Santa Bashing

The boys were drunk and, for a moment, could not tell if the sun over the Fushiko River was rising or setting. They’d hit two beards already. Jun had taken one from behind with a misplaced bike wheel, sending the old man reeling into the plate glass of an abandoned storefront, not breaking it but bouncing off it and leaving a big five-armed star in the glass where he’d landed. The other laid face-up on the bank of the river where Daichi had left him; what remained of the shattered liquor bottle filling up with blood and river slush. His red coat was water-logged and his hat was long gone. Daichi tried to flick his cigarette down onto the body. He missed. It turned out the sun was going down because they could both see the little infant moon rising in the ice like a spotlight at a prison wall. 

 

“Need more booze,” said Daichi.

 

Jun made a high, confused, geriatric sound.

 

When Jun was three, he’d gone into his father’s bedroom refrigerator, removed each beer, cracked them, and poured them out. His father came home from work and found pigeon-toed little Jun in the middle of a wet shadow on the carpet. The whole room smelled of yeast. Jun’s father boxed his son’s left ear with an open palm. To this day, no matter which north he faced, Jun always heard a buzzing out of the west.

 

“Booze. More booze.” Daichi signaled with his thumb and pinky. 

 

They rose from the culvert and took care not to slip on the ice as they liquor-danced back into town. Daichi held up the line at 7-Eleven searching his pockets for enough change for the whiskey and cigarettes. He was on his third full-body passthrough–Jun peeking past the public-safety covers of porn magazines at all the rosy little nothings–when one of the held-up customers, an old man with translucent skin the color of tapioca, laid two bills out on the counter and told Daichi to keep his change. This was tremendously fucking cool, Daichi thought: what a fucking class act. He opened the whiskey with a plasticky crack, took two moments directly to the throat, then offered the bottle to the old man. 

 

“C’mon, Uncle, you paid for it.”

 

Daichi had had a truly fantastic childhood. His mother loved him. His father was firm without being distant. His little sister admired him. From the age of four, he’d learned piano, martial arts, English, Italian, and French. He could still recite the first canto of Inferno from memory. Nothing in his life became him like the ease of it. So when he’d abandoned the smart stylish trappings of boyhood and donned the embroidered leather, the berserk-boy chaps, the self-shaven head, and the army surplus boots, his parents had nodded and smiled and encouraged him to go to art school. And when he dropped out of art school only two weeks into the fall semester, they heard nothing about it at all. 

 

The tapioca-colored Uncle took the whiskey like a chicken by the neck and took a tight-lipped half-thought from its open head. Daichi could tell it burned him like it did preteens. 

 

“It’s my last night on earth, you know,” Uncle said. Daichi did not hear him–he was busy laughing at Jun, who had begun masturbating through his pants. 

 

Uncle took another swig from the bottle, longer and sweeter. “I guess everybody’s gotta die sometime.” Each breath felt as if it moved through molasses.

 

“Fuckin’ right. That’s fucking right, old-timer.” Daichi snatched the bottle back, propped it in the crook of his arm, then lit a cigarette. The cashier took notice of both boys–one smoking and one jerking–and was beset with an annoyance bordering on panic. He waved his arms over his head like a referee, which was enough to free Jun’s pecker and usher all three out the door, Uncle trailing behind the boys. 

 

The boys forgot about the old man and went back to hunting. Now that the sun had gone down the odds of finding another Santa were slim: it’d gotten too cold to loiter, even for a paycheck. But the point was to never stop searching, at least until the booze and the cold made it so difficult to keep moving that the boys would retire into a bleary-eyed sleep on the floor of Jun’s apartment. 

 

Uncle kept pace and watched them from behind. They were like curly-tailed hunting dogs: heads low in their hoods, shoulders in a predator sway. But this sway betrayed something else: the synchronous movements of two boys on a swing-set, going harder and higher, trying to turn themselves upside down. 

 

The cold air hurt to breathe. 

 

Death had grasped Uncle before he’d seen her. One Autumn morning, he felt his lung squeezed like a peach in a fist: flesh rended and reduced to a pit. His breathing became a manual operation. Last week, he’d been slipped into a big buzzing machine and heard strange little agents clicking as they whirled about him and took pictures of impossible places: pictures in inverted colors showing a blistery white mass on the map where his air should be. On the morning of the evening in which he followed the drunk boys down the street, he’d gotten the bill for the scan. He felt, then, his life was worth less. He watched Jun and Daichi round a corner and, seeing them disappear, he realized he needed them.

 

The Santa was at the end of the street. He was looking away from the boys, his back and shoulders stock-still, waving a single hand in salutation at the unlit window of an opposing storefront. His hat’s bauble was frozen over and glimmered piss-yellow like department store tinsel in the streetlights.

 

The movement that followed was symphonic in its silence: Daichi set the bottle of whiskey in a pile of slush then broke into a simultaneous run with Jun, both of them riding ice patches like rogue winds, taking flight with the blind and total trust of high-borne birds. Jun, six feet off the ground and sideways, kicked the Santa in the back of the head. Not far behind, perfectly on his beat, Daichi lept ballerinic and brought both feet down hard on the small of the old man’s back. Further behind, back at the start of the system, Uncle pulled the whiskey from the snow and shuffled down toward the violence. 

 

It was beautiful, he thought. This crushing youth. Vital forces of nature. This was correct, he thought. This was correct. Old things ought to die for something newer and brighter. Ought to die for life itself. Perhaps that’s no death at all. 

 

But there was no blood. No cries, no writhes, no futile attempt to escape. The Santa’s back had caved in where Daichi had stomped and revealed soft rotten plastic. It flaked like pastry and stank of mildew. Jun squatted and pulled the old man’s head from his shoulders with a high thin snap. He held it up, the cheeks in his palms, and revealed the still-smiling face of Colonel Sanders. Daichi laughed and kicked the head from Jun’s hands. Its hat and shattered plastic fell quietly and unceremoniously onto the sidewalk. 

 

“Fuck this.” The boys fell into a squat–lit cigarettes and toyed around the remains of the Colonel. “Fuckin’ hate KFC, anyway.” 

 

Uncle approached and put the whiskey down next to Daichi. He could tell the boys were disappointed. He, too, was disappointed. He felt that he’d been promised to witness his own salvation: to pass from this life while keeping his rotting body. This would’ve required an actual death, of course. Not his. The bloodless plastic Colonel would not do. 

 

Then he saw the Santa hat. It had settled headless on the frozen concrete. He saw the hat and understood–with his whole being, he understood: salvation is not possible for the near-dead. Only the dead. You’ve got to step out of your body and into something else.

 

He snatched the whiskey like a snake at a rabbit and opened his throat to its long conversation. 

 

“Boys,” he said, “y’know my house isn’t too far from here. I’ll make you something to eat. More whiskey. You can even spend the night if you’d like.”

 

Jun nodded as he sketched characters in the ice with his fingernail. Daichi looked up at Uncle with a stray cat quality to his eyes. 

 

“I’ll give you the address and my key. Gotta go to the store and get stuff to cook. I’ll meet you there in an hour.” 

 

Uncle worried that an hour was too long–that asking them to wait was a guarantee that he would never see them again: that their feral lives were simply too virile and rich to ever pause on someone else’s account. But he wrote his address on the back of a check and handed it to Daichi along with his entire keyring. Daichi bleared at the address. 

 

“C’mon, Jun.” 

 

Jun broke his fingernail on the ice. Before he had a chance to react, Daichi grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him off toward Uncle’s house.

 

“One hour,” Uncle called off after them. 

 

“Grilled cheese sandwich with tomato. And beer,” Daichi called back. 

 

Uncle knew he could get home before them. When they disappeared into the dark, he collected the Colonel’s red robe and hat, threw them over his shoulder, and ducked into a nearby alley. He threw his wallet and checkbook and jewelry into a dumpster that smelled of fryer oil. When he slipped the robe over his clothes, it added no protection against the cold. The hat was no better. But he’d be back home soon and the wind couldn’t chill him for much longer.

 

------

 

Jun and Daichi had reached the point of the night at which talking became out of the question. Their thoughts were too fast and scattered–like hot bright Saturday morning commercials–to even attempt to map in words. Either way, their throats were torn to shreds. The liquor, the cigarettes, the cold. They’d get blood instead of words.

 

Daichi’s stomach groaned. He hadn’t had a cooked meal since before he left home. The thought of food not just warm but like actually cooked by someone making it for him would’ve made him weep in a less drunken moment. But he did then recall his old illustrated Book of Exodus, with its page of glittery blue manna falling from the sky on the Israelites. He’d lost the book some time before puberty. 

 

Lost in his reverie, Daichi was late to notice Jun taking off into a sprint. The Santa sat like an old dog on the curb ahead, his head high and gazing forward into the dark, his wrists resting on his meeting knees. Daichi, knocked off-beat, was slow to improvise and spent a too-long moment watching Jun’s approach. There, in the seconds between take-off and landing, he saw the Santa look up at Jun then, impossibly, right at Daichi. He was too far away to recognize the face, but Daichi was certain that the beard had looked at him. 

 

This had never happened before. Those Santas that had seen them coming always tried to turn tail and run. But this one didn’t. He just sat there and kept his eyes open to Jun’s fist. Daichi had never felt so violated in his life. So, scandalized by the old man’s fearlessness, he sprinted across the ice and joined Jun in stomping that old life deep enough into the ice that it wouldn’t reemerge until spring. 

 

When those eyes had been closed forever and the face was no longer a face and the snow had gone pink with blood, Daichi was confronted with another violation: he didn’t feel any better. His stomach ached. When he shoved his hands into his pockets in frustration, he rediscovered Uncle’s keyring. Here was a consolation. Something better. A warm place to rest. He withdrew the key and grunted at Jun to follow him. 

 

Enough novelty. It would be a long night yet. Uncle would be home soon and Daichi could enjoy his first home-cooked meal since becoming a man.