"Did you see their faces?” the man in the Santa suit says, suppressing a hiccup.
The bar is dim, cheap fixtures casting a blanket of anonymity into the farthest corners. Shelves of liqueur bottles—red, yellow, blue, green, amber—gleam like a jeweled high altar. A tinsel garland is looped on the corners of a framed picture of Jerry Springer, and mini lights are strung around the entrance to the bathrooms. A few sad sacks are nursing their beers at separate small tables. Merle Haggard’s wailing, “Some day when things are good.” And then there’s me and Santa on bar stools at the counter. No one should be pounding back scotch, not in a Santa suit, its red plush worn to threadbare, its white fake-fur cuffs an uneven clotted mass of pigeon-poop gray.
Earlier I watched the mall Santa hoist my twins on his lap, listen to their Christmas wishes and pose for Santa’s elf to snap a photo. Although I stood at a distance, I could hear his convincing, “Ho-ho-ho, we’ll see what Santa can do!” as he eased them from his lap. The twins did not see me; they ran straight to the open arms of their mother, Janine, and a moment later I turned back to my duties inside Walmart. I don’t think Santa saw me. Or if he saw me, he would assume I was just some drudge pausing in the middle of “Hello” and “Welcome” to watch random kids at Santa’s Magic Snow Castle in the mall concourse.
“Doesn’t this bar play televised games?” I say. They’re only playing CNN on mute tonight but I’m sure I’ve heard TSN blaring during playoffs. I’ve stood cheek by jowl roaring in the final moments of a match. I have fantasized, for a brief flash, that future day when I’d be cheering for my boys, sweat streaking their faces under stadium lights. Championship tournaments, those big impossible things I couldn’t help but dream as I wiped up their baby-puke.
“Did you see their faces, how I got kids grinning ear to ear?” Santa says. “Wanna know how I do it?”
How he does it. I know he’s trying to pull me in. I know it will be some cheap trick or stupid joke, so I ignore the guy as long as I can. But my curiosity gets the better of me and I lean closer like iron to the magnet.
Time stands still as his gaze impales me like a pin through a specimen. I see his face expand right before me, the features growing wider and wider. His drink-shiny eyes grow from almond size to lemon size; his bristle-lined nostrils the diameter of a pea widen to the diameter of a baseball. His mouth keeps opening, unhinging the jaw, stretching inhumanly wide, exposing a dark gullet as broad as a watermelon, no—a pig, no—a sinkhole, gaping and murderously dark. A hot foul breath pours upon me, and I see his huge teeth, crooked gray stumps with big heads bowed like chastised children, rows and rows of child-teeth and behind them the reproachful gray faces of parent-teeth. And behind them the leering, ravening faces of strangers. Strangers who’ve been hanging around, slapping a crowbar in one hand, muttering about meeting me, yes me, the deadbeat dad, after coping with the parade of snivelling ungrateful spawn that suck the breath right out of him. Their noise keeps mounting from unpleasant static to ear-rending shriek as Santa’s ever-deepening gullet reveals the roiling multitudes within, climbing and crawling over each other, cockroaches fleeing a burning shack.
I try to shut my eyes but—wait!—amidst the swaying multitude I see one twin, his face pouring sweat, his mouth a rictus of pain due to the scrofulous rat that is gnawing his fingertips. My brother, my brother! he is screaming and in an instant, I realize that it has always been the brothers together, one kid rescuing the other because Daddy’s never there anymore. I gave up, called it quits too soon, and now my whole life is as pointless as the vermiform appendix that has never served any function except to be a blind alley collecting bacteria and causing bellyaches while it putrefies and eventually bursts, making the whole organism sick.
