Alternate Gerrolds (14 page)

Filltree burst through the kitchen door to see a man rolling back and forth across the floor—a youngish-looking man, skinny and dirty, in bloody t-shirt and blue jeans. Rexie had his mouth firmly attached to the burglar’s right arm. He hung on with ferocious determination, even as the intruder swung and battered the creature at the floor, the walls, the stove. Again and again. The screaming went on and on. Filltree didn’t know whether to strike at the burglar or at the dinosaur. The man had been bitten severely on both legs, and across his stomach as well. A ragged strip of flesh hung open. His shirt was soaked with blood. Gobbets of red were flying everywhere; the kitchen was spattered like an explosion.

The man saw Filltree then. “Get your goddamn dinosaur off of me!” he demanded angrily, as if it were Filltree’s fault that he had been attacked.

That decided Filltree. He began striking the man with the hockey stick, battering him ineffectively about the head and shoulders. That didn’t work—he couldn’t get in close enough. He grabbed a frying pan and whanged the hapless robber sideways across the forehead. The man grunted in surprise, then slumped to the floor with a groan, no longer able to defend himself against Rexie’s predacious assault. The tyrant-lizard began feeding. He ripped off a long strip of flesh from the fallen robber’s arm. The man tried to resist, he flailed weakly, but he had neither strength nor consciousness. The dinosaur was undeterred. Rexie fed unchecked.

Behind him, Joyce was screaming. Jill was shrieking, “Do something! Daddy, he’s hurting Rexie!”

Filltree’s humanity reasserted itself then. He had to stop the beast before it killed the hapless man; but he couldn’t get to the net. It was still in the service porch—and he couldn’t get past Rex. The creature hissed and spit at him. It lashed its tail angrily, as if daring Filltree to make the attempt. As if saying, “This kill is mine!”

Filltree held out the frying pan in front of him, swinging it back and forth like a shield. The small tyrant-king followed it with its baleful black eyes. Still roaring its defiance, it snapped and bit at the frying pan. Its teeth slid helplessly off the shining metal surface. Filltree whacked the creature hard. It blinked, stunned. He swung the frying pan again, and, reflexively, the dinosaur stepped back; but as the utensil swept past, it stepped right back in, biting and snapping. Filltree recognized the behavior. The beast was acting as if it were in a fight with another predator over its kill.

Filltree swung harder and more directly, this time not to drive the creature back, but to actually hit it and hurt it badly. Rexie leapt backward, shrieking in fury. Filltree stepped in quickly, brandishing the frying pan, triumphantly driving the two-foot dinosaur back and back toward the service porch. As soon as Rexie was safely in the confines of the service porch, screaming in the middle of the broken remains of the carry cage, Filltree slammed the door shut and latched it—something went thump from the other side. The noise was punctuated with a series of angry cries. The door thumped a second time and then a third. Filltree waited, frying pan at the ready....

At last, Rexie’s frantic screeching ebbed. Instead, there began a slow steady scratching at the bottom of the door.

When Filltree turned around again, two uniformed police officers were relievedly reholstering their pistols. He hadn’t even heard them come in. “Is that your dinosaur, sir?”

Shaken, Filltree managed to nod.

“Y’know, there are laws against letting carnivores that size run free,” said the older one.

“We’d have shot him if you hadn’t been in the way,” said the younger officer.

For a moment, Filltree felt a pang of regret. He looked at the fallen burglar. There was blood flowing freely all over the floor. The man had rolled over on his side, clutching his stomach, but he was motionless now, and very very pale. “Is he going to make it—?”

The older officer was bending to examine the robber. “It depends on the speed of the ambulance.”

The younger cop took Filltree aside; she lowered her voice to a whisper. “You want to hope he doesn’t make it. If he lives, he could file a very nasty lawsuit against you. We’ll tell the driver to take his time getting to the E.R....”

He looked at the woman in surprise. She nodded knowingly. “You don’t need any more trouble. I think we can wrap this one up tonight.” She glanced around the room. “It looks to me like the burglar tried to steal your dinosaur. But the cage didn’t hold and the creature attacked him. Is that what happened?”

Filltree realized the woman was trying to do him a favor. He nodded in hasty agreement. “Yes, exactly.”

“That’s a mini-rex, right?” she asked, glancing meaningfully at the door.

“Uh-huh.”

“Lousy pets. Great guard-animals. Do yourself a favor. If you’re going to leave him running loose at night, get yourself a permit. It won’t cost you too much, and it’ll protect you against a lawsuit if anyone else tries something stupid.”

“Oh, yes—I’ll take care of that first thing in the morning, thank you.”

“Good. Your wife and kid know to be careful? Those rexies can’t tell the difference between friend and foe, you know—”

“Oh, yes. They know to be
very
careful.”

Later, after the police had left, after he had calmed down Joyce and Jill, after he had cleaned up the kitchen, after he had had a chance to think, Jonathan Filltree thoughtfully climbed the stairs again.

“I’ve made a decision,” he said to his shaken wife and tearful daughter. They were huddled together in the master bedroom. “We’re going to keep Rexie. If I’m going to be in Denver for two months, then you’re going to need every protection possible.”

“Do you really mean that, Daddy?”

Filltree nodded. “It just isn’t fair for me to go away and leave you and Mommy undefended. I’m going to convert the service porch into a big dinosaur kennel, just for Rexie. Good and strong. And you can feed him all the leftovers you want.”

“Really?”

“It’s a reward,” Filltree explained, “because Rexie did such a good job of protecting us tonight. We should give him lots and lots of hamburger too, because that’s his favorite. But you have to promise me something, Jill—”

“I will.”

“You must
never
open the kennel door without Mommy’s permission, do you understand?”

“I won’t,” Jill promised insincerely.

Turning back to Joyce, Filltree added, “I promise, I’ll finish up my work in Denver as quickly as possible. But if they need me to stay longer, will that be okay with you?”

Joyce shook her head. “I want you to get that thing out of the house tonight.”

“No, dear—” Filltree insisted. “Rexie’s a member of our family now. He’s earned his place at the table.” He climbed into bed next to his wife and patted her gently on the arm, all the time thinking about the high price of meat and what a bargain it represented.

WHEN I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Steven Dhor, he was talking about Christmas. Again.

He hated Christmas—in particular, the enforcement of bliss. “Don’t be a scrooge, don’t be a grinch, don’t be a Satan Claus taking away other people’s happiness.” That’s what his mother used to say to him, and twenty years later, he was still angry.

There were a bunch of them sitting around the bar, writers mostly, but a few hangers-on and fringies, sucking up space and savoring the wittiness of the conversation. Bread Bryan loomed all tall and spindly like a frontier town undertaker. Railroad Martin perched like a disgruntled Buddha—he wore the official Railroad Martin uniform: t-shirt, jeans and pot belly. George Finger was between wives and illnesses; he was enjoying just being alive. Goodman Hallmouth pushed by, snapping at bystanders and demanding to know where Harold Parnell had gone; he was going to punch him in the kneecap.

“Have a nice day, Goodman,” someone called.

“Don’t tell me to have a nice day,” he snarled back. “I’ll have any damn kind of a day I want.”

“See—” said Dhor, nodding at Hallmouth as he savaged his way out again. “That’s honest, at least. Goodman might not fit our pictures of the polite way to behave, but at least he doesn’t bury us in another layer of dishonest treacle.”

“Yep, Goodman only sells honest treacle,” said Railroad Martin.

“Where do you get lie-detector tests for treacle?” Bread Bryan asked, absolutely deadpan.

“There’s gotta be a story in that—” mused George Finger.

“—but I just can’t put my
finger
on it,” said one of the nameless fringies. This was followed by a nanosecond of annoyed silence. Somebody else would have to explain to the fringie that a) that joke was older than God, b) it hadn’t been that funny the first time it had been told, and c) he didn’t have the right to tell it. Without looking up, Bread Bryan simply said, “That’s one.”

Steven Dhor said, “You want to know about treacle? Christmas is treacle. It starts the day after Halloween. You get two months of it. It’s an avalanche of sugar and bullshit. I suppose they figure that if they put enough sugar into the recipe, you won’t notice the taste of the bullshit.”

“Don’t mince words, Stevie. Tell us what you really think.”

“Okay, I will.” Dhor had abruptly caught fire. His eyes were blazing. “Christmas—at least the way we celebrate it—is a perversion. It’s not a holiday; it’s a brainwashing.” That’s when I started paying
real
attention.

“Every time you see a picture of Santa Claus,” Dhor said, “you’re being indoctrinated into the Christian ethic. If you’re good, you get a reward, a present; if you’re bad, you get a lump of coal. One day, you figure it out; you say, hey—Santa Claus is really Mommy and Daddy. And when you tell them you figured it out, what do they do? They tell you about God. If you’re good, you get to go to heaven; if you’re bad, you go to hell. Dying isn’t anything to be afraid of, it’s just another form of Christmas. And Santa Claus is God—the only difference is that at least Santa gives you something tangible. But if there ain’t no Santa, then why should we believe in God either?”

Bread Bryan considered Dhor’s words dispassionately. Bread Bryan considered everything dispassionately. Despite his nickname, even yeast
couldn’t make him rise. Railroad Martin swirled his beer around in his glass; he didn’t like being upstaged by someone else’s anger—even when it was anger as good as this. George Finger, on the other hand, was delighted with the effrontery of the idea.

“But wait—this is the nasty part. We’ve taken God out of Christmas. You can’t put up angels anymore, nor a cross, nor even a crèche. No religious symbols of any kind, because even though everything closes down on Christmas day, we still have to pretend it’s a secular celebration. So, the only decorations you can put up are Santa Claus, reindeer, snowmen and elves. We’ve replaced the actual holiday with a third-generation derivation, including its own pantheon of saints and demons: Rudolph, Frosty, George Bailey, Scrooge and the Grinch—Santa Claus is not only most people’s first experience of God,” Dhor continued, “it’s now their
only
experience of God.”

Dhor was warming to his subject. Clearly this was not a casual thought for him. He’d been stewing this over for some time. He began describing how the country had become economically addicted to Christmas. “We’ve turned it into a capitalist feeding frenzy—so much so that some retailers depend on Christmas for fifty percent of their annual business. I think we should all ‘Just Say No to Christmas.’ Or at least—for God’s sake—remember whose birthday it is and celebrate it appropriately, by doing things to feed the poor and heal the sick.”

A couple of the fringies began applauding then, but Dhor just looked across at them with a sour expression on his face. “Don’t applaud,” he said. “Just do it.”

“Do you?” someone challenged him. “How do you celebrate Christmas?”

“I don’t give presents,” Dhor finally admitted. “I take the money I would normally spend on presents and give it to the Necessities of Life Program of the AIDS Project of Los Angeles. It’s more in keeping with the spirit.” That brought another uncomfortable silence. It’s one thing to do the performance of saint—most writers are pretty good at it—but when you catch one actually
doing
something unselfish and noteworthy, well ... it’s pretty damned embarrassing for everyone involved.

Fortunately, Dhor was too much in command of the situation to let the awkward moment lie there unmolested. He trampled it quickly. “The thing is, I don’t see any way to stop the avalanche of bullshit. The best we can do is ride it.”

“How?” George Finger asked.

“Simple. By adding a new piece to the mythology—a new saint in the pantheon.
Satan Claus.”
There was that name again. Dhor lowered his voice. “See, if Santa Claus is really another expression of God, then there has to be an equally powerful expression of the Devil too. There has to be a balance.”