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Red's Christmas
| Article
# : |
17174 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
3,807 Words |
| Author
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James Randall
James Randall has written for McGraw-Hill's Data
Communication. He is currently working on a novel entitled
Mama's Boy. |
Jets of flame bursting above the oil tanks illuminated the creeping geometry of elevated piping systems flanking the New Jersey Turnpike. Like other travelers that cold Christmas Eve, we had to run the gauntlet of this petroleum-age inferno to pass around New York City en route to a family Christmas on Long Island.
The kids had long since exhausted their mother's patience. All three of them - Nancy Louise (nine), Margaret Ann (eight), and Amy Elida (seven) - had lost interest in the passing nonscenery and had begun punching each other.
I was peering out the window into the deepening gloom ahead. Behind me, the great copper disk of the dying sun poised momentarily between the airport's tarmac horizon and the gray snow clouds beating in from the west before vanishing behind the horizon.
A state trooper's cruiser drifted up on my left, tilting hard on his left wheels. I tapped the brakes slightly, a conditioned reflex. My brake tapping caused a silent, ominous pull to the right.
Twilights would be brief, and there surely would be snow before morning. "No place to get stuck," I muttered, thinking of the desperate straits a motorist might find himself in with a disabled car on Christmas Eve on the outskirts of Newark.
I tapped the brakes a second time. Same slight pull to the right. My dozing kids and my distracted wife seemed to come alive all at once. "Is something wrong,
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