Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes (2 page)

“They were wonderful,” she said. “The kids woke, as always, a little disoriented and confused. But they quickly came around and hopped on board to join me in flight, asking question after question as Galatea drew us on. Each had at least one talent; several, scads of them. But all were delighted at what I showed them of their future triumphs. One little girl, Bethany Zander from North Spokane, clapped her hands and said, ‘That’s me all right, that’s me all over.’ She'll be a gifted physicist.”

Santa’s bold round laugh boomed out. “Bethany’s pure gold. She’s got extra stars beside her name on my niceness list.”

Thus did Wendy unfold the highlights of her hundred visits to good little boys and girls, her words dancing over the crisp jingle of sleighbells.

Ahead, Santa spied the protective bubble that enclosed their community in the mildest of winters. “Thar she blows, darlin’. Home, sweet home. Magic time, off with you.” Santa’s gesture brought them out of the expandable time that allows millions of visits in a single night, a time used as well by the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the Sandman.

Fierce floods of snow flew scattershot against his team.

Galatea lowered her antlers into the storm, her nose’s powerful gleam transforming the flurries into a mad scatter of emeralds.

When they pierced the protective bubble, the snow turned at once random and feathery. Wendy pointed ahead in wonder. “Look, Daddy. We’re almost home!”

Their runners brushed the treetops, raising mist-clouds of snow dust behind them as they flew. A swirl of dark dots in the commons resolved into individual elves. Over the mica sheen of the skating pond Santa and Wendy passed, then over the elves’ quarters, the periwinkle-blue stables, and the workshop’s fire-engine red, swiftly eclipsed by the gingerbread house and the cottage where Santa and his family made their home.

Rachel and Anya waved excitedly from the porch.

Santa felt such love for them, Anya his mate since their mortal days in Myra, Rachel only newly come into their lives. Though he took much joy in his annual trip around the globe, to be parted so long from his beloved helpmates tempered that joy.

Santa yielded the lead to Wendy, coming in. One final sweep above his helpers, their shouts rising in fountains of elfin delight, and the runners swept down to kiss the snow and bring them to a smooth stop.

Swarming in, the elves lifted him and Wendy on a surge of hands. Thrice about they carried them, high above their heads, then wrestled them good-naturedly to the ground and at last brushed them off and delivered them to the fond embraces awaiting them on the porch. This, thought Santa, was surely heaven on earth.

Yet something nagged.

Something was out of place.

Try as he might, he could not fix upon what it might be. He reviewed his deliveries. Everything was in order there, no child overlooked, no gifts switched or omitted.

What was ever so slightly off?

Consternation bedeviled him.

Could Wendy have—?

But Santa suddenly found himself overwhelmed by visions of his darling children the world over, snug in their beds and being so perfectly behaved it sent wave after wave of giggles rippling through him. How blessed he was in his task of making them happy!

His momentary upset no more than the shadow of a memory, Santa surrendered to the sea of mirth that surrounded him.

* * *

The Tooth Fairy squatted near the twisted cedar at the northern tip of her island, pelted by raindrops the size of dimes. Water fell from her necklace of blood-flecked teeth, struck her belly, and trickled down her thighs.

Tonight, she had finished her visits early—the eating of teeth, the excreting of coins—and awaited now the return of her sons in their night-black Santa suits, their eyes brimming with lust, their throats disgorging tales of ruffian waifs chased down and gobbled up.

Taking in the gray horizon and the dull thud of waves, she raged against heaven’s constraints. Try as she might, she could not again cross paths with the miscreant who called himself Santa Claus. Since their affair, broken off eight years before, such path crossings had been strictly forbidden. Nor, in punishment for her misbehavior, could she feel, once inside their bedrooms, the least menace toward the brats whose teeth she claimed. Done and de-coined, outside their bedroom doors, only then was her hatred given free rein. But vile thoughts went no further than the thresholds of those doors, leaving the gap-toothed rug rats untroubled in their sleep.

Bitter triumph that.

Zeus had disallowed wicked thoughts toward children on the day he blasted her womb with thunderbolts. A moment later her imps, from Gronk to Chuff, had blatted fat, bloody, and deformed from her charred sex. But the moment Zeus vanished from the sky, she labored to defy his injunction. It had taken years. She had started on the island and gradually pushed the geography outward. Seven years later, her hatred stretched to the outsides of house. Six months more and the boundary had advanced to the bedroom’s exterior. Beyond that, her efforts had failed. It left her choked with fury.

Then there was the North Pole. Something was shifting up there. She could sense it. Stirring and perturbations in that inbred little community might give her ingress. If she could no longer have the once king of the satyrs sexually, then she would destroy him.

Pan had once been hers, seduced and ensnared when their paths crossed one Christmas Eve. With each secret tryst in home or hidden hut, he had regained the goatish desire of old and deceived the fir nymph Pitys, who had flesh-doughed into a withered kitchen wench of a wife. Then had come his denial of their lust, followed by his ardor for that Rachel mortal, a tantalizing taste disappearing down the Tooth Fairy’s gullet. She had turned the woman into a giant coin and made her daughter suffer. Then the big blowhard in the sky, Zeus hidden behind white beard and robes, had pressed Pan back inside Santa, de-satyrized the elves, unsexed the Easter Bunny, and plagued
her
with thirteen stench-ridden brats.

She had always detested children. But atop the mountain of despised brats crawled the vicious brood Zeus had got upon her.

A dark blot appeared on the horizon, a faint buzz in her ears. Its pattern of flight belonged to her firstborn, the sleekest of a fat lot, the smartest of her witless bastards. As he took on form, three more blots stained the gray dropcloth of the sky, then nine more.

Coming in, Gronk ripped off his blood-caked Santa suit and dropped to the beach. “Mother!” he exclaimed. So too Cagger and Clunch. So Quint and Bunner and Bay. So Prounce, Pum, Frash, Faddle, Zylo, and Zest. So likewise lackluster Chuff, her fattest, ugliest, and least engaged son, scorned by the others for his tepid embrace of evil. Each had brought her the leg bone of a child.

With their mommy they tumbled, suffering the pain she meted out and turning the sand red. When they had had their fill, they hunkered about her, dumb as posts.

“Boys,” she said, “I’m hungry for tales of mayhem.”

“Me first,” said Pum, “me first.”

Gronk socked Pum in the eye. “Firstborn first,” he insisted. “I bagged fifty urchins, Ma. I tackled the scurrying rats on the run and sucked terror from their skulls. In Bombay and Berlin, in Topeka and Tangiers, I grabbed them, tormenting and torturing and shoving them screaming down my gullet. The first was a big-boned beggar boy.”

The Tooth Fairy savored the details, repelled by the teller but caught by the tale. Chuff sat on the sidelines as usual, waiting his turn as the last teller while his brothers roughhoused for position. Eyes were blacked, flesh flayed, arm bones snapped and mended. “Hurt him,” she shouted as they tore into one another. “Hurt that scum bum.” She didn’t care who doled out or suffered injury. Violence trumped the niceties of identity.

At last the tales were told, including Chuff’s meager three child killings, which drew jeers and beatings about the head from the others. “Splendid, boys. Pain and death are the just deserts of every child. Theirs from the womb are the seeds of nastiness. The so-called good ones are simply better at concealing the blackness of their hearts. We’ll get to them, fear not.

“Does Mommy love you?”

“No!” they shouted.

“Do you love Mommy?”

“No!”

“Love is a fable,” she said. “What force binds us?”

“Hatred!”

“Rightly do we fear and hate our differences. Sink your claws deep enough into them and you reach a common denominator of blood. Cling to mayhem. Adore the fist. Gullet and gore first, then sleep. Right, boys?”

Brutish concurrence befouled the air.

“Pan’s got it good now. But we’ll seek out cracks in his smarmy little community and shatter it. We’ll goad his elves. We’ll destroy Wendy’s respect for him. Gone all harmony there. And gone all harmony on earth, what meager amount exists. Generosity of spirit? It shall scarce be remembered, let alone felt and acted upon. We’ll continue humankind’s well-advanced corruption. Do I want to avenge myself upon Pan, to goad his hidden nature into the open? Of course. But more than that, I would shatter the Sky God’s complacency, undermining his faith in his own creation. Do these goals seem too ambitious? I tell you, they are within reach. The time is coming. I can feel it. The time when the earth turns, when we topple the big blowhard in the sky and take control. Gone all hope, gone charity, fragile myths of goodness and redemption exploded everywhere.”

Dull though her boys were, at this their eyes glowed.

“So nurse your bile. Bicker and brawl. Stay in shape, my sons, stay attuned. This is thy nature, this the destiny of humankind.”

At that, they rose up and retackled their mother. And mayhem most foul again stained the strand, as rain fell upon them in smacks and stabs from a gray-black bank of clouds.

* * *

One of Santa’s helpers never frolicked on Christmas Day.

That one was Gregor, who sat slumped and glowering at his spotless desk. Engelbert and Josef were out there somewhere, compromising the dignity of their family. When they were gone from the stables, Gregor often sat here, his lantern casting its emerald glare across a clutter-free desktop and its foursquare, precisely positioned blotter. Sitting bolt upright in his office chair, he muttered and mulled.

“Something isn’t right with us. We’ve changed, and I don’t know why. It’s connected with the arrival of Rachel and Wendy. That much I know.” Gregor wrestled with eight years of memory loss, a loose tooth he was forever niggling at before turning to whatever currently vexed him. “Something very...untoward went on back then.
I
was okay. I kept my virtue. But aren’t all the elves virtuous? Hah! We are not.
They
were not. God robbed us of our untoward memories. But I sense a nasty lurker, around a corner my mind cannot turn no matter how vigorously it tries. They were sinners, their cover of simpering innocence blown.

“Happy? Of course, we’re happy. Servile, vapid, and bubble-headed happy. Why, if it weren’t for good old Gregor, chaos would reign. I’m the linchpin. Old Saint Nick, he’s just a big baby, fascinated by children and childhood. See how he looks at Wendy, a perfect age on the outside, but he’s not so sure about her growing up in her mind. He’d rather she remain an ideal eternal little girl. Anya and Rachel? Blindworms who encourage their jolly old hubby’s boyish nature. Well, if Santa won’t lead, I will. Step into the vacuum of guidance, impose order, regiment the busy bees, marshal our forces to take back those stolen memories.”

Gregor brooded.

An index finger moved toward his nose.

I will not, he thought.

But he did, a slave to habit.

Infuriating!

“We’re
all
doing this. The fools think they’re unobserved. But Gregor knows all. The nervous tic crept in about the time Rachel and Wendy showed up, after the untoward whatever-it-was. I watch them do it. Fingers that probe. Nose. Mouth. It’s disgusting. But I do it too. Heaven help me, I’m doing it right now—Gregor, the moral compass for this wayward band of elves. No one has seen me sinning, of that I’m sure. I’ve admonished some of them. Stop doing that, I insist. Keep that finger away from your nose. For the love of God, pay attention to what you’re about. Do they listen? Does it stick? It does not.

“Something more is needed to whip them into shape. But what?”

Gregor mulled in torment, rooting for a booger even as he berated himself.

Be strong, he thought.

Then the idea blossomed. Gregor thump-fisted his blotter. “I can do it. But wait, can I really? Or am I deceiving myself? This deserves careful cogitation.”

His eyes narrowed. There in the harsh lantern light, he dug and indulged, both his tormented thoughts and his probing finger. From fresh-strewn stalls came the shifts and settlings of Santa's slumbering team. But Gregor, deeply ensconced in fierce brooding, noticed it hardly at all.

Chapter 2. Things Ever So Slightly Awry

THE NEXT MORNING Santa was in fine fettle. At each workbench he had placed a copy of the year’s plans. They were ambitious, as always, but his helpers’ ability to reach and exceed whatever goals he set had never come up short.

He spoke extempore at the lectern, his note cards before him in a neat untouched pile. “Welcome,” he said, “welcome each one, you of skilled hands, gentle hearts, and great good humor. My multitudinous crew of cheerful companions, in this divine endeavor we are brothers all. There exists no greater joy than to be generous to children and so encourage generosity in them.”

Santa had become adept at hiding fear and anger since the day the Father had suppressed his Pan side. Fear that the goat god would reemerge or that the Tooth Fairy would once more try his virtue. Anger at her past outrages against his loved ones. These emotions were at times great within him, but always under his control. Still, he played the jolly old elf now, and was jolly indeed, inspiring his helpers and getting off to a grand start the new year of toymaking.