Skinny Legs and All (24 page)

“Another way in which he’s like the church, I guess. I hadn’t thought of it till now.”

Buddy’s hidden saxophone emitted a soft indigo honk. “Girl, I’d warn you that God Almighty’s goin’ to strike you dead, exceptin’ I been warnin’ your mama that for years, and he in his infinite mercy has so far seen fit to withhold his lightnin’.”

“You’d be sorry if Patsy got zapped. You and half the men in Colonial Pines.”

Now Buddy placed both hands on her shoulders. He got as close to her face as her hair would allow. “You know ’bout your mama’s flirtations?” he whispered.

“I knew about them back when I was seeing elves in my pablum. But that’s in the past, I reckon, and I don’t want to gab about the past.”

“Me neither. Let’s us gab ’bout the present.”

“Uncle Buddy, I don’t have time to gab.” Anxiously, she surveyed the failing light. Another five minutes and Turn Around Norman would be history. Or, more accurately, geology. “But next time we run into each other, you can explain to me why you object to peace in the Middle East.”

“I’ll explain right now.”

“No. Please.”

“I’ll explain here and now. If you’d been readin’ your Scripture, you’d have knowed the answer. It’s not God’s plan for there to be peace in the Middle East. Not yet, it ain’t. First, we’ll be witness to an impressive scene. Yea, I say unto you . . .”

Oh, shit
, she thought. The sax was out of its case.

“. . . the awfulness of the impending judgment will be unequaled on the earth! The Holy Land, your so-called Middle East, is prophesied to be the scene of the ultimate world war. Combatants will be lured to the area by demons sent by Satan to assemble the armies of the world to challenge the armies of heaven. Up and down the Holy Land, they’ll battle. On the very day of the return of Christ, there’ll be house-to-house fighting in Jerusalem itself, the homes ransacked and the women raped. Zechariah, fourteen, two.”

“Bud, really . . .”

“This is to be the last war, darlin’. The wicked will be destroyed once and for all, whereupon the righteous will dwell with Christ in the New Jerusalem for—”

“Bud!”

“Come on now, let me answer your question. It’s not a matter of us Christians not wantin’ peace, it’s a matter of the time not bein’ ripe for peace. First, our Messiah must return. Then, the fightin’ in the Holy Land must begin in earnest. These bleedin’ hearts who’re clamoring for peace in the Middle East understand not what they do. They’re uninformed troublemakers, interferin’ with—and slowin’ down—the natural chain of events that’ll fulfill God’s promise and make the world sweet as pie for eternity.”

Turn Around Norman was about to break his concentration. Ellen Cherry recognized the signs: a fluttering of his girlish lashes, a relaxing of the origami creases in his forehead. Still, she was unable to refrain from blurting, “Is that why you picket and bomb Isaac and Ishmael’s? Because their concern for brotherhood and love is screwing up some alleged timetable for destruction?”

“Hush, now. We might picket, my associates and me might, but we don’t bomb. You and Boomer and the damn Yankee
po
-lice are jumpin’ to conclusions.” He flashed his gold teeth, teeth anxious to sink into afterlife pie. “That café is small fry. Small fry. When the Third Temple Platoon throws our dynamite, it’ll hit a right more important target than that grubby little restaurant, I promise you.”

“Oh? And what target would that be?”

“Hush. I’ve said too much already. But lemme set you straight on somethin’. The Arab and the Jew that runs that peacenik greasy spoon, it’s their own people that wants it shut down the most. Their own kind.”

Ellen Cherry had to admit that that seemed the case. “But why?” she asked.

“Because they are not real Arabs and Jews, them two. They are not religious! That Arab, Hadee, he’s well-known as an infidel, a livin’ insult to the teachings of Islam. They wouldn’t let him touch Mecca with a ten-foot pole. And that ol’ Jewboy, Cohen, when was the last time he set foot in a synagogue? He sports a Yid accent that’d curdle a bowl of schmaltz, but I understand that in private he can spout English as pretty as you or me. How can they pass themselves off as representatives of their people when neither one of ’em subscribes to the deepest beliefs of their people?”

“They’re kind, decent, compassionate—”

“Kind and decent got nothin’ to do with it! In the End Times, there’re to be many false prophets and false religions. You, little lady, your false religion is art. Verlin, I often suspect, his religion is football. He ain’t alone in that one, lemme tell you. Patsy’s religion I don’t want to speculate on. But the most insidious and dangerous of false religions is secular humanism. It’s so crafty, so sneaky, with its kindness and its decency, that only Satan hisself could’ve come up with it. Well, that’s precisely what them two old peaceniks practice, and that’s precisely why they’re so offensive to the truly devout, includin’ the Moslems and the Jews. I told Boomer and I’m tellin’ you, I want you to pull outta that heathen café, git back in holy matrimony where you belong, ’cause
I
can’t be responsible for your safety there.”

EARLY RELIGIONS WERE LIKE MUDDY PONDS
with lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Then, hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim.

The Reverend Buddy Winkler was correct about Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee: they did not glide in numb circles inside a glass box of religion. In fact, they, Spike and Abu, wouldn’t hesitate to directly attribute the success of their relationship to their lack of formal religion. Were either of them actively religious, it would have been impossible for them to be partners or pals. Dogma and tradition would have overruled any natural instinct for brotherhood.

It was as if Spike and Abu had been granted a sneak preview behind the veil, a glimpse in which it was revealed that organized religion was a major obstacle to peace and understanding. If so, it was a gradual revelation, for it unfolded slowly and separately, a barely conscious outgrowth of each man’s devotion to humanity and rejection of doctrine.

At best, perhaps when the fourth veil does slip aside, Spike and Abu will be better prepared than most to withstand the shock of this tough truth: religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

Of course, religion’s omnipresent defenders are swift to point out the
comfort
it provides for the sick, the weary, and the disappointed. Yes, true enough. But the Deity does not dawdle in the comfort zone! If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the “comfort” of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.

A longing for the Divine is intrinsic in
Homo sapiens
. (For all we know, it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well.) We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence.

Well and good. But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks “synagogues” or “churches” or “mosques.”

After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about
soul
anymore. Instead, they talked about
spirit
. Soul is hot and heavy. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached. Soul is connected to the earth and its waters. Spirit is connected to the sky and its gases. Out of the gases springs fire. Firepower. It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner or later to war. “War is hell.” Thus, religious belief propels us straight to hell. History unwaveringly supports this view. (Each modern religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, and its adherents have been quite willing to die—or kill—to support its presumptuous claims.)

Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged “mystics.” They were regarded as mavericks, exotic and inferior. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination. The fearful flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical.

Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is,
mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization
. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.

Those who witness the dropping of the fourth veil might see clearly what Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee dimly suspected: that not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.

AS NIGHT BUTTONED
the spires of St. Patrick’s in its blouse, Buddy Winkler gave Ellen Cherry a hard, nervous hug. “I’ll be prayin’ for you, doll baby,” he called, hurrying off to a meeting with some of his Jews. “And I’ll be in touch. You git yourself straightened out, you heah?"

She waved meekly. When she turned back in the direction of downtown, Turn Around Norman was gone. He was slow to rotate, fast to fly. She hadn’t even had an opportunity to throw a donation in his box.

Well, she’d be sure to return the following day.
Tomorrow, I’ll slip him a twenty
, she thought. Extravagant, maybe, but she felt a responsibility to encourage him. After all, he was one of a kind—and as far as she could tell, there was no one else who so much as acknowledged his existence.

As far as she could tell. The fact was, there had been five pairs of eyes on Turn Around Norman all day. Perhaps “eyes” was not quite the right word. From a grate over a shaft that led into the basement of the cathedral, Turn Around Norman’s performance had been watched at length and with interest by an odd quintet of inanimate objects, hiding there in the cellar.

There was a voluptuous seashell watching Turn Around Norman. There was a decorated stick. There was a little silver spoon, a man’s frazzled stocking, and a battered lump of tin from which hung scraps of paper that once had proclaimed the lump to be a can of pork and beans.

ONCE UPON A TIME,
the wolfmother went to market and picked out wallpaper. It was patterned in spirals and molecular chains. It was bordered with electrons and well-gnawed bones. The wolfmother licked the tip of the salesman’s shoelace and turned it into jade. That was her down payment.

Once upon a time, a painted stick and a conch shell arrived in New York City. The shell was warm, heavy, and wet, like the earth, the sea. The stick pointed at the sky. On its tip, it balanced configurations of gases. Although they had traveled long and far, the painted stick and the conch shell were not welcome in New York City. Accustomed to the protection of holy places, they hid in the cellar of a midtown cathedral. It was just a place to rest while they figured out a way to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, they were compelled to remark on how much its ambiance might have been improved by the right kind of wallpaper.

THERE WERE TWO MORE BOMB
scares at the I & I that week. Both occurred during dinner, so Ellen Cherry was not directly affected. The publicity reached her, though. Coming or going, she had to wade through the cameras of the curious. Like a reclusive movie actress, she donned a scarf and dark glasses, and studied her walking feet as if she had a research grant from the Stubbed Toe Foundation. Her fear was that she would encounter Buddy on the picket line. Or that he would recognize her in a media picture. Family trouble was the worst kind. Some families ran their own little versions of the Middle East. Come to think of it, what was the Middle Eastern situation but a family squabble that had gotten out of hand?
Isaac
v.
Ishmael
.

Her parents phoned her at work. “I’m busy,” she lied. The only customers in the most famous restaurant in New York were two tables of Japanese tourists, drinking green Egyptian beer and giggling uncontrollably at the
baba ghanoug
.

“How many eating places in New York City? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? More? Your mama says ’more.’ And you gotta hook up with the only blessed one that’s—”

“Relax, Daddy, the worst is over. There’re not going to be any further explosions.”

Indeed, the week passed without violence, and as a result, onlookers thinned out considerably, another example of the teeny-weeniness of the metropolitan attention span. But there was an explosion. It happened in the safety of Ellen Cherry’s own apartment, and while it had been expected, still, it nearly blew her into backward somersaults. The “bomb” was an invitation to Boomer Petway’s one-man show at the Ultima Sommervell Gallery.

THE DAY THEY ARRIVED
in New York, they had aimed the Airstream directly for Seventy-third and Broadway, where a one-bedroom apartment awaited them in the orchidaceous Ansonia Hotel. They were subletting from a sculptor who had moved to Florence for three years and who, in turn, was subletting from the new curator of contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum, a man who admired Ellen Cherry’s talent. This curator also had provided a letter of introduction to the prominent dealer, Ultima Sommervell.