Christmas at the Line Camp
Carl Barnes sat cursing, a near-empty pint bottle of cheap whiskey on the table in front of him. He railed drunkenly at his luck (bad), at the weather (worse), and at Dan Kelly, foreman of the Q Bar S ranch and Carl’s immediate boss (worst). The three had conspired in the chain of events that ended in Carl’s current predicament: stuck in a remote line shack on Christmas Eve, snowed in by a freak blizzard that raged and wailed without, piling up snow and producing wind gusts that shook the small, rudely-constructed cabin.
The day started full of promise, the ranch’s wealthy absentee owner giving the hands a week off for the holidays. Everyone made plans to head for town; talk of women, wine, and song thick in the air. Then the foreman walked into the bunkhouse.
Kelly stopped in the doorway, looked around, and spying Carl hunched over and stuffing clothing into his duffle bag, approached him. “Barnes,” he said. Carl looked up, one arm halfway into the bag. “Barnes, I got a job for you. Those three heifers we couldn’t find when we were moving the herd down from summer pasture, boss decided to leave ’em and write ’em off?” Carl nodded. He hadn’t liked that decision, no good cowboy left an animal behind, economic reasons be damned.
“Well,” Kelly continued, “couple Fish and Wildlife biologists were flying over, doing an elk count, and spotted ’em up in a buncha aspens, ’bout a quarter mile north of the Buck Creek line camp. Boss said to send someone after ’em.” He grinned smugly. “I told him you were the right man for the job. Go over to the equipment barn, check out a four-wheeler, and bring ’em in. Should be back by this evening, probably won’t set your vacation back by more’n a day or so.”
Carl groaned, started to bitch, realized it wouldn’t help, and settled for gifting Kelly an evil look as he grabbed his hat and wool-lined canvas jacket on his way out the door.
The weather was unseasonably mild for late December in the Rockies, with more of the same predicted, and the trip up to the line camp was fairly pleasant and uneventful. Carl found the cows easily, and was heading them down to the main ranch when the storm hit, and hit hard. He managed to get them to the line camp and into the small cattle shelter and corral. There was enough hay stored behind the shelter to last a few days, if necessary, and canned food and firewood in the shack to provide for a similar period of human survival. He fed the animals, parked the four-wheeler in the shelter, and started a fire in the shack’s wood stove. Rummaging, he uncovered a case of canned pork-and-beans and some Folgers coffee, as well as two pints of bargain-brand whiskey.
And so Carl, half-drunk and full of warmed-over beans, filled the tiny room with a fog of profanity. He’d had plans. They weren’t complicated plans, because Carl was a simple man, but he was pretty sure that their fulfillment would have made his hardscrabble life a great deal more pleasant. They were threefold: 1) get to town, 2) enter the Stockman’s bar and begin drinking, and 3) when sufficiently bolstered by artificial courage, proposition the pretty new bartender, Rose.
Rose Jensen had only just moved to town, but word of her looks and availability spread rapidly among the men working the widely-spaced ranches and farms in the area. Upon first sight of Rose, Carl quickly decided that, for a woman of her age, which was about the same as his own, she could even be considered beautiful. There was a rumor that she’d once appeared in a gentleman’s magazine sans apparel, but Carl figured it was typical bullshit dreamed up by guys with too much time on their hands and too little to fill it. Rose shot down every cowboy, farmhand, sheep herder and oil field roughneck that had so far had the nerve, real or alcohol-fueled, to ask her out, but Carl wasn’t going to let that stop him. Unlike himself, those clowns were just a bunch of insensitive, uncultured morons.
It being Christmas, Carl decided that Santa Claus deserved some of the blame for his predicament, and began to include him in his righteous diatribe.
“Hey! Hey you, wake up!” Carl felt the sting of a sharp slap to his face, and struggled to lift his noggin from the puddle of drool in which it had been resting on the table top as he dozed. His head ached, and spikes of pain shot through it as he concentrated, trying to bring the image in front of him into focus. He stared in disbelief at what swam into view: a small, portly man, about two feet tall, full beard hanging to his belt buckle, dressed in a green tunic and knickers with horizontally-striped red-and-white stockings. A wide red belt with a gold buckle girded his rotund middle, and his feet were shod in pointy-toed slippers of green leather, tiny bells dangling from the tips. A green felt cap, also belled at its pointed tip, perched on his bushy, graying head of hair.
“Wha’ the fu…,” Carl managed to get out. “Who the fu…” He shook his head and looked again, but what he saw remained unchanged. “I mean, uh, just who, or what, the hell are you?”
“Who I am is Dingleberries,” the apparition said, “What I am is an elf. To be specific, a Christmas elf, top of the elf pyramid. I work for the Big Guy himself.”
“The Big Guy, um, who?”
The elf bestowed on Carl a withering look. “The Big Guy,” he said impatiently. “C’mon, everybody knows the Big Guy. Pere Noel, Babbo Natale, Julenissen, Sinterklaas.” Seeing that none of these names were registering, he thought for a minute. “Oh yeah, I forgot. You people in these backward-ass parts call him Santa Claus.”
“Coulda just said that in the first place,” Carl grumbled.
“I suppose so, and I would have, had I known with whom I was dealing,” said the elf. “Got any of that whiskey left?”
Carl felt like he’d been insulted, though he couldn’t say why. “Sure.” He reached for the bottle, about a quarter full, and handed it to the elf. “Gotta warn ya, that’s some real nasty rotgut. Makes ya see things, fat elves and stuff.”
“Real funny. I’m hoping it’ll make me forget the ignorant redneck I’m seeing right now.” The elf grasped the bottle by the neck and took a healthy swig, nearly draining it. He wiped his mouth with a tiny hand and belched. “Whooee, good stuff. Could use a little peppermint, though.”
“Ugh. Say,” Carl said, “what did you say your name was? Dingleberries?”
The elf looked at him warily. “That’s right, what of it?”
“Well, I don’t know about the North Pole or wherever the hell it is you’re from, but around here dingleberries is the-”
“Yeah, yeah. It means the same damn thing everywhere you go. The bits of dried shit that sticks to the hair on a reindeer’s ass. My parents were real comedians.”
“I was gonna say ‘cow’s butt’, but no difference, I guess. Don’t everybody goof on you for that?”
“Yes,” said Dingleberries. “They do, as a matter of fact. And the monicker has been a real hindrance to my success. Despite the fact that I am over seven-hundred years old, and highly competent if I do say so myself, I have been unable to rise higher than the rank of CE-3. Most elves of my age and ability are at least CE-9s by now.”
“CE-3? What’s that mean,” Carl said.
“Christmas Elf, level 3. Elves at my rank are charged with taking to task those deplorables on the Naughty List who commit the ultimate naughtiness – taking the Big Guy’s name in vain. Which,” Dingleberries said, “brings us to why I am here.”
“Wait,” Carl said. “Are you trying to tell me that Santa sent you out here to the middle of nowhere during the worst blizzard that’s been in these parts for years, just so’s you can give me a ass-kickin’ for calling him a goddamn, mealy-mouthed, buttheaded mother fu-”
“Pretty much. You wouldn’t believe how big a no-no it is to swear at the boss, especially on Christmas Eve. It’s like lighting your farts in church, or letting your dog shit on the White House lawn – bad juju.”
“Well,” said Carl, “I guess I don’t exactly buy it. First off, I haven’t believed in Santa Claus since I was a kid. Second, I’m pretty sure you ain’t real. More likely, I drunk enough of this shitty booze to pass out and this is just a weird dream. Last, I think I already been punished enough.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, but let me assure you that both Santa and myself do exist, and I am more than capable of giving you ‘a ass-kicking’, as you so quaintly put it, despite the difference in our statures and ages. Now, let’s hear your story.”
And Carl related to the Christmas elf his tale of woe. “So here I am,” he concluded. “Stuck here in the snow, maybe for the whole damn week, with nothing to do but sit and nothing to eat but beans. I should be in town with the rest of the guys, whooping it up and dancing with Rose. It ain’t fair. And to top it off, now I gotta deal with a fucking elf out for revenge?”
“You say revenge, I say justice, po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe. You’re right, the world has treated you, and about three billion other people, unfairly. Still not an excuse for cursing at the Big Guy.” Dingleberries cocked his arm, and the last thing Carl remembered was a tiny fist coming at his face with incredible speed.
Carl woke late on Christmas morning, lying on the cot and covered with a thick quilt. The sun shining through the cabin’s lone window hit him directly in the eyes, adding insult to the injury inflicted by the previous evening’s events. The spot right between his eyes felt like someone had gone at it with a ball-peen hammer.
The wind still beat against the flimsy structure, but it didn’t feel cold, though the fire in the woodstove had burned out in the wee hours. Carl struggled into his jacket and boots and staggered out into the sunshine. The wind direction had shifted and created a chinook, blowing warm from the south and melting the drifted snow. He waded through puddles to the cattle shelter, cut open some bales of hay for the cows, and headed over to check the four-wheeler.
Something sat in the vehicle’s cargo basket. Two objects, he saw as he got closer: a bottle with a tag of some sort tied around its neck, and a flat, rectangular package wrapped in silver paper and topped with a red bow. Carl picked up the bottle, pleased to see it contained a brand of fine Bourbon he’d often admired but not been able to afford. The tag affixed to its neck read “To Carl, my favorite peckerwood. Your elfin pal, Dingleberries. P.S., don’t forget to open the other gift, jackass.”
He set the whiskey down carefully, then tore open the wrapping on the flat package. It contained a magazine. Playboy, Christmas issue from 1974, in remarkable condition. The bare-chested beauty wearing the Santa hat on the cover looked familiar, but Carl’s still-foggy brain couldn’t place her, until he noticed the caption at the bottom of the photo. Rose Jensen, it said, our December Playmate of the Month.
edublerps, llc 