The Great Storm of ’11, A Fat Guy in A Red Suit, A Bunch a’Frickin’ Reindeer and the Day Fast Eddie McKnight finally broke the sound Barrier-
A Fractured Santa Fantasy
By Pete “The Elfman” D’Alessio
Note: To all the readers of Chris’ web site: No shit, this is a Christmas tale. Why? Because some of the best times I can recall are being with Chris and Mary and all their little kids on Christmas Eve many years ago before I started looking like Santa myself. It cracks me up just thinking about all the crazy stuff Doc (Chris) and all us young idiots from the radio station got into. Most of the jokes in this tale are “recycled” into a vague recollection of some of the stranger events that always happened to the gang of strange friends of ours from Montclair at the Yule Season.
Hey! ACLU! It may not be your Holiday, but it sure as hell is mine, so MERRY CHRISTMAS, You Old Humbugs! Whoopee!
For Tom MacGlaughlin, the best cop and finest biker I’ve ever known.
It actually started a day or two after Christmas last year. Little Lizzy Henderschot was riding the shiny new bike she’d gotten from Santa for Christmas when she pulled up beside mounted Officer Smitty for a red light stop. “Nice bike. I’ll bet Santa brought you that bike for Christmas,” he said to the child.
“Yes!” replied the young girl, pleased to be noticed.
Officer Smitty climbed off his horse and casually walked around the bike and the beaming youngster. When finishing his inspection, he pulled out his ticket book and gave the shocked kid a ten dollar citation for a safety violation. “Better tell old Santa next time, a reflector light belongs on the rear bumper. Some fool will slam into your rear end and send you over the handlebars.” The distraught child fled the scene of the crime with tears in her eyes and flipping the Officer the finger.
Standing on the corner watching the whole thing was a beer-bellied old derelict that had drifted into the small town a couple of days before Christmas and earned a few bucks, a hot meal, and a warm place to sleep in exchange for playing Santa for the Reverend Goodbanger’s daycare kids. “Nice horse,” he said to Smitty as he was remounting. “I’ll bet Santa brought you that horse for Christmas!”
“Why yes, he did,” replied the Officer with a degrading snort of laughter.
The old guy looked up at the cop and smiled. “Better tell old Santa next time, the dick belongs on the bottom of the horse, not the top.”
The Canadian/ US border is the longest international border in the Americas. Along this strip, at the uppermost line of New York State and all along the Trout river region, there are pinpoints of small towns like Chateauguay, Cannon Corners, Mooers… all diminutive, rustic communities which have been there back in the woods for a couple of centuries, distinguished and thriving and proud of it. Not appearing on most maps in the last hundred years, however, and claimed by neither the Canadians nor US map makers, stands… well, actually “leans” would be more correct… leans Podunksville. A town appropriately christened in the 1750s, a name single handedly rising up to inform the misplaced traveler that the middle of nowhere had been reached!
Podunksville was a meaningless little assemblage of shacks, trailers, and modest homes lost in the forest with a collective population of 187 people, twelve of which were the girls of Mrs. Quims’ Christmas Cathouse Bar & Grill—and, as the name indicates, everyday there was Christmas—everybody got to come down a chimney in one way or another. Depending on who was passing through town, it constituted a good portion of Podunksville’s economy. Its competition across the street, The Moneysunk Inn—which was actually “an inn”—did an okay business, but as the Canadian truckers heading for New York City said, “While the food was much better at the Moneysunk, Mrs. Quims’ had the best desserts in New York State!” The rest of the economy comprised of two gas stations, Reverend Goodbanger’s Zen Baptist Non-Denominational church/medical & daycare center, a movie theatre still not set up for sound, the old pool hall (it was more than a century old), the “new” laundromat (it was less than a century old), a general store with the Town Hall/Courthouse and Mayor’s Office in the back, and a brick building with two cells that served as a Police Department, which did quite well passing out tickets on the two major highways that carefully avoided Podunksville, but fell for two and a half miles in its jurisdiction. In front of the Town Hall/Courthouse and Mayor’s Office, the road bowed into a circle surrounding an island where stood a flag pole—but ever since the population dipped below two hundred, they only raised the American flag on the 4th of July and holidays.
Smitty whacked the old derelict and marched him by the collar straight to the Courthouse. The Judge, who was also the Mayor, the Lawyer (both for the prosecution and the defense), and the Proprietor of the store (folks in Podunksville, while they closed the bars and had a polling booth as tradition dictated on election day, did not in point of fact vote)… actually, the Mayor/Judge/Clerk, whose family had occupied those positions since Washington was a boy, was still in the Christmas spirit, and would have let the old guy off (civic appreciation being shown for the great job Clausing the old chap had done for Goodbanger and the handful of children in the town). But the old guy began his defense by referring to Smitty as “the ghost of unemployment future here!” and stating that the last time Smitty had been seen reporting to his superior was when he had testified against him at the embezzlement trial. Well, the Judge was Smitty’s superior, and he wasn’t too crazy about the old guy’s choice of words. So Santa got ninety days in lockup for disturbing the peace, and another ninety days of community service for accusing the Judge of being a crook. The judge also suspended Lizzy’s bicycle citation.
All in all, it worked out well. The old fellow, who gave his name to the Court as “Chris, nothin’ else, jus’ Chris,” wintered out the cold weather in a nice warm jail cell getting three squares a day on a failing economy. Podunksville, like the rest of the country, was square in hard times—but the law was the law. Even though there had been talk of dissolving the town and melting it into other communities, most of the natives—which, actually, was everybody—clung to the hope that, despite the regulations imposed on their small businesses, the falloff in travelers at Mrs. Quims and the Moneysunk, and all the other problems being caused by Washington’s manufactured recession, the town would somehow hang on. In those first ninety days, old Chris just sat, ate, slept, and talked. Not to Smitty (who treated him like dirt), but the PVPD had two other members to the club: Big Mac, the town’s remaining motorcycle cop, and Eddie McKnight, who had been the town’s other motorcycle cop until the day he redefined what free flight meant in pursuit of the Mayor’s kid. After they took the bandages off, he had morphed into the newly created position of Police Chief. One old man sitting in a cell for three months would hurt the town budget, but again, the law was the law, and Eddie McKnight and his troop of two would uphold it as they passed out speeding tickets and hoped their paychecks would clear. The problem with old Chris, though, was that in a town comprised of two gas stations, one General Store/Courthouse/Mayor’s Office, Reverend Goodbanger’s makeshift church, and Mrs. Quims’ cathouse… where were you going to put an old guy for three month’s of community service?
Both Mac and Eddie were old bikers, and it was well known that Podunksville was biker friendly to anyone on two wheels, as long as they stayed on the right side of the law. Ever since someone had figured out that you could put an internal combustion engine on two wheels, that had been the tradition. In short order, after Chris stated that “good coffee should be indistinguishable from fifty-weight motor oil” (a pure give-away as a bike mechanic) and they realized that the old guy knew his way around a Harley (having been at the very least a mechanic at one time in his life), they solved the problem of what to get the old boy to accomplish for community service. The best they had previously come up with was sweeping out Mrs. Q’s, but they had feared that could have been fatal for the old fellow, what with some of the girls being kind of wild and awfully friendly.
Behind the General Store/Courthouse/Mayor’s Office was a shed that housed the bones of an old Moto Guzzi 1100 cc Police Special from 1977, six or seven shells of old Harley Police bikes including an old trike three-wheeled service bike (all that junk went back into the Podunksville PD of the 30s, 40s, and 50s), a miscellaneous bike or two, and an old Indian flathead that had died and went to motorcycle heaven decades ago (but Mac and Eddie thought it was so pretty they kept polishing the bumpers and tank). It was a good-sized shed (which had probably been a barn before the turn of the last century), and it was loaded with all kinds of diverse old parts and broken bikes. If Chris could do an oil change or two, maybe adjust a bulb or clean up some brake pads, they’d be ahead of the game. Since the bike budget was drying up, Ed and Mac had been doing the work on the Kawasaki, but slapping parts on a rice burner wasn’t like working on American steel! Oh, the Kawie was alright, but they found it just so depressing to think Podunksville’s very last cop motorcycle was un-American. Not having to change its oil for even a month or two would be a blessing to two old bikers.
It had been a Departmental tradition to lay service bikes to rest in the shed. The Force had never had a cop-car. In the “old days” ne’er-do-wells (what few there were, usually lumberjacks, truckers, or high school boys who got caught sneaking out on a “bed and breakfast” tab at Mrs. Quims’) had been taken to the slammer standing on the platform of the trike and handcuffed to the safety rail. After the trike died, crooks got walked to the pokey—everything was in walking distance in a town this small. Podunksville cops never yelled for a criminal to “Freeze!” They shouted, “If you run, you’ll only go to jail tired!” And that was a truism. They were so far back in the woods, even the damned squirrels got lost!
The young ladies at Mrs. Q’s were always grateful to the cops who snapped up a “skipper” and forced them to pay one of the lasses for her work. They’d be invited up for “coffee and doughnuts and other things” with these ladies. The Department record for a one-“skipper” invite was seven doughnuts… but then again, it was on a Christmas Eve at the end of a very good holiday season, and the cop had been a high school football player and was still in good shape.
The bikes, besides being great on the one and only street in town, gave the PVPD easier access to the cash bonanza that the two and a half miles of highways offered, literally jumping out of bushes to apprehend speeders. All across the State of New York, the speed limit was 55 to 65 MPH. As you crossed into Podunksville, it dipped to 20 MPH, with a bike cop waiting behind the sign. Even if a driver saw the signs, the odds of decelerating successfully to 20 MPH were nil or next to it, and the bang was $100 or more. And according to New York State law, this kind of literal highway robbery was perfectly legal! It had kept the town afloat and, over the long haul, kept the Force in motorcycles.
But times they were a’ changing, and had been for a while. It was getting too expensive to get new bikes. Mac’s motorcycle now was, to his unending shame, a second-hand Kawasaki Police bike that was bought from the Rouses Point Police Department and was well past its prime. Smitty’s horse (which was owned by the Mayor and rented by the town) was the result of dropping the Department’s last classy bike, an old ’41 Indian Four cop bike, which he had lost in pursuit of an old lady in a Jaguar doing upward of 120 MPH last November. She rammed on the brakes to a dead stop in front of Hecht’s Hess gas at the edge of town, blasted out of the car, and broke down the door to the lady’s room to get in. The sudden stop scared the hell out of Smitty, who bailed off the back and watched the town’s last working ’41 Indian go airborne over the Jag and disappear into the woods, finding the soft loving boughs of a large conifer to explode against.
The Kawie had been down, so Smitty had borrowed Eddie’s Police Chief’s bike for the night without telling him, for fear Ed would make him walk a beat all night. Smitty wouldn’t have done it but for the fact that he was an idiot. McKnight’s ’41 Indian had achieved legendary status in those there parts. Whole Police Departments took day trips just to walk around it as it sat on the curb outside the PVPD. Motorcycle gangs would ride up Main Street just for the honor of being pulled over by the Granddame of Motorcycles. The old girl brought badly needed money into town just by being. When Mac had reported to Eddie what had happened, rumor said both Eddie and Mac had walked off into the woods where it had gone and the sounds of wailing and the gnashing of teeth could be heard from Hecht’s to the cathouse at the other end of town. A funeral was held and the charred remains buried as the Hell’s Angels, the Blue Knights, and countless other worshippers of the two-wheeled rocket rode dejectedly up Main Street past Hecht’s to the cathouse in solemn tribute to a fallen masterpiece and old friend.
Mrs. Quims and her girls did so well that night, they paid for the repairs to the Kawasaki.
“You gotta be kidding me!” Chris exclaimed. “He jumped off the back? What a horrible way for a great bike to die! I’m surprised you still had it up an’ working.”
A smiled crossed the lips of the Police Chief as he handed a cup of java through the cell bars. “Yeah, Smitty ain’t the most hot-loaded bullet in the gun, Chris. And I’m the reason that bike ran! I had that old horse stoked and runnin’ over a hundred and ten miles an hour, and I liked it like that! According to the specs, that wasn’t possible, but I had to try—and dam’mit, she flew!”
“Yeah. Life begins at thirty, but it don’t get interesting ‘till 110! Ain’t it amazin’ how the thrill of speed can overcome the fear of death? You start believin’ the road never ends… but it does, and sometimes with a bang!” The old man shuddered down a sip of coffee and locked eyes with the Chief. “You’re THE Fast Eddie McKnight, ain’t you! You’re the guy who welded two Harleys together and went out to set the land speed record on the Utah salt flats…”
“I would’ve made it, too; I was two miles an hour short of breaking the record, but picking up speed when those damned Harley engines blew the fuckin’ pistons right through the gas tanks! The bang scared me so much I damned neared pissed my pants. I really wanted to know what it was like to actually be the world’s fastest man, even just for a… but I‘d promised the old lady I‘d give up the speed thing if I made it back from the flats.”
“Yeeeaaah, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do! But ya held those two bikes down. Man, that was great ridin’. All of a sudden, though, I get a feelin’ this is more than a great story and a cup of bad coffee. What’s it all got to do with me?”
“In a week, you’re out of the clink. Chris, I’m giving you a choice of what to do for community service: sweep out a whorehouse, or work on motorbikes.”
“Hmmm,” the old man pondered, pulling at his whiskers. “A whorehouse, ya say?”
“OH, THE HUMANITY! THE HORROR! THE…”
“Easy, Chris.” Mac held the old man up as he crumbled at the visions of awfulness that was the bike shed. He’s amazingly light for a guy with that much gut, the cop thought. As much as Chris would have liked to spend three months at Mrs. Quims’ Christmas Cathouse Bar & Grill, he’d opted for door number two, as he was still married to a woman who owned a torque wrench and knew other uses for it than the one intended. As he was a transient for the time being, the cops offered to fix up a cell as a real guest room and continue his meals. But Chris just wanted a small cot set up in the shed, and he told Fast Eddie to send him a ham sandwich and a glass of milk once a day… and maybe a carrot… or a cookie. Okay, a buttered roll and a coffee once in a while. And he asked Eddie to make Smitty bring it.
Eddie and Mac weren’t expecting too much from the old man, but after they’d put together a small tool set out of their boxes, they found out Chris had spoken to old man Hecht and his competition at the other end of town while he was still in the slammer. They had filled a box with all their old odd-sized tools that were closer in size to aged Harley and Indian motorcycle parts than modern cars. He was setting up a shop for real! While Chris would still have to drag quarts of oil in from the gas stations, old man Hecht let him tie some old hoses together to his air compressor to run his air-driven tools. Mac thought Chris must have made some sort of side deal, but truth was folk in town just seemed to like the old fellow.
It didn’t take long. There was some question in the minds of the three cops as to whether or not the old derelict could be left to his own devices. If he ran off, it really wouldn’t hurt anybody, but the cops did have to answer to the Judge. The first night Chris was left in the shop, McKnight kept an eye on it. All night long, the sounds of banging and air tools filled the upstate air. By morning, when Eddie showed up with a buttered roll and coffee, the old guy had cleaned the barn out, organized the tools, scraped and straightened two frames, and changed the oil on the Kawie. He had assembled the parts of different bikes and laid them out into a pile. It was enough work for ten men. “Holy shit,” the amazed cop gasped. “Chris, you’re gonna have a stroke…”
“Actually,” Chris said, still staring into a pile of seventy-year-old parts, “you’re gonna have a two-stroke once I rebuild a few of these parts. And watch your Ga’damned mouth, asshole. There are kids around who wanna see Santa grease-monkey a bunch a’ cop motorcycles. What is it with you cops and these kids?” The old man looked up and, seeing the coffee and roll and realizing that he was indeed hungry, apologized to McKnight for calling him an asshole. Over the next several months it became a ritual. Fast Eddie would appear at sun up—he had believed his whole life that the best alarm clock in the world was the rising sun shinning on freshly-polished chrome pipes. It got you wide awake in a good way—with coffee and a roll, and again at about eight or nine o’clock at night with another cup. Sometimes he brought Mac, but most nights he came alone. They were becoming friends. The tale of Eddie and the salt flats kept coming up, and Chris realized how much it bothered his friend that he had come so close and failed. For Eddie, being a Motorcycle Cop was second place in the race of life. And that bothered Chris. Eddie had shown himself to be a good guy… for a cop.
It had taken Chris all of two weeks (after chasing the cops out and meeting McKnight outside so he couldn’t peek at what Chris was working on) to rebuild, re-manufacture, and assemble enough parts to restore an old Henderson-Excelsior that nobody even knew was in there! It was perfect, right down to the suicide shifter on the side of the gas tank. Chris had even mixed paint to match the original color to a tee! People still aren’t sure how Chris redid the chrome, but lord almighty, it was brighter than a light bulb. It was too old to really catch speeders, but boy, it’d look good at the head of the 4th of July parade! At two in the afternoon, Chris had walked into the courthouse and told the Judge to have his Police Chief come out to the shed or he was going to escape. When Ed walked in, Chris just dangled the keys in front of him.
“I need this test driven,” was all he said. “Not too far, not too fast, bub.”
For the next four hours, Fast Eddie just rode a not-too-fast twenty or thirty miles an hour up and down Main Street as Chris sat on the steps of the general store calling out engine break-in instructions and drinking ice-cold Foster’s beer from the Chief’s private stash of what was left of the original Australian stock. He had radioed Mac to stop whatever he was doing and bring a whole case of the rare brew down, the situation meriting it. The whole town moved out to the curb to cheer the newest member of the community. Mrs. Quims’ girls, awakening from a hard night’s work, were moved by the oddly melodic tones emitting from the bike’s tail pipe. Truth be told, the only part Chris couldn’t fix or replace was the inner workings of the muffler, so he made a deal with the Reverend to be Santa again next year in exchange for the pipes to an old organ that was sitting in the Reverend’s shed, destined never to be used again anyway. The girls stood on the balconies of the second floor bedrooms and cheered as the bike literally whistled past. Eddie, to Chris’ satisfaction, rode to rapture with tears in his eyes.
It didn’t take long. Bikers from New York, Vermont, and Lower Eastern Canada were flocking to Podunksville to revel in the resurrection. As well as working on the other bikes in the shed, Chris started taking on oil changes, tune-ups, brake jobs, engine jobs, trannie work—hell, he even found a way to install air conditioning on some rich guy’s Honda Goldwing!—from the throngs of bikes passing through. And he was turning the proceeds over to the town, considering it an aspect of Community Service with a smile. He wouldn’t take a dime for his seemingly non-stop efforts as he worked on bikers’ cycles by day and cop bikes by night. Podunksville was being reborn on a set of swinging wrenches! Old Man Hecht was making a fortune ordering bike parts, the laundromat was soaping itself silly, the cops were merrily passing out tickets, the Moneysunk was cooking around the clock, and the girls at Mrs. Q’s… well, they were going around the clock too!
It was assumed that when Chris’ time was up in June, he’d stay on. But on the morning that his time was up, Fast Eddie McKnight showed up with the usual roll and coffee and found the shed door open. Chris was gone. Left behind were a dozen bikes he had worked on for customers (complete with handwritten bills), four rebuilt Harley Police bikes from the ’40s and ’50s, a fixed Indian flathead four-cylinder, and taped to the windshield of one of them was a note that said, “Got to go. Be back for the Rev at Christmas, see you guys then. Test drive these for me, will you? PS - don’t let Smitty ride the Indian!” Missing were the trike and the Guzzi. Eddie didn’t care that Chris had probably taken them… but it did bother him that he couldn’t figure how Chris got them out of town without being seen or heard!
The little town continued to prosper right through the summer. With four classic Harleys and a rare Indian or two in the stable, every day became a bike show. Word had gotten out through the motorcycle grapevine that the PVPD had gathered a herd of steel horses beyond the imagination. The Moneysunk, for the first summer in forty years, was packed with bikers, fishermen, and even genuine vacationers. The town was so packed that Mrs. Quims actually opened up the long locked side entrance and operated several rooms as a genuine Bed & Breakfast at a one night price tag that outdid the Blueberry Tart dessert package. Things were humming in Podunksville like they hadn’t been in a while!
But a blue funk settled over the members of the PVPD. It was as if their laundered uniforms were over-starched. The cops weren’t focused. These new bikes were turning them into depressed lumps. And it all centered around one thing—after six months, Chris had become a member of the staff, getting them back on the road and returning their dignity; he was missed. By late August, not even Smitty was arriving in a good mood. He had moved back onto a 1200 cc Harley flathead, and was happy as a pig in poop about it. But as his deposition settled into the funk too, Eddie had to move him to the desk—for his own protection.
Seems like Smitty had pulled a dentist on a big Yamaha over, got off his bike, and asked the man for his license and registration. The dentist had run a stop sign. “Oh, you gotta be kiddin’ me, cop! I slowed almost to a stop, saw there wasn’t a car in sight, and I even proceeded with caution!” screamed the dentist.
“Nevertheless!” Smitty snapped back, fighting his own irritability and preparing to write a citation. “You’re required to come to a complete stop! Let me see your license and registration.” It all went downhill from there.
“You guys out here in the sticks must have too much free time on your hands. What’s the matter, cop, are the doughnut shops closed this early out here in the woods?”
Smitty slowly shook his head. “SIR!” He sighed. “I’ll overlook that last remark; now let me see your license and registration… immediately!”
“I will, if you can tell me the difference between slowing down and coming to a complete stop!” sneered the dentist, folding his arms defiantly across his chest.
An evil smile spread across Smitty’s face. “Sir, I can do better than that.” The cop reached out, jerked the rude man right off his bike, and began hitting him over the head with his nightstick. “Now, Sir! Would you like me to slow down, or come to a complete stop?”
The only thing that saved Smitty’s job was that the dentist still had his helmet on. The Judge made Smitty replace the helmet (it being rather dented). And then the Judge fined the dentist, his Yamaha, and his bad attitude $500 for disturbing the peace, another $400 for assaulting a cop, and for good measure the Judge banged him another $50 for not coming to a full stop at a stop sign.
And by September, it was worse. Eddie, whose fame was spreading as the cop on a Henderson-Excelsior, had to ride to Jergyton, a small town up the road about forty miles, to help identify a captured criminal in a pending court case there. He really didn’t feel like it. It was an intrusion on his life, a bother. This stunned Mac, who looked at McKnight as a super cop, and even offered to take the ride for him, thinking his boss needed some time off. But Eddie wasn’t a guy to shirk his duty, so blue funk and all, he turned down the offer.
Eddie was released from court service about noontime and, still feeling kind of blue and wondering what else could go wrong today, decided to have lunch before the trip back. He went into a local tavern that served food and sat quietly at the bar pondering the meaning of life. He ordered a cheeseburger and would have loved a beer, but being on the bike, he ordered a Coke. As he sat sipping his Coke and minding his own business, a young lady sat down next to him. Seeing the rare bike parked outside and Eddie in his cop suit, she asked him, “Are you the real Fast Eddie McKnight, the Police Chief from Podunksville? I hear you’ve spent your whole life on the back of a motorcycle!”
He thought for a moment and replied, “Well, I have spent my whole life on cycles. My momma was pregnant with me when she rode on the back of my Daddy's Harley, then as a little boy I rode on the back with my Daddy until I finally got my own bike. Then the Mayor gave me a badge and told me to go and catch the bad guys, and I’ve been doin’ that ever since. So yes, I guess I am Eddie McKnight, the Police Chief from Podunksville.”
They sat in silence for a moment, then she said, “I'm a lesbian. I spend my whole day thinking about women. As soon as I get up in the morning, I think about women; when I shower, watch TV, eat, whatever, everything seems to make me think of women.” Then she finished the drink she’d ordered, got up, and left. Eddie was thinking about what just happened when a man sat down next to him and asked, “Are you the real Fast Eddie McKnight, the Police Chief from Podunksville?”
It took Eddie a moment to formulate an answer. “I always thought I was, but I just found out I'm probably a lesbian.”
By October, things were returning to the more-or-less normal economically depressed way of life Podunksville had come to know. The visitors were just not stopping by the old town anymore, the thrill of the bikes having worn off. The Moneysunk Inn had made a fortune serving a Fisherman’s Friday Fish Fry, a Saturday Night Special (which included a free dessert across the street), and a Biker day trip Sunday Brunch. By the end of September, they were closed all three days for everything except dinner and a handshake. The gas stations had agreed to close on alternate days. Even Reverend Goodbanger had considered closing the daycare center as parents lost their jobs and stayed home on welfare and food stamps. The Washington regulations and restrictions to small businesses were even starting to affect the girls at Mrs. Quims, who were finding it hardly worth staying in bed. In mid-November, after agreeing on a price for dessert with whipped cream but no cherry, one of the girls escorted a customer up to her room. After about ten minutes of furious nut topping chopping her customer asked, “So babe, how am I doin’?”
“You're doin' three knots,” she replied.
“Three knots? What's that mean?”
The girl replied, “You're NOT hard, you're NOT in, and you're NOT getting your money back!” A month earlier, that would have been against company policy. Some of the girls were considering snagging a trip to the city with the Canadian truck drivers and entrepreneuring by the Lincoln Tunnel… but what for? They had become wage slaves, and Mr. Lincoln couldn’t help free them from Washington—and New York didn’t offer free medical like Mrs. Q’s. It had become really tough to make a buck, and the bucks you did make stood a good chance of being taken away from you with the escalating food and gas prices. Guys who owned their own rigs just drove by Mrs. Q’s. Whatever was left in their pocket disappeared in the hidden taxes dumped on their business. The prospect of an unusually bad winter coming on with no money for heating oil (the price of which had gone through the roof) and the idea of a Christmas with no gift giving was getting downright depressing on a community level.
As Podunksville crossed into December, the weather was turning worse. It was so cold that one deer hunter filled his tag by setting up a Franklin Stove out in a clearing and waiting for the first big buck to come up to defrost his antlers. The brief respite to the local economy brought on by old Chris with his swinging wrenches and knowledge of classic old motorcycles was starting to sting a little.
At Thanksgiving, Mrs. Quims and the girls threw a hell of a holiday feast. They closed down their normal functions noontime the day before and, with help from chefs at the Moneysunk, prepared a half-dozen turkeys with all the fixings and invited Reverend Goodbanger’s entire daycare clientele and their parents. They opened up the Grand Ballroom and the dance floor and set up tables. After they reached out for the folk who had to drop out of daycare, and anybody else fighting through tough financial times, they put out the word: Free Lunch for anyone who didn’t have one. For the first time in a very long time, Mrs. Quims’ Christmas Cathouse Bar & Grill had actual dessert for dessert! It was a scene John Steinbeck would have recognized and been proud of.
It lifted spirits a bit, but not for long. As the snows of December drifted down from Canada, it cumulatively buried Podunksville in a constant two to four feet of frozen snow, with the traditional “ten foot drift” in spots. Upstate New York has always been wondrous in its ability to remove snow. Unlike New York City, upstate went into action as soon as the white lines on the roads got covered. If any good came out of the disastrous weather, it opened up some state-supplied day work. And the way things were, it was a help. But the snow didn’t seem to want to stop, and the temperature fell to twenty below zero at night. The roads became frozen rivers of ice, and cars of people who couldn’t stay at home got launched into drifts.
One of the reasons the PVPD never invested in a police car was the abundance of ice and snow at the Canadian border. Chris, seeing eighty years of motorcycle snow-chains hanging on the wall, had looked at Eddie and asked if he knew what they were. McKnight had just laughed. Bikes went when and where cars wouldn’t. Bike motors produced enough torque—pulling energy—to rip a stump from the ground. Pulling a car out of a snowdrift was child’s play for those old Harleys. Yeah, it got all cold, but the three cops had found ways to deal with Father Winter. Hamburgers and coffee reheated nicely when you strapped them to Harley exhaust pipes and rode a few miles, and hands could be warmed while waiting by the side of the road and holding them over an engine. More importantly, you found out who your friends were when folk living along the highway opened their garages and sheds to get you out of the snow and ice storms as you watched the major road in front of their homes.
And such was the case about two nights before Christmas. Fast Eddie had given Mac and Smitty the night off. T’wern’t a fit night for neither man nor beast, so a little voice in Eddie’s head told him to take the four to midnight shift. Coming down from Canada was a kick-ass Nor-Easter, and slow crawling across the US from the sunny Colorado Rockies was another monumental snow storm fixin’ to hook up with the Nor-easter at the New York border. It was a poor man’s Christmas this year made worse by arctic cold, snow that constantly fell, and another right-on-cue jump in the price of fuel oil and gasoline that went right through the roof. Eddie sat in Reverend Goodbanger’s garage, watching the snows swirl onto highways Nine and Eleven. The running engine from his bike warmed the garage just enough to make it livable. At this rate, Eddie knew nobody—himself included—would be out for Christmas Eve tomorrow. About ten o’clock, the first sets of plows were out—and ten minutes later, no roads were visible again. At midnight, Fast Eddie crawled onto the back road that led to his home. He glided silently along, mindful of the ice in spots. At the four-way intersection on the edge of the forest, he pulled up to a complete stop and warmed his gloved hands over the engine.
The heat from the engine warmed his numbing hands right through his gloves, and he pressed them more tightly to the lower portion of the gas tank to help the situation along. As he straddled the Harley, McKnight realized he was starting to feel “right” for the first time in months. Mrs. Quims and her girls had again shut down business early and were opening the grand old mansion to all the folk with little kids who were low on oil… and cheer. Folk without kids or with older children would go to the Moneysunk, a smaller house, but also well heated. Both of these Regal Manors were built at a time when wood and coal kept the winter chill away, and these were gifts of nature’s bounty and didn’t need to be spared. Both houses were sturdy and built with an eye on Adirondack winters. They had grown old with grace and still did not fear them. This was going to be a bad one, and as the owners of these grand old fortresses had done in the decades past, sheds full of wood had been prepared in advance, and the Franklin stoves could be kept blazing for weeks, easing the stress on the oil heating units! Eddie, thinking about how people in these here parts were looking out for each other, decided he was actually in the Christmas spirit.
He was about to shift into gear and cross the intersection when off to the North, through the swirling snow, a bright spot appeared in the sky. It was moving like a bat out of hell and coming right at him, dropping in elevation. It zoomed right over his head like a ball of fire. Eddie though he’d heard someone shout “Comet!” as it passed overhead before slamming into the abandoned Wilson farmstead about half a mile south. He debated taking a short cut through the woods, but decided it was too dangerous and headed south onto the highway instead. He wasn’t prepared for what he found when he got there.
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