Skinny Legs and All (15 page)

THERE WAS A FAMOUS LANDSCAPE PAINTER,
Russell Chatham, who lived in Livingston, Montana, and Ellen Cherry had hoped to pay him a courtesy call. Under the circumstances, however, she decided against it. No sense slipping another art burr under Boomer’s saddle, especially when she couldn’t make up her mind whether or not she wanted him bucked off. Surely, there were other women in the world who were confused about their feelings for their husbands. Otherwise, there would be no excuse for Burt Reynolds. The question was, were there other women who were confused about their feelings for their husbands after one week of marriage? She concluded that there must be. Probably some women, maybe a lot of women, walked down the aisle asking themselves, “Who
is
that man in the tuxedo? Why is he looking at me like that? How much better do I really want to know him?” At any rate, Ellen Cherry thought it better that she shove art on the back burner until they reached New York. When the subject did arise, later that same day, it was Boomer who brought it up.

Leaving the last snowfall of spring to melt in the Crazies, leaving the famous landscape painter, Russell Chatham, to go through life without ever meeting his colleague, Ellen Cherry Charles, they goosed the turkey northeastward and late in the afternoon crossed the Missouri River. “You know who loved this here Missouri River?” Boomer asked. “You know who lived along it and loved it well?”

Thomas Hart Benton
, thought Ellen Cherry. However, since she didn’t want to mention an artist, she answered, “No, hon, I don’t.”

“The outlaw Jesse James,” said Boomer. “That’s who.” Boomer was quiet for a while, as if the river had taken his tongue and carried it to some faroff place. Then he said, “Jesse James robbed beaucoup banks and near as many trains. He was in shoot-outs, ambushes, what have you, there was a posse big as an army on his tail around the clock, including Christmas. But, you know, ol’ Jesse never got a scratch. One day, though, he turned reckless and went to hang a picture on the wall. He was standing on a chair just hanging and admiring that pretty picture, and Robert Ford snuck up behind him, blew a hole in his skull. So much for art, I reckon.”

The sun peeked through the cottonwoods not long after that, and the roast turkey, stuffed with silence, glimpsed its own reflection swimming in the Missouri River.

"THE PRIESTS SENT FOR THE HIGH PRIESTESS.
’There’s something wrong with your stick,’ they told her. ’It won’t report on that red glow in the sky.’ The high priestess ran a test. ’Nothing’s the matter with the stick,’ she said. ’That glow happens to be man-made.’

“Come midnight, every priest, priestess, rabbi, sage, and counsel in temple service were up on the roof gazing to the north and the east. By then, there were
three
red glows in the sky.

“The despised old prophet, Jeremiah, was trying to get up onto the roof, as well, but every time his smelly gray beard appeared at the top of the steps, someone swung a fist at him and chased him down again. ’It’s the Babylonians!’ Jeremiah kept yelling. ’Yahweh has sent the Babylonians as punishment to you who have desecrated his laws.’

“Jeremiah was at least half right, and everybody knew it. At last, they sent a messenger to awaken the king. Just before dawn, the king ascended to the rooftop. He stood there in a robe of Phoenician purple and watched his outlying fortresses burn. ’Surrender! Surrender!’ old Jeremiah was screaming. ’Surrender and accept Yahweh’s judgment, else Jerusalem be destroyed.’ The king ordered somebody to brain Jeremiah with Mr. Stick, but the high priestess, not willing to risk breaking the instrument, threw her sandal at the prophet, instead.

“For most practical purposes, the Babylonians had been running Judea (that’s southern Israel, remember) for a decade. Much in the way, I suppose, that the Soviet Union ran Poland or Czechoslovakia. Babylon was riding tall under its powerful leader, Nebuchadnezzar. My, oh my, they don’t make names like that anymore. Ronald, George, Gary, Jimmy, just plain Bill: these modern mediocre monikers aren’t fit to shine the shoes of Nebuchadnezzar. John is a label. Nebuchadnezzar is a poem. A monument. A swarm of killer bees let loose in the halls of the alphabet. Anyway, back to the point Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonians had already invaded Jerusalem eleven years earlier, but after looting the Temple, filling their gunny-sacks with some of those ten thousand candlesticks, two hundred thousand trumpets, and forty thousand harps, they withdrew. They informed the city that it could maintain autonomy as long as it behaved. Ha. Fat chance. Proud little Jerusalem grew increasingly defiant, and, now, the dreaded Babylonian war machine was lighting up the suburban sky with some very nonentertaining fireworks.

“Jerusalem was destined to lie under siege for many months, during which time Mr. Stick failed to register a single auspicious omen in the clouds. As hunger, thirst, and disease overtook even the priests and priestesses, our stick finally was forgotten, abandoned on the Temple rooftop where they’d dropped him after one last futile sweep of the sky.”

A SAN ANTONIO TAXI DRIVER
with a degree in ichthyology was spinning green on “Wheel of Fortune,” racking up big bucks in every category, but Buddy Winkler was barely watching. Buddy was reading a book, of all things, a book checked out with no little embarrassment from the Colonial Pines Public Library.

A bible usually lay open in front of him, on the SpaghettiO—spattered Formica or on the upholstered arm of his favorite easy chair (worn so thin that puffs of stuffing periodically launched themselves from it like seeds escaping a milkweed pod). But Buddy didn’t actually read the Bible, not anymore, he consulted it the way that an actor consults a cue card. He needed merely to glimpse the words, “And he opened the bottomless pit and there arose a smoke . . .” to be off and running, blowing long-winded tenor riffs on his favorite subject, the End Days, the horrifying, blood-flooded terminus of history, the deluge of boiling guts that many claimed would wash away all sin and sinners and leave the universe squeaky clean forever.

On that March evening, however, the Reverend Buddy Winkler was reading a book. There was, in fact, on the dinette, a stack of books so tall it could have allowed a cat easy entry into any mockingbird nest in the neighborhood. Only one of those books held Buddy in its spell.

Buddy had sometimes suspected that God Almighty didn’t quite approve of him, had found his service wanting, and had kumquatted him with boils, wired him with toothaches, to demonstrate his displeasure. But now the Lord had spoken to him, had given unto him a mission. Buddy felt vindicated (even if at that very moment there was in the middle of his chin a furuncle the size and temperature of an oven-baked hors d’oeuvre); felt both humble and heroic, and was more than ready to put his martyrish shoulder to the wheel. Trouble was, the Jews wouldn’t cooperate. He had telephoned every rabbi in Richmond and Norfolk (the lone Jew living in Colonial Pines was an army officer stationed at nearby Fort Lee), to no avail. When he explained to them the essence of his mission, they had rudely intimated that he might be a crank. Buddy was as surprised as he was irritated. He thought the Jews wanted to rebuild the Temple. He thought they wanted the Messiah to come. Bloodied but unbowed, he went to the library to pick up some books on Judaism. That’s when his eyes fell upon this other book, the one absorbing his evening.

Entitled
Christian Wives: The Women Behind the Evangelists
, it was written by James Schaffer and Colleen Todd. He didn’t know why he checked out the blamed thing, let alone why he was reading it. When he read that Tammy Faye Bakker, spouse of superpreacher Jim Bakker, kept her husband’s interest up by changing her wigs several times a day, his mouth fell open so wide that that bouchée on his chin gave him a stab of pain. And when he read that Mrs. Bakker kept her marriage exciting by never ever letting the Reverend Bakker see her without makeup, that she routinely wore false eyelashes and earrings to bed, well, he just let “Wheel of Fortune” roll on without him.

“Jezebel business,” he kept saying to himself. “That there’s flatout Jezebel business.” Small wonder, he thought, that Jim Bakker and his associates had fallen from grace. When the most powerful preachers in the land take unto them painted hussies as their lawful wedded wives, then surely the Age of Wickedness is reaching its apogee. Where is the sanctuary that is safe from Satan, Satan in his most insidious form: the Whore of Babylon? Were he, Buddy Winkler, foremost evangelist of the Southern Baptist Voice of the Sparrow Network, were he to take unto him a wife. . . . He caught himself. What was he thinking?

At that instant, there was a rapping at his door. “Damnation!” he swore. “It’s Verlin and Patsy.” If Patsy caught him reading that book . . . ! Frantically, Buddy shoved
Christian Wives
under the sofa. It was not until he was about to unlatch the screen that he realized that there was bulging in his trousers, the oldest story of man, a tome that would slide beneath no furniture, an opus that he could not hide.

"NEBUCHADNEZZAR WAS A PATIENT MAN.
That much he had in common with inanimate objects. Month after month, he strolled along the rampart with which his troops had encircled Jerusalem, his big Babylonian nose in the air. When the stench from inside the walls became intense enough that he could assume half of the inhabitants must be dead, he ordered his men to erect their breaching engines. They met scant resistance as they battered down the vulnerable northern wall.

“Well, when the breach in the wall was accomplished and the boys from Babylon streamed through the narrow streets, our old hand-painted stick, who’d been watching from the Temple roof, prone upon a sheet of sun-warmed gold, did something that, except under the most rare and surreptitious conditions, no object had done since the evolutionary development of human beings on earth, had not done in more than a million years. He got up and ran.

“The reason behind his radical act, I can only guess. Maybe he was just fed up with all that back and forth nonsense, maybe he didn’t see any reason why he had to go down with the ship. It could be there wasn’t any logical reason, or if there was, its origins were in the stars. It wasn’t a piece of cake, I know that. An enormous amount of effort was required to set forces in motion that had lain dormant for so long. Certain subatomic particles had to be coerced to change direction, to orbit paths previously untraveled. Yet, in barely thirty minutes of human subjective time, Mr. Stick was clattering down the steps toward the Temple’s main courtyard.

“Bippity-bopping past the emaciated corpses of priests and priestesses with whom he’d once shared a mutual dependence, he crossed the vestibule and entered the great hall. As luck would have it, Miss Shell, all wrapped up real pretty in purple linen, rested upon a pedestal of white stone at the far end of the hall. Had she been inside the Holy of Holies, he would have been unable to pry open its heavy gold doors and get to her. Miss Shell isn’t going into any detail about this, but somehow Mr. Stick persuaded her to invoke her own powers of mobility and flee with him. He blew in her ear, for all I know.

“Miss Shell put up some initial resistance. Many females do, I’m told. She pointed out that the Babylonians were devout worshippers of Ishtar—the goddess Astarte under another name—and that no sanctified relic of the Great Mother religion should have anything to fear from Babylon. Mr. Stick countered that soldiers are soldiers, from any culture, in any age. Soldiers like to hack and break and rape and burn, and when they are in their invasion frenzy, nothing, living or inanimate, is sacred to them. And anyway, it wasn’t fear that had caused him to bolt. It was . . . something else.

“She joined him.

“Heading southward, away from the advancing invaders and not really caring, in the exhilaration of flight, that a half-starved Jeremiah had witnessed them and begun jumping up and down, they made their way to the Mount of Olives, and from its summit, in the sketchy shadow of a stripped-bare orchard tree, they looked on as the Temple was first plundered, then battered, then torched. Call it King Solomon’s Temple, call it Hiram’s Temple, it must have been one magnificent structure, that First Temple; opulent beyond the wildest Beverly Hills daydream; and the very heart and lungs, hub and corolla, anchor and balloon of the fated nation of Israel. The Babylonians fairly quickly reduced it to cinders. Then they trampled the cinders. Not one stone from it has ever been found.”

"SOME WOMEN HAVE
bedroom eyes,” said Boomer Petway. “My wife has bedroom hair.”

Boomer winked at Ellen Cherry. They were moored in a trailer park in North Dakota. A small crowd had gathered to gawk at the Airstream turkey. Some in the crowd had let their attention be diverted by the largely ceremonial gesture of Ellen Cherry running a comb through her curls. Ellen Cherry sat on the Airstream doorstep, sawing and raking with the comb. The comb was bent nearly double from the strain.

“Before it was captured by the Commies,” Boomer said to a housewife with mousy bangs, “her hair was as straight as yours. KGB tortured it for days, but it wouldn’t tell.”

“Wouldn’t tell
what
?” asked the woman.

“What happened to
your
hair?” asked her twelve-year-old son.

Boomer actually blushed. His bald spot flared like the head of a match. For a moment, it rivaled the setting sun, reflected now by the turkey’s silver fuselage.

Ellen Cherry giggled. “He doesn’t like to talk about his war experiences,” she said. “But I assure you, his hair didn’t spill the beans, either.”

Squeezing past her, Boomer went inside. “Getting chilly out here,” he said.

“His head gets cold,” Ellen Cherry told the boy in a conspiratorial tone. They both laughed, then she followed her husband into the turkey. He was in the galley, rummaging through cupboards.

“What you said about spilling beans gave my stomach ideas,” he said, rummaging.

“If you’re looking for pork and beans, there’s actually some in there,” said she.