Skinny Legs and All (3 page)

There was less art in Colonial Pines than there was porn in a Quaker’s parlor. As is sometimes the case, the very absence of cultural stimulation was culturally stimulating. For Ellen Cherry, art was a signpost pointing away from Colonial Pines. It would magic-carpet her out of that community where the single movie theater was a ratty drive-in whose existence was perpetuated solely because of its convenience as a surrogate lovers’ lane.

During her senior year, suffering from a chronic case of what Patsy, as a result of prolonged personal experience, termed “mosquito britches,” Ellen Cherry attended that drive-in’s cinematic exhibitions Friday night after Friday night in the company of Boomer Petway. When she went off to art college the following autumn, she would never see ol’ Boomer again, she was convinced, and that was fine with her. Alas, on her very first night in the freshmen girls’ dorm, there was a commotion at her window toward two in the morning—and in climbed Boomer, a can of Pabst in his fist and a rose in his teeth, having sped to Richmond aboard his brother’s Harley motorcycle and climbed three stories up a treacherous ivy-covered wall. Boomer, you see, was thunderously, dizzily, and—this should be said in his favor—sincerely in love.

“You can’t do this,” blubbered Boomer, as Ellen Cherry attempted to push him back through the window. “You gotta come home. Be with me. After what we been through! We—we signed into that motel as man and wife! You put—you put your
mouth
on me.”

“Shoulda checked the fine print, hon,” whispered Ellen Cherry, trying to assist him back onto the ivy vines as quietly as possible. “That blow job did not come with a lifetime warranty.”

ULTIMATELY, THE ROAST TURKEY
must be regarded as a monument to Boomer’s love.

Look at it now, plump and glossy, floating across Idaho as if it were a mammoth, mutated seed pod. Hear how it backfires as it passes the silver mines, perhaps in tribute to the origin of the knives and forks of splendid sterling that a roast turkey and a roast turkey alone possesses the charisma to draw forth into festivity from dark cupboards.

See how it glides through the potato Fields, familiarly at home among potatoes but with an air of expectation, as if waiting for the flood of gravy.

The roast turkey carries with it, in its chubby hold, a sizable portion of our primitive and pagan luggage.

Primitive and pagan? Us? We of the laser, we of the microchip, we of Union Theological Seminary and
Time
magazine? Of course. At least twice a year, do not millions upon millions of us cybernetic Christians and fax machine Jews participate in a ritual, a highly stylized ceremony that takes place around a large dead bird?

And is not this animal sacrificed, as in days of yore, to catch the attention of a divine spirit, to show gratitude for blessings bestowed, and to petition for blessings coveted?

The turkey, slain, slowly cooked over our gas or electric fires, is the central figure at our holy feast. It is the totem animal that brings our tribe together.

And because it is an awkward, intractable creature, the serving of it establishes and reinforces the tribal hierarchy. There are but two legs, two wings, a certain amount of white meat, a given quantity of dark. Who gets which piece, who, in fact, slices the bird and distributes its limbs and organs, underscores quite emphatically the rank of each member in the gathering.

Consider that the legs of this bird are called “drumsticks,” after the ritual objects employed to extract the music from the most aboriginal and sacred of instruments. Our ancestors kept their drums in public, but the sticks, being more actively magical, usually were stored in places known only to the shaman, the medicine man, the high priest, or the Wise Old Woman. The wing of the fowl gives symbolic flight to the soul, but with the drumstick is evoked the beat of the pulse of the heart of the universe.

Few of us nowadays participate in the actual hunting and killing of the turkey, but almost all of us watch, frequently with deep emotion, the reenactment of those events. We watch it on TV sets immediately before the communal meal. For what are footballs if not metaphorical turkeys, flying up and down a meadow? And what is a touchdown if not a kill, achieved by one or the other of two opposing tribes? To our applause, great young hunters from Alabama or Notre Dame slay the bird. Then, the Wise Old Woman, in the guise of Grandma, calls us to table, where we, pretending to be no longer primitive, systematically rip the bird asunder.

Was Boomer Petway aware of totemic implications when, to impress his beloved, he fabricated an outsize Thanksgiving centerpiece? No, not consciously. If and when the last veil dropped, he might comprehend what he had wrought. For the present, however, he was as ignorant as Can o’ Beans, Spoon, and Dirty Sock were, before Painted Stick and Conch Shell drew their attention to similar affairs.

Nevertheless, it was Boomer who piloted the gobble-stilled butterball across Idaho, who negotiated it through the natural carving knives of the Sawtooth Mountains, who once or twice parked it in wilderness rest stops, causing adjacent flora to assume the appearance of parsley.

RANDOLPH “BOOMER” PETWAY
was a welder by trade. He was seven years older than Ellen Cherry Charles. He was husky, dark, and, in a broad-faced, silly-grinned, thuggish sort of way, handsome. He drank a lot, guffawed a lot, and walked with a moderate limp, a piece of equipment having crushed his anklebone in the welding shop. In spite of the lameness, he boogied to country-rock more flamboyantly than any man in east-central Virginia. Some dance critic, who worked behind the bar in a honky-tonk, said that when Boomer danced he looked like a monkey on roller skates juggling razor blades in a hurricane.

“He’s a complete idiot,” reported Ellen Cherry to Patsy, “but I have to admit he’s a hill of fun.”

In addition to what she considered an unseemly excess of body hair, what displeased Ellen Cherry about Boomer was that he knew zip about art, cared zip about art, and, moreover, discouraged her from pursuing
her
interest in it. (Nevertheless, whenever the young philistines of Colonial Pines fired sarcastic barbs about her “weird” paintings, Boomer threatened to remove the plaque from their gums with his steel-toed workshoes, a promise they were sure he would keep.) He was a high-school dropout.

Suspended for a week for drinking beer in biology lab—and for various instances of insubordination—he went home from school, never to return. The track coach almost wept, almost bribed him to come back. Because by that time Boomer had already broken state records in both the shot put and the discus. Half of the universities on the Atlantic Seaboard had offered him scholarships. He was deemed to be Olympic material.

“Supposin’ I’d devoted the best years of my life to field events,” he said to Ellen Cherry. “After all that trainin’ and sweat and pain and never thinkin’ or dreamin’ ’bout anything else but shot puts, which at the world-class level is the way it’s done, what’d I been fit for in the end but the front of a Wheaties box?”

“So what are you fit for now, darlin’? The side of a Pabst Blue Ribbon can?”

Indeed, Boomer was world-class at pumping aluminum. He guzzled beer—and an almost equally large volume of RC Cola. He gobbled pizza, watermelon, and chocolate doughnuts. With rough delicacy, he guided his torch, pouring its earnings into a hot-rod Camaro that never seemed to run right. He danced and brawled and read espionage novels. Once he bragged that he had read every international thriller ever written, many of them twice. He smoked cheap cigars. He worried his thinning hair. He took secret tango lessons. He courted Ellen Cherry Charles.

That the courtship was encouraged, even aided and abetted, by Verlin and Buddy appeared contradictory on the surface of it, considering Boomer’s rowdy reputation, considering that the older Verlin’s daughter grew, the more strict Verlin became with her. Advised by Buddy, Verlin enforced a conservative dress code for Ellen Cherry. He censored her reading, monitored the television she watched, imposed a curfew, and forbade her to dab herself with the faintest trace of makeup or perfume. Surely, Verlin and Buddy could not have pictured her every Friday night at the Robert E. Lee Drive-in, her panties down around her shins, squirming on one of Boomer’s big shot-putter’s fingers. Or could they?

The Petways were a fine old Virginia family. There were judges and legislators in the clan. Verlin and Buddy had jigged many a bullfrog with Boomer’s daddy. They understood a boy like Boomer. They did not understand Picasso.

“Art school is nothin’ but a waste of your time and my money,” Verlin protested. “It’s flat-out silly. Bud claims art’s Satan’s way of belittlin’ God’s handiwork, and Bud may be on target. I do know it’s silly. Why don’t you go to a decent Christian women’s college and study to be a teacher? Or develop some secretarial skills? Somethin’ to fall back on. Some security. Marry yourself a good provider—”

“Like ol’ Boomer?”

“A woman needs a strong, hard-workin’ man. You wanna end up with some sissy makin’ mudpies in a attic fulla rats?”

Ellen Cherry smiled. She was remembering the rodents that fought over spilled popcorn alongside the steamed-up cars at the Robert E. Lee.

It was only because of Patsy’s militant support that Ellen Cherry was permitted to enroll at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which had one of the top fine-arts departments in the nation. She was happy and successful at VCU. She was excited there. She learned to properly stretch and prime a canvas, to ink a lithography stone. She discovered post-painterly expressionism and Georgia O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe became at once her ideal, her heroine, the subject of a paper for which Ellen Cherry earned her first collegiate A. The eye game of her childhood she played with fresh zeal, finding it increasingly a pitchfork with which to puncture what Melville labeled the “pasteboard mask” of visible reality. She was beginning to comprehend what de Kooning meant when he said, “Whatever I see becomes my shapes and my condition.”

On weekends, she Greyhounded to Colonial Pines—Daddy’s orders—where she continued to date Boomer Petway. Drinking beer and motel-hopping with Boomer provided a relaxing contrast to the intensity of classroom and studio. She had herself a fairly sweet little setup. Until something happened that busted her deal, leaving her with an emotional limp more pronounced than Boomer’s jerky gait.

Among the congregation of Colonial Pines Third Baptist Church, a rumor had been circulating that art students at VCU were forced to draw naked bodies. It was said that men as well as women paraded around totally nude in front of mixed classes of boys and girls. Essentially, the report was correct, except that nobody was “forced” to enroll in life classes and that the male models always posed in jockstraps. At any rate, dissatisfied with the school’s response to their letter of inquiry (Ellen Cherry, in self-defense, had denied the existence of the life classes), the Reverend Buddy Winkler and Verlin Charles decided to find out for themselves.

So dramatically did Bud and Verlin burst into the classroom that many of the students laughed and shouted, “Rambo! Rambo!” But Ellen Cherry wasn’t laughing. Her protests took on a hysterical edge as Verlin pulled her from the room (Buddy Winkler remained to lambast the professor and preach to the thoroughly embarrassed model). Wails, as piercing as meat hooks, as black as swamp water, spiraled from her breast when Verlin commenced to pack her belongings.

Buddy soon joined them in the dormitory. In a frenzy, the two men seized dry washcloths and scrubbed the lipstick, rouge, and eye shadow from her face. So harsh was the scrubbing that it peeled the skin from her cheeks. Like a boiled tomato, her lips split. Her eyelids swelled until it was as though she looked at her room through a blizzard of cinders. She felt as if she were caught in a firestorm and that the purest, smoothest part of her was being pitted.

All the while, as the men scrubbed at her, they uttered one word, over and over.

“Jezebel,” they chanted.

“Jezebel!”

JEZEBEL RODE
with Ellen Cherry and Boomer in the big roast turkey. Wherever Ellen Cherry went, Jezebel went, too. If Georgia O’Keeffe had been her temporary heroine, Jezebel was her eternal double, her familiar, the bright wound she swung in like a hammock, the ceramic skeleton that clacked inside her flesh. From the day of her humiliation at VCU until the present, a tambourine rang in her blood, and while it just as easily could have been Salome’s tambourine, Ellen Cherry identified it as Jezebel’s. As a rule, its ringing was soft, its beat distant: months would pass during which she and her invisible twin did not so much as brush past each other in the hall. No sooner had the turkey entered a colored canyon in southeastern Idaho, however, a place where the sandstone appeared to be painted with lavender eye shadow and pomegranate lip balms, than the latent frankincense of Jezebel filled the turkey like an effluvial stuffing and . . .

But hold on. Jezebel has waited this long, she can wait a little longer. First, we should deal with the turkey itself; its origins, its destination, its raison d’être.

For days following her forced withdrawal from college, Ellen Cherry stayed in her room and cried. Downstairs, Patsy and Verlin quarreled viciously. Verlin called Patsy a strumpet, a mother who influenced her daughter to behave lasciviously. Patsy called Verlin a hypocrite who enjoyed lasciviousness but lacked the backbone to admit it.

“God created my body,” said Patsy. “I’m not ashamed of its nekkidness.”

“Fine,” Verlin said. “Why don’t you get undressed, and I’ll call up all my friends to come paint pictures of you.”

“Your friends couldn’t paint a shithouse wall.”

Patsy charged that she might have become a dancer if it hadn’t been for Verlin. Verlin countered that she ought to fall on her knees and thank him for saving her from disgrace.

At one point Ellen Cherry overheard Verlin say, “She’s been shut up in her room for damn near a week. When’s she gonna come downstairs?”

“Oh, probably when her face heals,” answered Patsy.