Tom Robbins

Skinny Legs & All

The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed

—FRANZ KAFKA

It's the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine).

—R.E.M.

Contents

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. It's 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 wolfmother's blood roses that vibrated there?

Enough of this wild fox barking. You pulled up in the forest Cadillac, the vehicle you claimed you'd 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 history's tragic glitter, where Delilah practiced for her beautician's 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 turkey's aura of goofy vulnerability.

Despite its feetlessness, however, its pathetic podalic privation, this roast turkey—or jumbo facsimile thereof—was 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 groom's 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 she'd 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 K mart.

~

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren't 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 Cherry's 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 warming 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 letters—maybe it was a neon sign. In any case, there's 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 didn't blink or scratch his head or ask for details, Saint John didn't 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 preacher's 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 preacher's voice, never stopping to consider that it might have been hot pus that fueled its grand combustion.

"What the Almighty Father told John was this: that when the Jews return to their homeland—yea! when the Jew is once again at home in the land of Is-ra-el—the end of the world is at hand!"

The preacher paused. He gazed at the congregation with his starving eyes. Verlin Charles was later to say, "Sometimes when he looks down at us like that, I feel like he wants to eat the flower right outen my buttonhole." "Uh-huh," his wife, Patsy, replied. "Makes me feel like he wants to chew the elastic outta my underpants." Verlin Charles did not appreciate Patsy Charles's interpretation of the preacher's voracious stare, and he told her so.

Off to the left of the altar, a radio engineer raised three fingers. The Reverend Buddy Winkler caught the gesture out of the comer of his eye, immediately thereupon aborting the penetrating scrutiny of his flock and returning to the microphone.

"When the Jew has returned to his homeland, the end of the world is at hand! That is the sign God gave unto us. Why? I want to ask you somethin'. Do you think God just threw out that crumb of information offhand like it was gossip, like it was an interestin' item outen the Reader's Digest! Or did God have a purpose in the showing of this sign to John? Did God have a reason in ordering John to write down this prophecy in his Book of Revelation? Are we intended to act somehow upon this message?"

The engineer raised two fingers. Buddy Winkler nodded and quickened the tempo. Blowing Charlie Parker style, blowing a swift freight of harmonic rhetoric, blowing his sax-voice at about fifty-eight bars per minute, blowing alto now—his usual tenor abandoned at the gates of syncopation—the preacher swung into a dazzling diatribe against Semite and anti-Semite alike: instructed his brethren (with a sputter of grace notes) to turn their attention to Jerusalem, the city of their eternal fate; bade them prepare themselves for physical entry into Jerusalem, where they that were righteous among them were to accept their promised rewards; reminded them that on the following Sunday he would describe to them what conditions they might expect to encounter in the New Jerusalem; and further reminded them that next week's sermon, as each of the sermons in this series concerning the Rapidly Approaching End, would be broadcast over the Southern Baptist Voice of the Sparrow Network, of which WCPV was the local affiliate. He then stitched on a reedy coda of prayer, timing an "amen" to perfectly coincide with the wag of the engineer's single digit.

Sequins of spittle were scattered along his smile as he accepted compliments at the door.

"Powerful sermon, Reverend Winkler."

"God bless you, Roy."

"Reverend Winkler, you are just eloquence itself. You move me, you stir me up inside, you—"

"It's the Lord that speaks through me, Miz Packett." He squeezed her hand. "The Lord does the movin'."

"Right nice, Bud. Frogs are out."

"Don't know if I'll have time for any jiggin' this spring, Verlin."

"You got other frogs to jig, right, Bud?"

His boils waxed a deeper red. "Patsy now."

"As in 'other fish to fry.'"

"Patsy." He said her name laboriously, as if he were coaxing a lone low note from his saxophone bell. It was both censure and plea. Patsy grinned and left him to his flock.

Verlin and Patsy Charles walked to their Buick Regal in the parking lot.

"You hadn't ought to mess with him here, Patsy. In God's house ..."

"He was out on the steps."

"... on the Sabbath."

"Bud's Bud, on Sunday or the Fourth of July."

"How about on Judgment Day?"

"We'll see soon enough, I reckon," said Patsy, and Verlin, safely behind the lilac hedge, smiled.

"You know," Verlin said, as he stopped to admire a new Ford pickup that he knew to belong to an acquaintance, "the end of the world is not gonna be coming right away. You know why? Because the fact is, there're more Jews in New York City than in the entire country of Is-ra-el." He tried to pronounce it the way his cousin Buddy did, but Verlin's voice was more kazoo than saxophone.

"So, you wanna deport 'em?"

"No skin off my pecker if New York's more Jewish than Jerusalem. I'm not ready for Armageddon. I got bills to pay."

"You got a daughter fixin' to live in New York City."

A tremendous frown wadded up Verlin's face. It was a pink face, occupied neither on its west bank nor its east by a single whisker. Verlin was one of those men who seemed to shave internally. His build was rangy, as was his kin's, the preacher's, but his face was round, smooth, satiated (which is not quite the same as "content"), and it smelled perpetually of mildewed washrag, no matter what quantities of Old Spice aftershave were tossed at it. "You would have to remind me," he said.

"Millions of people live in New York. It must not be that bad."

"Perverts. Puerto Ricans. Muggers. Terrorists. Whatta ya call 'em: bag ladies."

"Terrorists in New York? Honey, New York is located in the U.S.A., for your information."

"They will have 'em if they don't already. Jews attract terrorism like shit attracts flies. Always have."

"I swear, you sound like Bud. The Jews didn't walk off some boat last Tuesday. New York's been full of Jews since I don't know how long. And they've been returned to Israel since back in the nineteen-forties sometime. I don't know why you two are all of a sudden so worked up about Jews."

"Oh, must be the Middle East on the news." He sighed. "Seems like any more that's all there is."

"Besides, Boomer'll take care of Ellen Cherry. You said so yourself."

"Once upon a time I said it. Not anymore. That damn contraption he drove out to pick her up in! I think she's finally made him as kooky as she is." Verlin spat. "Artists!"

As the couple walked up to their Buick, two mockingbirds flew away from its grill, one of them tweeting in a little-known dialect of the goldfinch, the other mixing a catbird cry with a raspy chord borrowed from a woodpecker. For centuries, mockingbirds had hunted live insects and foraged for seeds, but when motorcars began to appear in numbers on southern roads, they learned that they could dine more easily by simply picking dead bugs off the radiators of parked autos. Mockingbirds. Turning modern technology to their idiosyncratic advantage. Inventing new tricks to subsidize their expression. Artists!

~

Before static finally fried it to a crisp, a portion of the Reverend Buddy Winkler's Sunday sermon had crackled out of the roast turkey's radio. "Uncle Buddy," sneered Ellen Cherry. Although he was, in fact, what is called by southerners a mere "shirttail relation," she had called him "uncle" since she was a tot. "Ol' Uncle Buddy's gone nationwide."

Boomer was perfectly aware of that. In recent years he had been closer to her father's family than she. Boomer didn't appear to notice when she switched the Motorola to a news broadcast. ("In the Arab quarter of Jerusalem today, Israeli soldiers fired into a group of. . .") Boomer appeared to be counting cows. The cows that were stuck like gnats to the fly strip of the horizon. When he counted up to a certain number, he smiled. Thought Ellen Cherry, I will probably never really know how many little faraway cows it takes to make my husband smile.

Strange, but in country such as this—dry, bare, and wide; country given to forage crops, flat rocks, and sidewinders—Buddy Winkler's apocalyptic rant acquired a certain credibility. West of the Cascade Range, back around Seattle, where they had begun their journey, trees were so thick, so robust and tall, that they oozed green gas, sported mossy mustaches, and yelled "Timber, yourself!" at lumberjacks. Those chill forests, quietly throbbing with ancient vitality, seemed to refute the firmest eschatological convictions. Here, however, trees were wizened, drab, and thinly distributed. The road, clear and straight, uncoiled ahead of the turkey, recoiled behind, locking its passengers in a drowsy, lifeless rhythm from which the granulated yellow-brown layer cake to either side afforded scant relief. Distant cow-specks, raisins in the receding frosting, outnumbered pussy willows; and, indeed, the imprint of the hoof was on everything.

In country such as this, Ellen Cherry always rather expected the golden clock to go off. The clock with the alarm that sounded like firestorms and flügelhorns. Followed by the voice of Orson Welles reading from The Book of the Dead. "It'd be just like the world to end," she said, "when we're out here in the boondocks miles from a telephone."

Boomer didn't respond. His attention was fixed on an approaching cattle truck. As it drew nearer, the truck slowed and began to weave. It nearly sideswiped them in passing. The driver was hanging his head out the window in disbelief. Boomer swerved and honked the horn.

"Ignorant cowboy," muttered Boomer. "Nearly took a drumstick off."

~

Colonial Pines was a suburb without an urb. At a distance of twenty-two miles, it was too far from Richmond to truly function as an appendage thereof, yet it lacked the autonomy of a separate city. It boasted no industry to speak of, and while excellent tomatoes were grown in abundance in its immediate vicinity, it certainly couldn't be characterized as a farming community. Oddly enough, it had no downtown. What passed for a business district in Colonial Pines was a four-lane highway that, despite the turnpike that nowadays allowed traffic to skirt the place, still carried thousands of Yankee tourists to Florida and back. As it passed through Colonial Pines, that highway, three miles of it, was lined cheek to jowl with motels, service stations, and restaurants—although restaurant might be too dignified a word for the barbecue pits, ice cream stands, truck stops, and so-called "family" inns (whose blank, almost totalitarian cuisine could be trusted never to excite or confuse a repressed taste bud with flavors novel or bold). Presumably, inhabitants of this quasi-town earned their income from the Strip, as it was known (comparing it to the Las Vegas Strip would be akin to comparing Marie Osmond to Mae West), though we may also presume that they benefited from the proceeds of their traffic court: the reputation of the Colonial Pines speed trap stretched from Boston to Miami.

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 medic...