Skinny Legs and All Read Free Page B

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