Tiny fingers, tiny feet, tiny eyeless faces.
“Anson!” Marilyn shouted hoarsely, trying to find someone to hang on to. “Anson, God damn you! God damn you!” She rushed on the gift-shop window and broke it with her fists. Then, not knowing what else to do, she withdrew her hands — with their worn oxblood nail polish — and held them bleeding above her head. A woman screamed, and the crowd fell back from her aghast.
In front of Davner’s, only three or four stores away now, Nicholas Anson was stroking the head of the live reindeer. When he saw Marilyn, he gave her a friendly boyish smile.
Chris Deal
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT
SANTA’S BEARD WAS pure as yellow snow around the cigarette perched between his lips. His bones creaked as he rang his bell up and down, his movements robotic, his nose leaking. Santa's illustrious girth was a padded costume, he really too thin these days to keep up the illusion. Under the hat and beard his head a doll's skull slathered with paper-mâché.
Shoppers left in a hurry for their cars, bags filled and their wallets empty, none of them looking him in the eyes, nor him bothering to glance at the faces. Someone dropped a coin into the pot that landed with a heavy thud. Santa coughed a 'Merry Christmas' their way. He'd get chewed out if he didn't say it, maybe even lose the location.
The mall was closing up and the stragglers stumbled out into the cold with dumb smiles dreaming of the reactions they'd get for the junk no one wanted from the. Santa spat bloody mucus to the slush-covered sidewalk and kept ringing. With the locking of the mall's doors, Santa loaded up the pot into the front seat of the beater he called his sleigh and reached into the pot to find out how much he could get tonight.
He counted up a few bills amounting to $27. There were a lot of nickels and pennies, two or three quarters. "Fucking lack of Christmas spirit is what this is," Santa said. Thumbing through the change, hoping for enough to enable him to pick up some glass and still turn in a realistic pot, he found it.
Shining like the Star of Bethlehem under the orange cast of the streetlights, the coin was bigger than a quarter and had a weight to it. Solid gold, it looked to be struck by hand. An eagle on one side, a swastika on the other. He'd heard rumors of this, all the Santas had. Every year, a few anonymous do-gooders plunked gold pieces into the pots and the Army made a killing with those examples of Christmas spirit.
Santa pulled his sleigh out into traffic, his teeth tingling at the luck of the find. If he cut down Independence, technically the dealer was on his way to the Army office. He'd even turn in most of the pot, so it'd be fine in the long run.
His dealer was a Dutch expat by the name of The Mlaz. To be funny he wore his beard in the Old Dutch style, square along the jaw, his lip and chin smooth. He liked to tell people he wore it in homage of the homeland he was cut off from. Santa once brought him a Dutchmaster as a gift, considering the man was renowned for his selection of pills and his always fresh batch of glass. The Mlaz snapped the Dutch in half and held a pistol to Santa's gut for thirty minutes before he could be talked down.
At The Mlaz's door, Santa felt like a little brat on the night before Christmas, jumping from foot to foot with the Nazi coin clutched between both hands. He thumped against the door with both hands, and after several long beats considered clawing at the door. After a few moments, The Mlaz came to the door, his lips formed into his permanent sneer over his albino-blond beard. The disgust he had for every one of his clients was evident.
“What do you want there, Santa?” he said, his accent saturated with disdain. The Mlaz never let anyone into his apartment. He did his dealing from the doorway.
“Look what I found,” Santa said, pushing the coin to The Mlaz’s chest.
“A fucking coin? I’m all out of stars.”
“That’s got to be worth a hundred dollars, easy.”
The Mlaz held the coin up in the dull light that shifted it’s way from the apartment. He tossed it into the air twice, judging the weight. “Pure gold, by the looks. I judge it to be worth around $100.”
“Nah, man,” Santa said. “It’s got to be worth five, easy.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t exactly pay a tab with it now, can I. I’ll give you a hundred worth of glass for it.”
"How about two?”
The Mlaz put the coin in his pocket and withdrew a thin blade, poking Santa in his belly. “How about I give you one and I don’t gut you? I’m being generous, Christmas spirit and all that shit.”
“Sounds good to me,” Santa said with a shaky voice. The Mlaz closed the door and came back a moment later with five bags worth of glass.
"Merry fucking Christmas,” The Mlaz said, tossing them to the ground and slamming the door shut.
The Mlaz sat on the couch and dialed a number on his cell. “Royle, I’ve got a piece you might be interested in. Solid gold, hand struck. Looks to be a Nazi coin, too.”
“I’ll be there in five.”
“Sounds good,” The Mlaz said, putting the phone on the table and going back to his bowl. He was buzzing when there was another knock on the door. The Mlaz put his eye to the peephole and saw Royle standing there, his suit immaculate. For a high dollar coin dealer, the man smoked a lot of grass.
The Mlaz opened the door and pulled forth the coin in question. “What do you think?”
Royle’s face was blank. “Very rare piece. Made from the gold teeth taken from the concentration camps.”
"Fucking assholes. How much will you give me for it?” The Mlaz opened the door and let his guard down.
Royle pulled a gun from his jacket and shot The Mlaz in the gut, the shot not as loud as The Mlaz imagined it would be. The dealer staggered back, his hand to his belly, and slumped back onto his couch.
“The fuck, man?”
“Merry Christmas,” Royle said, pocketing the coin and picking up the spent casing.
Kailleaugh Andersson
NO PRESENTS FOR CHRISTMAS
I AM AN old man now, and here I sit chained to a wheelchair in a rest home, waiting for death to come.
My great granddaughter Katie gave me this book to write in. Well, that isn't true, not really. How in the hell can a four year old child give you any sort of gift that is not a toy? No, I should say her parents gave me this book.
So with a trembling and arthritic hand I now write.
I used to love to write, and boy, could I write. I was king of them all in my younger days. I didn't write novels or fiction or anything like that – I wrote about real things, real life.
By the age of about thirty or so I was the best reporter in the Pacific North West – or so they told me all the time. They talk a lot, and you come to believe in what they say about you. In any event, Mike Cobb, (that's me) was the star reporter for The Pacific Times just after The Depression. I did okay there, but it was a little dirt hole town you had to pass through to go through the Redwood Forest and the California beaches. If you weren't careful, you could miss the place. Hell, you could miss the whole southern portion of Oregon and not miss a thing.
The place was like the doldrums, and stagnant like pond water and I never understood why movie stars like Clark Gable came to this area for their summer vacation.
That was fine with me - it gave me something more interesting to follow and write about than the normal run of the mill local interest stories. Fall, Winter and Spring I was left chasing headlines like Gladiola Festival In Full Bloom, Van Hulzen's Holstein Has Triplets!, Rademacher Grows One Hundred Pound Pumpkin or whatever.
In any event, just right before the war I decided to take my chances and try to land a job as a reporter in Portland for The Oregon Star. Well, I got it! Not much time had passed and I had become the superstar reporter I had dreamed of being and life was good.
I was very popular around Portland and people saw me and would say hey, you're Mike Cobb! Men bought me drinks in the bars on the spot, and a couple of women even dragged me back to their apartments and showed me their bedrooms.
Life
was grand and I loved my job and how the everyday people treated me.
Then something happened that would change it all.
It was something that made me stop writing and working as a reporter, and it made me, for every night since, for over fifty years, to fear the darkness of winter.
I am afraid of the one who comes during the winter twilight - and for good reason. If I were you, I'd be afraid too.
Every night in the month of December I'd lock up the windows and the doors and be sure to build a blazing fire in the hearth.
Oh, and I'd get me some sort of protection too. Because he's out there.
And he's waiting.
Maybe for you.
You think I'm mad, I'm sure, or maybe it's the combination of senile dementia and the medication they shove down my throat, you're saying to yourself.
Think what you like, but it won't save you from him.
I saw him as plain as day one dark, chill winter night.
It was just before Christmas.
I should start at the very beginning, with the events leading up to that night.
Yes, that's where I should begin.
It was winter, 1946.
It was was cold and wet. It was the worst winter I had ever seen in my thirty two years
A huge storm had hung over the North West since just after Thanksgiving and lashed the region with fierce winds and wet and sticky snow that soon piled up all over Washington and while not as bad in Oregon, we had nearly a foot and a half on the ground in Portland.
I was going about my usual routine of following various stories around Portland – automobile accidents, fires and what have you.
Late one night I was awakened by the phone ringing. I picked up the phone and as I had expected, my editor Mr. Whitted was on the other end and acting very excited and saying something about a murder in a nearby little town on the coast.
"Kid," he said, his voice thick with excitement, "no one else knows about this yet and I want you to get over there now before someone else gets the scoop."
"Okay," I said, still half asleep and still a bit drunk from earlier that night.
I got the information I needed, packed my needs in the car and away I went at over 70 miles per hour. My head was still heavy with scotch as I sped toward this little town called Garibaldi on the coastline, about fifty miles west of Portland, not far from the naval base at Astoria near the mouth of the Columbia.
As near as I could figure out from the Chief, there was a triple murder in one night in this town of only 200 people. In those days, even a maiming in a small town was front page stuff - it wasn't like it is today with a murder a minute and mass homicides commonplace. Today, it's nothing for a small town to have a murder each year, but it was different then.
A triple murder was big city mobster stuff you read about in a well-thumbed copy of the Chicago Tribune that your cousin who went away to the big city sent you.
But you see, it just didn't happen then. Murders in small towns were only something you read about in the dime store detective novels. This was really something back then and while it wasn't the story of your lifetime, it might make your decade.
Of course, television was just a bouncing baby back then, and radio, well radio was for listening to music and the The Jack Benny Show, serials like Boston Blackie or The Shadow, or to catch a ball game. It was the papers that did the news because you couldn't just flip a channel to a cable news and get all the stories of the day. It was a different game back then. If you wanted to know about the world around you, the real world, you picked up the daily newspaper and to Hell with anything else.
When I arrived, it was about 05.00 AM and as near as I could tell, there weren't any other reporters there yet. No one was out on the icy streets at that time of morning, but the town was starting to come alive as lamps came to life in the houses lighting up the windows like so many yellow eyes.
At 05.30 AM I found a little cafe open and went in for coffee and breakfast. The waitress was a girl in her early twenties with dark hair around a nice oval face. She was very pretty, but her charm did not match her appearance. Today one would say she was a real a bitch, but we didn't quite put it that way back in those days.
I tried to pump her for information about the murders, but she looked at me strangely, said she didn't know what I was talking about, and plopped my order down on the main counter with a wild clatter, my coffee nearly toppling over. Then she simply walked off. I hung around the place for a while, trying to get bits of information from the people who came in - which wasn't very fruitful.
Around about seven or so, I went to visit the local sheriff, huge man, about six foot five and easily 280 pounds or more. He was truly awesome to look at, but he wasn't the sort of man you would look in the eye or look at too long due to his granite like features. Were it not for the hue of his golden star hanging over his right breast pocket, you would have thought he was a city ruffian who would take your money. Even at around fifty years old he looked something like a common thug. Amazingly, he seemed fairly good natured and he was not only co-operative, but very hospitable as he asked me sit to down for a while, handed me a cup of coffee and then topped it off with a snifter of whiskey.
In any event, I got what I needed, wrote the piece and called back to the office to say I had the story and I was on my way back to the city.
"Hold on kid," the Chief said. "I want you to wire me the story and stay on and see if anything new comes up."
"Sure," I say, not too thrilled and I can hear him yelling at one of the mail boys as I hung up the phone and off I go to wire my copy back to the office. I was thinking what a god forsaken little shit hole the place was, hoping they'd solve the murder so I could get the hell out of there.
Besides, it was December 23rd and the next night we'd have a big Christmas Eve bash at the office and I didn't want to miss it.
The story appeared in the Christmas Eve edition the next day and the Chief called for me at the only motel in town to tell me that we got scoop. No one else would have the story until the day after Christmas and by then it would be old news.
Ah, here's the old clipping right here:
Three Die In Small Town Bloodbath
By Mike Cobb of The Oregonian
Garibaldi - Residents of the small coastal fishing town of Garibaldi awoke with a fright on the morning of the 23rd to discover that the horrific murders of three men took place under cover of night.
"It was a bloodbath down there," recalled local Sheriff Dan Cole who was the first to arrive upon the ghastly scene just before midnight. "In thirty-some years as an officer of the law, you see alot of things, but nothing ever prepares you for something like this. At first, I thought some sort of large animal had done it; but that isn't the case because their necks were cut open on the right side. Each one of them on the right side and made by a dull weapon. It's a crying shame; they were all good men with families, hardworking folks. This is a nice town, quiet like, where people can raise their children. Nobody would ever have imagined something like this could happening in our town," said Sheriff Cole.
Dead are Jonathan Sparkes, 45; Thomas Anderson, 37; and William Denver, 21; all of Garibaldi. The three Men were all local fishermen and well-liked by all in the community. All leave behind a wife and families.
Denver served with the United States Marine Corps during the recent war and received the Purple Heart for being wounded in action and the Medal of Honor for bravery beyond the call of duty. He leaves behind a young wife and a four week old infant son.
According to local authorities, the three men were performing a routine check up and minor upkeep repairs to their fishing boat docked in the Garibaldi Bay marina and upon returning from the boat sometime after 9 PM were confronted by a group of still unknown assailants. A vicious struggle ensued resulting in the triple murder.
Local resident and friend of the three men, Norman Brenner reported having come aboard the boat for a visit around 6 PM. The men began drinking
shortly afterward, and when Brenner left at around 8:30 he said everyone was inebriated. This was the last time he saw his friends.
The incident is being investigated by the Tillamook County Sheriff's Dept. and the Oregon State Police.
Well, as far as the authorities are concerned, the story ends here apart from one more murder on Christmas Eve. To this day, over fifty years later, the murders remain unsolved.
Now, I could say that the story ends here, and that I went along home on my merry way, but that's not exactly true. Not at all. So, as Paul Harvey used to say on the radio: "And now, the Rest of the Story."
For the rest of the 23rd I just bummed around town. That night I went to the local bar, had a lot to drink and made the acquaintance of a blonde bombshell. She had a beautiful face, flawless peaches and cream skin, wavy blonde hair down past her shoulders. Did I mention her figure? It was one just made for sin and begging to be touched.
Well, she knew who I was and, of course, that delighted me completely. She was an aspiring poetess and wrote not only very well, but eloquently. To make a long story short, I slept in her bedroom that night. Whatever became of her I don't know.
As I said before, I wanted to get back to Portland by Christmas Eve, but it didn't happen. I spent Christmas Eve in the bar, celebrating only with myself. Apart from the owner, I was the only one there until about nine, when a wet and muddy grizzled old man came in.
I'd seen him around the whole time I was there, staggering down the sidewalks with a bottle of cheap wine in one hand. He was clearly the town drunk – every town from coast to coast has one. Garibaldi was no different. Other than the fact that he was Hungarian or maybe Czechoslovakian there was nothing extraordinary about him and since the town drunk is just as an important part of Americana as Uncle Sam and Mom's Apple Pie. He was so unremarkable that Norman Rockwell could have painted his picture for the Saturday Evening Post and no one would have thought much of it. He was normal in the sense that anywhere you go you see men just like him and they don't appear out of place. In fact, they are as easy to ignore as anyone else you pass on the sidewalk while you go about your daily grind.
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 106
