Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes (17 page)

He quickly surveyed the dreamers one by one. Their souls were of course misshapen in many ways. But in generosity toward homosexuals, he fully expected leaps and bounds. Not so. Something had envenomed them there. Even as he watched, their souls fell into ever-increasing fear and hatred.

“It’s gone awry,” he said anxiously. “Oh, why did we ever start this?”

“Calm down, Daddy. There’s got to be an explanation.”

Rising in his seat, Santa sent great urgency along the length of his whip. “Take us down without delay!” he commanded, calling Lucifer and the others by name. And down they went, so fast that Wendy said, “Whee!” and Santa said, “Whoa!” Through a ferocious snowstorm they plunged, protected as always by a bubble of calm and warmth. When they touched down in the barren wastes of the Yukon, Santa threw wide the mantle of magic time and shouted, “Michael!”

The storm went instantly still. Arrested flurries speckled the air with white feathers. At once the archangel appeared in all his glory, streaming light, his wings white and magnificent behind him.

“To what do I—?”

“Look at them,” said Santa. “Just look at the state of our visitants’ souls. They’re getting worse. I knew I was out of my league with fallen grown-ups and a compromised twelve-year-old. My rage has backfired. Or they’re too ensconced in their old ways to change. Erase our visits. Reverse them. Can you do that? Back out our clumsy interventions. Or mine, rather. Wendy was the soul of patience with them.”

“I’m sorry,” said Michael, “I can’t reverse or erase or back out anything. Only the Father can do that.”

“Well then ask him!”

“Let me examine them. Ah! It’s the Tooth Fairy. Her and her imps. They’ve somehow managed to penetrate the dreamscape and counter its effects. The mortals have retreated in panic to the safe haven of prejudice.”

Santa didn’t like the look on the archangel’s face. “You can fix them, can’t you?”

“Please say you can,” pleaded Wendy.

Michael shook his head sadly. “Your final visit has got to do the trick. Everything depends on appealing to their childhoods. Once you’ve persuaded them one hundred percent, she’ll be powerless against them. Oh but, good Lord, she’s convinced them you’re demons who only
seem
nice. Boy, you two have your work cut out for you.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Santa, his brain on fire. “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

“Hold on,” said Michael. His effulgent brow momentarily darkened with thought. “She’s trumped us. How can we trump her? I don’t want to bring in God if I don’t have to. He’s pretty busy. And he would probably say no. Besides, he wouldn’t have entrusted me with this task if he didn’t think....Wait! That’s it! I’ll enlist a recruit.”

“A recruit?”

“Of course.” Michael grew suddenly animated. “You were planning to appeal to the innocence of childhood anyway. Who better? And the Tooth Fairy hasn’t yet tainted his image. Stay right here. I have to make sure he’s willing.”

“Make sure
who’s
willing?”

“Back in a flash.” The archangel vanished.

Santa huffed. “Wonderful,” he said. “Here we are, stuck in a blizzard, our mortals compromised, our task derailed, and he tells us to wait. I’m beginning to think we’ve been bamboozled by an incompetent.”

“He’ll be back, Father, I know he will,” said Wendy, giving him a hug. “Don’t give up hope. That’s not like you. He’s bringing reinforcements. He’s an archangel. I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”

“Reinforcements,” said Santa, distraught. “We’ll wait. For your sake, we’ll wait.” But despair and dread and a distinct lack of
ho-ho-ho
were all he felt.

* * *

That evening, the Easter Bunny retired early to his burrow.

On the anniversary and at the very spot of God’s visit here eight years before, he always spent a quiet evening counting his blessings. This he followed with a full day of giving thanks, loudly and joyously before his hens and his perpetual and mercifully noiseless machines, making great leaps about the burrow, in his quarters, in the exercise area, and in the clearing near the burrow’s mouth. Every year, without fail, the forest floor brimmed with crisp noisy leaves, red, yellow, and brown, among which the Easter Bunny would kick up raucous shufflings of jocundity and thanksgiving.

He truly had much to be thankful for. Uncountable years—well, all right, coming on to two thousand—of delivering Easter baskets. A maintenance-free environment. Zero commute. And a central role in the celebration of Christ’s resurrection and of course (though this was mostly hush-hush) of the pagan fecundity rites Christianity had absorbed. But surely the thing he had most to be thankful for was the Father’s visit to his burrow.

He knew his memory of that event had been severely altered. But that didn’t matter. Yea, though the visit had lasted an hour—dare he hope it had?—were he to recall but one second, nay the thousandth part of a second, such special attention from the Almighty would have made his life a supreme satisfaction entire. But he remembered far more than a second. Indeed he did. He had nestled in the divine palm, and God had praised the efficiency and appropriateness of his deliveries, the early spring happiness he brought to little boys and girls.

To be sure, there was a gap in his memory, something which, were it known, he ought to spend eternity repenting for, a terrible misdeed whose specifics escaped him. But whatever that elusive ugliness was, it paled before the privilege of having been created by the Father and walked through these quarters so many centuries ago, and then of having him drop in again so recently. Though eight years had passed, the sweet scent of divinity still infused the burrow’s every chamber and expanse. The hens had begun to lay more vigorously, their eggs more precisely ovoid than ever, the designs upon the shells ever more impressive as they rolled down the ramps into vast unfillable bins.

So here he sat in the always-crisp straw of the exercise area, wide-eyed, dagger-eared, wet-nosed, his front paws in parallel before him, his back ones flat beneath the tense curve of haunch and thigh. In the distance, the machines hummed and the eggs knocked along like unspherical billiard balls, rolling end over end down the switchbacks of perfectly maintained ramps. This was the sound of divinity, the sound of childish glee not quite unleashed but soon, soon. To its rump and roll, the Easter Bunny contentedly counted his blessings.

Think then with what wonder it was that a change in the light, a fresh waft of divine perfumes, the hint of wings, of shoulders, of an angelic eye and face and form, quite enraptured our meditative if high-strung rabbit. His eyes grew wide. His nose twitched. His tail dust-mopped furiously in the air. A back leg stirred, a foot began to thump.

And when the form clarified itself—a boyish figure berobed in white, wide-winged, wanton-locked, a beatific smile upon its face, its golden halo nearly brushing the dirt-curves of ceiling, the soles of its feet suspended inches above the floor—why, the Easter Bunny simply had to burst free, to racetrack madly about his exercise area, stopping for a quick roll in the dirt and a vigorous gnaw upon scraps of bark, only to leap up and resume his frenzied career once more.

“Blessed art thou, best of bunnies,” said the angel. That froze him where he was. “For thou hast been chosen to serve the Lord in yet another way.”

“You mean,” he asked, “other than my Easter chores?”

“I do. For I am Michael, of archangels the highest, who stayed the hand of Abraham when his sacrificial knife touched the throat of his son Isaac, who routed the army of Sennacherib, who leads the souls of the dead to the afterlife. From my tears are the cherubim formed. From my breath do autumn leaves take their dying, drifting downward to scatter and scoot below.”

“Do tell.”

“There is a task,” he continued. “A task begun by Santa Claus and his stepdaughter Wendy. You must, if you will, help them see this task to completion.”

At the names the archangel spoke, panic seized the Easter Bunny. His mouth went dry. Unfocused shame welled up in him. What was it? What had he done? And how had this girl and her stepfather figured into it? He was heartsick. How could he possibly accept the angel’s charge if it meant having to collude with Santa Claus and Wendy? She had a cat, two cats, this girl. How did he know that?

“No, really, it’s impossible. I couldn’t possibly join those good souls in a task of
any
kind. We operate in such different spheres, in the service of completely different holiday traditions, don’t you see?”

The angel simply gazed upon him with love.

“On the other hand...I would be honored to accept, and I do.”

Who had said that? Yet how could he say otherwise?

Michael beamed. The Easter Bunny, filled to the brim with panic, was also flooded with relief. He warred and worried, the joy within him leaping as great as the dread that weighed him down.

Then the angel, in florid phrases, filled in the outlines of what lay ahead. His task involved visits to mortals, bringing them in touch with the purity of their childhoods, all for the sake of one boy, Jamie Stratton, eight years old, happy now, but headed, as he aged, for shipwreck on the shoals of societal mishap.

The Easter Bunny nodded and said he was most effervescently eager to be enlisted in God’s army of the righteous. And so he was. But it was also true that he inwardly cowered and flinched and trembled at the thought of working with Santa and the child. What dread memories would be dredged up at the sight of them? Would they shun or denounce him? Would they expose and shame him, casting him forever into disfavor with the Almighty? Ah but the Almighty, who knew all, had not taken away the demi-paradise in which the Easter Bunny lived and worked and had his being.

Be calm, he thought.

He nodded, and listened, and watched the archangel vanish, and waited in dread and longing for the red-suited, black-booted, white-bearded benefactor of children to sweep down before the burrow and gather him up.

Chapter 18. Innocence Triumphant

“WHAT DID MICHAEL MEAN, the Easter Bunny has changed?” asked Wendy.

Santa’s lip line was tight as he overlooked his galloping reindeer and Lucifer’s glowing antlers. “More docile, I hear. Not as nasty as he once was. More worthy of delivering baskets to decent homes.”

“When was he ever
not
worthy?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Why doesn’t he visit the North Pole?”

“He used to. Now it’s forbidden.”

“But why?”

Santa looked at her, then forward again. “It would upset your mother. It would upset Anya and me. Someday I’ll tell you why, but not now.”

Santa’s tone gave Wendy the creeps. But she knew enough to press the point no further. Maybe she would ask Mommy when she got the chance. She tried to recover the thrill she had felt when Michael told them he had enlisted the Easter Bunny’s aid. She had clapped her hands at that and squealed with delight, only to see Santa grow pale and his eyes widen in disbelief.

“Why him?” he had asked the archangel.

That’s when Michael told them the Easter Bunny had been utterly transformed, in the twinkling of an eye.

An assurance. But of what?

“We have to assume,” said Santa, “that the archangel knows what he’s doing. That he’s not an incompetent bumbler making an absolute hash of things. We’ll try to have faith in that at least. Ah, there’s the place.”

“Where?” Wendy saw only a dark sea of unbroken tree tops. Then suddenly there appeared a clearing and the entrance to an underground burrow. They swooped down and came smoothly to a stop near the entrance.

“Bunny!” shouted Santa. “Look lively. We haven’t got all night.”

Nothing.

Santa hauled back to shout again when a furry head with long pink ears popped out of the entranceway. He blinked once, then bounded into the clearing to stand an impressive eight feet tall, ten if you counted the ears.

“Good evening,” he began, “and may I say what a great—”

“Get in,” said Santa.

Wendy was stunned by her father’s rudeness.

“I’m Wendy,” she said, thrusting out a hand. One of them, at least, would show some manners.

When the Easter Bunny raised his paw, Santa said, “Don’t touch her! I told you to get in. There in the back.”

“Father, where are your...?” She gritted back her anger and her upset. “Shake, Mister Rabbit.” Wendy seized his paw and shook it, thrilled to be meeting this warm and generous creature at last. Many were the Easter baskets he had left at her home in Sacramento. Though monstrous in size, he was the soul of gentleness. “With your help, we will save little Jamie’s life. It’s a privilege to be working with you, kind sir.”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” said the Easter Bunny.

He nearly tipped the sleigh over getting in. He squeezed himself into the back seat where Santa’s bulging pack rode on Christmas Eve. “It’s a tight fit,” he said.

Santa cracked his whip and shouted, “Up with you, my four-footed beasties!” The team shot skyward with such abruptness that Wendy’s head angled up and her back pressed against the lacquered seat.

“Whee!” said the Easter Bunny.

“It’s fun, isn’t it?” said Wendy, looking over her shoulder.

“Goodness, yes.” Silence. “May I say again how grateful I am to be on this mission. I’ve seen plenty of mortals of course, sleeping in their beds and...and so forth. But I’ve never spoken to them, and I must say little ants of anticipatory joy are crawling up and down my spine at the prospect.” Silence. “If I may be so bold, I sense a wee bit of discomfort emanating from the driver of this magnificent vehicle. If I have done aught to offend, and I have the vaguest feeling I have, I humbly and profusely apologize. We are none of us perfect—”

“What you did is beyond apology.”

The hairs rose on the back of Wendy’s neck.

“So don’t even try.”