Free Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins Page B

flat, dull rose, like a dance hall memory, and so thin that the original wood showed through it like the night sky through a canopy of fishnet. In addition, there were five blue bands—four narrow, one broad—around the stick’s middle, although these, too, were badly faded. Painted Stick’s top end was notched, as if someone had tried to carve little horns there, little bull’s horns. These crescent-shaped nubs once had been gilded, and flecks of gold leaf still clung to them, like spinach to teeth. His length was under a yard, but he was long enough to have been a cane for a blind jockey or a baton for a conductor with an overbearing personality. In circumference, he equaled a mature carrot, although he was not tapered in any direction.
    As the World Tree stands, so stands its child, the sanctified stick. Shamans climb it. Maidens dance around it. Men use it for pointing. It points to thunder, to comets, to the migrating herds. Sometimes it points to you.
    Once there was a man who carried a stick that he swirled in a stream until a hair clung to it. The direction in which the hair pointed led to satisfaction. But who deserved credit, the hair or the stick?
    Stick is the magic penis. When waved, it sows sons and daughters. Stick is also lethal. It cracks a skull nicely.
    Guns have been called “magic sticks,” but guns are only half magical: they take life but can’t create it.
    If a stick is twirled under proper conditions, it makes fire. If rubbed against another stick, it makes fire. Once a stick is painted, however, it is assigned to other duties.
    Sigmund Freud observed children rolling hoops with sticks. Freud made notes in his journal.
    T. S. Eliot wrote:
    In a deck of cards, there are four suits: diamonds, spades, hearts, and sticks. The card stick was both the rod of the peasant and the wand of the magi. Whip the donkey. Stir the moon.
    Like a sword, or a phallus, it feels quite good to hold a stick in your hands. If held correctly, with maximum consciousness (and that is difficult to do), the stick may suddenly flower.
    There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.
    LATER, WHEN DIRTY SOCK ASKED Painted Stick what he did, meaning exactly what people mean when they ask at a cocktail party, “What do you do?", Painted Stick answered that he was a navigational instrument.
    Although his description of his function was an understatement, a simplification, it wasn’t precisely a lie. Dirty Sock accepted it at face value, and, up to a point, Can o’ Beans did, too. After all, despite his errors of judgment in some areas, it couldn’t be denied that Painted Stick marched them unwaveringly eastward.
     
     
     
    Almost as abruptly as they had presented themselves, Conch Shell and Painted Stick had asked to be excused.
    “Forgive us if we are rude,” said Conch Shell, “but we have lain in this foreign place for a very long time.”
    “And unless the globe has shrunk while we lay in our trance,” added Painted Stick, “we have a very long journey ahead of us.”
    “Where is it that you’re headin’?” asked Dirty Sock.
    “Why, to the Holy City,” said the stick, as if it had been a silly question.
    “That would be the Vatican,” whispered Spoon, who had spent most of her life in the jelly bowl of a strict Catholic household. Ellen Cherry had acquired her at a diocesan rummage sale.
    Dirty Sock nodded in agreement, but the can shook its contents, slosh gurgle , as if it weren’t so sure.
    “Without human assistance,” Painted Stick complained, “we probably shall arrive too late.”
    “Oh, you must not worry so,” said the seashell. “I feel in my whorls that we’ve time to spare.” Then, before Can o’ Beans could spit out any of the many questions burning his/her sauce, Conch Shell inquired, in her compassionate manner, about the others’ circumstances and how they happened to be in that desolate den.