The Waterbear (Samhain Shake, #1)

By Wade C. Taylor

Samhain Shake has never had a conversation with his mother due to her dying only hours after birthing him, but he feels himself infused with the curiosity of spirit born of the mystic collision of French, Spanish, African and Native American in her Creole blood. This curiosity of spirit manifests not only as the common, normal spiritual curiosity most humans share, but as a spiritually curious view of the world Shake himself describes "as disturbing to those conservative minds (bent as they are on preserving worldly divisions) as to witness semen slung, like a chameleon tongue, upon the innocent eyelids of a virgin cheerleader." 

The world is no mystery to Shake, whose cosmic predisposition rejects both organized religion and atheism alike, and whose attitudes towards love, friendship, and fatherhood are colored by an indiscriminate detachment. 

Warren Meek, his "black brother from a blacker mother" and "gallant psychopath" who's "dispersed his mischievous seed on enough stoned minds and inside enough drunken white girls throughout the American South to have gotten him lynched to all the way to Jim Crow Hell and back in an earlier lifetime"; and Constance Hopkins, whom Shake describes as a proud "Baptist slut", are the closest souls in his orbit of mayhem. Both friends are ardent defenders of their own wanton passions -- passions which have already tangled the younger Constance and a married Warren together in an extramarital affair, and threatens to spin everything and everyone off axis when Shake -- who's been secretly aware of their secret -- eventually and unwittingly insinuates himself as the third angle of an unexpected love triangle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wade C. Taylor
• Release date: Mar 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781505737462

Book preview

"And of course you're a bore, but in that you're not charmless

'Cause a bore is a straight line that finds a wealth in division

And some kinds of love are mistaken for vision"

——Some Kinda Love,  The Velvet Underground

CHAPTER ONE

Cause I'm a voodoo child

––––––––

The innocence of Constance Hopkins' face was but skin deep.  Any x-ray would have shown the grotesque raw meat beneath the porcelain mask flexing against the gristle to form a crude pantomime of human expression, which her feathery eyebrows and hydrated eyelids and antifreeze blue eyes and pink pouty lips then somehow rendered graceful as she talked to me.

I can't believe you would do something like that, she said as we drove down US Route 231 .  I had taken the day off from my landscaping job to once again pick up Warren Meek from the Bay County Jail in Panama City, Florida.  Constance, who made decent money as a Tyndall Credit Union bank teller and had agreed to put up the money for his bail, sat in the passenger seat of my Jeep.

Funny, cause I found it to be perfectly in keeping with something I'd do, I said.  I'd just finished telling her how I'd seduced a 20-year-old Mormon missionary girl from Arizona.  She and two other young women had wandered to my apartment one afternoon about a week before, doubtlessly intending to show me the same light which inspired them to leave their families (in Arizona, Utah, and California, respectively) for 18 months to win converts in Florida.  I invited them in to give it their best shot.  Before it was over I had shaken the faith of each girl at its foundations and got them stoned and had them violating their vows to not read anything but The Book Of Mormon while on mission by reading a segment of Henry Miller's Tropic Of Cancer to them aloud:

And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous tham anything which man has looked forward to. It would be miraculous because it would be undreamed of. It would be more miraculous than even the wildest dream because anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has, and probably nobody ever again will.

Arizona girl was visibly less disturbed than the other two when I asked them if they were all virgins.  And she was the one who came back later in the night alone to smoke more weed with me and fuck and talk about what it means to be a spiritual soldier in a world of spiritual frauds.

I can't believe you led those poor girls astray, said Constance.  Using their love for their God and their desire to help lead people to Him to feed your twisted libido.

You would have rather I pretended to not know the truth?

Listen, anyone whose faith allows polygamy is flawed, but that doesn't mean the misguided should be taken advantage of, she said.

I'm pretty sure I set them on the superior path.

I'm pretty sure you're delusional.  We'll see on Judgment Day.

I had yet to fall in love with Constance.  Until then, I foolishly believed it was my human right, and within my human capabilities, to avoid having to deal too much with fools.  I thought as a boy in school that dealing with foolish teachers and foolish children would be over once I was grown and on my own in the world, free to pick who would populate my orbit.  Many others believe this too I suspect.

But what I and they eventually come to learn is that foolish people will not be quarantined to a room full of flat screens displaying epsiodes of  Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Castle, while the rest of us just merrily consort in the sunshine and grow and marvel with childlike capacity at each other and the charged particles in the air of the breaths between us as we speak of love and treachery and older sadnesses—sadnesses so sad they've become sweeter than young joys.  No, we will not be left alone to flirt like savages and make fun of organized religion and puff on illegal marijuana blunts while the quarantined grow pale inside on various legal prescription poisons from the government pharmacy.

By the rest of us I mean the intellectually sensible, who—if not always in agreement—are at least sensibly disagreeable with each other.  Being sensibly disagreeable would involve things like not considering every untested idea or feasible theory a threat to your grandmother's God, or not