Fritz had seen their work suffer. The very work they were now engaged upon, these replicas, suffered. Santa had put him in charge of them. He had remonstrated with his colleagues. To an elf, they had nodded eagerly. But nothing had changed.
Their toymaking suffered as well. Morale had plummeted. Yet Santa seemed not to notice. Or if he did, he minimized the problem. Why didn’t anyone tell him what was going on? Fritz had asked Herbert this very question.
The flaxen-haired elf, wordless as always, simply shrugged.
But Fritz knew why. To tell was to be too much like a spy, an informer, a snitch. Too much like Gregor. Besides, Santa was a little boy at heart. He hated having to deal with discord. He expected things to run smoothly, as they always had.
Fritz applied cherrywood stain to the dresser. There rose from the replicas a righteous racket of planing and sawing and hammering. Herbert and three co-workers were busy painting the walls of the Beluzzo replica a lemon-peel yellow. On occasion, Herbert glanced over at Fritz and they exchanged significant looks. They had grown more careful, their stolen moments of intimacy far more discreet. It had once been easy to slip away. But in the poisoned atmosphere that now surrounded them, they had grown stealthier.
Fritz disliked that, and so did Herbert.
They could have cut it off entirely. But Fritz would be damned if he’d give up the pleasure of their trysts to feed the ego of a self-righteous prig like Gregor. Yet as soon as he thought that, he berated himself for thinking ill of a fellow elf.
Then his anger took wing, anger over Herbert’s unmerited dismay, the communal chaos, Saint Nicholas’ willful blindness, everyone’s ingrained inability to confront Gregor’s egregious behavior, and his own impotence in the face of tyranny, a state he had once believed could never take hold at the North Pole.
Fritz sighed. How far they had fallen.
But what could he do? Then he brightened. I know, he thought. I’ll have a few words with Gregor. In private. Surely he mustn’t understand the impact of his actions. Maybe a talk, maybe the gentlest nudge, would persuade him to call off this nonsense.
I’ll do it. I will.
But when he imagined himself crossing the commons, when he pictured flinty-eyed Gregor staring at him as he approached, his limbs grew cold, his resolve flagged, and everything seemed more hopeless than ever.
* * *
A dreamscape shared by four dreamers tends to be far more stable than your typical solitary one, especially when it has been designed by the angels to reinforce righteous behavior.
Kathy and Walter Stratton found themselves holding hands as they floated into this particular dreamscape. They had on long white flannel nightgowns, not at all what they usually wore to bed. On either side, in similar attire, lazily drifted the Reverend Taylor and a wide-eyed teen whose name Kathy somehow knew was Matt. He slipped his hand into Walter’s as the preacher took Kathy’s hand. Her mood was jubilant, the air balmy and rich with oxygen, the clouds surrounding them full and wispy by turns.
“There they are!” exclaimed Matt.
Kathy looked, and Santa Claus, Wendy beside him in the sleigh, passed below the dreamers waving. Behind them, a full-to-bursting sack of toys, suede leather stretched and poked out at odd angles, threatened to spill its abundance over the sides of the sleigh. The four of them fell toward that sack, whose puckered top unthonged and peeled open. But instead of sleds and stuffed stockings and gaily wrapped and beribboned gifts, the glorious green and blue earth revealed itself.
Over it they sailed, marveling. For the sights and sounds and smells came to them as if for the first time, sharp, full, and vivid. Here was the white of a heron in full flight, there the slap and retreat of surf on a briny beach, the scent of a pear as it ripens and falls to a squirrel’s prodding, the red-brown fur of that squirrel as it stares and nibbles and tenses and darts treeward from the ground. Below them, the earth yielded and gushed, vegetation spreading forth in joyous riot, birds flying out of it in formation, the seas replete with crab and mussel, with dolphin, minnow, and whale.
“Such abundance,” marveled the preacher, to which Kathy said, “Yes.”
They came to light on a high hill. As their feet touched ground, there sprouted from the burgeoning earth the entire race of humanity, busily buzzing about. But what was odd in Kathy’s eyes was the contrast between the abundant earth and humanity’s self-imposed restraints. For she could see deep into every living soul. And that same abundance lay at their foundation. Generosity flowed in their veins. It infused the marrow of their bones. Yet a certain gloomy ugliness clamped down upon them by common consent, by conspiratorial fiat. A rich confusion of words swarmed about them and enwrapped their skulls in a stew of divine babble. Some who dove into it resurfaced with delightful concoctions, with dances upon the tongue and music. But others, hobbled by fear or laziness, wrenched ill-formed dicta from it, ground imperfect lenses in haste, and clamped filters on their unfiltered senses. Into tribes they clustered.
“They shouldn’t do that,” scolded Walter.
But the moment he said it, the dreamers picked themselves out of that same roil of humanity and saw that they were acting with just as much foolishness as any of the others. “Wow, there I am,” said Matt, “shuffling through fog.” And so he was, his potential for limitless goodness quashed by his own dim vision and by signals coming from his family, his peers, and the surrounding herd. “Wake up!” he screamed. But for all the notice his observed self took, he might have been a ghost.
Below them unfolded all of human history. Brutality held sway. In painful clarity, each brutal act rasped and unrolled—rapes, wars, words unkind diminishing their intended victims, the barbs and insults which throttled vitality and encouraged resignation and despair. Feints at goodness threaded tentative through the inertia, pockets of creativity and kindness too often discouraged and crushed. “It’s human nature,” came the phrase. “What are you going to do?” But it wasn’t human nature at all, not the underlying nature evident in babes-in-arms and in those rare souls who reveled in creativity, not in Michelangelo, Mozart, or Shakespeare. Works of art, even those that depicted strife, celebrated life in all its abundance and variety. From the simplest elements emerged a complex of delightful patterning, an acceptance and embrace of what was falsely perceived as alien.
But the thunder of destruction, wanton blasts that shattered the work of centuries beneath a moment’s fist—these made a mockery of human nature. And they were so pervasive, it was an easy temptation to mistake them for the embodiment of natural humanity.
Then things froze and began to roll backward.
“It’s reversing,” said Kathy, “the whole sorry mess.”
Indeed it was, landmines unplanted and disassembled in factories, soldiers taking back death and undeploying home, grown men and women youthening through childhood and babyhood into the fetal clutch, then deflating and splitting to sperm and egg, which likewise disappeared into the organs of degeneration. Bombed towns were unbombed, reconstructed in an instant as corpses rose to life and walked backward out of their upraised looks of terror into indifference, benignity, or the dry dead mull of judgmentalism. Advancing fashions reversed. Michelangelo’s brushes sucked up and repotted the paint that moistened on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Beethoven lifted stroke by stroke his Ninth Symphony from depopulated staves, tucking the glory of one masterwork after another back inside his cranium, which burgeoned enriched with anticipation a-dying. And on it went.
“We’re headed for Golgotha,” said Ty. “They’ll spare him, it’ll be the turning point, he’ll live forever, growing in power. The course of history will change.” And as soon as Ty said that, the dreamers shifted into myth. For dream logic tends to oblige. Golgotha it was. And indeed, instead of condemning Yeshua to crucifixion, Pilate recognized the avatar of God and yielded all power to him. And time began moving forward again. But with what a difference!
For his gentle love infused all it touched, so that they lived up to
humankind’s highest ideals. And Christ laughed to see men and women utterly transformed in an instant. And that laugh rolled on as a soft steady underpinning for future events, so that the dreamers witnessed divine acceptance and embrace, a celebration of the magnificent diversity of humanity sweeping through the generations to the present moment. In this revised history passing before them, there were no wars, no weapons, no spite, but only creativity and cooperation, the banding together of people without mad grasps at power, without lording it over anyone—all of that fell away, and generosity flourished in every soul.
With that, the urge to awaken took them. Feeling light, they rose from the hilltop. And back into the burgeoning sack the earth slipped. Its puckering top thonged shut.
“Wait,” said Kathy.
Wendy waved and Santa winked. “We’ll see you shortly,” he sang out, as reindeer hoofs pounded divots from the sky and antlers bobbed to and fro like thickets of branched lightning.
Leaving Kathy and Walter, the boy and the preacher drifted upward. And all four sleepers eased into their slumbering bodies and a state of wakeful anticipation.
* * *
When Gronk bumbled home, the Tooth Fairy was sitting at the mouth of her cave, her bedroom visits concluded, glaring seaward and munching on a bowl of molars gathered from a midnight round of grave robbing.
While freshly drawn teeth from young jaws always resulted in spit-shiny, spanking-new coins, these teeth, depending how long the corpses had lain aground, produced coins that showed degrees of wear and tarnish, the serrations tire-tread thin, the edges crimped or jagged, the sort of coin that mortals withdrew from circulation and melted down. After eons of such molar munching, there fell away from the cliff upon which her great chair perched a perilous slope of metallic offal.
Ordinarily this was his mother’s private domain, a place Gronk avoided as off-limits. But she had insisted he find her wherever she was. With great trepidation he alighted, graceful as a rubber boot flung upon a wharf, at her side.
She continued munching and ruminating, acknowledging not in the least his presence. Gronk waited, listening to the crunch of bone upon bone, watching her swallow, wanting and not wanting her to punish him for his trespass, to deliver the hurt that reassured him he was alive.
At last, still staring into a troubled sky, the Tooth Fairy said, “Your report?”
“He’s out there all right, him and his little girl,” said Gronk, “by the authority of God Almighty, through the agency of the archangel Michael.”
“Zeus the skirt-chasing thunderbolt-hurler, and Hermes his fleet-footed trickster and psychopomp, you mean. Go on.”
Gronk told her that Pan and his daughter had visited a preacher, a bully, and the parents of an eight-year-old boy. They intended three visits, he said, the first just finished in which the mortals had been shown scenes from recent days.
“To what end?” she asked.
Laying a hand on one of her armrests, Gronk told her they wanted to deflect, soften, or eliminate the mortals’ homophobia, so that the boy would not kill himself eight years hence. Moreover, he said, after each visit, these mortals would share a dreamscape designed to further Pan and Wendy’s ends.
Gronk’s report so increased the Tooth Fairy’s indignation, she threatened to explode into random violence. But when he mentioned the dreamscape, his mother calmed considerably. “Reinforcing Zeus’s message in the land of dreams.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“This holds promise.” Gronk held fire as she mulled. “Go back. Continue your mission. If we’re lucky, I see an opening.”
“What opening?”
She turned her fury on him. “I give orders. You obey. Get that stinking hand off my chair! In good time, if there’s anything to tell, you and your miserable brothers will be told. Now go.”
She grabbed him and Gronk was hurled skyward, grateful for her touch and sailing off, but not before he watched her stride into her cave, buff, muscular, and hatching some scheme to exact revenge on Santa Claus and his brood of do-gooders at the North Pole.
Chapter 13. A Bully Further Softened
FROM TY TAYLOR’S HOME, Santa and Wendy circled the globe, gazing through magic time’s soft glow upon cityscapes caught beneath moonlight or all abustle with daylight pedestrians frozen in mid-step. Over shantytowns and mansions, over the homeless and the homed, the desperate and the contented they flew, remarking to one another about the sights below.
Santa thought it grand to be sharing this special mission with Wendy. He so adored sharing his sleigh with her, letting her take the reins at times. She was in so many ways a lovely nine-year-old, feisty, innocent, and utterly childlike; yet she was also in full command, as one venturing over the dawn line of womanhood tends to be. That was good to see, though truth to tell it raised a teensy bit of anxiety in him. Children far distant from adulthood were so much easier to love.
They spoke of the special aura that had surrounded the archangel Michael and how wonderful it was to be doing something to save Jamie Stratton, whether they succeeded or no.
“Are you happy?” asked Wendy.
A curious question. It meant she had sensed his distress at touching the lives of grown-ups.
“Very,” he said, and that was in part true. No cause to raise alarms in her. Perhaps, thought Santa, they wouldn’t need to continue these visits at all. Maybe the dreamscape would finish the job and Michael would materialize and tell them to go home, there was no need to suffer proximity to the fallen any more. Ah, but that was his anxiety talking.
“Our dreamers are doing okay,” she said. “Have a look.”
Giving Lucifer his head, Santa observed them dozing, their spirits deep in dream. They seemed to be softening nicely. It was appalling how hardened mortals grew, with how much eagerness they embraced calcification after the freedom of childhood. But their shared dreamscape seemed to be reversing that process. As a chicken bone in vinegar softens and bends, so the perspectives of the dreamers expanded beyond the rigid, blinkered, rulebound views they had cobbled together out of communal prejudice and doctrinal lies. Even the bitter child, Matt Beluzzo, had begun to see beyond his broken family and the traps that hobbled his mind.
Though the first visits had proved a trial, Santa had high hopes for the remaining ones. One misstep did not determine an outcome. He still had time, if he could only keep his Pan side suppressed, to approach persuasion persuasively. He would make Wendy proud. He would deliver on the task the Father had given them. More important, he would save, nay enrich if he could, the life of this good little boy. Gifts of toys and Christmas cheer were worthy indeed, but far worthier the lifting of sorrows unto death.
It would most certainly transform his annual giftgiving. As much as he gloried in his Christmas deliveries, so much more joy would he derive, having explored in detail one boy’s life and yes even the lives of his principal tormentors. Every grown-up had once been a child. Go back as far as babes-in-arms to find unspoiled innocence if you must, but there it was. At their very core, there it was. And it could be tapped and brought forth. It might infuse their lives, breaking the cold hard grip of habit and letting the Christ inside emerge into open air.
It was possible, he thought. I know it is. I can do it. My Pan side can be damped down.
And through the night sky, headed for Matt Beluzzo’s bedroom once more, sailed Santa Claus, laughing to beat the band, cracking his whip, and hugging Wendy, as the sleigh left a wide swath of radiant joy in its wake.
* * *
With the Beluzzo replica near completion and the Strattons’ well under way, Fritz trudged through the alpenglow of magic time toward the stables, his slippers ovaling ice-blue pits in the new-fallen snow.
He pictured himself knocking and being grudgingly ushered in for intense conversation with a fellow elf who would quickly come to see the error of his ways. Instead, Gregor stood at the half-door, arms folded, glowering out on the commons with utter grump and scowl. An eyebrow rose on his dee
ply etched face, his eyes flaring outrage that anyone dared approach unbidden. It gave Fritz pause.
“Hi there, Gregor,” he said, with half a heart.
The eyebrow arched higher.
“May I come in?”
“Hmph.”
“Ah, I see. You want to be contrary. All to the good. Well, I guess we can talk right here. Nice door, by the way. I’ve got to hand it to you, the stable’s always spotless. So, listen, you know, your lectures at the Chapel, they...they’re well intended, it’s clear. But honey attracts the cheerful flies of compliance far better than vinegar, I think that’s how the saying goes. Your fellow elves are for the most part simple folk. They need encouragement. Praise. Now you take shame and fear. They don’t motivate at all. They feel bad too. They end up having a contrary effect. See what I mean? Ah, there’s that glower again. It’s off-putting, I must say. Right now, standing here, I’m starting to sweat. It feels as if you’re, I don’t know, as if you’re judging me. It’s like that with the others too. How can we concentrate on doing superb work if we have half an eye toward you and whether you’re staring at us with scorn, and judging us, and finding us coming up short?”
“You do come up short.”
“Ah, words. That’s good. You’re a man of few of them, I know. Now maybe you think that’s a position of strength. But after a while, to speak frankly, it wears thin. You know, sometimes I think, for all of our camaraderie up here, we don’t communicate enough. Amongst ourselves, I mean. We’re too nice. We’d rather not rock the boat. If we’re upset, we just swallow it. Or form little whispering cliques. And things get worse. If we could just air our upsets freely, without fear of being put down, with mutual respect—”
“I respect the hell out of everybody.”
Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes Page 9
