A Christmas Story (with Kids)

By Rose Po

"That's when I find out Jen has locked herself in her bedroom and Joanne wants me to do something about it." Paramedic Roy DeSoto's fingers tightened around the steering wheel of the rescue squad, as he glared irritably at the still red traffic light and remembered the previous evening's domestic bliss.

In the seat next to him, paramedic John Gage nodded sympathetically, all the while entering the details of their last response into the run sheet. The light changed and the squad accelerated sharply, causing the pen in Gage's hand to slip. He braced his arm against the dash and glanced at DeSoto, eyebrows rising. "Do you mind?"

DeSoto's gaze shifted from the traffic to his partner for a second. "Um, sorry," he said sheepishly, slowing down. "Have you ever tried to dissuade a woman from sulking?"

Johnny snorted. "She's a little girl."

"Doesn't matter, she's a female."

"Who'd take you off at the knees for talking about women that way," commented Gage, still writing. "Your three-and-a-half-foot tall women's libber."

Roy grinned ruefully. "Joanne's convinced Jen will burn her first bra when she's old enough to get one."

Johnny chuckled.

DeSoto signaled, turning the squad onto Alameda. "Anyway, I get upstairs, pick the lock and find her hiding under her bed, talking to the Smilin' Suzie doll my mother-in-law gave her." He shook his head. "I tell you, that damn thing is creepy -- nothing that isn't stoned or possessed has pupils like that -- I expect to wake up some night to find it standing over me with a butcher knife, out to avenge all the wrongs my daughter has whispered to it over the years."

Flipping the cover of the clipboard closed and dropping the pen into his pocket, Gage laughed. "Personally, I find all baby dolls creepy." Sighing, he leaned back in the seat.

"Meanwhile, Chris decides to use the matches he stole from his grandfather to light the Advent wreath -- the plastic wreath not the candles." Roy's expression darkened. "Next thing I know, I hear the smoke detector and Joanne screaming, I grab Jen and run down the steps to find Joanne dousing the wreath with a glass of milk."

"Were there any survivors?" asked Gage, rolling his eyes.

"You haven't heard the best part yet."

"There's a best part?"

Roy grimaced at Johnny. "While the fruit of my loins is in his bedroom contemplating just how much coal Santa can bring him over the next thirty years and I'm scraping melted Advent wreath off the table, Joanne leans over and starts nibbling on my ear..."

Gage made a face. "Roy, I don't need to hear this."

"...and announces she'd like another."

"Wreath?"

"Kid!"

Gage gaped open-mouthed at his partner, while DeSoto nodded solemnly. "Kid," repeated Johnny weakly.

"Yeah. Turns out, she'd spent the afternoon packing up Chris and Jen's old baby clothes for the church charity drive," began Roy, his words trailing off when the call-out tones sounded on the radio.

"Squad 51, child down," crackled Sam Lanier. "Giggles' Discount Toy Palace, Town Center Mall. 6-3-0-0 Hawthorn, cross street Sepulveda. 6300 Hawthorn. Time out 10:47."

John lifted the handset. "Squad 51, 10-4," he acknowledged.

"Kids," mumbled DeSoto, darkly. He switched on the lights and craned his neck to watch the traffic while making a tight U-turn.

******

"Excuse me!" repeated Roy, in his most authoritative and exasperated voice. None of the holiday shoppers standing in line outside the toy store moved an inch.

"Allow me." Johnny selected a well-stacked blond and nudged the back of her shapely thigh with the biophone. Twenty pounds of battery, radio and cold metal had the desired result; the woman screeched and leapt forward, jostling her fellow shoppers, who looked at her with expressions distinctly lacking in peace on Earth and good will to men. "Excuse us!" bellowed Gage, brandishing the heavy orange case. The crowd finally parted.

Roy dove through the opening.

"You took your time getting here," accused a tall, thin man wearing a green jerkin, red tights, an inordinate number of tiny bells, and a nametag that pronounced him 'Santa's Head Elf.'

"You might try some crowd control," suggested Roy.

"Well, you're here now." Santa's Head Elf spun on the ball of his green slipper clad foot and jingled his way down a Barbie doll lined aisle.

"What happened?" asked Gage.

"These stupid kids trip over their own untied shoelaces and their parents slap you with a lawsuit before you can say tort reform." The Head Elf punctuated his observation with a hard right turn beside a display of Betsy-Wetsies. As he pivoted, the tip of his elf cap swung around, landing a white pompom squarely between his lips. "Damn hat!" He tore the cap from his head. "If the..."

A piercing shriek prevented DeSoto from hearing the next word, but a nearby shopper clapped her hands over the ears of her child.

"...at Corporate had to wear these get-ups they might..."

"What happened?" interrupted Gage, scrambling to keep from being knocked into a pile of incontinent dolls.

Abruptly, the Elf stopped and stepped aside, allowing the paramedics an unobstructed view.

Roy looked at the spectacle spreading before him. Roped off by plastic chains, shaped to resemble wrapped candies, was a mountain of polyester-fiberfill snow, capped by a red velvet-draped dais and a golden throne. Two enormous candy canes supported a banner proclaiming 'Santa Land.' A long plastic slide connected the dais to a mound of fake snow, marked with a lollypop-shaped exit sign. A half-a-dozen 'elves' clustered around a figure leaning against the wall of a faux gingerbread house. At the exit to Santa Land lay a boy tangled in 'candy' chains and support posts painted to look like peppermint sticks. A woman and two other children bent over him.

The Head Elf pointed to the boy. "He punched out Santa Claus."

The woman looked up from her son and jabbed her finger toward Santa. "He deserved it. You charged us five bucks for a lousy picture, my son should get to speak his peace."

"Twenty-two pages, lady!" jangled the Head Elf.

John nudged Roy. "I'll take care of Father Christmas."

"Ok." Roy knelt next to the tear-soaked child and set down the drug box. "What seems to be the problem, son?"

The boy sniffled. "I was reading my list when one of the stupid girl elves said I had to stop."

At the boy's words, one of the college-aged girls in elf outfits milling around Santa turned and glared. "Male chauvinist pig," she mouthed.

The Head Elf chimed in. "That's when he decked Kris Kringle."

"I was aiming for the elf."

"Like that makes it OK? Didn't your daddy ever teach you it is wrong to hit girls?" asked Head Elf.

The female elf, straightened and planted her hands on her hips. "What a sexist thing to say!"

"I meant, where do you hurt?" interrupted DeSoto, loudly.

"My leg," sobbed the boy, pointing to his left leg.

Roy ran his hands down the child's leg, feeling for fractures.

"One of Santa's helpers over there snatched him off Santa's lap and threw him down the slide," said the woman, leaning over DeSoto.

"Are you his mother?"

The woman nodded. The long necklace of mock holiday lights she wore slipped free of her collar and swung forward, slamming into the side of Roy's head. "That's when my little Jason fell off that death trap!" she continued, gesturing wildly toward the pile of fiberfill.

The Head Elf also leaned over DeSoto. "Fell! Your little demon -- uh -- Jason turned around and tried to climb back up."

"I wasn't done telling Santa what I wanted," asserted Jason, sulkily.

"You should have told him want you didn't want, that'd've taken less time." Santa's Head Elf shook his head.

"Don't you talk to my son that way..."

Roy looked up, a poke in the eye with a fake Christmas bulb rewarding his efforts. "Could you back up and give him some air... please," he begged, blinking frantically.

Glowering, the two adults fell silent and moved away. The Head Elf retreated to a table of Tonka trucks, muttering darkly about yard apes and rug rats. The woman gathered her other two children close.

"Looks like you broke your leg," concluded Roy.

"Is my brother going to have to stay in the hospital for a long time?" asked the young girl, detaching herself from her mother's grip to stand next to the paramedic. She stared at Roy, a speculative gleam in her baby blue eyes.

******

Setting down the biophone and trauma box, Johnny squatted next to Santa Claus. The man had his head tipped back and a wad of blood-soaked Kleenexes pressed against his nose. "Let me take a look," said Gage, pulling the man's hands away from his face. Under the layer of blush covering Kris Kringle's checks, Johnny could see the beginnings of a bruise. Gently John traced his thumbs along Santa's face.

"I gave up a good job -- my own cable home improvement show -- for this," moaned Claus. Suddenly he leaned forward, pushing away Gage's hands. "Four hundred dollars for the outfit, Santa school... For what -- Cherrios and sour milk breath in your face at nine a.m.?" Santa sniffled as blood began to again stream from his nose.

"Calm down," directed Johnny, easing the man back against the mock gingerbread house. He dug through the case for a moment, pulled out a packet and handed Father Christmas a 4 x 4. "Here." Gage resumed his examination.

"Do you know what you can get from children? Pink eye, ringworm... Head lice."

Johnny rapidly pulled his hands away from the man's full beard.

"Now this," Santa hissed, inhaling sharply as he touched his tender nose. He struggled to sit up.

"Settle down," ordered Gage, holding the man's shoulders. As Claus quieted, John pushed up the heavy velvet sleeve and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around his arm.

"And they bring you things: stale popcorn for Rudolph, grubby bits of cookies with teeth marks... A friend of mine, who works the malls in the Valley, ate one of those once, and in ten minutes he was flying higher than his reindeer."

Frowning, Johnny pulled the stethoscope from his ears. "Sir, I can't hear."

"Don't bother," he said, pulling the cuff from his arm. "Its sky high. Someday, I’m going to stroke out with a kid in my lap and give him a real Christmas memory." One of the young women in tights and skimpy jerkins surrounding Santa leaned forward and patted his shoulder, comfortingly.

Gage jerked his head toward the attractive coed. "Surely, the job has some perks." He wrapped his fingers around Claus's wrist, counting.

Claus grimaced gingerly. "Forget it." He threw up his arms in an exaggerated shrug, foiling Gage's attempts to determine his pulse rate. "Santa is a thirteen hundred year-old virgin. They don't call him Saint Nick for nothing."

John simultaneously stifled a sigh and hid a grin.

Santa gestured to the young woman. "Give me your compact, dear." The coed handed him a small mirror. "I'm going to miss the entire rest of the holiday," he groaned, examining his reflection from various angles. "It's supposed to be a nose like a cherry not a blueberry."

"Johnny." DeSoto bent over the trauma box and extracted a cardboard splint and a wide roll of tape. "I got a possible tib-fib fracture over there. You?"

"The patient is..." Gage rolled up the discarded BP cuff. "...Too agitated to get vitals on. He may have a broken nose." John shrugged.

"The ETA on the ambulance is five minutes."

"That long?"

Roy looked over his shoulder at Jason, the mother and Santa's Head Elf. "Yeah, that long."

******

Johnny watched Roy slide wearily into the squad. The paramedic's shirttail had escaped the waistband of his pants and was flopping dispiritedly against his hip; a lock of Roy's hair hung askew, revealing the thinning crown of his head. As they had followed the ambulance crew out, DeSoto had fallen a few steps behind the stretcher and the crowd had closed in around him. Gage shook his head.

"What are you gonna do?" Johnny asked.

Roy reached past his partner, opening the glove compartment and pulling out the citation pad. "Share the joy. I'm sure I saw a violation of the fire code in there."

"I mean about Joanne."

Roy exhaled slowly. "Stop by Rampart and get..." He mimed a cutting motion.

Gage crossed his legs and pulled the tickets from Roy's hands. "Sounds a bit drastic to me."

******

"Roy, Joanne called while you were out." Captain Stanley stood in the door of his office, watching the paramedics climb from the squad. "She wants you to call her back."

DeSoto rolled his eyes. "Thanks, Cap." He closed the squad door with a bit more force than was strictly necessary and headed for the payphone in the dayroom. "Wish me luck," he muttered to Johnny.

"I'll bring the cucumber sandwiches to the shower."

"Gee, thanks partner."

Johnny walked to the stove, filled a cup with coffee, and leaned against the counter and sipped the steaming beverage. He watched Roy with undisguised glee.

"Hi, Joanne..." DeSoto covered the receiver and frowned at Gage. Unaffected Johnny continued eavesdropping. "Uh huh," Roy said turning his back on his grinning colleague.

Chet Kelly entered the dayroom and joined Gage at the coffeepot. He nodded toward DeSoto. "What's up?"

"Shhh," ordered John.

Feeling another set of eyes on his back, Roy darkly glanced over his shoulder. "That's great," he whispered. "Joanne, I got to go." He listened for a minute. "I love you, too."

"Well?" asked Johnny, as Roy approached.

"She changed her mind and went to the drugstore."

"No Rampart?"

Roy shook his head.

"No special Christmas presents?"

"No," breathed Roy in relief.

Gage raised his coffee cup in a salute. "Here's to the spirit of Christmas."

"And the Pill," sighed Roy.

The End

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thanks to MJ for proofing this nightmare. And thanks to Mary for her astute eye for the correct turn of phrase. Ideas and inspiration pilfered from "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash", "A Christmas Story", "The Santa Clause" and the lady in the elf hat who almost plowed her minivan into my car outside the mall because she was talking on a cell phone and turned around whacking a kid in the backseat all while running a red light.