Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes (11 page)

Ty thrilled at his delivery. Yet what he saw moving along the connecting ribbons, and the overheard thoughts of those hanging on his every word, gave him pause. They were filled with pride at not being among those who would burn in hell. They hated the sodomites, or rather the image he himself had painted. And for all his golden words, for all his carefully wrought phrases, the one message he saw snaking along those ribbons into their hearts was, “Hate queers.”

“But I don’t understand,” he said. “What I’m telling them is the gospel truth.”

The little girl said, “No it isn’t, Mister Taylor.”

“Child,” he said, “Leviticus tells us—”

“You shall not,” said Santa, blushing with anger, “befoul my daughter’s ears with your fixation on questionable passages from the Old Testament, draping your own prejudice in sanctimony, exalting a man-made collection of writings over the self-evident truth of God’s love for all he has created.”

“But I—”

“Look at yourself, flailing your arms and contorting your face. You’re no better than a showman, and worse than many, because you hawk poison to the soul. Of all the sects you could have embraced, this is the one you chose. Behold the young.”

And Ty saw thin ribbons to the children, some very young indeed, most of them half listening or sighing in boredom. But even these his ribbons of judgment entered. Here sat Cully Harmon and his anorexic mother; there the Pine twins, Gayle and Tara, between their parents.

“We’ll see them again on our next visit, older.”

Wendy touched his sleeve. “Now show Mister Taylor...you know.”

With a flick of Santa’s finger, Ty’s entire congregation came into view. But it seemed as if two bright lights shone in varying mixes upon them, a red light indicating attraction to their own gender; a blue, attraction to the opposite. While most of his flock were bathed in varying shades of blue, many were tinged pink or red, and some were completely red, though they expended much mental activity in denying it. Hank Febinger, sitting beside his wife of sixty years, was a bright cherry-red. A babe in arms, as well; a third-grader named Jamie Stratton; and Bessie Pullman, a middle-aged spinster who had joined the church last week.

But what most startled Ty was the color of his own body as he stood at the pulpit, bright blue broken up by intense patches of red, perhaps twenty percent of the whole. It would explain his youthful uncertainties, at seminary especially, about such matters.

“So that old devil Kinsey had it right after all.”

“Yes,” said Santa. “A scale of attraction.”

“But that doesn’t abrogate God’s word.”

The elf took umbrage at that.

“Daddy!” Wendy grabbed her father’s upraised arm.

“In fact it confirms it,” said Ty. “Are you threatening me? God’s true emissary would not threaten.”

Blood pounded in Ty’s temples as the enraged creature hovered over him, his eyes ablaze with intolerance. That this immortal elf could, at any instant, strike him dead he had no doubt. Jacob had wrestled with an angel. Perhaps such a death would be his fate.

Santa contained his rage. “I’m all right. I’m fine.”

“The alcoholic is born so, yet he learns—”

“Enough!” said Santa. “I ought to smite you on the spot. But I’ll not do that. I won’t. Wendy, come. You, sleep, little Ty all grown up. You haven’t seen the last of us.”

“God has sent you as a trial, to test my resolve to uphold his word, no matter what.”

“Ah,” said Santa, taking a swipe at Ty’s face. And he was gone, him and the girl and the pine boughs and their marvelous scent. The bedroom plunged abruptly into darkness, Ty’s tight blinds shutting out the least hint of moonlight.

Ty marveled then, but somnolence drained the life from him and he slipped at once into the land of dreams.

Chapter 12. Friends Reform, Foes Regroup

AT THE NORTH POLE, FRITZ, HERBERT, and two dozen others worked on the Beluzzo replica, adding ornate carvings to the oak drawers of a replacement dresser and to thick turned bedposts where Matt’s actual bed had none. They arced back the roof on its hinges so that snowdrifts could be strategically built up in scatterings about the bedroom, enough to make an impact without hindering their work.

Ordinarily, they would have been a happy crew, trading quips and pitching in wherever extra hands were needed. Not so now. For Gregor had kept up the pressure. His rants at the Chapel continued and grew more condemnatory. He had gone so far as to have a centrally situated bed, with a thin mattress and no posts to obscure his view, built in the dormitory, abandoning on nights unpredictable his bed in the stables to sleep among them.

Some time during the night he would appear. You could never tell when, but you could always be sure he would be gone in the morning, and no one had ever seen him shut his eyes or put on a nightshirt. Always the eagle eye. If you dared glance toward his bed, Gregor would be staring back at you, his fierce glower accusing you of looking his way because you were about to sneak a fingertip up your nostril.

And sometimes that was so.

It was most unsettling.

What had been a harmless, unconscious habit became for many an obsession. Their thoughts turned continually to the nose and the finger, to observing the noses and fingers of their brothers, wondering if they had come into satisfying contact when Gregor or his spies let their guard down.

That was the worst of it. Gregor had split their once harmonious community in half. There were those who joined him wholeheartedly in his police efforts. Fritz knew, and Herbert confirmed with a nod, that the most public of these were in fact deeply closeted nosepickers, who, when they weren’t busy snitching or scolding, slipped off in solitude to extract bodily manufacture from a nostril, licking and sucking in the throes of guilt, savoring and swallowing, enjoying the added zing of doing something completely sinful and getting away with it.

Hypocrisy tasted sweet.

So did mucus.

The other elves had no strong opinion one way or the other. Some picked their noses, some did not. But all of them marveled at their community’s down-drooping devolution and felt helpless to halt or reverse it. At first they murmured about it in hushed tones. But soon that felt like a waste of time and dangerous to boot. For having no strong opinion was tantamount to subversion. And being seen murmuring in hushed tones about anything at all, well, that was regarded in some circles as well-nigh treasonous.

Fritz had seen their work suffer. The very work they were now engaged upon, these replicas, suffered. Santa had put him in charge of them. He had remonstrated with his colleagues. To an elf, they had nodded eagerly. But nothing had changed.

Their toymaking suffered as well. Morale had plummeted. Yet Santa seemed not to notice. Or if he did, he minimized the problem. Why didn’t anyone tell him what was going on? Fritz had asked Herbert this very question.

The flaxen-haired elf, wordless as always, simply shrugged.

But Fritz knew why. To tell was to be too much like a spy, an informer, a snitch. Too much like Gregor. Besides, Santa was a little boy at heart. He hated having to deal with discord. He expected things to run smoothly, as they always had.

Fritz applied cherrywood stain to the dresser. There rose from the replicas a righteous racket of planing and sawing and hammering. Herbert and three co-workers were busy painting the walls of the Beluzzo replica a lemon-peel yellow. On occasion, Herbert glanced over at Fritz and they exchanged significant looks. They had grown more careful, their stolen moments of intimacy far more discreet. It had once been easy to slip away. But in the poisoned atmosphere that now surrounded them, they had grown stealthier.

Fritz disliked that, and so did Herbert.

They could have cut it off entirely. But Fritz would be damned if he’d give up the pleasure of their trysts to feed the ego of a self-righteous prig like Gregor. Yet as soon as he thought that, he berated himself for thinking ill of a fellow elf.

Then his anger took wing, anger over Herbert’s unmerited dismay, the communal chaos, Saint Nicholas’ willful blindness, everyone’s ingrained inability to confront Gregor’s egregious behavior, and his own impotence in the face of tyranny, a state he had once believed could never take hold at the North Pole.

Fritz sighed. How far they had fallen.

But what could he do? Then he brightened. I know, he thought. I’ll have a few words with Gregor. In private. Surely he mustn’t understand the impact of his actions. Maybe a talk, maybe the gentlest nudge, would persuade him to call off this nonsense.

I’ll do it. I will.

But when he imagined himself crossing the commons, when he pictured flinty-eyed Gregor staring at him as he approached, his limbs grew cold, his resolve flagged, and everything seemed more hopeless than ever.

* * *

A dreamscape shared by four dreamers tends to be far more stable than your typical solitary one, especially when it has been designed by the angels to reinforce righteous behavior.

Kathy and Walter Stratton found themselves holding hands as they floated into this particular dreamscape. They had on long white flannel nightgowns, not at all what they usually wore to bed. On either side, in similar attire, lazily drifted the Reverend Taylor and a wide-eyed teen whose name Kathy somehow knew was Matt. He slipped his hand into Walter’s as the preacher took Kathy’s hand. Her mood was jubilant, the air balmy and rich with oxygen, the clouds surrounding them full and wispy by turns.

“There they are!” exclaimed Matt.

Kathy looked, and Santa Claus, Wendy beside him in the sleigh, passed below the dreamers waving. Behind them, a full-to-bursting sack of toys, suede leather stretched and poked out at odd angles, threatened to spill its abundance over the sides of the sleigh. The four of them fell toward that sack, whose puckered top unthonged and peeled open. But instead of sleds and stuffed stockings and gaily wrapped and beribboned gifts, the glorious green and blue earth revealed itself.

Over it they sailed, marveling. For the sights and sounds and smells came to them as if for the first time, sharp, full, and vivid. Here was the white of a heron in full flight, there the slap and retreat of surf on a briny beach, the scent of a pear as it ripens and falls to a squirrel’s prodding, the red-brown fur of that squirrel as it stares and nibbles and tenses and darts treeward from the ground. Below them, the earth yielded and gushed, vegetation spreading forth in joyous riot, birds flying out of it in formation, the seas replete with crab and mussel, with dolphin, minnow, and whale.

“Such abundance,” marveled the preacher, to which Kathy said, “Yes.”

They came to light on a high hill. As their feet touched ground, there sprouted from the burgeoning earth the entire race of humanity, busily buzzing about. But what was odd in Kathy’s eyes was the contrast between the abundant earth and humanity’s self-imposed restraints. For she could see deep into every living soul. And that same abundance lay at their foundation. Generosity flowed in their veins. It infused the marrow of their bones. Yet a certain gloomy ugliness clamped down upon them by common consent, by conspiratorial fiat. A rich confusion of words swarmed about them and enwrapped their skulls in a stew of divine babble. Some who dove into it resurfaced with delightful concoctions, with dances upon the tongue and music. But others, hobbled by fear or laziness, wrenched ill-formed dicta from it, ground imperfect lenses in haste, and clamped filters on their unfiltered senses. Into tribes they clustered.

“They shouldn’t do that,” scolded Walter.

But the moment he said it, the dreamers picked themselves out of that same roil of humanity and saw that they were acting with just as much foolishness as any of the others. “Wow, there I am,” said Matt, “shuffling through fog.” And so he was, his potential for limitless goodness quashed by his own dim vision and by signals coming from his family, his peers, and the surrounding herd. “Wake up!” he screamed. But for all the notice his observed self took, he might have been a ghost.

Below them unfolded all of human history. Brutality held sway. In painful clarity, each brutal act rasped and unrolled—rapes, wars, words unkind diminishing their intended victims, the barbs and insults which throttled vitality and encouraged resignation and despair. Feints at goodness threaded tentative through the inertia, pockets of creativity and kindness too often discouraged and crushed. “It’s human nature,” came the phrase. “What are you going to do?” But it wasn’t human nature at all, not the underlying nature evident in babes-in-arms and in those rare souls who reveled in creativity, not in Michelangelo, Mozart, or Shakespeare. Works of art, even those that depicted strife, celebrated life in all its abundance and variety. From the simplest elements emerged a complex of delightful patterning, an acceptance and embrace of what was falsely perceived as alien.

But the thunder of destruction, wanton blasts that shattered the work of centuries beneath a moment’s fist—these made a mockery of human nature. And they were so pervasive, it was an easy temptation to mistake them for the embodiment of natural humanity.

Then things froze and began to roll backward.

“It’s reversing,” said Kathy, “the whole sorry mess.”

Indeed it was, landmines unplanted and disassembled in factories, soldiers taking back death and undeploying home, grown men and women youthening through childhood and babyhood into the fetal clutch, then deflating and splitting to sperm and egg, which likewise disappeared into the organs of degeneration. Bombed towns were unbombed, reconstructed in an instant as corpses rose to life and walked backward out of their upraised looks of terror into indifference, benignity, or the dry dead mull of judgmentalism. Advancing fashions reversed. Michelangelo’s brushes sucked up and repotted the paint that moistened on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Beethoven lifted stroke by stroke his Ninth Symphony from depopulated staves, tucking the glory of one masterwork after another back inside his cranium, which burgeoned enriched with anticipation a-dying. And on it went.