Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

  “Uh…are you sure that’s a good idea considering what we have in the trunk?”

  “Oh please. Who the hell is going to look in the trunk? It’s fucking Christmas, for Christ’s sake!”

  Renny turned into the parking lot of the 7-11. He waited impatiently and watched the snowflakes as they danced around the windshield.

  As he watched in pure, unadulterated horror, a police car pulled into the parking lot. Renny stared straight ahead and tried to act as normal as possible. Out of his peripheral vision he noticed the cop get out of the car and walk directly towards him. At the same time, Casey came out of the 7-11, nodded at the cop, and got back into the car.

  Renny kept a passive face as the officer knocked on the glass. He rolled the window down and tried his best to smile. “Hello, officer.”

  “Merry Christmas, guys. Remember me?”

  Renny squinted. It was the same cop who arrested him last year on a misdemeanor charge of marijuana possession at his Daddy’s hoedown.

  The cop smiled. “I can tell by your face you recognize me. Staying out of trouble on this fine Christmas night?”

  “Actually, we killed Santa Claus and stuffed him in the trunk,” Casey said, his face keeping a deadpan expression as he lit his Kool cigarette. Renny imagined himself wrapping his fingers around Casey’s throat and squeezing until the veins popped.

  “Cute,” the cop said, looking towards the back of the car. “You know, that trunk can’t be sticking open like that. It’s a hazard and may distract you. What the hell you got in there anyways?”

  Renny swallowed heavily, his smile growing weaker. “Just some presents I’m taking home to my kid. I haven’t seen him in six months. I’m hoping this Christmas will give us a chance to get together.”

  The officer nodded. “I hear ya there. I got the same problem.” He pulled his pants up over his beer belly and straightened his shirt. “Well, have a Merry Christmas guys.”

  Renny nodded, hoping desperately the cop didn’t notice he was starting to sweat. “You too, officer.”

  When they pulled out of the parking lot Casey howled in laughter. “Oh my god was that fucking funny. You should have seen your face when I said that about the Santa in the trunk! That was priceless!”

  “Are you a goddamn retard!” Renny screamed. “Do you want us to go to prison?”

  “Calm down, man,” Casey said, a giggle escaping his lips. “Like he was going to believe me when I said that.”

  “That’s not the point, dumbfuck! You made him take notice of the trunk. That was stupid.”

  “You’re going to make me laugh even harder, stop. Think of it as a funny story you can tell your kids.”

  Renny turned off on a barely plowed side road. “Man, you need help. What kind of story would this be to tell a freaking kid? And then, little Jimmy, we couldn’t fit Santa in the trunk.”

  Casey chuckled. “That’s the spirit, man! See, you’re even starting to find humor in this.”

  Renny sighed. “Yeah, I am. It’s just too messed up of a situation for it not to be a little funny.” He pulled off to the side of the road. “Okay, this should be good enough. We can bury the body out here and hope they don’t find him until spring sometime.”

  They exited the car and untied the fishing wire. Santa’s eyes were open and he groaned.

  “Oh shit!” Renny hissed. “Now what?”

  “Oh no,” Casey said, backing away from the car like it was wired with explosives. “I thought you said he was dead.”

  “He looked dead to me. Didn’t he look dead to you?”

  Casey pulled a wool hat from his pocket and stuck it on his head. “We’re going to have to leave him here.”

  “Are you kidding me? No way. It’s Christmas, man!”

  “He tried to steal your blunts. Did he not?”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I can murder Santa Claus. No way, no how.” Renny stared down at the corpulent man. Santa was watching them fearfully, his eyes white in the darkness of the trunk.

  “It’s not Santa Claus,” Casey said, leaning forward. “It’s some fat bastard who broke into your apartment and tried to steal your blunts. Think of it that way, and it’s not so hard to leave him out here, is it?”

  “I’m not leaving him out here. I can’t. Especially not on Christmas night. And don’t you think I KNOW it’s not goddamn Santa Claus for real, whipdick?” He looked up into the sky and squinted. The snow was starting to fall heavily.

  “Are you forgetting you already shot the fat bastard?”

  “Uh…no, asshole, but shooting him before was shooting a prowler. Shooting him now makes it murder. Screw that.”

  “Well, we can’t take him to the hospital,” Casey said, pulling his cap down over his head tightly. “Someone will see us and then find out that you shot him. So where does that leave us?”

  “We’ll have to take him home and hope we can make him better.”

  “Oh man. I should have gone over my girlfriend’s house tonight. This night is fucked.”

  They tied the trunk closed as best they could, but it was definitely weaker as they had destroyed some string while untying it. Renny started the car and headed back into the opposite direction. The mood had darkened as both of them were a little nervous as to what they were going to do.

  “Stop here again,” Casey said as they passed the 7-11.

  “What the hell for!” Renny shouted, his patience running out.

  “I need some coffee, man. You don’t have any at home.”

  Renny tried not to scream and pulled back into the parking lot, slamming on the brakes at the front of the store. “Hurry the hell up!”

  Casey opened the car door. “Okay, okay. Jeez. Take a chill pill, man.”

  Renny watched as Casey ran into the store and rubbed his temples in a vain effort to rid himself of his massive headache. He gasped as the trunk lid shot up in his rearview mirror. In his side mirror, he watched in horror as Santa climbed out of the trunk and started to walk drunkenly towards the road.

  “Uh…uh…uh,” Renny muttered, struggling to find the proper word.

  Casey walked out of the 7-11, the cup of coffee to his lips. He froze when he saw the portly man staggering out to the road. “What the hell?” he mouthed at Renny.

  Renny opened the car door and jumped out. “Shit, shit, shit. Help me get him!”

  “Just let him go,” he said turning around and looking inside the building nervously. “Someone is going to see us.”

  “We can’t just let him go, fucknut!” Renny shouted, taking off after the old man who by now had made it to the main road where he was crossing tipsily. “I shot him! He saw our faces! He heard us talking from the trunk! If this shit gets back to the cops, I’m going right back to prison! He knows where I live, man!”

  Casey watched as his chubby partner ran through the snow-covered parking lot. He sighed, threw his coffee down onto the ground, and took off after his friend.

  Renny tackled Santa just as he reached the other side of the road. They went down in an explosion of wet snow, wrestling around madly.

  Santa managed to get his boots into the center of Renny’s chest and launched him airborne.

  Renny went squealing into the road, sliding through the snow, his mouth wide open. Casey jumped up just in time as his howling friend went sailing past and he turned to watch almost curiously.

  “Get him!” Renny shrieked, still sliding backward.

  Casey shouted out a war cry and launched himself on Santa, his face filled with macho anger. Two seconds later, he was trying to crawl away from the plump man, screaming in pain, his eyes wide as snowballs. Santa bit down ferociously onto his calf and he screamed.

  The rabid Santa pulled Casey back as he struggled to crawl away, his fingers making lines in the snow as he went backward.

  “FOR THE LOVE OF FUCKING GOD! HE’S GOING TO KILL ME, MAN, HE’S—” Casey screamed, abruptly cut off as the old man launched a fist into his face.

  R
enny got up from the road and ran full force towards the fighting men. He tripped at the curb and fell clumsily into them, shrieking as he hit.

  Santa kicked and bit savagely.

  Finally, in a move that was more luck than skill, Renny managed to slam the chubby head into the curb, knocking him back into unconsciousness.

  The squad car from earlier in the evening pulled up next to the curb. The cop rolled the window down. “Evening, fellas.”

  “Evening, officer,” Renny and Casey said in unison. They were lying on top of the unconscious Santa, big fake smiles plastered on their faces. Casey dabbed his sleeve on his bloody lip.

  “Ah, Christmas,” the cop said, staring at them with a crooked smile. “This looks like a picture right out of Currier and Ives. Always lay an assbeat into Santa on Christmas, do ya’s?”

  “It’s my girlfriend’s father,” Renny said. “He’s drunk. We were taking him home to sleep it off when he leapt from the car. We had to stop him or he would have froze to death, officer.”

  “Uh huh,” the cop said. “You know, I’m almost inclined to believe this story, as I find it hard to believe anyone would have the audacity to beat Santa’s ass on Christmas. Need any help getting him back to the car?”

  “Nah,” Renny said. “We’ll be okay. Thanks anyways.”

  “Okay,” the cop said, rolling his window back up. “Oh, and fellas…”

  “Yes, officer?” they said again simultaneously, practically holding their breath.

  “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas!”

  “Get that poor drunk bastard home before he freezes to death,” the cop said and pulled away.

  Renny watched the squad car drive leisurely down the street. “Shoot me. Shoot me now.”

  Casey got to his feet, rubbing his bleeding lip. “Let’s get this fat fuck back into the car.”

  After lots of struggling, they managed to get Santa back inside. This time they threw him into the back seat. The ride home was uneventful.

  With great effort, they dragged the old man into the house and placed him on the couch. They sat down heavily on the floor, exhaling big sighs of relief at being back in the warmth.

  Casey lay backwards all the way, sprawling himself. “I can’t believe we got our asses beat by Santa Claus.”

  Renny laughed, his sore body shaking. Seconds later, they were both in hysterics.

  “Oh man,” Renny said between giggles. “Imagine how funny we must have looked to that cop.”

  After they had rested a bit, they decided to see if they could help the old man. They managed to get the top of the Santa suit off.

  To their astonishment, the wound was gone.

  “What…the…fuck,” Renny whispered. “He was bleeding all over the floor.” He picked up the Santa suit. There was a huge hole where the shell of the shotgun had ripped through. Blood still caked the hole. “How in the hell did he heal himself?”

  “I don’t even want to think about the implications of this,” Casey said, his face turning white as he studied the Santa’s huge belly. The old man was breathing quite normally. “I only have one suggestion in a situation like this.”

  Renny turned to his friend. “What’s that?”

  “You pull one of those blunts out of your pocket and we get so high that cannabis smoke drifts out of our ass.”

  Renny smiled, pulling one of the joints from his pocket. “Oh…how high they got, pa rum-pum pum pum.”

  Casey snickered, lighting the end of the joint for his friend. Renny inhaled of the smoke deeply and passed it back to his partner.

  Ten minutes later, they were completely stoned. They sat back on the floor and studied the sleeping Santa.

  “So,” Renny said, blowing a ring of smoke into the air. “Do you think it’s really Santa Claus?”

  “Well, if it is, it’s a good thing we didn’t leave him out in the snow like that. That would have been just wrong.”

  Renny dug deep into his pocket. “I have two more, want to smoke them?”

  Casey fell back, exhausted. “Nah, save them for tomorrow.”

  When Renny awoke the next morning, Santa was no longer on the couch. There were two neatly wrapped presents in his place. He shook Casey awake and pointed at the lavishly decorated boxes.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Casey said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  Renny picked up the presents cautiously. He threw one to Casey and shook the other before putting it up to his ear for a listen.

  “You go first,” Casey said, swallowing nervously.

  Renny tore upon the box as carefully as if he were opening up a ticking bomb. He gently ripped off the top, peered inside and then closed his eyes, a wide smile on his face. He tried to hold it back, but he started to giggle. When he held the open box up to Casey’s face, he too started to laugh.

  Inside was a big lump of coal.

  Casey’s box held the same thing. What had happened last night now seemed surreal and dream-like in the morning.

  “Merry Christmas, man,” Casey said, holding his coal up at his friend.

  Renny picked his own lump out of the box and held it up. They knocked the coal together like wineglasses. “Lord knows we deserve it, man. Merry Christmas, my friend.” He put his hands in his pocket and then frowned. “Oh, that jolly, fat thieving fuck.”

  “What?” Casey asked, rubbing his coal with a big smile.

  “My last two blunts are gone.”

  Michael Bishop

  WITHIN THE WALLS OF TYRE

  AS SHE EASED her Nova into the lane permitting access to the perimeter highway, Marilyn Odau reflected that the hardest time of year for her was the Christmas season. From late November to well into January her nerves were invariably as taut as harp strings. The traffic on the expressway - lane-jumping vans and pickups, sleek sports cars, tailgating semis, and all the blurred, indistinguishable others - was no help, either. Even though she could see her hands on the wheel, trembling inside beige leather-tooled gloves, her Nova seemed hardly to be under her control; instead, it was a piece of machinery given all its impetus and direction by an invisible slot in the concrete beneath it. Her illusion of control was exactly that - an illusion.

  Looking quickly over her left shoulder, Marilyn Odau had to laugh at herself as she yanked the automobile around a bearded young man on a motorcycle. If your car’s in someone else’s control, why is it so damn hard to steer?

  Nerves; balky Yuletide nerves.

  Marilyn Odau was fifty-five; she had lived in this city— her city — ever since leaving Greenville during the first days of World War II to begin her own life and to take a job clerking at Satterwhite’s. Ten minutes ago, before reaching the perimeter highway, she had passed through the heart of the city and driven beneath the great, grey cracking backside of Satterwhite’s (which was now a temporary warehouse for an electronics firm located in a suburban industrial complex). Like the heart of the city itself, Satterwhite’s was dead—its great silver escalators, its pneumatic message tubes, its elevator bell tones, and its perfume-scented mezzanines as surely things of the past as . . . well, as Tojo, Tarawa Atoll, and a young marine named Jordan Burk. That was why, particularly at this time of year, Marilyn never glanced at the old department store as she drove beneath it on her way to Summerstone.

  For the past two years she had been the manager of the Creighton’s Corner Boutique at Summerstone Mall, the largest sell- contained shopping facility in the five-county metropolitan area, Business had been shifting steadily, for well over a decade, from downtown to suburban and even quasi-rural commercial centers. And when a position had opened up for her at the new trilevel mecca bewilderingly dubbed Summerstone, Marilyn had shifted too, moving from Creighton’s original franchise near Capitol Square to a second-level shop in an acre-square monolith sixteen miles to the city’s northwest—a building more like a starship hangar than a shopping center.

  Soon, she supposed, she ought also to shift residences. There we
re town houses closer to Summerstone, after all, with names just as ersatz-elegant as that of the Brookmist complex in which she now lived: Chateau Royale, Springhaven, Tivoli, Smoke Glade, Eden Manor, Sussex Wood. . . . There, she told herself, glancing sidelong at the Matterhorn Heights complex nestled below the highway to her left, its cheesebox-and-cardboard-shingle chalets distorted by a teepee of glaring windowpanes on a glass truck cruising abreast of her.

  Living at Matterhorn Heights would have put Marilyn fifteen minutes closer to her job, but it would have meant enduring a gaudier lapse of taste than she had opted for at Brookmist. There were degrees of artificiality, she knew, and each person found his own level. . . . Above her, a green-and-white highway sign indicated the Willowglen and Summerstone exits. Surprised as always by its sudden appearance, she wrestled the Nova into an off-ramp lane and heard behind her the inevitable blaring of horns.

  Pack it in, she told the driver on her bumper—an expression she had learned from Jane Sidney, one of her employees at the boutique. Pack it in, laddie.

  Intent on the traffic light at the end of the off-ramp, conscious too of the wetness under the arms of her pantsuit jacket, Marilyn managed to giggle at the incongruous feel of these words. In her rearview mirror she could see the angry features of a modishly longhaired young man squinting at her over the hood of a Le Mans— and it was impossible to imagine herself confronting him, outside (heir automobiles, with the imperative, “Pack it in, laddie!” Absolutely impossible. All she could do was giggle at the thought and jab nervously at her clutch and brake pedals. Morning traffic— Christmas traffic—was bearable only if you remembered that impatience was a self-punishing sin.

  At 8:50 she reached Summerstone and found a parking place near a battery of army-green trash bins. A security guard was passing in mall employees through a second-tier entrance near Montgomery-Ward’s; and when Marilyn showed him her ID card, he said almost by way of ritual shibboleth, “Have a good day, Miss Odau.” Then, with a host of people to whom she never spoke, she was on the enclosed promenade of machined wooden beams and open carpeted shops. As always, the hour could have been high noon or twelve midnight—there was no way to tell. The season was identifiable only because of the winter merchandise on display and the Christmas decorations suspended overhead or twining like tinfoil helixes through the central shaft of the mall. The smells of ammonia, confectionary goods, and perfumes commingled piquantly, even at this early hour, but Marilyn scarcely noticed.