Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (14 page)

Santa seemed in high spirits. He gave each reindeer a hug around the neck and a cube of sugar. Then he made a rousing speech about giving freely of oneself, about the virtues of self-sacrifice, about respecting the core of one's beliefs and particularly that which makes each of us unique and peculiar and idiosyncratic, about not yielding one iota on issues that defined one's very nature, about how love always triumphs in the end. Fritz laughed and cried and cheered along with his compatriots, though he thought it odd that Santa strayed so far from his usual themes.

More fuel for the midnight fires.

Santa and his wife came into one another's arms and kissed long and lingering for the crowd. The elves went wild, as always, but wilder than they really needed to and longer in leaving off their cheers. Then Santa strode to the sleigh, pulled himself into it, picked up the weighty reins, chucked them across the backs of the team, and rose into the air, waving and laughing down at them like life irrepressible.

As always, Fritz and the others watched and waved until the diminishing spot in the sky winked out and the high jingle of sleighbells was but the memory of a memory. Hands dropped here and there in the crowd and heads turned from the sky. Fritz heard the general gasp first. Then he registered the drawn faces of Johann, of Friedrich, of Gustav and Knecht Rupert.

He followed their eyes.

There on the front porch stood Mrs. Claus.

Her peasant blouse—red and white and shot through with stitched green ivy—was unlaced and ripped open to expose the pink-tipped mounds of her breasts. Her skirts she had hiked up and tucked into her wide black belt. Below, she was naked as truth. While one hand teased her left nipple hard, the other moved in slow deliberate circles, rounding upon her sex like the fist of a yawning child at one puffy eye.

And when Fritz brought his gaze to her face, God help them she was looking out over the shocked multitudes with the hungriest old-lady eyes he had ever seen in his life.

8. Vengeance and Lust

Gregor stood at the stable door, an eternal humph of disapproval stuck to his face. Arms folded tight upon his chest, he gazed out through the buttercup light of magic time at an elfsnake whose long green body stretched deep into the forest, its restless tail tapering off at the middle of the skating pond. He refused to imagine the tomfoolery its head was engaged in. Every few minutes, another green-clad figure with his fly unzipped and his penis flapping right-to-left-to-right dashed out of the woods, kicking up snowdust in his eagerness to rejoin the line for another turn at Santa's wife.

"Disgusting," muttered Gregor. But as he said it, he wondered why he alone, of all the elves, had been able to summon up the willpower to refuse Mrs. Claus's outrageous proposal. Even his brothers, shy by nature, shifted under their clothing at the sight of her—as if a darkness long suppressed slithered up out of their bellies.

The whole wretched mob had grinned and nodded at her words, stamping and whistling their encouragement, until at last they stormed the porch and hefted her, half-naked, high above their heads. Gregor had just stood there by the stable, mouth agape, feeling as though he'd tumbled into a bad dream. Then into the woods they dashed, Mrs. Claus—acting suddenly as young and irrepressible as a schoolgirl—jouncing above and pointing the way.

Gregor missed his reindeer, their clear brown eyes, their animal honesty. He didn't much like these wild new elves with their demented looks and their taunts, these demonic doppelgangers. Some of them, before they rejoined the queue, dashed across the commons and waggled their willies at him. They laughed. They called him names. Albert did this, and so did Wilhelm, two of his dearest friends. He shut his eyes to stifle a sob.

What Gregor missed most was watching the elves wink in and out. Usually, at the moment Santa's sleigh passed through the protective bubble around his domain, those inside reverted to normal time. Every few minutes thereafter, a handful of elves would "wink out" of normal time into magic time, vanishing from their midst and reappearing soon after, exhausted and ready for sleep. It was no easy task, so they told him, to spend six straight hours transporting gift after gift from storage to loading where they had to be to replenish Santa's pack as he went from house to house. But now that Mrs. Claus, in her fury at Santa, had sustained the wrap of magic time about the entire North Pole, there was no need to wink in and out. There was only this ever-renewing queue of elves stretched into the woods, the now unbearable glowlight of magic time over all, and Gregor's interminable wait for the return of reason.

He rested his hairy forearms on the half-door of the stable. "A sorry time," he muttered. He watched Fritz, Mrs. Claus's appointed pander, march out of the woods with an air of self-importance, barking orders up and down the line.

A sorry time indeed.

*****

From the shadows, the Tooth Fairy watched her lover pull presents from his pack and arrange them beneath the tree. As golden as her memory was of their time together, the reality never failed to outshine it. He was a better lover now—better because more giving—than in the old times, and he had been superb then.

"Santa," she said, low and husky. Her paramour gave the slightest start. Still on his knees, he turned to her. "Do you recognize the place?" she asked. She said nothing about his failure, for the first time in twenty years, to show up at her island; said nothing, though it stung deep.

"Of course." She didn't like the blank look on his face. "Our first time together," he said. "Twenty years ago, red lace panties, little Rachel Townsend's bed. I thought you might show up here so I scheduled California early."

"Like the way I look?"

"Radiant as ever." His eyes never strayed from her face.

"Aren't we the cool one tonight?" she teased, hiding her upset. "There's another little girl sleeping in that same bedroom tonight, Rachel's daughter Wendy." She clung to him and fingered his lower lip. "There's a delectable upper right lateral incisor lying beneath her pillow. Why don't we go in and . . . see what happens?"

"Anya knows," he said.

Ah. Things began to make sense.

"How?" she asked, searching his eyes.

"The Easter Bunny. He brought her to the hut. They watched us through the window."

She laughed. "Well, well. So good old Anya knows what we're up to."

"Yes. And it means we've got to stop."

Reluctance. She hadn't felt that from Santa for years. It unsettled her. "No need for hasty judgments, lover. Let's go in and look at Wendy, shall we?"

He hesitated, then agreed. "But no bedding down next to her." He raised an index finger. "We'll peek in at her. Then I'm off to the next house."

"Of course," she said, cozying up to him and making sure her right breast pressed against his upper arm.

*****

Fritz did his best to seem in control. But inwardly he was a mass of conflicts, all of them bitter and none of them anywhere near resolution.

His penis. That lay at the heart of his problems. Before now, he had hardly been aware of it. It was just something you held onto so you didn't pee on your slippers. Funny soft droopy tubes of flesh, peripheral to their lives; they all had one, no big deal. But now this thing—all of their things—had stirred at Anya's words and deeds up on that porch. (She had insisted they call her Anya, not Mrs. Claus.) Suddenly, this hitherto inconsequential appendage had taken on great pitch and moment, nagging for female completion, refusing to let him think about anything else.

"Stay in line, men," he shouted to those nearest the hut. "Dicks at the ready. And warm them with your hands. Anya's orders." He stopped before a dole-eyed elf whose mittened fists hovered uncertainly at his belt. "Albert, for the last time, will you get your goddamn dick out?"

"Aw gee whiz Fritz, it's too cold," Albert grumbled. But he unbuttoned his pants and did as he was told.

Never before had Fritz's loyalty to Santa been at odds with his loyalty to Anya. "Fritz," she had told him after his first time, "I swear to you the next elf who fucks me deferentially gets tossed out on his ear. I want you diminutive cockwielders to wallow in my flesh like piglets in mud. Spread the word."

Lordy, lordy, why, he wondered, was he taking it all in stride? Why had all of them adapted so quickly to what they would rightly have seen as scandalous behavior scant hours ago?

And what would Santa think of all this?

But the horror—and the humor of it—was that, deep down, Fritz didn't really give a shit
what
Santa thought. In her porch ramblings, Anya had spoken right to the heart of some depraved creature hidden inside him, hidden in all of them. It was rude and rowdy. It refused to be ruled. It stamped, it bellowed, it raged, and it craved precisely what Anya was offering.

Who, it demanded, was Santa Claus anyway? They had a new master now, a new mistress rather, a lusty old woman who seemed suddenly not so old at all, who had taken it upon herself to envaginate them, to bring them to a boil, to strip from them the sweet veneer of elfdom and wrench into focus a wilderness that surged unchecked within.

*****

Wendy's room silvered in moonlight.

As he gazed upon the little girl's beauty, Santa felt its mild reproach. Anya had been right all along. He had been bullheaded about the Tooth Fairy. One glance at the sleeping child was all it took to bring him to his senses. "Aren't they astounding?" he said.

"Mm." The Tooth Fairy's agreement was perfunctory. She was too busy munching on Wendy's baby tooth to say more. Swallowing it, she cupped a palm over her anus.

Santa kept his eyes fixed on Wendy's angelic face. His cheeks were burning. "Are you finished yet?"

"What's the matter, stud?" she taunted. "Afraid to see my cunt pucker?"

"You're being a little childish," he said. He saw her thrust a hand beneath the pillow, heard the muffled clink of coins. Her every curve and concavity was pantherish and provoking.

Without straightening up, she brought her fingers to her nipples and teased them out into hard tight nubs. Her eyes probed Santa's face. "Childish?" she said. With a sinking heart, Santa watched her right hand move down her belly into a thicket of curls whose every twist and turn he had by heart. "Is this the body of a child, Santa?"

In an instant he was behind her, gripping her wrist. He intended to scold her, to plead with her to honor the innocence of the child's sleep and leave him be. But she whirled about, planting a kiss deep in his mouth as she cupped and caressed his burgeoning desire.

And Santa let it happen, neither horrified nor elated, watching his body expend its lust, knowing that this time he had the strength to end it, and the resolve, and the best of reasons—his undying love for his wife.

*****

Anya lay beneath Fritz, out of her mind with rage and desire. His prick was lodged up inside her. His balding head with its wisps of red hair rotated now at her breast, working like a horny babe at her nipple. His long bushy beard tickled her belly.

She couldn't believe how youthful she felt. What she was doing scared and exhilarated her. It seemed precisely counter to anything the wife of Saint Nicholas ought to be doing, yet it felt like something she had done countless times in some forgotten past—done and enjoyed, as now she enjoyed Fritz.

"You're improving, Fritz," she said. "Your first go was wretched, your second only so-so, but honey you've hit your stride with number three. Oh shit Fritz yes keep it up keep doing that don't stop don't break that rhythm."

In Anya's mind, each surge of pleasure Fritz evoked drew a razorline across Santa's face or scored a random whipwelt upon his bare back. Though she had thus far bled the jolly old son of a bitch dry thousands of times, she had thousands more to go before her vengeance would begin to approach anything like completion.

Anya gripped the sheets to either side of her, the same sheets that Santa had slaked his lust upon. Fisting them tight, she arched up to meet the moaning elf-body that pounded down on her. Wide-eyed faces packed tight the windows. Then orgasm bulleted through her and sent her screaming like a newborn, drawing Fritz along as well. He bucked and humped like joy and sorrow combined as she tightened about him.

"Anya, dear Anya," he gasped at his breath's end. He seemed, this detumescing elf, impatient to say something. For a moment Anya couldn't recall his name. "This isn't right," he blurted out, "what we're doing out here in the woods. We've got to start thinking about—"

Abruptly she raised herself on her elbows and glared at him. Then she hauled back and struck him, three hard blows. Fritz scrabbled off the bed and slumped, hands collapsed over his head, in a disarray of green clothing. "Don't you talk to me, you little shit, about right and wrong. We make the rules out here, me and my quim. Not you. Not any of you. Your job is to obey me. Mine is to hurt my sainted husband and to keep on hurting him until there's no more hurt left."

"But—"

"Enough!" she yelled. In an instant she was off the bed, her fingernails dug deep into Fritz's hairy shoulder. He clutched his clothing and winced, slunk in silence.

Anya rushed him to the door and swung it wide. Out he sprawled, naked in the snow.

"You! Inside!" she said, grabbing an elf at random. Then she slammed the heavy oak door on the unending line of little men stretched through the winterscape and fell to her knees, sucking fiercely at the new member, trying to identify its owner not by his face but by the taste and shape of him and by the feel of his buttocks through the chill green seat of his pants.

*****

"It was awful when she found out. Plenty of bickering and hurt pride. Lick a little lower, would you? The knives came out too. Of course my feelings hurt more than my flesh. I stuck to my guns. You would have been proud of me. I tried to insist on having you both. But that's not going to happen, clearly. This has got to be our last time together so—oh Jesus God—so let's—"

The Tooth Fairy poked her head up. "Would you mind not talking so much?" She ducked down and went on with her work.