Chabo's Journal: A Christmas Tale

Note: This is a continuation of a series of stories written by a central Texas police officer named "Darth Tang", which are being archived by Chabo, with no editing. Read more about this project.

This story was originally posted on December 19, 2005.

Back in the mid-80s, I was freshly out of the Army (but still in the Army National Guard, from which I would eventually retire) and employed by a Sheriff's Office in an impoverished county as a Reserve Deputy/Corrections Officer.

I was pulled out of the jail and assigned full-time to the street when it was noted that I had voluntarily spent my own off-duty time riding with a Sergeant hereafter known as Rick. Rick had not been able to keep a partner for more than a month, and usually not more than a week. He patrolled a quadrant of the county which was a tangle of cedar breaks and scrub ranchland populated by the dirt poor and home to many old-school meth labs. In a rough county, it was the roughest place to work. In theory, a two-man unit was assigned.

Rick was in his early forties, a three-tour Vietnam vet who kept a pickle jar of formaldehyde containing ears on his desk. He talked to himself as he drove, long mumbled dissertations that were never completely understandable, and was known for going a full shift without saying a word to his partner. He had no FM radio in his patrol unit, and he patrolled his quadrant with a vengeance, and thought nothing of taking on any call or suspicious activity no matter what. He was so hated by the meth-cooking bikers that his house was shot at on four occasions in the year before I teamed up with him. Nobody wanted to work with him.

I was going through a bad time; I was missing the Army badly, a nine-year relationship was coming to an end, I was living far from my family, and I was unsure of what I wanted to do with my life. Spending twelve hours in a car with a guy who mumbled to himself wasn't any sort of strain; I spent four days on duty staring out the passenger window (Rick always drove), and at least part of my four days off in the office catching up on paperwork and generally avoiding confrontations with the woman who was shortly to be my ex.

Which was another thing: Rick would frequently patrol his quadrant on his own time (in his take-home patrol unit), and I dropped into the habit of going with him. It beat arguing with my soon-to-be-ex, and on the slender Deputy's pay, I needed to save up for the financial turmoil that was certain to be coming. Soon, they were referring to me in the same manner that they spoke of Rick.

We volunteered to work the 7pm-7am Christmas Eve/Day shift, since Rick's wife was out of state with a dying parent, and I was now living as a bachelor while I waited for it to become official.

Shift change was pretty unofficial in those days; the guys on day shift who had our quad usually never went there in the first place, so about quarter to seven Rick picked me up in the patrol unit and we drove to the office, where we looked over the reports filed since we got off at 7am, and checked in with Dispatch.

We exchanged gifts, since it was Christmas; Rick had borrowed my Colt Gold Cup and unknown to me (he was a master gunsmith) dropped in a full combat modification into it; I presented him with a Human skull I had brought back from El Salvador. We were both very pleased.

We drove to a volunteer fire station near the junction of the four quads the county was divided into, where a sizeable repast had been laid out for those on duty. The SO units from the other three quads would spend their entire shift there watching movies on a VCR with the firemen; Rick and I ate, and headed back to our car. Before I went out the door, I grabbed a couple fistfuls of candy canes and candy bars, which I tucked in my jacket. Twelve hours was a long time, and no place was open in our quad, and almost nothing in the county.

Soon we were rolling down country roads, the dashboard dim, windows down, Rick mumbling inaudibly to himself. I watched the snow-less Texas countryside roll past, silver-white in a nearly full moon, and tried not to think.

The radio was quiet for the first couple hours, but then they called us: there was a panicky call from the Dogpatch, someone hurt bad, some questionable sort of trouble. EMS, predictably, was refusing to roll until law enforcement was on scene.

A word here about the Dogpatch: it was a un-incorporated village of about four hundred dirt-poor souls with at best two phones amongst all, with half the houses having electricity, and a quarter having running water. It was one of the oldest black communities in Texas, settled by freed slaves in 1865, and boasted one of the oldest black churches and graveyard in the state. The primary occupation was cedar-cutting, as hard, poorly-paid, and dirty work as you were likely to find in Texas. They didn't care much for officers of the law, and in fact other than Rick, no one wearing a badge went into the place. It was commonly said that no one was every murdered in Dogpatch, because there was no law down there to define something as murder.

Ambulances didn't go down the heavily rutted road to DP unless deputies were already on scene, which was something I always found odd, as aside from the usual sort of domestic violence and the occasional drunken brawl, the only significant violence that occurred in DP came from outside. In the Thirties, it held the dubious distinction of losing citizens to the largest Klan mass-lynching in Texas, and as late as the Sixties had endured what would now be called drive-by shootings from various hate groups. In the last ten years, biker gangs (primarily the Banditos, Texas' largest and most dangerous outlaw biker organization) had killed at least four natives of DP and shot up the place several times because of real or perceived tampering with their meth labs.

There was an old First Responder (volunteer EMT) called Pop Keeling, an old rancher made from leather and baling wire who looked like he was a hundred years old, who would respond into the DP whenever a call for help was made regardless of whether deputies were en route or not, an old Colt stuffed under the bib of his overalls, but a message at Dispatch when we came on had noted that Pop was gone for the holidays.

Dispatch asked if we were available, and called for a second unit as backup. The other deputies hastily advised that they were out of service or out of position. Rick glanced over at me (a tribute to our service together), and I gave a 'what the fuck' shrug. He advised Dispatch that we were rolling.

We rolled up the last mile of road blacked-out, as you couldn't rule out the possibility that this might be a set-up; we had busted several meth labs in the last couple months, and some very hyper people were out serious money and some good friends & business associates.

Rick slowed to a crawl on the outskirts of DP, and I rolled out of the car with a 70s-era CAR-15 with a Whitman folding stock, trailing him by about twenty feet on foot. I wore dark brown levis and a dark brown waist-length jacket with an embroidered star; the jacket was to hide the tan uniform shirt, which made too good a target at night, and to conceal the fact that I (like Rick) wore a second pistol in a shoulder holster. Backup, if it came, was coming from a long ways away. There was no point, as Rick often said, in dying for a lack of shooting back.

We found the address in question, a shack with a tin roof and plank siding; a young woman was waiting in the front door. She told Rick the trouble was in back-she rented the front room, but we could go through it to reach the back. We could hear the wailing and hollering for ourselves.

The flooring was hardwood planks, humped where the piers had settled, worn to a third of their thickness where traffic passed. The ceiling was the old tongue-and-groove slatwork from the turn of the century, and the walls were not sheet-rocked, but cheap plywood nailed to the timbers. It was what they called a 'railroad shack', the vertical frame being railroad ties split lengthwise, and the horizontal being ties split into thirds (by width) and then cut lengthwise in half. Solid, but if those creosote-soaked ties ever caught fire, there was no putting them out.

The air in the room was thick with the smell of a old wood stove in one corner, a well-oiled skillet staying warm atop it, and the sickly-hot smell of burnt Human flesh.

Rick went into the back room, where a kerosene space heater had sent a gout of burning fuel across the upper torso of a seventeen-year-old male; it was a miracle the floor had not caught before others got the flames doused. Rick got the family to quit smearing lard across the burns while I gave the EMTs the all-clear.

I stashed the CAR-15 and waited in the front doorway to wave the EMTs over, while Rick rummaged in the trunk for the oxygen bottle. Mainly for something to do: the kid was burned over his entire front torso, neck, face, hands, and head; in most places cooked to the point where the skin was sliding off in crisp and curling sheets. He was likely a goner, not even making much noise, just wheezing little grunts, which suggested he might have sucked in a good lungful of fumes & superheated air and was dying from oxygen deprivation.

The front room held the stove, a sort of no-plumbing sink, and cupboards made out of very old crates; there was a wood table that must have been nice fifty years ago, and some old chairs that didn't match whose seats were freshly re-woven wicker. A big metal-framed bed took up the rest of the room, leaving little walkways between it and the other furniture. It was neat, tidy, and clean.

There was a pretty little cedar cut so it looked like a pine on the table, decorated with ornaments cut from colored construction paper and tinfoil; a couple of child's crayon drawings of Santa and a Christmas tree were tacked to the wall on either side. A fuzzy red and white Christmas stocking with a stiff gold bow hung from the back of one of the chairs. It looked like a small package was nestled in the toe.

The woman who had flagged us down was standing at the door that connected her room to the back room, staring through the crack; standing on the bed at the head, gripping the decorative metalwork like an inmate standing at a cell's bars was a little girl somewhere around four, staring at me with huge, serious eyes. I winked at her, and she ducked her head, but peeked up again after a moment. I winked again, and she grinned and ducked.

The ambulance rolled up, and she scooted towards the wall, frightened and intrigued in equal parts by the flashing colored lights. I pointed the EMTs to the back room, and told them to bring the kid out the back door, rather than through the front.

Rick joined me and we listened to the EMTs mutter their litany of abbreviations and arcane phrases in the next room for a moment, standing in the traditional stance: feet a shoulder's width apart, right heel four inches back of the left and pointed out, left hand resting on the portable, right thumb hooked over the mag pouches so the forearm and elbow protected the sidearm.

The woman had joined her daughter on the bed, sitting with her back to the wall; the little girl stood next to her, mother's arm around her waist, back against the wall. The mother was watching the moving lights visible in the crack of the door, a frown of concern drawing a line between her brows, while the little girl chewed her fingers and looked at Rick and me, shifting her feet slightly so she rocked on the mattress, a merry gleam in her eyes.

Rick jerked a shoulder, and turned from the door in dismissal: our job was done, time to go.

I reached into my jacket, brushing the grip of the Colt Commander in its shoulder holster, and pulled out the candy I had grabbed earlier, dumping it into the stocking as I turned to go. Rick heard the noise turned, hesitated, then dumped several candy bars in as well.

As we walked outside, unexpectedly, the little girl spoke. "Merry Christmas!" she cried, with the gusto that only a child of innocent years can manage.

It was so unexpected it stopped us in our tracks. Finally Rick said, 'Merry Christmas,', and we heard the girl giggle.

We climbed into our car, and rolled out. I checked us back into service, and we headed back out into the quad.

After a while, longer than usual, Rick started mumbling.