Free Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins Page A

dreamboat, the sacred submarine that carries fertility to its rendezvous with poetry.
    Shaped by the primal geometry? No, the conch shell is primal geometry. Its perfect logarithmic spiral coils from left to right around an axis of fundamental truth. A house exuded by the dreams of its inhabitant, it is the finest example of the architecture of imagination, the logic of desire.
    A calcified womb, a self-propelled nest, the conch shell outlasts its tenant, its builder, to go on alone, reminding the world’s forgetful of their watery sexuality.
    Mermaid’s tongue. Milkmaid’s ulcer. Courtesan’s powder box. Ballerina’s musk. With its marvelous pinkness, the glow from Conch Shell’s long, smooth, folded aperture saturated the cave. It was a bonbon pink, a tropical pink; above all, a feminine pink. The tint it cast was that of a vagina blowing bubble gum.
     
     
     
    As the three forgotten articles were admiring Conch Shell, and puzzling how she came to be in that dry place, Painted Stick flew out of the nook and gave them each a fright. Conch Shell had dropped as elegantly as a parachutist. Painted Stick, on the other hand, leapt with reckless abandon—so reckless, in fact, that he landed on top of her.
    No harm was done her, for he hit her backside, which was as rough as her front was slick. Hardly a puny periwinkle, Conch Shell weighed a full five pounds and measured eleven and a half inches from apex to lip curl. Her spire was spiked in the manner of a mace, and the whorls that ribbed her bulk were thick and tough. It was almost as if she were naked in front, around the pinks and creams of her aperture, yet protected elsewhere by a tan suit of armor that would have made a knight rattle with envy.
    Speaking of iron tuxedos, one of the religious billboards passed by the giant turkey had commanded its readers to “Put On the Whole Armor of God.” Boomer and Ellen Cherry failed to guess that it was a motto borrowed from the Crusaders, although Ellen Cherry eventually was to learn that it was the Crusaders, those barbarous European knights, who, in the sweet name of Jesus, had done as much as anyone or anything to lock the Middle East in the lapidary machine of hellfire in which for all these centuries it has been painfully tumbling.
     
     
     
    Painted Stick bounced off Conch Shell’s armor plate, then rolled to within several feet of our abandoned trio. “Greetings,” he said, at no loss for breath or words (although, obviously, objects do not, in the animate sense, breathe or speak). “Greetings. I assume from the likes of you that you were not responsible for the great fucking that summoned us from our rest.”
    Spoon blushed and Dirty Sock chuckled. “There were humans here,” said Can o’ Beans. “They’ve run away.”
    “How unfortunate,” said Painted Stick.
    “Why’s that?” asked Dirty Sock, who was rather pleased to be free of Boomer’s twisted foot.
    “They would have taken us to where we must be going,” Painted Stick replied.
    “Don’t bet on it,” said Dirty Sock.
    It turned out that Painted Stick had assumed that Boomer and Ellen Cherry were a priest and priestess of Astarte, from the way they had addressed Jezebel while making love. Painted Stick had had no intentions of walking across America. He thought that he and Conch Shell would be carried to their destination in the arms of the Goddess’s adorers, as had been their experience in former times.
    When, on the following morning, against Can o’ Beans’s warnings, Painted Stick had led the group toward the roadway, the can had confided to the seashell, “I’m afraid Mr. Stick is naive.”
    “Not naive,” Conch Shell had corrected him. “He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.”
    IN HER HYSTERIA, Mike’s beery sister had described the stick as “red.” Actually, its original coating was a strong, rusty umber, but the passing centuries had sapped the mineral pigment of its oxidic potency, leaving it a