Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins Read Free Book Online

behind. He admired the way the paladins of pumice seemed intent to stand on their own wide feet, to stand tall, face their gods, and one day ascend from this chatty planet to a world more worthy of their silence. Look at ’em back there, rugged and unwavering, not a Pouilly-fumé sipper in the lot. No, those rocks were not artists but working stiffs, heroic welders who could mend the hinges of hell, yet if need be, if their loved ones required it, could transform a motor home into a traveling juggernaut entrée basted by the butters of the sun.
    The rock formations were thinning out, however. The land was starting to jut less and roll more. Rolling toward the Rockies. It was less arid here. In fact, the road was running parallel with a stream, a tributary of the Green River, perhaps. Juniper sprouted from the hillocks, and barely budding aspen huddled along the creek like ghost squaws come to launder their sheets.
    There weren’t any settlements, not even on the map, but sure enough, around the next bend a billboard stood, quoting, in archaic English, the apocalyptic rantings of a long-dead Middle Eastern prophet. It made Ellen Cherry shudder, and then it made her mad. “Anybody,” she said to herself, “who would erect a garish billboard in a beautiful setting like this would fart in a phone booth, dynamite a hummingbird feeder, use the Mona Lisa for a dartboard, consult a Japanese light meter at the burning of the Hindenburg, or name their firstborn after Richard Milhous Nixon.”
    On they rolled, turkey and hills. The dire prophesy did not slow them down, nor did it relieve the driver’s grip on the passenger’s thigh. Suddenly, Ellen Cherry brightened.
    “Boomer, you realize you and I can’t fornicate anymore?”
    He looked astonished. “We can’t?”
    “Why, no. We’re married now. Dictionary says fornication is between unmarried persons. From now on, we’ve got to call it something else.”
    “When did we ever call it fornication in the first place? That’s a dumb word: fornicate. Sounds like something lawyers do. Government lawyers.”
    “Well, we’ve fornicated for the last time, darlin’.” She placed her small hand atop his huge one. “So what’re we going to do from now on?”
    “Same thing but call it something friendly.” He was trying to remember if anyone in a spy novel ever spoke of “fornication.” Certainly not Bond.
    “What would you call it, then? What friendly thing are we going to do from now on?”
    “I hadn’t thought about it.”
    “Well, think about it.” With her nails, she raked the hair on the back of his hands. “What would you like to call it?”
    “I don’t wanna call it anything. I just wanna do it.”
    “Then let’s do it.”
    In teasing him, she had gotten herself aroused. While she kissed the right corner of his mouth, he pulled the vehicle off the road, concealing it behind the last mesa in the wilderness.
    "WILL THE NEW JERUSALEM look like Richmond, the lovely capital of our most lovely state? Nay. Will it look like Washington, D.C., the great capital of this great nation? Nay. Will it look like London or Paris or even—even, what? What’s another city that everybody thinks is hot stuff in the beauty department? Uh . . . Venice. Will it look like Venice? Nay. Am I using too many ’nays’ here? Oh, no! All these grand cities will shrink beside the New Jerusalem; Rome at the height of its glory will, no, would , be but a slum in comparison to . . . Tallahassee. Tallahassee, you moron!"
    Despite the prodding of the Reverend Buddy Winkler, the contestant identified the capital of Florida as Miami Beach—"Miami Beach ? The moron must be a Jewish moron.”—thereby losing out on a set of fine Wedgwood china and a year’s supply of margarine.
    “Now, let’s see. Where was I? Ever’ last city that man has built in this world, including the fabulous showplaces of the Oriental potentates, that’s good, ’fabulous showplaces of Oriental potentates,’