* * *
Michael, winging heavenward, grew righteous with pride. Melding with the repressed Hermes and giving that side of him equal weight had lifted much guilt from his shoulders. All of his bumblings—failing to prevent Santa and the Tooth Fairy from crossing paths three decades before, an earlier incident that had resulted in the birth of the Orgasm Fairy, and his more recent creation and dissemination of the ill-fated egg-seeds—he realized now that they hadn’t been bumblings at all.
They had been intended.
Which really wasn’t such a bad thing.
For one thing, it relieved boredom. It stirred the pot, kept it simmering: no cooling, no coagulating, no settling of ingredients which tasted better well-mixed. Real life bubbled and blistered and burnt the tongue, sometimes.
Besides, it was all part of God’s plan. Oh, he pretended to be miffed. And Michael as always would pretend anguish the next time God called him on the carpet. But they would both understand, behind the berating, that it was a game, that each had his role to play and the obligation to play it to the hilt.
Spotting the floor of the Empyrean above, Michael laughed out loud. How wonderful it was to be an archangel. And how wonderful to fully embrace the trickster god within.
I believe I’ll keep this job, thought he. Good benefits, steady employment, constant surprises, and delightful bouts of bumbling and upset, swiftly followed by equilibrium regained.
And upward into ever holier realms did he speed.
Chapter 43.
Embracing What Is and What Could Be
LONG BEFORE MICHAEL’S APPEARANCE, Wendy knew Santa had something on his mind. On their outbound trek, as fresh snow draped soft curves over every angle and edge and turned the landscape into a wonderland, he had been quieter than usual. Their boots crunched and squeaked as always, but they paused less often for conversation. And when they did, its content, though pleasant, never strayed far from the trivial and safe.
At age nine, she would have worried his silence signaled his displeasure with her, a girl whose mortal origins meant she would never measure up; at seventeen, she was far more assured. Whatever was on his mind he would reveal in his own good time.
When Michael showed up, she turned giggly and girlish. Through him had she and Santa made a dent in mankind’s nastiness. He seemed almost like family. It was strange to hear him deliver such a formal message. But she noticed the impish gleam in his eye and understood he was playing his proper role.
When he vanished, she and Santa sat on twin boulders, sharing a childish excitement for their new task, mixed with grown-up sobriety about the responsibility it entailed. Still, that unrevealed something lurked behind many of Santa’s glances toward her and inside each pause in their exchange.
“No, Wendy,” he insisted, “I think you should be the one to plan our agenda next Thanksgiving. You retain a child’s sense of fair play. That, coupled with your ability to project futures and your superb choice of Jamie’s worst tormentors last year, suggest that you, if you’d be so kind, ought to decide which homes we visit.”
“Goody,” said Wendy. “I accept.”
“Wonderful.” Then he paused, huffed out a sigh, and shook his head. “My darling girl, now that your mind is more grown-up than childlike and we have been newly blessed, it’s high time I revealed what happened at the end of your mortal stay up here, not so long ago.”
“Only if you want to,” she said, seeing how stricken he was.
“I need to. And I want to. Tell me what you remember of that time.”
Wendy scrunched up her face. “You came home from your Christmas deliveries. Mommy and I had been sad because our year here was up and we had to leave. Then somehow Anya fell in love with Mommy after all, and we were suddenly going to stay and be very happy. There was a big celebration on Christmas Day. Then I went to sleep, but in the middle of the night, I tiptoed past Fritz, who was snoring in a chair in my bedroom. I went potty and wiggled my loose tooth out. Let’s see. I rinsed my mouth a few times, feeling very proud to be a big girl, slid the tooth under my pillow, and fell back asleep. Next thing I knew, I woke up and there were all these jingle bells on me, which fell with a clatter to the floor, only I wasn’t in my bedroom, I was by the picture window, and everyone was really happy and they said I had been dead, but now I was not only alive again but immortal too. Somewhere in there, I lost nearly two months.”
Santa nodded. “Let me tell you what happened to you during that time.”
“‘kay,” she said, trying to be as nonchalant as possible.
Then did Santa unfold the horrors that had been expunged from her memory: the Tooth Fairy’s horrendous extraction of her teeth; that same fairy’s devouring of her mother and minting of her as a large gold coin; Wendy’s being kidnapped and her bone-chilling flight to her father’s burial plot, where the Tooth Fairy revived the corpse of Frank McGinnis and forced Wendy to watch her couple with him; Santa’s fight with the monstrous fairy in the graveyard and his rescue of Wendy in exchange for a week’s dalliance with his lead reindeer; his rescue then of Snowball from the rapine clutches of the Easter Bunny (“Oh, he was a heartless beast back then, nothing like he is now.”); her descent into catatonia, being fed and bathed and dressed, looking at no one, saying nothing; Santa’s creation of a love doll that looked just like Rachel; Anya’s repulsion at same; and finally Santa’s burial of the doll beside his hut in the woods, witnessed and misunderstood by Wendy herself in concealment, after which she had relapsed into catatonia and frozen to death, found too late the next morning by a frantic dragnet of elves.
All of this, Santa revealed with the most heartrending mien and the greatest anguish she had ever witnessed. But not one iota of love or respect left her for a single moment, despite her amazement at what he told her. Indeed, she was greatly relieved to hear his confession. Santa had descended from his perch of perfection to admit imperfection. This together with Michael’s bumblings had erased her silly notion that immortals were pure and spotless and that she, when set against them, would always be found wanting.
“I had been Pan, the goat god, king of the satyrs, a fact I had forgotten. But now I freely admit it. I am Pan, as well as Santa. His urges triumphed because I tried to suppress him. Now I embrace him in all of his waywardness and without reserve, though I, not he, hold and ever shall hold the reins.”
Santa’s eyes were moist, his manner fretful.
She put an arm around his shoulder. “Father, I love you. You’re the soul of generosity. You could never be less than that, not to me.”
This made him weep the harder. But for joy. She felt the guilt and fear lift from him. “I’ve wanted to be a great father to you. But I’ve always known I was holding this thing back.”
“And now,” she said, “you’ve stopped holding back. You’ve shared it with me. And it’s all right. You are a great father.”
“I’ve wondered how to parent you, especially now that your mind is pretty much grown-up.”
Wendy laughed. “You do it by loving me, silly, by trusting that you’ll do and say the right thing, by trusting me to accept you as you are, to ask for guidance when I need it, and to follow my own instincts otherwise.”
“And you’re okay with...with your situation?”
She shrugged. “We’re all dealt our lot in life. I’ll never know what it means to be an adult in an adult’s body. Never marry. Never bear a child. It can’t be helped. Meanwhile, I’m immortal, I live in the most wonderful community on earth, I get to please children, and now I get to guide grown-ups toward a better life. I have the sweetest mommies and the very dearest daddy there could be, one whose generosity led him to take on the pain of the world, even unto death, in order to save the world. I’d say it doesn’t get any better than that!”
Releasing a great sigh, Santa crushed her tearfully to him in a rolling, rollicking embrace. “Oh Wendy, I love you so.”
“It’s mutual, pardner!”
And thus they wiled away th
e hours appreciating each other and their lives, good and bad alike, until the waning light told them it was time to leave the boulders and head home.
* * *
The Tooth Fairy stoically digested Gronk’s report as he grunted it out before her throne of bones. She did not cuff him or kick him or fly into a rage. Instead, she commanded him to assemble his ragtag band of brothers by the blasted cedar at the island’s northern extremity.
There they gathered, cowering before her. Planting her feet in the sand and her hands on her hips, she trained her hard eyes on them. “Miserable wretches, rapine whelps of Zeus,” she said, “it’s clear that your father has decided not to punish us for inverting umpteen million egg-seeds. In the end we failed. But the big blowhard in the sky has stayed his hand. Glowering coward. For all his bluster, there appear to be limits to his power, and we are testing them.
“The eldest among you, the least doltish in this festering lot of blockheads, informs me that Pan and his insufferable brat will be meddling in a handful of mortal lives each Thanksgiving, by order of that same Father God. Know this: We shall not only do all we can to stop them; we will corrupt the very mortals they would make pure.”
“Mommy.”
Who dared interrupt? Ah yes. Frash, youngest after Chuff and the latest butt of her offspring’s torment.
“Won’t Zeus hurt us if we do that?”
The imps jeered and threw catcalls and then clumps of wet sand at their brother, who fisted his face in rage but dared not look at them straight on.
The Tooth Fairy laughed. “Is that the best you can do? You would pummel him, but for your fear of me. Well, you’re right to fear me. But you’re wrong not to pummel Frash. Do it. Do it now. Pummel the little bastard. Beat him to a pulp!”
Tooth and claw, they sailed into him. With eye gouges and torn limbs did they vex him, whose agony gave her great delight. When they were spent and Frash lay asprawl on the sand, groaning in misery, the Tooth Fairy berated him. “You would whimper? Rather curse Chuff for abandoning us and shifting your brothers’ taunts to you. Never interrupt me. Stifle those moans. Stifle them, or my worthier sons will give you cause for more.
“Now boys, it’s true we lost this battle. But we shall not lose the next one, and we shall not lose the war. From what Gronk tells me, Hermes, playacting the angel, has been reined in. Next November, the power imbalance will be less pronounced. Moreover, the big blowhard has overstepped. He has altered hitherto unalterable laws, and his creation will crumble because of it. Guilt gnaws at him. In our next skirmish, he’ll prove a weaker adversary. As for Pan, our guile and determination will trump the fat satyr’s feigned goodness, and we will drag his straying mortals deeper into the muck and mire of their sins. See if we don’t.
“As for homophobia, that’s the least of humanity’s inexhaustible store of failings. Let it go. We don’t need it. The mortal masses provide plenty of fodder for mischief. And we shall feast upon that fodder like flies upon the droppings of a centaur.
“Dwell upon mischief. Ponder and scheme how you might mete out torment to grown-up mortals. That’s your task for spring, summer, and early fall. Now be gone. The sight of you sickens me. For the space of three heartbeats, I’m going to close my eyes. Anyone still cowering on the sand when I open them shall pay dearly for his disobedience.”
Then she lowered her eyelids, heard them scurrying, felt clumps of sand kick in panic against her ankles. Silence. She opened her eyes to behold a beach devoid of impish ugliness.
Near the cedar she squatted, gazing toward Pan’s northern abode and lifting her palms to the gray-clouded heavens. Though slaps of rain battered her face, not once did she blink against the pelting, but brooded deeply on revenge.
* * *
The Easter Bunny had watched with quiet satisfaction the waking of select mortals on Easter morning, how they had eaten the divine egg and been transformed. He had also thrown his gaze northward to witness Santa Claus’s resurrection and Chuff’s acceptance into the community of elves. Ah well, he thought, that’s nice for the ugly little fellow. It can’t be helped, my being banished from the North Pole. I did some pretty terrible things, some horrendously horrible unforgivable things, though I can’t for the life of me recall what they were. Whatever the regrettable deeds, I shall not soon stop browbeating myself for them.
Imagine, then, his surprise when Santa’s lead reindeer, antlers aglow, made a graceful swoop-down, landing right in front of him in the clearing before his burrow. He wore a saddle, and tucked securely into the right saddlebag, one corner peeking out, was a large green envelope. Inside the envelope the Easter Bunny found a simple card, serenity pictured upon it, a snow scene, a hut with candles in the windows, white wisps of smoke lazily skirling up from its chimney top. Inside, in a graceful looping hand, it said: “I would like to see you. Lucifer knows the way. The Easter baskets are missed. Rachel.”
The summons threw him into a tizzy. How could he possibly face this woman, sensing the horrendous wrong he had done her? And why ever had she requested a visit from him? Was it out of obligation, for the recent good he had done? He neither wanted nor deserved that. It was in his transformed nature to act thus, to assist Santa with his Easter task, to do his part in saving Jamie Stratton’s life, and to help Wendy and Rachel escape from the Tooth Fairy’s island. Whatever had provoked this invitation, he must go, if only to endure the shame. Snubbing Rachel was unthinkable. She must have thought long and hard before sending this card. He felt obliged, at the very least, to show up, if only to accept and humbly acknowledge whatever shame she might cover him with. If she summoned him a thousand times to berate and humiliate and heap scorn upon him, it would be as a pinch of dirt removed from the Everest of his disgrace.
“All right, Lucifer,” he said with a sigh. “Forgive my weight.” Wriggling a furry foot into one stirrup, he swung onto the reindeer’s back, gripped the saddle horn, and tightened his legs about Lucifer’s flanks. Then up they rose. Despite centuries of flying on his own, the abrupt lift tickled him. It was a different thing entirely, zooming into the sky upon Lucifer’s back, watching the forest collapse into green bristle below, the earth passing beneath them, sea and land and cities and farms and streams as thin as hairline cracks, then the arctic wastes, brilliant and blinding in the sun, and finally the North Pole, temperate inside its bubble though snow sprawled soft and fluffy everywhere he looked.
When they passed over the commons, a few figures looked up and pointed, including Wendy, who broke into a run but was soon left behind by the skating pond. Lucifer knew the way. That’s what Rachel’s card had said. So the Easter Bunny contented himself with skimming along treetops dusted with snow, delighting in the stately march of spruce and pine and fir, and anticipating with dread his impending meeting with Santa’s once-mortal wife.
Straight ahead, a brilliant patch of orange-yellow winked into view, the color of egg yolk before it pales into the over-boiled hue of sulfur. A tent. The sort a pasha might raise to hold court, spacious with pole supports, its taut ropes angled to metal stakes pounded deep into the ground. In front of this tent they landed, Lucifer stamping and snorting as his rider dismounted. At once, he flew off. High up, the treetops stirred into a sigh, then grew still.
The Easter Bunny hopped to the entrance. The tent flaps were held aside by rope and grommet.
“Ah, there you are,” said a voice from within. “Wipe your feet and come inside.”
He gulped and dutifully obeyed. Two sets of snow boots stood at one edge of a throw rug, on which he wiped his feet. Then he ventured into the tent proper, moving in small tentative hops across an Oriental rug that felt as if it had been spread over plastic sheeting to keep it free of moisture. Rachel McGinnis sat in a plush armchair, cherrywood at the arm ends and down below. Off to the left, knitting, sat Santa’s first wife, doing what she could to keep her glower from being too obvious. A bodyguard, he thought. To be expected.
He stopped a respectful distance from Rachel.
>
“First,” she said, “thank you for coming. This isn’t easy for me, and it can’t be easy for you.”
“No, ma’am.”
“You have demonstrated, in rather dramatic ways, how very much changed and chastened you are. I need not enumerate them. What most impresses me is that the Divine Mother chose you as her emissary, when she could just as easily have entrusted her miraculous pouch to Wendy or Santa. And then you were chosen once more by heavenly forces to rescue me and my daughter from the Tooth Fairy’s island, for which I thank you with all my heart. So...”
She paused. He saw her blink away tears. But he felt paralyzed to do or say anything. She wasn’t in physical distress. Anya shifted in her chair as if to speak. But Rachel waved away her help, smiled, stopped smiling, and went on: “So if you wish, you may once more leave Easter baskets here every spring on your long night’s journey.”
He kept his eyes averted. “That would be an honor.”
“Come and go, as you did before the bad times. Leave them beside our beds if you think it best. I cannot quite offer my forgiveness—”
“Nor do I expect it.”
“The scar will always be there. But I will no longer allow our past to dampen the joys of Easter for this community of worthy souls. And I want to state, right here and now, that I do forgive you, even as I cannot ever forgive you—I know that makes no sense at all, and yet it does—”
“Perfect sense.”
“Yes. And now you may go.”
Her words abruptly broke off, as though a rope had paid out and slipped from her grasp. He longed to see the expression on her face. But he simply nodded, said, “As you wish. Thank you,” and hopped back through the makeshift vestibule into the snowy patch in front of the tent. Colors seemed sharper now, scents more redolent, textures as vivid as if his paws were touching them.
Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes Page 32
