Skinny Legs and All (11 page)

“You’re asking me if I brought pork and beans? Dabney, I shopped for this excursion for over a week—”

“For
more than
a week.”

“Excuse me.
More than
a week. Are you aware of the money I spent?”

“So these aren’t
our
pork and beans?”

“Really, Dabney!” The woman looked as if she had just gotten a whiff of a Calcutta latrine. Then, she softened and smirked. “For breakfast I’m preparing orange crepes. With Cointreau. But not until you’ve had your go at the fish.”

“Agreed.” He positioned a small log on the fire. “I’ll dress and get cracking.” As he crawled into the tent, he called, “Oh, honey. You won’t forget the linen tablecloth?”

“Have I ever?”

Purposefully, the woman snatched up the tin of beans, subjected it to a rather scatological scrutiny, then, with amazing strength, hurled it against a boulder at the edge of the campsite.

The canning process was invented in 1809 by a French confectioner named Nicolas Appert.
Oui
, the simple proletarian vessel that shepherded our Spam from processing plant to dinner dish emerged in Paris, birthplace of so very much genius, so very much chic. Is it inappropriate, then, that a painter, Andy Warhol, had caused the soup can to be the most recognized image in contemporary art? Is it mere coincidence that the most representative Parisian dance is called the cancan? Or that the famed French film festival is held at a place called Cannes? Yes, of course it is, but no matter: there are more tin cans in the world than there are human beings (a hundred billion new ones are manufactured each year in the U.S. alone), and they trace their beginnings not to some savage simian savanna, as do we, but to the home of Matisse and Baudelaire, of Debussy and Sarah Bernhardt; to the metropole of the muses, the City of Light.

For all of the fizzy artistry that surrounded its birth, however, the can is sturdy, dependable. Incidences of rupture or spoilage are rare. Cans have been opened after five decades to reveal perfectly edible contents, if you fancy potted mutton. If only we could so can our innocence, our sense of wonder, our adolescent libido. Campbell’s Cream of Youth. Swanson’s Spring Chicken.

Early food cans were handmade from tin and sealed with solder. Today, they’re machine-fabricated from pressed steel. The only tin in a modern “tin can” is an internal coating so thin you could read through it. You could read
The Tin Drum
through it, were you bent in that direction. Tin habitually broadcasts extra electrons, and those superfluous particles create a barrier against acids in the foodstuff that would otherwise corrode the can, slowly weakening it from within, the way political convictions weaken morality and religious convictions weaken the mind.

When Can o’ Beans was dashed against the rock, the impact naturally dented his/her steel cylinder. That would have been problem enough, since a deep dent couldn’t help but impede equilibrium. Alas, it didn’t end there. Because the dent occurred directly over the seam, the seam split. There was an inch-long tear in his/her side, out through which tomato sauce was flowing like blood.

Humming a melody from Prokofiev, the man lugged his fishing tackle, price tags still attached, blithely to the stream. With trepidation, the woman paid a reluctant but necessary visit to the camp-ground privy. As soon as the couple was out of sight, Painted Stick and Conch Shell rushed to rescue Can o’ Beans. First, they turned him/her so that the wound was topside up. That stemmed the flow of sauce. Next, they pushed the can—rolling was out of the question—into the underbrush.

Reconnaissance by Conch Shell turned up a well-concealed but soon to be sunlit rockpile. Painted Stick dragged the sock there; then, with the shell’s assistance, pushed the can there, as well. Painted Stick may have been having second thoughts about his choice of traveling companions. He was a talismanic device, the sanctified awe-detector of a community of ecstatics, not a nursemaid. It was time for an assessment.

Although confused, tired, perhaps in shock, the old purple footsnood was out of danger. The holes in its envelope were minute and manageable. A few hours in direct sunlight would draw out the last of the moisture that plagued it. Cleaner, if none the wiser, the sock would persevere.

The vessel of legumes, on the other hand, was in definite peril. Were it to lie in any but the one position—on its side with the seam on top—its juice would leak. If enough of the sauce bled out, the beans inside would congeal into a hard, dry lump. Eventually, bacteria entering the wound would decompose the lump. The crippled container would be full of rattle and rot. Can o’ Beans was incapacitated. Further travel was impossible.

What to do? Dirty Sock did nothing. He lay the entire morning as if in a stupor, soaking up sun like a wage slave on the first day of a cut-rate Hawaiian vacation. Can o’ Beans was equally silent and still. Never leaving his/her side, Spoon repeatedly smoothed the can’s bedraggled paper jacket, as if mending its tatters with the compulsive caresses of her ladle. Conch Shell cast her pink net of oceanic compassion over the lot of them, not that it did them much good, while Painted Stick, anxious to keep an appointment in far Jerusalem, paced to and fro, his little “horns” twitching like feelers. What to do?

The scene was glum, and boring, too. By midafternoon, Can o’ Beans had had enough. “I realize that I’ll probably have to be left behind,” he/she announced. “I can accept that. It’s the breaks of the game, that’s all. But I can’t let you get away, Miss Shell, Mr. Stick, without at least telling me why I was going to where I’m not going. I’ve been just bursting, no joke intended, ha-ha, to learn the purpose of this marathon to Jerusalem, and now. . . . What’s your background? What’s your mission? What am I missing? Leave me in the night but please don’t leave me in the dark.”

Perhaps they, too, needed a diversion, something to take their minds off the trouble and delay. At any rate, Conch Shell and Painted Stick settled in the disorder of broken rock (it was as if the mountain god had come home drunk and thrown his clothes on the floor) beside the disabled bean can and addressed its curiosity.

“As previously mentioned, we come originally from Phoenicia, a great trading center beside the mild blue sea. Phoenicia was blessed with hills and harbors; a land of lighthouses, cedar groves, and purple dust on the olive fruit. It was divided into two kingdoms, the city-states of Sidon and Tyre—”

“You might be interested in knowing,” Can o’ Beans interrupted, “that those two cities still exist. They’re in a country that’s called Lebanon nowadays.”

Spoon regarded Can o’ Beans adoringly, as if once more overwhelmed by his/her intelligence.

“Most fucked-up country on earth,” mumbled Dirty Sock. “Pardon my French.” He hadn’t moved a thread. Nobody realized that he’d been listening.

“A long civil war’s been raging there,” Can o’ Beans explained. “Moslems fighting Jews, as usual, but also Moslems fighting Christians. And Moslems fighting Moslems. Everybody fighting everybody, including themselves. It’s crazy. Murderous and crazy.”

“That is sometimes the way it is with human beings,” Conch Shell said.

“Absolutely,” agreed Can o’ Beans. “But human beings in your neck of the woods seem to have a special gift for it. I’m curious about why that is.”

“Well, the Jews were the first to deny the Goddess,” said Conch Shell.

“And Islam is merely an offshoot of Judaism?” ventured Can o’ Beans.

Was Conch Shell implying that it was her goddess who had put a curse—
the
curse, the legendary curse—on the Jews? And, by extension, on the whole Middle East? Was there, indeed, a curse at all, or was it simply a desperate (at times, violent) clinging to narrow, rigid belief systems that had brought so much suffering to the region, to the race? Could it be coincidence, a mere accident of geography and history? Or was there yet a different reason for the travail: something fabulous, unexamined, unthinkable, even; some circumstance hidden from human knowledge as if by a . . . a veil?

Phantom swimmers, greased with speculation, took a few bright strokes through the waters of the bean can’s intellect, but in its present condition it failed to provide adequate buoyancy, and they rapidly sank into the deep unconscious. When the ripples had subsided, Can o’ Beans said, “I regret to inform you that Sidon and Tyre have shrunk in size and importance. They’re just backwater burgs these days. But you’re not returning to your place of natural origin, anyway. You aren’t going to Lebanon, which used to be Phoenicia, you’re going to—”

“We are returning to the Holy City for the opening of the Third Temple,” said Painted Stick. It was practically the only relevant remark he was to make all afternoon. For Painted Stick, this period of exegesis proved merely an excuse to comment upon the galaxies, which he described as if they were inkwells into which he, like a busy pen, must be regularly dipped.

“Sounds like an event you’ve been looking forward to.”

“Much of the world has been looking forward to it,” said Conch Shell.

“How come?”

“Oh, sir/ma’am, don’t you know?” blurted Spoon, amazed that there might be a gap in Can o’ Beans’s erudition. “When the Third Temple is built, it will mean that the Second Coming is here.”

Can o’ Beans shrugged. “Third Temple. Second Coming. Who’s on first?”

“Christians associate the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem with the second appearance on earth of their deity, Jesus Christ,” explained Conch Shell. “Jews associate it with the
first
appearance of their long-awaited Messiah, if that is what you intended. In either case, it is supposed to mean the end of the world as we know it.”

“What if the Christ
and
the Messiah come, and they’re two different guys?” asked Can o’ Beans. “Would they debate on television? Would they lead their faithful off to two different rewards; separate, restricted heavens? And would Jesus, a pious Jew, really run with the Gentiles? Would there be a war between saviors that would ’save’ the world by ending it? You look at the Middle East right now, look at Northern Ireland, at India with its Hindus and Sikhs; it would seem that most of the bloodshed in the world is the result of religious squabbling. Maybe that’s why I’m cynical about religion.”

“You
are
?” asked Spoon, incredulously. “Why, in your condition . . .”

“It’s blasphemy now, is it?” mumbled Dirty Sock.

“Things do not always turn out exactly as humans expect them to,” Conch Shell reminded them.

Painted Stick added something amazing and irrelevant about the moons of Saturn.

“You’re quite correct,” said Can o’ Beans. He/she meant that Conch Shell was correct about people’s expectations. The remarks of Spoon and Dirty Sock he/she dismissed as misplaced anthropomorphism, and whether or not Painted Stick was correct was anybody’s guess. “Jesus, after all, has been away two thousand years. In all that time, he must have changed. As for the Messiah, he’s rather a pig in a poke.”

Conch Shell laughed. It was a high, musical, merry laugh, like the singing of field mice going forth to gather grain in a land where the hawks are all vegetarians. “Your attitude is probably healthy,” said she. “The Third Temple could turn out to be associated with . . . with something quite different.”

“Do you and Mr. Stick know what that is?” The can expected to get an earful of the Goddess.

“Considering the past, we certainly think we do. Yet when it comes to final fruit, we may be in for as much a surprise as anybody else.”

“But it
will
be a big deal, this new Temple over there in Jerusalem town?”

“We have every reason to expect it to be.”

“And you and Mr. Stick—inanimate objects—will have a part in it?”

“We hope so,” said Conch Shell. “We were promised that we would. Is it not time that inanimate objects—and plants and animals—resume their rightful place in the affairs of the world? How long can humankind continue to slight these integral pieces of the whole reality?”

A shiver ran along the container’s broken seam. It was excited by the implications of that notion, though despite its vantage point as an inanimate object, it did not fully understand them.
Had
it fully understood them, then for it, at least, for that injured can of pork ’n’ beans, the second veil already would have fallen.

ELLEN CHERRY AND BOOMER
were trying to decide how to celebrate their anniversary. They had been married one week. Although she would have preferred to spend the evening sketching—try as she might, she couldn’t think of a single attribute of wedlock that measured up to the bliss of a penciled line snaking across the Eden of a blank sheet of paper—Ellen Cherry suggested that they go dancing. Now Boomer Petway was a dancing fool, but it so happened that the lone floor open for public dancing on a March Wednesday in Livingston, Montana, was an “international” disco that had recently supplanted the country-and-western bar in the Grizzly Bear Hotel. Livingston’s famed literary crowd would be there, the couple was assured, as well as every aspiring jet-setter in that part of rural Montana, rising and falling in the glitz spill of chrome and neon like the studiously posed figures in a baroque masterpiece.

“No way, José,” said Boomer. “When I turned thirty, I broke off diplomatic relations with the Pepsi generation. Any hip young people want to communicate with me, they have to go through the Swiss.”

That attitude doesn’t bode well for our art-scene life in New York
, thought Ellen Cherry. But then, what did? “As I recall, honey boy, your relations with ranchers and farmers aren’t in any détente mode, either, so I guess it’s just as well there’s not an ounce of excrement being kicked on the dance floors of this burg tonight. It’s getting harder and harder to figure out your foreign policy.”

“I’m nonaligned.”

“But hardly nonaggressive.” She touched her hair. It was familiarly stiff and convoluted, and that seemed to calm her. She wound a finger in a taffy coil, then pulled free and felt it spring. “What
would
you like to do this evening?”