Skinny Legs and All Read online

  Exactly how an almost exclusively Caucasian lower-middle-class residential community of nineteen thousand supported itself, how it paid for its green shutters, power mowers, and ubiquitous American flags, is a question fit to occupy a demographer for a useless month or so, but it is not, thankfully, a concern of ours. Suffice for us to establish that Ellen Cherry Charles was born and reared in Colonial Pines, Virginia, that she loathed it from the cradle on, plotting even as a little girl to flee the vapors of unrelieved boredom that she believed were stifling her there. Eventually, and with some difficulty, she did escape. The tentacles of home place are as tenacious as they are stealthy, however, and the fact that she had yet to cut completely free of their coils was attested to by the weekly telephone calls she aimed at the Charles household. She made one on that March day.

  “Hi.”

  “Honey!” exclaimed Patsy. “Good to hear your voice! Listen, I oughtta go pull my robe on ’fore we commence. You caught me nekkid as a jaybird.”

  “’Nekkid’ or ’naked,’ mama?”

  “What’s the blessed difference? Are you making Yankee fun of the way I talk? The way you used to talk?”

  “No, no, mama, let me tell you. Naked means you just don’t have any clothes on. Nekkid means you don’t have any clothes on and you’re fixing to get into trouble.”

  Patsy giggled. “Lord, chile, I’ve already done that.” She lowered her voice to a notch above a whisper. “The fact is, your daddy just had his way with me, as is his custom on a Sunday afternoon. I understand that most of these once-a-weekers do it on Saturday night, but your daddy’s gotta be different in some category, I reckon. I swear, I think it’s Buddy’s sermons get him heated up, just like they do half the good Baptist ladies in this town. Or maybe it’s the football, I don’t know. He does watch the football first.” Patsy stopped and cleared the giggle out of her voice. “Anyways, I shouldn’t be gabbing to you about it. Except you are an ol’ married woman now.”

  “Boomer’s fine, mama.”

  “Good. Where y’all callin’ from?”

  “Some rodeo town. Close to Idaho, I think. A person would believe they’d have nice hamburgers in towns like this, cows practically grazing on Main Street, but I swear the patties have more sawdust in them than they do in Colonial Pines. Boomer’s had two, though, and working on a third.”

  “You watch that boy. Don’t let them pretty muscles go to fat.”

  At that, Ellen Cherry glanced over her shoulder toward the snackbar blacktop where she had last seen her muscular groom. A half-dozen or more men had gathered to gawk at the great turkey, and Boomer was standing in their midst.

  “They still refer to you gentlemen as cowboys?” Boomer asked. He gnawed at a ragged rind of burger bun the way a howling wolf sometimes seems to gnaw at a gibbous moon.

  Apparently, the teenager at whom he’d directed his inquiry was too shy to respond. The young fellow seized the opportunity to examine his boots. Likely need new soles by summer.

  One of the older men, raising his neck, gooselike, up out of his denim, took it upon himself to extend the courtesy of a reply. “How might you think they’d be referring to us?” His voice was slow and deliberate, like a mouse-fattened adder crawling over a rock pile.

  “Oh, I thought that this day and age you maybe would be known as bovine custodial officers.” Boomer chuckled. He snapped at the last of the mustard-lit crust. “I did read somewheres,” he said through a mouthful, “that the most accurate job description of your ol’ wild west cowboy would be ’boorish Victorian agricultural worker.’ Don’t reckon that’s a handle that’d stick.”

  There was a general shuffling of boots.

  “Uh-oh,” said Ellen Cherry.

  “Honey, let me slip a robe on,” said Patsy.

  “Mama, I think we have to go. Right now. Love you. Bye.”

  Perhaps admiration of the cowboy as the quintessential American hero is, indeed, not as universal as it was once. Traveling among the “bovine custodial officers” of Wyoming, Can o’ Beans was to remark that a comparison between the American cowpoke and, say, the Japanese samurai, left the cowboy looking rather shoddy. “Before a samurai went into battle,” Can o’ Beans was to say, “he would burn incense in his helmet so that if his enemy took his head, he would find it pleasant to the nose. Cowboys, on the other hand, hardly ever bathed or changed their crusty clothing. If a samurai’s enemy lost his sword, the samurai gave him his extra one so that the fight might continue in a manner honorable and fair. The cowboy’s specialty was to shoot enemies in the back from behind a bush. Do you begin to see the difference?” Spoon and Dirty Sock would wonder how Can o’ Beans knew so much about samurai. “Oh, I sat on the shelf next to a box of imported rice crackers for over a month,” Can o’ Beans would explain. “One can learn a lot conversing with foreigners.”

  Ah, but we are getting ahead of our story. The immediate news is that Boomer and Ellen Cherry were obliged to depart the rodeo town in a bit of a rush. As a matter of fact, a mob, made mobile by a fleet of Japanese pickup trucks, chased the turkey across the state line and some twenty miles deep into Idaho.

  AFTER THE PHONE WENT DEAD in her hand, Ellen Cherry’s mother, moderately puzzled and freshly laid, wriggled into a robe, poured a cup of coffee, and went out on the sunporch to have a good think. She wished to consider, once again, the possibility that her daughter might have erred in marrying Boomer Petway and that Verlin and his cousin, Buddy Winkler, might have meddled insidiously in Ellen Cherry’s life, not just where Boomer was concerned but generally. She had had her own secret plans for Ellen Cherry, and it vexed her that Verlin might yet succeed in thwarting them.

  If she makes it in New York as an artist, it’s due to me, Patsy thought. She parted her robe slightly so that the late afternoon sunlight might warm her between her legs, where she was leaking a rivulet of the manly fluid in which she sometimes suspected her own artistic life had drowned.

  As a young woman, Patsy had been a cheerleader who yearned to become a dancer. Why, at fifteen she was Grapefruit Princess of Okaloosa County! At seventeen, she met and married Verlin Charles, a navy pilot flying out of Pensacola. Discharged, Verlin moved her to Virginia, where he had resumed his career as a civil engineer. For the rest of her life, when Verlin was at work, Patsy would dance at home alone in cute white boots.

  Ellen Cherry liked to watch her dance, but, to be honest, it wasn’t Patsy’s fancy-stepping that had channeled Ellen Cherry toward art. Rather, it was vertigo. And Colonial Pines.

  Twice each year, the family would drive down to Florida to visit Patsy’s folks. Inevitably, Ellen Cherry got carsick. To keep from vomiting, she had to lie on her back in the rear of the station wagon and look up. As a result, she began to see the world from a different perspective.

  Telephone poles went by like loops. She would register the light from signboards first, then the tops of the signs, then their blurry message: the melting Marlboro man, the expanding slice of pie. Gradually, she experimented. Played what she called her “eye game.” By squinting, and controlling the squint, she could achieve a figure-ground reversal. Figure-ground, ground-figure, back and forth. She could make herself color-blind. For miles, if she wished, the landscape would be nothing but red.

  “How’s Daddy’s girl?” Verlin would ask from the driver’s seat. “Need to pee-pee?” Often, Daddy’s girl failed to reply. Daddy’s girl was busy, sliding her focus to muffle or distort the normal associative effects of object and space, stripping them of common meaning or symbolic function, forcing them to settle in the highly mysterious region that lies between the cornea and the brain—and fooling with them there. The parallel lines of electrical wires, under her dynamic gaze, would tend to overlap, so that they would break their continuity and magnify the open areas between them. This was especially interesting when a flock of blackbirds could be stirred into the optic mixture. Or, she would be looking at the field of vision itself, refusing to favor a central form, such as a water tower,
but concentrating instead on the zone surrounding the tower, finding pattern and substance in areas our eyes tend to regard as secondary, vacant, vague. And all the while viewing everything upside down, sideways, and nauseated. Is it surprising, then, that she would be a trifle contemptuous of Boomer Petway’s practice of tallying cows?

  From kindergarten through high school, Ellen Cherry could draw better than anyone in her class. With all respect to Patsy’s boasts, it was a talent inherited from her father, the engineer being a whiz at site sketches and schematic renderings. (What she inherited from her mom, aside from a certain feisty dreaminess, was an animated rump, perfectly round breasts that, Grapefruit Princess or no Grapefruit Princess, were closer to the tangerine end of the citrus scale; a pert nose, a pouty mouth, wide blue eyes, and a tangle of caramel-colored curls that no matter how it was styled, always looked as if it had starred in the first reel of The Wizard of Oz. It was hair that did its own stunts.) Every school has its unofficial “school artist,” does it not, and, there, Ellen Cherry was it. Over the years, as the optic ore she mined on her trips to Florida was refined, her art projects became increasingly adventurous and complex. She started to lose her local following. Kids made cruel comments. She didn’t care. She had decided to be a painter.

  There was less art in Colonial Pines than there was porn in a Quaker’s parlor. As is sometimes the case, the very absence of cultural stimulation was culturally stimulating. For Ellen Cherry, art was a signpost pointing away from Colonial Pines. It would magic-carpet her out of that community where the single movie theater was a ratty drive-in whose existence was perpetuated solely because of its convenience as a surrogate lovers’ lane.

  During her senior year, suffering from a chronic case of what Patsy, as a result of prolonged personal experience, termed “mosquito britches,” Ellen Cherry attended that drive-in’s cinematic exhibitions Friday night after Friday night in the company of Boomer Petway. When she went off to art college the following autumn, she would never see ol’ Boomer again, she was convinced, and that was fine with her. Alas, on her very first night in the freshmen girls’ dorm, there was a commotion at her window toward two in the morning—and in climbed Boomer, a can of Pabst in his fist and a rose in his teeth, having sped to Richmond aboard his brother’s Harley motorcycle and climbed three stories up a treacherous ivy-covered wall. Boomer, you see, was thunderously, dizzily, and—this should be said in his favor—sincerely in love.

  “You can’t do this,” blubbered Boomer, as Ellen Cherry attempted to push him back through the window. “You gotta come home. Be with me. After what we been through! We—we signed into that motel as man and wife! You put—you put your mouth on me.”

  “Shoulda checked the fine print, hon,” whispered Ellen Cherry, trying to assist him back onto the ivy vines as quietly as possible. “That blow job did not come with a lifetime warranty.”

  ULTIMATELY, THE ROAST TURKEY must be regarded as a monument to Boomer’s love.

  Look at it now, plump and glossy, floating across Idaho as if it were a mammoth, mutated seed pod. Hear how it backfires as it passes the silver mines, perhaps in tribute to the origin of the knives and forks of splendid sterling that a roast turkey and a roast turkey alone possesses the charisma to draw forth into festivity from dark cupboards.

  See how it glides through the potato Fields, familiarly at home among potatoes but with an air of expectation, as if waiting for the flood of gravy.

  The roast turkey carries with it, in its chubby hold, a sizable portion of our primitive and pagan luggage.

  Primitive and pagan? Us? We of the laser, we of the microchip, we of Union Theological Seminary and Time magazine? Of course. At least twice a year, do not millions upon millions of us cybernetic Christians and fax machine Jews participate in a ritual, a highly stylized ceremony that takes place around a large dead bird?

  And is not this animal sacrificed, as in days of yore, to catch the attention of a divine spirit, to show gratitude for blessings bestowed, and to petition for blessings coveted?

  The turkey, slain, slowly cooked over our gas or electric fires, is the central figure at our holy feast. It is the totem animal that brings our tribe together.

  And because it is an awkward, intractable creature, the serving of it establishes and reinforces the tribal hierarchy. There are but two legs, two wings, a certain amount of white meat, a given quantity of dark. Who gets which piece, who, in fact, slices the bird and distributes its limbs and organs, underscores quite emphatically the rank of each member in the gathering.

  Consider that the legs of this bird are called “drumsticks,” after the ritual objects employed to extract the music from the most aboriginal and sacred of instruments. Our ancestors kept their drums in public, but the sticks, being more actively magical, usually were stored in places known only to the shaman, the medicine man, the high priest, or the Wise Old Woman. The wing of the fowl gives symbolic flight to the soul, but with the drumstick is evoked the beat of the pulse of the heart of the universe.

  Few of us nowadays participate in the actual hunting and killing of the turkey, but almost all of us watch, frequently with deep emotion, the reenactment of those events. We watch it on TV sets immediately before the communal meal. For what are footballs if not metaphorical turkeys, flying up and down a meadow? And what is a touchdown if not a kill, achieved by one or the other of two opposing tribes? To our applause, great young hunters from Alabama or Notre Dame slay the bird. Then, the Wise Old Woman, in the guise of Grandma, calls us to table, where we, pretending to be no longer primitive, systematically rip the bird asunder.

  Was Boomer Petway aware of totemic implications when, to impress his beloved, he fabricated an outsize Thanksgiving centerpiece? No, not consciously. If and when the last veil dropped, he might comprehend what he had wrought. For the present, however, he was as ignorant as Can o’ Beans, Spoon, and Dirty Sock were, before Painted Stick and Conch Shell drew their attention to similar affairs.

  Nevertheless, it was Boomer who piloted the gobble-stilled butterball across Idaho, who negotiated it through the natural carving knives of the Sawtooth Mountains, who once or twice parked it in wilderness rest stops, causing adjacent flora to assume the appearance of parsley.

  RANDOLPH “BOOMER” PETWAY was a welder by trade. He was seven years older than Ellen Cherry Charles. He was husky, dark, and, in a broad-faced, silly-grinned, thuggish sort of way, handsome. He drank a lot, guffawed a lot, and walked with a moderate limp, a piece of equipment having crushed his anklebone in the welding shop. In spite of the lameness, he boogied to country-rock more flamboyantly than any man in east-central Virginia. Some dance critic, who worked behind the bar in a honky-tonk, said that when Boomer danced he looked like a monkey on roller skates juggling razor blades in a hurricane.

  “He’s a complete idiot,” reported Ellen Cherry to Patsy, “but I have to admit he’s a hill of fun.”

  In addition to what she considered an unseemly excess of body hair, what displeased Ellen Cherry about Boomer was that he knew zip about art, cared zip about art, and, moreover, discouraged her from pursuing her interest in it. (Nevertheless, whenever the young philistines of Colonial Pines fired sarcastic barbs about her “weird” paintings, Boomer threatened to remove the plaque from their gums with his steel-toed workshoes, a promise they were sure he would keep.) He was a high-school dropout.

  Suspended for a week for drinking beer in biology lab—and for various instances of insubordination—he went home from school, never to return. The track coach almost wept, almost bribed him to come back. Because by that time Boomer had already broken state records in both the shot put and the discus. Half of the universities on the Atlantic Seaboard had offered him scholarships. He was deemed to be Olympic material.

  “Supposin’ I’d devoted the best years of my life to field events,” he said to Ellen Cherry. “After all that trainin’ and sweat and pain and never thinkin’ or dreamin’ ’bout anything else but shot puts, which at the worl
d-class level is the way it’s done, what’d I been fit for in the end but the front of a Wheaties box?”

  “So what are you fit for now, darlin’? The side of a Pabst Blue Ribbon can?”

  Indeed, Boomer was world-class at pumping aluminum. He guzzled beer—and an almost equally large volume of RC Cola. He gobbled pizza, watermelon, and chocolate doughnuts. With rough delicacy, he guided his torch, pouring its earnings into a hot-rod Camaro that never seemed to run right. He danced and brawled and read espionage novels. Once he bragged that he had read every international thriller ever written, many of them twice. He smoked cheap cigars. He worried his thinning hair. He took secret tango lessons. He courted Ellen Cherry Charles.

  That the courtship was encouraged, even aided and abetted, by Verlin and Buddy appeared contradictory on the surface of it, considering Boomer’s rowdy reputation, considering that the older Verlin’s daughter grew, the more strict Verlin became with her. Advised by Buddy, Verlin enforced a conservative dress code for Ellen Cherry. He censored her reading, monitored the television she watched, imposed a curfew, and forbade her to dab herself with the faintest trace of makeup or perfume. Surely, Verlin and Buddy could not have pictured her every Friday night at the Robert E. Lee Drive-in, her panties down around her shins, squirming on one of Boomer’s big shot-putter’s fingers. Or could they?

  The Petways were a fine old Virginia family. There were judges and legislators in the clan. Verlin and Buddy had jigged many a bullfrog with Boomer’s daddy. They understood a boy like Boomer. They did not understand Picasso.

  “Art school is nothin’ but a waste of your time and my money,” Verlin protested. “It’s flat-out silly. Bud claims art’s Satan’s way of belittlin’ God’s handiwork, and Bud may be on target. I do know it’s silly. Why don’t you go to a decent Christian women’s college and study to be a teacher? Or develop some secretarial skills? Somethin’ to fall back on. Some security. Marry yourself a good provider—”