headlights. Someone's driving up behind us. Could be the state police. Could be some poor sucker about to get his head blowed off just cuz he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. Could be both.

I freeze.

Mr. Gun glances down the road toward the lights, then takes another step toward me.