Skinny Legs and All (42 page)

“To get rid of your demon I have to read aloud the Ninety-first Psalm. If that doesn’t do the trick, then I got to blow the shofar, the ram’s horn. The shofar works every time. Oy! Too bad a shofar I don’t have, so I’m bringing a bottle of rum instead.”

“Mr. Cohen, you don’t really think there’s a dybbuk involved. . . .”

He smiled. His teeth were even, and as white as laundry flakes. “No, no,” he said. “Of course not. No self-respecting dybbuk would bother a
shiksa
. But it’s a lovely psalm, and the rum is also nice.”

Spike poured them each three fingers of dark Bacardi. “Now,” he said, sitting down opposite her, “you tell me about this spoon what is going and coming, going and coming.”

As Ellen Cherry was relating the facts of the matter, Spoon, herself, was gathering the courage to peer out from the sheet of dirty newsprint in which she had concealed herself. It happened to be the editorial page of a New York newspaper. The lead editorial defended the stockpiling of poison gas, chemical bombs, and long-range missiles by both sides in the Middle Eastern conflict on the grounds that if the arsenals were equal in size and capability, they would cancel each other out. It went so far as to quote the unforgettable logic of Henry Kissinger: “We have to have more missiles in order to get rid of missiles.” Spoon wasn’t cognizant of the paper’s content. She was too occupied with hiding under it to read it (even if she could read), just as none but the most conscionable human beings ever question the true nature of the institutions that are theoretically protecting them.

Ascertaining that Forty-ninth Street was empty, she squirmed to the top of the trash basket and leaned against its rim. Up and down the street she gazed, wondering in what direction St. Patrick’s lay and at what distance. It was awhile before she realized that she was chanting in the manner of that unspeakable device and his lingerie disciples, except that instead of “Wooga go nami ne,” Spoon was endlessly repeating. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear.” She hushed herself—and then immediately cried, “Oh dear.” What was that coming down the street?

It resembled a wheel, turning so rapidly that it was no more than a rolling blur. As it whirled closer, Spoon could make out that which an organic eye was probably incapable of perceiving: the blur was Painted Stick.

Had the intoxicant vagrancies of the spring night aggravated the stick’s restlessness and lured it, at no slight risk, out of hiding and into the streets? Spoon had been gone for five months, and while in ordinary object time that span was the briefest of moments, neither these objects nor their circumstances were ordinary. It was well known among them that Painted Stick was anxious to strike out for Jerusalem by whatever means. He was contemptuous of this land, America; convinced that not one of its citizens, with the possible exception of Turn Around Norman, was wise enough in the ways of the universe to facilitate his return to Jerusalem. How could they be when they were stupefied by a violent fear of Yahweh and corrupted by a violent love of money? If Conch Shell was more tolerant, more resigned than he, it was the shell, nonetheless, that, in league with the full moon, had influenced his flight from the cathedral.

Conch Shell had spent that third Friday in April—the day that spring tickled New York with the hardest of feathers—lying on her side on the ledge gazing through the grate. Long after Norman had completed his last revolution, she continued to gaze. Or, maybe she wasn’t gazing at all. The conch shell is the bride of Taurus, the sea-bull who surfaces each and every April to water the earth with his translucent semen; she is the bull’s herald, trumpeting his arrival, softening and arousing the land so that it might open up and receive his vital emissions. It’s conceivable, then, that Conch Shell was in direct communication with something in the season that New Yorkers vaguely sensed but couldn’t begin to identify. Certainly, the aura she broadcast was both wider and pinker than Can o’ Beans had seen it in a great while. “Miss Shell seems to be in deep longing,” he/she commented to Dirty Sock. “Poignant reverie.”

“So that’s what they call it at Bean Can College,” said the sock. “Do tell? What do you smarty-pants call what’s bugging our buddy here? If he weren’t a stick his own self, I’d say he had a stick up his butt.”

The sock’s ill-bred diagnosis was accurate to the extent that Painted Stick seemed more rigid than usual. For long periods, he would stand upright, perfectly still, on the basement floor below Conch Shell, looking up at her. That would be followed by equally long periods during which he would march to and fro, like a military commander awaiting news from the front. It went on in that fashion for hours, until, late in the night, or more precisely, early in the morning after the moon had set and human activity had flagged, the stick hopped up on the ledge beside the gastropodous undine and announced that he was going to the sea. Before Conch Shell’s protests could fully form, he was past her, forcing his way through the grate. A tight squeeze, the maneuver cost him a third of his remaining paint. Tiny shavings, colored by hands that had been dead three thousand years, peeled away and joined the soot and grit on the city sidewalk. Painted Stick took no notice, but moved brazenly to the curb and made a fix on the stars. When he was satisfied as to the location of the ocean, he set out for it at once, turning end over end at a speed that he hoped might render him barely visible to the human eye. When he had traveled several blocks without detection, a familiar, exultant power gripped him, and he wondered why he hadn’t attempted this before.

Painted Stick didn’t make it to the sea. The East River got in his way. For more than an hour, he perched on the revetment, about a hundred and fifty yards from Isaac & Ishmael’s, studying the current of the river and the shipping upon it. There would be a harbor downstream, obviously, and the open Atlantic beyond, but how far he couldn’t reckon. Still, it was in reach, and he was determined to lead his group there in the hope that they might stow away on a ship bound for Israel. Those modern vessels passing in the night were massive compared to the Phoenician boat in which he’d been transported to America, although they seemed slower in the water and not nearly as beautiful. The good news was, there would surely be places aboard to hide.

Shortly after four in the morning, the stick, turning like a vertical propeller, began retracing its route. It was only a short way up the street numbered forty-nine when it “heard” the timid, breathy “voice” of the American spoon “calling” its name. Painted Stick didn’t show surprise, he wasn’t the type, but Spoon could discern his excitement by all of the questions that he asked. She had never known him to be this effusive.

“Oh, sir, just help me get back to the cathedral,” she pleaded. “There’ll be plenty time for explanation. Are the others still there? Can o’ Beans?”

Painted Stick sent her on ahead. “You locomote slowly and can be easily intercepted. Just proceed at the supreme limits of your speed, stay in the gutter close to the curb, and know that I shall be guarding your flank.”

Indeed, that is the manner in which they ventured forth: Spoon scuttling along in the gutter between parked cars and the curb, Painted Stick half a block behind, on the sidewalk, whirling rapidly for the invisibility that was in it, but holding his forward progress in check. It seemed a workable system, but they hadn’t gotten far before there was a crisis.

The door of the Mel Davis Dog Boutique flew open, and a man in a T-shirt and jeans ran out. He was laden with dog collars, some studded with diamonds, others with rubies that glowed red under the streetlamp like the hypodermic wounds in his arms. He dashed to the curb as if to meet an accomplice in a vehicle and instantly spotted Spoon scurrying by. Instinctively, he squatted for a closer look, visions of an expensive remote-control toy in his mind. Spoon scuttled on. The burglar sought to pin her down by placing his foot on her. A torn, dirty sneaker was in the process of pressing her to the pavement when Painted Stick whirled up, rammed the fellow forcefully in the groin, then, as he doubled over in pain, poked him in both eyes. He toppled and rolled into the gutter, bejeweled dog collars strewn about him like trinkets about a pharoah’s mummy.

Never before had Painted Stick struck a human being. No other inanimate object, to the best of his knowledge, had, deliberately and of its own volition, struck a man. He felt as if he had committed a grave transgression, had violated fundamental rules of separation and domain, and that there might be dire consequences. What if a precedent had been established? What if he had rent somehow the fabric of universal order? At the same time that he, in dread and guilt, questioned the ethics of his rash deed, he felt empowered by it. He realized now that no person could safely impede his progress were he to lead his comrades to the sea.

It was a troubled but confident stick and a hysterically jittery spoon that continued down East Forty-ninth Street. But though the crossing of Lexington Avenue proved tricky—and nearly calamitous—they reached St. Patrick’s ahead of the dawn.

"Surely he shall deliver thee from the fowler’s snare

and from the deadly pestilence.

He shall cover thee with his feathers,

and under his wings shalt thou find refuge;"

THE NINETY-FIRST PSALM
was dramatic and long, and Spike Cohen read it with quiet majesty. Ellen Cherry found herself thinking of how Buddy Winkler would have hammed it up. By the third verse, however, she had ceased to listen. Maybe it was the rum, maybe it was the hour, but she drifted into an involuntary eye game, optically mixing the patterns and hues of Spike’s clothing—the salad-green V-neck sweater, the violet and white polka-dotted shirt, the plum and olive windowpane plaid suit—until she felt as if she were being pistol-whipped with a kaleidoscope. As she continued to play, she remembered a previous game, the one that her eyes had played with the spoon, and how it had made her aware of another level of reality, a level, a layer that consensual reality veiled. That experience had had the effect of making the world seem larger to her. Yet, simultaneously more private.

In general, this whole business with the spoon had provided her with a secret point of reference outside the everyday order of things. It was like Turn Around Norman had been, only more personal. Spike had spent a quarter hour sweetly assuring her that there was a rational, simple explanation for the spoon’s appearance and disappearance, and that someday that which had seemed mysterious would wax mundane. Now, it occurred to her, in that event, she would feel cheated. Wasn’t there a surplus in life of the boring, the repetitive, the mediocre, and the tame? Shouldn’t she be glad,
grateful
for this intrusion of the unexpected and unexplained? And if she never understood it, why, so much the better. The surprise and shock of the extraordinary, even when embodied in so small a happening as the riddle around the spoon, could be a tonic, a syrup of wahoo, and she found herself wishing a dose—dangerous side effects be damned—for everyone she knew.

"With long life shall I satisfy him

and show him my salvation.”

Finished, Spike looked up from the page to see a grin cross Ellen Cherry’s face like the chicken crossing the road, although the grin more closely resembled the fireman’s red suspenders. “Hoo boy,” he said. “Maybe a dybbuk I’ve chased out of you, after all. Didn’t I tell you it’s a swell psalm?” He emptied his glass of its rum. “And the surrogate shofar what I brought is useful also, ha?”

Ellen Cherry consulted her glass, and giggled.

“So, you relax now, ha? You can be getting some sleep. Dream of beautiful things, except no wandering silverware, okay? What is this spoon, Jewish or something?” Spike got up from his chair, as if to exit. He glanced around the room. “Some other day maybe you can show me these pictures what some
gonif
is stealing into your apartment to monkey with.”

“Okay, maybe someday I will.” She felt a tad guilty that she hadn’t at least shown him the paintings of the spoon, since they apparently were involved in some way with the utensil’s departure. Holding her kimono closed around her, she, too, arose. “Right now, though,” she said, a whoopee cushion of mischief in her tone, “I think I’d rather show you some shoes.”

“Shoes?” Spike asked innocently, as if the subject of footwear was an alien motif.

“Uh-huh. I always wear flats to work, you’ve hardly ever seen my prime-time heels. I mean, hey, I’m no Imelda, but I’ve got three or four pair that could loot the treasury of a Third World country and make the natives say thank you. My hot pink Kenneth Cole ribbon pumps could fleece Manila in an hour.”

Taken unawares, Spike didn’t quite know how to respond. “I recall some red Cassinis what you wore to our reopening,” he said. His tone and manner were meek.

“Right. Those shoes could burn, but they couldn’t pillage. Let me show you a pair that takes no prisoners.” Ellen Cherry knocked back a slug of rum and vanished into her bedroom closet. When she reappeared, she was holding out in front of her, as if they were twin holy grails, a pair of pumps that seemed to have been fashioned from passion fruit and monkey entrails knotted together in posh bows; with cut-out insteps, ribbon ties, and spool heels, wider at the ends than in the middle. “Ta-da,” she said, softly and without emphasis. “Now aren’t these the shoes estrogen would wear if estrogen had feet? I call the color ’neon fox tongue,’ but that’s another story.”

“
Oy
, such a show! Very girly, very—I got friends, to be honest, what would complain these shoes are
ongepotchket:
overdone, garish, a mish-mosh, but me I like them.” Spike stepped back a step or two. “Yah, I think they suit you. They got . . . Hard to tell when you’re just holding them up. Can you . . .” He hesitated, and there was a subtle but discernible increase in the volume and velocity of his breath. “Can you maybe try them on?”