Skinny Legs and All (60 page)

Detective Shaftoe shot him dead.

The two security guards ran in, guns blazing, just as they had seen it done in the movies. Salome was shot accidentally, Shaftoe more or less on purpose.

Both were critically wounded but, in time, recovered.

Jackie Shaftoe, once he could walk again, retired from the police force and devoted his days to painting, with moderate success. His major influence, he was ever quick to point out, was Ellen Cherry Charles. He never attended another football game nor watched one on TV.

Once she could breathe without the aid of a respirator, the Jewish/Arab girl who called herself “Salome” was whisked by her guardians out of the country, presumably to Lebanon—once known as Phoenicia, an extension of the land of Canaan.

SCATTERED SNOWFLAKES
as large as postage stamps were spinning in the dusk, but the temperature was rather mild, a benefit to Ellen Cherry, who had neglected to don her coat. She did shiver slightly as she passed the Mel Davis Dog Boutique, but it was not due to the weather.
If we’re making everything up
, she wondered,
why are we making up doggy salons?
Sushi bars, she could understand, which was nice, because she and the motley band of ecstatics who tagged along with her must have passed a dozen of them, closed for the Sabbath, the green furnaces of their
wasabi
banked against the night.

As the group neared Lexington Avenue, it became aware that a great many automobiles were blowing their horns. That was unusual for a Sunday evening and had not the “pilgrims” been so blissed-out, some of them might have taken it personally. On Park Avenue, sedate Park, the automotive blare increased, and on Madison, people were yelling from the windows of hotels and cars. Approaching Fifth, Ellen Cherry paused to listen. The others paused behind her. In the distance, a great din could be detected, a singing and cheering and banging sort of din, as if, in a parking lot many blocks away, the Woodstock rock festival was being reenacted. At last, the “pilgrims” had a destination. They crossed Fifth, then Sixth, and turned southward toward the roar, their waitress, Ellen Cherry, leading their advance.

Times Square was in turmoil. There were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, there. A huge noisy surge of humanity clogged every artery, like animated cholesterol, halting vehicular traffic for blocks in all directions. Drivers leaned on their horns, but less in anger or frustration than in joy. As for the multitudes on foot, they whooped like warriors on an ancient rampage, danced, jumped up and down, slapped one another’s palms repeatedly and ritualistically, and raised their index fingers in the air. Grinning boys of many races chugged beer from quart bottles, and intoxicated girls flashed their bare breasts at the mobs, just as they might in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras, in fact, was what it resembled, except for the occasional dancing snowflake and the absence of masks. It was a celebration, a mighty, riotous jubilee—and the dazed group from Isaac & Ishmael’s jumped to the conclusion that what was being celebrated was the end of illusion, the undraping of the Mystery, the genesis of a grand new age.

Even Ellen Cherry, momentarily, thought that the spontaneous outpouring had been unleashed by the Dance of the Seven Veils. Gradually, however, it dawned on her that what was being celebrated, what had whipped the population into exultant frenzy, was New York’s victory in the Super Bowl game.

Symbolically, perhaps, Ellen Cherry swam against the current, fighting her way out of Times Square even as hundreds fought their way in. At one point, her forward progress arrested by a knot of Jersey guys through which she could not slice, she used the delay to scan the front pages of newspapers at a kiosk. A prominently featured article bore a Jerusalem dateline. In its lead paragraph, it reported that a squad of Israeli soldiers had employed a bulldozer to bury alive a half dozen West Bank Arab youths (one as young as eleven) whom they suspected of stoning military vehicles. In the second paragraph, it described how a pair of Palestinians had stabbed to death four innocent Israeli civilians and an American tourist at a sidewalk café in Jerusalem. As the Arabs shoved their long knives into stomachs, hearts, lungs, they had shouted, “God is great! God is great!”

Sickened, she turned, found a seam in the mob, and snaked through. She pushed, and was pushed, back to Fifth Avenue. There, she walked to the north, the crowds growing thinner, the din fainter with each step. By the time that she reached St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she was virtually alone on the sidewalk, although Times Square roared behind her like a distant waterfall of parrots and soup pots, and every other passing motorist had his palm on his horn.

At St. Patrick’s she slackened her pace. Instantly, she saw, or thought she saw, a flash of purple fabric behind a shin-level grate. It so resembled one of Salome’s falling veils that she was convinced that she was hallucinating.
I’ll probably be seeing them everywhere
, she thought.
I’m really in a state
.

Ellen Cherry walked a few yards further, stopping at the place where Turn Around Norman had performed. Deliberately, she planted her feet as precisely as possible on the spot where his feet always stood. She closed her eyes and even tried turning a fraction of an inch to her left, but her slow motion was far too fast.

“Turn Around Norman,” she said aloud. “Where does magic and beauty go when it’s driven from the world?”

At the grate, there was another flicker of purple, but she wasn’t inclined to investigate. She just stood there, a snow stamp pasted to her forehead as if she were about to be mailed to the Yukon, wondering about Turn Around Norman until there was nothing left to wonder. Then, recalling the newspapers that she had seen, she wondered,
Why are we making up a mess like the Middle East?

The dance was over. The veils were all dropped. The cascade of epiphanies had ceased. The inner voice was mute, and that was fine, it had given her more than enough guidance, more than enough understanding, more than enough to figure out for herself. Nevertheless, she believed that she would try to summon it one more time. Standing in Turn Around Norman’s footprints, she squeezed her eyelids and began to hum an approximation of the music that had filled the I & I all afternoon.

Yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh yeeh

Eeena eeena, eh-eh, haj

What about this Middle East business? Why is it making everybody crazy? Why is it so awful? Is it really totally hopeless? I need to know.

For a long while she heard nothing except Super Bowl fallout. It didn’t surprise her. She brushed a snowflake from her nose (Antarctica, twenty-two cents). What could she expect? Ah, but then an answer began to build in her brain, slowly, organically, like bees excreting comb.

Consider the anatomy of the Middle East, said the inner voice. Hasn’t it been called the Fertile Crescent, the primordial uterus from which the human race emerged? Well, look at it today, consider it now. Of all the places on the planet, it is the most feverish, hot, pain-racked, tense, dilated, bloody, traumatized, stretched to the point of ripping. Remind you of something? The “trouble” in the Middle East is nothing but natal contractions. The world is in labor, and the Middle East, quite obviously, is the vagina out of which, if it doesn’t abort, the new order of humanity must be born. The labor is difficult and long, and it may get worse before the vagitus is heard, but don’t despair over the Middle East: something great, something wondrous, something completely unimaginable is there aborning.

Are you putting me on?
asked Ellen Cherry Charles. But then a carload of loudmouths drove by, chanting the score of the Super Bowl game, and she heard nothing further, nor could she generate another pertinent thought.

THE NEXT EVENING,
she flew to Jerusalem. Her mama paid for part of her expenses, Spike Cohen paid the rest. Her benefactors drove her to JFK and saw her off.

On the way home from the airport, in the backseat of a limo, Patsy and Spike fell in love. They later married, settling in Brooklyn Heights, where Patsy took belly dancing lessons and where her white go-go boots finally got the attention they deserved.

The mere thought of it would one day cause Ellen Cherry to lose her lifelong fondness for shoes.

RUSTY METAL CAUGHT
the morning sun like a ruby brooch catching the eye of a burglar. Had Can o’ Beans been human, he/she might have stretched and yawned. It was a new day in Jerusalem, a city that, in one state of disrepair or another, had seen so very many new days; and in a rock pile a couple hundred yards west of the Jaffa Gate, the bean tin, or what remained of it, greeted this morning, as it did every morning, with the rusted-out, inanimate equivalent of a grin.

The Atlantic, from whose waters Conch Shell could not fully shield it, had taken a terrible toll on the can. Oxidation had enveloped it like an orange mitten enveloping a fist, and then disintegration had set in. “I’m just a tired old bum beside a railroad track,” Can o’ Beans told a beloved companion. “A busted, rusted derelict fit for nothing but the two-bit harmonica junkyard blues.” Of course, that lament was fanciful, if not wholly tongue in cheek.

The hope that Israel’s arid climate might extend the tin’s life expectancy for another six months could not alter the fact that it was a goner; encrusted, crushed, cracked, and worn as thin as the whiskers on a billy goat. Still, it was happy with its final resting place. Can o’ Beans, you see, loved, absolutely
adored
, the statue of Pales.

Painted Stick and Conch Shell, who had had little trouble locating each other once they were back on their old stomping grounds, had invited him/her to accompany them to the Dome of the Rock, where now they were in some manner or other unofficially ensconced, awaiting the advent of the Third Temple, in whatever form it might take. Grateful for their offer, Can o’ Beans had nevertheless declined. “I’d just be in the way,” he/she said. “I have nothing to contribute. And the Messiah, should he—or she—or it—decide to put in an appearance, doesn’t need rubbish like me underfoot. Besides, I like it right here in this little plaza. Just look at that statue! How mischievous it is, how lurid and full of life. And it’s androgynous! It’s AC/DC! In regard to gender, that donkey covers the waterfront. This is
my
Temple of Jerusalem.”

The sun climbed higher over the most revered, most bloodied town on earth. The sun felt at home in Jerusalem. The sun had connections there. And though it was a long way from a Safeway shelf, Can o’ Beans felt at home there, too. He/she sat among the rocks, as still as an inanimate object ought to be, enjoying the warmth, admiring Pales, and observing the people who came to photograph or point at Pales, many of them with an air of outrage.

About that time, Can o’ Beans noticed Boomer Petway. He/she noticed Boomer not because he/she remembered him from their Airstream turkey ride—Boomer was in disguise now and hardly could be recognized as the fellow who’d deserted him/her in that cave after so thoroughly and entertainingly partaking of his wife—but, rather, noticed him because of his gait. “Isn’t it odd,” he/she said to his/her nursemaid and companion, “that every morning about this time a different person comes and walks around and around the monument with the same identical limp. Oh, what a marvelously weird place this is!”

Jerusalem didn’t seem so weird to Ellen Cherry. Where she sat in the overgrown garden of the little stone house that Boomer had shared with Amos Zif, the vectors of death cults, past or present, did not reach her. The February sunshine was just strong enough to buzz in her plasma, and the light was almost impossibly clear. From the weedy patio, there spread a field of rosemary and thistle. Honeysuckle wound bureaucratically around the trunks of Persian lilac and wind-bent pine. Birds chirped messages older than prophecy, older than tourism, and even the furry black centipedes that scurried along the crumbling garden wall appeared benign. She sipped her tea, drew on the pages of her mental sketch pad, and absorbed through every pore that she could open, the ancient golden light.

Ellen Cherry was awaiting the return of her husband. Each morning, after they’d had their sex and breakfast, Boomer dug into his spy bag, selected a disguise, and went down to the plaza by the Old City’s Jaffa Gate to ascertain that nobody had bombed, censored, or vandalized his creation during the night.

From the moment of its unveiling, a fortnight prior, the piece had generated an uproar. Much of the adverse reaction was elicited by Pales’ two-for-the-price-of-one frontal nudity, but many also took offense on racial grounds, the figure being both Arabic and Jewish. However, few in government or elsewhere had yet caught on that the prancing donkey-person represented for Arab and Jew a common ancestral deity, because few had been taught that it was for the prince of jackasses, the buck-toothed empress of jennies, that their solemnized and contested land had, appropriately or not, been named. When that information emerged, either Jerusalemites would lighten up or the
falafel
would really hit the fan. In anticipation of the latter, Zif had embarked on an extended tour of France. Boomer wasn’t worried. What could they do to him? He’d been ordered to leave the country in thirty days anyhow, as a result of the shipment of Armageddon paraphernalia that he had received from the late Buddy Winkler.

In spite of everything, Boomer had hopes for the survival of his sculpture, so he ventured out morning after morning to survey its condition. When he came home, he delighted in making love to Ellen Cherry while still wearing the disguise
du jour
. She admitted that that could occasionally be exciting, such as the time that he’d been in drag as a nun, but today he was dressed as a municipal rat catcher, and she knew that she was going to have to draw the line.

Beyond that, the future was uncertain. Doubtlessly, she would leave Jerusalem along with Boomer, although her curiosity about the new dimension of being that was aborning there had hardly been satisfied. They talked about building a house near Seattle somewhere; a roomy, rustic lodge on one of those evergreen hills, if they could find one that the timber companies hadn’t skinned alive. There, with her eye on the ball, she would paint. She’d paint and paint and paint. She would dedicate herself to . . . well, she’d have to call it “beauty,” for want of a better word. She wouldn’t be sentimental about it, or self-righteous, or even spiritual and pure. And she wouldn’t get defensive when ridiculed or misunderstood. Beauty she would not carry like a banner, nor would she take refuge from the world in it like a hermit in a shack. Beauty would just be her everyday thing.