Skinny Legs and All (8 page)

The big man shook his big head slowly from side to side. He was quiet for so long one might have imagined that Anne Sullivan, indeed, would have been required to restore his powers of speech. Eventually, he gave his whiskers a sort of snappy tug and asked, “What kind of stuff walking the side of the road?”

“Let’s jest forget it.” Mike summoned the bartender from her jihad on flyspecks, ordered another round of Coors, and offered the opinion that Uncle Sam ought to just wade in and take the oil fields away from the Arabs and be done with it. “Not that I favor the Jews over the Arabs, they’re both lower than the tits on a sow, far as I’m concerned. But we ought to stop the terrorism and take the damn oil.”

Mike really didn’t want to discuss foreign policy, but how could he sit there and tell anybody that his sister had seen a seashell that morning walking alongside a country road? And a fork or a spoon. And a red stick and a sock. A sock, for Christ’s sake! And what looked like a can of beans.

THERE ARE LANDSCAPES
in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour (the wispiest little pasta of cloud can spoil the effect), our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection to space becomes as solid as bone.

Near that raised stitchery on the map where the quilt scraps of Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming are sewn together, Can o’ Beans rested in the twilight, taking in, and being taken in by, an overflowing vault that was not so much sky as space.

It was the end of their first day’s journey but also the beginning of their first night’s journey. Following the events of the morning—the tipsy woman who almost wrecked her pickup truck when she spotted them along the highway, the hunters who fired at them (thinking them rabbits or what?) not long after they moved away from the road and into the countryside—Painted Stick and Conch Shell had decided to take Can o’ Beans’s original advice, which had been to travel by night. Painted Stick was naive even to consider that their band of objects might, with impunity, move across America in broad daylight. Welcome to the modern world, Painted Stick.

Having spent the afternoon hiding in a tiny arroyo, they would soon be under way again, and now Can o’ Beans stood on the gully’s lip, looking past a darkening sky into the dominions of stillness and grace. With a serene, if tinny, shiver, he/she centered him/herself at that spatial crossroads where Intimacy and Elsewhere intersect, and reviewed from a philosophical vantage, the strange situation in which he/she found him/herself.

CONCH SHELL HAD BEEN
first out of the niche. She had dropped in such a manner that she landed on the hard tip of her spire, thereby avoiding any cracking or chipping of her body or lips. For a second, she had stuck there in the cave floor’s soil, balanced upright on her spire. Then, slowly, she had fallen over to rest on the low ridges of her body whorls. She had lain like an odalisque, lounging upon her whorled side, affording an unobstructed and, perhaps, immodest view of her tannish outer lip, her creamy inner lip, and the heavenly pinks of her opening, her aperture.

To Can o’ Beans and Dirty Sock, who had been expecting something scaly and wired, the pink glow of Conch Shell was heavenly indeed. Can o’ Beans thought she might have been the most lovely thing he/she had ever seen. He/she issued a sigh that spun every single bean in his/her sauce. Dirty Sock whistled in the style of a construction worker and called, “Hey now, hey now, foxy lady!” or something like that.

As for Spoon, she registered such a pang of jealousy that it very nearly turned her as green as if she had spent a night in mayonnaise.

The conch shell is the voice of Buddha, the birth-bed of Aphrodite, the horn that drives away all demons and draws lost mariners home from the sea. Colored by the moon, shaped by the primal geometry, it is the original dreamboat, the sacred submarine that carries fertility to its rendezvous with poetry.

Shaped by the primal geometry? No, the conch shell
is
primal geometry. Its perfect logarithmic spiral coils from left to right around an axis of fundamental truth. A house exuded by the dreams of its inhabitant, it is the finest example of the architecture of imagination, the logic of desire.

A calcified womb, a self-propelled nest, the conch shell outlasts its tenant, its builder, to go on alone, reminding the world’s forgetful of their watery sexuality.

Mermaid’s tongue. Milkmaid’s ulcer. Courtesan’s powder box. Ballerina’s musk. With its marvelous pinkness, the glow from Conch Shell’s long, smooth, folded aperture saturated the cave. It was a bonbon pink, a tropical pink; above all, a feminine pink. The tint it cast was that of a vagina blowing bubble gum.

As the three forgotten articles were admiring Conch Shell, and puzzling how she came to be in that dry place, Painted Stick flew out of the nook and gave them each a fright. Conch Shell had dropped as elegantly as a parachutist. Painted Stick, on the other hand, leapt with reckless abandon—so reckless, in fact, that he landed on top of her.

No harm was done her, for he hit her backside, which was as rough as her front was slick. Hardly a puny periwinkle, Conch Shell weighed a full five pounds and measured eleven and a half inches from apex to lip curl. Her spire was spiked in the manner of a mace, and the whorls that ribbed her bulk were thick and tough. It was almost as if she were naked in front, around the pinks and creams of her aperture, yet protected elsewhere by a tan suit of armor that would have made a knight rattle with envy.

Speaking of iron tuxedos, one of the religious billboards passed by the giant turkey had commanded its readers to “Put On the Whole Armor of God.” Boomer and Ellen Cherry failed to guess that it was a motto borrowed from the Crusaders, although Ellen Cherry eventually was to learn that it was the Crusaders, those barbarous European knights, who, in the sweet name of Jesus, had done as much as anyone or anything to lock the Middle East in the lapidary machine of hellfire in which for all these centuries it has been painfully tumbling.

Painted Stick bounced off Conch Shell’s armor plate, then rolled to within several feet of our abandoned trio. “Greetings,” he said, at no loss for breath or words (although, obviously, objects do not, in the animate sense, breathe or speak). “Greetings. I assume from the likes of you that you were not responsible for the great fucking that summoned us from our rest.”

Spoon blushed and Dirty Sock chuckled. “There were humans here,” said Can o’ Beans. “They’ve run away.”

“How unfortunate,” said Painted Stick.

“Why’s that?” asked Dirty Sock, who was rather pleased to be free of Boomer’s twisted foot.

“They would have taken us to where we must be going,” Painted Stick replied.

“Don’t bet on it,” said Dirty Sock.

It turned out that Painted Stick had assumed that Boomer and Ellen Cherry were a priest and priestess of Astarte, from the way they had addressed Jezebel while making love. Painted Stick had had no intentions of walking across America. He thought that he and Conch Shell would be carried to their destination in the arms of the Goddess’s adorers, as had been their experience in former times.

When, on the following morning, against Can o’ Beans’s warnings, Painted Stick had led the group toward the roadway, the can had confided to the seashell, “I’m afraid Mr. Stick is naive.”

“Not naive,” Conch Shell had corrected him. “He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.”

IN HER HYSTERIA,
Mike’s beery sister had described the stick as “red.” Actually, its original coating was a strong, rusty umber, but the passing centuries had sapped the mineral pigment of its oxidic potency, leaving it a flat, dull rose, like a dance hall memory, and so thin that the original wood showed through it like the night sky through a canopy of fishnet. In addition, there were five blue bands—four narrow, one broad—around the stick’s middle, although these, too, were badly faded. Painted Stick’s top end was notched, as if someone had tried to carve little horns there, little bull’s horns. These crescent-shaped nubs once had been gilded, and flecks of gold leaf still clung to them, like spinach to teeth. His length was under a yard, but he was long enough to have been a cane for a blind jockey or a baton for a conductor with an overbearing personality. In circumference, he equaled a mature carrot, although he was not tapered in any direction.

As the World Tree stands, so stands its child, the sanctified stick. Shamans climb it. Maidens dance around it. Men use it for pointing. It points to thunder, to comets, to the migrating herds. Sometimes it points to you.

Once there was a man who carried a stick that he swirled in a stream until a hair clung to it. The direction in which the hair pointed led to satisfaction. But who deserved credit, the hair or the stick?

Stick is the magic penis. When waved, it sows sons and daughters. Stick is also lethal. It cracks a skull nicely.

Guns have been called “magic sticks,” but guns are only half magical: they take life but can’t create it.

If a stick is twirled under proper conditions, it makes fire. If rubbed against another stick, it makes fire. Once a stick is painted, however, it is assigned to other duties.

Sigmund Freud observed children rolling hoops with sticks. Freud made notes in his journal.

T. S. Eliot wrote:

In a deck of cards, there are four suits: diamonds, spades, hearts, and sticks. The card stick was both the rod of the peasant and the wand of the magi. Whip the donkey. Stir the moon.

Like a sword, or a phallus, it feels quite good to hold a stick in your hands. If held correctly, with maximum consciousness (and that is difficult to do), the stick may suddenly flower.

There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.

LATER, WHEN DIRTY SOCK ASKED
Painted Stick what he did, meaning exactly what people mean when they ask at a cocktail party, “What do you do?", Painted Stick answered that he was a navigational instrument.

Although his description of his function was an understatement, a simplification, it wasn’t precisely a lie. Dirty Sock accepted it at face value, and, up to a point, Can o’ Beans did, too. After all, despite his errors of judgment in some areas, it couldn’t be denied that Painted Stick marched them unwaveringly eastward.

Almost as abruptly as they had presented themselves, Conch Shell and Painted Stick had asked to be excused.

“Forgive us if we are rude,” said Conch Shell, “but we have lain in this foreign place for a very long time.”

“And unless the globe has shrunk while we lay in our trance,” added Painted Stick, “we have a very long journey ahead of us.”

“Where is it that you’re headin’?” asked Dirty Sock.

“Why, to the Holy City,” said the stick, as if it had been a silly question.

“That would be the Vatican,” whispered Spoon, who had spent most of her life in the jelly bowl of a strict Catholic household. Ellen Cherry had acquired her at a diocesan rummage sale.

Dirty Sock nodded in agreement, but the can shook its contents,
slosh gurgle
, as if it weren’t so sure.

“Without human assistance,” Painted Stick complained, “we probably shall arrive too late.”

“Oh, you must not worry so,” said the seashell. “I feel in my whorls that we’ve time to spare.” Then, before Can o’ Beans could spit out any of the many questions burning his/her sauce, Conch Shell inquired, in her compassionate manner, about the others’ circumstances and how they happened to be in that desolate den. After they had given their account of the aborted picnic, she asked, “What will happen to you now?”

Spoon and Dirty Sock looked blank, but Can o’ Beans, who had obviously thought about it, replied, “Well, it’s fairly dry in here. That’s to our advantage. But, unless some human stumbles upon us and takes us away . . .”

“Who’d want just one solitary ol’ sock?” asked the soiled one, suddenly morose.

“Unless a peg-legged human stumbles upon us and takes us away, we’ll gradually pay our dues to the elements. Miss Spoon should fare okay. She’ll tarnish, of course, she’ll turn as black as Aretha Franklin, but otherwise, she’ll be healthy and whole.”

“No, I won’t,” said Spoon, with a sob in her voice. “What good is a spoon that nobody eats with? To be eaten with is—is all that I exist for.” Through her tears, her private longings had unintentionally surfaced. The others could sense the extreme sensual pleasure this dainty utensil had enjoyed in the jelly, in the ice cream—and in the mouth; forever being slipped into soft, sweet substances, then licked and sucked affectionately and repeatedly, followed by a bath in warm, bubbly dishwater.

“As for me,” Can o’ Beans went on, “I suppose that as the years go by, my label will peel off, and slowly I’ll rust. Or, my contents could ferment and cause me to burst. But I’m optimistic. Some adventurous lad will find me and carry me off to his hungry scoutmaster.” He/she paused. “Poor Mr. Sock, though. He can only look forward to dry rot and disintegration.”

Conch Shell made as if to comfort the distressed stocking, but Painted Stick stopped her. “We wish you the fortune that we wish for ourselves,” he said, “but we really must depart now. Matters of mighty importance are about to transpire, and our presence is required.”

“At least, we would like to think so,” said Conch Shell. Reluctantly, she followed the wooden relic out of the cave. “Have faith,” she had called back. “We shall petition the elements in your behalf.”

They were alone then, the three of them, really alone. And as silent and useless as Mozart’s inkblots.

Within an hour, the exotic objects had returned.

“Greetings again,” said Conch Shell. “We have come to beseech you . . .”