by Tom Robbins
Alas, Buddy Winkler never learned for certain if “pancreas” was the correct answer, for at that instant the game show was interrupted by a news bulletin. Another bomb had exploded on a crowded bus in Jerusalem, killing nineteen and wounding fifty-four.
BOOMER THOUGHT that they would simply make love in the turkey, back in the rear of the bird on the corner double bed in “blush” color scheme with deep innerspring mattress and color-coordinated quilted bedspread (ample storage tucked away beneath the bed with “pack-at-home” removable trays). Ellen Cherry had other ideas. The sun was shining, it was the first week of spring, there was little traffic and no inhabitants—she wanted to do their friendly thing outdoors in the open air, in the zone of vegetation beneath a gulping sky.
“We’ll have a picnic, too,” she announced, and she swept into a paper bag a box of crackers, a tin of sardines, a can of pork and beans, a jar of dill pickles, cheeses of both the cheddar and jack varieties, a can opener, a knife, and a spoon. Boomer added four frosted beers.
Hand in hand, she short, he tall, she bouncy, he lame, they walked along the stream. The bank was shaded and many degrees cooler than it had appeared from inside the motor home, so they left the creek and set out across a sun-sprayed hill. Releasing her hand, Boomer walked a few paces ahead of her, meaning that Ellen Cherry, the brisker walker, was forced to throttle her gait. He meant to protect her from any venomous reptile awakened from hibernation by the bells of spring. To that end, he brandished a hefty stick, with which he swatted the bushes and clumps of grass that they passed. From time to time, as they searched for an ideal spot to spread their blanket, he glanced over his shoulder at her, regarding her, as he often did before they made love, as if she were a lost continent about to be rediscovered.
It was sweet of him, she thought, to be protective; sweet and typically southern. In her experience, southern men tended to be charming that way. Protective as Brink’s, polite as tea, respectful as a job applicant during a recession. Yet, just beneath the surface of that inviting lagoon, fierce green lobsters clanged brutal claws. Possessive and pugilistic, even the most educated and aristocratic of them—lawyers, psychologists, investment bankers—engaged in fisticuffs with some regularity, usually at swell parties where ponds of bourbon were drained, and frequently over a harmless flirtation. Southern men were trapped in a backwater of masculine ethics, a classical male image that the rest of the population had largely outgrown. To be sure, their code of honor precipitated their chivalrous charm, but it also fostered the primate-band competitiveness that prevented them from relaxing unless dead drunk. Their strength was a facade, for it emanated from rules and protocol rather than from self-knowledge or inner resources. They were paper tigers, these Dixie white boys, though Ellen Cherry would ever prefer them to Latino males: those guys—Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, some Italians, even—had absolutely no sense of humor about themselves and got angry over offenses so small a woman required a microscope to identify them.
As for Greek men, she was on the verge of tarring them with the Latino brush when her southern Anglo-Saxon groom, who, she was concluding, was preferable to many Mediterraneans, most South Americans, and all art critics, interrupted with a wave of his club. “Look there,” he called, pointing toward a cavity in the hillside just below a rocky overhang. “A cave.”
Indeed, it was. Due to the manner in which Ellen Cherry automatically looked at landscapes, squinting and widening, focusing and fuzzing, employing her eye game to drag God’s patio furniture from one retinal lanai to another, she probably would have missed it. For that matter, a conventional hiker might have passed it by, as well, since the cave was small and its opening partially obscured by juniper bushes and fallen shale.
As they climbed the slope to its entrance, they entertained similar ideas. The afternoon breeze had stiffened, and spring or no spring, it was chilly enough to pave their backsides with goose bumps at the very thought of undressing. Perhaps the cave would shelter them, provide a warm, cozy haven where they might launch their carnal canoe. They would still be out in nature, but as snug as if swallowed up by the turkey.
Naturally, Boomer insisted on scouting it first. Because the hillside was steep, a fair amount of light angled into the cave’s opening. “It’s shallow and right dusty, but it looks okay,” he reported when he was positive there were no rattlesnakes or bears lying in wait for his tasty bride. She dropped to her hands and knees and followed him inside.
Once in the chamber, they could have stood upright, but standing upright was not what they were there for.
“Have you ever done any spelunking?” Ellen Cherry inquired as she arranged the picnic.
Boomer knew perfectly well what speleology was, since Trevanian’s Shibumi, with its cave-exploring protagonist, was his favorite spy novel, but he replied, “Is that a fancy form of fornicatin’—or is it something married people can do?”
Ellen Cherry set down the pickles and regarded him drolly. For all of his rowdy bluster, she knew him to be actually rather shy in the trenches. “Oh,” she said finally, “some married men are expert spelunkers.” She took his left hand and, lubricating his ring finger by licking it, removed his wedding band. His protests dwindled into grunts when she gave the finger a bonus suck.
Hiking her skirt up to her waist and pulling her panties down a few tantalizing inches, she slipped the wedding ring into her vagina. She gave it a poke to, well, ascertain that it was securely hidden; then, with a kind of reverse flourish, like a magician who has pulled a rabbit into a hat, she snapped her elastic and announced that he could try his luck at spelunking whenever he felt fit.
The um, the oh, the ah; the rubbery slap slap of bare bellies, damp as cavern walls; the clink of gold against tooth enamel as they passed the salty wedding ring from mouth to mouth; the almost audible vibration of her tiny stalactite.
He was lost among glowworms, among silky sprays of bats. Down the shaft of his explorer, he sensed a trickle, like mineral solutions slowly dripping into the eternity of a subterranean lake. There had been other spelunkers in these hollows, that she had confessed, but he took solace in the knowledge that he’d been first, that his was the brush that had left the hunting scenes upon her labial Lascaux.
Um oh ah, this troglodyte love was for him, he reckoned; this cave within a cave, this paleolithic pussy, this descent into the deepest dark of fuck. With what intensity they stared into each other’s eyes, their gazes roped together like the discoverers of Carlsbad! Boomer felt that they were squeezed into a narrow crevasse that any moment now would expel them with a rush into a fabulous undiscovered chamber, resplendent with polychrome columns and calcite organ pipes—but, alack, Ellen Cherry chose at that instant to utter a word that jarred him as rudely as a collision with a dripstone.
“Jezebel,” she whispered.
“Uh?”
“Please, darlin’, call me Jezebel.”
Oh, no, he thought. Not this. She’s turning kinky on me. He said nothing, but increased the power of his thrust.
“Come on, honey.”
“Huh-uh.” He wished she’d be quiet. That wedding ring trick was cute, but this . . .
“Come on, now. Call me your Jezebel.”
“Aw, gee, Ellen Cherry.” He pumped with even greater velocity, but she persisted in her demand, and he could tell that if they continued to argue he would lose his erection. Already, it was bowing in the middle like a maître d’s tie. “Jezebel,” he grunted.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Jezebel.” There was a detectable shortage of enthusiasm.
She sunk her fingernails into his buttocks, her teeth into his shoulder. “Say it, Boomer.”
Against his better judgment—was this the way women behaved once they married?—he called it out, loud and clear. “Jezebel!” It echoed: “Jezebel! Jezebel!” The name rattled in the little cave like a die in a cup.
Digging her nails in deeper, Ellen Cherry bucked against him. A moan wobbled out of her throat like an
overweight dove.
“Jezebel!” he yelled. “You cheap slutting cunt-whoring Jez-a-fucking-bel!”
With that, he lost consciousness. As for her, her orgasm had been lent the necessary dynamic gradient that in classical theater promises its audience catastrophe, immortality, or both.
Of course, there was no audience there in that funky, obscure little burrow in the disappearing American wilderness.
Or was there?
They lay in silence, barely touching, their postcoital reverie edged with mild embarrassment. Each was waiting for the other to speak, each secretly hoping that when the other did speak, his or her remarks would be cheerful and loving, with no trace of the shame that muzzled the other—and with absolutely no reference to a certain maligned queen from the ninth century B.C. They might have lain like that until the sun went down but for the fact that three or four minutes after their sex cries subsided—it seemed considerably longer—there was a stirring at the rear of the cave.
Ellen Cherry froze. Boomer bolted to a sitting position and made a frantic search for his club.
There it was again, a dry rustle followed by the sort of noise Boomer’s work shoe made when he was tired and given to dragging his bad foot. Ellen Cherry’s eyes widened, and not in the service of some arty game. Her protective southern husband turned in the direction of the sounds.
At most, the cave was twenty feet deep. To be sure, the light was dim, but they could see easily to the back wall. There was no place for anything, man or beast, to hide. Unless. . . . For the first time, Boomer noticed a small niche, a vaginal slit in the left corner. It was about eight feet from the floor, up near the ceiling, too high to peer into. It hardly seemed adequate to conceal an animal, although he supposed one or more snakes might have called it home.
The noises weren’t quite right for snakes, however, nor for the ghost of Injun Joe. Imagine, if you will, that a naive girl has accepted the invitation of an older gentleman to peruse his etchings. Imagine the leather-bound book being dragged from a shelf, the turning of its heavy, expensive pages. Then, imagine the young girl, in her nervousness, knocking over the quart of mescal with which the gentleman would ply her, freeing the mescal worm, which comes to life and tries to organize a revolution in a basket of nacho-flavored corn chips. Those were the kind of noises they were.
Comes to life. . . . There was an accompanying sensation, a feeling that overtook our couple the instant they heard the noises, and that they were later to agree was a sensation of something coming to life, although what they couldn’t guess. It was spooky, more spooky even than the prospect of some fat fang-snapping reptile sliding down from the niche on its squamous stomach. They pulled on their clothes, snatched up their picnic things, and vacated that den in a flash.
All the way back to the highway, they kept checking to determine that they weren’t being pursued, and it wasn’t until they were safely inside the turkey that they could laugh.
“You’re only wearing one sock,” Ellen Cherry pointed out.
“Lucky to get one on,” Boomer said. “You manage to put on your underpants?”
“Of course. What do you think I am, some Jezebel?”
They stared at each other for one tense moment, then, giggling, fell into a long and tight embrace.
“Must’ve left that sock behind as an offering to the cave monster,” said Boomer.
“As I recall, honey, you’d been wearing that sock for three days.”
“Jesus. You’re right. How offensive! We better haul on outta here.”
Joking aside, they drove quite a distance before they felt comfortable. Even then, they were too flustered to realize that in addition to Boomer’s sweat-caked sock, they had left behind in the cave a fine silver spoon and a can of beans.
FOR APPROXIMATELY A QUARTER HOUR after the couple fled the cave, the stirring continued in its niche. None but Dirty Sock, Spoon, and Can o’ Beans was privy to it now.
“I’m frightened,” said Spoon.
“Nothin’ in there can hurt us,” said Dirty Sock. The idea of a viper biting an old purple sock struck him as funny. Were there a possibility of a puppy in the niche, he would have been less amused.
“Shhh,” shushed Can o’ Beans. “Hear those sighs. Whatever is waking up in there is waking up slowly because they’ve been asleep a long, long time.”
Can o’ Beans was correct. In fact, nearly two thousand springs had come and gone since that which was awakening was last awake. Obviously, more than a simple vernal equinox was required to interrupt such slumber. What had awakened that which was awakening was the sexual intercourse of Mr. and Mrs. Boomer Petway, combined with the echoing shouts of a familiar and treasured name.
Oh, yes, Jezebel was well known to those that hibernated in the nook. Any questions that Ellen Cherry had concerning the “painted hussy” could have been answered by them in accurate detail.
They could, for example, have supplied the following information:
Except in an entirely secondary manner, Queen Jezebel never worshipped Baal. Baal was the ancient Semite word for “lord” or “husband.” The god referred to by the Bible as Baal had divine status primarily because he was husband to Astarte. It was Astarte whom Jezebel worshipped.
Who was Astarte? She was a goddess; rather, she was the Goddess, the Great Mother, the Light of the World, the most ancient and widely revered divinity in human history. Shrines to her date back to the Neolithic Period, and there was not one Indo-European culture that failed to remove with its kiss the mud from her sidereal slippers. In comparison, “God,” as we moderns call Yahweh (often misspelled “Jehovah") was a Yahny-come-lately who would never approach her enormous popularity. She was the mother of God, as indeed, she was mother of all. As beloved as she was for her life-giving and nurturing qualities, the only activities of hers acceptable to the patriarchs, she was mistress over destruction as well as creation, representing, according to one scholar, “the abyss that is the source and the end, the ground of all being.”
In Jezebel’s native Phoenicia, the Goddess’s name was Astarte. In Babylon, she was Ishtar; in India, Kali, in Greece, Demeter (immature aspect: Aphrodite). If Saxon was your indigenous tongue, you would address her as Ostara; if Nordic, you’d say Freya; if Egyptian, Isis—or Nut or Hathor or Neith. Oh, the Goddess had many names, and many roles. She was virgin, bride, mother, prostitute, witch, and hanging judge, all swirled into one. She had more phases than the moon. She knew the dark side of the moon like the palm of her hand. She shopped there.
Because the Goddess was changeable and playful, because she looked upon natural chaos as lovingly as she did natural order, because her warm feminine intuition was often at odds with cool masculine reason, because the uterine magic of her daughters had since the dawn of consciousness overshadowed the penis power of her sons, resentful priests of a tribe of nomadic Hebrews led a coup against her some four thousand years ago—and most of what we know as Western civilization is the result. Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman’s superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.
In Jezebel’s time, a full millennium after the patriarchal revolt, Yahweh had managed to establish no more than a precarious foothold. Today, each and every ejaculation, each and every earthquake or harvest moon may remind the deep male unconscious of the Goddess’s continued presence, but in the ninth century B.C., she was openly worshipped in the lands surrounding Israel, and covertly in Israel itself. Small wonder, then, that when King Ahab’s Phoenician bride started building shrines to Astarte, and when the Israelites started flocking to those shrines—the populace apparently favored Astarte’s voluptuous indulgence over Yahweh’s rigid asceticism—the patriarchs reacted violently against her. Interestingly enough, one of the crimes charged to Jezebel, according to the historian Josephus, was the p
lanting of trees. Since the Goddess always has been honored in sacred groves, it is understandable that patriarchs, then as now, leaned toward deforestation.
Incidentally, Astarte’s Hebrew appellation—Ashtoreth—is mentioned in the Bible only thrice. In carefully patriarchalized incarnations, the Goddess does appear in Scripture as Eve and the Virgin Mary (the one a wily temptress, the other an asensual, passive vehicle); John refers to her as the whore of Babylon, identified with the fornicating “Beast” whom the innocent, nonorgasmic “Lamb” will defeat in the battle that climaxes history. But the mouthpieces of patriarchy were far too freaked out by her, by her openness, her variability, her magic and carnality, to so much as write down her name. Thus, they substituted her husband, her baal, realizing, too, that only to a male divinity could the alleged sacrifice of babies be convincingly attributed.
Lest it be misconstrued here that those that stretched and yawned in the underground niche had some historic ax to grind, it should be established that they were . . . well, agents of reality, not scholars or proselytizers, and hardly would have bothered, even were they able, to reel off names of goddesses as if announcing the lineup of a soccer team. Yet, while they undoubtedly would have been less loquacious about it, they would willingly have revealed to Ellen Cherry the true character of Jezebel’s transgressions. To wit: her misdeed was her devotion to Astarte. Because that devotion was contagious (being an instinctive human reflex), because it weakened the grip of the Yahweh cult, she was slandered, framed, and finally murdered.
When the moment arrived, Jezebel was thoroughly aware that she was to be assassinated. She put up her ergot-black hair, donned her tiara, rouged her cheeks and lips, applied kohl to the lids of her huge Phoenician eyes, and went to face her killer with the style, dignity, and grace befitting a reigning queen. So much for painted hussies.
