Rudolph! (23 page)

Let's be honest: most musicals are sort of scary anyway, even the ones that purport to be about passionate excess, and most kids' movies that have song and dance numbers would prefer you not to call them by that name.
Rudolph! A Musical
was a fiery fever dream of psychotic fury and impotent man-child rage. It stomped and trampled its way across the popularized myth of Santa's favorite reindeer with absolutely no remorse for its bleak tone. It was equal parts Grand Guignol, orgiastic mystery cult ritual, Abbott and Costello-style sight gags, and a cheap remix of the old Faust legend. Full of pyrotechnics, full-scale choral histrionics, and kinetic word play, it was a mesmerizing disaster. The only way it was going to be successful was if the audience bought the premise that Christmas sucked.

And I had to ask myself: how far from the truth was that?

We had gone to purgatory to make sure that no Christmas wish was left unfilled, thinking—in our eternal sugarplum-coated innocence—that a child's happiness was the most important thing in the world. And, that night in Troutdale, watching little Suzy jump into her father's arms? That moment had been totally worth everything we had done.

But we had performed a miracle, and Ramiel had been right about the repercussions of our actions. We had changed the rules, and it had changed Christmas. It raised the bar, and the wish lists the following year had been outrageous. Even with the help of the heavenly host, we had been hard pressed to fulfill every wish—and some of them we interpreted
really
liberally. And we had hit the ground running after being recruited by Mrs. C. There had been so much work to do in restoring people's faith in Christmas. What do you do for an encore after performing a miracle? Especially when you know the cost of doing them?

Part of the reason I put Rudolph and myself in a metal plug six thousand feet below sea level was that I didn't want to see what happened when Christmas cratered. The fact that it didn't without us was both heartbreaking and a huge relief.

But Santa knew. I could tell. Satan wasn't stealing the Spirit from him this time. It was the rest of the world. We had wrecked things when we went to purgatory, and no matter how hard we tried to put it all back together, it wasn't the same. It was like watching a remake of your favorite TV show. It seems like it should be better—it certainly looks prettier, and the actors are way younger and sexier—but something isn't quite right. And eventually you realize what is off is your sense of wonder. It's gotten dull.

And Mrs. C knew too. I was slow to figure it out, but she had already extrapolated Rudolph's emotional trajectory.

It was all there in the Boston job. If Rudolph's anger had gotten the better of him, if he lost track of his faith and his desire and his direction, that job would have ended a lot worse. He had the Spirit of Christmas in him still—just like I did—but his core was nuclear. How long could the Spirit survive in that heat?

I will tell it true.
That's what Rudolph says in the musical. Scene One, Act One. If you looked at it the right way—or wrong way, I suppose—this wasn't a musical. It was a prophecy. Oh, sure there's the deeply entrenched Rankin and Bass influence where Rudolph laments how different he is from the others. How they won't let them play his games. How he can't run with the reindeer on Christmas night. But the similarities stop there. Whereas Rankin and Bass paste a "Kumbaya! let's all clap our hands" veneer on the story, the musical script pulls a Milton and dives off the deep end. Just like Satan in
Paradise Lost
, the musical Rudolph is bent on revenge.

November 27th

T
urkey Day was a respite from everything for everyone except the
turkey. "A day off," Barb said when she invited me to join the turkey orphans at her place. "We could all use a day off. No rehearsals. No budget meetings. Nothing to do with the show. It'll all be there tomorrow."

The cab driver did the Seattle version of over the hill and through the woods, taking me across one of the floating bridges that spanned Lake Washington and whisking me through one of the neighborhoods where the tech industry's early retirees live. I was deposited on the curb in front of a narrow brownstone house that looked like it had been airlifted out from the east coast. It was half as wide as the surrounding houses, but a full floor taller. White lights were strung along the eaves and the edges of the windows, and through the open curtains, I could see a fire dancing in the fireplace and the requisite triangle of a Christmas tree. Up but not decorated. She wasn't one of those crazy ones.

A pudgy teenaged girl answered the door. She had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her wrinkled nose, and her eyes were the color of the ocean and appeared ready to overflow with water at any moment. She was dressed in a plaid skirt and a frilly blouse that looked nearly as uncomfortable as her expression.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Jacob Marley," I replied dryly.

She slammed the door in my face. Hard enough to rattle the brass knocker. I tapped my thumb against the side of the bottle of Pedro Ximénez I had brought. "Obviously, a huge
Christmas Carol
fan," I muttered as I leaned on the bell again.

"Sorry," Barb said as soon as she opened the door. "Cordelia—my niece—is unhappy with her stepmother and is taking it out on the rest of us." She was wearing a printed wrap dress that augmented the color in her eyes. A simple strand of pearls wreathed her neck. "This is your last chance," she said, offering me a smile. "You can still turn back."

"‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.'"

She cocked her head to one side. "Is that Goethe?"

"Dante."

"You sure?"

I laughed. "Yeah."

She stepped out of the way and ushered me into her house. "From the sound of that laugh, I'd say you're more than a little familiar with Dante."

"Personally? No," I said. "But yeah, I've . . . well, let's just say I've done some independent research on Dante."

"Is there a good story there, or is it all dry academic talk?"

"It's a knee-slapper," I said.

"Do I get to hear it?"

I turned around in the foyer and looked up at her. "Now?"

She closed the door and leaned against it.

"Later is fine." Her eyes twinkled. "If you survive."

I twirled the bottle of wine around in my hand and held the neck like the handle of a shillelagh. "I can handle the moody ones."

She swirled past me, trailing an aroma of spices and sandalwood that whispered Chanel. "Give up your outer vestments, o fierce warrior," she said as she led me toward the back of the house, where all the noise was coming from. "Let me show you off to the rest of the savages."

I filled out the double-digit group of turkey orphans. Barb. Cordelia. Cordelia's father and stepmother and two smaller moppets: half-brother and -sister to the obnoxious one. The other couple was Edgar and Sylvia Brandstreet. Barb said that Edgar painted and that Sylvia wrote, which I had already guessed by how he held his wine glass and the way she picked at the
hors d'oeuvres
. The other man in the room was Terence Ulan. He tried to bond with me by playing the game of
Whose Hand is More Like a Cold Fish
? and letting me know that he preferred "Doctor" to "Mister." I bonded back by calling him "Terry" and squeezing his hand hard enough to make fish oil.

Cordelia's wrath, as Jack, her father, rapidly explained to me the first moment she was out of earshot, stemmed from the fact that her birth mother had picked last Monday to go into rehab. "Prescription medication addiction," he explained
sotto voce
. "Darlene loved her pills more than her own daughter." Cordelia, he elaborated, never cared much for his new wife, Nancy, and she found the idea of spending an entire four days in her stepmother's companyworse than the psychological torture inflicted upon illicit prisoners of war.

"You couldn't lock her in the basement and send down bread and water twice a day?" I asked.

From his nervous laughter, I could tell that the idea had occurred to him already. More than once.

Nancy was blonde and petite, and as I discovered through the course of snack-table small talk, she had been a cheerleading coach out in North Carolina during the last decade. Her team had gone to Nationals a few times, and had almost one once. Her voice wasn't as helium-charged as I would have expected, but the lingering aroma of ground tobacco hiding beneath her perfume gave her secret away. Her breasts were new, and she was enjoying how they stretched the fabric of her dress, which was very disconcerting, as they were sort of at eye-level for me. Every time she turned toward me, I was worried I was going to get smacked in the head.

Sylvia's demons had taken her beauty. Not entirely. In honest moments, you could be stunned by the shape of her nose or the turn of her hair about her collar or the movement of her jaw. But she was too tightly wound by the stress of her art to remember her grace. Edgar saw it in her. You could tell by his eyes and the way his fingers lingered every time he touched her. And he found lots of excuses to touch her. Even though they were opposites in many ways—he was gossamer to her stone—they seemed made for each other.

Terrence—Terry—wanted that same connection with Barb, but he was as limp and passive as his hands were clammy. He was having a hard time making eye contact, and most of his longing gazes were directed at her legs. Not that I could blame him for that.

Once I had made the social circuit a few times, I excused myself and wandered down the hall to find a bathroom. Locking the door behind me, I cracked open the window and stood on the edge of the bathtub. I was feeling that old tugging sensation in my chest. That magnetic pull north. I sucked in the brisk November air, reveling in how clean and pure it felt.

I didn't miss the North Pole that much, and most of the blame there could be dropped right in the NPC's lap. What I missed was the tranquility of the Residence. Even with all the hubbub of Seasonal prep, the Pole wasn't as crazy and chaotic as life down in the lower latitudes. Life was simpler with the Clauses; well, it had been until recently. Until Satan started mucking with us, and everything took on a little darkness. A little shadow that never went away.

Closing my eyes, I leaned my head against the cool tile of the bathtub wall. "It's this damn show," I muttered. All that gothic posturing was like getting verbally tongue-lashed by Mephistopheles. No wonder Faust said yes. He was hoping that doing so would shut Mephistopheles up.

I washed my hands a couple of times as if it were possible to erase the stain of the script from my hands. I threw some water on my face, trying to ignore the circles under my eyes. My face was getting older too, sprouting worry lines and crow's-feet like weeds in an untended field.

Santa had looked older too when I had last seen him in Edmonton. The job was catching up with us.

I ran into Cordelia in the hall. The passage wasn't wide enough for her to march past without one of us giving way to the other. She opted for confrontational instead, stopping dead center in the hall and staring at me, hands cocked on her nearly non-existent hips.

I let my gaze wander over the framed pictures running the length of the hall. Typical family records, both indoor and outdoor shots. Barb was in some of them, as were a number of other people. I avoided Cordelia's glare and pointed at a picture of Barb sitting on a log out in the wilderness somewhere, a picturesque mountain rising in the background.

"Who took these?" I asked Cordelia.

She was flustered by my willful avoidance of her confrontational air, and she sputtered and stuttered for a few moments, her fists kneading against her hips. "Daniel," she muttered finally. "Daniel took them."

"Who is Daniel?" I asked.

"My uncle," she said, her lips curling. "He's the family vegetable." And that got the stunned reaction from me that she had been hoping for. She flounced past with a toss of her head before I could formulate another question.

I was still in the hall when Barb found me a little while later. "We're about to sit down," she said.

I had been wandering back and forth, looking at all the pictures. Figuring out the family connections. I pointed at a picture of Barb and a sandy-haired man sporting that deep ruddiness that comes only from exposure to the sun. "Is this Daniel?" I asked.

He looked a lot like the younger version of Jack in some of the pictures.

Barb didn't even look at the picture. "It is, though you wouldn't recognize him now." She took a deep breath. "His hair is gone and he's lost the tan." She tried to find a smile, but couldn't sustain it.

"I'm sorry," I said, dropping my hand.

"It isn't your fault."

"Doesn't make me any less sorry for bringing it up."

She firmed up the smile then. "It's all right. It was a stupid accident. And there's no point in being angry about it any more. I just wish—" She stopped herself.

I stepped forward and touched her arm. "Is there food on the table?" I asked. "Is that why you were looking for me, or has Terry choked on a cracker or something? Do you need me to perform the Heimlich on him?"

"Aren't you a little short for that?" she asked. Her smile worked up to her eyes.

"Not if he is lying down."

"He's not," she said. "Lying down, or choking. He's just"—she raised two fingers to her eyes and then mimed walking around with them—"making sure I don't trip on something."

"He's very observant that way."

"So are you." She laughed lightly as I blushed. "Come on," she said. "Dinner is ready. You can flirt with me more at the table."

"What? And risk Terry's wrath?"

She favored me with a look. "If you're lucky, Cordelia will make vomiting noises," she said.

"I knew it," I said as I followed her toward the dining room. "You totally asked me here to provide comic relief."

It was all fun and flirtatious until I ended up at the kid's table. There was an awkward moment when Nancy announced that she had put my place setting at the lower table—somewhat proudly, I thought, as if she was patting herself on the back for doing something to minimize the potential embarrassment that could come from me sitting at the big people's table.

Terry looked inordinately pleased at the idea, and he might have even applauded Nancy's decision if I hadn't been staring daggers at him. Barb just shook her head and disappeared into the kitchen, and Sylvia stared at me, her long teeth gnawing at the end piece of the crusty bread. Jack had a sick look on his face, like he was worried that he was going to lose control of his bowels at any moment.

"Thanks, Nancy," I said. What else could I do?