A Rocky Stone Christmas

For the Christmas season, we interrupt our exciting serial to bring you a Christmas entry in the Rocky Stone notebooks. The following entry takes place a few years later, in 1952. Rocky has married his long-time girl, Sultry Vixen, and they go to visit Rocky's sister in San Francisco:

They say that domesticity fits on a guy like me like a glove fits on a gun, and while it's true that most guys I know who get out of the game and fill a house with a wife, two and a half kids and a white picket fence eventually lose whatever's left of their minds and go off to join the circus, the same wasn't going to happen to me. I knew who I was and why God put me on this Earth and nothing was going to change that, not even Christmas morning at my sister's place in Frisco.

Since her husband went to Korea, Amanda has needed a man around the house to take care of a few things, especially since she has two little boys. Twins, three years old, named Peter and Paul. Whenever I get the odd break or if I'm in town on a case, I stop in to see how everyone is doing, and that kind of thing goes over well for everyone involved. This was different. This was bringing the wife over, sitting at the dinner table, carving the Christmas goose and talking about cups and saucers and garden implements while the twins try to do competing Houdini acts to see who can slip away from the table unnoticed first.

I wasn't looking forward to it.

It started out all right. The boys scampered up to me shouting their heads off like Santa Claus himself had come to the door. They latched on to me, choosing one leg each, and stayed anchored there as I crossed the threshold, but once the hugs were over and the pleasantries were sufficiently made, it was off to the kitchen for the ladies.

“Mind the boys, would you, Rocky?” Amanda asked dismissively over a shoulder before disappearing down a hallway, as if I really had a choice in the matter.

Mind the boys. I've had a lot of requests over the years, from finding delinquent husbands to discovering the whereabouts of the Killagong Diamond, but I've never been asked to baby-sit. I wandered in to the living room, heavy-legged, until they both decided to break free and run at full speed around the davenport. I sat and watched them for a while, until one got the idea to turn around and run clockwise instead of counter-clockwise. I stepped in before there was a head-on collision and got them to stand still for a second.

“Tell us a story, Uncle Rocky,” Peter suggested.

Another new request. The morning was full of them. “Yes, yes!” Paul shouted and began to jump uncontrollably. “Tell us a story!”

“A story, huh?” I said, and immediately thought of one that the tabloids would love but couldn't tell to three-year old boys. I thought of a better one, and sat them down on the davenport with me. Paul continued his hopping from a sitting position.

“There were three guys. They worked out in a college out East. One of those fancy types your mother would like to send you to when you get older. They worked in this lab, you see, and they had this big telescope. Every day they would look through it and look at the planets and the stars and then write down what they saw, and every day it was the same.”

Paul stopped hopping. “That doesn't sound like fun,” Peter observed.

“It wasn't,” I agreed. “Until one day, one of these guys looked in the telescope and they saw one of the stars was brighter than it had been before. It was suddenly brighter than anything else in the night sky. The three of them got together and looked through their notes and they couldn't figure it out, so they did some calculations. What they worked out was this: the star was directly above a point on the Earth, and if they followed it, they would figure out what it was all about. So they got in a car and headed west.”

“To San Francisco?” Paul asked. Bright kid. Must come in the bloodlines.

“Almost, but I'll get to that in a second. So, meanwhile there was this man and his wife. His name was Joe and he worked in construction in San Francisco and his wife was going to have a baby. But the state of California had started a new taxation system...” I could see their eyes were glazing over and I skipped over that part. “Well, anyway, they had to go back to Joe's hometown, just north of the city, and when they were there, they tried to get a room at the only motor court in town, but there was no room for them. So the owner of the place put them up in the garage.”

Pete's eyes got big: “They had to spend the whole night in the garage?”

“Sure did,” I replied. “And midway through the night, Joe's wife Mary started to feel the baby coming, and before the night was over, she had the baby right there in the garage. She wrapped him up in a blanket and that was that.”

“So the three wise guys from the college out east got into San Francisco and realized the star was still a bit north of here they were, so they followed it to Joe's hometown. And where do you suppose they went?”

“To the garage?” Paul asked, helpfully.

“That's right. And when they saw Mary and her baby they knew why they had taken the trip. There was something about this baby that was important, and they gave the baby whatever they had on them as a gift.

“And later on, that baby turned out to be the King.”

“We don't have Kings,” Peter declared. “This is America.”

“Well, all right then, the President. And they all lived happily ever after. The end.”

Paul hung on to my arm and pulled it. “Uncle Rocky,” he said, earnestly. “Uncle Rocky, were you there? Did you see the star? Did you go and see the baby just like the three guys?”

It made me laugh. “Yeah, I suppose I did.” I patted him on the head.