CAN Bus without Transceivers
You will have to play some games to make it work.  CAN is a bus with dominate and recessive states.  This is how it arbitrates.  When a unit starts sending a message and another starts concurrently they will both keep transmitting until one is sending a dominate signal and the other is recessive.  At that point the unit placing the recessive signal on the bus backs off and waits until the bus is idle before re-trying. 

You can simulate this with a few transistors (not real CAN but will work).  Monitor the bus with the receive side and drive it with the transistor with a pull up resistor.  When the transistor is on that is the dominate state when the transistor is off that is the recessive state.  This automatically places a priority order to each unit. Also you cannot operate with 1 CAN device, each message has to be acknowledged by another. It is imperative that you receive what you send.  Transceivers are very cheep on eBay and they have the Maxim chip which is very good.
Good Luck,
Gil