Skinny Legs and All Read Free

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