Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  It was a fresh corpse, too. Still warm. There were no signs of violence on it or about it, so I wasn't particularly scared. The cadaver was male, dressed in a wool plaid shirt and khaki hunter's trousers, boots, pair of powerful binoculars hanging about the neck. First thing I do is check for identification. He's not carrying a wallet—has he been robbed, I wonder, and experience a little ding of fear for if he has the culprit could not be far away. But no, he has a wad of bread in his pants pocket, about $300. I'm breathing easier. Then I see a bulge under his shirt and investigating I find some official-looking papers, folded and sealed. Typed on the outside of the packet is the name 'Brother Dallas, F. S.' and that's all, no address. I don't break the seal.

  About that time I notice a satchel, a brown leather valise, lying in the moss about four feet from the body. It's locked, but Dead Man has the key in his pocket and in a wink I've got it open. The contents don't exactly set my thyroid to pumping. Men's toilet articles, underwear, dark socks, pair of nondescript black shoes that could have shod any small-time insurance salesman in America. There is a road map of Washington-Oregon and a Catholic prayer book. Aside from that, just one more item: a long, heavy, silken robe as black as blood.

  Still no identification. What to do? He is a big cat and I am not about to lug him back to Humptulips. Best thing, I decide, is to skip on back alone and notify the town marshal or the state patrol, although the idea of getting involved with the pigs doesn't have me tittering with delight. I reshoulder my pack and am in the process of splitting when what to my wondering eyes doth appear but a path. It's about thirty feet from me, leading off from the logging road into the woods, and it not only is a well-worn path, it is lined with stones. It has an air of permanence and use, and on a hunch supported by my reluctance to hike to Humptulips for a chat with the heat, I take it. Now, I'm only a short way up that trail when it occurs to me that I am carrying Dead Man's satchel, but, what the hell, I can see no harm in it and that path is luring me on like it's a siren song and I'm the seven seas' horniest sailor.

  In a flash—and baby, it was a flash—I'm into a huge clearing, and squatting in the center of said clearing, just as cool and calm as Cleopatra on the royal pot, is a fort! Well, anyway it looks like a fort. It's made of logs, with a ten-foot-tall fence of sharpened poles surrounding it, and if the gates had suddenly flung open and John Wayne had led the 9th Regimental U.S. Cavalry out in a thundering charge, I scarcely would have blinked. But Col. John is in Beverly Hills voting the Conservative ticket and the gates are formidably shut and by this time I see a sign that reads “Wildcat Creek Monastery, Catholic Society of the Felicitator, Sorry No Visitors."

  Let me set it straight for you. This monastery-fort is no more than a couple football fields from the logging road, and less than two and a half football fields from where Dead Man is lying, all tuckered out. My steel-trap mind is snapping on connections. Brother Dallas. Black robe. Monastery. Dead Man is affiliated with the monastery. Eureka! I don't have to walk to Humptulips. Here's the logical place to report the cadaver. I'm wondering if they have a lost-and-found department. Anybody here misplace a slightly used monk?

  For about five minutes I've been standing at the edge of the clearing, staring at that monastery which is silent except for some low, steady rumbling inside, like that monastery is the world's biggest all-log rustic refrigerator. When suddenly—yipes!—there's a hand on my shoulder, a very much alive hand, a hard hand, and I find myself in between two enormous gentlemen who are standing very close to me but withholding any outward signs of affection: that handhold is no caress. I react instinctively (for experience has taught me 'tis best) and backswing my left arm fast in an arc, a lovely Yokohama chop that knocks the seeds out of the recipient's Adam's apple. As he bends in gurgling pain, I follow through with a rabbit chop to the back of the neck and—thud!—he topples. I whirl to the man on my right, only I don't swing at him because he's holding a cocked .38 Special and it's pointing impolitely at my navel.

  For the first time, I notice that the men—the one on the ground and the one putting my vital organs in jeopardy—are attired in blood-black robes. Robes? I glance at my feet for in my impetuous act of self-defense I had hurled Dead Man's satchel to the ground and his robe has spilled out and is curled there in the ferns like the small intestine of a dragon. The gunman stares at the robe, also, and he looks at his buddy whom karate has cut down in his prime, and he says to me in a low chilly voice like he was that log refrigerator talking, “I suppose you are Brother Dallas? Why in Mary's name didn't you identify yourself?"

  And yours truly, either because I am a genius of the magnitude of John Paul Ziller, or because hereditary brain syphilis (a common malady among Southern aristocrats) has left me an imbecile of indescribable deficiency, I don't tell the man, “Your Brother Dallas is a bit indisposed and could use any old last rites you happen to have handy.” I don't say that; I say, instead, “You startled me. How do you expect a man to identify himself when you creep up on him like that?"

  And the gunman says, “I guess you're right, but you aroused suspicion. Why didn't you go directly to the gate and ring the bell as you were instructed? Better let me see your papers."

  Do I panic? Yes, I nearly shit little green apples. The good monk isn't pointing the .38 at me any longer but he hasn't put it away, either. My cool doesn't blow, however. I start fumbling around in my pockets, scratching myself wildly like Mon Cul, and I blurt out to him, “Oh my God, they must have fallen out of my shirt back there when I bent over to look at some mushrooms. It's just a little ways down the path. I had 'em just a second ago.” I take off my pack and set it down (to help mitigate suspicion) and start back down the trail. “I'll run get them. Won't take a minute."

  He's looking at me like I'm Fool of the Year, and he keeps repeating incredulously, “Mushrooms? Mushrooms?” He makes a move to accompany me but I say, “You'd better attend to the brother there. He may be seriously hurt.” And indeed the poor dude is writhing and moaning in a semiconscious state. So, the big-gun brother he kneels to examine his pal, and old Plucky he zips back down the path; man, his boots were made for walking. Humptulips, I hear you calling. Humptulips never sounded better. Humptulips sounds like it is Papeete, Tahiti, or the French Riviera. O Humptulips, Shimmering Pearl of the Mediterranean! I love thee, Humptulips, even though there is not one Dutch girl in thy whole domain.

  Yes, my first impulse is to run for it, and as you know, I am a dedicated follower of impulse. By the time I reach the logging road, however, newer and stronger impulses have eclipsed the initial ones. These secondary impulses do not advise retreat. Quite the contrary. They say “advance.” And after a moment's reflection, I realize that I am going to return to that strange silent monastery with its armed monks, that I am going to return there and . . . hold it! Just heard something! Excuse me . . .

  Now. I'm back. It was deer. Two doe and a buck. Beautiful things. Wow. Spooked me. In fact, I'm too spooked to continue this narrative. My thought train has been derailed. I've been gone more than an hour so I'd best get back to the monastery. At the first opportunity, I'll write again and extend my tale. Please pardon the raw prose style of this epistle, but there was just no time for literary embellishment. Here's to your health and happiness, chum. Play for peace. And do not try to contact me!!!

  Plucky P.

  The Only White Man the Natives

  Trust.

  The afternoon sky looked like a brain. Moist. Gray. Convoluted. A mad-scientist breeze probed at the brain, causing it to bob and quiver as if it were immersed in a tank of strange liquids. The Skagit Valley was the residue at the bottom of the tank. Toward dusk, the wind flagged, the big brain stiffened (mad doctor's experiment a failure), and ragged ribbons of Chinese mist unfurled in the valley. The blaring cries of ducks and geese and the popping of hunters' guns echoed over the sloughs. During the waning Sung dynasty moments of the day, Ziller cooked up his first batch of sausages. A trial run at the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot D
og Wildlife Preserve.

  Earlier that day, soon after the arrival of Plucky Purcell's letter, the new steam cabinet had been delivered by the Acme Restaurant Supply Co. of Seattle, and now Ziller was taking it on a shakedown cruise, putting it through its paces, his eyes narrowed in ritualistic test pilot concentration. Like the wife of any good movie test pilot, Amanda waited on the ground, pride in her eyes but worry bending her mouth, and one ear cocked for disaster. (Picture Amanda and Deborah Paget in the kitchen of one or the other's modest little bungalow, drinking cup after cup of coffee and chit-chatting about everything under the sun except the one thing that's really on their minds: their men out there on the frontiers of weenie space. And then the phone rings and they tense up like clothespins, only it's a wrong number and Deborah bursts into tears and pounds her little fists on the formica tabletop, sobbing, “I just can't take it any more, the waiting and the fear. I married Jim because I love him, he's all I have in the world; but he has something else. He's married to the U.S. Air Force and to that gosh almighty hot dog steam cabinet, boo hoo hoo.") But the movie had a happy ending and although Amanda refused to taste a sausage she did eat part of a bun and found it yielding and velvety. John Paul ate two dogs “with everything,” as they say, and was pleased.

  After the test, they lingered in the downstairs kitchen. Amanda was jiggling Baby Thor on her knee and John Paul was attaching an electrical amplification device to one of his crude clay flutes. The kinetic energy of their thought systems was somewhere else, however: 150 miles south near the hamlet of Humptulips, where it crackled and spit and coursed through one circuit after another in pursuit of the exact position of Plucky Purcell. Amanda's curiosity was almost tangible, a great glowing radio of pique that broadcast from the cavity where the fetus ought to be. One thing was certain, however, they could not intrude. Not only had they been explicitly warned away by Plucky himself, but they were unable to conceive of any immediate circumstances under which their appearance at that forest monastery would have positive results.

  “It appears that Purcell has got himself into a ticklish situation,” said Ziller, “but it is equally apparent that he must work it out for himself. Actually, we know very little about the true character of his predicament. His aborted letter rather leaves us hanging.”

  “I hope he can work it out,” said Amanda, jiggling the child. “For all of his two-fisted heroics and naughty background, there's a kind of, well, innocence about him.” Jiggle. Jiggle. “At any rate, what are we to make of his story about militant monks who spy and kill? Considering the nature of organized religion in general and considering the history of the Roman Catholic Church in particular, I suppose it should not be surprising. Still, in this day and age it isn't easy to believe such a thing.” Jiggle. Jiggle. Jiggle.

  “I could not say that it shocks me,” said Ziller. “Civilized man's cruelties seldom do. I know very little about the Catholic Church, actually. In Africa I did encounter quite a few Catholic missionaries. They were brave and dedicated humans who worked diligently to alleviate physical suffering among the indigenes. On the other hand, they unwittingly precipitated an awful amount of psychic damage through the superimposition of their dogma upon ancient tribal beliefs. And they seemed abysmally ignorant of the primitive ethos, how rich, how squirmingly musically rich is the savage mind and how deep.” Here, Amanda thought John Paul about to reveal something personal concerning his African quest, but instead of continuing his comments he plugged in his flute and blew into it. Whereas it used to go twoooo twoooo tweeee rather softly and hollowly, it now went shatweeeeee-tweet taa-wow with shrill blue vibrating edges on it. Could that be considered an improvement? John Paul did not say. He made an adjustment on his amplifier and asked, “You must have had a Catholic education, what were your impressions?”

  Ziller knew nothing of Amanda's religious background, but as she was half Irish and half Puerto Rican it was only logical to assume that she had had some intercourse with Roman institutions. “I abandoned formal education in the eighth grade,” confessed Amanda. “I must tell you about that sometime. But, yes, I did attend parochial school from the second grade through the fifth. And, of course, I watched many of my little friends 'grow up' (to use a term I detest) under ecclesicastical conditions. My impressions were this:

  “There is an insect called the hunting wasp. The female hunts for spiders and other insects and preys on them in an unusual way. She stings them in the large nerve ganglion on the underside of the thorax so that they are not killed but only paralyzed. She then lays an egg on the paralyzed victim (or within its body) and seals the prey up in a nest. When the egg hatches, the wasp larva commences to eat the prey, slowly, gradually, in a highly systemized way. The nonvital tissues and organs are eaten first, so that the paralyzed creature remains alive for a good many days. Eventually, of course, its guest eats away so much of it that it dies. During the whole long process of consumption, the prey cannot move, cry out or resist in any way.

  “Now, suppose we view the Church as the hunting wasp, its stinger being represented by the nuns and priests who teach in its schools. And let us view the pupils as the paralyzed prey. The egg that is injected into them is the dogma, which in time must hatch into a larva—personal philosophy or religious attitude. This larva, as that of the wasp, eats away from within, slowly and in a specialized manner, until the victim is destroyed. That is my impression of parochial education.”

  In a typical Amandan spasm of fair play, she called to John Paul as she went upstairs to bathe the baby, “Public secular education is only a little less thorough in its methods and only a little less deadly in its results.”

  She continued up the stairs, but Ziller stopped her. “Amanda,” he said, “when I was in Ceylon I climbed Adam's Peak, a mountain that is sacred to four world faiths. At the summit there is a five-foot depression in the rock. Buddhists believe it to be the footprint of Buddha; Hindus claim it for their god Shiva; Moslems, for Adam; and local Catholics, for St. Thomas. Geologists at the university in Colombo say it is the result of ancient volcanic action. Who do you suppose is right?”

  “All five, of course,” said Amanda and she carried the squeaking baby on up the steps.

  Ziller smiled. Ziller's smiles are noted for their emery and misterioso and this one was no exception. Nevertheless, it was a smile that seemed to say, “I have married well.”

  Happily for Amanda, whose curiosity was a radio left on all night at full volume and the neighbors complain and the cops come, happily for her only four days passed between the arrival of Purcell's first letter and his second. As did the first, the second epistle arrived with no ceremony. A minor government employee simply slipped it into the Ziller mailbox with a soft dry sound, a scarcely audible rustle of the tail of bureaucracy. John Paul fetched it inside and summoned Amanda. When she had joined him in the parlor, he disemboweled the envelope with a flick of an ivory blade. This is what they read:

  Dear z and a (the end and the beginning, eh, folks?),

  Hi there. The cat who invented karate was some dude. He did two thousand push-ups a day, pounded tree trunks until his hands were bloody and meditated while sitting under an ice-cold mountain waterfall. Those are the sort of pastimes in which your old pal Plucky is supposed to be engaged—out in the woods alone manifesting the rigors of the karate mystique. Of course, it's all a ruse on my part to enable me to get away from my new companions (I ain't about to punch no tree in the chops), but I am karate-master-in-residence at the Wildcat Creek Monastery and what those mad monks don't know won't hurt them. Out here at my favorite stump, I have the time and privacy to continue my description of this freaky scene of which I am all too much a part, yes yes.

  Well, as previously reported, old fast-talking Plucky manages to rap his way out of a potentially grim encounter with a pistol-packing padre and is in the process of setting a world's record for the Humptulips dash when considerations other than personal safety flag his flight. With your permission, I won't bother to
articulate those considerations except to remark that they involved things like intrigue, religious fulfillment (ahem) and a simple desire to get my poor bored ass out of the logging business for a while and into some kind of caper.

  At least one thing seems obvious, I am thinking: the late Brother Dallas is a newcomer to the Wildcat Creek Monastery—he is expected but not known. He is carrying a map of the area, which indicates he has not been here before, and the two monks of my immediate acquaintance do not know him by sight. He died on his way to the monastery, a mere two hundred yards from it, and the brothers are as yet unaware of his demise. The monk with the gun at least halfway believes that I am Brother Dallas, and there is a chance that if he will believe it others inside the monastery will, also. Of course, there is a possibility that someone inside does know B. D. personally, but I'll gamble against that. There are surface implications of something sinister afoot hereabouts and I could be sticking my already rope-burned neck into a noose. But just as likely these implications are the result of coincidences, misinterpretations and general paranoia and probably there is nothing going on behind those unfriendly gates except the usual Catholic hanky-panky and churchly mumbo-jumbo. After all, it is not astonishing that men, even monks, who reside in an isolated semi-wilderness inhabited by cougars, bears, and stray drunk Indians would maintain firearms, although it is a trifle unusual that a monk who armed himself against the beasts of the hills would choose a .38 Special instead of a more conventional weapon like a shotgun. But that, too, might be explained simply. What my caper will probably amount to is this: I'll sneak backstage at the holy show, experience a weekend of the kind of fun the Great Imposter must have had all of his life, and split the scene in time for work on Monday morning. On the other hand, there is a dead man involved, however innocently, in this business and even if he died of natural causes I have some moral obligation to report his passing—he might have a worried and loving family somewhere. More and worse: suppose I pretend to be Brother Dallas for the weekend, whereupon I confess my true identity and disclose that the real B. D. is dead in the woods—wouldn't I be one hell of a prime suspect in B. D.'s death? Even if I did not reveal B. D.'s rather permanent predicament, which would be damnably unethical, still his body might one day be found. It might be found right in the middle of my masquerade. And then wouldn't Plucky's fat be in the fire? I should nip this irresponsible escapade in the bud and save myself and perhaps a whole lot of honorable people unnecessary trouble and confusion. But no, by God, there is something screwy going on in that John Wayne monastery; there is, as my old Dixie daddy used to put it, a nigger in the woodpile; something's akimbo if not downright evil. I can feel it.