Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  Occasional visitors, mostly strangers, called. Attracted by the vibrations or alerted by word of mouth. Young men and women in transit. Moving from California to Canada. Or vice versa. They smiled a great deal, some carrying their belongings in tattered guitar cases, some carrying their heads in bandages. Getting rough out there for the young and free. They were given a good meal and happy words for the road.

  Adding seasoning to life at the zoo were Purcell's letters, telling of the wiles of right-wing monks under orders from the conservative nucleus of the Vatican to protect the Church against Protestants, tax-minded governments and liberalizing tendencies. Telling of assassination devices and crafty plots and narrow escapes. Telling of his monkish longing for pussy. Letters somewhat unusual in the nature of their information, letters in a masculine register, letters to be read more than once. Read with ceremony. Incense and drums. Thus the days marched across November serenely, almost ecstatically. And then the rains came.

  And then the rains came.

  They came down from the hills and up from the Sound.

  And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast.

  Rain fell on the towns and the fields. It fell on the tractor sheds and the labyrinth of sloughs. Rain fell on toadstools and ferns and bridges. It fell on the head of John Paul Ziller.

  Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckle-berries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating.

  And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

  Rain fell on the Chinese islands. It fell on the skull where the crickets live. It fell on the frogs and snails in the gutters. It fell on the giant improbable pacifying vulnerable sausage. It fell against the windows of the hospital where Amanda had been carried, the blood on her legs diluted with rain water.

  The rain had nearly obscured her little yelps of pain as she lay in the brush near the mouse burrows. Rain had fallen on the fetus. Prematurely expelled. In the muddy field-grass. Rain had spattered Amanda's unconscious eyes, as it now spattered the windows of the hospital where for eleven days she lay, some days close to dying.

  The hospital corridor glistened with quiet. At the reception desk, the nurse—amicable of countenance if bony of physique—looked up from the Reader's Digest in which she had been enjoying an article entitled “What Makes a Good President” by the late Dwight David Eisenhower. Visiting hours would not begin for another forty minutes, so the nurse was not expecting a caller. Especially, she was not expecting a caller such as this one. My God. Most irregular. A tall, vinegar-colored man with a ball of tumble-weed for hair; wearing a raincape of python skin, beneath which was only a . . . loincloth.

  "Must be some kind of kooky joke,” the nurse thought. “Whatuz he want? How'm I gonna cope with him? How unlike General Eisenhower he is. Make a piss-poor President?” Her thinking was a trifle shredded.

  The man turned out to be polite. Had no thought to rape and pillage. He was here to see his wife; oh, yeah, the poor little girl who had the miscarriage. He was aware that visiting hours had not begun but he had only a moment to stay as he had left his young son in the care of a babo—a friend. All the doctors were out to dinner, so the nurse excused herself and disappeared with practiced indifferent efficiency down one of the white-tiled corridors. In a few minutes she returned and announced, “Mrs. Ziller is sleeping. She's very weak. Still on the critical list. I think it would be better, Mr. Ziller, if you came back tomorrow.” ("And for God's sake wear some clothes.") This last statement was made under her bony breath.

  "May I please just look in on her?” His voice was tired but so very cultured and strong. “I'd like to leave these.” He held out a bouquet of fly amanita (Amanita muscaria)—big, robust mushrooms with white warts distributed about their scarlet caps.

  The nurse gulped. “They are poison, aren't they?"

  "No. No, they have . . . er . . . abnormal . . . effects on the nervous system, the brain, but there is no death in them. Anyway they're for looking, not for munching.” He smiled. “She'll like them very much."

  The nurse tried not to fluster. “Well, okay,” she said. “Just leave 'em in that pot you brought them in. But I'll have to ask the doctor about 'em when he gets back.” She led Ziller through the clean glare and medicinal smell and whiteness to Amanda's room. “We mustunt disturb 'er,” said the nurse. She cracked the door.

  Ziller tiptoed into the gloom. He scooped Amanda's face up in his vision, weeding out the paleness, the thinness, the plastic vines running out of her veins and nose, the arms that lay askew like broken wings. He was afraid to burden her with a kiss. The magic words he had to say for her he barely whispered. He left the bowl of blazing mushrooms on the table at her bedside. And with it, a haiku written on rice paper, stained by the rain:

  They've built their nests

  in the chimneys of my heart:

  those swallows that you lost.

  Plucky Purcell says that sooner or later everything boils down to a matter of a buck. Perhaps Purcell overstates the case, but few are the lives untouched by considerations of economics. A financial crisis arose for the Zillers, for example, as a result of Amanda's hospitalization.

  In truth, Ziller had brought a tidy little nest egg to the roadside zoo. He and Amanda had hardly been extravagantly compensated in their employ to Nearly Normal's traveling Tibetan show (although John Paul was paid union scale), nor had Ziller grown rich from the sale of his sculptures (although he had sold a few to collectors of considerable means). However, his associations with the Hoodoo Meat Bucket had been quite profitable. Despite the fact that the band's record album was merchandised under the counter—no reputable distributor would touch it—and was blacklisted by broadcasting stations from coast to coast, it become nevertheless a cult totem, an “underground classic,” so to speak, and sold upwards of fifty thousand copies. With monetary success came an inevitable token of establishment acceptance—and numerous opportunities for compromise. There had been an impromptu meeting at the Annex Bar down on Avenue B. The four musician-heroes quaffing beer and eating the free peanuts. (In leaner days, Ziller and Mon Cul had subsisted on Annex peanuts. Protein is where you find it.)

  “Look, Ziller,” whined Ricki-Tick, the lead guitarist, “there's two major record companies wants to sign us. Heavy bread. We don't have to sell out, man. Just tone down the sex trip. Tone down the voodoo trip, the anarchy trip, the trephination trip. Muff the perversities. That's all, man. Life magazine wants to do a spread on us.”

  And Ziller had skewered his fellows with his fierce pyramid eyes and had displayed his smile as if it were a dagger on a pillow. “You gentlemen do what you wish. The pleasures of exile are imperfect, at best. At worst, they rot the liver. Napoleon's hide turned yellow as a buttercup. I leave on the Midnight Special for the town of my birth.” And with one last handful of free peanuts, he went away to Africa. But as 90 per cent of the songs in the Meat Bucket repertoire were Ziller compositions, he received a handsome settlement prior to departure.

  Travel had been costly. The conversion of Mom's Little Dixie Bar-B-Cue into the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve had not been inexpensive. The motorcycle had been traded in on a used but late model Jeep station wagon and quite a few dollars had had to be added to close the deal. Then came Amanda's accident. The sum of the medical bills was staggering. It was Black Friday beneath the colossal weenie.

  Now, Amanda's father was probably the most well-to-do overweight Irish immigrant orchid baron in America. As Amanda was his only ch
ild, and as he had no wife, alas, he was in an excellent position to alleviate the newlyweds' economic woes. While Papa was not overjoyed with his little one's choice of mate, he gladly would have sent bank notes galloping to her bedside. They would amble up, hats in hand, shaking rain from their green mustaches, and say, in husky voices not the least bit tremulous from the long ride, “Howdy, mam. The bank note brigade. Hallowed protectors of the American way. May we be of service to ye?” Moreover, the Zillers could have touched Nearly Normal for a loan. But if neither of them desired to become dependent upon a relative, the thought of sinking in debt to a friend was even more depressing.

  So, Ziller, to whom the telephone was a well-oiled instrument of torture, placed a call to New York City. Heard his hesitant words go limping across the continental span. Heard the twinkle-toe lisp of his dealer come rushing back, oblivious to the hostile stares of cowboys and farmhands as it swished across Iowa and Montana. He endured the pronouncing of his plight into the cold black mouthpiece, endured the lollipop vowels that bunny-hopped into his ear. Endured them. And on the day that Amanda was released by the Mount Vernon clinic, coming home to floral arrangements of cattail and salmon berry branch, to oyster casserole and baby kisses and baboon antics and a favorite tune on the flute, she was told of new wealth in the Ziller domain. She learned that the Non-Vibrating Astrological Dodo Dome Spectacular, formerly on loan to the Whitney Museum, had been sold to an Amsterdam couple for a figure approaching twenty-five thousand dollars. Cheap at the price. The dealer had ladled off a third of those dollars, as dealers do, but a bank draft for the remainder was in the mail.

  “There will be a minimum of tourists on this road until spring,” John Paul told his bride. “A minimum of connoisseurs searching for old-fashioned red-hots beneath these sour skies and in these hammering rains. We have funds now. Enough. No hassle. The opening of our enterprise can be delayed. We are here in the Northwest Corner; you brightening it, me poking in it—and vice versa, although I have fewer inclinations to brighten than you to poke. The Northwest, albeit on a fairly superficial level, is one of my sources. You spoke of curiosity about the science of origins, or as I would prefer to call it, the science of godward solutions. Well, aside from my personal tinctures—which would only fog the essences in your crucible—there still seem to me to be qualities in this region worthy of our investigation. Mushrooms, for example, and what is left of the aboriginal culture. Perhaps there is even something to be learned from the rains. Therefore, I suggest that we postpone our grand opening until April first. In the ensuing four months let us become intimate with the spaces and speeds and loops and patterns of the Northwest biosphere of which we have voluntarily become a functioning part. That way we may better serve it as it serves us, just as the Wheel People of Anugi serve the circumferences which in turn supply their sacred rotations.” He paused. “We shan't neglect our usual interests and private projects, of course.”

  “Right up my alley,” said Amanda quickly. “Pass the oysters. What's the latest word from Plucky Purcell? I love you, John Paul. Have you noticed that the tops of the fly amanita are colored the same brilliant red as Mon Cul's great butt?” Her health was returning in gulps.

  The magician's underwear was found early yesterday. Or late the day before. The authorities weren't specific. They assured us, however, that the magician himself would be apprehended within forty-eight hours. What then?

  This morning, the agents seemed increasingly sullen. We overheard them discussing the future of the snakes. One of them, we think he was FBI, said, “Let's turn them loose in the woods.” But the others, the CIA boys, said, “Mash 'em!” They are planning to kill the snakes. What are their plans for us?

  The author realizes that time may be running out. Due to the morbid uncertainty of the situation, it is probably incumbent upon him to spur his Remington into the heart of the matter, to deploy to the front all salient and essential facts under his command. Get the nitty-gritty down on paper while there's still opportunity. And that he shall do, forthwith. If he has been indulgent up to now, if he has subjected you to an excess of background, if he has dallied in the scenery when he should have been upstage center disclaiming, forgive him or chastise him as you will. Just remember that while you may have a stake in this matter—and all of you do—the writer has what seems to him (from his proximity to events) to be a bigger stake. And he has never claimed to be unselfish or heroic.

  It must be obvious to you that the author was not a witness to the episodes which he has so far described. They transpired in those elysian days before Marx Marvelous turned up to manage the zoo, before the Corpse appeared and really knocked things on their ears. Therefore, it is important to the author, for personal reasons, to establish in his own mind the prevailing moods, if not the exact sequence of events—that brought Amanda, John Paul and Plucky together in such portentous circumstances. To this end, he had made use of letters, journals and considerable oral accounts.

  Amanda insists, although she's not read a sentence of it, that the author is compiling a history. The author knows what she means, of course, but he is not certain he wants that responsibility. Actually, however, there is no cause to recoil from the “historian” tag. Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry that it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

  History is a discipline of aggregate bias. A history may emphasize social events, or cultural or political or economic or scientific or military or agricultural or artistic or philosophical. It may, if it possesses the luxury of voluminousness or the arrogance of superficiality, attempt to place nearly equal emphasis upon each of these aspects, but there is no proof that a general, inclusive history is any more meaningful than a specialized one. If there is anything that the writer has learned from Amanda (and he must confess having learned a measure), it is that the fullness of existence embodies an overwhelmingly intricate balance of defined, ill-defined, undefined, moving, stopping, dancing, falling, singing, coughing, growing, dying, timeless and time-bound molecules—and the spaces in between. So complex is this structure, and so foolishly simple, the historian's tools will not fit it: they either break off and go dumb in the scholar's hands or else pierce right through the material leaving embarrassing rents difficult to mend. Rule One in the manual of cosmic mechanics: a linear wrench will not turn a spiral bolt. Drawing courage from that rule, the author can boast that his approach to history is no worse than any other and probably better than some. And so what?

  “And so what?” the writer types, tapping the Remington softly so as not to disturb Amanda. It is sunset now and she has retired to her sanctuary. Dusk and dawn, evidently, are the most advantageous times for trances. Evidently. The poor girl has been in and out of trance a dozen times during the past two days. Her eyes are as flat and lifeless as linoleum cutouts, the skin sags from beneath them like fresh dough dripping from a baker's spoon. And still she's beautiful. She was just in the living room, here, where the author is typing; wearing only blue lace panties and a sheer cotton blouse of the peasant or gypsy variety; not dressed that way in order to arouse the author—as has sometimes been the case—but due to carelessness: her thoughts are elsewhere. All that she has learned in twelve enervating sessions she learned this morning at sunrise when the “voices” informed her that she would soon be receiving a letter. Big deal. Great voices, huh? They did not even say from whom. It could be a letter from Al's Butterfly Shop in Suez soliciting a contribution to Al's Journal of Lepidoptera, a monthly magazine. It could be a letter from her Uncle Mick in Pasadena.

  Despite her exhaustion, despite her concern over Ziller, over Plucky, over Mon Cul and over, of course, the Corpse—(O Corpse! What terrible schisms will be thy la
test legacy?)—Amanda offered to prepare supper for your correspondent before undertaking her twilight trance. (She had just fed Baby Thor his wheat custard and left him to play himself to sleep in his crib.) The author declined. “No,” he said, “you mustn't bother. I'll fix myself some hot dogs after a while. What with the zoo closed down the hot dogs are going to spoil anyway. Better to eat them up.”

  Amanda smiled. “Going to eat sausages, are you?”

  “Yes. Might as well. What fitter meal for a condemned man than Ziller's little mythic cylinders of peace?”

  “Bon appétit! I've got to go now.”

  “Will I see you later tonight?”

  “If I learn anything in trance I'll report. If not, you'll see me about two o'clock in the morning. I'll come to your room.”

  What was that? Could it be what the author was thinking? Hoping? Wishing? O thank the gods. Let him sacrifice twelve white doves to Venus. His skin flushed and his hot brain swarmed with delicious fantasies. He suffered such a forceful and abrupt erection that it almost tipped his typewriter off the table.

  “Look, now, you don't have to help if you don't want to,” said Amanda. “It really isn't fair to expect you to. But I'm going to sneak downstairs late tonight or, rather, early tomorrow morning. And I'm going to free the snakes.”