Skinny Legs and All (17 page)

FOWARD
March!
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.

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 car 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.

Returning to the lobby of the Ansonia, Raoul removed his porkpie hat and flicked raindrops off it, carefully, one by one. Flicking, he wondered if this “Jerusalem” where Mrs. Charles worked was a club. Maybe it was an art gallery. He remembered that she was an artist. Like her loco husband, before he split. Maybe she worked in a shop that sold religious art. In a dress like that? With an ass like that? No, man. Forget it, man. A P.R. girl would go to church, even, in shoes like hers, but not a
blanquita
. High heels, they put a woman that much closer to heaven, but gringos didn’t see it that way. Riding to “Jerusalem” in a limo, man? Bu’shit.

Raoul took a pencil from his filthy raincoat and scribbled on a damp notepad:

The Virgin Mary ride on a donkey

Her son Jesus he ride on a cross

Mick Jagger ride on a Concorde jet

And a rolling stone gather no moss

Maybe he would record a song for Mrs. Charles. Mrs. Charles would hear it on the radio. Then she would fuck him, man.

In the drizzle, the limousine shot through Central Park like a blow dart shooting through Amazon foliage, whooshing toward the haunch of an unsuspecting sloth. It was the first time that Ellen Cherry had ridden in a rubber-tired vehicle since the turkey changed hands. Tomorrow, she would be once again a subway passenger, but tonight was special, and she labored to feel special about it.

Tonight was the grand opening of Isaac & Ishmael’s. Rather, it was the grand reopening. Isaac & Ishmael’s originally opened back in June. Within a fortnight, it was firebombed. Now, damage repaired, security improved, it was ready to try again.

Personally, Ellen Cherry wasn’t particularly worried about working at the I & I. She would, starting tomorrow, be working day shift. The time-honored safety of lunch. The dinner staff and the cocktail staff were said to be as nervous as a Q’s tail in an alphabet stampede. They were reasonably positive that the restaurant would be targeted again.

No less than seven organizations, after all, had claimed responsibility for firebombing the I & I. They included three militant Zionist groups, three outlawed Islamic cults, and a fundamentalist Christian gang known as the Little Matches of Jesus. Taking as their credo these words that Luke (12:49) attributed to Our Savior—"I have come to set fire to the Earth"—the Matches had been sneaking about for a year or more, torching “ungodly” establishments, mainly in Brooklyn and Queens. They were sometimes referred to as the Holy Pyromaniacs or Firebugs for Christ.

In reality, police investigators suspected the I & I firebombing to have been instigated by an eighth organization, a coalition of ultraorthodox Zionists and evangelical Christians incorporated as the Third Temple Platoon, Inc. One of the group’s principal spokesmen was the Reverend Buddy Winkler of Colonial Pines, Virginia.

Uncle Buddy had found his Jews.

AN ARAB AND A JEW
opened a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations . . .

It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke. But Isaac & Ishmael’s was no funny story. Oh, it had its humorous aspects, as any worthwhile enterprise probably does, and neither the Arab nor the Jew was a stuffy old toad, yet the I & I was an earnest undertaking, an idealistic undertaking, perhaps a heroic undertaking.

An Arab and a Jew decided to open a restaurant together. It was to be a gesture of unusual cooperation, a symbolic reconciliation, an exemplary statement on behalf of peace—in the Middle East and beyond. If it could be demonstrated on a small scale that traditional, “natural” enemies could join together for a common purpose profitable to both, then might it not inspire adversaries on a global level to look into one another’s eyes, to explore avenues of mutually beneficial friendship? That was the rhetoric, that was the hope.