Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (28 page)

Wendy set a hand against the bark of a thick ash. She made out a dark hut through the trees, and Santa bent to his digging. The flat patch of earth he had chosen was slapped with a blaze of moonlight. Propping the shovel against the hut's outer wall, he dropped the blanketed shape into a shallow hole. Looking more serious than Wendy had ever seen him, he took up the shovel again and began covering his burden.

Then Santa stopped and stood up, peering about. He turned his back to her and his pants loosened and fell about his boots. His legs were muscled and hairy. When he peeled back the dirt-clotted blanket, it seemed to Wendy that the woman he unwrapped, whoever she was, was dead. But then Santa touched her neck and she came at once to life, kissing him and wrapping her legs about his waist, and Wendy had at last a clear view of her mother's face—
her mother's face!
—her lips pressed to Santa's, her long blond hair spilling across the blanket.

*****

Santa knew his mind was diseased. That it had been so at least since the incident in the graveyard when Pan had taken over. And that things had steadily deteriorated since then.

While slogging out to bury the doll, he had cursed Anya many times over. But she was right. This contrivance slung over his shoulder was an outrage, a madman's fantasy. He must have been insane to imagine for one moment its successful incorporation into the community.

By the time he broke open the earth, Santa thought he had regained control.

But then the shape of the doll, the remembered heft of it, its womanliness, its vulnerability to violation, brought the intruder rushing to the fore. Horrified, he fell upon her. He plunged into her, groped for her lobes, felt her surge into a ghastly parody of love beneath him.

No,
he thought,
this is wrong, this is vile, I can't be doing this.

(That's right, pal, disassociate. It's not you, after all. It's me. A convenient fiction, this split between us. I get to wallow like pigs in shit, you get to be as appalled as a priest pulling his pud, and your star hitter slides into home plate.)

The doll writhed under him.
Must gain control, must put you under.

(Fine, fine. Just let me fuck in peace, okay? Go off somewhere and count daisies, why don't you.)

Then the doll moaned at his mouth and whispered depravities in his ear.

Revulsion seized him. He rebelled. He saw Rachel mocked by his hands, the memory of Rachel dishonored by his selfish acts. It was enough to make the virtue well up in him and topple the intruder.

(Now hold on here—)

Enough! Santa swiped at him with all the goodness in his heart. And in a flush of anger, with more ease than Santa thought possible, the goat-god was gone.

*****

Santa gave a cry of rage and horror, a cry that cut into Wendy's heart. Leaping off her mother, he pulled up his pants, took up the shovel, and began throwing clods of dirt on her.

She tried to rise, looking hurt and confused, saying "What's wrong?" and "Where are we?" and "Stop that!" but Santa brought his shovel down hard upon her head and she fell forward. Then Santa shouted "Die, damn you, die!" and his shovel whipped through the air again and again until she lay still.

The chug of the train began anew, picking up steam, and Wendy's eyes watched a weeping Santa bury her mother under a deep mound of earth. But Wendy herself climbed aboard the warm embracing train and let it take her, one painful puff after another, farther and farther from the hut.

She didn't notice Santa walk away, head bowed, when he was done.

Nor the falling snow that flaked and clumped against her cheeks.

Nor winter's icy fingers moving in to touch her skin, to press upon her skin, to sink beneath her skin.

*****

Not until seven the next morning, when Anya brought in porridge, was Wendy's absence discovered. The cats glared up at her from an empty bed. Ten minutes later, Santa, dressed at last in something other than black, stormed into the elves' quarters. Quickly they were out in force, combing the countryside.

Santa cast a wide net of magic time about his lands and took to the air in his sleigh, tightly spiraling out into the woodlands, skimming as close to the treetops as he dared. Two hours into the search, a dreadful thought seized him and he flew at once toward the hut. On the first pass, he caught the bright red of Wendy's down jacket. She was standing, dear God, in a copse of ash trees not a hundred feet from where he had buried the Rachel doll.

When the elves in that sector of Santa's domain saw his sleigh zoom overhead on its way to the commons, they guessed the reason and raced for home. Others heard the rumor shouted through the trees but kept on until the lifting of magic time confirmed it. Then they too broke off the search.

Santa's sleigh stood empty outside the cottage, the reindeer restless and neglected in their traces. Growing clusters of elves crowded about the porch, waiting.

Inside, Anya feverishly tongued Wendy's frostbitten fingers and toes while Santa knelt beside the little girl, chafing her hands and pleading with her not to die. But Wendy opened her eyes just once and made a soughing sound low in her throat. She raised a hand to him. And then, as all mortals do in time, little Wendy slipped down the rabbithole of death and was gone.

Santa wept. He crushed the dead girl to his chest.

Anya stroked her forehead, then turned away, wanting to dole out her grief bit by bit. With two small safety pins, she fastened a black armband around Santa's arm. Then she draped a shawl of black knit about her shoulders.

"It's time we told the others," Anya said, touching her husband's head. He rose and sobbed upon her shoulder. Then he released her and nodded. Turning back to the bed, he lifted Wendy's lifeless body into his arms.

Someone saw movement in the cottage and someone else caught a glimpse of Wendy being carried by Santa. Wasn't certain, he said, but it looked as though she was beaming up at him. Mrs. Claus appeared at the door and rumors of full recovery flew backward through the crowd.

Santa stepped out onto the porch.

And the rumors fell to the snow.

"Our beloved Wendy," he announced, "is dead." He stood there for the longest time and displayed the bald fact of it. No one spoke. No one moved.

Then Anya touched her husband's elbow. He gazed at her, confused. Nodding like one bumped awake in travel, he looked over the crowd toward the gingerbread house to his right. Like a green sea they parted to let him pass. Those in back glimpsed only Santa's bare head moving and Mrs. Claus's white bun bobbing at his far side. But the front ranks saw it all: Wendy, skin white as porcelain, her long auburn hair waving unbraided as they walked, her patent-leather shoes giving a ghastly carefree bounce; Mrs. Claus with one hand at her husband's arm, the other clutching an embroidered handkerchief to her lips; and Santa, face drawn, the color drained from his cheeks.

Wilhelm and Fritz helped bring Wendy's bed away from the far wall of her bedroom and prop it up by her picture window. Then they joined the others outside. The crowd watched Santa lay Wendy down and bend a slow kiss to her forehead. Mrs. Claus knelt beside her, cradling the dead girl's face in one hand and smoothing her hair against the pillow with the other. She folded Wendy's hands across her waist, fussing with her clothing until Santa stepped in and raised his wife.

Then began a parade of elves past Wendy's corpse, a parade that stretched across three days and nights. The line hugged the perimeter of the commons, running the length of the workshop and veering at the stable, then going past Santa's cottage and making a wide bulge out, which twisted back to the elves' quarters, curved round the skating pond, and hugged the hills almost to the gingerbread house again.

Those who, cap in hand, had said one farewell to Wendy wanted to say another. They rejoined the line. Soon the far bulge flattened out, the end of the line met its beginning, and the visitation became continuous.

Midafternoon of the first day, Englebert and Josef retrieved the black armbands from the recycling bins in the workshop and passed them out. Over their protests, they were thrust forward to the front of the line.

At sunrise on the second day, Knecht Rupert disappeared into the woods and returned with an armload of snow crocus. Until Anya called a halt to it, there was a brief incursion into the hills and hordes of elves returned with the purple and yellow flowers clutched to their chests. Soon a blanket of soft petals covered Wendy from chin to ankles, filling her bedroom with fragrance.

And on the following night, Heinrich, heartsick at the happy sound his half-dozen bells made dangling from his half-dozen caps, not to mention the bells jangling at the tips of his dozen slippers—Heinrich closed his fists around the cold silver X-cut spheres, wrenched them with a muffled
clk-clk-clk
off his clothing, and placed them, shiny with candlelight, above Wendy's folded hands on the crocus blossoms. Those that followed saw. And seeing, did likewise. Anya's sewing scissors were passed round the circle of mourners until, to an elf, they held their bells clutched tight in their hands and moved solemnly through the silent night, contributing, when it was their turn, to the shimmering coat of moonlight that silvered and grew about Wendy's corpse.

Such were the rituals that developed in the course of their three-day vigil. But none so simple nor so moving as the ritual approach to the body, the kneeling, the gaze upon Wendy's face, the kiss upon her brow, the reluctant rise, the slow nod to Santa and his wife, and the stoop-shouldered departure.

Mrs. Claus held together well.

But Santa looked worse at each pass.

The first day, he avoided their eyes. He stood there without a word, looking down at Wendy and letting her death assault him full in the face.

The second day, he stared at them as though they were unearthly beings that angered and appalled him. Late afternoon, he seemed like a fat old man with no home, no food, no one to love.

By the third day, the strangeness he had shown of late began to dominate. Above his forehead, twin bulges rose at the hairline as if inch-thick brass rings pressed his flesh outward in torment. And his grief grew, all that day and into the night and on into the dawn that followed.

The odd thing about their visits to Wendy's side was that no one expected them to last more than a few hours, a day at most. They thought their shared grief would peak, that the flow of elves across the threshold would cease and Santa would lead them back to the Chapel to bury Wendy beside her mother. But even as the cloud cover grew darker and more oppressive during those three days, just so did Santa's sorrow feed the communal woe, wrapping them in ever more unbearable layers of woe. Death coaxed them hour by hour—none more so than Santa—toward some awful orgastic brink. But, like a cruel lover, he withheld release, letting the torment build and build in them.

When Santa could stand it no more, he broke from the house with a roar of agony, sending Friedrich and Helmut tumbling into the snow. Anya followed, her mouth red and wet, her tears streaming free. Clouds churned above him like blankets of pitch. Trembling before the weeping elves, Santa ran his fingers through his beard in a gesture of supplication. Then the buttons from chin to belt popped like cherries into the snow and his red suit peeled open under his hands.

"Help me Lord!" he supplicated, in a voice that tried their hearts. Then abruptly, full of gall and grapeshot: "
Show yourself, you god of scum and shit!
" Santa shouted this aloft, rending his garments, tearing off his boots, and hurling his belt away from him like a shiny black snake twisting through the air. Patches of red and puffballs of white filled the air about him and fell in fury to the snow. He stood there naked, his body wavering between two extremes: one was the round soft Santa they had always known; the other had horns and hoofs and hair, eyes that burned, and a shout that hurt their eardrums.

"Heal me, oh my God!
Bully pantheon tyrant, I spit in your face!
Let me vomit my soul into oblivion, let me fling away all trace of Santa, for Santa is a sack full of sin and ashes, a fraud, a fiend, and I must be rid of him or my heart will burst!
I defy you! I hurl figs at you out of my arse! May you choke on them, you slayer of the innocent!
"

And his wife wept and tore her dress and let her hair tumble down, as she knelt naked in the snow beside her husband and opened her hands to the heavens. When he was penitent, she was the sweet-faced old woman they knew; but when Santa raged and shook his fist, she swayed toward him and her body appeared to tuck and smooth and firm and tighten, fir-green tresses flowing down her back, her eyes reflecting—as the moon the sun—her mate's outrage.

Santa's alternating rage and self-loathing washed against the rapt circle of elves. And though they were mightily confused, they too stripped and knelt, joining hands, holding them high. They keened into the clouds, weeping and swaying with the buffet of Santa's words, but giving vent to a delicious defiance when Santa veered that way.

"Dear God," implored Saint Nicholas, "hollow me out, scoop me clean of presumption and lust." But Pan surged forth and bellowed, "
Forget what the wimp says! Physician heal thyself!
"

The split raged in him, first one side of him holding high ground, then the other. "Mercy I pray. Give me, if such be Thy will, the gift of nullity.
Go ahead, blast me! You scared to? Do it! Annihilate the fuck out of me!
The immortal blood pounds in my skull. Naught passes before my eyes but cascades of boys and girls falling, endlessly, into the grave. They die. We live. Dear Lord, the burden crushes.
Get the fuck down here! Get the fuck down here right now! We got things to duke out, you and me, and I'm raring to take you on!
"

Then it happened.

Those in front of Santa saw the shaft of light fall upon him and strip away the rage and pain, salving his visage with soothing. They saw the body come back full and Clausean, the droll little mouth, the twinkling eyes, the rosy cheeks, the bowlful of jelly—all there in the wink of an eye. Gone the horned bellicosity. Gone the defiant fist, the goat-god's savage eyes.