Skinny Legs and All (2 page)

“Millions of people live in New York. It must not be that bad.”

“Perverts. Puerto Ricans. Muggers. Terrorists. Whatta ya call ’em: bag ladies.”

“Terrorists in New York? Honey, New York is located in the U.S.A., for your information.”

“They will have ’em if they don’t already. Jews attract terrorism like shit attracts flies. Always have.”

“I swear, you sound like Bud. The Jews didn’t walk off some boat last Tuesday. New York’s been full of Jews since I don’t know how long. And they’ve been returned to Israel since back in the nineteen-forties sometime. I don’t know why you two are all of a sudden so worked up about Jews.”

“Oh, must be the Middle East on the news.” He sighed. “Seems like any more that’s all there is.”

“Besides, Boomer’ll take care of Ellen Cherry. You said so yourself.”

“Once upon a time I said it. Not anymore. That damn contraption he drove out to pick her up in! I think she’s finally made him as kooky as she is.” Verlin spat.
"Artists!"

As the couple walked up to their Buick, two mockingbirds flew away from its grill, one of them tweeting in a little-known dialect of the goldfinch, the other mixing a catbird cry with a raspy chord borrowed from a woodpecker. For centuries, mockingbirds had hunted live insects and foraged for seeds, but when motorcars began to appear in numbers on southern roads, they learned that they could dine more easily by simply picking dead bugs off the radiators of parked autos. Mockingbirds. Turning modern technology to their idiosyncratic advantage. Inventing new tricks to subsidize their expression.
Artists!

BEFORE STATIC FINALLY FRIED IT TO A CRISP,
a portion of the Reverend Buddy Winkler’s Sunday sermon had crackled out of the roast turkey’s radio. “Uncle Buddy,” sneered Ellen Cherry. Although he was, in fact, what is called by southerners a mere “shirttail relation,” she had called him “uncle” since she was a tot. “Ol’ Uncle Buddy’s gone nationwide.”

Boomer was perfectly aware of that. In recent years he had been closer to her father’s family than she. Boomer didn’t appear to notice when she switched the Motorola to a news broadcast. ("In the Arab quarter of Jerusalem today, Israeli soldiers fired into a group of . . .”) Boomer appeared to be counting cows. The cows that were stuck like gnats to the fly strip of the horizon. When he counted up to a certain number, he smiled. Thought Ellen Cherry,
I will probably never really know how many little faraway cows it takes to make my husband smile.

Strange, but in country such as this—dry, bare, and wide; country given to forage crops, flat rocks, and sidewinders—Buddy Winkler’s apocalyptic rant acquired a certain credibility. West of the Cascade Range, back around Seattle, where they had begun their journey, trees were so thick, so robust and tall, that they oozed green gas, sported mossy mustaches, and yelled “Timber, yourself!” at lumberjacks. Those chill forests, quietly throbbing with ancient vitality, seemed to refute the firmest eschatological convictions. Here, however, trees were wizened, drab, and thinly distributed. The road, clear and straight, uncoiled ahead of the turkey, recoiled behind, locking its passengers in a drowsy, lifeless rhythm from which the granulated yellow-brown layer cake to either side afforded scant relief. Distant cow-specks, raisins in the receding frosting, outnumbered pussy willows; and, indeed, the imprint of the hoof was on everything.

In country such as this, Ellen Cherry always rather expected the golden clock to go off. The clock with the alarm that sounded like firestorms and flügelhorns. Followed by the voice of Orson Welles reading from
The Book of the Dead
. “It’d be just like the world to end,” she said, “when we’re out here in the boondocks miles from a telephone.”

Boomer didn’t respond. His attention was fixed on an approaching cattle truck. As it drew nearer, the truck slowed and began to weave. It nearly sideswiped them in passing. The driver was hanging his head out the window in disbelief. Boomer swerved and honked the horn.

“Ignorant cowboy,” muttered Boomer. “Nearly took a drumstick off.”

COLONIAL PINES WAS A SUBURB
without an urb. At a distance of twenty-two miles, it was too far from Richmond to truly function as an appendage thereof, yet it lacked the autonomy of a separate city. It boasted no industry to speak of, and while excellent tomatoes were grown in abundance in its immediate vicinity, it certainly couldn’t be characterized as a farming community. Oddly enough, it had no downtown. What passed for a business district in Colonial Pines was a four-lane highway that, despite the turnpike that nowadays allowed traffic to skirt the place, still carried thousands of Yankee tourists to Florida and back. As it passed through Colonial Pines, that highway, three miles of it, was lined cheek to jowl with motels, service stations, and restaurants—although
restaurant
might be too dignified a word for the barbecue pits, ice cream stands, truck stops, and so-called “family” inns (whose blank, almost totalitarian cuisine could be trusted never to excite or confuse a repressed taste bud with flavors novel or bold). Presumably, inhabitants of this quasi-town earned their income from the Strip, as it was known (comparing it to the Las Vegas Strip would be akin to comparing Marie Osmond to Mae West), though we may also presume that they benefited from the proceeds of their traffic court: the reputation of the Colonial Pines speed trap stretched from Boston to Miami.

Exactly how an almost exclusively Caucasian lower-middle-class residential community of nineteen thousand supported itself, how it paid for its green shutters, power mowers, and ubiquitous American flags, is a question fit to occupy a demographer for a useless month or so, but it is not, thankfully, a concern of ours. Suffice for us to establish that Ellen Cherry Charles was born and reared in Colonial Pines, Virginia, that she loathed it from the cradle on, plotting even as a little girl to flee the vapors of unrelieved boredom that she believed were stifling her there. Eventually, and with some difficulty, she did escape. The tentacles of home place are as tenacious as they are stealthy, however, and the fact that she had yet to cut completely free of their coils was attested to by the weekly telephone calls she aimed at the Charles household. She made one on that March day.

“Hi.”

“Honey!” exclaimed Patsy. “Good to hear your voice! Listen, I oughtta go pull my robe on ’fore we commence. You caught me nekkid as a jaybird.”

“’Nekkid’ or ’naked,’ mama?”

“What’s the blessed difference? Are you making Yankee fun of the way I talk? The way you
used
to talk?”

“No, no, mama, let me tell you.
Naked
means you just don’t have any clothes on.
Nekkid
means you don’t have any clothes on and you’re fixing to get into trouble.”

Patsy giggled. “Lord, chile, I’ve already done that.” She lowered her voice to a notch above a whisper. “The fact is, your daddy just had his way with me, as is his custom on a Sunday afternoon. I understand that most of these once-a-weekers do it on Saturday night, but your daddy’s gotta be different in
some
category, I reckon. I swear, I think it’s Buddy’s sermons get him heated up, just like they do half the good Baptist ladies in this town. Or maybe it’s the football, I don’t know. He does watch the football first.” Patsy stopped and cleared the giggle out of her voice. “Anyways, I shouldn’t be gabbing to you about it. Except you
are
an ol’ married woman now.”

“Boomer’s fine, mama.”

“Good. Where y’all callin’ from?”

“Some rodeo town. Close to Idaho, I think. A person would believe they’d have nice hamburgers in towns like this, cows practically grazing on Main Street, but I swear the patties have more sawdust in them than they do in Colonial Pines. Boomer’s had two, though, and working on a third.”

“You watch that boy. Don’t let them pretty muscles go to fat.”

At that, Ellen Cherry glanced over her shoulder toward the snackbar blacktop where she had last seen her muscular groom. A half-dozen or more men had gathered to gawk at the great turkey, and Boomer was standing in their midst.

“They still refer to you gentlemen as cowboys?” Boomer asked. He gnawed at a ragged rind of burger bun the way a howling wolf sometimes seems to gnaw at a gibbous moon.

Apparently, the teenager at whom he’d directed his inquiry was too shy to respond. The young fellow seized the opportunity to examine his boots. Likely need new soles by summer.

One of the older men, raising his neck, gooselike, up out of his denim, took it upon himself to extend the courtesy of a reply. “How might you think they’d be referring to us?” His voice was slow and deliberate, like a mouse-fattened adder crawling over a rock pile.

“Oh, I thought that this day and age you maybe would be known as bovine custodial officers.” Boomer chuckled. He snapped at the last of the mustard-lit crust. “I did read somewheres,” he said through a mouthful, “that the most accurate job description of your ol’ wild west cowboy would be ’boorish Victorian agricultural worker.’ Don’t reckon
that’s
a handle that’d stick.”

There was a general shuffling of boots.

“Uh-oh,” said Ellen Cherry.

“Honey, let me slip a robe on,” said Patsy.

“Mama, I think we have to go. Right now. Love you. Bye.”

Perhaps admiration of the cowboy as the quintessential American hero is, indeed, not as universal as it was once. Traveling among the “bovine custodial officers” of Wyoming, Can o’ Beans was to remark that a comparison between the American cowpoke and, say, the Japanese samurai, left the cowboy looking rather shoddy. “Before a samurai went into battle,” Can o’ Beans was to say, “he would burn incense in his helmet so that if his enemy took his head, he would find it pleasant to the nose. Cowboys, on the other hand, hardly ever bathed or changed their crusty clothing. If a samurai’s enemy lost his sword, the samurai gave him his extra one so that the fight might continue in a manner honorable and fair. The cowboy’s specialty was to shoot enemies in the back from behind a bush. Do you begin to see the difference?” Spoon and Dirty Sock would wonder how Can o’ Beans knew so much about samurai. “Oh, I sat on the shelf next to a box of imported rice crackers for over a month,” Can o’ Beans would explain. “One can learn a lot conversing with foreigners.”

Ah, but we are getting ahead of our story. The immediate news is that Boomer and Ellen Cherry were obliged to depart the rodeo town in a bit of a rush. As a matter of fact, a mob, made mobile by a fleet of Japanese pickup trucks, chased the turkey across the state line and some twenty miles deep into Idaho.

AFTER THE PHONE WENT DEAD
in her hand, Ellen Cherry’s mother, moderately puzzled and freshly laid, wriggled into a robe, poured a cup of coffee, and went out on the sunporch to have a good think. She wished to consider, once again, the possibility that her daughter might have erred in marrying Boomer Petway and that Verlin and his cousin, Buddy Winkler, might have meddled insidiously in Ellen Cherry’s life, not just where Boomer was concerned but generally. She had had her own secret plans for Ellen Cherry, and it vexed her that Verlin might yet succeed in thwarting them.

If she makes it in New York as an artist, it’s due to me
, Patsy thought. She parted her robe slightly so that the late afternoon sunlight might warm her between her legs, where she was leaking a rivulet of the manly fluid in which she sometimes suspected her own artistic life had drowned.

As a young woman, Patsy had been a cheerleader who yearned to become a dancer. Why, at fifteen she was Grapefruit Princess of Okaloosa County! At seventeen, she met and married Verlin Charles, a navy pilot flying out of Pensacola. Discharged, Verlin moved her to Virginia, where he had resumed his career as a civil engineer. For the rest of her life, when Verlin was at work, Patsy would dance at home alone in cute white boots.

Ellen Cherry liked to watch her dance, but, to be honest, it wasn’t Patsy’s fancy-stepping that had channeled Ellen Cherry toward art. Rather, it was vertigo. And Colonial Pines.

Twice each year, the family would drive down to Florida to visit Patsy’s folks. Inevitably, Ellen Cherry got carsick. To keep from vomiting, she had to lie on her back in the rear of the station wagon and look up. As a result, she began to see the world from a different perspective.

Telephone poles went by like loops. She would register the light from signboards first, then the tops of the signs, then their blurry message: the melting Marlboro man, the expanding slice of pie. Gradually, she experimented. Played what she called her “eye game.” By squinting, and controlling the squint, she could achieve a figure-ground reversal. Figure-ground, ground-figure, back and forth. She could make herself color-blind. For miles, if she wished, the landscape would be nothing but red.

“How’s Daddy’s girl?” Verlin would ask from the driver’s seat. “Need to pee-pee?” Often, Daddy’s girl failed to reply. Daddy’s girl was busy, sliding her focus to muffle or distort the normal associative effects of object and space, stripping them of common meaning or symbolic function, forcing them to settle in the highly mysterious region that lies between the cornea and the brain—and fooling with them there. The parallel lines of electrical wires, under her dynamic gaze, would tend to overlap, so that they would break their continuity and magnify the open areas between them. This was especially interesting when a flock of blackbirds could be stirred into the optic mixture. Or, she would be looking at the field of vision itself, refusing to favor a central form, such as a water tower, but concentrating instead on the zone surrounding the tower, finding pattern and substance in areas our eyes tend to regard as secondary, vacant, vague. And all the while viewing everything upside down, sideways, and nauseated. Is it surprising, then, that she would be a trifle contemptuous of Boomer Petway’s practice of tallying cows?

From kindergarten through high school, Ellen Cherry could draw better than anyone in her class. With all respect to Patsy’s boasts, it was a talent inherited from her father, the engineer being a whiz at site sketches and schematic renderings. (What she inherited from her mom, aside from a certain feisty dreaminess, was an animated rump, perfectly round breasts that, Grapefruit Princess or no Grapefruit Princess, were closer to the tangerine end of the citrus scale; a pert nose, a pouty mouth, wide blue eyes, and a tangle of caramel-colored curls that no matter how it was styled, always looked as if it had starred in the first reel of
The Wizard of Oz
. It was hair that did its own stunts.) Every school has its unofficial “school artist,” does it not, and, there, Ellen Cherry was it. Over the years, as the optic ore she mined on her trips to Florida was refined, her art projects became increasingly adventurous and complex. She started to lose her local following. Kids made cruel comments. She didn’t care. She had decided to be a painter.