by Tom Robbins
What to do? Dirty Sock did nothing. He lay the entire morning as if in a stupor, soaking up sun like a wage slave on the first day of a cut-rate Hawaiian vacation. Can o’ Beans was equally silent and still. Never leaving his/her side, Spoon repeatedly smoothed the can’s bedraggled paper jacket, as if mending its tatters with the compulsive caresses of her ladle. Conch Shell cast her pink net of oceanic compassion over the lot of them, not that it did them much good, while Painted Stick, anxious to keep an appointment in far Jerusalem, paced to and fro, his little “horns” twitching like feelers. What to do?
The scene was glum, and boring, too. By midafternoon, Can o’ Beans had had enough. “I realize that I’ll probably have to be left behind,” he/she announced. “I can accept that. It’s the breaks of the game, that’s all. But I can’t let you get away, Miss Shell, Mr. Stick, without at least telling me why I was going to where I’m not going. I’ve been just bursting, no joke intended, ha-ha, to learn the purpose of this marathon to Jerusalem, and now. . . . What’s your background? What’s your mission? What am I missing? Leave me in the night but please don’t leave me in the dark.”
Perhaps they, too, needed a diversion, something to take their minds off the trouble and delay. At any rate, Conch Shell and Painted Stick settled in the disorder of broken rock (it was as if the mountain god had come home drunk and thrown his clothes on the floor) beside the disabled bean can and addressed its curiosity.
“As previously mentioned, we come originally from Phoenicia, a great trading center beside the mild blue sea. Phoenicia was blessed with hills and harbors; a land of lighthouses, cedar groves, and purple dust on the olive fruit. It was divided into two kingdoms, the city-states of Sidon and Tyre—”
“You might be interested in knowing,” Can o’ Beans interrupted, “that those two cities still exist. They’re in a country that’s called Lebanon nowadays.”
Spoon regarded Can o’ Beans adoringly, as if once more overwhelmed by his/her intelligence.
“Most fucked-up country on earth,” mumbled Dirty Sock. “Pardon my French.” He hadn’t moved a thread. Nobody realized that he’d been listening.
“A long civil war’s been raging there,” Can o’ Beans explained. “Moslems fighting Jews, as usual, but also Moslems fighting Christians. And Moslems fighting Moslems. Everybody fighting everybody, including themselves. It’s crazy. Murderous and crazy.”
“That is sometimes the way it is with human beings,” Conch Shell said.
“Absolutely,” agreed Can o’ Beans. “But human beings in your neck of the woods seem to have a special gift for it. I’m curious about why that is.”
“Well, the Jews were the first to deny the Goddess,” said Conch Shell.
“And Islam is merely an offshoot of Judaism?” ventured Can o’ Beans.
Was Conch Shell implying that it was her goddess who had put a curse—the curse, the legendary curse—on the Jews? And, by extension, on the whole Middle East? Was there, indeed, a curse at all, or was it simply a desperate (at times, violent) clinging to narrow, rigid belief systems that had brought so much suffering to the region, to the race? Could it be coincidence, a mere accident of geography and history? Or was there yet a different reason for the travail: something fabulous, unexamined, unthinkable, even; some circumstance hidden from human knowledge as if by a . . . a veil?
Phantom swimmers, greased with speculation, took a few bright strokes through the waters of the bean can’s intellect, but in its present condition it failed to provide adequate buoyancy, and they rapidly sank into the deep unconscious. When the ripples had subsided, Can o’ Beans said, “I regret to inform you that Sidon and Tyre have shrunk in size and importance. They’re just backwater burgs these days. But you’re not returning to your place of natural origin, anyway. You aren’t going to Lebanon, which used to be Phoenicia, you’re going to—”
“We are returning to the Holy City for the opening of the Third Temple,” said Painted Stick. It was practically the only relevant remark he was to make all afternoon. For Painted Stick, this period of exegesis proved merely an excuse to comment upon the galaxies, which he described as if they were inkwells into which he, like a busy pen, must be regularly dipped.
“Sounds like an event you’ve been looking forward to.”
“Much of the world has been looking forward to it,” said Conch Shell.
“How come?”
“Oh, sir/ma’am, don’t you know?” blurted Spoon, amazed that there might be a gap in Can o’ Beans’s erudition. “When the Third Temple is built, it will mean that the Second Coming is here.”
Can o’ Beans shrugged. “Third Temple. Second Coming. Who’s on first?”
“Christians associate the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem with the second appearance on earth of their deity, Jesus Christ,” explained Conch Shell. “Jews associate it with the first appearance of their long-awaited Messiah, if that is what you intended. In either case, it is supposed to mean the end of the world as we know it.”
“What if the Christ and the Messiah come, and they’re two different guys?” asked Can o’ Beans. “Would they debate on television? Would they lead their faithful off to two different rewards; separate, restricted heavens? And would Jesus, a pious Jew, really run with the Gentiles? Would there be a war between saviors that would ’save’ the world by ending it? You look at the Middle East right now, look at Northern Ireland, at India with its Hindus and Sikhs; it would seem that most of the bloodshed in the world is the result of religious squabbling. Maybe that’s why I’m cynical about religion.”
“You are?” asked Spoon, incredulously. “Why, in your condition . . .”
“It’s blasphemy now, is it?” mumbled Dirty Sock.
“Things do not always turn out exactly as humans expect them to,” Conch Shell reminded them.
Painted Stick added something amazing and irrelevant about the moons of Saturn.
“You’re quite correct,” said Can o’ Beans. He/she meant that Conch Shell was correct about people’s expectations. The remarks of Spoon and Dirty Sock he/she dismissed as misplaced anthropomorphism, and whether or not Painted Stick was correct was anybody’s guess. “Jesus, after all, has been away two thousand years. In all that time, he must have changed. As for the Messiah, he’s rather a pig in a poke.”
Conch Shell laughed. It was a high, musical, merry laugh, like the singing of field mice going forth to gather grain in a land where the hawks are all vegetarians. “Your attitude is probably healthy,” said she. “The Third Temple could turn out to be associated with . . . with something quite different.”
“Do you and Mr. Stick know what that is?” The can expected to get an earful of the Goddess.
“Considering the past, we certainly think we do. Yet when it comes to final fruit, we may be in for as much a surprise as anybody else.”
“But it will be a big deal, this new Temple over there in Jerusalem town?”
“We have every reason to expect it to be.”
“And you and Mr. Stick—inanimate objects—will have a part in it?”
“We hope so,” said Conch Shell. “We were promised that we would. Is it not time that inanimate objects—and plants and animals—resume their rightful place in the affairs of the world? How long can humankind continue to slight these integral pieces of the whole reality?”
A shiver ran along the container’s broken seam. It was excited by the implications of that notion, though despite its vantage point as an inanimate object, it did not fully understand them. Had it fully understood them, then for it, at least, for that injured can of pork ’n’ beans, the second veil already would have fallen.
The Third Veil
ELLEN CHERRY AND BOOMER were trying to decide how to celebrate their anniversary. They had been married one week. Although she would have preferred to spend the evening sketching—try as she might, she couldn’t think of a single attribute of wedlock that measured up to the bliss of a penciled line snaking across the Eden of a
blank sheet of paper—Ellen Cherry suggested that they go dancing. Now Boomer Petway was a dancing fool, but it so happened that the lone floor open for public dancing on a March Wednesday in Livingston, Montana, was an “international” disco that had recently supplanted the country-and-western bar in the Grizzly Bear Hotel. Livingston’s famed literary crowd would be there, the couple was assured, as well as every aspiring jet-setter in that part of rural Montana, rising and falling in the glitz spill of chrome and neon like the studiously posed figures in a baroque masterpiece.
“No way, José,” said Boomer. “When I turned thirty, I broke off diplomatic relations with the Pepsi generation. Any hip young people want to communicate with me, they have to go through the Swiss.”
That attitude doesn’t bode well for our art-scene life in New York, thought Ellen Cherry. But then, what did? “As I recall, honey boy, your relations with ranchers and farmers aren’t in any détente mode, either, so I guess it’s just as well there’s not an ounce of excrement being kicked on the dance floors of this burg tonight. It’s getting harder and harder to figure out your foreign policy.”
“I’m nonaligned.”
“But hardly nonaggressive.” She touched her hair. It was familiarly stiff and convoluted, and that seemed to calm her. She wound a finger in a taffy coil, then pulled free and felt it spring. “What would you like to do this evening?”
Boomer was of the opinion that it would be piercingly romantic to go to a drive-in picture show. There they could relive, within certain parameters, their youthful nights at the Robert E. Lee. As it turned out, the Yellowstone Drive-in had come out of winter mothballs that very week, kicking off the new season with a blockbuster science-fiction triple feature:
2001: A Space Odyssey
2010: The Year We make Contact
2020: So Who Need Glasses?
They had to pay for four parking spaces. The roast turkey took up two spaces lengthwise, and one more on either side was blocked by its drumsticks. “Hang the expense!” shouted Boomer. “Nothing’s too good for my juicy bride.”
Lowering her eyes, Ellen Cherry turned to the ticket seller. “Of one week,” she said meekly.
“Of one whole week!” thundered Boomer. “How ’bout a tub of popcorn, darlin’?”
“You’re going to spoil me.”
Since they had legal and physical access to four speakers, they used them all, receiving the cartoony assault of the snack bar commercial quadrophonically. They also cranked up the Airstream’s heating system, for, with the setting of the sun, an icy blue wind had come yowling out of Canada and into the drive-in picture show. The wind filled every available parking space but listened only to itself.
Since he had legal and physical access to what was inside them, Ellen Cherry removed her panties, to save Boomer the trouble, but after kissing her once or twice, he repaired to the Dometic eight-cubit-foot, AC/DC refrigerator, ostensibly for beer, only to surprise her by returning with a reasonably good bottle of French champagne. “The wine steward says this here is the perfect complement to buttered popcorn.”
“There’s hope for you yet,” she said. She herself could not determine whether that flicker of hope caused her cheer or concern. “Happy anniversary.” Beneath her skirt, where the panties had come and gone, where there was nothing but hair and nakedness, beneath her skirt (she was a southern woman, still, and refused to go about in jeans or trousers), Ellen Cherry crossed and uncrossed, crossed and uncrossed, her fingers.
"I WONDER WHERE THEY ARE NOW?" Verlin Charles had a folding map of the United States of America spread out on the coffee table before him. Verlin was looking at the states, which is to say, he was looking at the little variously colored shapes into which the larger shape, the shape representing the nation, was irregularly divided. Verlin’s concept of “where they are now” was relative to the state shapes, nothing more, nothing less. People tended to regard those shapes, those comparatively brand-new, arbitrary, political subdivisions as if they were natural facts, ancient and inviolable; as if they were end products of evolution ("No, children, Texas did not evolve from Rhode Island, Texas and Rhode Island evolved from a common ancestor"), or, supposing the people were Bible Belt creationists, as if God had made the states, had sat down at his big cumulous desk with his big titanium pen in his big creative fist and said in his big boom-boom voice, “I think I’ll make Louisiana look like a Frankenstein boot.” Either way, people got very attached to the imagined physical reality of those states.
Because the map was printed on a flat surface, only four colors were required to separate each and every state shape from its neighbors. On a sphere, a globe, four colors likewise sufficed. Had the map been printed on a torus—a doughnut shape—seven colors would have been needed to allow for the state-shape distinctions. There are, of course, additional reasons why one seldom encounters a map of the United States on one’s doughnut.
“I wonder where they are now?” said Verlin. He was tracking, after a fashion, the progress of his daughter and son-in-law, subconsciously wishing that it would take them a long, long time to reach the dreaded New York.
“I wonder where he is now?” said Patsy. She nodded her exploded cuckoo’s nest—the head of hair whose trillion tornado curls had somehow forced their pattern into her chromosomes and been passed along to her daughter—at the Reverend Buddy Winkler.
In the easy chair, where he had dozed off while watching"Jeopardy!” on the Charleses’ console, Buddy was writhing in a dream. It didn’t appear to be a nightmare: his thin lips were parted in a pious sort of grin. Yet, he twisted and kicked, and he was sweating like an icebox. Patsy was fascinated by the sheen he projected, the way his boils glistened. Patsy switched off the lamp.
“Hey! What’re you doing?” complained Verlin. “I’m studyin’ this dad-blamed map.”
“Sorry, sweet pea. I just wanted to see if you could read by the light of Bud’s boils.”
The instant she switched the lamp back on, Buddy snapped awake. Once he had gotten his bearings, once he realized that they were into prime time and the game show was over, he turned to Verlin and Patsy and gave them a serious smile. “The Lord has just spoken to me,” he said. Effortlessly, he switched into his saxophone voice. “The Lord has addressed me in this living room!”
“That’s rude. He didn’t say beans to me, and it’s my house.”
“Patsy, now.”
“Did you hear the Lord, Verlin? I swear, if I’d known the Lord was gonna show up, I’d of emptied the blessed ashtrays.”
Verlin and Buddy in perfect unison: “Patsy!”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean any disrespect. It’s just so . . . unusual.” She looked to Verlin, hoping that he would pick up the ball, but he was as closed as the Kellogg states, those little Plains states on his map that were all shaped like cereal boxes. Patsy jumped back in. “What did the Lord say to you, Bud?” She was sincere. Sincerely sincere.
“The Temple,” Buddy answered vaguely. “God said something about rebuildin’ the Temple.” It was as if the preacher had not heard the Lord too clearly.
“Rebuilding what temple?”
Abruptly, Buddy rose to his feet. “What time is it?”
“’Bout eight-fifteen,” said Verlin.
“Hmmm. Well, too late tonight.” Almost affectionately, Buddy stroked the epidermal eruptions about his chin. “First thing tomorrow morning,” he announced, “I’m gonna get me a Jew on the phone.”
CAN O’ BEANS HAD FEARED that when Ellen Cherry married the husky fellow with the thinning black hair, the man called Boomer, he/she might have been emptied out and, along with a whole string of other cans, tied to the bumper of a honeymoon car. As the car drove down the street, trailing paper streamers, inflated condoms, and squiggles of shaving cream, the cans would clatter and clang, proclaiming to one and all in their vulgar clamor that the bashful, nervous innocents who occupied the car were en route from the altar to the bed.
As it turned out, the honeymoon car
was the Airstream turkey, and none of Ellen Cherry’s friends—the waitresses who wept and then got drunk and wept some more—could muster the courage or whatever it took to decorate the thing. The Airstream turkey just didn’t lend itself to decoration. “How about cranberry sauce?” one waitress suggested. “A hundred pounds of it,” added another. “Where we gonna put it?” asked a third. “Where we gonna get it?” asked a fourth. A fifth, openly weeping, inquired, “What’s cranberry sauce got to do with having a husband to love you forever and ever?” In the end, they hadn’t touched the turkey. Perhaps the turkey was a complete statement, a sentence to which no further clause or phrase could logically be appended. Perhaps it was just too weird.
Now, Can o’ Beans was thinking that he/she would be satisfied to end up in a wedding procession. If, with the help of Mr. Stick, he/she could make it as far as a church, a little roadside chapel, well, he/she could just lie around in the yard there, drained dry of sauce, and sooner or later some bridesmaid or younger brother would tie him/her to the bumper of a honeymoon car, and JUST MARRIED JUST MARRIED honk honk honk clatter bangle clink, he/she would end his/her career, if not in a blaze of glory, at least as a participant in a traditional rite of noisy joy. How much finer that would be than being left on this rockpile for the porcupines to lick and the buzzards of the sky to pee upon.
But, wait. Why was he/she sinking into morbid fantasies? There were a couple of hours left before dusk. With thermonuclear nonchalance, the sun was still cheerfully converting hydrogen into helium at the rate of four million, two-hundred-thousand tons per second, and inside the solar-heated can, the beans were enjoying genetic memories of the photosynthesis that had made them possible. Moreover, Conch Shell had resumed her narration. Can o’ Beans shrugged off his/her sense of impending doom and paid attention.