Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  The dog-sucked bones of Jezebel may be the skeleton that bangs its knobs in the closet of our race.

  Why wasn’t Ellen Cherry aware of all this? Why wasn’t the mass of humankind aware of it? Because veils of ignorance, disinformation, and illusion separate us from that which is imperative to our understanding of our evolutionary journey, shield us from the Mystery that is central to being.

  The first of those veils conceals the repression of the Goddess, masks the sexual face of the planet, drapes the ancient foundation stone of erotic terror that props up modern man’s religion.

  But, listen now. If Painted Stick and Conch Shell are permitted to leave the cave where they’ve been sleeping—and what stands in their path but a spoon, a smelly old sock, and a can of beans?—Salome might dance in the Temple again. And if nobody stops Salome from dancing, that first veil may one day soon be dropping.

  The Second Veil

  "WHY IS IT," Boomer asked, “that beer goes to your head faster in the daytime than it does after dark?"

  The man to whom he had addressed the question tugged at his scraggly beard, nodded, said nothing.

  “It’s a fact,” Boomer went on. “I can drink triple after sundown what I can hold in the afternoon. You notice that, too?”

  Ellen Cherry was in a Speedy Wash doing their laundry. From now on, she insisted, Boomer would go forth into the world attired in the freshest, most sanitary footwear that detergent and hot water could provide. Should ever she break that vow, he would have only to remind her of the sock he’d left in the cave the previous day, the one whose foulness was offending, they half-kiddingly suspected, some chthonian spirit creature whose hospitality they had violated after it stood guard over their marvelous fuck. While she watched the stockings and underwear flap and churn, dive and surface in the suds, directing her eye game through the porthole in the washer door, Boomer had repaired to a tavern across the street.

  “It’s a common phenomenon,” Boomer said, “but I’ve never heard it explained on the education channel or anywheres. How ’bout you?”

  There were only three people at the bar: Boomer, the man to his left, and the man to his left. Boomer’s neighbor was large and seedy looking, shirted in wrinkled plaid flannel that gave the impression it had been repeatedly run over by farm machinery. His beard might have endured an identical ordeal. He nodded at Boomer but did not speak. His pal, obscured from Boomer’s view by the first man’s bulk, stared straight ahead. The bartender, an elderly woman, was at the far end, assiduously polishing, inspecting, and repolishing cheap glassware, as if the Queen of England and her entourage were due by any moment for a round of brews. From its lonesome perch, an unwatched TV set flicked frizzy pictures of a soap-opera character weeping for her boyfriend who had been dispatched to help keep peace in the Middle East. The girl on the show was wondering why the Arabs and the Jews couldn’t learn to live in harmony.

  Boomer, like most Americans, had wondered about that himself once or twice. Today he was wondering about something else. “Must have something to do with light. The alcohol refracts the sunlight somehow, causing a reaction in the brain. Bang! Right behind the eyes.”

  Still the big man was reticent. Boomer leaned toward him.

  “Of course, the effect might be different up here in the Rockies for all I know. Altitude. I understand that peacocks can’t squawk above five thousand feet. Altitude makes ’em mute as doorknobs. I’m assuming that doorknobs are mute. They’re widely acknowledged to be deaf. Regular little Helen Kellers.” Boomer flashed an understanding grin. “Say, maybe that’s your problem.” Placing his mouth close to the fellow’s ear, he screamed, “Annie Sullivan calling!", confident that the man would recognize the name of the therapist who taught Ms. Keller to speak.

  With one slow but unavoidable paw, the man flung Boomer from the bar stool. As he struggled to right himself, brushing spilled beer from the palm fronds on his aloha shirt, Boomer exclaimed, “If God didn’t prefer for us to drink at night, he wouldn’t have made neon! Am I right or wrong? And that is not a rhetorical question.”

  They exchanged grazing blows, grappled, clinched, and fell to the floor, Boomer on the bottom. Boomer had just linked his fingers around the man’s arboreal throat—which had yet to produce a peep—and was commencing to squeeze when Ellen Cherry marched in, swatted them both with her loaded laundry bag, and pulled them apart. The third man slipped off his stool as if inclined to interfere, but a newly washed pink lace brassiere tumbled, A cup over A cup, from the laundry bag and landed at his shoes. He backed away from it like a vampire from a garlic bulb.

  Ellen Cherry retrieved her undergarment, assisted the combatants to their feet, and pushed Boomer toward the exit. “Gentlemen, I apologize,” she said. “My husband is a complete idiot.” They nodded. “But you’ve got to admit, he’s a hill of fun.”

  As the couple was backing out the door, the big man at last broke his silence. In a hoarse whisper, he croaked, “I kicked your ass.”

  Boomer whirled, shaking an angry fist at his opponent. “You never kicked nothin’, Dumbo! You use steroids! You’ve been disqualified!”

  With a yank that could have ripped the beak off a toucan, Ellen Cherry snatched him into the street. A full foot of snow remained in the village gutters. When they saw the blaze in Ellen Cherry’s face, each little compressed crystal in the drift whimpered with anxiety. “Where, oh where, will we be come August?” they cried in unison.

  Ellen Cherry had a question of her own. “Goddamn it, Boomer!” she swore. “Are you going to be pulling these stunts in New York City?”

  Inside the tavern, normalcy returned. On television, a jilted lover was sobbing; on the jukebox, a jilted lover was crooning; on a beer glass, a flyspeck was disintegrating; on the ceiling, a Marlboro cumulus was gathering; on wire racks, beef jerky was moldering, and on bar stools, the two patrons were frescoing their tonsils with the Bavarian brush. They drank as one.

  “You know,” said the smaller man, rimming his Coors can with an index finger, “that asshole was right.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “Brew treats you different in the day than it does at night.”

  “Maybe some people.”

  “Makes you sleepy. Makes you see stuff.”

  Habitually, the big man’s laugh so resembled choking that he couldn’t watch “Hee Haw” in public without some stranger trying the Heimlich maneuver on him. When his derisive chortle had finally humped its way through the mucilaginous layers that webbed his throat, he added, “See stuff,” as if repeating his friend’s remark was enough to refute it.

  “My sister called me this morning. Now, I’ve knowed her to put down near as many brewskies as me and you. And you’d need a damn Breathalyzer machine to know she hadn’t been sipping Bosco. I’m talking night drinking. Well, this morning, about noon, she called from way over near Pocatello, where they been living. She’d had a couple already. And she seen stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “You know. Things.”

  “There’s things all around us, Mike. Every damn place you look, there’s things. Things on that fool’s shirt whose ass I kicked. Whud your sis see—things from outer space?”

  “They was regular things, ordinary little usual things. You’re missing the damn point. It was morning, and she’d had, the most, four beers, and she was driving along and thought she saw this stuff walking the side of the road. That’s all.”

  The big man shook his big head slowly from side to side. He was quiet for so long one might have imagined that Anne Sullivan, indeed, would have been required to restore his powers of speech. Eventually, he gave his whiskers a sort of snappy tug and asked, “What kind of stuff walking the side of the road?”

  “Let’s jest forget it.” Mike summoned the bartender from her jihad on flyspecks, ordered another round of Coors, and offered the opinion that Uncle Sam ought to just wade in and take the oil fields away from the Arabs and be done with it. “Not that I favor the Jews over th
e Arabs, they’re both lower than the tits on a sow, far as I’m concerned. But we ought to stop the terrorism and take the damn oil.”

  Mike really didn’t want to discuss foreign policy, but how could he sit there and tell anybody that his sister had seen a seashell that morning walking alongside a country road? And a fork or a spoon. And a red stick and a sock. A sock, for Christ’s sake! And what looked like a can of beans.

  THERE ARE LANDSCAPES in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour (the wispiest little pasta of cloud can spoil the effect), our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection to space becomes as solid as bone.

  Near that raised stitchery on the map where the quilt scraps of Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming are sewn together, Can o’ Beans rested in the twilight, taking in, and being taken in by, an overflowing vault that was not so much sky as space.

  It was the end of their first day’s journey but also the beginning of their first night’s journey. Following the events of the morning—the tipsy woman who almost wrecked her pickup truck when she spotted them along the highway, the hunters who fired at them (thinking them rabbits or what?) not long after they moved away from the road and into the countryside—Painted Stick and Conch Shell had decided to take Can o’ Beans’s original advice, which had been to travel by night. Painted Stick was naive even to consider that their band of objects might, with impunity, move across America in broad daylight. Welcome to the modern world, Painted Stick.

  Having spent the afternoon hiding in a tiny arroyo, they would soon be under way again, and now Can o’ Beans stood on the gully’s lip, looking past a darkening sky into the dominions of stillness and grace. With a serene, if tinny, shiver, he/she centered him/herself at that spatial crossroads where Intimacy and Elsewhere intersect, and reviewed from a philosophical vantage, the strange situation in which he/she found him/herself.

  CONCH SHELL HAD BEEN first out of the niche. She had dropped in such a manner that she landed on the hard tip of her spire, thereby avoiding any cracking or chipping of her body or lips. For a second, she had stuck there in the cave floor’s soil, balanced upright on her spire. Then, slowly, she had fallen over to rest on the low ridges of her body whorls. She had lain like an odalisque, lounging upon her whorled side, affording an unobstructed and, perhaps, immodest view of her tannish outer lip, her creamy inner lip, and the heavenly pinks of her opening, her aperture.

  To Can o’ Beans and Dirty Sock, who had been expecting something scaly and wired, the pink glow of Conch Shell was heavenly indeed. Can o’ Beans thought she might have been the most lovely thing he/she had ever seen. He/she issued a sigh that spun every single bean in his/her sauce. Dirty Sock whistled in the style of a construction worker and called, “Hey now, hey now, foxy lady!” or something like that.

  As for Spoon, she registered such a pang of jealousy that it very nearly turned her as green as if she had spent a night in mayonnaise.

  The conch shell is the voice of Buddha, the birth-bed of Aphrodite, the horn that drives away all demons and draws lost mariners home from the sea. Colored by the moon, shaped by the primal geometry, it is the original dreamboat, the sacred submarine that carries fertility to its rendezvous with poetry.

  Shaped by the primal geometry? No, the conch shell is primal geometry. Its perfect logarithmic spiral coils from left to right around an axis of fundamental truth. A house exuded by the dreams of its inhabitant, it is the finest example of the architecture of imagination, the logic of desire.

  A calcified womb, a self-propelled nest, the conch shell outlasts its tenant, its builder, to go on alone, reminding the world’s forgetful of their watery sexuality.

  Mermaid’s tongue. Milkmaid’s ulcer. Courtesan’s powder box. Ballerina’s musk. With its marvelous pinkness, the glow from Conch Shell’s long, smooth, folded aperture saturated the cave. It was a bonbon pink, a tropical pink; above all, a feminine pink. The tint it cast was that of a vagina blowing bubble gum.

  As the three forgotten articles were admiring Conch Shell, and puzzling how she came to be in that dry place, Painted Stick flew out of the nook and gave them each a fright. Conch Shell had dropped as elegantly as a parachutist. Painted Stick, on the other hand, leapt with reckless abandon—so reckless, in fact, that he landed on top of her.

  No harm was done her, for he hit her backside, which was as rough as her front was slick. Hardly a puny periwinkle, Conch Shell weighed a full five pounds and measured eleven and a half inches from apex to lip curl. Her spire was spiked in the manner of a mace, and the whorls that ribbed her bulk were thick and tough. It was almost as if she were naked in front, around the pinks and creams of her aperture, yet protected elsewhere by a tan suit of armor that would have made a knight rattle with envy.

  Speaking of iron tuxedos, one of the religious billboards passed by the giant turkey had commanded its readers to “Put On the Whole Armor of God.” Boomer and Ellen Cherry failed to guess that it was a motto borrowed from the Crusaders, although Ellen Cherry eventually was to learn that it was the Crusaders, those barbarous European knights, who, in the sweet name of Jesus, had done as much as anyone or anything to lock the Middle East in the lapidary machine of hellfire in which for all these centuries it has been painfully tumbling.

  Painted Stick bounced off Conch Shell’s armor plate, then rolled to within several feet of our abandoned trio. “Greetings,” he said, at no loss for breath or words (although, obviously, objects do not, in the animate sense, breathe or speak). “Greetings. I assume from the likes of you that you were not responsible for the great fucking that summoned us from our rest.”

  Spoon blushed and Dirty Sock chuckled. “There were humans here,” said Can o’ Beans. “They’ve run away.”

  “How unfortunate,” said Painted Stick.

  “Why’s that?” asked Dirty Sock, who was rather pleased to be free of Boomer’s twisted foot.

  “They would have taken us to where we must be going,” Painted Stick replied.

  “Don’t bet on it,” said Dirty Sock.

  It turned out that Painted Stick had assumed that Boomer and Ellen Cherry were a priest and priestess of Astarte, from the way they had addressed Jezebel while making love. Painted Stick had had no intentions of walking across America. He thought that he and Conch Shell would be carried to their destination in the arms of the Goddess’s adorers, as had been their experience in former times.

  When, on the following morning, against Can o’ Beans’s warnings, Painted Stick had led the group toward the roadway, the can had confided to the seashell, “I’m afraid Mr. Stick is naive.”

  “Not naive,” Conch Shell had corrected him. “He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.”

  IN HER HYSTERIA, Mike’s beery sister had described the stick as “red.” Actually, its original coating was a strong, rusty umber, but the passing centuries had sapped the mineral pigment of its oxidic potency, leaving it a flat, dull rose, like a dance hall memory, and so thin that the original wood showed through it like the night sky through a canopy of fishnet. In addition, there were five blue bands—four narrow, one broad—around the stick’s middle, although these, too, were badly faded. Painted Stick’s top end was notched, as if someone had tried to carve little horns there, little bull’s horns. These crescent-shaped nubs once had been gilded, and flecks of gold leaf still clung to them, like spinach to teeth. His length was under a yard, but he was long enough to have been a cane for a blind jockey or a baton for a conductor with an overbearing personality. In circumference, he equaled a mature carrot, although he was not tapered in any direction.

  As the World Tree stands, so stands its child, the sanctified stick. Shamans climb it. Maidens dance around it. Men use it for pointing. It points
to thunder, to comets, to the migrating herds. Sometimes it points to you.

  Once there was a man who carried a stick that he swirled in a stream until a hair clung to it. The direction in which the hair pointed led to satisfaction. But who deserved credit, the hair or the stick?

  Stick is the magic penis. When waved, it sows sons and daughters. Stick is also lethal. It cracks a skull nicely.

  Guns have been called “magic sticks,” but guns are only half magical: they take life but can’t create it.

  If a stick is twirled under proper conditions, it makes fire. If rubbed against another stick, it makes fire. Once a stick is painted, however, it is assigned to other duties.

  Sigmund Freud observed children rolling hoops with sticks. Freud made notes in his journal.

  T. S. Eliot wrote:

  In a deck of cards, there are four suits: diamonds, spades, hearts, and sticks. The card stick was both the rod of the peasant and the wand of the magi. Whip the donkey. Stir the moon.

  Like a sword, or a phallus, it feels quite good to hold a stick in your hands. If held correctly, with maximum consciousness (and that is difficult to do), the stick may suddenly flower.

  There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.

  LATER, WHEN DIRTY SOCK ASKED Painted Stick what he did, meaning exactly what people mean when they ask at a cocktail party, “What do you do?", Painted Stick answered that he was a navigational instrument.

  Although his description of his function was an understatement, a simplification, it wasn’t precisely a lie. Dirty Sock accepted it at face value, and, up to a point, Can o’ Beans did, too. After all, despite his errors of judgment in some areas, it couldn’t be denied that Painted Stick marched them unwaveringly eastward.