Skinny Legs and All (7 page)

“As I recall, honey, you’d been wearing that sock for three days.”

“Jesus. You’re right. How offensive! We better haul on outta here.”

Joking aside, they drove quite a distance before they felt comfortable. Even then, they were too flustered to realize that in addition to Boomer’s sweat-caked sock, they had left behind in the cave a fine silver spoon and a can of beans.

FOR APPROXIMATELY A QUARTER HOUR
after the couple fled the cave, the stirring continued in its niche. None but Dirty Sock, Spoon, and Can o’ Beans was privy to it now.

“I’m frightened,” said Spoon.

“Nothin’ in there can hurt us,” said Dirty Sock. The idea of a viper biting an old purple sock struck him as funny. Were there a possibility of a puppy in the niche, he would have been less amused.

“Shhh,” shushed Can o’ Beans. “Hear those sighs. Whatever is waking up in there is waking up slowly because they’ve been asleep a long, long time.”

Can o’ Beans was correct. In fact, nearly two thousand springs had come and gone since that which was awakening was last awake. Obviously, more than a simple vernal equinox was required to interrupt such slumber. What had awakened that which was awakening was the sexual intercourse of Mr. and Mrs. Boomer Petway, combined with the echoing shouts of a familiar and treasured name.

Oh, yes, Jezebel was well known to those that hibernated in the nook. Any questions that Ellen Cherry had concerning the “painted hussy” could have been answered by them in accurate detail.

They could, for example, have supplied the following information:

Except in an entirely secondary manner, Queen Jezebel never worshipped Baal.
Baal
was the ancient Semite word for “lord” or “husband.” The god referred to by the Bible as Baal had divine status primarily because he was husband to Astarte. It was Astarte whom Jezebel worshipped.

Who was Astarte? She was a goddess; rather, she was
the
Goddess, the Great Mother, the Light of the World, the most ancient and widely revered divinity in human history. Shrines to her date back to the Neolithic Period, and there was not one Indo-European culture that failed to remove with its kiss the mud from her sidereal slippers. In comparison, “God,” as we moderns call Yahweh (often misspelled “Jehovah") was a Yahny-come-lately who would never approach her enormous popularity. She was the mother of God, as indeed, she was mother of all. As beloved as she was for her life-giving and nurturing qualities, the only activities of hers acceptable to the patriarchs, she was mistress over destruction as well as creation, representing, according to one scholar, “the abyss that is the source and the end, the ground of all being.”

In Jezebel’s native Phoenicia, the Goddess’s name was Astarte. In Babylon, she was Ishtar; in India, Kali, in Greece, Demeter (immature aspect: Aphrodite). If Saxon was your indigenous tongue, you would address her as Ostara; if Nordic, you’d say Freya; if Egyptian, Isis—or Nut or Hathor or Neith. Oh, the Goddess had many names, and many roles. She was virgin, bride, mother, prostitute, witch, and hanging judge, all swirled into one. She had more phases than the moon. She knew the dark side of the moon like the palm of her hand. She shopped there.

Because the Goddess was changeable and playful, because she looked upon natural chaos as lovingly as she did natural order, because her warm feminine intuition was often at odds with cool masculine reason, because the uterine magic of her daughters had since the dawn of consciousness overshadowed the penis power of her sons, resentful priests of a tribe of nomadic Hebrews led a coup against her some four thousand years ago—and most of what we know as Western civilization is the result. Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman’s superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.

In Jezebel’s time, a full millennium after the patriarchal revolt, Yahweh had managed to establish no more than a precarious foothold. Today, each and every ejaculation, each and every earthquake or harvest moon may remind the deep male unconscious of the Goddess’s continued presence, but in the ninth century
B.C.
, she was openly worshipped in the lands surrounding Israel, and covertly in Israel itself. Small wonder, then, that when King Ahab’s Phoenician bride started building shrines to Astarte, and when the Israelites started flocking to those shrines—the populace apparently favored Astarte’s voluptuous indulgence over Yahweh’s rigid asceticism—the patriarchs reacted violently against her. Interestingly enough, one of the crimes charged to Jezebel, according to the historian Josephus, was the planting of trees. Since the Goddess always has been honored in sacred groves, it is understandable that patriarchs, then as now, leaned toward deforestation.

Incidentally, Astarte’s Hebrew appellation—Ashtoreth—is mentioned in the Bible only thrice. In carefully patriarchalized incarnations, the Goddess does appear in Scripture as Eve and the Virgin Mary (the one a wily temptress, the other an asensual, passive vehicle); John refers to her as the whore of Babylon, identified with the fornicating “Beast” whom the innocent, nonorgasmic “Lamb” will defeat in the battle that climaxes history. But the mouthpieces of patriarchy were far too freaked out by her, by her openness, her variability, her magic and carnality, to so much as write down her name. Thus, they substituted her husband, her
baal
, realizing, too, that only to a male divinity could the alleged sacrifice of babies be convincingly attributed.

Lest it be misconstrued here that those that stretched and yawned in the underground niche had some historic ax to grind, it should be established that they were . . . well, agents of reality, not scholars or proselytizers, and hardly would have bothered, even were they able, to reel off names of goddesses as if announcing the lineup of a soccer team. Yet, while they undoubtedly would have been less loquacious about it, they would willingly have revealed to Ellen Cherry the true character of Jezebel’s transgressions. To wit: her misdeed was her devotion to Astarte. Because that devotion was contagious (being an instinctive human reflex), because it weakened the grip of the Yahweh cult, she was slandered, framed, and finally murdered.

When the moment arrived, Jezebel was thoroughly aware that she was to be assassinated. She put up her ergot-black hair, donned her tiara, rouged her cheeks and lips, applied kohl to the lids of her huge Phoenician eyes, and went to face her killer with the style, dignity, and grace befitting a reigning queen. So much for painted hussies.

The dog-sucked bones of Jezebel may be the skeleton that bangs its knobs in the closet of our race.

Why wasn’t Ellen Cherry aware of all this? Why wasn’t the mass of humankind aware of it? Because veils of ignorance, disinformation, and illusion separate us from that which is imperative to our understanding of our evolutionary journey, shield us from the Mystery that is central to being.

The first of those veils conceals the repression of the Goddess, masks the sexual face of the planet, drapes the ancient foundation stone of erotic terror that props up modern man’s religion.

But, listen now. If Painted Stick and Conch Shell are permitted to leave the cave where they’ve been sleeping—and what stands in their path but a spoon, a smelly old sock, and a can of beans?—Salome might dance in the Temple again. And if nobody stops Salome from dancing, that first veil may one day soon be dropping.

"WHY IS IT,"
Boomer asked, “that beer goes to your head faster in the daytime than it does after dark?"

The man to whom he had addressed the question tugged at his scraggly beard, nodded, said nothing.

“It’s a fact,” Boomer went on. “I can drink triple after sundown what I can hold in the afternoon. You notice that, too?”

Ellen Cherry was in a Speedy Wash doing their laundry. From now on, she insisted, Boomer would go forth into the world attired in the freshest, most sanitary footwear that detergent and hot water could provide. Should ever she break that vow, he would have only to remind her of the sock he’d left in the cave the previous day, the one whose foulness was offending, they half-kiddingly suspected, some chthonian spirit creature whose hospitality they had violated after it stood guard over their marvelous fuck. While she watched the stockings and underwear flap and churn, dive and surface in the suds, directing her eye game through the porthole in the washer door, Boomer had repaired to a tavern across the street.

“It’s a common phenomenon,” Boomer said, “but I’ve never heard it explained on the education channel or anywheres. How ’bout you?”

There were only three people at the bar: Boomer, the man to his left, and the man to
his
left. Boomer’s neighbor was large and seedy looking, shirted in wrinkled plaid flannel that gave the impression it had been repeatedly run over by farm machinery. His beard might have endured an identical ordeal. He nodded at Boomer but did not speak. His pal, obscured from Boomer’s view by the first man’s bulk, stared straight ahead. The bartender, an elderly woman, was at the far end, assiduously polishing, inspecting, and repolishing cheap glassware, as if the Queen of England and her entourage were due by any moment for a round of brews. From its lonesome perch, an unwatched TV set flicked frizzy pictures of a soap-opera character weeping for her boyfriend who had been dispatched to help keep peace in the Middle East. The girl on the show was wondering why the Arabs and the Jews couldn’t learn to live in harmony.

Boomer, like most Americans, had wondered about that himself once or twice. Today he was wondering about something else. “Must have something to do with light. The alcohol refracts the sunlight somehow, causing a reaction in the brain. Bang! Right behind the eyes.”

Still the big man was reticent. Boomer leaned toward him.

“Of course, the effect might be different up here in the Rockies for all I know. Altitude. I understand that peacocks can’t squawk above five thousand feet. Altitude makes ’em mute as doorknobs. I’m assuming that doorknobs are mute. They’re widely acknowledged to be deaf. Regular little Helen Kellers.” Boomer flashed an understanding grin. “Say, maybe that’s
your
problem.” Placing his mouth close to the fellow’s ear, he screamed, “Annie Sullivan calling!", confident that the man would recognize the name of the therapist who taught Ms. Keller to speak.

With one slow but unavoidable paw, the man flung Boomer from the bar stool. As he struggled to right himself, brushing spilled beer from the palm fronds on his aloha shirt, Boomer exclaimed, “If God didn’t prefer for us to drink at night, he wouldn’t have made neon! Am I right or wrong? And that is
not
a rhetorical question.”

They exchanged grazing blows, grappled, clinched, and fell to the floor, Boomer on the bottom. Boomer had just linked his fingers around the man’s arboreal throat—which had yet to produce a peep—and was commencing to squeeze when Ellen Cherry marched in, swatted them both with her loaded laundry bag, and pulled them apart. The third man slipped off his stool as if inclined to interfere, but a newly washed pink lace brassiere tumbled, A cup over A cup, from the laundry bag and landed at his shoes. He backed away from it like a vampire from a garlic bulb.

Ellen Cherry retrieved her undergarment, assisted the combatants to their feet, and pushed Boomer toward the exit. “Gentlemen, I apologize,” she said. “My husband is a complete idiot.” They nodded. “But you’ve got to admit, he’s a hill of fun.”

As the couple was backing out the door, the big man at last broke his silence. In a hoarse whisper, he croaked, “I kicked your ass.”

Boomer whirled, shaking an angry fist at his opponent. “You never kicked nothin’, Dumbo! You use steroids! You’ve been disqualified!”

With a yank that could have ripped the beak off a toucan, Ellen Cherry snatched him into the street. A full foot of snow remained in the village gutters. When they saw the blaze in Ellen Cherry’s face, each little compressed crystal in the drift whimpered with anxiety. “Where, oh where, will we be come August?” they cried in unison.

Ellen Cherry had a question of her own. “Goddamn it, Boomer!” she swore. “Are you going to be pulling these stunts in New York City?”

Inside the tavern, normalcy returned. On television, a jilted lover was sobbing; on the jukebox, a jilted lover was crooning; on a beer glass, a flyspeck was disintegrating; on the ceiling, a Marlboro cumulus was gathering; on wire racks, beef jerky was moldering, and on bar stools, the two patrons were frescoing their tonsils with the Bavarian brush. They drank as one.

“You know,” said the smaller man, rimming his Coors can with an index finger, “that asshole was right.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Brew treats you different in the day than it does at night.”

“Maybe some people.”

“Makes you sleepy. Makes you see stuff.”

Habitually, the big man’s laugh so resembled choking that he couldn’t watch “Hee Haw” in public without some stranger trying the Heimlich maneuver on him. When his derisive chortle had finally humped its way through the mucilaginous layers that webbed his throat, he added, “See stuff,” as if repeating his friend’s remark was enough to refute it.

“My sister called me this morning. Now, I’ve knowed her to put down near as many brewskies as me and you. And you’d need a damn Breathalyzer machine to know she hadn’t been sipping Bosco. I’m talking night drinking. Well, this morning, about noon, she called from way over near Pocatello, where they been living. She’d had a couple already. And she seen stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“You know. Things.”

“There’s things all around us, Mike. Every damn place you look, there’s things. Things on that fool’s shirt whose ass I kicked. Whud your sis see—things from outer space?”

“They was regular things, ordinary little usual things. You’re missing the damn point. It was morning, and she’d had, the most, four beers, and she was driving along and thought she saw this stuff walking the side of the road. That’s all.”