Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  The sun peeked through the cottonwoods not long after that, and the roast turkey, stuffed with silence, glimpsed its own reflection swimming in the Missouri River.

  "THE PRIESTS SENT FOR THE HIGH PRIESTESS. ’There’s something wrong with your stick,’ they told her. ’It won’t report on that red glow in the sky.’ The high priestess ran a test. ’Nothing’s the matter with the stick,’ she said. ’That glow happens to be man-made.’

  “Come midnight, every priest, priestess, rabbi, sage, and counsel in temple service were up on the roof gazing to the north and the east. By then, there were three red glows in the sky.

  “The despised old prophet, Jeremiah, was trying to get up onto the roof, as well, but every time his smelly gray beard appeared at the top of the steps, someone swung a fist at him and chased him down again. ’It’s the Babylonians!’ Jeremiah kept yelling. ’Yahweh has sent the Babylonians as punishment to you who have desecrated his laws.’

  “Jeremiah was at least half right, and everybody knew it. At last, they sent a messenger to awaken the king. Just before dawn, the king ascended to the rooftop. He stood there in a robe of Phoenician purple and watched his outlying fortresses burn. ’Surrender! Surrender!’ old Jeremiah was screaming. ’Surrender and accept Yahweh’s judgment, else Jerusalem be destroyed.’ The king ordered somebody to brain Jeremiah with Mr. Stick, but the high priestess, not willing to risk breaking the instrument, threw her sandal at the prophet, instead.

  “For most practical purposes, the Babylonians had been running Judea (that’s southern Israel, remember) for a decade. Much in the way, I suppose, that the Soviet Union ran Poland or Czechoslovakia. Babylon was riding tall under its powerful leader, Nebuchadnezzar. My, oh my, they don’t make names like that anymore. Ronald, George, Gary, Jimmy, just plain Bill: these modern mediocre monikers aren’t fit to shine the shoes of Nebuchadnezzar. John is a label. Nebuchadnezzar is a poem. A monument. A swarm of killer bees let loose in the halls of the alphabet. Anyway, back to the point Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonians had already invaded Jerusalem eleven years earlier, but after looting the Temple, filling their gunny-sacks with some of those ten thousand candlesticks, two hundred thousand trumpets, and forty thousand harps, they withdrew. They informed the city that it could maintain autonomy as long as it behaved. Ha. Fat chance. Proud little Jerusalem grew increasingly defiant, and, now, the dreaded Babylonian war machine was lighting up the suburban sky with some very nonentertaining fireworks.

  “Jerusalem was destined to lie under siege for many months, during which time Mr. Stick failed to register a single auspicious omen in the clouds. As hunger, thirst, and disease overtook even the priests and priestesses, our stick finally was forgotten, abandoned on the Temple rooftop where they’d dropped him after one last futile sweep of the sky.”

  A SAN ANTONIO TAXI DRIVER with a degree in ichthyology was spinning green on “Wheel of Fortune,” racking up big bucks in every category, but Buddy Winkler was barely watching. Buddy was reading a book, of all things, a book checked out with no little embarrassment from the Colonial Pines Public Library.

  A bible usually lay open in front of him, on the SpaghettiO—spattered Formica or on the upholstered arm of his favorite easy chair (worn so thin that puffs of stuffing periodically launched themselves from it like seeds escaping a milkweed pod). But Buddy didn’t actually read the Bible, not anymore, he consulted it the way that an actor consults a cue card. He needed merely to glimpse the words, “And he opened the bottomless pit and there arose a smoke . . .” to be off and running, blowing long-winded tenor riffs on his favorite subject, the End Days, the horrifying, blood-flooded terminus of history, the deluge of boiling guts that many claimed would wash away all sin and sinners and leave the universe squeaky clean forever.

  On that March evening, however, the Reverend Buddy Winkler was reading a book. There was, in fact, on the dinette, a stack of books so tall it could have allowed a cat easy entry into any mockingbird nest in the neighborhood. Only one of those books held Buddy in its spell.

  Buddy had sometimes suspected that God Almighty didn’t quite approve of him, had found his service wanting, and had kumquatted him with boils, wired him with toothaches, to demonstrate his displeasure. But now the Lord had spoken to him, had given unto him a mission. Buddy felt vindicated (even if at that very moment there was in the middle of his chin a furuncle the size and temperature of an oven-baked hors d’oeuvre); felt both humble and heroic, and was more than ready to put his martyrish shoulder to the wheel. Trouble was, the Jews wouldn’t cooperate. He had telephoned every rabbi in Richmond and Norfolk (the lone Jew living in Colonial Pines was an army officer stationed at nearby Fort Lee), to no avail. When he explained to them the essence of his mission, they had rudely intimated that he might be a crank. Buddy was as surprised as he was irritated. He thought the Jews wanted to rebuild the Temple. He thought they wanted the Messiah to come. Bloodied but unbowed, he went to the library to pick up some books on Judaism. That’s when his eyes fell upon this other book, the one absorbing his evening.

  Entitled Christian Wives: The Women Behind the Evangelists, it was written by James Schaffer and Colleen Todd. He didn’t know why he checked out the blamed thing, let alone why he was reading it. When he read that Tammy Faye Bakker, spouse of superpreacher Jim Bakker, kept her husband’s interest up by changing her wigs several times a day, his mouth fell open so wide that that bouchée on his chin gave him a stab of pain. And when he read that Mrs. Bakker kept her marriage exciting by never ever letting the Reverend Bakker see her without makeup, that she routinely wore false eyelashes and earrings to bed, well, he just let “Wheel of Fortune” roll on without him.

  “Jezebel business,” he kept saying to himself. “That there’s flatout Jezebel business.” Small wonder, he thought, that Jim Bakker and his associates had fallen from grace. When the most powerful preachers in the land take unto them painted hussies as their lawful wedded wives, then surely the Age of Wickedness is reaching its apogee. Where is the sanctuary that is safe from Satan, Satan in his most insidious form: the Whore of Babylon? Were he, Buddy Winkler, foremost evangelist of the Southern Baptist Voice of the Sparrow Network, were he to take unto him a wife. . . . He caught himself. What was he thinking?

  At that instant, there was a rapping at his door. “Damnation!” he swore. “It’s Verlin and Patsy.” If Patsy caught him reading that book . . . ! Frantically, Buddy shoved Christian Wives under the sofa. It was not until he was about to unlatch the screen that he realized that there was bulging in his trousers, the oldest story of man, a tome that would slide beneath no furniture, an opus that he could not hide.

  "NEBUCHADNEZZAR WAS A PATIENT MAN. That much he had in common with inanimate objects. Month after month, he strolled along the rampart with which his troops had encircled Jerusalem, his big Babylonian nose in the air. When the stench from inside the walls became intense enough that he could assume half of the inhabitants must be dead, he ordered his men to erect their breaching engines. They met scant resistance as they battered down the vulnerable northern wall.

  “Well, when the breach in the wall was accomplished and the boys from Babylon streamed through the narrow streets, our old hand-painted stick, who’d been watching from the Temple roof, prone upon a sheet of sun-warmed gold, did something that, except under the most rare and surreptitious conditions, no object had done since the evolutionary development of human beings on earth, had not done in more than a million years. He got up and ran.

  “The reason behind his radical act, I can only guess. Maybe he was just fed up with all that back and forth nonsense, maybe he didn’t see any reason why he had to go down with the ship. It could be there wasn’t any logical reason, or if there was, its origins were in the stars. It wasn’t a piece of cake, I know that. An enormous amount of effort was required to set forces in motion that had lain dormant for so long. Certain subatomic particles had to be coerced to change direction, to orbit paths previously untraveled. Yet, in barely t
hirty minutes of human subjective time, Mr. Stick was clattering down the steps toward the Temple’s main courtyard.

  “Bippity-bopping past the emaciated corpses of priests and priestesses with whom he’d once shared a mutual dependence, he crossed the vestibule and entered the great hall. As luck would have it, Miss Shell, all wrapped up real pretty in purple linen, rested upon a pedestal of white stone at the far end of the hall. Had she been inside the Holy of Holies, he would have been unable to pry open its heavy gold doors and get to her. Miss Shell isn’t going into any detail about this, but somehow Mr. Stick persuaded her to invoke her own powers of mobility and flee with him. He blew in her ear, for all I know.

  “Miss Shell put up some initial resistance. Many females do, I’m told. She pointed out that the Babylonians were devout worshippers of Ishtar—the goddess Astarte under another name—and that no sanctified relic of the Great Mother religion should have anything to fear from Babylon. Mr. Stick countered that soldiers are soldiers, from any culture, in any age. Soldiers like to hack and break and rape and burn, and when they are in their invasion frenzy, nothing, living or inanimate, is sacred to them. And anyway, it wasn’t fear that had caused him to bolt. It was . . . something else.

  “She joined him.

  “Heading southward, away from the advancing invaders and not really caring, in the exhilaration of flight, that a half-starved Jeremiah had witnessed them and begun jumping up and down, they made their way to the Mount of Olives, and from its summit, in the sketchy shadow of a stripped-bare orchard tree, they looked on as the Temple was first plundered, then battered, then torched. Call it King Solomon’s Temple, call it Hiram’s Temple, it must have been one magnificent structure, that First Temple; opulent beyond the wildest Beverly Hills daydream; and the very heart and lungs, hub and corolla, anchor and balloon of the fated nation of Israel. The Babylonians fairly quickly reduced it to cinders. Then they trampled the cinders. Not one stone from it has ever been found.”

  "SOME WOMEN HAVE bedroom eyes,” said Boomer Petway. “My wife has bedroom hair.”

  Boomer winked at Ellen Cherry. They were moored in a trailer park in North Dakota. A small crowd had gathered to gawk at the Airstream turkey. Some in the crowd had let their attention be diverted by the largely ceremonial gesture of Ellen Cherry running a comb through her curls. Ellen Cherry sat on the Airstream doorstep, sawing and raking with the comb. The comb was bent nearly double from the strain.

  “Before it was captured by the Commies,” Boomer said to a housewife with mousy bangs, “her hair was as straight as yours. KGB tortured it for days, but it wouldn’t tell.”

  “Wouldn’t tell what?” asked the woman.

  “What happened to your hair?” asked her twelve-year-old son.

  Boomer actually blushed. His bald spot flared like the head of a match. For a moment, it rivaled the setting sun, reflected now by the turkey’s silver fuselage.

  Ellen Cherry giggled. “He doesn’t like to talk about his war experiences,” she said. “But I assure you, his hair didn’t spill the beans, either.”

  Squeezing past her, Boomer went inside. “Getting chilly out here,” he said.

  “His head gets cold,” Ellen Cherry told the boy in a conspiratorial tone. They both laughed, then she followed her husband into the turkey. He was in the galley, rummaging through cupboards.

  “What you said about spilling beans gave my stomach ideas,” he said, rummaging.

  “If you’re looking for pork and beans, there’s actually some in there,” said she.

  “Where?”

  “They’re in there. There’s a can of beans that’s been sitting on my shelves for years. I swear, I’ve moved with those beans three different times. Guy in Seattle gave ’em to me when he graduated from the art school. Before that, they sat on his shelf for years. Those poor beans are so old they’ll probably give you crude oil instead of gas.”

  “They’re not here.”

  “Well, I don’t . . .”

  “I know what happened to ’em. We left ’em in that cave.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “Beans, too?”

  “Yep.”

  “Are you sure, Boomer?”

  “’Course, I’m sure. I have a photogenic memory.”

  CAN O’ BEANS WATCHED the last tangerine peel of dusk swirl down the drain behind the mountains. It was completely dark now. It was time.

  When he/she considered that Painted Stick and Conch Shell were the sole surviving oddments from the great Temple of Jerusalem, they seemed all the more precious and wondrous, and he/she felt all the more sorrowful to part company with them. For one thing, there were many questions left unanswered. For another, there was a unique and perhaps momentous adventure under way from which he/she was now excluded. Ah, well . . .

  There was plenty still to be thankful for. What was a can of beans but a pawn in the game of consumption? From field to factory, from market to household, from cook pot to lunch plate, the destiny of a can of beans was as sealed as it was simple. Ultimate destination: rust heap and sewage pond. Yet, he/she had managed to escape the norm, to taste a freedom unimagined by others of his/her “lowly” station. Moreover, were the lives of most humans really any better? When humans were young, they were pushed around in strollers. When they were old, they were pushed around in wheelchairs. In between, they were just pushed around.

  The thick veil that shields a being from the transformative and tricky light of liberty, from the dizzy incandescence of self-determination, that veil had been briefly parted for Can o’ Beans. Obviously, freedom’s glare is too bright for many. They panic when any sudden gust lifts the hem of the brocade. Eyes blinking frantically, they’ll cling with their last broken nail to the protective folds of social control. A few, among them Can o’ Beans, bask in the glow. It warms them in hidden and unexpected places that might have been forever dark and cold.

  Of course, like the cliché moth courting the trite candle, the lit-up libertarian runs a constant risk. Is it not finer, however, to sizzle whole in the flame of freedom than to slowly stew to pieces in one’s own diminishing juices, constrained and constricted before the veil? Can o’ Beans thought so. Out of the sauce pan and into the fire! That was this can’s credo. Were it not for the burden that he/she would surely be to the others, he/she would tackle the road to the Middle East regardless of his/her handicap! Alas . . .

  They made a sled for Can o’ Beans out of aspen bark and loops of grass. Painted Stick pulled it. When a rock, log, or steep incline blocked its path, Conch Shell pushed from behind. Lying back, its wound open to the moon, the bean can let itself be dragged, bumpy mile after bumpy mile, until, toward dawn, the band of objects arrived at a weedy churchyard on the outskirts of a small Wyoming town.

  “Fare you well, Can o’ Beans. Thank you for your sage counsel regarding this bizarre land of yours.”

  Painted Stick, so charismatic, so primal, so difficult to know. Good-bye.

  “The Goddess shall monitor your fortunes, dearest noble vessel.”

  Conch Shell, lovely siren, still nurturing, charming, offering hope. Good-bye.

  “See ya in the funny papers, perfesser.”

  Not if I see you first, vulgar fellow, but persist in your candor and enthusiasm. Good-bye.

  “Boo-hoo-hoo.”

  Spoon. Brush those sentimental globules from your elegant ladle. Goodbye, Miss Spoon.

  Since it was Painted Stick’s intention to lead his party beyond the village before daybreak, the good-byes were not drawn out. From the weeds beside the little whitewashed church where they deposited Can o’ Beans, he/she watched his/her erstwhile companions bounce, toddle, and scurry along until they disappeared, one by one—Spoon last, looking back through her tears—into a ditch. The ditch was running with snowmelt, littered with filthy newspaper, shreds of tire rubber, and beer cans as empty as the bean can surely would be soon, but the small pilgrims let themselves be swallowed up by it as though i
t were a glory road. Oh, strange are the routes to Jerusalem!

  "WE’RE HERE ABOUT THE MIRACLE, Bud,” said Verlin.

  “Why, bless your souls. Come right in.” Buddy Winkler was so flattered that he forgot, as quickly as he had noticed it, his Christian Wives hard-on.

  “Yes sirree,” Patsy chimed in, eyeballing his protruding fly but resisting commentary on it, “I reckon you heard about the miracle?”

  Buddy’s eyes narrowed with disappointment and suspicion. “Now what is it that y’all are talkin’ about? What kind of miracle? Where?”

  “A religious visitation,” Verlin explained. “Out there on the Chesterfield road somewheres.”

  Strongly conflicting emotions seized Buddy Winkler. On the one hand, the possibility of a religious miracle right there in the county excited and encouraged him. On the other, he had to worry whether this alleged visitation might not steal the thunder from his own recent vision—and the mission it had generated. He was hoping that Verlin and Patsy, his congregation and, if the Voice of the Sparrow Network approved, his radio audience, would soon be moved to support that mission with their personal checks.

  Now, here Verlin and Patsy were telling him that some woman had folks in a tizzy because for the fourth night in a row, her neighbor’s porch light was casting the shadow of a bearded man on her standup freezer.

  “It’s on the local news,” Verlin said. “Ever’ preacher in the area’s been out there. We thought sure they woulda called you.”