If you were standing on the International Dateline (remember the blue stripe on your high school globe that went straight through the Pacific except where it oddly bent around several groups of small islands?) today would be Christmas. Several milliseconds flight by sleigh (nine deer-power, greased rails) north of those tropical time benders, a white-haired woman of considerable girth lay naked on a bed of fresh goose feathers and straw, waiting for the driver of said sleigh, just as she'd done for centuries.
Only this year, he wasn't coming home.
Yes, Virginia, there once was a Santa Claus. Fat, jolly, all the appropriate adjectives you could shovel into a sack. And yes, he did manage, through the trickery of science fiction and an outlawing of disbelief, to deliver presents to every deserving person on the face of the Earth in a single night. And finally, yes, he did once live in a place so cold and snowy that matches froze the moment you lit them and where refrigerators were undoored, deshelved, and used as bathtubs.
But not anymore. Old Jelly Belly hacked out one curtain-closing "Ho, ho, ho" and cut the reindeer free last night, at one minute after twelve on the starting side of the invisible Dateline. His sack was empty, save for cookies, cakes, and a few miscellaneous items he'd accumulated on the trip. The reindeer were covered in slobber and soot, and what whale blubber was still on the rails, had hardened to a sharp gleam. Three, four, possibly five centuries at the same job was enough to burn out the strongest of the seasonal icons, Santa Claus had been at the helm for ten.
He'd been to every country, every city, town, and hamlet; every house, apartment, and teepee man had ever cobbled together and most of them hundreds of times. Was it any surprise he had no need of a travel agent when he decided to retire?
His island, roughly four square miles at low tide, had been Amelia Earhart's home for the last years of her life. He'd brought her a collection of engine parts and struts every Christmas, but never enough to get her airborne it seemed. She left behind an eleven-hundred square foot thatched hut on the beach, a dozen acres of coconut palms, and hundreds of fruit trees from seeds that had lodged in her wings and flaps on her aborted journey around the world. Santa had eaten his last reindeer steak, polar bear patty, and seal stew; in the waning years of his life, he was going vegan.
There were birds on the island, both indigenous and migratory, but Mr. Jolly hadn't even packed a Bic disposable for the trip. If a lightening bolt hit a pile of tinder, there'd be fire, but the only thing he'd ever cooked was a Meerschaum pipe and that too had been left behind. Clothing was no longer a requirement for the four-hundred pound Santa; no cameras, no paparazzi, not a single blip on a government radar screen to capture his image. The thick red coat, size too many Xs, made a wonderful blanket and his waterproof boots would capture rainwater.
Santa lay down on the talcum powder beach and spread his arms and legs several times to make a sand angel. Above him, more stars than adorned every slaughtered pine tree in Des Moines twinkled for his pleasure. At his feet, a murmur of small waves burbled and faded, the pulse of the ocean in the dark. He looked over his shoulder at the full moon and howled with the glee of a timber wolf in heat, "I'm free!"
Mrs. Claus waited until sunrise before slipping into her nightgown and shuffling over to the workshop. Elves, drunk and snoring, were scattered about the floor, half-covered in shreds of cloth and pieces of cardboard. To someone who'd never seen the workshop on Christmas Day, it would have appeared as though thousands of homeless dwarves had congregated for some pagan ritual in a toy store. Stepping over, around, under the few who hung from the overhead lighting like green bats in a cave, she made her way to the garage. Three of the four sleighs were parked where they'd been on the day before Christmas Eve. Xmas One, her husband's favorite and the sleigh he'd used for several centuries was still gone. Snow filled the tracks just past the open garage door, but blubber drippings had congealed on the wood-planked floor, marking where the rails had been prepped for Santa's annual 'round the world excursion. All of the reindeer had returned with the exception of Rudolph, who, if the truth be known, couldn't find his way off a dead-end street, and Blitzen, who made it as far as Marin County, California. (Rudolph had flown south instead of north and was currently munching on several mossy outcroppings in Antarctica. Blitzen had found vegetation better suited to his demeanor but was having trouble standing.) And although she'd only driven a sleigh to WalMart and back, Mrs. Claus began the arduous task of hanging a long-distance harness rig on the seven available beasts.
Elfis Presley, foreman of the housekeeping staff, arrived at the garage just as Santa's wife had locked Dancer into the lead harness. Staring at the odd configuration for a moment, he pointed at the empty space and asked, "Where's the old man?"
As Santa had only been to the one dwelling on the island, and that was over sixty years ago, he spent the day exploring. Weight, heat, and humidity combined to slow his expedition, but concern for those annoyances was light-years from his mind. A small lake, half a mile inland, was filled with rainwater and wrapped by a solid blanket of lush, green vegetation. He found a bar of Irish Spring in his sack, purloined from a house in Bangor, Maine the night before, and marched into the cool water to wash the last of the chimney dust from his beard. "I am king of all I see," he bellowed to several flocks of birds watching him from the surrounding trees. "You birds want fresh worms next Christmas?" He nodded. "Best not crap on my head when I'm sleeping. Ho, ho, ho! No, that's not right. Ha, ha, ha, perhaps? Hee, hee, hee?" Tossing the soap over his shoulder, Santa floated on his back, scratching the white mound of his belly. "Nah, that's not me." He shouted to a passing cloud, "Yuck, yuck, yuck!" One of the birds swooped down from a palm and landed next to the sack. It walked tentatively into the bag and flew out moments later with a large chocolate chip cookie in its beak. Santa watched the bird and gave a few seconds thought to getting out of the refreshing water to tie the bag closed. "Go ahead and eat them," he urged the birds, "you'll get fat and then what?" He rubbed his massive stomach. "And then what?"
Never having spent any time alone, save for one night a year, Santa Claus found the lack of voices disconcerting at first, straining his head into the breeze every time he thought someone was speaking to him. The birds crackled and whistled at each other and occasionally it seemed as though they were mimicking human speech. A coconut, too long in the tree, fell behind him and Santa jumped, thinking that Friday had marched out of the jungle as he'd done for Crusoe on his private island. Commercial aircraft missed the tiny atoll by hundreds of miles in each direction. Cruise ships failed to document the place on any chart. The only visitors to Santa Claus's island on Christmas Day were a family of crabs who scuttled back into the Pacific for safety when he began snoring in the middle of a late afternoon nap on the beach; a brief respite that captured him in its dreams a bit longer than he expected.
It was not without surprise and a modicum of disappointment then, when the sleeping recluse was awakened by the shrill voice he thought he'd escaped twenty-four hours earlier. They mounted the sleigh, Santa taking the whip in hand and ordering the reindeer to depart. But as they climbed through the clouds, he reached down, ripped the GPS unit from its bracket, and let it fall to the clear blue water below. |
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