Tom Robbins - Skinny Legs and All

Its the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).

R.E.M.

For Alexa dAvalon and Ginny Ruffner and their pink shoes.

PRELUDE

THIS IS THE ROOM of the wolfmother wallpaper. The toadstool motel you once thought a mere folk tale, a corny, obsolete, rural invention.

This is the room where your wisest ancestor was born, be you Christian, Arab, or Jew. The linoleum underfoot is sacred linoleum. Please remove your shoes. Quite recently, the linoleum here was restored to its original luster with the aid of a wax made from hornet fat. It scuffs easily. So never mind if there are holes in your socks.

This is the room where your music was invented. Notice the cracked drumhead spiked to the wall, spiked to the wolfmother wallpaper above the corner sink where the wayward wife washed out her silk underpants, inspecting them in the blue seepage from the No Vacancy neon that flickered suspiciously out in the thin lizard dawn.

What room is this? This is the room where the antler carved the pumpkin. This is the room where the gutter pipes drank the moonlight. This is the room where moss gradually silenced the treasure, rubies being the last to go. Transmissions from insect antennae were monitored in this room. Its amazing how often their broadcasts referred to the stars.

A clue: this is the room where the Painted Stick was buried, where the Conch Shell lay wrapped in its adoring papyrus. Lovers, like serpents, shed their old skin in this clay room. Now do you remember the wallpaper? The language of the wallpaper? The wolfmothers blood roses that vibrated there?

Enough of this wild fox barking. You pulled up in the forest Cadillac, the vehicle you claimed youd forgotten how to drive. You parked between the swimming pool and the row of blackened skulls. Of course, you know what room this is.

This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with historys tragic glitter, where Delilah practiced for her beauticians license, the room in which Salome dropped the seventh veil while dancing the dance of ultimate cognition, skinny legs and all.

The First Veil

IT WAS A BRIGHT, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey.

The turkey lay upon its back, as roast turkeys will; submissive, agreeable, volunteering its breast to the carving blade, its roly-poly legs cocked in a stiff but jaunty position, as if it might summon the gumption to spring forward onto its feet, but, of course, it had no feet, which made the suggestion seem both empty and ridiculous, and only added to the turkeys aura of goofy vulnerability.

Despite its feetlessness, however, its pathetic podalic privation, this roast turkeyor jumbo facsimile thereofwas moving down the highway at sixty-five miles an hour, traveling faster, farther on its back than many aspiring actresses.

The turkey, gleaming in the callow March sunlight, had been a wedding present from the groom to the bride, although the title remained in the grooms name and he was never, in fact, to relinquish ownership. Actually, it was the fashioning of the turkey, the phenomenon of its existence, that was his gift to the bride. More important, it was the manifestation of the turkey, the squealy, swoony surprise of the creation of the turkey, that had precipitated the marriage: the groom, Boomer Petway, had used the turkey to trick the bride, Ellen Cherry Charles, into marrying him. At least, that was what Ellen Cherry was thinking at that moment, less than a week after the wedding, thinking, as she watched the turkey suck the thawing countryside into its windshield and blow it out its rearview mirror, that shed been tricked. Less than a week after the wedding, that probably was not an excellent indicator of impending decades of marital bliss.

Some marriages are made in heaven, Ellen Cherry thought. Mine was made in Hong Kong. By the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at Kmart.

MOCKINGBIRDS ARE THE TRUE ARTISTS of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although theyre born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds arent content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

And so it was that in the dogwood branches and lilac bushes on the grounds of the Third Baptist Church of Colonial Pines, mockingbirds were producing art, were making a joyful noise unto the Lord, while inside the building, a Georgian rectangle of powdery brick and prissy white trim, several hundred freshly scrubbed, well-fed human beings concerned themselves not with creation but destruction. Ultimate destruction.

In east-central Virginia, where Colonial Pines was located, spring was quicker on its feet than it was out in the Far West, through which Boomer and Ellen Cherrys roast turkey was transporting them ever eastward. Pussy willows had already come and gone in Virginia, and sickly faced dogwood blossoms, like constipated elves, strained to take their places. From underground silos, jonquil bulbs fired round after round of butter-tipped stalks, all sorts of buds were swelling and popping, birds (not just mockingbirds) strung ropes of birdsong from treetop to fence post, bees and other insects were waking to the unfamiliar alarm of their own faint buzz; all around, the warning natural world was in the process of rebirth and renewal, almost as if to deliberately cast some doubt upon the accuracy of the sermon being concluded at that moment in the church.

God gave us this sign, said the preacher from his oak veneer podium. The Lord gave us a sign! A sign! It was a warning, if you will. A word to the wise. He gave his children a big easy-to-read sign, words in tall black letters, maybe golden lettersmaybe it was a neon sign. In any case, theres no mistakin its message. The Lord shoved this sign before the countenance of his beloved disciple, John, and John, being a righteous man, John bein a wise man, John didnt blink or scratch his head or ask for details, Saint John didnt call up a lawyer on the phone and ask for a legal interpretation, no, John read this sign and copied it down and passed it on to mankind. To you and I.

The preachers voice was reminiscent of a saxophone. Not the cool, laconic sax of Lester Young, but the full, lush, volatile sound of, say, Charlie Barnet. There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness. His pockmarked face was lean and hungry looking, a beat face poisoned by boils and the runoff from rotting teeth. Yet the voice that rolled out from that face, from underneath the boyish shock of damp, black hair, the voice was fecund and round and gloomily romantic. Females in the congregation, especially, were touched by the preachers voice, never stopping to consider that it might have been hot pus that fueled its grand combustion.