Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups

by Robert Devereaux

  Santa turned the head this way and that, trying to read its enigmatic expression. He loved crafting dolls, puppets, figurines of every kind. Especially the faces. Their prevailing emotion—joy, anger, sorrow, grief—was usually bold and transparent. But this face, emerging now from the wet womb of his imagination, troubled him with its uncertain mix of emotions. It grinned stupidly up at him. He wished it could talk. Then he quickly changed his mind about that, chuckled wryly, and set it upon a heap of rags to dry.

  *****

  The Tooth Fairy's island looked, from the stormclouds above, like a gray-green gash knifed into the wet flesh of the sea. Where the waves washed against it, jutting rock alternated with stretches of strand. The sand was finest, the tough dune vegetation least choked together, at the gash's two jagged extremities. From the sparse beaches and ocean-dashed rocks, the island rose abruptly into steep wooded slopes, as though God had placed His hands to either side of a flatland forest and bunched the earth together between them. Save for the blasted cedar at the north tip of the island, the trees were exclusively ash.

  When she was in residence, the mistress of the island preferred either to squat upon the shore near the cedar, brooding into the ceaseless storm, or to take refuge up among the ash trees in a grim cavern punched into the mountainside and decked out with bone-furniture. She sat now at the cave entrance on a bleached-white armchair, munching on a bowl of molars and staring past the wind-tossed treetops. Incessant rain beat at her breasts and belly. But her mind was fixed on the fat fellow with the generous cock and the sensitive hands.

  These days he called himself Santa Claus. But she knew who he really was, who he had been before the Christers had wrested control from their pagan predecessors.

  A rough wind set the tops of the trees to rioting. Vacant now, every one of them, despite their animation. She could still hear, as if it were yesterday, the shriek and moan of her sister nymphs as they perished. She could feel the jaws of death close over her. She recalled how the rescuing hand of Almighty Zeus—in the midst of his own self-transformation—sealed a pact with her and infused her with life.

  Bitter pact. Grim life. Sundered from the ecstatic community of nymphs and satyrs—constant byplay, constant sensual delight, life lived to the full. Set down alone on this island, given a craving for bone which could never match, marvelous though it was, her old cravings for wine and fruit and the frenzies of the flesh.

  Their god, the One-and-Only-God, he who sometimes glared at her in patriarchal admonishment through swirls of stormclouds, had obliterated Santa's memories of those days, slipping more convenient myths into his head. But whenever she tried to speak of these things, her words would not come.

  "You really don't remember," she'd say.

  "Remember what?" he would ask.

  "The time before you were . . . the time he who calls himself God was . . . back before you were . . ." The hut walls shook with her frustration.

  "There, there, don't trouble yourself over it."

  But she did trouble herself, and greatly. She wanted Santa to know. Together, they would conspire against the big blowhard in the sky; they'd topple the turncoat whose betrayal had led, in spite of his rescue of her, to the slaughter of her sisters and their goatish lovers.

  At times, it was hard to see the old satyr in Santa. From time to time she caught hints, a special stance, a casual scratch behind an ear. But he looked so different. The hornless forehead, the kind eye, the impossibly white curls. They thrilled and disgusted her.

  Desolation blew through the dripping forest before her now. A curious feeling harried her heart these days when she thought of Santa. In the beginning her lust had been pure, her desires wholly selfish. She had wanted the jolly fat man because he, of all beings, could best cater to her insatiate whims, could give give give until there was no giving left—and then give some more.

  But of late, his selfless giving had seeded her gut, had sent out runners from her viscera to her every soul and limb. More often than not, to her astonishment, she found herself mouthing her lover for the sheer pleasure of hearing him moan, without a thought to the payback to come when he turned her about, as he invariably did, to feast on her fairyhood.

  She wondered—perverse thought—if it could be love she felt. "Love. Love for the fat man. Love for Santa," she said. She liked the way that sounded. It made her skin shiver, that word. Seeing him turned her ravenous; she wanted desperately to devour him. But then, fighting that urge had always been the most harrowing part of the copulations of nymphs and satyrs. She recalled the old community, roused by the smell of blood, circling about and egging on a thrusting couple who had lapsed into total anarchy and died feasting on one another's innards, the green moss beneath them drenched red.

  She sighed. Tears of rain, rolling down her cheeks, depended from her nipples. She knew, because he'd told her so often enough, that Santa Claus did not love her, not in that way. No, it was lust alone, he assured her, full-throttle lust and nothing more, that tore him from the side of his wife. More rhizome than root, his feelings for her.

  A chill rippled through her.

  Her eyes clamped down upon a glare.

  There had to be a way, she thought. A way to unseat Mrs. Claus, to swivel Santa's head forever away from her, from his elves and reindeer and his blasted beloved brats.

  A way to claim him exclusively for herself.

  *****

  Good Friday, 1990. St. Mary's Cemetery and Mausoleum on 21st Street in Sacramento. A young woman in black held her daughter's hand and watched her husband's coffin sink into the earth.

  Time had not stood still for Rachel Townsend. Now nearly thirty, she had lived a full mortal life, joyous and painful, zesty and bland by turns. Of that special night twenty years past, when Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy tussled naked upon her bed, she remembered nothing.

  "Mommy?" Wendy looked sadly up at her. "My legs are getting tired."

  Rachel stroked her daughter's braided hair. An image came and went of Frank holding a baby spoon in his hand, bending intently toward the high chair, his eyes smiling in disbelief at his daughter's loveliness. That loving look stayed with him through the years since, and Wendy had loved her father as fiercely. It was a shame Easter had been spoiled for her this year.

  So few years, so quickly lived.

  "Be patient," Rachel told her. "It won't be much longer."

  "Can you lift me up?"

  "Later," she assured. Rachel rested her hands on Wendy's shoulders and listened to Father Doyle intone the words of the burial service.

  She liked Father Doyle, though she felt nothing but indifference for his Church. But Frank—or Francis Xavier McGinnis, as the reverend father now referred to him—had been raised a Catholic and had remained devout to the end. Frank would have wanted Father Doyle to give him the complete Catholic sendoff.

  A light breeze stirred the treetops. Her husband had been a huge man, with a love of life and a sense of humor as expansive as his girth. He'd brought joy to everyone he touched in his fifty-seven years. Little wonder, then, that the funeral party numbered nearly three hundred, and that its mood was not so much funereal as celebratory—of Frank himself, of his caring heart, of the privilege they had shared in knowing him.

  Rachel expected that Frank's friends would drop away. The lecherous ones—George Seacrest of the wayward wife, and Harold Stamm who sported a gold tooth—would hit on her once or twice, then take the hint and be gone. The others might hang on a bit longer but she'd be glad to see them go. It was time for her to think about a new life, and that was easier to do without the flotsam of the old floating past.

  The sole exception was Mrs. Fredericks from next door, dear old Ellie Fredericks, eighty years young and still full of fire. She couldn't imagine that feisty old woman ever giving up the ghost, let alone abandoning her "little Rachel." She'd been Rachel's pretend granny for as long as Rachel could recall, and now she was Wendy's as well.

  She glanced down at her daughte
r. It had been a rough year for both of them, a year full of death. First Frank's parents. Then Rachel's, a boating accident out on Folsom Lake that also claimed her brother Billy and his wife. Frank had questioned the wisdom of moving into her parents' house on K Street, but they'd been looking for an old house anyway and Rachel's girlhood had been a time of magic, rich memories woven into every room. Rachel hadn't regretted the move for a moment, and Frank and Wendy quickly fell in love with the place.

  Now she and her daughter would be alone there. Her husband of seven years—that rarest of all breeds, a truly compassionate underwriter of life and health—had cared more for his clients' well-being than his own. High blood pressure, ignored to the point of disdain, had felled him while Rachel retrieved Wendy from school and stopped at Corti Brothers for groceries. Wendy cried for days. So did Rachel.

  She bent over and kissed her daughter on the top of the head, pausing long enough to breathe the sweet scent of Wendy's scalp. Wendy gave her a look of disapproval that was pure Frank.

  Funny how they'd met. At nineteen, she had come home from Chico for the holidays, happy to divert her thoughts for a few weeks from the study of bits and bytes, pixels and Pascal, semaphores and CPUs. Her intense flirtation with lesbian love was a year behind her, she was a junior now, between boyfriends, and happy to be home for the holidays. She had gone to Macy's on the corner of 5th and K to hunt for Christmas gifts.

  Rachel usually avoided large department stores. She much preferred out-of-the-way places: bookstores, toystores, stores filled with exotic foods or given over entirely to puzzles and games. But Macy's was different. Macy's laid claim to Santa Claus in a way no other store could match. She had seen Miracle on 34th Street many times on TV. Once she had even seen it downtown at the Crest Theatre.

  Though she'd stopped believing in him around age ten, the figure of Santa Claus held an eerie fascination for her. That year, she lingered at Santa's Workshop, watching him dandle kids on his knee, pose for Polaroids with them, hand them candycanes. In that lingering, the man wearing the red suit captured her heart. She stood transfixed; he noticed her; when closing time came, he changed clothes, met her at the doors, and took her to dinner at his favorite restaurant, Fat City in Old Sacramento.

  Six months later, she and Frank were wed. He urged her to complete her degree, then look for work in the Sacramento area. Every few weeks, he'd drive up to spend time with her, inner-tubing down the river (quite a sight, Frank at fifty, floating among the youngsters), or taking long walks through Bidwell Park (where Errol Flynn had once played Robin Hood), or indulging in an endless night of marital bliss locked away in her apartment off the Esplanade six blocks north of campus. Her pregnancy ran neck and neck with her studies that year. She graduated in mid-May of 1984, gave birth to Wendy the following week, and began work three months later as a software engineer for HP in Roseville, some thirty miles east of Sacramento.

  "Mommy?"

  "We'll be going home soon, honey."

  "Where did you say the Easter Bunny lives?"

  "Underground in a big burrow. Just show a little more patience, Wendy. You've been very good."

  Graveyard grass swayed long and green in the breeze. Father Doyle's lilting voice caressed the words he held in his hands. Opposite Rachel and Wendy, old Mrs. Fredericks coughed into her hand and shifted her feet. Tears welled in her eyes.

  "Mommy?" Wendy whispered.

  "Not now, dear."

  "Is Daddy going down there to be friends with the Easter Bunny?"

  II. Discovery

  The rabbit has a charming face;

  Its private life is a disgrace.

  I really dare not name to you

  The awful things that rabbits do.

  —anonymous

  Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of the meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.

  —Dame Rose Macauley

  4. What the Easter Bunny Saw

  Up from the perpetual ice and snow of the North Pole his hind legs rose, invisible as the body they supported. His front paws rested on the sash of the bedroom window, his nose twitched, his eyes sizzled into the writhing pair of lovers upon Santa's bed. He had chanced, the Easter Bunny had, upon far better entertainment than befriending corpses.

  'Twas the night, you see, before Easter. And in this cottage, at the tail end of his rounds, two creatures were stirring it up quite nicely. Beside them, a white-haired woman, beautiful beyond describing, slept the sleep of the dead. The Easter Bunny's eyes darted betwixt her and the humping couple. The contrast between their carnal frenzy and her innocent oblivion excited him no end. His heart pounded lubba-di-lubba-di-lub in an odd mix of envy, love, and outrage. Like erratic brushes riding a cymbal, his whiskers skritched against the glass.

  How he adored peering in upon nocturnal copulations. Petunia'd once asked him why. She'd stared at him out of those vacuous, shit-brown eyes of hers as he lay spent on the burrow floor, peering up through the dimness. Why do you peep? he heard her say.

  He shrugged. "Forgive me, dear Petunia, but I like seeing love happen. I like to pretend I'm the man who's making the happy lady even happier. Even though I feel quite sad, suicidal even, right after my genitalia spurt, when the bubble of my fantasy pops and I'm not that man, it's worth it to feel like I'm giving someone my love—someone alive and responsive—even for a few seconds."

  She didn't speak to him for days after that. Just sat in her room and sulked.

  Usually he had to slip out of magic time to animate the lovers he caught. No problem, most nights. But on Easter Eve, that was an extravagance he could ill afford. He simply had to get on with the business of distributing baskets and hiding brightly colored eggs in grass. There was his schedule to contend with, not to mention the Father's stern face glaring out of the night if he dared dawdle. Whenever he chanced upon pudendal play, he was forced to limit himself to witnessing two seconds, tops.

  But these lovers were different.

  These lovers were themselves wrapped in magic time, though their beautiful companion languished in the real time of an open-mouthed snore. That meant he could stay and watch for as long as he liked, particularly since his invisibility, God bless it, hid him from immortals as well as mortals. He grew hot with desire at what he witnessed. Hot too with envy. Love for the adorable white-haired woman thumped in his heart; and in his head, a righteous anger at Santa's adultery mixed with strange new thoughts indeed—disquieting thoughts that whispered around the corners of an obliterated past, whispered of powers lost and of divine betrayal.

  Nonsense, he thought, shaking such notions out of his head and concentrating on the scene within. His scent glands drooled exudate down his chin and into the snow. His claws unsheathed against the sash. His penis poked out, red and hard, into the chill arctic air.

  At the window, soundlessly, he chittered.

  *****

  Earlier that evening, the elves' quarters had been unusually noisy, what with the anticipation of Easter candy on the morrow. They jostled one another at the sinks, each elf jamming his face close to the mirror, holding his beard free of the water with one hand and working his toothbrush with the other. Hans and Dieter had an argument over whose nightshirt was whose. Pillow fights broke out spontaneously at the east and west ends of the vast dormitory, spreading like two waves toward the middle until a great surge of shouts and feathers whitened the air with happy violence. When at last the ruckus died down, general exhaustion settled upon them like a comforter and they tucked themselves in for the night.

  Each elf had his own bed except for Heinrich, the six dollmaking elves who went by one name. In the forgotten reaches of time, they had made one large bed for themselves. Therein they slept, tightly packed, their stubby arms and longish black beards sticking out over the covers.

  That
night, soon after falling asleep, Heinrich had a dream. In Heinrich's dream, only five Easter baskets lay waiting by his bedside the next morning. One mouth, the dreamer's, went without; one pair of fists, the dreamer's, pummeled five grinning mouths that munched smugly on jelly beans. Heinrich opened his twelve sleeping eyes to find himself embroiled in a bloody brawl, fists flying, sheets and pillows tossed hither and yon. When things wound down, the six sat there bewildered, looking out at a moonlit sea of snoozing elves and consoling each other.

  In cleaning up, one of them spat a tooth into the sink. Should Santa be told? Should Knecht Rupert? No. Both were asleep. They positioned their injured brother at the east edge of the bed, placed the tooth beneath his pillow, soothed him, and eased back into sleep.

  *****

  Hovering voluptuous over Heinrich, the Tooth Fairy smiled to see where she was. She drew her toothsome treat from beneath the pillow, bit into it, savored its elfin sweetness, and replaced it with coins from her anus.

  Gold doubloons, six of them.

  "One for each of you," she said, planting a kiss on Heinrich's foreheads, hungering for the thick flat bone beneath. She ran greedy fingers in and out of his mouths, reading the raised runes of ancient molars.

  As swift as thought, she drifted the familiar path to Santa's bed. The blankets bulked huge as a bear over his rotundity. Behind him, Anya's blip of blanket seemed an annoying afterthought. With a gesture, she paid out her invisible net of magic time until it compassed round both herself and her dozing lover.

  For a moment, she watched his untroubled breathing and felt again that odd love she had felt on her island. How giving he seemed, even in sleep. His great mane of white hair spilled like a gift of blizzards from beneath his red stocking cap onto his pillow. His face, bearded and wise with age, was yet the face of a cherub.