Page 37 of Shadow Ticket
“They made him up, he’s a make-believe department store critter—”
“Skeptical, ain’t you?”
“Billie the Brownieisreal, you never heard him on the radio?”
“WTMJ, weekdays at five.”
“Sure, the person who plays Billie on the radio is real but…maybe not Billie himself, not in…the same way that, oh, Walter Winchell is, for example.”
“Walter Winchell is real?”
It isn’t that Hicks enjoys mutually blank staring, though now and then he’ll find himself provoking some, like calling a time-out in a game, hoping to pick up a few meaningful seconds. Which doesn’t seem to be happening here.
“And…now we suppose you’ll tell us Amos ’n’ Andy aren’t really Negroes either.”
“Both white guys, sorry, didn’t you see the movie?”
“Check and Double Check, sure, two white guys in blackface.”
“Well, that was them. Can’t believe I’m the one you heard it from first.”
“And, and…Heinie und His Grenadiers, how about them, they’re not really Germans?”
“Standard-issue Americans, the whole gang, sorry.”
Here they are standing in the middle of downtown Milwaukee, holiday shoppers hurrying to and fro, having this discussion.
“Sorry, but somehow you boys don’t look like elves.”
“We’re not short enough?”
“Ears, he probably wants pointed ears.”
“That’d help, yeah, and aren’t you supposed to be in some kind of elf outfits or somethin too, you know, those hats you guys wear…”
“Only during working hours, at the moment we’re still off the clock, this isn’t official elf business.”
“Not like he needs to know, Sven.”
“Oops.”
“Could you give me some idea who this is from, at least?”
“Not unless you’re authorized to see the work order, which could put the Saint in something of a mood, just when he needs his wits about him, big delivery schedule coming up and so forth…”
“Wait, the name here, this isn’t me, this is for somebody else, you got the wrong—”
“Got to breeze, children all over the world to deal with, you understand.”
“You have a real Merry Xmas now, Mister Schultz.”
And like that, considering the tool kit of tricks available to elves, both of them have vanished. Hicks has begun to get funny looks from passersby. The package, however, is still there in his hands. Seems heavy for its size, which could always mean something interesting, maybe even a gold ingot or something. ’Course there’s interesting and there’s—
“Well, howdy there, Capitalist Scum, funny running into you again.”
Damn if it ain’t the same sawed-off Bolshevik striker Hicks didn’t manage to kill that fateful night not so long ago—
“Sure…been a while, never did catch your name…”
