SANTACIDE

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

og shit and mud.  The trees are as bare as a geezer's gums.  No sun since early autumn.  The clouds haven't heard that silver lining jazz; the only thing they are lined with is each other.  Sky the color of pig iron.  Too cold to snow.

I am not partial to December.

I am brooding by the dark casement, dreaming of the dome that used to regulate the city's weather before NY went bankrupt.  My Martian cocoa--zoot-spiked, of course--is warming me from the inside out but cools at the epithelium.  I glance at my wristwatch.  Old habit--I had a job once.  The prochrono is glowing.  Someone is about to arrive.

"Chuck?"  Cecil has a voice like dry heaves.  I haven't seen him since before the sun--when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was still married to Agnes.  At seven foot two with an executioner's build and a face like a pit viper's, he doesn't have to take much guff.  Used to do inquiries for me (Read: knucks and bucks) when there was still some percentage in the law maven trade, before the slime (Read: Cecil's ilk) sucked my dogs to the kneecaps.  We won a case or two--but not the one that counted.  "Arnby, you in there?"

I hit CURRENT on my watch to cut to where Cecil and I are having cocktails.  I hate salutations.  I don't wear no cologne.  I still have a fifth of Venusian zoot rot: 2018, a very good year.  We pass the bottle back and forth--no clean glasses in walking distance.  He is nattily dressed in codpiece and suspenders, his tubulars in a heap on my sleep unit.  I am at ease in my cheek pin.  Cecil is in excellent spirits--cause for suspicion.

"I want you to see something," he says.

"Cease-fire," says I, "the last time you had something to show me, he was dead, you had a hot gat minus one slug, and I was disbarred, pending.  I ain't stepping outside till midsummer."

"For this you are," he says.  He reaches over to punch my watch.  We are old enough buddies, altercations despite, that I do not impede him; I cried on his shoulder when Agnes left me, though I needed a stool to do it.  And he kept me in zoot rot when she didn't come back.

He punches CURRENT a couple of times.  We are out on the street in our tubulars; then we are jumping down the rusted-frozen escalator at his tenement, buns thawing after the transit; and finally we are in his basement crib, in his cold-as-a-dookil's-pizzle basement crib, eyeballing a closed wooden door, from when trees were being cut to build things.  It has peeling whitewash, like in Tom Sawyer.

"You'll never guess what I got in there, Chucky."

I am not sure what is in store.  Knowing Cecil, this may be some Casque of Amontillado action, and I am not partial to mortared stiffs.  I sneak a glance at my wrist.  Cecil reaches to cover the watch, but he is a little late.  I see on the prochrono who I'm going to see in there.  "Holy dookil scats!"

"Damn!  I wanted to surprise you."  Cecil throws open the door, and there he is, just like my watch said--

"Ho! Ho! Ho!"

--shackled to the brick wall, the white fur trim on that apple-red suit torn and muddied, one foot bare, the boot lying just out of his reach, the sock under my heel, as it happens.  Beside him lies a torn sack.  Little toys, cheap thingies--"Made on the Moon"--are flung about the floor, smashed.

There is only one thing I want to do, the thing any reasonable adult would want to do, something I've been aching to do so long and so hard, Christmas after Christmas, that I've put it clean out of my mind just to be able to carry on.  But it's back in my mind now, boy!  It's in my eyes when I turn to Cecil.

"Go for it, Chuck!" says the Seesaw.

I cock my good right arm and bash Santa square in the old kazoo.  When he groans, I smile.

 

t's wonderful how fast an eye can blacken when a sucker's circulation is good.  It's all in the contrast, really.  On jowly, pink Santy, brow and whiskers the color of snow blindness, the shiner sprouts like mushrooms in manure.  I rub my paw and think of Agnes.  (Not that I've ever gotten to use it on her: she has a left hook like an air hammer, and I have a glass jaw.)

"Good one!"  Cecil grins.  "The boys and girls in Toyland are gonna have a funeral."

"Excellent punch, son . . ." the big elf is saying, but I cock my arm again; his shoulders hit his ears, his knees jerk to mid-lard bucket--an elephantine flinch--and he shuts his mouth.  He is shaking like a bowl full of jelly.

"Cecil, my man, how in hell did you get a hold of him?  He's not the real one, is he?"

"Close as makes no diff, old upChuck,"--unzippering the stashhole in his tubulars and producing a small, red-enameled dingus the size and shape of a triple-seeded goober--"Ever see one of these?"

This is rhetorical.  I used to own one, and Cecil knows it: a  vintage dynestat, a Bull patent model, state of the art in the 2020s, that wonderfully myopic decade!  Only thing was, they had all been recalled around 2032 on account of a faulty transcat chip.

"You're not supposed to have that."  It is my choirboy coming out.  "It's unstable.  You could hurt yourself."

"Bubbeh meisehs, Chucky.  The chip's okay.  It's the governor that made the white collar boys at Bull Enterprises, Inc. sweat and puke in the executive john.  Too easy to disable--catch my drift?"

I look at the fat man.  I look at the goober.  "How in hell . . . ?"

"When Bull recalled, their PR boys threw a scare into the citizens with that 'unstable chip' bushwah, plus the Federales put some penal muscle behind it.  I think you defended one or two of the hold-outs, ain't that so?"

"Could be.  I'm not partial to the memory function these days."

"Yeah, well, there was twenty or thirty of us non-compliers.  One was in Michigan; this outlaw user jimmied the governor and set up a dream brothel, as God is my witness, that put the cat houses of Venus to shame.  But in the end--and I'll let you guess which end--they attracted the wrong sort of attention, spelled B-U-L-L, I-N-C., whose private security force is also known as the 'United States Marines.'  The Bull nerds hypodyned all them fine ladies back to wet dreams, every nipple and chassis.

"Me, so happened I knew this disgruntled ex-employee of Mr. Bull's.  A chug of Venusian zoot rot regruntled him okay.  He showed me how to gum the governor, and quick as you can say 'hypodyne-hypostat', I was laying my dreams about me.  With this little number, I was a frigging Praxiteles: thoughts to flesh, boy, dyne and stat, dyne and stat.  And I don't mean little 3D movies like what the brochure touted.  I mean big as life, Chucky, your wildest dreams."  He points to Santa Claus.  "Q.E.D."

"But why Santa Claus?"

"In a word, Arnby: money."

"Money?"

"Did you enjoy . . . ?"

"Smacking the old fart?  You bet I did.  I've been laying for that gut wagger ever since my first wish list come up goose eggs.  He throws it in our faces, Cecil.  And then we have to bail the Fat Man out, paste smiles on our mugs for the little tots, pile debt on debt to patch their dumb dreams.  Christmas music alone is enough cause to off that bloated bugger.  I got dimple fatigue from here to the Magellanics.  A guy can take only so much."

"Exactly.  That's how I feel, too, Chuck-a-luck.  And that's how every one of these eggs feels as well."  From his other stashhole, Cecil pulls a fat wad of tiny green cards.

"What are those things?"

"Ticket stubs."

 

at hot lead, fat man!"

It's rooty-toot-toot without the rummy-tum-tum.  Father Christmas's little round belly jumps like dust on a jack hammer handle as the Kalashnikov rips into him.  His droll little mouth curls back like a slug in the killing jar.  He doesn't seem so lively and quick any more.

The little guy with the meat perforator is shaking all over
--not used to the recoil.  He is happy though.  "I ain't afraid of you, fat boy.  Them reindeer don't scare me.  Them elves of yours make me laugh.  And as for them toy guns, Buster, this little honey"--slapping the stock of Cecil's antique Big K--"will do me just fine."  Another clip of bullets blasts across the room.  The painful echo.  The gunpowder smell.  Modern weaponry is deadlier perhaps, but it lacks the whack.

"That's extra for the second clip, you know," says Cecil.  The little guy hands back the Kalashnikov and forks over a sawbuck along with it.  Cecil turns to open the door and wave in the next customer, when the guy lays a hand on Cecil's elbow.

"Mister, you're a Prince."  There are tears in the little guy's eyes.  "I been putting up with Mel Torme and Bing Crosby and Roy Rogers and my wife's mistletoe for twenty-odd years.  I was ready to skip for the outer planets till February, but now, because of you, pal, I can face it for another year.  God bless you!"  He kisses Cecil on the lips and runs out, closing the door behind him.

Cecil beams at me.  "God, it makes a bugger feel good to help out his fellow man!"

"Not to mention the dough.  What's that--a thou already?"

"Damn near!  Thirty satisfied customers!"

The knob turns and the door edges open, but I stop it.

"Hey!"--from out in the hallway, a lady's voice.

"What's the idea?" says Cecil.

"Look there," I says.  Santa Claus is a gooey mess of blood and formerly internal organs.

"You certainly are a wonderful shot!" he gurgles.

"Shut up, Kringle!" Cecil suggests.  Then to me: "I catch your meaning."  He pulls out the dynestat, pinches the middle bulge, and squints hard.  This is always a wonder to me, no matter how many times I see it.  The hypostat beam lights up Cecil's noddle like a DaVinci saint.  For a brief moment, I can see his neurons and synapses in dayglo pinks and green, with the ions charging around through grey matter like maggots on an old pork butt.  Cecil strokes the goober, focussing the beam on the thought of Santa Claus.  With the governor intact, you could never reach this far into the collective unconscious.  In a flash, the Sumo elf is hohohoing again, real as income tax, all his wrinkles, rips, prolapses and perforations erased, in a word: hypostatized.  The former heap has been overstruck.  The new one is chained to the wall, right where Cecil thought him.

"And the Word became flesh," Cecil chirps.

That's when the lady decides to charge through.  "You blasphemous pig!"  Only it's no lady--it's Agnes.

She marches in, all five foot two of her, both eyes of blue on my face of red.  She is wearing her hair in a businesslike bun.  Her tubulars are professional, stashhole and hem to
collar--she's been doing better than yours truly, it is clear.  You meet a better class of clientele in environmental law--cleaner anyway.

I reach for my prochrono button.  I am not the confrontational type; I'd rather have done it than do it, and that's what this gadget is for.  Back in the '10s when the chronoshafts first opened up, I was right there, gilding pedigrees and depositing back cash for the fast samoleans: and all in an open 'hurry'--what a jalopy!  But since I got the barrister's tile, a prochrono is as risky as I like to get, even with caseload zilch.

Agnes, however, knows my predilections in this regard.  She intercepts my pinky en route to the left wrist.  "Forget it, slimeball,"--that left jab, but she pulls it, thank God, before it meets my proboscis.  "I want this to be strictly present tense."

Have I told you how pretty my Agnes is?  Plenty pretty.  Plenty smart.  Plenty simpatico in all respects.  But when the chips were down, no match for a liquid lunch.  I'm just a zoot rot kind of a guy, and Agnes is cocoa straight-up.

In half a second, she is gone to me; she has spotted Santa.  "You poor dear, what have they done to you?"  I am on the garbage heap of Aggie's awareness.  Cecil, aching to let in the next ticket-clutching, dinara-proffering, Santacidal customer, shares steerage with me in Agnes's mind.

Agnes kissing Santa Claus.  Agnes's fingers running up and down that white fur collar.  Googoo and poowiddow dumplin'.  Pêre Noël is eating up my ex's attentions: "What do you want for Christmas, sweetheart?"

I am ready to buy another ticket.  "For crissakes, Ag, get off the guy's lap . . . "--I don't wear no cologne--" . . . please."

It's beginning to get ugly outside the wooden door.  There is a multitude of stomping, pounding, and chanting out there.  "We want the fat guy!  We want the fat guy!"  Others prefer: "Off the elf!" with this sustenuto: "I want mine!  I want mine!"

Cecil is busting a gut, his seven two useless against Aggie's five-two-and-righteously-indignant.  "C'mon, Agnes.  Chucky's right.  This Santa is just a hypostat.  Look."  He produces a bazooka from a trunk in the corner and fires point blank at Santa Claus's rosy forehead.

Agnes has jumped away.  She stumbles into my arms as the jolly cranium explodes.  "Dear Lord!"

"No sweat!" says Cecil.  Out comes the goober, and before you know it, there's a brand new Santa manacled to the wall, and the old, loose giblets have hypodyned to neural fizz.

"Ho! Ho! Ho!"

Agnes in my arms.  I feel her trembling through her tubulars and mine.  Slowly she unclenches the little fists of her eyelids and pours those baby blues into mine.  I hate this action: I am in love again.  I have that weak, warm feeling of having wet my bed.  I'll do anything for her.

"Chuck, please make him stop.  It's Santa Claus, Chuck.  He is the embodiment of the happy dreams of all the world's children.  You still have that child in you, too, Chuck, I know you do.  I can't have hurt you that much."

"You hurt me?  Oh, honey!"

Then the door breaks open, squishing Cecil flat to the wall.  In struts a tough, in adman blacks, swinging his laptop like a shillelagh.  "Lemme at 'im!"  He slams the door behind him, delivering free nose jobs to the two guys next in line.  Cecil unpeels but is counting birdies.

The shitkickers on this citizen are CEO class.  His type don't like to stand in line.  "I've had it with you, fat guy.  You and the flood of red ink that washes in with you every goddam Exmas."  He stomps forward like a seismosaurus.  His tan, Hollywood jaw is working, drool brimming over the fat lower lip.

"Ho! Ho! Ho!" says Santa.

The customer's eyes are blazing, crazed.  With every step, he spits out another phrase.  "I tore open the shutters . . . and threw up the sash . . . "  It's a Niagara Falls routine.  "I vaulted over the sill . . . and gunned the red dumpling down!"  He pulls out a gat the like of which I have never seen, a deluxe executive semi-automatic laser-system doohickey; it throws a bright red dot of light on Santy's solar plexus, where the slug will hit.

Agnes disengages from our little rapprochement long enough to introduce the belligerent to her famous left jab.  His red dot blinks out.  "What makes people that way?" she muses, dusting off her knucks while he joins Cecil among the birdies.  "I don't like to use these tactics, Chuck.  I'd much rather use persuasion."

"I'm persuaded, Agnes."

"No, you're not."  Then, turning to Father Christmas: "Hell, you talk to him, Santa."

Claus twinkles and flashes me some tooth enamel--moonlight on an ice cove.  I am not melting.  He opens his fat arms.  "Would you like to sit up here on Santa's lap?"

"This ain't 34th Street," says I, "and I ain't Natalie Wood."

"Listen, Chucky," the imp coos, "your friend hypostatted me from his own human mind, the same mind you share in, Chuck.  Don't you know that when you castigate me, you are castigating yourself?  I still have some things in my bag for you, Chucky.  It's never too late to stop being naughty and to start being nice instead."

Lord, I wanted to bank him on the grill.  "Get real, you big zit.  You ain't checked your list twice--I can see that.  I'm a two-bit zoot swiller, no good to nobody.  I never done a good turn without an angle.  Ask Aggie."

"Don't sell yourself short, Charles," she says.

You could have decked me with a feather.

Cecil has adjusted his vertical, meanwhile, and is yammering out the door at the bilious masses.  They are doubling time slots out there to fit in the basement hallway and up two flights of oxide-infested escalator.  "Off the elf!  I want mine!"

Shoulder to the door, he peeks back at me and says between grunts, "Don't go limp on me, Chuck roast.  She's just a dame, for crissakes, and he don't even exist!"

Santa clucks and shakes his whiskered noddle.  Then he looks up at me and Aggie.  "Why don't you let me take you two for a little sleigh ride?  There are some things I'd love you to see."

How we get out of Cecil's basement I do not recall.  Agnes has grabbed my wrist and prochronoed, leaving Cecil in an embarrassing squeeze vis-a-vis his paid-up, ticketed customers.  She and I are sitting alongside the scarlet pudgeball at about two thousand feet.  The reindeer are hoofing across cloudbanks and galloping upward.  Tucked between Agnes and the dumpling, I hardly need my tubulars.

Suddenly the surrounding mist starts to glow and dwindle.  Up ahead, I see something I have not seen for a very long time.  I blink and look again.  It is the sun.

"I thought you was a night person, Nick," I says.

"Ho! Ho! Ho!" he says.

Agnes is holding my hand.  "I had to find you, Chuck.  I heard about Cecil's new racket; guy on a street corner tried to sell me a ticket.  The way you've been acting since you hit the zoot . . . "

" . . . Since you walked out, you mean."

"Whatever.  I figured he would get you in on it."  The moon is there, faintly, the North Wind's cookie, just like the children's rhyme says, baking in the sun--middle shelf, across the wide, blue sky.

"He don't like to work alone."

"I remembered that.  Cecil always needed somebody with character to back him up, Charles.  Someone like you."  Claus dips through the clouds like a gull diving for his catch--and we see these big cumuli from just below, lined with silver, the way they say.

"Ho! Ho! Ho!"

"Don't look at the clouds, Charles.  Look at me.  Why did you give up?"

This action is not my favorite.  I don't wear no cologne.  I figure, if a dame don't understand you, you can't be all bad.  "Agnes . . . we are in the upper jeebasphere, and everything is beautiful.  I never seen such blue.  I never seen such silver."

"Ho! Ho! Ho!"

"Stop that!  But down there, Agnes, in the real world, its scum and maggots in the dark."

"Maggots are fly babies, Chuck," Santa Claus puts in.  "I have something in my bag for them, too."

"Butt out," says Agnes.  "That's it, isn't it, Charles?  You couldn't take the shadows.  You're a lot more sensitive than you pretend to be.  Let me help you, Charles.  I'll come back to you if you promise to try."

I am raining.  I can't help it.  Maybe it's the altitude, the dew point, the wind.  Tears drip and dry, drip and dry in the upper jeebasphere.  "Agnes, you know I never stopped loving you."

Her forearms on my chest--"I know."

I feel myself slipping into the world of Agnes's love--it must be meteorology.  "But I can't . . . " I say.  Owl!  Her eyes are melting together.  We are approaching osculation.

Which is when Santa Claus chooses to say, "Would you like to try the reins, little man?"  Santa is watching the jet stream; he doesn't know what he has interrupted.  That fuzzy cuff between our chins.  The leather strap, with its salt taste, rubbing against the lips that almost touched Agnes's.

Agnes's face lights up.  She cocks her head, a sweet inch from mine.  I am ready to shpritz cologne in all my little places.  "Go on, dear!" she says.  "For once in your life, fly!"

I take the reins.  "Ho! Ho! Ho!" I say.  Santa and Agnes are hohohoing, too.  "On, Donder!  On, Blitzen!"  It's a rolly coaster ride through the jeebasphere, brother!  We're leaping like dolphins in and out of those cumuli.  The whee and wow of it rip laughs out my mouth and hugs from wifey.

It must be a field effect from those hypostatted reins:  I can see every kiddy on Santa's list, down through their chimneys, dancing sugarplums and all.  There's Cecil with his Santacidal mob, Cecilcidal now.  He's punching that goober like nobody's business, but the thing has gone out of whack.  All he gets are sparks and Nat King Cole crooning Adeste Fideles.  Santa Claus has a thing or two lined up for Cecil's stocking; who'd have thought the palooka was partial to Marcel Proust?  I can see his argyles dangle and bulge with the weight of Les Jeunes Filles En Fleurs and a dozen madeleines.

I can see the Bar Association down there, too.  They're about to reinstate me--providing.  Lumps of coal, all around--just kidding!  "You know, Ag," says I, "environmental law don't sound too bad.  I always wanted to try my hand at that.  Somebody's gotta protect the jeebasphere."

"Watch out for that flock of storks, son!"  Santa touches my wrist, and we swoop below the rush of white wings, and--if it isn't the altitude pickling my sensorium--below the mewling, no-neck tots swinging in their diapers, like hammocks hung from the birdies' bills.

"So happens I know a dame in that racket as could use a decent partner," says Agnes, doing her George Raft.

"I could put her in your stocking, Chuck," says Santa--Edward G. Robinson, badly.  "Ho! Ho! Ho!--see?"

I tear off my wristwatch, prochrono and all, and throw it to the wind.  Life is too much fun, stürm, drang, and everything, to miss a minute of it.

I hand the reins back to the old elf.

"Home, Santa!" Agnes laughs.

"I'll drop you off on the way to the pole."

We jingle down into the city.  Nobody gives us a second thought: New Yorkers!  Between the clouds, lined with silver, the sky is crystalline blue.  It is snowing in Manhattan.  Kids turn their chins up, squeeze their eyes shut, and open their mouths wide to taste it.  Grumblers and hoods peep sunward.  Grudgingly, they leak a smile.  Maybe they'll give Santa another chance this year.  Maybe not.

"Agnes . . .".says I.

"Yes, Charles . . .?"

Donder, Blitzen and the antlered brethren are winging the old pudgeball north.  Mistletoe flutters down from the sleigh--"Ho! Ho! Ho!"

We kiss.