Skinny Legs and All (5 page)

As Ellen Cherry walked the rain-rippled pavement of Seattle, bumbershooting from restaurant to restaurant in search of a job, she bore upon her back the weight of a skull, a pair of feet, and the palms of two hands. The nails of the feet were lacquered vermilion, a pretty ribbon fluttered from a lacuna in the skull. And she would wonder as she walked, “What is the Bible trying to tell us?”

That Satan is a hairdresser?

That Elizabeth Arden ought to be fed to the poodles?

“Spooky around here, don’t you think, Boomer?”

“Well, it’s kinda like the moon.”

“We should have taken the direct route.”

“What’s the hurry? This is our honeymoon. Honeymoon on the moon.”

“Are you nervous about New York?”

“Why, hell no. No reason for
me
to be nervous. New York’s just a big pile of iron and steel. Perfect for a welder.” He focused on the countryside. They were either in Wyoming or Utah now, he wasn’t sure which, and the rock formations looked like furniture in the lobby of the Eternity Hotel. “Out here,” he said, “a welding torch could atrophy. Just wither away and die from lack of use.” He stared at his bride. There was no danger in staring. The road was as straight as a shot of grain alcohol, and the jackrabbits, well, each individual rabbit had the right to make his or her own choice when it came to crossing the path of an onrushing Airstream turkey. “There’s a part of me gonna atrophy and drop off, too, if you and me don’t make a rest stop pretty soon.”

“Oh, Boomer! You just had some this morning.”

“That was this morning.” He squeezed her thigh.

“Oh, Boomer!”

He turned back to the highway but continued to grip her leg as though it were a misshapen shot put that he might at any second hurl into the record books of western Wyoming. Or was it Utah? “Maybe New York is making
you
a little nervous, huh, babe?”

She shook her tumbleweed, her butterscotch maelstrom, but she answered, “Yeah, I guess. Famous artists, dealers, collectors, curators, critics. I’ll be involved with some high-powered people, rich, sophisticated hard-ball players; me, Ellen Cherry Charles, the painting waitress, the little Jezebel of Colonial Pines.”

Boomer snatched his eyes off the road again, allowing a jackrabbit to fulfill its pact with destiny. “Mrs. Randolph Petway the Third—of the Virginia Petways—and don’t ever let ’em forget it.”

He wished that she wouldn’t link herself to Jezebel like that. No matter how lightly she phrased it, it struck him as self-deprecating. A person can’t make a career out of somebody else’s invective. Only recently, an observer had called him a hydrocephalic lummox, and he hadn’t even bothered to look it up. Was Ellen Cherry just picking scabs or what?

Confused by the Bible’s portrayal of Jezebel—it appeared to contend that cosmetics were witchcraft, and coquetry a capital offense—Ellen Cherry had asked Patsy (lines of communication with her parents had been reopened approximately six months after she settled in Seattle) what she knew about the queen’s sordid reputation.

“Just a real tacky woman, I reckon.”

“Mama! Is it possible you could be more specific?”

“Your daddy didn’t mean it, honey. Calling you ugly names. Bud just had him all festered up. Bud makes him feel guilty about stuff they did when they were boys, mischief they got into, and then he manipulates him. But—”

“Mama, please, do me a favor and just ask Uncle Buddy what Jezebel did that was so bad. I’d like particulars.”

The next time the Reverend Buddy Winkler stopped by for dinner, Patsy had, indeed, raised the subject. There was silence, except for the musical sizzle of pork chops in the skillet. Slowly, the preacher got up from the kitchen chair, a chair whose green enamel contrasted vividly with his berry-domed boils, and he laid his hungry expression upon Patsy like the tongue of a steer. She could almost feel strings of cold saliva dripping to make paste of the flour on her apron.

“You tryin’ to spoil my appetite, Patsy? Ain’t there enough pork chops to go ’round? Utterin’ the name of that shameless fornicator, that painted hussy before we’ve sat down to our supper. I want you to lead our grace tonight, so’s to scour the scum the name of Jezebel may have left in your mouth.”

“My mouth’s spic and span, thank you, Bud.” She opened it wide and held it open for a while, close to his face, to see if looking into her pink yawn would set off his tic. It did. “Jest tell me, who all did this ol’ hussy fornicate with?”

Buddy stepped back. Something about the way she said “fornicate” unnerved him. “Patsy now.”

“Well,
who
, Bud?”

When he spoke again it was in his pulpit voice, his saxophone voice, his blue flame voice, although the jaw tic that Patsy had inspired caused him to miss occasional stops and to blur the higher registers. “It is written in the Book of Revelation, chapter two, verse eighteen, that God Almighty sent a message to the church in Thyatira—”

“Where?”

“Thyatira.”

“Where’s that?”

“It don’t matter! It don’t exist anymore. God said unto them, ’I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest a woman named Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication.’”

“So, she didn’t do the fornicating herself. She tried to get other folks to do it.”

“Patsy, you’re missin’ the point. Jezebel was a prophetess of Baal. She was a pagan fanatic, she was a filthy idolator who led the Is-raelites away from Jehovah. For twenty-seven years, that woman used her power as queen to try and overthrow Jehovah and replace him with the idols of her native country.”

“What was the king doing all this time?”

“Ahab was under her thumb. It’s the same ol’ story. A connivin’ woman influencin’ a weak man to commit crimes he never woulda had the gumption to commit by hisself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She wanted to convert Is-ra-el to Baal worship. I’m talkin’ the golden calf, Patsy. You know what I’m talkin’? I’m talkin’ strange shrines in the woods. I’m talkin’ nekkidness and orgy and human sacrifice. Little children by the hundreds sacrificed to some stupid, smelly dairy animal. Babies hacked to pieces on a greasy altar in the moonlight—”

“Gross!” Patsy suddenly held the plumping pork chops in vomitus regard. “I don’t wanna hear about dead babies.”

“Oh, we hear a heap of ugly things when we speak of Jezebel. Her lies sent an innocent neighbor to a horrible end so that Ahab could annex his vineyards.”

“Hubby’s little helper went too far, you say? But tell me now, Bud, where does the makeup figger in?”

“The makeup?”

“You know, the painted woman thing. Isn’t that what she’s remembered for?”

“Patsy, have you never seen a baboon’s bottom?”

“I thought we agreed not to spoil our supper.”

“A baboon’s rump is redder than your apron. Sometimes there’s yellow and blue thrown in. Why does your baboon have a colored rump? To attract other baboons to mate with it. Why did Jezebel color her face? I’ll wager you can make the obvious connection.” He paused. He returned the saxophone to its case.

“Taters are done, I see. Maybe I should call Verlin in. Monday night football, he’ll be wanting to eat and scat.”

Later in the week, Patsy had telephoned Ellen Cherry in Seattle and catalogued, as faithfully as she dared, Jezebel’s vices.

“Neat,” Ellen Cherry had said. “I’m delighted to learn that I’ve been compared to a heathen fornication instructor, a husband corrupter, and a baboon’s ass, all in one lump.”

Patsy, who had purposely omitted the part about diced babies, cautioned her, “You’ve got to accept some of Buddy’s preaching with a grain of salt. Granted, he’s a man of God, but ol’ Bud has got . . .
ambition
.”

“Mama, you say it like he’s got a disease.”

“Well, ambition’s not as bad as AIDS, I reckon. But it can be a whole lot worse than the measles.”

THEY WERE MAKING GOOD TIME.
Saying adios to the rock stacks. Boomer hated to leave them behind. He admired the way the paladins of pumice seemed intent to stand on their own wide feet, to stand tall, face their gods, and one day ascend from this chatty planet to a world more worthy of their silence. Look at ’em back there, rugged and unwavering, not a
Pouilly-fumé
sipper in the lot. No, those rocks were not artists but working stiffs, heroic welders who could mend the hinges of hell, yet if need be, if their loved ones required it, could transform a motor home into a traveling juggernaut entrée basted by the butters of the sun.

The rock formations were thinning out, however. The land was starting to jut less and roll more. Rolling toward the Rockies. It was less arid here. In fact, the road was running parallel with a stream, a tributary of the Green River, perhaps. Juniper sprouted from the hillocks, and barely budding aspen huddled along the creek like ghost squaws come to launder their sheets.

There weren’t any settlements, not even on the map, but sure enough, around the next bend a billboard stood, quoting, in archaic English, the apocalyptic rantings of a long-dead Middle Eastern prophet. It made Ellen Cherry shudder, and then it made her mad. “Anybody,” she said to herself, “who would erect a garish billboard in a beautiful setting like this would fart in a phone booth, dynamite a hummingbird feeder, use the Mona Lisa for a dartboard, consult a Japanese light meter at the burning of the Hindenburg, or name their firstborn after Richard Milhous Nixon.”

On they rolled, turkey and hills. The dire prophesy did not slow them down, nor did it relieve the driver’s grip on the passenger’s thigh. Suddenly, Ellen Cherry brightened.

“Boomer, you realize you and I can’t fornicate anymore?”

He looked astonished. “We can’t?”

“Why, no. We’re married now. Dictionary says fornication is between unmarried persons. From now on, we’ve got to call it something else.”

“When did we ever call it fornication in the first place? That’s a dumb word: fornicate. Sounds like something lawyers do. Government lawyers.”

“Well, we’ve fornicated for the last time, darlin’.” She placed her small hand atop his huge one. “So what’re we going to do from now on?”

“Same thing but call it something friendly.” He was trying to remember if anyone in a spy novel ever spoke of “fornication.” Certainly not Bond.

“What would you call it, then? What friendly thing are we going to do from now on?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, think about it.” With her nails, she raked the hair on the back of his hands. “What would you
like
to call it?”

“I don’t wanna call it anything. I just wanna do it.”

“Then let’s do it.”

In teasing him, she had gotten herself aroused. While she kissed the right corner of his mouth, he pulled the vehicle off the road, concealing it behind the last mesa in the wilderness.

"WILL THE NEW JERUSALEM
look like Richmond, the lovely capital of our most lovely state? Nay. Will it look like Washington, D.C., the great capital of this great nation? Nay. Will it look like London or Paris or even—even, what? What’s another city that everybody thinks is hot stuff in the beauty department? Uh . . . Venice. Will it look like Venice? Nay. Am I using too many ’nays’ here? Oh, no! All these grand cities will shrink beside the New Jerusalem; Rome at the height of its glory will, no,
would
, be but a slum in comparison to . . . Tallahassee. Tallahassee, you moron!"

Despite the prodding of the Reverend Buddy Winkler, the contestant identified the capital of Florida as Miami Beach—"Miami
Beach
? The moron must be a Jewish moron.”—thereby losing out on a set of fine Wedgwood china and a year’s supply of margarine.

“Now, let’s see. Where was I? Ever’ last city that man has built in this world, including the fabulous showplaces of the Oriental potentates, that’s good, ’fabulous showplaces of Oriental potentates,’ will pale into ghettos. . . . Hmmm, I guess your ghetto is not exactly,
pale
, is it? Heh. Will pale beside the transformed Jerusalem that God Almighty will bring down from heaven to serve as the capital of his kingdom on earth, the city where, in which, you and me—you and I—will for all eternity . . . rumba. Come on, stupid. Rumba! Oh? Okay, samba. What’s the blessed difference? Nobody dances like that anymore. Let’s see. For all eternity dwell. Dwell or live? Ummm . . .”

The Reverend Buddy Winkler was experiencing some difficulty with his powers of concentration. The game show was not to blame. He always watched television game shows while working on a sermon. As a rule, they proved more inspirational than distracting. All that energetic yearning. Each contestant standing at the gate of wealth, hoping to be judged worthy of admission. No, it wasn’t “Wheel of Fortune” that was slowing his pen, it was the good news from the Baptist network. Only that morning, he had learned that two stations in California and one in Oregon had agreed to air his weekly broadcasts. California, yet! Talk about your going forth among your whores, publicans, and sinners. At the rate that his radio exposure was expanding, could a TV contract be long in coming? He couldn’t afford to keep postponing a dental overhaul. On the tube, your smile was your mustard-cutter and not a penny less. “Right, Bob?” He grinned at the game show host. And then, the merry saliva turning to roach powder in his cheeks, he drew a despairing hand over his candy jar of boils. “Heal!” he almost shouted, but he was not that kind of preacher.

Buddy’s mind wandered to the house call he must make the following day. A member of his local congregation had recently, at the age of eighty-two, undergone surgery to restore her sight. She had been blind since four. The operation was an unqualified success, yet when she looked in a mirror for the first time and observed her corduroy complexion, observed the fissures and puckers that caused her countenance to resemble a close-up photograph of a Laplander’s scrotum, she ignored the miracle of vision and flew into a fury. Having never seen an old person’s face, she thought the doctors had done it to her, that the epidermal wasteland was an unnatural consequence of the surgery, and she was intent upon filing a malpractice suit. Neither her family nor her attorney could dissuade her, so it fell to Buddy, as her minister, to explain how and why God routinely made prunes out of his little sugarplums.