Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  With that blast of language, Ziller stepped back against a fir trunk to gain a slightly more distant perspective on the thirty-foot hot dog.

  Amanda was shocked. She had never seen him like this: smiley, ebullient. Not once in the weeks she'd known him, worked and played with him, listened to his drums and flutes and plans, pored over his maps and charts, mingled her beauty and force with his, trapped explosive ribbons of his semen in her various bodily orifices, not once had he replaced his high jungle pride with such easy enthusiasm. It did not displease her, however. She walked to his side and stood with him, the better to admire the object of his excitement: the mighty mammoth king of weenies which he had painted in oils on thirty-four feet of plywood paneling.

  “Note how the wrinkles in the bun—it's a steamed-soft bun, of course—fold dynamically, intuiting hidden movement as if they were folds in silks draped about a Renaissance Madonna. The texture of the bun is soft but not rubbery; it has the luster of a prairie moon. The sausage itself possesses a kind of peasant-folk serenity: it lounges in that bun as plump with confidence as a Polack bowling champion snoozing in a backyard hammock on the afternoon before the Greak Lakes regional finals. A simple fellow, the sausage, but the way his gentle contours catch the light and hold it gleaming, one senses something glorious in his spirit. I have molded his bulk—can you sense the physical participation of the artist in the formal objectification of the weenie's presence?—into a continuous volume that consumes vast quantities of space; it is three-dimensional, tactile, larger than life, as rotund and good-natured as Falstaff but not entirely devoid of Hamlet's rank. And what glamour is lent to the scene by the golden cloak of mustard, by the jazzy, jumpy play of flat patterns in the relish. Ahem.”

  Amanda licked her lips in amazement, more at the verbiage than at the inspiration of it, although it was indeed a hot dog of grand proportions. The panel was thirty-four feet long and nine feet high, the red hot was thirty feet in length and a little less than six feet in height and that weenie was not just loitering there in empty space. She perceived at the left end of the bun a green valley with cornfields and a river and some men in a boat on the river drinking beer and trolling for catfish; and across the river was a stadium with a baseball game in progress, probably a World Series because of all the dignitaries in the stands—political figures, movie stars and their counterparts in crime. In the twenty-four-inch space at the right end of the hot dog there was a brown-yellow plain with just a few thorny trees a-thirsting on it and a pride of lions resting in the stingy shade beneath one of those trees, and far in the distance, too far for the warm lions to bother with, a herd of wildebeests was kicking up dust, and even further in the distance Mt. Kilimanjaro jumped up like God's own sugar-tit, and in a modest encampment at the foot of the peak, E. Hemingway was cleaning his Weatherby 375 magnum (not trusting the native boys to handle such an instrument) and slurping his gin. In some mythic gesture of interracial world solidarity, the frankfurter bridged Africa and America in a manner that no United Nations mission or foreign aid program could hope to equal. It quickened the pulse. And reminded Amanda of John Paul's testimonial of a few days prior in which he professed that the sausage was one of the few achievements of Western technology that he could genuinely respect.

  Up above that ambassador hot dog, in the night-blue sky above it, was to Amanda's eyes the most thrilling segment of the whole tableau: a skyful of vanilla stars and pastel planets and rushing comets and constellations (Jupiter was in the house of Gemini) and novae and nebulae and meteors dissolving in spittoons of fire and a tropical moon laid out against a cloud bank like a radioactive oyster on the half shell, and dominating the entire sidereal panorama was Saturn—silver and mysterious mushy omelet of ammonia and ice girded by its sharp gas rings like an avatar egg with a hip-hugger aura. And all this astronomical grandeur merely a backdrop for the mustard-draped shoulders of the cosmic colossal weenie, a sight to put a lump in the throat of the most unambitious Nebraska piglets, bar none.

  The hot dog was to be erected on the roof of the road-house. Some workmen were coming from Mount Vernon with a crane. In a day or two, as soon as the paint was dry. It would be visible for miles.

  The Zillers had reached no decision on the contents of the zoo. They were opposed to cages. Society was opposed to wild animals running loose in restaurants. The proper compromise evaded them. Amanda consulted the I Ching. She induced a trance. With no fit results. They had agreed to forget it for a while. In the meantime they could concentrate on what items they would sell in their shop, on what foods they would serve.

  Something simple, they both insisted on simplicity. They had no intention of wasting their days cooking and washing dishes for tourist hordes. They shuddered at the thought. “Hot dogs,” John Paul had suggested. “Good old-fashioned hot dogs. With steam-softened buns. We'll keep our buns in a steam cabinet the way they did when men were men and the sausage was the backbone of an empire. We'll offer fresh onions, raw or fried. A variety of mustards, catsups and relishes. Bacon, chopped nuts, melted cheese, sauerkraut—optional at additional cost, like whitewalls or power steering. The sausages we will carefully select for size and flavor; 100 per cent meat sausages (a little heavier on the beef than the pork), the best we can buy, the finest offspring of German technical expertise and American ingenuity.”

  Amanda was not at ease with the prospect of operating a hot dog stand. She was a vegetarian.

  Due to the fact that she occasionally consumed milk and milk derivatives, she could not be considered a strict vegetarian. “Amanda,” purists would scold, “milk is an animal product. How can you drink milk and still consider yourself a vegetarian?” And Amanda would answer, “The label states that this carton contains activated ergosterol. Have you ever heard of a cow that activated ergosterol?” But as vegetarians are a stubborn lot, the argument was never resolved.

  At any rate, Amanda protested. “I shan't impose my beliefs on other people,” she said, “but my conscience would turn purple were I, a vegetarian, to earn an income selling meat. There are limits to the decency of irony. Why, I'd feel like a Mormon.” (Not that Amanda had any particular prejudice against Mormons, but she was a curious young woman, as many persons had established, and it confounded her curiosity that a denomination of nonsmoking teetotalers like the Mormons could justify supporting itself through the operation of supermarkets and drugstores in which alcoholic beverages and tobacco are prominent wares.)

  John Paul was untroubled by any undue reverence for meat. “Look,” he said, “the world is overrun with animals, great and small, fanged and feathered, all eating one another in happy harmony. Man is the party pooper. He'll eat pig flesh and pretend it's pork. He'll devour a chicken but not a kitten, a turkey but not a Turk. It isn't that he is principled, particularly. In fact, we all gut somebody every day. But it's sneaky, symbolic, unappetizing, ego-supportive, duty to God and country—never with a good pot roast in mind. No cheerful, honest cannibalism. Alas, alas.”

  Amanda was not much swayed by John Paul's remarks. Incidentally, though, her vegetarian sentiments received a bit of a shake a few months later when Marx Marvelous said to her: “The cow became a sacred symbol to the Hindu because it gave milk and chops and hides. It nourished the babies and kept the old folks warm. Because it provided so many good life-supporting things, it was regarded as an embodiment of the Universal Mother, hence holy. Then it occurred to some monk or other, some abstract scholarly kook, as you would say, that gee, folks, since the cow is holy we maybe shouldn't be eating it and robbing its udder. So now the Hindu has got sacred cows up to here but no more milk and steaks. They starve in plain view of holy herds so big only Hopalong Cassidy could stop them if they took a notion to stampede. The spiritual man's beef against beef is the result of a classic distortion. It's another case of lost origins and inverted values.” But that was Marx Marvelous and that came later.

  For the present, they worked it out. They had to. While the interior of the cafe was now
clean and freshly painted, the exterior had hardly been touched. A warning: the sky bulged like the sooty cheeks of an urban snowman—it hadn't rained yet but it wouldn't be long. The downpour was overdue. Action was required. So, Amanda reluctantly gave her consent to frankfurters and, in concession, John Paul agreed to a ban on dangerous fluids such as coffee and soda pop. For beverages they would serve the juices of fruits and vegetables. Amanda would squeeze them fresh in her automatic juicer. She had fun planning zesty combinations. Apple-papaya juice, for example. Carrot-orange. Spinach-tomato-cucumber. Good health to all! “People will think this a real funny place,” said Ziller, “when they can't buy their coffee and Coca-Cola.”

  It was a funny place anyway. A roadside zoo with no animals. Except two garter snakes and a tsetse fly. And the tsetse fly was not even alive.

  A trailer of rain fell for an hour at sunrise, but the afternoon was dry. The hot dog was erected on the roof of the cafe. It looked good. It could be seen for miles.

  Ziller's magnificent sausage became a landmark in Skagit County. Directions were given in relation to it. “Turn right a couple hundred yards past the big weenie,” some helpful farmer might say. From that time on, Mount Vernon school children would be obliged to compose annual essays on “The Sausage: Its Origin, Its Meaning and Its Cure.”

  To this day it hovers in plump passivity above the fertile fields. It is a perfect emblem for the people and the land.

  A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquillity in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.

  Consider the peaceful repose of the sausage compared with the aggressiveness and violence of bacon.

  "Er, ah, this quite an interesting place you fixing up here.” The speaker was Gunnar Hansen, a thirty-fivish pea farmer from down the road a ways.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hansen,” smiled Amanda.

  Gunnar Hansen. Yes. This mystic old Chinese valley (with Dutch undertones) in northwestern America is inhabited almost exclusively by Scandinavians.

  “But you folks, your name ain't Kendrick,” Farmer Hansen said with uncertainty.

  “No,” Amanda assured him, “our name is Ziller.”

  “Well, er, ah, who's this Kendrick?” asked Farmer Hansen, trying to sound jocular through an accent the color of a midwinter suicide. He was nodding his tombstone head at the new neon-bordered sign that stretched across the roadhouse facade just below the great giant sausage: CAPT. KENDRICK MEMORIAL HOT DOG WILDLIFE PRESERVE. That's how the sign read, in letters the height of Jewish ghetto tailors.

  “Shame on you, Mr. Hansen,” Amanda said. “You don't know your local history.”

  “Well, I thought I did.”

  “Captain John Kendrick. You can look him up in History of the Pacific Northwest by George W. Fuller. Captain Kendrick was one of the first fur traders and explorers to operate in the Puget Sound region. Came here in 1788. On slim evidence he was reported to be the first white man to navigate the Strait of Juan de Fuca and to circumnavigate Vancouver Island. He did quite a bit of exploring but unfortunately he neglected to leave any records of his discoveries. History has repaid him for that oversight by generally ignoring him. After about five years here, he tired of the Northwest skin trade and set sail for the Sandwich Islands. He arrived on December 12, 1794 and was immediately killed by a shot from a British ship which was saluting him.”

  “Oh, awful,” said Farmer Hansen, with a Nordic insensitivity to irony. He drove away in his truck. Farmer Hansen had five children attending public schools in Mount Vernon and Conway. Perhaps that explains why it is now common belief among Skagit County pupils that Capt. John Kendrick invented the weenie sandwich in 1794.

  Amanda climbed to the top of a big spruce tree, the better to absorb the Skagit twilight. She climbed slowly, using only one hand, for with the other arm she cradled her belly much as an avid bowler holds his favorite ball.

  The sky was afloat with raw oysters and dead nuns, a grim canopy beneath which flew wild ducks by the dozens. It was a green sunset. The reds, the oranges, the purples which Amanda automatically associated with sunsets had been snuffed out in the soggy cloud pile, and the nearly invisible sun that sank—beyond the fields, sloughs, rock islands and tide flats—into Puget Sound, it looked like an unripe olive photographed through gauze.

  From her perch Amanda could watch Baby Thor as he played on the moss near the base of the tree. And she could watch John Paul as he nailed silhouettes of sausages to the newly painted facade of the cafe. The sausages, about two feet in length, had been cut from plywood and covered with diffraction grating, a thin, synthetic, metallic silver material that picks up light and diffracts it so that its shiny surface is constantly rainbowed with moving spectra.

  It is amazing, thought Amanda, how John Paul's weenie cutouts succinctly advertise our good common indigenous merchandise while at the same time suggesting the virility fetishes of numerous African tribes. I'm glad that John Paul recognizes that they are images of pleasure not of domination.

  Amanda rested quietly in the boughs. Although the mid-October skies were gray, the air remained mild and mellow and she was comfortable in a cactus-colored corduroy jump suit beneath which there was not a thread of hampering underwear. She had devoted the day to arranging furnishings in the upstairs apartment, caring for Thor and baking panfuls of her notorious breads. Now she was due a rest. As she rested, she thought of many things. She thought of Life and said to herself, “It's okay. I want more of it.” She thought of Death and said to herself, “If I fall out of this frigging treetop, I'll soon enough learn its secrets.”

  She thought of the planar fields—some plowed dark brown, others yellow-green with cabbage or broccoli left deliberately to seed—that straightened toward the horizon in every direction, the ones to the east tilting into hills, the ones to the west falling off into the Sound with a slow fuzzy expansiveness, and she said to herself, “Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that's no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it's to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.”

  She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear. And she thought, as she often did at dusk, of the Infinite Goof. Mostly, however, she thought about the dilemma of the roadside zoo. A zoo without animals was no zoo at all.

  It was peaceful in the spruce. The breeze about her was buttery; tropical in texture if not in temperature. A Canadian goose flapped over so close she could have reached up and grasped its honk—over the sloughs she'd fly, hanging on to the dark arch of that primordial noise as a subway passenger holds to a strap.

  The moments passed. It was very nearly night when she suddenly began to descend the tree, climbing faster than she had moved up it; letting her silken bellyball bounce where it might. “John Paul,” she called. “John Paul.”

  The sausage hammering ceased. Ziller answered: "Umbatu jigi" Or was it "Ombedoo gigi"? Or "Ambudu geki"? It was a Swahili phrase, probably, or Nilo-Hamitic or from a Bantu dialect and Amanda couldn't pronounce it, couldn't spell it and couldn't define it, but her husband always answered with it when she called, so it made sense.

  “Insects,” yelled Amanda, squirreling down the spruce trunk.

  “Insects? In the tree?”

  “No. In the zoo.”

  By this time she had reached the lowest limb and John Paul helped her down onto his shoulders. Her crotch pressed against the back of his neck. She hadn't bathed yet that day although they had made love the night before. She smelled like the leftovers from an Eskimo picnic. He was inflamed. (Didn't someone once say that odor is 80 per cent of love?)

  “Insects in the zoo,” Amanda repeated. />
  John Paul took Baby Thor's hand and he walked mother and son toward the back door. “What do you mean?” he asked, interest as faint in his voice as scruples in a letter from a collection agency. She felt his long Egyptian neck arching back against her, forcing the lips of her vagina apart, and she was determined to resist until she could present her new idea. They were in the kitchen now. John Paul was lifting Thor into his high chair, on the tray of which awaited a fat banana. Amanda was still riding John Paul's shoulders.

  “An insect zoo,” said Amanda. “Insects. The most numerous creatures on earth and perhaps the least understood. They don't require the space for their freedom that animals do. Most of them would be content to range over quite small areas. We could build wondrous cages for them, little palaces and pagodas, labyrinths and landing strips, jewel-like enclosures. Uh. Ummmmm.” The pressure against her vulva was unrelenting.

  “Am I to ascertain that you are proposing a hexapodium, a roadside attraction of beetles and bugs?” Ziller was walking upstairs. Amanda had to duck to protect her head. Bony Watusi fingers kneaded her thighs.

  “Why not? The cricket, the tarantula, the praying mantis, all thrive in captivity and make interesting pets. Many insects live relatively long lives and their upkeep is no problem. Bedbugs have been known . . . Oooops!” John Paul had dumped her onto the mattress. “. . . have been known to live for a year on a single meal. Oh my God.”

  “I could live for many years on these,” said Ziller, nibbling madly.

  Amanda's jump suit was unzipped, throat to crotch. Between the parted corduroy her pink belly rose like the mushroom that conquered Hollywood.