Abandon Trail!!! Fostering deeper relationships. Pickled Eggs and Pickled Pigs Feet. Lucifer's Big Toe.
Part IV
I did not drop Kathy off at the next scheduled trailhead. As it turned out she had not only grown bored with the whole hiking-the-great-outdoors idea but had started to feel ever more unsafe by herself.
I concurred, adding there must be plenty of granola eating creeps who have dropped out of society in hopes of finding their paleolithic, ancestorial-self in the wilderness.
“If you can’t adjust to society,” I suggested further, “isolation probably won’t improve matters. Your own thoughts will drive you bananas.”
Kathy considered this in silence with a blank face, staring straight ahead at nothing on the horizon. It was if she donned a mask to hide any expression that might betray how she felt inside. The Kathy Mask of Passivity, I called it.
I didn’t want to pry into Kathy’s past. I didn’t have to. I could tell she had been through the wringer with someone, something, or both. It was obvious the poor girl’s lack-of-trust issues were caused by past trauma, and I felt sorry for her. Scar tissue that forms around the soul makes the soul even more vulnerable to future damage just like a sprained ankle is more susceptible to future sprains. When she wasn’t wearing her mask, she would say unsettling things like: “Just don’t hurt me” or “You can have all my money” or “If you leave me now, I will never tell anyone what happened.”
Each time she spoke like this, I would take one of her perfect hands in mine and assure her that none of those situations would come to pass. Despite my promises, Kathy was intent on never letting me get too close.
Even during our love making, Kathy’s obsession over past hurt was evident. She possessed a desire for pain to be inflicted during intimacy as a mechanism to keep her distance, out of reach of any real emotional harm. Respected publications dealing with psychology might term such proclivities as deviant. Crude, adult periodicals might refer to them as kinky. Regardless, they manifested themselves in the act of me binding Kathy’s two gorgeous hands together before stripping off her clothes like a savage rapist or spanking her voluptuous, bare bottom like a naughty girl all the while calling her terrible names and threatening her with worse violence if she displeased me in any way. Our congress always concluded with me leaving her bound, naked and shivering in the glossy slime of our pleasure.
I shared the tale of “Wojo Visits the Old Schoolhouse” with Kathy after a few days of being together. I shared even more stories of violence and chaos from my past, too. Unlike the sessions with Dr. Isaac, I had no fear of revealing too much too soon with Kathy. I felt at ease when holding her strong yet pulchritudinous hands in mine.
For the most part, she seemed unimpressed by these recollections. Perhaps my experiences ran so parallel to her own that I could evoke little more than a been-there-done-that feeling in the implacable inertia of Kathy H.
I once thought I saw a crack in her Mask of Passivity when I described the jar of pickled pigs feet that loomed on a shelf behind Riverside’s bar. For anyone whose consumption of alcohol was enough to produce the necessary amount of courage or the appetite of a starving hyena, Riverside offered a selection of unsavory comestibles. Among these, the preserved swine hooves were unrivaled.
Inside the jar floated what could only be described as something that had at one time been animated with life before meeting an unfortunate end as a specimen in a museum of medical curiosities or an unidentified creature local yokels paid two bits to gaze at in wonder in a sideshow tent of a cheap carnival. By comparison, an equally massive crock holding pickled eggs was almost appetizing.
Only once did I witness anyone eating either savory and that person chose the foot. Wojo fished one out of the brine using steel kitchen tongs and served it on a paper food tray ornamented with a red and white checkerboard pattern. He placed in front of a hulking fellow who looked as though he had just stepped off the set of Hee Haw.
Glistening in its little paper boat, the foot looked more like a something awaiting dissection in biology lab rather than food. The suspension of salty pickling juices intended to arrest decomposition had left the pigskin in tatters exposing clumps of shredded meat, sinew and translucent cartilage.
As a boy, I imagined the soft orbs of pickled eggs, stained purple by the fluid in which they bobbed, resembled grotesque eyeballs peering through the glass of their jar. Together we watched with revulsion as the man devoured the carcass with the eager lack of hesitation attributed to the famished. Juices dribbled down his double chin as his jaw muscles throbbed in labor against the meat and gristle. He left nothing behind save the cloven hoof.
Stay Tuned for Final Part V
