Chapter Sixty One

"It' s all Mother Nature...She hates you." Babe Ruth held up his hand in a stopping motion and walked away from me and towards the box.

I watched him walk all the way around me without moving my head. I saw every step. At the same time I mentally squinted to see the flocks of birds flying above. They were barely visible because of the dense foliage and contrast between the dark forest and brilliant sky.

Babe walked behind the box to find Satan had pushed a small opening in the rear, his Devilish hand crawling as if it had eyes, as if it were searching for a better escape plan. The Bambino reached in his back pocket and produced a very large, shiny, meat cleaver. His attack on the Prince of Darkness was obscured by the box, but I did see a swift, downward thrust, followed by a terrible scream.

"Everything OK?" I chewed hard on my lower lip as I asked the question.

Babe was repairing the hole in the box with an endless assortment of tools he pulled from his pants. It reminded me of the television version of "Batman" when the Caped Crusader would pull anything he needed at the appropriate time from his Utility Belt. I have always wondered how such an overweight man could be such an incredible baseball player and now I think I figured it out. He wasn't overweight at all! He was carrying everything he would ever need beneath his uniform.

The King of the homers walked back to where I was waiting. He had the long purple/orange index finger of the Devil in his hand. "Its all good!"

He stuck the digit from hell that was slowly turning brown into the opening of a cigar cutter. Once it was in, past the fingernail, he chopped it cleanly. He eyed the finger from both sides and then slid it under his nose. The cigar that was in his mouth dropped to the ground next to the Devil's fingernail. Before any words could leave my open mouth he shoved the decapitated finger into his lips and lit it with the Nascar lighter.

"What you poor confused people see as "Natural" in your natural lives, is exactly what's stopping you from getting anything accomplished. It's exactly what's keeping you from realizing your potential."

"Isn't living and loving part of God's plan for us? Doesn't he challenge us to make us stronger? Stronger to do his will?" I don't know where this philosophy was coming from, I must have gone to church at some point in my life. I think I'm a Methodist.

"Marty, don't confuse God with Nature. God built us so he could enjoy watching us. We're like television for him. He made a couple of humans and that was plenty entertainment for him. He created Nature to tend the gardens and keep the whole Eco-system in check. Think of the world as a fish tank and Nature is the snail you buy to eat all the crap off of the glass."

"So which is it, a TV or a fish tank?"

Babe blew a puff of purple/orange smoke from his lips "Ha!" he chortled. "Go fick yourself!" I was feeling as if he had lost interest in me for a moment. "God wanted nothing more than to watch A&E."

"Arts and Entertainment?"

"Adam and Eve." He pulled a folding chair out of nowhere, snapped it into shape and slid his bottom down for a rest. "But Nature saw them as nothing but a nuisance. They were killing the grass by walking on it and peeing everywhere. They ate anything that sprouted from the ground or bloomed on the bushes and would then shit it out all over Eden. Nature got pissed. She tried to wash them away with nasty storms and fry them with a piercing sun but those wily bastards kept figuring out ways to beat the system. When she figured out she couldn't kill them from the outside she found a way of using the Moon to instill sexual urges inside them. Pretty soon they were fickin all over the place, making babies and then the babies grew up and they all started screwing and fighting. The human body can only stand so much sexual tension, something that God had never calculated, and after a few years it just gives up and dies."

"Are you making this up?"

"God created Heaven and Hell as a temporary warehouse for all of the casualties until he could figure out a way to get his message to the people. If he was able to send someone with his sensibilities and knowledge to the Earth to spread the word, then all the crazy sex and killing would stop and he could figure out a way to repatriate the dead back into the fish tank."

"Wait, why didn't he just make Nature stop trying to eliminate his creation?"

The Sultan didn't like being interrupted. He wasn't good at keeping one line of thought going through his head and hated having to veer off course for fear of never finding his way back. "Creating shit is not like typing into a computer. You can't create something and then hit backspace a couple of times and take it all back! God wasn't into home repair. He didn't have a manual. He created something cool on his weekend and what happened next was out of his control."

"Are you saying he doesn't decide who lives or dies? He doesn't make it rain for forty days and forty nights?

"Are you paying any attention? All he wanted was some sea monkeys to use as a distraction during the down moments, you know, while he was writing his novel. The next thing he knew he had a hutch full of baby- making bunnies instead. He had to stop writing and spend all of his time finding a place for everybody to go after they used up their bodies with all the warring and humping. He was pissed as heck at Mother Nature for balling up the works, but there was nothing he could do about it." He pulled another folding chair out of his breast pocket and offered me a seat. "Now Hell was another mistake. He wanted a place for serial humpers and people with the desire to kill to go and be relatively safe and warm until he could fix the whole mess on Earth. He told his favorite angel to oversee the process and Satan kinda freaked out. At first he was doing pretty well, and then he took up smoking."

"This is sooo fucked up!" I plopped down into the folding chair. Thank goodness it was the type with a padded seat.

"Tell me about it!" Babe lifted his hat and wiped the sweat on his brow with his forearm. "When God found out about the smoking he got angry with Satan and took his cigs away. The Devil went into serious withdrawal and started making things hard on everyone in Hell. Trust me, it wasn't a nice place to be. I mean, he went from 2 packs a day to NOTHING. It wasn't pretty."

I was starting to think that Babe was making this story up as he went. "Who told you this?"

"That doesn't matter does it? The important thing is that you know how this mess got started, so you can go back to the living and spread the word."

"Who the FUCK told you this?" I was feeling angry. I didn't stop to consider that I hadn't been angry for quite some time....Maybe never. How could I? I was angry.

Babe Ruth's eyes got big. He trembled a little. The greatest baseball player of all time was afraid. Here he was, in the woods with the embodiment of evil only a few meager feet away and he was suddenly afraid for the first time. He was afraid of me.

"Who told you this bullshit?" My eyes flashed like the steel of a polished dagger. "Spit it out, FATBOY!"

His head lowered. The brim of his hat blocked my view of his eyes. His chin quivered as he answered, softly. "Red."

"Red Skelton, you stupid son of a bitch! Babe Ruth, you stupid son of a bitch! Which one of you son of a bitches is stupider?"

I didn't even notice that Babe had raised his hand in response to my question.