Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  “Phone’s broke,” said Buddy. “I think one of them rabbis put a whammy on it.”

  “That’s a crying shame,” said Patsy. “We thought you’d of been on this miracle like a hobo on a ham sandwich.”

  It was nearly ten at night by the time they found the woman’s house, but more than sixty people were milling about her carport, which was where the freezer stood.

  “It’s him,” proclaimed somebody in a loud whisper. “It’s Jesus!” Buddy, however, was of the opinion that the shadow looked more like Willie Nelson.

  “Or else Castro,” Verlin suggested. As for Patsy, she said, none too softly, “When the Good Lord shows up, we may rest assured it is not gonna be on a major appliance.”

  SHORTLY BEFORE ELEVEN O’CLOCK that morning, cars, dozens of cars, began pulling into the churchyard. Can o’ Beans was elated. What splendid timing that there would be a wedding on his/her very first day at the church! If his/her luck continued, he/she might be clattering behind a honeymoon car by noon.

  With effort, the bean can stood upright. The dent in its side threw it off balance, making walking difficult, but it wobbled toward a more conspicuous spot near the front steps, where it might attract the attention of someone requiring its services in the nuptial parade. I wonder if they’ll have a can opener on them? thought the container. Never had it imagined that it might form the words “can opener” with such positive anticipation. Fatalistic calm, yes, but hardly glee. Yet, here it was, practically longing for the singing blade. Now that its fortunes had come to this, now that the greatest opportunity in the history of canned vegetables had been lost, it was anxious to play out its hand, to embrace the fate to which, prior to gaining mobility, it had been equanimously resigned. Can o’ Beans turned a complete circle, hoping to get a look at the bride. A thin orange rivulet of sauce, like a thread from a volcano’s bloomers, unfurled from the vent in his/her side, alerting the antennae of nearby ants.

  It was then that the hearse drove up. Followed by the military Jeep carrying the color guard.

  Can o’ Beans staggered back into the tall weeds and lay down again. Forty yards away, mourners would be laying down for all eternity, or at least for a sufficiently long time, a local boy who’d let his young body be punctured and splayed by the insatiable can opener of the Middle East.

  "WE COULD CROSS OVER into Canada,” Ellen Cherry proposed, “and come down into New York by way of Montreal.”

  “Nah,” said Boomer. “Them people up there call their cheese fromage.” He made a poison-bottle face.

  “I see your point,” she said, humoring him. “Fromage, indeed. That’s enough to keep me away from the snack table.”

  “Sooner or later,” said Boomer, “I’d like to ease this baby into Chicago.”

  Ellen Cherry glanced out the galley window. It was quite dark now, but several people were still studying the roast turkey. The people wielded flashlights and behaved as if they were inspectors from the Center for Poultry Abuse.

  “Why Chicago?” she asked. She knew that it wasn’t the Chicago Art Institute that was beckoning him. Ellen Cherry knew that her husband wasn’t licking his muscular chops over the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.

  “Well, I’d kinda like to see where they held the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre.”

  Just look in on any married woman on February fourteenth, she thought. But she said, “What else?”

  “The hospital where Dutch Schultz died.”

  “Oh, right, Dutch Schultz. Wasn’t he the boy who saved the community by sticking his finger in the dike?”

  Boomer looked at her as if she had referred to their dinner as macaroni-and-fromage.

  “Sorry, hon. Guess I was thinking of a different story. You’re obviously talking about ’Dutch Schultz and the Silver Skates.’”

  Boomer took a long, long swallow of beer. She must be getting her dot, he thought. Ellen Cherry called her period her “dot.” She gets like this right before her dot.

  For all practical purposes, we’re going to leave them now, Boomer Petway and Ellen Cherry Charles, we’re going to leave them in a North Dakota trailer park, ringed by overstuffed midwesterners with flashlights; leave them finishing supper at the Airstream dinette, Boomer thinking that if her “dot” was coming on he’d better hurry and sweet-talk her into the sack, since she was protective of the sheets once the monthly pot began to percolate (talk about your Valentine’s massacre); Ellen Cherry thinking, wondering, if now that she was married and moving to New York, was she going to suffer more, or less, for her art—and if she suffered less, would she paint less, or more; and if she suffered more, would she paint more, or less; and if she painted less, would she paint better, or worse; and if she painted more, would she paint worse, or better, and did it matter so long as she wasn’t waiting tables?

  We’re going to leave our newlyweds sitting there, thinking their private and, perhaps, all too disparate thoughts, and, except for a brief overview, when we catch up with them again more than a year will have passed, and their lives will have taken unexpected turns.

  These pages were never meant to be a chronology of their travels across America, but rather a revelation of their indirect but indisputable link to Jerusalem, old and New, a city far from our shores, far from our life-styles, yet, it could be argued, a city in which each of us psychically dwells: Jerusalem, sacred and terrible, bloody and radiant, the most important town in America.

  Suffice to say, their trip afforded them both pleasure and edification. With Boomer at the wheel, they continued to zigzag, to meander, at a pace that allowed them leisure for sexual intercourse with each other (time out for her “dot") and social intercourse with their countrymen. They did, by the way, visit Chicago, where Ellen Cherry executed a tiny painting of the street corner where the gangster John Dillinger was gunned down (Dutch Schultz, it turned out, died in New Jersey) and presented it to Boomer as a wedding gift. He shed a couple of muscular tears. Then he took her dancing.

  At journey’s completion, in Manhattan, they had telephoned her parents and reported that all across the continent, folks seemed to be talking about just three things: AIDS, the Middle East, and the Final Four. AIDS was a fatal, as yet incurable, disease. The Middle East, although capricious in its daily ups and downs, seemed to be firmly connected somehow in people’s minds with “the end of the world.” The Final Four was the culminating event of the postseason collegiate basketball tournaments (then under way), and by its very name—it logically might have been dubbed the Top Four or even the First Four—conveyed, not unlike AIDS and the Middle East, a sense of finality, entropy, apocalypse, something forcibly drawing to a close. Thus, the newlyweds concluded, America had termination on the brain like a tumor. Endings, happy or otherwise; exits, dramatically correct or not; climaxes, not to be confused with orgasms, dominated their thoughts. Their minds were on end, so to speak.

  “Bud’ll be pleased as punch,” said Patsy.

  Verlin got on the line. “How’d that, what do they call it, DuraTorque suspension system, hold up?”

  “Like ridin’ on mashed potatoes,” testified Boomer.

  “Figures,” said Verlin.

  Speaking of the roast turkey, wherever they stopped it, coast to coast, onlookers had invariably inquired, “What’re you selling?” “Who do you represent?” “What company are you doing this for? Armour’s?” “Are we on TV?” It was a sad commentary, but people simply could not accept that the giant entrée was not an advertising gimmick, a promotional stunt.

  “They don’t get it,” complained Boomer. “Can’t they comprehend that not ever’thing’s done for a paycheck? That sometimes you just make a thing ’cause you wanna see how it’ll turn out, ’cause you have a feeling in your gut that it oughta be made?”

  Ellen Cherry regarded him then with something barely short of admiration. She regarded him in the cardboard ray of newfound optimism. This bozo might be capable of understanding art, after all, thought she.

  FOWARD M
arch! Single file, in step, hup two three four (five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve—each had three pairs of legs), rotating their twitchy feelers like parallel filaments in Salvador Dali light bulbs, a formation of licorice-backed ants (a throbbing artery of blues notes, a line of aardvark cocaine) advanced on leaky Can o’ Beans the way that hundreds of columns of warriors, over the years, have advanced on Jerusalem.

  Fastened to its rocky hillsides with hooks both physical and abstract, Jerusalem could only stand and fight. Can o’ Beans, however, by wobbling a yard in one direction, toddling a yard in another, could manage to evade the regimental ants. That’s the weakness of bureaucrats, he/she thought, with a grin. They just can’t hit a moving target.

  The ants were dressed in black, like the people inside the church, an irony not wasted on Can o’ Beans. In truth, it made him/her a little uneasy, but he/she joked about it. “You don’t think ants are stuffy?” he/she asked a nearby brick. “Why, not even William F. Buckley would wear a tuxedo to a picnic.” Possessing no more of a sense of humor than the ants, the brick looked blank, and Can o’ Beans doddered off a yard to the left. Those evasive tactics interfered but marginally with the fascinated attention he/she paid to the funeral service.

  Like a deceased Italian mama damned to make pasta for the demons in hell, the minister’s wife pulled strands of death spaghetti from a wheezy old organ. Resisting the temptation to toss in a few brimstone meatballs, the minister wove a tinsel garland from the various bromides of sympathy and laid it upon the bowed heads of the mourners. He used words such as “heroism,” “sacrifice,” and “eternal reward,” while the heads bobbed with sobbing, like corks in a popular fishing hole. Later, they carried the broken skeleton (yearning in its bones for rock ’n’ roll) out back to the cemetery, dipped an American flag over it, fired shots in the air (as if it were the clouds’ fault the boy had died), and, while a lonely bugle wounded the spring morning with sounds more mournful than a midnight freight, they slipped it below the vegetable layer into the mineral earth, to be compressed into gas for the jets of a future that Wyoming had not imagined yet.

  Taking all this in, while dodging the ant advance, Can o’ Beans wondered if human animals didn’t set themselves up to suffer excruciating grief, most of which could have been avoided with a slight expenditure of imaginative thought. Without quite realizing it (being ignorant of the ramifications of Salome’s dance), the bean can had identified the veil of political illusion—and the reluctance of humankind to part it—as the reason behind the morning’s sad occasion.

  Lost now to family, buddies, girlfriend, rabbit hound, society, and himself, this poor young sailor had fallen—not very many miles from Jerusalem—understanding virtually nothing of the situation in the Middle East. He probably believed it involved a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, freedom and oppression. That was his second mistake. His third mistake was in trusting that even if he didn’t understand the situation, his leaders did. His first—and worst—mistake was blindly doing what he was told to do. Without questioning their methods or their motives, he allowed politicians to make the decisions that led to his early demise.

  What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other people’s decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity.

  Inanimate objects, destined to spend their existence in outwardly passive and obedient behavior, understood perhaps more sharply than humans that true freedom was an internal condition not subject to the vagaries of politics. Freedom could not be owned. Therefore, it could not be appropriated. Or controlled. It could, however, be relinquished. The Wyoming sailor had surrendered his soul long before he sacrificed his body. And that inner death—in the eyes of Can o’ Beans, at any rate—was more lamentable than the physical death that followed.

  In the not too distant future, in some abrupt movement of the dance, the third veil, the veil that permitted political expediencies (usually transitory, often stupid, regularly corrupt) to masquerade as timeless universal expressions of freedom, virtue, and good sense, could conceivably fall away. Young persons, from then on, might be more particular about the “freedoms” they would be willing to defend, thus preserving their souls and—if quick enough of wit and foot—their bodies, as well.

  Meanwhile, individuals had to yank at the disguise as best they could; to pull, poke, and peek, and finally, when they had sufficiently penetrated it, to take command of their lot. Assuming responsibility for one’s lot was no nap on the beach. Ask Can o’ Beans. Tantalized by the leaking sauce, by the sugar and corn syrup in that sauce (perhaps in the same way that industrial nations were tantalized by Middle Eastern oil) the ants were relentless in their pursuit. They were starting to wear the bean can down.

  But just as the individual usually can outwit the herd, the bashed-in bean can, in a desperate ploy, suddenly gathered its remaining strength and leapt wildly, clumsily into the middle of a puddle that had formed when the cemetery caretaker, cleaning up after the service, had overwatered the graveside flowers. The lower half of its label was soaked and beginning to become unglued, but what the heck, there were compensations. Frustrated ants lined the shore, cursing the Creator who, in crafting them as the most efficient creatures on earth, had somehow neglected to teach them how to swim.

  The Fourth Veil

  THIS IS THE ROOM of the wolfmother wallpaper, the room where the black virgin fell down the chimney and burned a hole in the linoleum. Countless are the antelope hooves that have pounded this floor. No wonder the linoleum is worn.

  This is the room where the black virgin was kidnapped, later to be caged in the grand mosque at Mecca. After all these years, they are still interrogating her about the location of true north. “Why won’t the polestar stand still?” is what they want to know. That and . . . One Other Thing.

  In this room, the salamander was squashed between the pages of the rhyming dictionary, thereby changing poetry forever. Here, Salome walked around with a big red fish held high up over her head. Old Father spanked her with a ballet slipper, sending her to bed without milk or honey. Dance was changed in this room, too.

  So this, then, is the chamber of the hootchy-kootch. Its bathtub full of orchids. Its closet full of smoke.

  And on the wolfmother wallpaper, little beads of dew.

  MAYBE ELLEN CHERRY CHARLES didn’t look like a million dollars, but nobody could deny that she looked like the tax on a million dollars. Raoul, the doorman, was impressed.

  For months, Raoul had observed her moping about the Upper West Side in sneakers, paint-spattered sweatshirts, and denim skirts, unrouged lips so pendulous in their pout she could have picked pennies off the street without bending over. Yet, here she was on a drizzly autumn afternoon pulling a new red vinyl slicker over a tight-fitting red wool dress, elevated by the sort of heels that Raoul called “follow-me-home-and-fuck-me shoes,” her usual frown sweet-talked into an approximation of pleasantness by the hedonistic pigments in her lip gloss and eyeshadow. All that vivid makeup under all those unruly curls would have activated every Jezebel detector in Colonial Pines. Raoul didn’t mind one bit, however, although something in his subconscious did provoke him to run a slow thumb over the crucifix he wore. Ellen Cherry, noticing the gesture, actually smiled, mainly because of the salsa buildup observable beneath the thumbnail.

  “Mmmm, man, you looking so fine, man,” said Raoul. “Get you a taxi?”

  “No, thanks, Raoul. My boss is sending a car for me.”

  “Yeah? Didn’t know you worked. Where you working, Miz Charl?”

  When Raoul opened the door for her, the first thing she noticed was a teal Volvo station wagon hissing by in the wet. Instantly, she was reminded of a similarly colored Volvo, that one a sedan, that the roast turkey had passed eighteen months previously. The driver of that c
ar had annoyed Boomer somehow, and in order to distract him, prevent him from launching into a tirade, she had said, “Volvos are supposed to be the safest cars on the road. Why is that, hon?”

  “Damned if I know,” Boomer had said, fuming. “There’s probably something in the seat covers that draws the toxins outta your body.”

  Ellen Cherry became lost in memory, and to her face returned a sadness that no eyeshadow could console.

  Raoul stood watching her. His baggy raincoat was so dirty a cash crop could have been grown in its folds, but atop his head sat a crisp, expensive, absolutely spotless porkpie hat. Raoul wore the hat every day. “I say, where you going to work, Miz Charl, looking so fine?”

  “Huh?” Ellen Cherry snapped back into present time, the time of laying aside grief and art, the time of a new beginning, a fresh opportunity in the food service field. “Oh.” She looked at Raoul brightly for a moment. “Jerusalem,” she said.

  A limousine as sleek and potent as a vitamin capsule stopped in front of the building. Raoul and the driver took turns helping Ellen Cherry into the backseat. A lot of help for a girl that small.

  “Jerusalem, shit man, Jerusalem,” muttered Raoul as the car pulled away. Raoul wondered if the blanquita Jezebel was not woofing him in some way. In Raoul’s mind, the name Jerusalem evoked a place vague and sacrosanct, a city on this earth but not of this earth, a place watched over by angels, but where bad things happened, man. Even the Pope didn’t go there. Jerusalem was the most holy and spooky place in the world, man. Raoul closed his big brown eyes to picture Jerusalem. He saw rocks and robes and gold domes and donkeys. He didn’t see any angels, but he knew they were hanging around. Jerusalem was where it all went down, man. It was connected to heaven like Spanish Harlem was connected to Puerto Rico.