Skinny Legs and All Read Free Page A

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