Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins Read Free Book Online Page A

will pale into ghettos. . . . Hmmm, I guess your ghetto is not exactly, pale , is it? Heh. Will pale beside the transformed Jerusalem that God Almighty will bring down from heaven to serve as the capital of his kingdom on earth, the city where, in which, you and me—you and I—will for all eternity . . . rumba. Come on, stupid. Rumba! Oh? Okay, samba. What’s the blessed difference? Nobody dances like that anymore. Let’s see. For all eternity dwell. Dwell or live? Ummm . . .”
    The Reverend Buddy Winkler was experiencing some difficulty with his powers of concentration. The game show was not to blame. He always watched television game shows while working on a sermon. As a rule, they proved more inspirational than distracting. All that energetic yearning. Each contestant standing at the gate of wealth, hoping to be judged worthy of admission. No, it wasn’t “Wheel of Fortune” that was slowing his pen, it was the good news from the Baptist network. Only that morning, he had learned that two stations in California and one in Oregon had agreed to air his weekly broadcasts. California, yet! Talk about your going forth among your whores, publicans, and sinners. At the rate that his radio exposure was expanding, could a TV contract be long in coming? He couldn’t afford to keep postponing a dental overhaul. On the tube, your smile was your mustard-cutter and not a penny less. “Right, Bob?” He grinned at the game show host. And then, the merry saliva turning to roach powder in his cheeks, he drew a despairing hand over his candy jar of boils. “Heal!” he almost shouted, but he was not that kind of preacher.
    Buddy’s mind wandered to the house call he must make the following day. A member of his local congregation had recently, at the age of eighty-two, undergone surgery to restore her sight. She had been blind since four. The operation was an unqualified success, yet when she looked in a mirror for the first time and observed her corduroy complexion, observed the fissures and puckers that caused her countenance to resemble a close-up photograph of a Laplander’s scrotum, she ignored the miracle of vision and flew into a fury. Having never seen an old person’s face, she thought the doctors had done it to her, that the epidermal wasteland was an unnatural consequence of the surgery, and she was intent upon filing a malpractice suit. Neither her family nor her attorney could dissuade her, so it fell to Buddy, as her minister, to explain how and why God routinely made prunes out of his little sugarplums.
    “For seventy-eight years, that woman sat in the dark, unaware that the cream was curdling. At least I wasn’t ambushed.” He let his fingers glide over the pustules again, then it was back to the sermon.
    Of the New Jerusalem, the Lord revealed to John that its gates were pearls; its foundations garnished with precious stones. Buddy underlined the Bible verse: “The city was pure gold, like unto clear glass.”
    He supposed that he was obliged to defend that description. There would be debunkers out in California who would object that pure gold wouldn’t stand up as construction material. Even in Colonial Pines, the unrighteous, the troublemakers might raise issues of practicality. Patsy might, for example.
    Well, he’d be ready, he’d head them off at the pass. “If I was one of these so-called modern preachers, I might say to you, don’t get literal on me. John’s vision of the New Jerusalem is not meant to be taken at face value. We’re dealin’ with your symbolism here. John was shown a city that was so beautiful, so glorious, so overwhelmin’ to his senses that he compared it to jewels and gold because he lacked the language to describe its reality. John just helped hisself to the most high-sounding metaphors he could come up with. Well, if you wanna believe that the saints and prophets of biblical times went around talkin’ like English professors, you’re welcome to it. I believe the Holy