Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (26 page)

"He must be back at the North Pole one week before Christmas."

"Done."

"In perfect condition."

"Spanking clean and ready for action."

"So be it," said Santa. "He'll arrive on your island before daybreak. And Wendy—?"

"She's yours." The Tooth Fairy gave Lucifer a wicked look and twisted about to delve into her dead lover.

"One thing more," Santa said.

"What?" Impatience thundered in her face.

Santa tugged off his coat, wrapped it snug around Wendy, lifted her from the tombstone, thrust a hand into his pocket, and took out his prize. "You can have these back. I'm finished with them."

Hissing at him, the Tooth Fairy snatched the red lace panties from his fingers and pussied down onto her lover's aroused putrescence, twisting the wispy garment about his exposed neckbone in a grim parody of sexual strangulation. Santa's last glimpse of her, as he settled his precious, unresponsive burden before him on Lucifer's back and lifted into the air, was of her necklace knocking like a rattle of dice against the screaming corpse's chest as she bent to bury her teeth in his skull.

*****

Between his paws his bunnyhood grew rigid. His back right foot had begun to pound the packed earth of his burrow. The sharp high-pitched
meowl
s coming from the bed wove a stirring counterrhythm across the boom and thud of his thumps.

He felt good, very good indeed.

But just as he bent to touch the fat red tip of his sex to Snowball's pink privates, the earth rumbled. At once he straightened, perking up his ears. A ringing sang in his head, a jangling that made him slightly nauseous.

Then thunder sounded and the burrow shook. Giving out with a high treble squeal, he dashed wildly about, making for the door, hoping to reach open air before an earthquake swallowed his home. But as the archway gaped to let him into the exercise area, a flash of brilliance flared at the mouth of the burrow, growing in intensity as the jangle of sleighbells shrilled louder.

Through a pulsing ring of light burst the figure of a fat red rider on an antlered steed. Light swept in with them, swirling about them. And he saw that it was Santa Claus glowering down from Lucifer's back and looking like no Santa he had ever seen—harsh, shifty, full of muscle and meanness, not the soft and fuzzy elf he'd grown used to. The pale unseeing face of Wendy McGinnis poked up out of Santa's coat.

Terrified, he skittered backward into his bedroom. But the bells started up again with a raucous jangle and the solid wall of earth which kept him from his invaders dropped away like a curtain of dust. Lucifer charged through glowing motes of earth, bringing his master and the little girl through without a spot. The Easter Bunny cowered against the outer wall, trying to stay out of the vast corona of light which splashed through the bedroom, trying to avoid the fat elf's piercing glare.

Santa's eyes swept the room and whipped back to sting him with righteous wrath. The great hands lightly flicked the reins they held. Then Lucifer dashed into the air. Flattening himself against the wall, the Easter Bunny felt the sharp tip of an antler sear a line of fire across his face and the quick vicious punch of hoofs—front, back—pounding at his belly, bringing blood and pain welling up there. Santa swiped across the bed and lifted Snowball, unrestrained, up into his lap.

Holding his belly as the blood burbled from between his paws, the Easter Bunny sobbed bitter tears. "I'm sorry," he blubbered. "She made me do it. I'll be good from now on, I promise."

Santa reined in, hanging in mid-air, and looked back in scorn. "Shame on you! May you roast in hell for this!" Then he put bootheels to the sides of his mount and he and the girl and her still-protesting pet dashed away in a blur of color.

Gloom descended then upon the Easter Bunny. Dread, despair, emptiness. For hours he stood against the wall, sobbing and chittering as his flesh—but not his spirit, no never his spirit—healed. When at last he moved, it was beneath a weight of misery that would not be shaken off. He looked upon his hens with indifference, upon Petunia with loathing.

For weeks, guilt and shame filled his heart. He ate little and slept less. Thus his life limped along until Valentine's Day, when the Lord God Almighty Himself paid him a long-overdue second visit and relieved the Easter Bunny of his torment forever.

V. After the Storm

Sex is nobody's business except the three people involved.

—anonymous

Faith is under the left nipple.

—Martin Luther

The marriage supper of the Lamb is a feast at which every dish is free to every guest. . . . In a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restricted by law, than why eating and drinking should be—and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other.

—John Humphrey Noyes

14. A Time to Mourn

The weeks which followed were the saddest ever spent at the North Pole.

When Santa streaked out of the night, his elves were out in force, their faces turned upward to catch the distant
chin-chin-chin
of sleighbells. Pacing the porch in fret over his failed watch, Fritz was the first to spy the bright light of Lucifer's antlers parting the darkness above the trees.

"Here they come!" he shouted.

Anya threw up the sash of her sewing room window and leaned out. Wendy's pale face shone above Santa's folded hands. Her husband's features seemed gaunt and drawn, his hair wild and unruly.

Those nearest the landing swarmed about, reaching to steady Santa's mount. Some helped unclaw Snowball from Santa's pocket and set her down in the snow; she scampered off with Nightwind toward the skating pond. Others lifted Santa's red-and-white bundle down from the reindeer's back and conveyed her to Anya's arms. "Easy with her," Santa snapped. "She's had a terrible shock."

Wondering murmurs arose at this, and again when Santa whispered in Lucifer's ear, reached down to uncinch his saddle, and slapped his lead reindeer briskly on the rump, sending him bounding skyward again. Santa's shout rose up like a stern whipsmack: "And God help you if you're a day late in returning!"

Then Santa elbowed aside elf after elf, disappearing into the cottage with Anya and Wendy. Inside, Fritz drew a hot bath and heated some broth. The others stood in the commons, feeling relief at Wendy's safe return, horror at rumors of Rachel's death, and shock at the harsh demeanor that had overtaken their master. When Fritz reappeared on the porch, his features were drawn, his manner distracted. Choking back tears, he confirmed the rumors, saying only that the Tooth Fairy had killed Rachel and turned her to gold. "Wendy will live," he said, "but her condition is uncertain. She focuses on no one, says not a word, hears nothing, takes food sparingly. Santa and Mrs. Claus ask that we pray for her, and for her mother."

And so, with long faces and leaden hearts, Santa's helpers returned to their quarters. There they knelt by their beds, hands clasped, eyelids shut tight, lips moving in their beards. And when they had poured out to God all the love and concern they felt for Wendy and commended Rachel's soul to His keeping, they added a special prayer for the restoration of Santa's spirits and crawled beneath the covers, seeking in vain the solace that sleep brings.

*****

Santa leaned against the jamb of the bathroom door, arms folded, watching Anya bathe Wendy. The child's eyes stared straight ahead. Her arms and shoulders shivered as they had done throughout the return trip, though she was immersed, her head only excepted, in steaming bathwater. "So how long's the little—?" Stopping himself, Santa softened, let his arms unfold. "I mean, will she be all right?"

"We're going to be just fine," said Anya, a tinge of anxiety in her voice, "aren't we, Wendy?"

Wendy remained silent.

"Of course we are."

"Don't patronize her, Anya. Wendy's a strong girl, strong enough to deal with her own grief, surely."

With a wrung washcloth, Anya gently daubed away the streaks of blood around the little girl's mouth. When she asked if she might use her tongue on Wendy's wounded gums, the girl made no reply. But when Anya lifted her fingers to her chin to ease open her mouth, Wendy screamed and lashed out at her with such frenzy that Santa was forced to rush into the chaotic slosh and outfling of bathwater to help his wife soothe the girl.

Anya dried her and wrapped her in a warm robe. Santa carried her to the bed in the guest room and watched while Anya stood over her and kissed her and caressed her brow and wished her a good night. Then it was time to close Wendy's door, return to their bedroom, confront the blood-spattered walls and the huge gold coin lying atilt on the hardwood floor.

Since Santa's departure, Anya had avoided the bedroom. She wept anew in her husband's arms when she saw the pained engraving of Rachel's face howling up through the moonlight, her golden hands tensed to fend off death. "Oh Claus," she sobbed, "her pain hurts to look at." The object's obscene clarity rattled her, the shoulders and breasts and belly thrust into prominence, yet receding at the same time into the coin's artificial depths.

"I'll turn it away."

Santa righted it to vertical on its thick milled edge and slowly rotated the offending sight about; caught the obscenity of the obverse side; quickly turned it back to heads and rolled it like a warped cymbal against the wall, where he tossed Anya's blue knit shawl over it. But the cruel depiction of Rachel's lower body—the wrinkled soles of her feet, the splayed legs, the taut buttocks, and the wide golden gape of her vulva—burned into Anya's brain and caused her to weep the night away.

Santa alternately wept and scowled, confused by the oceanic struggle within. He did his best to soothe his wife
(the simpering bitch!)
beneath the covers, turning to stare for long stretches at the shrouded shape propped against the wall.

Strange ideas percolated in his head.

*****

Lacking Rachel's body, they buried the coin.

"It may help Wendy," Santa confided to Fritz the next morning. A large ledger lay open on the rolltop desk's ink-stained blotter. Santa's quill pen rested slantwise across one page. He had been making notes in an odd hand—not his usual florid script but one that looked runic, ancient, unwholesome. "It might help focus her grief if we hold a funeral, all of us gathered in the Chapel." Santa's voice had a rasp to it. "Along with that wretched coin, we can bury a good deal of Wendy's pain. It might snap her out of it sooner. What do you think?"

"Sounds like a good idea," said Fritz. He disliked the hard glare Santa sometimes fixed him with, as though he found him—found all of them—utterly despicable. Worse, he disliked the preoccupation that often claimed his master, his massive thumbs massaging erratic circles into the skin of his clasped hands, the corners of his mouth struggling against a smirk. Fritz noticed patches of coarse hair sprouting on the backs of Santa's hands.

"Fine!" Santa hunched over in his swivel chair and ticked off funeral preparations, drawing Fritz into what felt like a dark plot.

Fritz went at once to the workshop, where the elves sat glumly at empty workbenches, awaiting Santa's traditional opening speech to inaugurate another year of toymaking. He walked to the podium from which Santa usually spoke. In his piping voice, he gave them Santa's orders concerning the funeral.

Then, while a team of woodworkers bent to the manufacture of a pine coffin lined with red velvet, four feet and a tad more square, and the others queued up for armbands snipped from bolts of black-dyed muslin, four of the burliest elves—Knecht Rupert, Johann, Gustav, and flaxen-haired Franz the watchmaker—followed Fritz to the toolshed by the stable and broke out pickaxes and shovels. Silently through the snow they trudged, tools slung over their shoulders.

At the Chapel, Fritz paused and picked out a smooth patch of ground near the Altar. It was dappled now in sun and shade, but Fritz calculated it would be bathed in sunlight two hours hence. "We'll dig here," he said.

Johann and Gustav measured out the plot. Then Fritz watched his four friends swing their pickaxes through the air and break open the earth.

*****

Anya shrouded herself in magic time. For a time, she allowed nothing to exist but moving vistas of black cloth, her own nimble fingers, and the mind-numbing
mmmmmmmm
and
shutch-shutch-shutch
of her sewing machine. No thoughts or memories. Just the easy reliable thrust and withdrawal of a sharp silver needle. With the embracing slowness of eternal solitude, two black dresses and one black Santa suit furred in funereal gray took shape under her hands.

When they were completed, lying across her lap like three boneless bodies, she allowed normal time to surge back into her life. She put on one of the dresses and carried the other garments to Wendy's room, where Santa sat gazing at the sleeping girl.

Despite the depth of Wendy's slumber, she woke easily at Anya's touch. No discernible improvement. Anya helped her use the potty, washed her face, and brushed her hair, speaking softly to her all the while. While Nightwind and Snowball watched wide-eyed from the blankets, she removed Wendy's nightgown and buttoned her into the black dress. Then she told her that they would have a light breakfast before burying her mother in the woods near the Chapel.

Anya held spoonfuls of porridge to Wendy's mouth, cupping her other hand beneath the spoon to catch drips but being careful not to touch Wendy's chin. Wendy took apple juice in small sips the same way, and Anya lightly patted her lips with a napkin.

At a knock on the front door, Santa rose to let Fritz in. Since his return, there was a roll to her husband's walk, a hint of swagger. He had changed. He looked less chubby in the face, smiled rarely, spoke less often and sounded earthy and rough when he did. But then he wasn't alone, she thought. They had all changed. Odd how grief wore one down.

Low whispers sounded in the hallway. Fritz and a number of elves carried something angular and white, the coffin, past the archway and beyond. Some minutes later, they returned, slower now and struggling with the plain brass handles, the bells they wore on their caps and slippers sounding heavier as they paced.