Lights & Sirens for Santa
"Party. Gotta have a party," John Wadkowski said, and he winked across his bottle of mango-flavored Muscle Milk at Diane Quinn, Jamestown's one-armed lawyer. "And it's gotta be your place because my apartment is so small—"
"How small?" asked the third person at the table in The Library, a class-act bar—the third person, the forever thin sheriff's detective, Howard Zigman.
"So small," said Wads, punching the line, "that there's only room for me and three stoop-shouldered mice."
Quinn fought against laughing, but lost it when a snicker escaped. "How long did you two rehearse that one?"
Wads touched his chest, his fingers spread wide in a gesture of innocence.
But she still gave him the cold eye. "Why should I have a party?" she asked.
"My God, who are you, Scrooge's sister? It's Christmas. Well, almost."
Zigman took a pull on his Coke. He set the half-empty bottle aside as he said, "Diane, you've got reason. You aren't in jail. If it weren't for old Wads and me, you would be."
He held up a ten-dollar bill. That got the attention of the bartender, Barb Larson. She strutted over in her uniform of the day—a black miniskirt and tight sweater the color of rum fruitcake. She took Zigman's money.
"A round on me," he said.
"Celebrating, huh?"
"Yup, it's Di. We've talked her into hosting a Christmas party at her place."
"Do I get an invite?"
Zigman glanced at Quinn.
"Sure," she said.
"You're just starting the planning, is that right?"
Quinn forced a smile.
"If it were me," Larson said, "I'd have everybody come in costume. I've got this really cute little elf outfit I made for myself when I took my kids trick-or-treating."
Wads studied Larson from the shoulders of her sweater to the hem of her miniskirt. "More revealing than what you've got on?"
"Honey, if you want to find out, it's gonna cost you big."
* * *
Larson knocked on the door of the one-time Pure Oil station that Diane Quinn's brother had bought and converted into a law office and apartment for Quinn.
The door opened and there she stood wearing a power suit, a Frosty the Snowman pin on her lapel, a red LED light blinking for his nose.
"Oh, that's nice," Larson said, "but the Lone Ranger mask?"
"I'm not big on costumes. Come in."
Larson hefted an oversized suitcase through the doorway. "Know you don't have a piano, so I brought my accordion."
"Why?"
"To play Christmas carols, sweets."
"I've got a stereo."
"Oh, poo on that." She opened the case. From it, Larson lifted out a squeeze box covered with a panoply of art deco designs and colors, the accordion's buttons and keys made of mother of pearl and black shell. "Some beauty, huh? A Gabbanelli, the only thing I got out of my divorce. 'Weird Al' Yankovic plays one of these. Sheryl Crow, too. Even John Lennon did, did you know that?"
She strapped the accordion on. Larson noodled out a series of scales, hauling the bellow open and squeezing it shut to pump air through the reeds.
The scales transitioned into "Roll Out the Barrel."
"The Wisconsin national anthem," Larson shouted over the volume.
Knocking interrupted. She played on, moving into "The Blue Skirt Waltz" as Quinn went to the door. She opened it and there before her stood a multi-pillowed Santa and Missus Claus, Santa with a trombone and Missus Claus with a clarinet.
Before Quinn could ask, Santa pointed to Barb. "She said 'no party' if we didn't bring our instruments."
"Judge, I thought all you played was the radio."
"Flora and I, when I was in law school, we had a jazz quintet. Playing gigs in Madison, that's what paid my tuition."
Santa and his wife came in, Santa—Judge Raeford Chalmers, chief judge of Wappello County's court system. They went straight to Larson where Chalmers said, "'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.'"
Larson nodded and segued to the carol.
Chalmers came in, scooped the first note. With the scoop, he changed the tempo and beat so the Sunday morning church carol became a Saturday night jazz-improv piece.
Another knock on the door.
Quinn answered that, too. Her brother there—Randolph—in a black suit, black shirt, red necktie, and he wore a black fedora at a raffish angle, with a sprig of holly in the hat band. She hugged him. "The neighborhood hoodlum, I love you. Where's Jillian?"
"Down with the flu, but she said I had to come anyway." He held up his B-flat coronet. "Barb told me. I'm not too late, am I?"
Quinn aimed him inside as a county car drove up. Out stepped a man in a night shirt and night cap and a woman dressed as a fairy queen. "He's Scrooge," the woman said, gesturing to her husband.
County Executive David Josey shrugged. "Just seemed right since I had to cut the county budget and rescind everybody's pay raises. Tomorrow, I even take away my own car."
He opened the trunk. There between a flat tire and bag of road salt laid a euphonium.
When Quinn saw it, she thumbed the latest musicians inside.
A black-and-white police car with a bubble light on the roof pulled up to the curb—an old Ford Fairlane straight out of the Andy Griffith Show. Out jumped two women dressed in police tans. They—friends from the county attorney's office—ran to Quinn, one with a flute and the other with a tambourine.
"Isn't this great?" the first said. "The car's my uncle's, and we found the uniforms in a costume shop."
Quinn, shivering, blew a warming breath on her good hand. "I'll bet Barb told you to bring your instruments, right?"
"Right," said the second. "I don't play anything, so Cindy gave me this jingle-bang thingy."
Quinn flicked her pointer finger at her office.
The two faux policewomen hurried off. An quickly as they disappeared inside, they spilled back out, led by Santa Claus and Elf Barb.
"Getting to be a crowd," Elf Barb said, "so we thought we'd play out here. It's not too cold yet, is it?"
An engine clattered in the distance, the sound growing as the vehicle it powered rambled down Quinn's boulevard. When it rolled under a streetlight, everyone saw it—an ancient John Deere, a cowboy at the steering wheel and an astronaut sitting on the fender. Behind, in a manure spreader polished to a high gloss, rode someone in a monk's garb steadying a lighted Christmas tree.
"Is that who I think it is?" Missus Claus asked.
Santa put his arm around her shoulders. "Yup, the Three Wise Guys. Wads told me he was going to do this. I just didn't believe him."
John Wadkowski guided the antique farm equipment off the street and up onto the tarmac, a sign over the manure spreader's beaters pulsing out "Spreading Christmas Joy."
Quinn turned three shades of red. She glanced at Larson. "All I need now is for some lunatic newspaper photographer to show up and take a picture of this."
Wads cut his Johnny Popper's two-cylinder engine and waved to the claque of musicians as he and the spaceman, Howard Zigman—Zigman wearing an oversized fish bowl for a helmet—climbed down from the tractor.
The man in the hooded robe, still up in the manure spreader, made the sign of the cross. Then he shook holy water over the assemblage.
Wads threw a hand out to him. "Let's hear it for Father Eduardo Medina, chaplain to the county sheriff's department."
Father Ed bowed. "These two yahoos," he said, wagging a gloved finger at Wads and Zigman, "I want you to know they corralled me into helping them on their Lights and Sirens for Santa route. We've delivered groceries and gifts to twenty needy families tonight."
Zigman waved for attention. "Ours is only one of fifteen routes. Deputies and county truck drivers took Christmas to two hundred twenty-six families, and we couldn't have done it without our courthouse employees and, this year, the teachers in our public schools. We know who's in need in our county, and we public employees, we do give back."
He looked hard at Scrooge. "Some we gave back to are families of men and women that man laid off."
Santa Claus stepped away from the musicians. He squared off to Zigman. "That's enough," he said.
"He needs to know."
"He knows, and you need to know David didn't take any salary this year so he wouldn't have to lay off more people."
Father Ed jangled a set of sleigh bells hard. When everyone had turned to him, he said, "Since I'm the only cleric here, it's up to me to deliver the commercial. We wouldn't have any of this if it weren't for Jesus. Tomorrow's his birthday. If you aren't in your church to celebrate, I expect you to be in mine. Mass is at nine o'clock."
Elf Barb played a series of chords, working her way up the scale. She nudged Santa Claus just before she dropped back to middle C. "'It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,'" she said, and Santa joined her on the trombone. The others came in when they recognized the melody.
After the band hit the chorus, Elf Barb leaned into Wads. "Come over to my place, big boy, and I'll light your lights."
He choked. When he recovered, he said in his best imitation of Woody in "Toy Story," "Shucks, ma'am, I thought you'd never ask."
She breathed in his ear, "How's your instrument?"
Wads took a mouth organ from his shirt pocket. He blew a few notes through it—wailed them—and said as he inspected his harmonica, "It's just fine."
© Jerry Peterson.
