Skinny Legs and All (12 page)

Boomer was of the opinion that it would be piercingly romantic to go to a drive-in picture show. There they could relive, within certain parameters, their youthful nights at the Robert E. Lee. As it turned out, the Yellowstone Drive-in had come out of winter mothballs that very week, kicking off the new season with a blockbuster science-fiction triple feature:

2001: A Space Odyssey

2010: The Year We make Contact

2020: So Who Need Glasses?

They had to pay for four parking spaces. The roast turkey took up two spaces lengthwise, and one more on either side was blocked by its drumsticks. “Hang the expense!” shouted Boomer. “Nothing’s too good for my juicy bride.”

Lowering her eyes, Ellen Cherry turned to the ticket seller. “Of one week,” she said meekly.

“Of one whole week!” thundered Boomer. “How ’bout a tub of popcorn, darlin’?”

“You’re going to spoil me.”

Since they had legal and physical access to four speakers, they used them all, receiving the cartoony assault of the snack bar commercial quadrophonically. They also cranked up the Airstream’s heating system, for, with the setting of the sun, an icy blue wind had come yowling out of Canada and into the drive-in picture show. The wind filled every available parking space but listened only to itself.

Since he had legal and physical access to what was inside them, Ellen Cherry removed her panties, to save Boomer the trouble, but after kissing her once or twice, he repaired to the Dometic eight-cubit-foot, AC/DC refrigerator, ostensibly for beer, only to surprise her by returning with a reasonably good bottle of French champagne. “The wine steward says this here is the perfect complement to buttered popcorn.”

“There’s hope for you yet,” she said. She herself could not determine whether that flicker of hope caused her cheer or concern. “Happy anniversary.” Beneath her skirt, where the panties had come and gone, where there was nothing but hair and nakedness, beneath her skirt (she was a southern woman, still, and refused to go about in jeans or trousers), Ellen Cherry crossed and uncrossed, crossed and uncrossed, her fingers.

"I WONDER WHERE THEY ARE NOW?"
Verlin Charles had a folding map of the United States of America spread out on the coffee table before him. Verlin was looking at the states, which is to say, he was looking at the little variously colored shapes into which the larger shape, the shape representing the nation, was irregularly divided. Verlin’s concept of “where they are now” was relative to the state shapes, nothing more, nothing less. People tended to regard those shapes, those comparatively brand-new, arbitrary, political subdivisions as if they were natural facts, ancient and inviolable; as if they were end products of evolution ("No, children, Texas did not evolve from Rhode Island, Texas and Rhode Island evolved from a common ancestor"), or, supposing the people were Bible Belt creationists, as if God had made the states, had sat down at his big cumulous desk with his big titanium pen in his big creative fist and said in his big boom-boom voice, “I think I’ll make Louisiana look like a Frankenstein boot.” Either way, people got very attached to the imagined physical reality of those states.

Because the map was printed on a flat surface, only four colors were required to separate each and every state shape from its neighbors. On a sphere, a globe, four colors likewise sufficed. Had the map been printed on a torus—a doughnut shape—
seven
colors would have been needed to allow for the state-shape distinctions. There are, of course, additional reasons why one seldom encounters a map of the United States on one’s doughnut.

“I wonder where they are now?” said Verlin. He was tracking, after a fashion, the progress of his daughter and son-in-law, subconsciously wishing that it would take them a long, long time to reach the dreaded New York.

“I wonder where
he
is now?” said Patsy. She nodded her exploded cuckoo’s nest—the head of hair whose trillion tornado curls had somehow forced their pattern into her chromosomes and been passed along to her daughter—at the Reverend Buddy Winkler.

In the easy chair, where he had dozed off while watching"Jeopardy!” on the Charleses’ console, Buddy was writhing in a dream. It didn’t appear to be a nightmare: his thin lips were parted in a pious sort of grin. Yet, he twisted and kicked, and he was sweating like an icebox. Patsy was fascinated by the sheen he projected, the way his boils glistened. Patsy switched off the lamp.

“Hey! What’re you doing?” complained Verlin. “I’m studyin’ this dad-blamed map.”

“Sorry, sweet pea. I just wanted to see if you could read by the light of Bud’s boils.”

The instant she switched the lamp back on, Buddy snapped awake. Once he had gotten his bearings, once he realized that they were into prime time and the game show was over, he turned to Verlin and Patsy and gave them a serious smile. “The Lord has just spoken to me,” he said. Effortlessly, he switched into his saxophone voice. “
The Lord
has addressed me in this living room!”

“That’s rude. He didn’t say beans to me, and it’s my house.”

“Patsy, now.”

“Did you hear the Lord, Verlin? I swear, if I’d known the Lord was gonna show up, I’d of emptied the blessed ashtrays.”

Verlin and Buddy in perfect unison: “Patsy!”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean any disrespect. It’s just so . . . unusual.” She looked to Verlin, hoping that he would pick up the ball, but he was as closed as the Kellogg states, those little Plains states on his map that were all shaped like cereal boxes. Patsy jumped back in. “What did the Lord say to you, Bud?” She was sincere. Sincerely sincere.

“The Temple,” Buddy answered vaguely. “God said something about rebuildin’ the Temple.” It was as if the preacher had not heard the Lord too clearly.

“Rebuilding what temple?”

Abruptly, Buddy rose to his feet. “What time is it?”

“’Bout eight-fifteen,” said Verlin.

“Hmmm. Well, too late tonight.” Almost affectionately, Buddy stroked the epidermal eruptions about his chin. “First thing tomorrow morning,” he announced, “I’m gonna get me a Jew on the phone.”

CAN O’ BEANS HAD FEARED
that when Ellen Cherry married the husky fellow with the thinning black hair, the man called Boomer, he/she might have been emptied out and, along with a whole string of other cans, tied to the bumper of a honeymoon car. As the car drove down the street, trailing paper streamers, inflated condoms, and squiggles of shaving cream, the cans would clatter and clang, proclaiming to one and all in their vulgar clamor that the bashful, nervous innocents who occupied the car were en route from the altar to the bed.

As it turned out, the honeymoon car was the Airstream turkey, and none of Ellen Cherry’s friends—the waitresses who wept and then got drunk and wept some more—could muster the courage or whatever it took to decorate the thing. The Airstream turkey just didn’t lend itself to decoration. “How about cranberry sauce?” one waitress suggested. “A hundred pounds of it,” added another. “Where we gonna put it?” asked a third. “Where we gonna get it?” asked a fourth. A fifth, openly weeping, inquired, “What’s cranberry sauce got to do with having a husband to love you forever and ever?” In the end, they hadn’t touched the turkey. Perhaps the turkey was a complete statement, a sentence to which no further clause or phrase could logically be appended. Perhaps it was just too weird.

Now, Can o’ Beans was thinking that he/she would be satisfied to end up in a wedding procession. If, with the help of Mr. Stick, he/she could make it as far as a church, a little roadside chapel, well, he/she could just lie around in the yard there, drained dry of sauce, and sooner or later some bridesmaid or younger brother would tie him/her to the bumper of a honeymoon car, and
JUST MARRIED JUST MARRIED honk honk honk clatter bangle clink
, he/she would end his/her career, if not in a blaze of glory, at least as a participant in a traditional rite of noisy joy. How much finer that would be than being left on this rockpile for the porcupines to lick and the buzzards of the sky to pee upon.

But, wait. Why was he/she sinking into morbid fantasies? There were a couple of hours left before dusk. With thermonuclear nonchalance, the sun was still cheerfully converting hydrogen into helium at the rate of four million, two-hundred-thousand tons per second, and inside the solar-heated can, the beans were enjoying genetic memories of the photosynthesis that had made them possible. Moreover, Conch Shell had resumed her narration. Can o’ Beans shrugged off his/her sense of impending doom and paid attention.

BOOMER WAS DISPOSED
to swill the champagne directly from the bottle, a procedure that violated some sense of propriety in his wife. Ellen Cherry was from the South and had good manners. She didn’t have panties on, but she had good manners.

Ellen Cherry walked back to the galley and fetched two glasses. They were water tumblers, but they were glasses. “Honey,” she said, “I’ve lost my spoon.”

“You were gonna take this champagne by the spoon?”

“Hey, it’s good, but it’s not
that
good.”

“You were gonna eat your popcorn with a spoon, then. A Yankee habit you picked up in Seattle.”

“Just shut up, Boomer,” she said. The movie had started, and some men in monkey suits were prancing around a huge sculpture of a candy bar. For a second, Ellen Cherry thought it was a wilder version of the snack bar commercial.

“Whaddaya mean you’ve lost your spoon? You only had
one
spoon?”

“Forget it.” On the screen, the apemen were worshipping the great god Hershey. Some sort of primitive chocolate cult. “I’ve got—
we’ve
got—a whole blessed set of stainless steel flatware. But I had a special little spoon. It was a silver dessert spoon. I bought it at a Catholic garage sale.”

“That spoon meant right smart to you,” said Boomer. His mouth was stuffed with popcorn. “And now it’s lost.”

“You’re making fun of me. It’s no big deal.” She filled their glasses. “For the first three years I lived in Seattle, it was the only spoon I had to my name. I had chopsticks and one spoon. I think I left it in the cave back there.”

“You wanna go back and get it?”

“Well, obviously I do!”

Boomer stared at her. “Seriously?”

“No, God, no. Don’t be silly.”

“’Cause I’ll do it.”

“Forget it, Boomer.”

“I’d go back and get your spoon. It’s hundreds of miles, but I’d go.”

“I know you would. Forget it. Let’s drink a toast. It was just a dumb little secondhand spoon.”

He lifted his glass. There was a spaceship on the screen. “Well, your spoon can just keep my sock company.”

They laughed. They toasted their week of marriage, including their hour in the cave. Little did they know.

"SO MR. STICK WAS
made from the wood of a fig tree, a very old fig tree that apparently had some special aura about it, like the locals thought it was enchanted or something. Maybe it had been struck by lightning or there was a spring beneath it. Maybe it was just old. Sometimes, being old is enough. Clearly, I’m not respected because I’m a bean can but rather because I’m old, as bean cans go; I’ve been around, seen things, learned a thing or two, survived, and that puts me in a separate category, a kind of elder statesman among canned vegetables. It’s a common thing with humans. Mr. Petway remarked to Miss Charles that now that he’d reached the age of thirty, he was going to start starching the collars of his Hawaiian shirts. He said, yes, of course, it would chafe his neck but dignity had its price. Droll fellow. Although disagreeably prolific in the production of epidermal foliage. I’m sure happy that inanimate objects have been spared the curse of body hair. Anyway, there was this venerated fig tree in Phoenicia, and Mr. Stick was fashioned from its wood by an equally venerated astronomer.”

As Conch Shell and Painted Stick were telling their story (the stick’s contribution consisting mainly of irrelevant asides pertaining to what did and did not get caught in the spiderweb of the stars), Can o’ Beans retold it to him/herself. That was his/her method of absorbing information. Whatever Can o’ Beans heard or overheard, he/she immediately repeated it—or a personalized version of it—to him/herself. That way it stuck. It would be interesting to see if a kid could get through Harvard using a retention technique perfected by a can of pork and beans.

“This revered astronomer maintained an observatory on the Plain of Al Biq¯a. It’s amazing that there were observatories so long ago, nearly a thousand years before Christ, but I guess the ancients paid a lot of attention to the heavens, even though they had no instruments. That is, they had no telescopes. Evidently, Mr. Stick was designed as an astronomical instrument of some sort. He pointed out unusual occurrences in the sky.

“The astronomer cut the stick and walked it to his observatory, where, under a full moon, it was painted by the priestess. The observatory doubled as a special shrine where the more educated Phoenicians would come to adore Astarte. (One of the Goddess’s titles was Shepherdess of the Stars.) There was an attractive priestess on duty there, and Mr. Stick is claiming that she would have sex with anyone who made a cash donation to the observatory. A novel means of institutional fund-raising. Wonder if the Smithsonian knows about it?

“Later that same year, a sailor donated Miss Shell to the observatory. The Phoenicians were a seafaring people, famous for their navigation, and this fellow had discovered the conch shell on a deserted beach. In his opinion, she manifested an aspect of Astarte, so he brought her to the astronomer, who’d taught him everything he knew about starlight, and to the priestess, who’d shown him the irrefutable link between pussy and the Pleiades. Carl Sagan, eat your heart out.

“Mr. Stick and Miss Shell hit it off right from the start. Individually, they were fine, but in tandem they were terrific. Like Tracy and Hepburn. Gradually, they acquired a reputation as especially effective talismans. It was partly because of them that King Ethbaal and Queen Acco of Sidon paid a royal visit to the observatory, bringing along their young daughter, Princess Jezebel. The child enjoyed her first spiritual experience there. She realized that there was something larger, more meaningful in life than licking honeycomb and dressing up her pet monkey.