Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes (12 page)

“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 deeply 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.”

“I’m sure you do—”

“But they lack respect for themselves.
You
lack self-respect. Would any self-respecting elf pick his nose? He would not. That’s the long and the short of it.”

The back of Fritz’s neck grew hot.

Gregor wagged a finger three times sharp, as if he were shaking out a thermometer. “Get right with your nostrils, little elf, before you come marching over here blowing smoke up mine. You speak to me of scorn? You deserve it in spades. Santa’s little favorite, huh? You know how long that would last if he caught wind of this foul practice? Gone in a trice. Now, you just march your meddling little slippers right back across the commons and tend to your own garden. I’ll tend to mine, with no unsought advice from the likes of you!”

With that, Gregor slammed the upper door in Fritz’s face. Fritz stood there, in shock, forgetting to breathe. Then his breath returned over the pounding of his heart.

Well, he thought. How about that?

With a huff and a sigh, Fritz shook his head, and trudged back toward the replicas, doing his best to shake off Gregor’s belittling and feeling very bad indeed about the deteriorating state of affairs.

* * *

The aroma of hot chocolate lured Matt from sleep. When he opened his eyes, there stood Santa with a steaming mug redolent with the beguiling scent of cocoa and mint and marshmallow. At his side, Wendy held a piping hot plate of shortbread.

“Courtesy of my wives,” said Santa.

Matt sat up, accepted the food and drink, and glanced about his bedroom. “Wives,” he said. “Whatever. Man, how’d you get snow in here?” Drifts glistened beyond the bedposts. Bedposts? Where had
they
come from?

“A gift from my helpers,” said Santa. “But we have more serious matters to speak of.”

Matt stiffened. There was that tone. Some grown-up was about to tell him what to do. What to think. How to behave. Refuse, and that grown-up would beat him until he cried uncle. That’s how his father had been before they put his ass in stir. That’s how his boozy bitch of a mom was, with her smoker’s breath and her jowly made-up face and her red-lipped, hate-spewing pie hole.

He wouldn’t be shoved around. Not by anyone.

“Okay, Wendy,” said Santa. “Bring on the future.”

With a gesture, the lemon-yellow walls of the bedroom sparkled and fell away. There before them slumped three slit-lidded punks against the wall of an alley, dragging on cheap cigarettes.

“Hey, it’s me!” said Matt, though the kid he pointed at was pimply, tightlipped, and needed a haircut. “And there’s Robbie Stover. But the other guy...who the heck is he?”

“You’ll meet him next year in junior high. Jack Pangborn’s his name, a good little boy until he turned four.”

Robbie Stover had put on bulk and was stooped over, one shoulder higher than the other as he listened to Matt and glared at the bricks under his boots. The other kid was more compact and stared intently from under a wild shock of hair. Matt could tell this Pangborn dude wanted to topple him as leader but didn’t have the guts to take him on.

The scene switched. Now the three of them were pistoning slow and sullen along a sidewalk, watching the approach of an alarmed kid in white band pants. When he tried to cross the street, they cut him off. “Hey, queer boy, no problem,” Matt said, giving him a shove, “there’s room on the sidewalk for everybody. We’ll just brush past you. You’d like that, I bet, huh?”

“Please, I’m only trying to—”

“Yeah. I know. In your ice cream pants. You got any ice cream for us, queer boy?”