Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes (34 page)

The second was the beginning of resentment, the first small wedge that signaled Pan’s return. Why couldn’t the Easter Bunny assume
his
share of pain? Why not Wendy, who could have monitored the implants as easily as he? Why not the mortals themselves? Why, instead of merely the spiritual emptiness attendant upon extraction, did they not suffer even the slightest discomfort? Something, anything, to take the edge off his one hundred percent suffering on their behalf!

Anger, resentment, and shame grew in Santa’s breast. And these feelings too were part of the torment he took on, which wasn’t simply the physical pain that went with the extraction, but the pent-up evil the sleepers had been poised to unleash upon waking, and on top of that, all of his feelings about them and Wendy and the Easter Bunny, about having to perform this task instead of staying home, comfy with his pipe and slippers, imagining the Easter joy being spread by that other great deliverer of goodies.

Take for instance, the Baptist minister Calvin Jurgens and his wife Betty, good souls as far as humankind’s compromised notions of goodness went. Their bedroom in Ashland, Ohio smelled of pressed flowers and pinched-off dreams. As Wendy stood by to give moral support, and the Easter Bunny hopped about placing chocolate eggs on their nightstands, Santa bent first to Calvin. The minister’s egg-seed pulsed with ill will. Its root tips wormed their way into a dream in which Calvin rehearsed remarks that would replace his prepared sermon. Santa was privy to it all, the pretense at non-interpretation of the Holy Bible, the selective dismissal, adoption, and distortive magnification of key passages, the equating of homosexual practice with lying and cheating, with murder and adultery and stealing and fornication. He heard too the words that would explode from this wretched pack of lies, that would incite the congregation, themselves turned in the night, to kill gays in God’s name, giving teeth to the Levitical injunction to put to death men who slept with men, and extending it to embrace lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered. Santa absorbed the whole bundle of judgmentalism masked in piety, which was but a fraction of the vileness in Calvin’s inverted egg-seed. Extracting the implant would not
begin
to address the waywardness of this man’s heart. What’s the use, Santa thought, and cursed himself for thinking it. Why should I taste the bitterness of this wretched fellow’s prejudices, the nastiness beneath his transparent veil of goodness? Why should
he
not suffer a little for his misguided choices?

Then Santa caught himself.

He recognized what he was about—the demeaning, the demonizing, the intolerance—and rejected it. The whole swirl of emotions tapped directly into Pan, not lending him power but making Santa aware that he lurked just below the surface. He began to question how far his generosity went. How shallow was Santa, how unendingly deep Pan? But that fear too was surely an illusion. He was all generosity, and by God he would prove it by continuing to take the weight of suffering upon his shoulders, house by house, sinner by sinner.

Still, the strain grew as the night progressed.

Then there was Wendy.

Sometimes, as they swooped toward a home, she would project its inhabitants’ coming nastiness. And when they flew away, she would project what had replaced it, to lift Santa spirits and to keep their task from seeming an endless, undifferentiated round.

But what also developed, because Wendy had not so long ago been mortal, was an aversion to the sight of her.

Surely this would pass, he thought. If it did not, the night’s effort wasn’t worth the candle. He was glad that they had taken their own sleighs and that he led the way through the night sky. More and more, he avoided eye contact with her. When she asked if he was all right, there was a barely perceptible pause before he marshaled his generosity and said, “Yes, dear.”

She was a good girl. Even at nine, and mortal, she had been very good indeed. But given the depths of wickedness he had plumbed this night, even in the young, he had to wonder what unworthiness lurked in
her
heart. Or in her mother’s. He already knew what lurked in his own.

Had his nice list grown so much longer than his naughty list merely because he hadn’t looked deep enough into mortal hearts? After tonight, could
any
boy or girl be counted nice?

Nonsense. There were countless homes he hadn’t visited, neither for insertion nor extraction, because not a trace of homophobia dwelt there. Ah but what of their other failings?

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry.

The qualities that moored him to his role as Santa Claus felt as if they were becoming unmoored.

No! Cling to generosity and all else would return. Did it hurt to give? Then he would increase his giving. Was the pain crushing? He would pile it on. Was there far more to forgive in mortals than he had ever guessed? Why then, he would forgive and keep on forgiving.

He knew he was slowing.

He pushed harder.

Fortunately, the Easter Bunny avoided conversation and kept his distance, tending to the placing of the Divine Mother’s eggs with a subtle smugness that grated only a little.

Santa had no idea if he would survive the night. But he was determined to go on, right to the last house. Like a roused bull, he lowered his great head and charged with a will into the unspeakable darkness before them.

Chapter 34. Heading Home, Heavy Laden

FINE. HE WASN’T WELCOME at the North Pole.

Santa had snubbed him. He had provided reasons in his visit to the burrow, though memory refused to divulge them. The Easter Bunny wore a sheen of shame and accepted that his sins, whatever they were, were irreversible and unforgivable, no matter how contrite he carried himself, no matter how changed he was.

But one’s emotional field is ever rich and loamy.

As he flew home in the pre-dawn hour for a well-deserved rest, the Easter Bunny flared with pride. Umpteen million chocolate eggs from the Divine Mother’s womb had he held and marveled at, sniffing them and caressing them and setting them beside as many homophobic mortals. Each such egg, unique in its perfection, had thrilled him. To hold such goodness between his paws, to leave a heavenly confection where each hungering soul would find it upon waking—what a privilege it had been to be the Divine Mother’s go-between.

Dare he say it? Why not? No one else was about, as he trailed a gaping wake of night air behind him. It had been a privilege as well to be in the presence of Santa’s suffering. For hide it as Santa might, he hadn’t been able to hide it at all. The robustious elf had grown dark and depleted, in physique and spirit, as he carried out his charge. His eyebrows bristled in all directions, his boots lost all sheen and buff, his suit had been soiled with the dust of dissolving nastiness. His chubby face grew gaunt and lined. His walk lost its bounce.

To watch it occur had been magnificent and terrifying.

He, the Easter Bunny, would not collapse in exhaustion when he reached home, despite tonight’s extra duties. The divine fires within were banked too high for that. He would dash about his burrow, trumpet his triumph to the hens, kiss every square inch of his abode, leap to the ceiling, dash again everywhichwhere, and return and regale anew his puzzled-eyed, rump-egged layers.

Santa? Only the Father knew what the pain would do to him. If indeed it dissipated, it might not do so soon enough. By the time the Easter Bunny had veered off with a farewell wave, Santa was swimming in aches, his face scandalous with hurt.

Speeding along, the Easter Bunny stroked the strap across his chest, feeling at his back the featherweight pouch. This sacred womb he would enshrine in his quarters, his first sight upon waking, his last before closing his eyes. He prayed for Santa’s survival and recovery, worrying what the world would be like if that recovery was slow in coming or Santa’s survival thrown into doubt.

But his heart was filled with too much joy to entertain these worries long. No more would he quiver in dread, having done what he had done this night. He had gulped down panic, embraced an impossible challenge, and seen it through. He had changed his itinerary, been nimble in his planning, and not missed a single house (he stopped, did a mental scan, and assured himself that this was so). If the archangel showed up to thank him, fine. If not, fine. The doing had been all.

Ahead, a familiar forest rose into view. The Easter Bunny put on a last burst of speed, scurrying along the treetops toward home and an exuberant, if solitary, celebration.

* * *

Wendy followed her stepfather’s sleigh through the gathering dawnlight, eager to entrust his care to Anya and Mommy. It was all she could do to stay back, as he had asked. Were they to travel side by side, her words might comfort him; instead she trailed after and fretted.

“What can I do?” she asked Galatea. “He’s so frail, every move so full of pain.”

Santa gave a half-hearted wave into the air and they were free of magic time, the halted flurries of snow now like a tunnel of white fury through which their sleighs passed. The bright lime beacon that beamed from Galatea’s nose lit Wendy’s way, and up ahead, Lucifer’s antlers pushed against the encircling storm with a blinding white light. Santa’s reindeer, taking their homecoming cue from the resumption of normal time, pounded the sky with renewed fury.

An idea occurred to Wendy.

At once, she scanned Jamie Stratton’s future and projected signal moments, majestic in size and sound, upon the surrounding walls of snow off to their left. Here walked Jamie and his future mate Tom, holding hands with the complete assurance heterosexuals take for granted, while passersby took no special notice. There sat a younger Jamie attending Mel White’s Truth and Reconciliation Conference, at which Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps gave speeches of contrition and were forgiven, Phelps emerging at long last from the deep closet he had so long hunkered down inside. They were afforded too a glimpse of Jamie in old age as he knelt at Tom’s grave, weeping for the rich life they had shared.

When the storm eased, Wendy let her projections vanish. Santa, with great effort, glanced back over one shoulder. His lips formed a thank you, though he had no wind to put behind his words. He turned again to face forward, starting to raise his whip hand, then thinking better of it.

In the distance, Wendy saw the lush green inside the temperate bubble that protected their community.

Almost home, and none too soon.

* * *

Zeus had declared the North Pole off-limits, the occasional lost elf-tooth unreachable since that injunction. Dead ahead, she spied Pan’s brat and, a quarter mile on, the satyr turned elf, fresh from undoing the Tooth Fairy’s mischief. No bedroom they visited had she been unable to enter, even those of budding homophobes with teeth under their pillows, so repulsive was the stench of sanctity that surrounded the chocolate eggs the Easter Bunny left.

From a distance she observed Pan falter in his sleigh. His suit was streaked with grime. His shoulders slumped. He was clearly weak and distracted; the girl, a healthy ways back from him, ripe for the plucking. This would be easy.

As soon as the lead sleigh pierced the bubble, the Tooth Fairy sped beneath the other, its runners coated with back-shooting arcs of ice. The hooves of the white-furred doe soundlessly pounded the sky. A soft keening whistle slipped along the sleigh’s underbelly, and the Tooth Fairy, matching its speed, made ready to snatch the child. Not too soon, not too late.

They were fast approaching the bubble. When the green glow of the reindeer’s nose touched and then passed through that barrier, the Tooth Fairy came up on the right and swooped in, grabbing the startled girl around the middle, tearing the reins from her hands, and plucking her off the seat so that the sleigh passed beneath them.

“What...?” began Wendy. But the Tooth Fairy clamped a hand over her mouth lest she call out and Pan, far distant, hear and turn about and try to save her. The empty sleigh, drawn by a heedless Galatea, hurtled onward toward the North Pole.

Chapter 35. Santa Claus Crushed

THE PROPORTIONS WERE all wrong.

As Lucifer’s glowing antlers led Santa’s thundering reindeer homeward, they seemed—these undying beasts that pulled him through the sky—monstrous in size, shape, and smell. The ground below was too white, sick and pulsing like flocculent pustules. The buildings glared red, blue, and green. And what caricatures of his helpers swarmed from the workshop, each looming large in his too-much-ness as the sleigh drew nearer. There sprinted Fritz, his limbs stretching like taffy, his garish hair matted and crushed beneath his cap.

All
of them moved like taffy. Had they lost their bones?

Santa’s vision blurred, then focused and blurred again. The reins felt like lead weights in his hands, which lay helpless in his lap. The reindeer knew the way, but surely he ought to guide them. He owed it to himself to make a grand entrance one last time. Summoning every ounce of will power, he raised his arms and tugged the reins this way and that, banking wildly, then correcting too far in the opposite direction. As he spiraled downward, exaggerated panic filled the faces below. Too wide, more like a palsied series of ellipses, his descent. The left runner hit first, oddly angled, almost tipping him out before it righted itself. Then the other runner rumped down hard, as the reindeer’s hooves thundered upon the snow-packed ground.

Every jar of the sleigh punished him further. Even the glide’s smoothness roused nausea in him. Though the sleigh came to a halt, it felt as if it continued, spinning and turning. Then the flesh of his helpers flowed in. They looked like little human beings, little sinning men in green—and their resemblance to mortals repulsed him, even as he knew their kind intent.