by Tom Robbins
“We must continue now,” the shell said tenderly.
Can o’ Beans roused his/her friends, and soon they were off again, scooting, toddling, and bouncing along through the soul-testing, teeth-chattering forests of the night.
For another three hours, they climbed rocks, scaled logs, challenged shadows, and waded through owl-hoots so raw with enigma they would have sent half of urban America grabbing for the Valium bottle. Then, they paused again. It was obvious that Spoon, Dirty Sock, and Can o’ Beans were exhausted. Painted Stick announced that under the circumstances they would retire early, a good three hours before dawn, and hope to make up for lost time on the following night.
They had stopped in a flat place, upholstered with moss. It was secluded there, in the blackest part of the forest, although moon rays were strewn through the pine boughs like rolls of toilet paper hurled from the upstairs windows of some primeval fraternity house. The castaways from the big turkey (which was parked at that moment under unfiltered moonbeams, many miles to the east) found it an agreeable resort. Quickly, they began to sink into a kind of sleep, each at the base of a separate tree trunk.
“Good night, Miss Spoon. Good night, Mr. Sock.”
“Good night, you two,” said Spoon. “I’ll be mentioning you both in my prayers.”
“Yeah,” mumbled Dirty Sock, who was still disgruntled over the lecture he had received on his slang.
Can o’ Beans wanted to ask Spoon just to whom she thought she was praying, but he yawned instead and let it slide. He didn’t even hear Painted Stick and Conch Shell slip off into the woods in search of a larger clearing, there to communicate with the constellations.
An hour, more or less, had gone by when the bean tin was jolted into consciousness by a horrible screaming.
“Help! Help me! Goddamn! Help me!”
It took a moment for Can o’ Beans to recognize the voice as Dirty Sock’s—and another moment to actually see the silhouette of the monster.
In the fading moonlight, the creature loomed huge and spiky, like a punk haircut mutated and vitalized in a nuclear accident.
“Help! Get this motherfucker off me!”
“Oh dear! What is it?” asked Spoon.
“It’s a porcupine. It’s got hold of Mr. Sock.”
Indeed, it had. The thirty-pound rodent had the sock in its mouth and was greedily chewing the salt out of its fibers, the salt from Boomer Petway’s sweat.
“Let go of me, you evil bastard! Help!”
“Oh, Can o’ Beans, do something! Do something, please!”
With all the clumsy force in its newly heightened mobility, the bean can threw itself against the porcupine’s left front leg. Startled, the animal wobbled for an instant and ceased to chew. It very nearly dropped the sock. Then, having analyzed, in its rodent fashion, the threat presented by its much smaller attacker, it stepped to the side and whacked Can o’ Beans a good one with its tail.
The porcupine was surprised, and even mildly pained, when its quills were repulsed by the metal container. Nevertheless, the whack had sent Can o’ Beans tumbling into the shadows, and the intruder returned to its gnawing.
“Help! Hit it again! Hit it again!”
Upright now, his/her Van Camp’s label scratched and torn by barbs, Can o’ Beans thought it futile to strike again. But he/she had an idea. “Hurry, Miss Spoon. Over here. Lean against this log.”
“Oh, dear.”
It wasn’t a really a log, merely a fallen pine branch, but Spoon leaned against it as instructed. “I’ll try not to hurt you,” said Can o’ Beans, nudging a pebble into her ladle. Then he/she struggled up onto the branch, steadied him/herself, sighted the target, and jumped. Zing! The pebble was catapulted at the porcupine: direct hit! Unfortunately, because Spoon’s ladle was designed to fire nothing of a larger caliber than a candied strawberry (the kind the old bishop loved to gum), the pebble did the porcupine not much more harm than a deerfly. After three or four more missiles were bounced off its quills, however, it grew annoyed and, to the dismay of the bombardiers, lumbered off into the trees, Dirty Sock hanging from its muzzle like . . . like the slipped veil of a copulating harem girl.
“I’ll follow them!” shouted Can o’ Beans. “You yell for Mr. Stick.”
That proved unnecessary. Having heard the commotion, Painted Stick and Conch Shell had interrupted their celestial enterprises and were even then rushing into the little clearing. “What is the trouble here?” asked the shell.
Her soft voice jackhammered with sobs, rubberized with hysteria, Spoon babbled a largely incoherent account of the emergency, but Painted Stick eventually got the picture. He took off in pursuit. Conch Shell and Spoon followed after.
By that time, the porcupine had arrived at the creekbank. It stood there, absentmindedly chewing, too narcotically blissed by the salty delicacy in its chops to invest much effort in either battle or retreat. Can o’ Beans caught up with the animal but had no idea what to do next.
End over end, like a Chinese acrobat, Painted Stick flipped furiously along the forest path. He flipped directly up to the porcupine, striking its nose with a resounding swack. The animal squealed with pain, dropped the sock, and wheeled dizzily around in two complete circles before scrambling up the trunk of the nearest tall conifer.
“Heeelp!” screamed Dirty Sock, from far away, and to his/her horror, Can o’ Beans realized that the porcupine’s thrashing tail had swept the sock into the white waters of the stream.
True, Boomer Petway washed his socks infrequently (aristocrats never have shared the bourgeoisie’s infatuation with personal hygiene), but Dirty Sock had been underwater once or twice. It was preferable to a porcupine’s mouth. He didn’t panic until he realized that the current was carrying him downstream with such speed that he would be back in Idaho by breakfast.
He struggled to surface; the current held him under. He was out of control. Reality whistles a different tune underwater. Time and space are wadded up like old newspaper. There is light underwater, even at night, but it is a far cry from the lights we all know and love.
The light is green and its shine is mean. Shark light. Fecal light. The light by which the Reaper reads his list. The light our antecedents crawled out of the sloughs to get away from. A light filtered through old cabbage brains.
The torrent spit up Dirty Sock long enough for him to yell for aid, then sucked him down again into its rolling green barrel of funless foam monkeys.
This is it, thought the sock. My sock life is over. I’ll turn into muck at the bottom of this cold damn river and never see that seashell pussy again. He would have welcomed the funky confines of Boomer Petway’s dresser drawer. He would have embraced that odd-angled lump of a foot, shielded it from spilled beer and the stray welding spark. Dry-rotting in the cave with that know-it-all bean can would have been better by a damn sight than this.
Hope springs eternal and all that, yet isn’t it a fact that when we give up and quit hoping; genuinely, sincerely quit hoping, things usually change for the better? Zen masters say that when we become convinced that the human situation is hopeless, we approach serenity, the ideal state of mind. Dirty Sock wasn’t exactly Zen, there was just too much polyester in him for that, but he had pretty much resigned himself to a watery grave when the rapids temporarily ran out of gradient. His flaccid, battered form was discharged into a quiet pool, where he swirled for a moment, putting the fear of the polymer gods into a couple of trout, before hooking himself on a driftwood snag.
He tried to call out, but nothing escaped him save a bubble.
It took them more than an hour, bumbling along the creekbank, to locate him. Conch Shell swam out to him and revived him with her pink touch but failed to free him from the snag. She swam back to shore, picked up Painted Stick, and ferried him out to the snag. The stick pried the sock loose, and the two of them rode to safety on board the seashell.
Dirty Sock’s threads had been bruised and, in some cases, broken by porcupine teeth. Worse, he
was sopping wet, far too soaked to walk, and in the predawn chill a brilliant and biting scum of frost was collecting on his fibers.
Rather desperately, they were wondering what to do when Spoon spied a flickering glow off a ways through the trees. Having no better alternative, they made for it, Painted Stick dragging Dirty Sock from his nubs. Within a hundred yards, they came upon a small public campground, where in addition to a teal-colored Volvo sedan and one of those fancy many-zippered tents from the R.E.I. backpackers’ boutique in Seattle, they found a cheerful campfire, snapping and smoking in the prime of its life.
Although the fire had been recently kindled, the campers were nowhere to be seen. From inside the tent, however, there issued a murmur of sleepy voices.
“We’ll have to risk it,” the objects agreed. While Spoon watched the tent, Painted Stick pulled the waterlogged stocking to a flat rock beside the fire and laid it out. It occurred to Can o’ Beans that if he/she were to roll upon Dirty Sock, it would press some of the water out of him and permit him to dry faster. Although the sock was less than charmed by the arrangement, it was too weak to protest. Back and forth rolled the bean can, back and forth, while rivulets webbed the rock and the frost on the synthetic fibers turned slowly to steam.
“But hon-eee,” whined an ostensibly male voice from inside the tent, “I don’t want instant coffee, even if it is cappuccino.”
“Imported. Quite as good as fresh.”
“I want, just this once, coffee boiled in the pot over an open fire.”
“He-man coffee, Dabney?”
“It needn’t have gender.”
“Hemingway coffee?”
“Indeed.”
The woman’s voice was high-pitched, nasal, pinched, as if strained through the eyelets in Jane Austen’s corset. “Hemingway would have caught his limit by now.”
“Before daybreak? Faddle! Hemingway had excellent values. He believed in the good breakfast. In the good stiff coffee.”
“Normally you would pour such coffee down the drain.”
“This isn’t ’normally,’ Heather. This is our adventure.”
“Very well. But if your sense of romantic adventure demands that you drink battery acid . . .”
The man sniffed. His sniff fluttered the wall of the tent. “This is not battery acid material. This is Starbuck’s Colombia-New Guinea blend.”
“It will be industrial waste when you’re through boiling it. By that, I mean if you wish your he-man, fisherman coffee, you are going to have to prepare it yourself.”
“Heath-er,” the man whined. “I built the fire.” Even as he protested, however, he was unzipping the tent’s front flaps.
By rapping her ornate handle against a metal tent stake, Spoon sounded the alarm. Deftly, like a Pamplona bull hooking a drunken tourist, Painted Stick hooked Dirty Sock and began pulling him toward the bushes. Conch Shell pushed from behind. As for Can o’ Beans, he/she had just been rolling off the flattened sock at the instant that the stick jerked it up and away. The sudden yank sent Can o’ Beans rolling right off the rock and into the path of the approaching camper.
“Heather! There’s something out here!”
“Oh, my God!” gasped the woman. Visions of Ted Bundy, of hairy Charlie Manson, stretched in her mind like blood-drenched elastic.
The man forced a deep chuckle. “It’s only animals, dear,” he called. “Some small animals attracted to my fire.”
“They could be rabid,” snapped the woman. Then, abruptly conscious of her hysteria, she added in a steadier tone, “Toss some pebbles at them, dear.”
In teal flannel pajamas, over which he had Velcroed a raspberry nylon parka, the man was having a look around. He was not old, probably between thirty-five and forty, yet he hobbled like a nursing-home lecher in his spanking new Timberland brogans. Although chunky spectacles rode his sharp little nose like the wheels of a chariot overrunning an emaciated fourth-century Christian, he still appeared handicapped by myopia. He had the look of a midlevel academic, perhaps one of those literary moles who compound their pallor in stuffy rooms, stroking the musaceous nuances of E. M. Forster; or else the editor of an urban weekly newspaper that fills its pages with wine-shop and gallery advertisements and earnest evaluation of the anal-retentive sawings of European string quartets. Only a day or two before, that same man had glared at Boomer Petway with such haughty disdain, as the Volvo passed by the giant turkey, that Boomer turned to Ellen Cherry and asked, “Do you think there’s males that suffer from penis envy?”
“Heather,” called the man. His bugged eyes had discovered an artifact in front of the campfire.
“Yes, dear.”
“Did you bring pork and beans?”
“What?”
“Pork and beans.”
Squinting hard, he squatted in the firelight. The Chinese fingers of dawn, slender and opium stained, were massaging the bruised bottom of the sky, and owl-hoots were beginning to be supplanted by benevolent birdsong and what may have been the sound of the night shift punching off duty at the bugworks. On the sidelines of a planetary routine that seldom has failed to inspire the poets—those among them who’d been awake and sober at that hour—the man made as if to pick up Can o’ Beans, then thought better of it and prodded him/her with a length of store-bought kindling.
In the underbrush, Spoon emitted a tiny squeal. “Oh, what can we do?” she asked.
“Do not move,” ordered Painted Stick.
The woman emerged from the tent. She looked remarkably like her husband, down to the flannels and the aquarium-weight eyeglasses. She may have been an inch taller than he, which meant that she still would have had to stand on a peach basket to curry the ears of a Shetland pony. Aggressively as a TV cop, she strode up to the helpless bean tin.
“You’re asking me if I brought pork and beans? Dabney, I shopped for this excursion for over a week—”
“For more than a week.”
“Excuse me. More than a week. Are you aware of the money I spent?”
“So these aren’t our pork and beans?”
“Really, Dabney!” The woman looked as if she had just gotten a whiff of a Calcutta latrine. Then, she softened and smirked. “For breakfast I’m preparing orange crepes. With Cointreau. But not until you’ve had your go at the fish.”
“Agreed.” He positioned a small log on the fire. “I’ll dress and get cracking.” As he crawled into the tent, he called, “Oh, honey. You won’t forget the linen tablecloth?”
“Have I ever?”
Purposefully, the woman snatched up the tin of beans, subjected it to a rather scatological scrutiny, then, with amazing strength, hurled it against a boulder at the edge of the campsite.
The canning process was invented in 1809 by a French confectioner named Nicolas Appert. Oui, the simple proletarian vessel that shepherded our Spam from processing plant to dinner dish emerged in Paris, birthplace of so very much genius, so very much chic. Is it inappropriate, then, that a painter, Andy Warhol, had caused the soup can to be the most recognized image in contemporary art? Is it mere coincidence that the most representative Parisian dance is called the cancan? Or that the famed French film festival is held at a place called Cannes? Yes, of course it is, but no matter: there are more tin cans in the world than there are human beings (a hundred billion new ones are manufactured each year in the U.S. alone), and they trace their beginnings not to some savage simian savanna, as do we, but to the home of Matisse and Baudelaire, of Debussy and Sarah Bernhardt; to the metropole of the muses, the City of Light.
For all of the fizzy artistry that surrounded its birth, however, the can is sturdy, dependable. Incidences of rupture or spoilage are rare. Cans have been opened after five decades to reveal perfectly edible contents, if you fancy potted mutton. If only we could so can our innocence, our sense of wonder, our adolescent libido. Campbell’s Cream of Youth. Swanson’s Spring Chicken.
Early food cans were handmade from tin and sealed with solder. Today, they’re machi
ne-fabricated from pressed steel. The only tin in a modern “tin can” is an internal coating so thin you could read through it. You could read The Tin Drum through it, were you bent in that direction. Tin habitually broadcasts extra electrons, and those superfluous particles create a barrier against acids in the foodstuff that would otherwise corrode the can, slowly weakening it from within, the way political convictions weaken morality and religious convictions weaken the mind.
When Can o’ Beans was dashed against the rock, the impact naturally dented his/her steel cylinder. That would have been problem enough, since a deep dent couldn’t help but impede equilibrium. Alas, it didn’t end there. Because the dent occurred directly over the seam, the seam split. There was an inch-long tear in his/her side, out through which tomato sauce was flowing like blood.
Humming a melody from Prokofiev, the man lugged his fishing tackle, price tags still attached, blithely to the stream. With trepidation, the woman paid a reluctant but necessary visit to the camp-ground privy. As soon as the couple was out of sight, Painted Stick and Conch Shell rushed to rescue Can o’ Beans. First, they turned him/her so that the wound was topside up. That stemmed the flow of sauce. Next, they pushed the can—rolling was out of the question—into the underbrush.
Reconnaissance by Conch Shell turned up a well-concealed but soon to be sunlit rockpile. Painted Stick dragged the sock there; then, with the shell’s assistance, pushed the can there, as well. Painted Stick may have been having second thoughts about his choice of traveling companions. He was a talismanic device, the sanctified awe-detector of a community of ecstatics, not a nursemaid. It was time for an assessment.
Although confused, tired, perhaps in shock, the old purple footsnood was out of danger. The holes in its envelope were minute and manageable. A few hours in direct sunlight would draw out the last of the moisture that plagued it. Cleaner, if none the wiser, the sock would persevere.