Nine Kinds of Naked (28 page)

“Yep. Go to a university library and look up the
Food Defect Action Levels
, or probably you could just look it up online. Excrement, rot, maggots, mold, insect fragments, fly eggs, rodent hair, dirt, grit, it's all there. I wish it weren't true, but I helped to put the guide together years back.” Diablo paused. Elizabeth was about to redirect the conversation to something less scatological, but he launched into a new hypothesis before she had a chance to formulate a subject toward which to change. “Cherry
pop
,” Diablo said emphatically. “Maybe that's what you're looking for? Pop is one letter away from poop, which of course is synonymous with shit. And then there is the cherry pop centipede, right? Are you familiar with this creature?” Elizabeth shook her head, amazed that he had still more to say on the topic. “It's this centipede that craps a cyanide poison that smells like cherry pop. If you catch one and shake it up in your palm, it craps itself in self-defense. Basically, when something scares the shit out of it, the poison it craps smells just like cherry pop.” Diablo grinned triumphantly. “How about that? There's your cherry shit right there.”

 

73
I
T WAS UNDENIABLE.
Diablo had told Elizabeth something interesting about cherry shit. And now, he was holding her to her end of the bargain.

“You promised,” he insisted. “You said you'd tell me where this cherry shit notion came from if I told you something interesting about it.”

Elizabeth had never told anyone the origin of cherry shit. This had more to do with the fact that she rarely thought about it than that she found it necessarily embarrassing. Actually, she rarely thought of most of the first eighteen years of her life, or at least, anything past the age of eight, right around the time that her classmates began to tease her. Churchgoers might wonder at the solace and comforts of her family life, but life wasn't much better in that sphere. Whereas Georgeann found the exponential growth of her stepdaughter's breasts to be shamefully inappropriate (an assessment she did not hesitate to point out), Dave simply couldn't reconcile the fact that his daughter was turning into a sexpot. Her hips, after all, though typically overshadowed by her breasts, were busy flashing their own set of curves, and Dave had noticed. However, instead of simply noting this fact with paternal pride and moving on, Dave creeped himself out on his own mortification, and so had to repress the realization. For Elizabeth, this translated into an aloof and distant attitude toward her from there on out.

Anyway, Elizabeth decided to stall the story. “It's a long story,” she said.

Diablo shrugged, idly arranging some of the seashell pipes in front of him on the table. “That depends on how long you stall.”

“I'm not stalling,” Elizabeth protested. “Let me tell you over lunch.”

“Lunch?” Diablo laughed. “Are you trying to pick me up? Because I gotta tell ya, sister, the aroma's not all that amorous around here, what with all this talk of maggots and shit.”

“Pick
you
up?” Elizabeth retorted, defensive. “You're like twice my age.”

“That's true.” Diablo nodded, patting his belly. “But I am in decent shape, although I'm also a fortysomething paraphernalia pusher. Ultimately, I'm not much of a catch. My celibacy seems certain.” Diablo shrugged. “But I fear I've enchanted you with clever conversation, and I cannot risk your attraction.”

“Whatever.” Elizabeth blushed in spite of herself. “I hate to disappoint you, but I am
not
attracted to you.”

“Of course you are. Why else would you be acting so awkward? Or are you always this clumsy? Perhaps you can hide your presence in this world behind social illusions, but your spiritual presence is perfectly apparent to the open of eyes and the wide of mind.”

“So what if I am—which I'm not.” Elizabeth gazed directly at him. “What are you afraid of?”

Diablo shook his head. “Although I'm deeply flattered, I think I'll have to pass on lunch.”

Elizabeth stared at Diablo for a long moment, smirking. “You're chicken,” she concluded at last.

“No.” Diablo shook his head. “Not really. The problem, as a matter of fact, is that you are an untrustworthy person.”

“Untrustworthy? How?”

“Cherry crap,” Diablo insisted. “What about it already? You said you'd say. Now you're trying to renegotiate your promise. Out with it. Come on,” he gestured, “let's hear it.”

“I can't believe you're still on that.”

“Why would you introduce such a topic into polite conversation, that's what I want to know. Cherry crap.” He pronounced it slowly, shaking his head. “Such an indelibly offensive concept. Where did you come up with that, and why?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Fine. There's no story to tell, really. I actually don't know what it means. Those were my mother's last words. She died giving birth to me in the middle of a tornado, and apparently, that was her final comment on life.” She shrugged. “That's about all I can say about it.”

“No story to tell!” Diablo bellowed a laugh. “Goddamn, sister. That sounds like a story if ever there was one!” He squinted at her for a long moment. “You're an Aries, I suppose? April 1?”

Elizabeth was stunned. “How the heck did you know that?”

“Because that's the date of the F4 tornado that hit Normal, Illinois, almost twenty-five years ago. I was in that tornado that you whipped up just to announce your arrival, by the way and thank you very much.” Diablo stuck up the missing middle finger on his right hand, his favored way of demonstrating his tornadic heritage. “My whole life turned on that tornado. And now you come along with strange talk of cherry shit.” Diablo shook his head, aggravated. “This is just perfect. You don't have some weird linguistic habit I should be aware of, do you? Like speaking only in the present tense?”

“What?” Elizabeth shook her head, confused. “This is the craziest thing I've ever heard.”

“All right,” Diablo observed. “That was present perfect.”

“What are you talking about? How do you know about the tornado?”

“I was in that tornado,” Diablo repeated, again flipping his phantom fuck-you finger at her.

“And what does that have to do with anything?” Elizabeth gestured unimpressed toward his castrated profanity.

Diablo looked at his hand. “I lost my finger in that tornado, obviously.”

“How?”

“I'm not getting into that right now.” Diablo never got into that. After all, he'd survived active combat in the service without so much as a scratch only to bite off his own finger in peacetime. It was an embarrassment of irony.

“I don't believe you,” Elizabeth announced, more accusation than assertion.

“About my finger or the tornado?”

“Nothing.” She crossed her arms. “None of it.”

“Well, that's your prerogative, but I might point out that it would be far more peculiar to meet someone who had memorized the locations, dates, and intensities of the more than five hundred tornadoes recorded annually in the United States than it is to meet someone who was in the same tornado as you were. Tornadoes are strange this way, you must have noticed by now. I mean, come on, you were
born
in the middle of it. That's some crazy shit, sister.” Diablo paused. “I mean, look at you, hanging around in the shadow of Laughing Jim. You've gotta be some breed of goddess. The Tibetans say one born in a great wind will speak like a great wind to the hearts of men.
So, let me ask you this, sister—my duty, by the way. You can just think of me as your climatological godfather from here on out. Let me ask you this,
godchild:
What do you have to say to the rest of us? You caused quite a fuss upon your arrival, and this tornado obviously ain't over yet. So what's up? What's the deal? What's going on?”

Stagger-struck, Elizabeth was unable to do little else than obediently answer his avuncular condescension. “I don't know what's going on,” she admitted feebly, but then added, defiantly and in her own defense, “But neither does anybody else, you know.
Nobody
knows what's going on.”

 

74
T
WENTY-FIVE YEARS
back, when Bridget Snapdragon breathed her last words into the oblivious Dave Wildhack's ear, she succeeded in freeing him of all sorrow. However, and unfortunately for Dave, this was like banishing a dismal sky for the peace of a hurricane. Her whisper of “cherry shit” had unseated his safe, simple sorrow, and its shit-shit-shitting echoes had reverberated themselves into a broiling bewilderment. An undotted question mark carved into a stump in the middle of a labyrinth couldn't have been more befuddled.

Bewilderment and sorrow. Relative to bewilderment, the trials of sorrow are straightforward, softening with time and leaving a deeper appreciation for life in their wake. For even in its most severe spasms, sorrow burps bubbles of calm from beneath its blackened bog. But to be be-wildered is literally to be cast into the wilderness, the
whole
wilderness, complete with bogs, burrs, thickets, thorns, and total disorientation. As a
consequence, striving to make sense of his faithful departed's dying vulgarity consumed some of Dave's attention all of the time.

It was years before he shared her last words with another person, during which time he tortured every possible angle into death and dismissal. Eventually, he decided to see if posing the words to some random stranger would offer any insight. It didn't, but once he had opened up about it he couldn't help but pronounce them pointedly to everyone that crossed his path. “Cherry shit,” he would blurt, expectantly. “What do you think it means?”

He offended many, but more than anyone, Dave offended Georgeann. Georgeann Judge, recall, was a member of the parish, and present at Bridget Snapdragon's untimely death. Good Christian that she was, Georgeann and many others had offered to assist in holding Dave's home together during his time of loss and renewal. During one such visit several months after the tornado, Georgeann—a plumber by trade—offered to fix a clog in the kitchen sink. While she was squatted over, her husky frame heaving with impressive exertion, Dave's ass-man glance happened to idle upon her ensqueezed crack of plumber's cleavage. He was helplessly enamored.

But this auspicious moment was not the moment at which Dave would offend Georgeann. Rather, it only set into motion the circumstances in which Dave would eventually offend her, years later, long after Georgeann had accepted his marriage proposal. It was an ordinary day in Normal, Illinois, and they were chatting idly in the kitchen, when out of an extended ebb in the conversation Dave suddenly spat the words “cherry shit” at her.

Now, before we continue, realize that in ancient Greece it was widely known that such lulls of silence in the midst of otherwise lively conversation indicated the entrance of Hermes, messenger of the gods and conductor of souls into the underworld. A lull in conversation was understood to signify a loosening of boundary between the here and the hereafter. Consequently, whatever words were spoken to break this silence were deeply regarded, unless of course some churl heaved some jerky spasm of a remark, in which case the low-mindedness was perfectly apparent and the offender was roundly reprimanded. For Hermes was also the god of luck, and when the breezes of conversation inadvertently parted the veils of illusion, the resulting revelation was respected, and even feared. Thus, while Hermes never brought bad luck, he was known to be a merciless trickster, and as such, had no prejudice against hard luck, which is merely good luck disguised as bad.

So, it cannot be said for certain whether Dave's offering of “cherry shit” to quench the conversational drought between himself and Georgeann qualified as a legitimate revelation or if it was merely a boorish barbarism. At first grunt, it might be easy to jump to the latter conclusion, but two things must be understood before rushing to such a judgment. First, Georgeann had only begrudgingly agreed to take Dave's legal surname of Wildhack when they were married. Indeed, she was upset that Dave had chosen to honor his late wife's lunacy by not changing his surname back to Wilson, for she rather liked the ring of Georgeann Wilson. Hence, there was some degree
of posthumous jealousy on Georgeann's part. When Dave tried to explain that this offensive vulgarism was
that
woman's dying revelation, well, that pretty much shut her off to any possible consideration of its merits. As far as she was concerned, Bridget Snapdragon was now gross as well as crazy. From there on out, she said, she would only refer to Bridget Snapdragon as “the vulgarian, God rest her soul,” but she didn't really keep this promise.

Second, and more importantly, regarding Dave's utterance as a boorish barbarism rather than a legitimate revelation disregards the fact that Bridget Snapdragon authored this uncivilized profanity at the very moment of her death. Whatever our discomforts, this cannot be denied. And for Bridget Snapdragon, “cherry shit” was not inspired by the silence of some breezy conversation gently wafting aside the veil of eternity. For her, it was death and birth, chaos unleashed, the catastrophic fury of unfathomable revelation. Are we to assume that from the heights of her dying ecstasy the lovely and heroic Bridget Snapdragon beckoned her lover draw near only to burp in his ear?

So, while Dave's spittle-spoken incantation of “cherry shit” was probably not really an unveiling of ineffable truth, it was nonetheless a reference to an ineffable truth unveiled by the late Bridget Snapdragon. None of this mattered to Georgeann. She found the concept of cherry shit so upsetting that she painted over the grove of trees drawn and colored by Bridget and Dave on their kitchen wall years back. This she did the very next day, for while it had long irritated her that Dave
would sometimes gaze upon the artwork on the wall for an hour after dinner, Georgeann now found that she couldn't even glimpse it out of the corner of her eye without beginning to ponder the meaning of something so revolting as cherry shit. It was an unacceptable contemplation.