Skinny Legs and All Read Online Free PDF

connoisseurs were interested in integrity, vision, and technique again. Because of nostalgia, perhaps, an unconscious yearning for a countryside not damned by pollution and development, landscape painting began to be taken seriously for the first time since the Great Depression. And a path began to be beaten to the door of Ellen Cherry Charles.
    Sure, she depicted cattails growing out of the side of ferry boats; sure, her trees were loops in space, her mountains sky-blue and her skies as tan as stone: they were recognizably landscapes, nonetheless, and they acquired an audience. She hadn’t the trendiest gallery, the most chic patrons, but she was launched, as they say, and down to two shifts a week at the War on Tuna Café.
    Generally speaking, that was her situation when Boomer drove into Seattle in the turkey.
    APPROACHING RETIREMENT, Boomer’s father had purchased an Air-stream motor home with the notion that he and his wife might spend their golden years touring the United States. “We’ll drive this sucker from sea to shining sea,” he said. “And not miss a one of our favorite TV shows,” added Mrs. Petway.
    Alas, midway through his retirement party, at the apex of merriment, Mr. Petway collapsed and died. His widow sold their house and moved in with a sister, but not before signing over the Airstream to Boomer.
    “What the hell am I gonna do with an eight-ton silver egg?” Boomer wondered.
    His metaphor was apt. Except that it had a cockpit with steering wheel, Airstream’s motor home looked almost exactly like its famous trailer. Which is to say, it looked like the ovoid deposit of a metallic dragon-bird, the hard-boiled cackleberry the Statue of Liberty was about to peel for her breakfast. Silvery as starlight, bulbous as a porpoise nose, the Airstream was an elongated pea, a bean, a sausage skin inflated with mercury, a land blimp, a lemon (in shape, not performance), the football of the titans.
    Each morning before he went to work, Boomer would stand in his driveway, hands on his hips, scrutinize the Airstream, and shake his head. Some days, if he wasn’t late, hungover, or both, he would circle it, tracing its curves in the dust with his lame foot. One morning, a funny picture popped into his mind. From then on, every time he saw the motor home, he thought of that image.
    This continued for approximately a year, until one Friday he awoke in a mood that could best be described as operatic. Overwrought, melodramatic, exploding with energy, his head swimming in a kind of ornate, fatalistic overture, he frightened away the soprano with whom he’d spent the night, fetched a six-pack, and drove the Airstream to the welding shop. There, ignoring work orders and the hoots of his assistants, he spent a month fabricating a pair of giant metal drumsticks and two stumpy metal wings, then welding them to the motor-home body in appropriate positions.
    “There,” Boomer said. “If that ain’t the spittin’ image of a roast turkey, what is?”
    “It’s cute,” the girls all said. “How’d you ever think of that?” They giggled nervously.
    “You’ve goddamned ruined a highly expensive piece of equipment,” his buddies accused. They were embarrassed for him.
    Calmly now, he packed every thread of his wardrobe (six pairs of jeans, five Hawaiian shirts), his welding paraphernalia, and collection of spy novels into the forward storage bin. He loaded on a cargo of Pabst. And then he aimed the glimmering breast of the thing northwestward.
    “If Ellen Cherry’s not with me on this,” he said, “I’ll just motor on down to Mexico and tequila myself into a stand-up fossil.”
    WOMEN WERE MORE INTERESTED IN SEX than men were, Ellen Cherry was convinced of that. True, men talked about sex more. Men were forever making a big deal about it with jokes, Hustler magazines, aggressive advances, and transparent braggadocio—but in her opinion that was largely for the benefit of other males. They thought that to be