So anyway, there it was Christmas Eve, and Ivor calls up and says, "I got a job for you, Ba.s.s."

"Uh-huh," I say.

"You'll probably want to leave right away," he says.

"Uh-uh," I say. But that doesn't faze Ivor.

"You'll have to be back by ten a.m. tomorrow," he says.

I don't even bother with an "Uh-uh" this time. Remember now-"tomorrow" is Christmas Day.

"Round trip's about a thousand miles," Ivor says.

I could've whistled or groaned or asked him just how much Jack he'd put in his eggnog, but I stayed quiet.

And then he mentioned how much he'd pay.

Bootsie heard me gasp from the kitchen and hustled over, looking worried. She probably thought somebody'd died or the church had burned down or one of the boys had got himself arrested again. I gave her a don't-worry shake of my head, but my words didn't comfort her much.

"You know I don't haul drugs or guns, Ivor," I say.

"I'm not asking you to," he says.

"Well, I don't get it then," I say. "Cuz that figure you just mentioned is...o...b..scene. If it was a movie, Jerry Fallwell'd tell me to boycott it."

And then he said something that really made me think he'd gotten carried away with the Christmas spirits that day: "You ever heard of a Cabbage Patch Kid?"

Well, I hadn't. I look at Bootsie and roll my eyes and do that little finger-circle-around-the-ear crazy sign. I figure I'm talking to a loony tune.

"No, I have not," I say, getting ready to hang up before he asks me whether I believe in the Abominable Snowman.

"They're dolls," he says. "Ask your wife about 'em. She'll know. Everybody's crazy for 'em this year. Stores can't keep 'em on the shelves. You got people practically killing each other for the chance to buy one. There've been fights, riots, you name it."

"Over a doll?" I say. I still don't exactly believe him at this point, but he's starting to make some kinda sense.

"Over a doll," Ivor says. "And right now in River City, you can't buy a single one of 'em. Sold out. On Christmas Eve."

"Uh-huh," I say.

"The company that makes 'em is working around the clock to crank out more," Ivor says. "The folks at Monkeyberry Toys have a consignment on order that'll be ready tonight at midnight. Six hundred dolls. And they know they can sell every dang one of 'em-if we can get 'em back to River City on Christmas Day."

"Uh-huh," I say. "Can you hold on a minute?"

Ivor grunts at me, and I slap a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

"Bootsie," I say, "Ivor Boraborinski wants me to do a special haul for him. Like right now. About a thousand miles."

"Uh-huh," says Bootsie, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I drop it: I tell her how much they'll pay.

"You want Pepsi or Mountain Dew this trip?" she says.

"Mountain Dew," I tell her.

Ivor overhears that and knows what it means. He starts telling me where to go to get the dolls.

Now usually, Ivor'd have me pick up a load of this or that on my way out of town. In the trucking business, it don't pay to go nowhere with an empty trailer. But Ivor just tells me forget it, this is rush-rush stuff and the Monkeyberry folks couldn't get anyone else to do it and the profit margin is covered but good. I've just gotta grab them toys and get 'em back to River City by Christmas morning.

See? Just like Santa Claus.

So less than thirty minutes later, I'm headed east on I-70. Pennsylvania, here I come. Turns out them "kids" didn't grow in any cabbage patch. They were made in a factory in a dumpy little industrial park outside Pittsburgh. This was back when you could actually find a doll that didn't have MADE IN CHINA tattooed on its keister, you understand.

They may as well have come from the North Pole, though. Whammy! The second I hit the road, here comes the snow. It starts off all slow and pretty and I've got my Johnny Mathis on the tape deck singing "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow" and it's real cute. But darn it all if Mother Nature don't take Johnny serious. The snow just don't stop. It didn't take long to go from cute to a pain in the b.u.t.t to downright dangerous. And I've got hours and hours to go.

That's where the Mountain Dew comes in. Load me up with a couple cases of that stuff and I could drive to the moon and back without making a pit stop. When one can wears off, I pop open another. And when I get tired of that, I start tossing Lemonheads in my mouth to give it an extra kick. A man can't live on caffeine alone, you know. He needs sugar, too.

So by the time I get to the factory, here's what I've got on my bodily odometer: fifteen cans of Dew, two jumbo boxes of Lemonheads, G.o.d only knows how many cigarettes, enough beef jerky to start my own cattle drive and about five hundred close calls with ice, snow, deer, state troopers and cars driven by drunks and pinheads. And I've got to face that all over again on the way back, all without a single wink of sleep. Which is not exactly legal, but you know how it is. A trucker's logbook's got more fairy tales per page than Mother Goose.

When I finally get to the factory, it's something like eleven forty five in the p.m. Right on schedule-on my part, anyway. But it turns out I'm the twentieth truck in line. They've got people in the factory working quadruple overtime, those dolls are breaking the sound barrier as they come flying off the a.s.sembly line and still they're behind schedule. The demand was just too huge. So I'm told to sit down, shut up and wait my turn.

Which I do. But not 'til after I've gotten me my first gander at them dolls. They're in boxes all pushed together by the hundred and wrapped up tight in industrial plastic. But if you get up close and squint you can see their pudgy faces back there, like row after row of chubby little mummies staring out at you through their shrouds.

"Holy Cheez Whiz," I say. "That's what all the fuss is about? Looks like somebody busted these babies in the face with a baseball bat. Any kid with one of those in her bed's gonna wake up screaming for sure."

The toy people aren't exactly amused by this, maybe because they're just as tired as me. So I shut my trap and climb into my cab and turn up my Elvis Christmas tape real loud. But I'm off my stride with the Mountain Dew, and nature takes its course.

One minute Elvis is singing about having a blue Christmas without you, the next he's telling me to run for my life cuz them Cabbage Patch Kids are the unholy sp.a.w.n of Satan. I even see one peeking at me in the rear-view mirror, its beady little eyes glowing in the dark, blood trickling from its nasty puckered mouth. I try to yell for help but nothing comes out. The little monster's pulling at the handle of the door and there's something pink and pulpy caught in its sharp teeth and I hear it say "I'm hungry, Daddy" and I can't move a muscle and knock knock knock. Suddenly some bossy foreman's telling me to wake the heck up cuz it's my turn to load.

First thing I do, of course, is pop open another soda. Then I take a peek at my watch-and nearly give myself a Mountain Dew shower, I jump so bad. It's almost two in the zippity doo-da morning! Those unmentionable so-and-sos let me sleep for two blankety-blank hours!

I rev up my rig and whip around to the loading dock and back up at fifty five miles an hour and hop out and start tapping my foot and staring at that loading crew so hard my eyes are about to pop out of my skull. They get the message, too.

"Take it easy, fella," the foreman says to me. "We know, we know. We've got families to get home to, too."

"Yeah, but mine's five hundred miles away," I say.

"O.K., O.K.," the foreman says all irritable like, but he and his boys work fast. Twenty minutes later he's sticking a form under my face saying, "Alright, fella, sign it and haul."

I look in the trailer and don't like what I see. The thing's more than half empty.

"That's six hundred dolls?" I say.

"Hey, they're dolls-not TVs or hogs or whatever you're used to hauling." He slaps the paper he's trying to get me to sign. "Six hundred. Just like it says in the order."

"Alright," I say. "You know your business."

"d.a.m.n straight," the foreman says-and pardon my French for saying it now.

I sign and I haul.

The snow's still coming down as I pull out. There's maybe eight inches on the ground at this point, and it's starting to drift. It don't look good. But I'm in a fine mood cuz I'm finally on my second leg, so it's just one more big push and I'm home. The factory's about five miles off I-71. All I've gotta do is get on the interstate, crank up the Christmas tunes and let the Dew do the rest.

I'm about half-way to 71 on this dark little two-lane stretch through the woods when I see a big orange sign propped up in the middle of the road. "Detour," it says. There's a black arrow pointing off onto something that looks about half a step up from a deer trail. But the weather being so bad and all, I just figure it's drifting up ahead, and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation must know what they're doing, right? I turn onto the detour road.

Now this isn't one of your cla.s.sic straight-as-an-arrow roads mapped out by a cartographer with a degree from a big state school. It follows a creek bed. It twists and it turns and it doubles back on itself until you don't know if you're headed east, west, north, south or straight down. I was out of sight of the main road before I'd gone thirty yards. By the time I'd gone a hundred, I was beginning to think about turning around-if I could ever find a spot to do it. Eighteen wheelers aren't exactly known for their maneuverability.

Of course, I'm none too happy about what this is gonna do to my ETA. And "none too happy" becomes "downright p.o.ed" when I see a fella in the middle of the road up ahead waving his arms. A few yards behind him there's a rusty old Buick half-on half-off the road at a c.o.c.k-eyed angle. Looks like some Bud-happy yahoo couldn't handle the snow, and now it's up to old Ba.s.s to save the day . . . while ten a.m. Christmas morning gets closer and closer.

I'll admit it: There was a part of me that wanted to just keep on truckin'. But I guess all that "joy to the world" spirit of Christmas stuff was sloshing around in my head along with the Mountain Dew. I stopped.

I roll down the window and lean out and say, "What's the trouble, buddy?" To which the fella in the road has two interesting responses. One, he rolls down the stocking cap on his head so it covers his face. Turns out it's a ski mask. And two, he reaches under his coat and pulls out a revolver, which he proceeds to point in the general direction of my head as he walks over to my truck.

"No trouble here, 'buddy.' Unless you make some," he says.

I'm usually pretty good with the snappy comebacks, but this time I'll admit I wasn't up to the challenge. All I could get out of my mouth was something none too snappy like "Wha'?" or maybe "Huh?"

"Out," the fella says, waving the gun with three quick little jerks of his wrist. "Out out out."

Now I don't know about you, but my first inclination is to do what people pointing guns at me tell me to do. But just as my hand wraps around the door handle and I'm getting ready to climb down from my rig, I see lights flashing over the snow. Headlights. Someone's driving up behind us. Could be the state police. Could be some poor sucker about to get his head blowed off just cuz he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. Could be both.

I freeze.

Mr. Gun glances down the road toward the lights, then takes another step toward me.

"You deaf or somethin'?" he says. He c.o.c.ks the revolver. "I said out."

The lights are close now-so close Mr. Gun is lit up like he's up on stage at a girlie bar. Plain as day I can see his faded blue jeans and raggedy parka and muddy good ol' boy boots. And I notice that he's not the biggest buck in the herd and his hand's shaking maybe a little more than the cold would account for. And I start to figure that this here highwayman ain't exactly Jesse James. Which doesn't help whoever's driving toward us. This fella might not be a professional, but he's got himself a gun, and that can be enough.

The crunch of snow and gravel's getting pretty loud now, the lights are getting brighter, but Mr. Gun's still focused on me me me.

"I'm not kiddin' around here, you so-and-so," he says, except his language is a little stronger than that. "Get out of the ding-danged truck."

A beat-up red pick-up pulls to a stop behind him while he's saying this, and I figure this is when the shooting's gonna start. I'm getting ready to throw myself down on the floor of the cab and start praying for a miracle when I notice the orange Detour sign lying in the back of the truck. A heavy-set fella steps out of the pick-up and walks up to Mr. Gun. He's got himself a ski-mask, too. His has got "Campbell's Soup" written across the forehead and "M'm! M'm! Good!" on the chin. The mask is stretched so tight across his fat face the fabric looks like to rip, like maybe it's three sizes too small.

"What's going on here?" Mr. Soup says. Except it sounds more like "Whuz goin' on hee-er?" He's got him a Southern accent so thick you could make a mattress out of it.

"He won't get out of the truck," Mr. Gun says. His voice is high-pitched, nervous, and for the first time I notice his accent instead of just being hypnotized by his Smith and Wesson. Sounded like these two were Mountaineers-kid hillbillies up from West Virginia.

"Well, heck," Mr. Soup says, and he s.n.a.t.c.hes the revolver right out of Mr. Gun's hand. He steps up on the footboard of my rig and brings the barrel up under my nose. "This just ain't your night, is it?" he says, and a big grin stretches the fabric of his mask even further. "First truck we saw went whoosh-right by our little Detour sign. Didn't even slow down. The second one came down this way but didn't bother stopping to help my buddy here. On Christmas Eve yet! So we've been out here waiting a looooooong time. We're cold, we're tired and we want them babies. So just step out of the truck and I won't have to mess up your pretty face with a couple of bullets."

Now the more this fella talks to me, the more time I've got to stew on things. I'm not a brave man, but I can be a bad-tempered one, and a temper can make a coward do things a bona fide he-man hero would think was crazy. And I was getting madder and madder that these two holler-dwellers were trying to steal my rig after all the hours I'd put in-and with all the money I had waiting for me at the end of the haul. So I decided I wasn't going to make it easy for 'em.

"You say you want what now?" I say.

Mr. Soup's grin goes a little lop-sided.

"Cabbage Patch Kids," the former Mr. Gun-now Mr. Gunless, I suppose-says from behind him. "We know you got 'em."

"Cabbage Kids?" I say, giving Mr. Gunless a "What the . . .?" look. I turn to Mr. Soup and lower my voice. "Is he alright?"

Mr. Soup's smile has flopped all the way over into a frown now.

"Don't think you can b.s. me, mister," he says. "There's only one factory up that road that's still workin'. The toy factory."

"Yeah, that's right," I say. "I just dropped off a load of plastic there. I don't know nothin' 'bout any 'Cabbage Babies' or whatever it is you're looking for. Sounds to me like something you'd get in a grocery store."

I see a little fire kindle in Soup's eyes and I'm beginning to wonder if I've just made the biggest mistake of my too-short-by-half life when I hear Gunless say, "What are we gonna do?"

"He's lyin'," Soup says.

"What if he's not lyin'?"

"He's lyin'."

"What if he's not lyin'?"

"He's lyin'!"

"What if he's not lyin'?"

"He's lyin', you dot-dot-dash fool!"

Gunless goes all silent for a second. Then he says in a quiet kinda voice, "What if he's not lyin'?"

Soup takes in a deep breath. When he exhales, I get a nasty whiff of Cheetos and beer.

"We're gonna check," he says to his partner. Then he turns back to me. "And if you are lyin', I'm not gonna kill you with this."

He gives the revolver a little wave, then reaches up under his jacket with his left hand and fiddles with something. The hand comes back with a Rambo-looking hunting knife in it.

"I'm gonna kill you with this."

"There'll be no need for any killing," I say.

"We'll see about that," Soup says. "Now gimme them keys so we can open up this trailer and take a look."

Lickity-split, a plan forms in my head: I give the yokels the keys, then while they're in back checking on my cargo I hop out and slip into Soup's truck, which is still sitting there with the engine running.

Just as quick, Soup seems to have the same thought.

"Better yet," he says, "get on out of there and open it up yourself."

He steps away from the door, but he's still keeping that gun on me. I get the sudden feeling I've bluffed about as far as I can bluff and any more dilly-dallying is gonna get me a hole in the head bigger than the one I've already got.

"Alright, alright," I say.

I pull the keys from the ignition, open the door and slip out of the cab.