“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 TWENTY-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.
Of course, this act inspired a tremendous blowout between Dave and Georgeann, and it was from the dust of this spectacular argument that Elizabeth Wildhack learned that her mother’s last words were “cherry shit.” She also learned, ipso facto, that Georgeann was not her real mother. It was not an easy time in the Wildhack household.
Elizabeth, never having known her mother as her father did, did not become similarly obsessed with Bridget Snapdragon’s undying wisdom. And having barely been a second grader at the time of the blowout, she actually recalled finding the whole situation more confusing than traumatizing, and was relieved to discover that her mother was not a plumber. But once she grew older, and especially once Diana had begun teaching her kundalini yoga, a lingering curiosity sometimes made itself known. It was in such yogic reverie that she was so reminded of cherry shit the morning she asked Diablo what he thought about it.
Elizabeth had been impressed with Diablo’s cherry pop centipede hypothesis, so much so that she called her father later that afternoon to tell him about it. She hadn’t gotten through half the explanation before Dave interrupted and told her he’d already come across that angle years ago. Even if that is what she meant, Dave muttered, he could see no sense in it.
Elizabeth had to agree.
75 THE STREET MUSICIAN at whom Special Agent J. J. Speed had barked disapproval concluded his rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” feeling defeated. What am I doing? he thought derisively to himself, gazing down at the pile of his independently produced CDs, Songs I Sing So Sins Go. He frowned, disappointed that no one had ever even noticed that it was a triple anagram of gnosis. I gotta be kidding myself, he thought. You can’t swing a guitar anywhere these days without cracking the heads of a half-dozen latter-day Dylans. He glumly watched as a rivulet of Pepsi puddled its way toward his guitar case, spilling from a bottle a ways up the sidewalk.
He bent down and began gathering the smattering of coins and bills assembled in his open guitar case, pausing to pick up a plastic bottle cap that had also found its way into the mess. It might have been unworthy of note and littered immediately aside if he hadn’t glimpsed a word imprinted inside the cap, which upon further inspection revealed itself to read IMAGINE.
Goosebumping at this synchronicity, he looked around as if to confirm this coincidence but found no one to bear witness. He moved his guitar case aside to avoid damming the rivulet of black sugar water, his eyes automatically following the fizzing stream to its source, which he guessed to be the origin of the bottle cap. After a moment’s contemplation, he trotted up the sidewalk to retrieve the bottle. Examining its label and reading about Pepsi’s thousand-dollar giveaway contest, he gradually realized that the IMAGINE bottle cap someone had dropped into his guitar case was a winning bottle cap worth ten thousand dollars.
76 IN SMUG SELF-SATISFACTION, Elizabeth cajoled herself through the ostracism and harassment of her long adolescence, believing that it was bestowing upon her the ability to see the world for what it really was—a confidence game perpetrated and perpetuated by everyone everywhere and always. Initially, she did not regard herself as gifted with some rare extrasensory perception, though she soon enough discovered that everyone else seemed to really believe the prattling bullshit they told themselves as they went around bluffing intentions and wagering identities.
Her greatest gift, she liked to think, is that she could push her con better than anybody. And it was simple, really. She simply saw through what others did not. Everyone is goading some con or another, about themselves and life and everything in between, but not everyone is aware of it. Elizabeth was aware of it, and she took full advantage. As far as she was concerned, she was in on the scam, over the spell, and confident. Confidence, she repeatedly realized, each time straightening her shoulders a little more. Her poise could not be perturbed.
And then she met Diablo, cunning as the devil himself, and found herself consistently unable to direct an encounter with him. In Diablo’s presence, Elizabeth felt helpless and out of control, and was determined to get the better of him, if only to hold intact the defensive identity so carefully forged in the fires of her adolescence. But Diablo not only dominated their encounters, he blew past her like the gusts of an approaching storm, leaving her exhilarated, yes, but also tangled and unkempt, and though she felt lighter for the experience, she felt also precarious and vulnerable.
Consequently, Elizabeth sought out Diablo again a few days later, this time with a plan to unbalance him. It was time, she’d decided, for her strategy of last resort, her means of annihilating a conversant’s comfort level, and it was as simple as casually revealing her occupation in the course of a conversation. No man could contain himself in the presence of her relentless breasts urgently swelling against the taut fabric of her T-shirt, especially once she revealed her proclivity for baring them.
But Diablo just laughed, and explosively so. “Of course!” he bellowed. “What else would a tornado goddess be?” He shook his head. “This is just fantastic. Tell me, godchild, have you figured out what’s going on yet?”
Elizabeth was perturbed. Not only was Diablo unfazed, he was amused. She may as well have just revealed that she mowed lawns wearing nothing but a thong for a living. “Actually,” she said, inflamed. “I have figured out what’s going on.”
“Really?” Diablo mocked. “Well let’s hear it, sister Christian.”
“Confidence,” Elizabeth pushed back. “What’s going on is confidence, and nothing else. Everybody admires confident people because we think that they must know something the rest of us don’t. But confidence is gullibility, really. It’s basically believing what others have told you about the world. It’s a form of enchantment, a spell. And me? I’m a con artist casting the stripper con, and a liar like everybody else. What’s going on is confidence, mutual deception. I’m just honest with myself about my dishonesty.”
Diablo sat up. “Hey that’s nice.” He pointed at her. “I like the cut of your gibberish, kiddo. Faced with the howling incomprehensibility of existence, all we have is confidence. We’re browbeaten into identity by parents and peers who were themselves browbeaten into their own delusions. Everybody succumbs to the social lullaby, sleepwalking through the dance of life, snoring in the face of infinity, perfectly confident that they are—and life is—as described. Then society, society becomes our security blanket woven from nylon lies and polyester platitudes. We cast cons in the web of social deceptions, and oh what a wicked web we weave. Confidence,” he nodded, “yes ma’am, that’s nice. But I think you need to distinguish between two kinds of confident people. Those you’re talking about are the false confident—confident only because they absolutely believe the social fictions they’ve been sold. That’s not true confidence. Blithering dumbfuckery is actually what it is, obsolete stupidity, you hear what I’m saying? True confidence is absolute comfort with the notion of being alive. Those are the people we admire, those who went their own way, those who have no wish to lead but whom others can’t help but follow. Pardon the pith, but as Barefoot Barry once told me, the only good leader is a reluctant one.”
“This is you?” Elizabeth teased. “The reluctant leader?”
Diablo shrugged. “Let me tell you something, sister. I spent two years in the military and five in mortgage and monogamy before I woke up and walked away. If that ain’t reluctant, I don’t know what is. And as far as leading goes,” he went on, “do your own thing, be your own king, that’s my philosophy. Lead or get out of the way.”
�
�My lower lip trembles when I ponder your bravery.” Elizabeth continued her attempt to tease him down, but Diablo just blasted right past her, pausing not at all in his babblative exposition.
“Here’s the thing,” he continued. “The mediated masses of clubfooted cretins who act like they actually know where in the bottomless abyss of this universe we are, that ain’t fucking confidence. That’s marketing. They’ve been suckled on Satan’s nipple, the boob tube, and now they can do little else but crap the consequences of their consumption all over the rest of the planet. I mean, did you know that the average American spends three years of their life watching television commercials? Three years! Just commercials! That’s a lot of life to spend doing nothing but injecting dissatisfaction and desire into your existence. I bet if you told a dying person that, they’d bawl themselves to death right there. And if you’ve seen the teevee lately, you know that there’s basically this totally contrived world dancing in front of us all, a billion brands of bullshit smiling fake and fancy, and selling a life stolen from us in the first place. And now,” he lifted his arms high, “now the lie is cast, the con is on, and this game in which we gripe drives us each into absolute mistrust and mortification, leaving us allegedly confident that life requires doing something other than exactly what you want to do and nothing less. As you’ve rightly guessed, we are merely trapped in a very persistent, very consistent con.”
“But the difference with us,” Elizabeth found an entrance, “is that we see the con.”
“Is that so?” Diablo replied, sarcastic. “Do you see yourself conning yourself into believing that you see the con?”
“Sometimes.” Elizabeth nodded immediately. “Absolutely. The con deepens every time I think I have it figured out.”
“Well that’s good,” Diablo grunted grim. “Socratic ignorance.”
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