by Chuck Austen
“RAPE!” she howled. “RAAAAAPE!”
She slap-slap-slapped at me, and grabbed the pajamas, still screaming, and trying to pull them back on. Tripping over the torn fabric, she fell onto the toilet seat, struggling, wriggling, and squirming, all while trying to hide her exposed private parts. Her body was hideous. Every inch of her flesh resembled photographs of Hiroshima bombing victims, only less attractive, and in full color. Things burst and oozed everywhere. The doctor and I tried to control our revulsion, and I fought the need to vomit.
“Eeeeewww,” Morgan said through a mouth full of chocolate, having walked down to stand in the bathroom door with his comic. Ms. Waboombas was looking over his shoulder.
Mindie stopped screaming and glared up at them with absolute horror, and absoluter fury.
“HOW DARE YOU LOOK AT MEEEEEEE!”
An otherworldly growling sound launched itself from her, and she leaped off the toilet, slamming me backward into the shower and under its spray of scalding water. Rebounding off my flopping body, Mindie hopped over the doctor, plowed through Morgan, and knocked him flat, stepping on his face as she scrambled past Waboombas, scratching, clawing, and snarling her way out into the hall.
Screaming in my girlish way because of being boiled alive, I rolled in the tub, yanked down the shower curtain, and managed to scald myself fairly evenly on all sides. After hours, and hours of rolling and screaming which really lasted only seconds, I finally managed to pull myself out from under the murderous spray of death, leaped out of the tub, over Morgan and the doctor, and ran after Mindie.
Stopping near the bed in the hotel room, I could see my naked former fiancée through the doorway, out in the corridor, looking like some partially cooked animal trying to escape its own barbecue. She snorted and grunted, glaring up and down the hall, considering what to do next.
“Mindie,” I said calmly. “Come back inside. You need to…”
She snarled at me, scratching her stomach, baring her fangs and hissing like a cornered snake, before she bolted off toward the stairs.
I chased her, but was hampered by sticking, wet, clingy pants, and roasted skin. On top of that, Mindie was faster than she looked— a woman possessed—escaping in a blur, out through the exit and down the stairs.
By the time I got to the ground floor, she had disappeared somewhere, either into town or the surrounding foliage, completely naked and covered with boils, where she would likely become an urban legend.
I wrote Doctor King a check for his services and thanked him profusely. He told me if Mindie returned, I should get her to a hospital immediately, and I promised I would, knowing innately that it would never happen. She was running wild now, running free, and likely wouldn’t stop until she’d made it home.
“Good riddance,” Waboombas snarled.
I couldn’t agree more. I felt sympathy for her pain, but not much. I was now a man with a mission. Meeting Wisper’s mother in the lobby shop had changed everything for me. She could accept me if I made her daughter happy. So I would make her daughter happy. Somehow.
And given time, I might even become comfortable here. Or—if not—her mother would still be a potential ally, and that made the situation immensely more promising. I could handle being the weird son-in-law if it meant I were sleeping with Wisper every night, and seeing her naked, a lot.
As Ms. Waboombas sat on one of the twin beds, still nude, cleaning her toenails, I began cobbling together a plan. I paced back and forth across the room and thought things out. Morgan—carefully hiding his anchovy beneath the stack of comics and magazines—sat on the other bed and read.
Suddenly something struck me.
“Where’s the pastor?”
“In our room,” Waboombas said, as something flicked out of her toenail and hit me in the eye. “Taking a bath. He made me leave.”
“He made you,” I said, stunned. “You.”
“All right, he asked me. Nice. He seemed kinda upset, was breathing hard, all wild-eyed and shit, so I came up here and found the doctor trying to get in. The rest you know.”
“Are you okay, here?” I asked her. “You in a hurry to leave town?”
“Not really. The convention’s pretty much over for today, and tomorrow’s the better selling day anyway. And I kinda wanted to look around the place. It’s interesting here. Why? Are we staying?”
“I am. And I need your help with something.”
“It have something to do with the hostess from that restaurant?”
“As a matter of fact, it does.”
“I figured.”
“She’s also the model from the closet last night,” Morgan said, not looking up from his girlie magazine.
“I knew you knew her,” Waboombas said to me. “You were too cute together.”
“Will you help me?”
“Of course!”
“You will?”
“I’m a stripper. I know true love when I see it.”
That’s why she hadn’t ratted me out to Mindie in the restaurant. Why she’d stopped harassing me.
“You’re a romantic.”
“Shut up!”
“You are!”
“I could tell you never really wanted pasty-tits. But when I saw you talking to that honey in the restaurant—whoo! Splendor in the grass, baby!”
“Really?”
“I told you. I’m a stripper. I’m trained in the arts of love.”
“And you’re okay with it?”
“What? You think I’m hurt somehow? Get over yourself. You ain’t even my type, Corky.”
“But all those comments…”
“I’d marry ya, ‘cause you’re rich. I’d even fuck ya, ‘cause you’re cute, and ya got a nice wee-wee. But I ain’t in love with your ass!”
“I need you to go with me to this Summertime Soiree auction and party tonight.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll go?”
“Suuure. Looks like fun. I hear they’re going to sell white people. Maybe I’ll buy one.”
“I was hoping you would actually.”
“You were?”
“Remember that tall, dark, Tarzan looking guy at the restaurant?”
“The one with the great dick?”
“Um…yeah.”
“Thought a lot about him in the tub,” she said steamily.
“I’ll bet. How would you like to buy him?”
“Buy him? I don’t now. Guy like him—could go for a bundle.”
“I’ll pay.”
“You’ll pay?”
“I’ll pay. Whatever he costs, I’ll cover it for you. Just keep bidding and win him.”
“Whatever makes you happy. How about that gas station attendant?”
“I want you to focus on the restaurant guy.”
“Okay. It’s all good.” She studied me. “This is probably gonna cost you. The Nuckeby girl worth it?”
She knew her name. She really did pay attention.
“And more,” I said.
“Just her ass alone is worth it,” Morgan said, still not looking up from his magazines.
“So what’s it all about, Corky?” Waboombas asked, curiously amused. “What’s going on?”
“I want to buy her at the auction tonight, and her brother wouldn’t like it.”
“Tarzan?”
“Yep.”
“So you want me to keep him busy.”
“I do.”
She licked her lips. “Works for me.”
Two floors down, the pastor was in the tub, naked save for with a washcloth over his crotch, devouring his Good Book.
He was skimming chapters that memory told him contained God’s word about how nudity was bad, evil, or—at the very least— generally frowned upon. But he wasn’t having much luck.
Unfortunately he had the King James Version of the Bible, so his search was taking some time. There were about 104 references to the word ’naked’, and its derivatives in approximately eighty-seven verses of that translatio
n. If he had been reading the New International Version, a translation preferred by many conservative Christians, things would have gone faster. There were only forty-nine references to nudity, and its various forms in forty-seven verses of that version of God’s unalterable word.
The pastor had blown through the first eight verses of Genesis, looking for anything concrete to help him correct that blasphemous woman’s point of view, and it’s perverse, Biblical interpretation. Damn her. Or, rather, darn her.
Genesis 9 told of Noah drunk and naked. Noah passes out, one of his sons, Ham, tells his two brothers about it, and they cover their father’s genitals with a rag.
He glanced down at his crotch.
“All right, then,” he said to himself, and went back to reading.
Noah awakes, and curses Ham’s offspring—presumably because Ham ridiculed his father to his brothers. But Noah isn’t punished for getting drunk and lettin’ it all hang out. God doesn’t even give him a stern reprimand or a time-out.
Amazingly, in what should have been the perfect place to let it fly, there was not one word about an angry God who hates the exposed bodies of His most perfect creations and punishes those who flop around freely.
Pastor Winterly skipped up to Exodus and found Moses punishing the 3,000 men and women, some of who were dancing naked. But he seems to have punished them only for the false idol worship, and not for the dancing naked part. Maybe that verse had been accidentally edited out during the council of Nicaea. Well, then it wouldn’t be official, would it?
Still no help.
Didn’t God ever get righteously angry over the things that truly mattered?
1 Samuel 18. Jonathan gets naked in front of David. No cursing or damning there. The pastor skipped past that passage without a thorough read. It had always made him a little uncomfortable because it could be interpreted to mean that Jonathan leaned a little to the ‘melikey-men’ side.
1 Samuel 19. Saul prophesizes in the nude. Okay, we’re going backward here.
Isaiah 20. God makes Isaiah take off all his clothes, and walk around naked and barefoot for three years.
God made him? What was He thinking?
The pastor closed his book and set it on the sink. He looked into space and thought deeply for a moment. Why was nudity a sin? There had to be a specific reason. A pertinent passage. A footnote.
What was he forgetting?
He removed the washcloth from his lap and laid it carefully over the side of the tub. Then he stared at it for a moment, thinking of his mother. After a moment’s unpleasant reminiscing, he turned and looked at his penis, studying it for a long time.
It seemed…ugly. Withered. Like it didn’t even belong there between his legs and should be removed. A bit of dried flesh, like a leftover umbilical cord that hadn’t completely detached. Or a twig that had become lodged there.
Or a cancer.
Then he flashed on the smiling face of the girl from Toulon and wondered if she would have agreed. Maybe not then.
After too long contemplating the existence of his organ, Winterly stood from the water and stepped out of the tub, toweling himself, lost in thought. As he held the soft cloth to his moistened lips, he lowered his head and continued searching his mind, quietly dripping onto the floor. He felt he was just on the verge of remembering something of significance, but it was too deeply buried beneath the clutter of his mind for him to dig it out.
Making matters worse, disconnected memories of his ex-wife’s complaining had begun to swirl in and out of focus, further obscuring his search. He kept hearing her anguished remarks about how he’d changed, how he’d lost the essence of what she’d loved about him, how he’d retreated too much into dogma to be helpful, either to her or his parishioners, in today’s changing world of new ideas. She hadn’t understood that ‘dogma’ was the only thing that had held him together during every difficult moment in his turbulent life, up to, and including, the failure of their marriage.
Very early on, she had angrily given up trying to convince him that she had liked his penis.
And now, this woman, this supposed minister in the buff, had taken the comfort of his dogma away from him. She had challenged him. Stumped him. Embarrassed him. And for the first time in his life, the answers he needed were not readily at his fingertips in the one resource that trumped all other forms of wisdom.
If she was right about nudity not being a sin, that naked pastor had upset the delicate balance of his life by knowing more about ‘dogma’ than he did, and turned his certainties into uncertainties. If he had seen something in scripture with such clarity, such absolute conviction, only to be shown he’d seen nothing of the kind, where was he? What did that mean about his other ‘beliefs’? His other ‘truths’?
His harsh words to the girl from Toulon?
What was God trying to teach him by bringing him to this place? By tempting and testing him so? Where had the pious man fallen short?
Perhaps it hadn’t been in denying, or obscuring, or eradicating his feelings. Perhaps it had instead been in trying to deny, and obscure, and eradicate.
Was it possible that God was trying to tell him that He—as the nude, lady minister believed—had no problem with the human body being publicly unadorned exactly as He had made it? That His real feelings and intentions and ideas about the naked form had been hidden under layers and layers and layers of detailed tapestry woven from the beliefs and the teachings and the interpretations of others who could not and did not know the truth as well as He.
Perhaps God was trying to remind him that His will superceded the will of his mother.
The precipice of doubt loomed and the abyss of unexpected possibility lay below. Would he fly through it, angelically, or fall to his death?
Is this what Eleanor, his wife, had meant when she’d once asked him ‘Why must you always look for what’s “wrong” and never for what’s “right”?’ The parallels here to his arguments with her were so similar. His firm belief in something scripture said, and her firm belief that it meant something else. Being the minister, though, his supposed learning could more readily steamroll her.
But not, apparently, this naked woman in the church.
“If we don’t attend to the little things as if God were watching,” Reverend Winterly said, again, only to himself, “He will eventually remind us that we have fallen short—somehow—in His eyes.”
He sensed, in some profound way, that how he chose to face this crisis would change him for whatever might be left of his life. Whether for good or ill was entirely up to him. Though God seemed intent on hitting him in the head with lessons if he chose incorrectly.
This is why he had preferred Mindie’s company to the others. Mindie never challenged him. Mindie’s arguments were often his own—though perhaps more strident and rude. He had once felt certain that Mindie would have made a comfortable wife for him. But on this trip, she had been continually thrown up before him as a fool, almost as if to show him, in no uncertain terms, the wrongness of her point of view. More importantly, he now saw with looking-glass clarity that no one liked Mindie.
So what did that say about him?
While reflecting deeply on that disturbing thought, he turned and was caught off-guard by his reflection in the mirror. At first he was horrified to see a fat old man standing in his bathroom. Then he realized with even greater horror that he was the fat old man. His rumpled hair didn’t look as his mind remembered it. No longer blonde and wind-blown, instead, it was thinning and somewhat gray. His body held no familiarity to him. His stomach, arms and neck had become thickened with overeating, sitting, and watching sports instead of participating in them. And was that cottage cheese on his thighs? How had he not noticed that before now? Sometimes the ministerial robes and collar hid things a little too well.
Or perhaps he’d stopped noticing that he even had a body.
Feeling a sudden urge for a return to clarity, he dropped the towel to the floor and studied himself in full.
/> Once he had been so proud to see himself after a shower. He had been an athlete in High School—a runner—lean and trim. The ‘Handsome American’. Now he pinched his flab—far more than an inch—and thanked the Lord for those ministerial robes and collar.
How had he not noticed this deterioration before now? How had he seen things so clearly—and not seen them at all?
Then he thought of her. That woman in the church, and the way she had trimmed her…
He felt a part of him spring to life that had been dormant since even before his wife had left him. It surprised him, yet felt comforting and familiar. It reminded him even more of those younger days when he’d looked good in a mirror, when women had eyed him with smiles and interest, and unspoken invitations instead of indifference.
When a pretty young French girl had become excited about the thought of seeing him naked. In public. Before others.
When he’d been hopeful. And happy. And Alive.
The sensation of desire for this female minister was warm, and exciting, and welcome—but it made him a little afraid. Could God want him to feel this way about such a woman?
The same way he had felt about the girl from Toulon?
Because—Lord help him, Lord tell him if this wrong—he still liked it, just as he had in Bordeaux, and ever since. The excitement, the uncertainty, the thoughts of her—that minister—nude. All the time. In public.
Okay. If he was going to be honest with himself about what God had lain before him and seemed to be testing him with, he liked it.
He really, really liked it.
“These magazines suck,” Morgan said, as Waboombas put on make-up for the evening.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
“Look at this centerfold,” he said, holding it up.
It was a typical Playboy image—a beautiful ‘girl-next-door-toplastic-surgeons’ type who never lived next-door to me, and had unbelievably white teeth, perfect hair, and an overly developed body. Only she wasn’t naked. I had been so inundated by naked people for the last few hours, that there was something rather jarring and sexually attractive about it.
