The drone crossed to the saloon and returned with a bottle of whiskey and a glass and poured the bluesman a snort.
“He drinks whiskey?” the Marshal asked.
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a nip,” Lemon wheezed.
“Nip my ass!” Maggie yawned. “Probbly drinks like a fish!”
“Actually, freshwater fish hardly drink at all,” Wiggler remarked. “It’s the marine bony fishes—”
“Mister—yoo jest can’t leave it alone, can yoo? Noa wondur yoo down heer in this can-yen makin’ yer own playmates!”
Wiggler’s face flushed with anger for a moment and the Marshal braced himself—but instead the bald man laughed and said, “Ms. Kane, you really do have a gift—a rare refreshing gift. Go along to your rooms and rest now—they’re laid out in the hotel. Your friend is sleeping. We’ll talk more at dinner.”
The Marshal escorted Maggie back to the hotel, leaving Wiggler blowing smoke rings with Blind Lemon and Walt Whitman. Maggie nodded off to her bed, too drowsy to fuss. The Marshal looked in on Clearfather, who was, as Wiggler had said, asleep in his room. The lines on his face had relaxed, and he looked like a child again. Maybe the bad dreams are behind him, the Marshal thought—but he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. He went into his own room and pulled off his boots.
It occurred to him that he’d never actually slept in an old western hotel room before. He was meant to in Star City. In fact, there was going to be a big episode when he leaves the wife he no longer loves (not knowing she’s really an alien) and moves into the hotel. He lay back on the big four-poster bed and closed his eyes, thinking of the episodes that might’ve been. But he bolted awake and almost fell off the bed because he suddenly remembered what Wiggler had said in his toast. “May they always be with us!”
As in forever.
CHAPTER 10
Wheels Within Wheels
Clearfather awoke to hear the church bell echoing. He was on the bed in the white and airy Lodema Room of the Red Cloud Hotel, and yet he could see that the room wasn’t made of bricks and lumber. The apparent solidity was due to the sustained intersection of countless whirlwinds of light. His own body shared the radiance. Then he realized that he hadn’t woken up because of the bell. The bell had awakened because of him.
Maybe I am Home, he thought, as the plaster and pressed metal stabilized. All the faces and images came deluging back, curiously normal in his mind . . . mutant but mundane. But how can Wiggler be my father? What about my mother? What about Uncle Waldo and Aunt Vivian? What did this have to do with Hosanna Freed? And how can my name be Elroy? Surely I would’ve remembered that, he thought.
He recalled Wiggler’s toast and the beaming Neanderthals—the lemon curd. What had happened after that he couldn’t say. It was embarrassing, after so wanting to be welcomed and celebrated—to faint. Now he needed to find out how much time had passed and what had happened to his friends.
He thought of what Dr. Tadd had said about the possible connection between Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd and Ronwell Seward/Stinky Wiggler. What if Seward’s true identity was Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd? Was that what Dr. Tadd had been hinting at? He’d be well over two hundred years old—though for someone of such legendary inventiveness—who knew what was possible? But why would he be rooting about in a forgotten canyon in an obscure state like South Dakota? And how did Parousia Head fit in? Is she my mother? Clearfather wondered. Is she in hiding, waiting for the right moment to reveal herself? And Kokomo? Perhaps no force could bring her back—but to know . . . to understand . . .
One thing seemed clear. If I am home, he thought . . . and I’m welcome . . . then I’m welcome to roam around.
He felt for the little white ball in his pocket. He’d been careful to transfer it from his IMAGINE-NATION togs to the Nehru suit. Maybe soon he’d find out its meaning. He tiptoed over the creaking floor. The hall was empty but for a vase like the kind that had housed the Man of Steel’s first wife. Next door Maggie lay fully clothed on the bed, her face buried in a pillow. She was breathing deeply and didn’t seem in any way molested so he closed the door. Across the hall it looked as if the Marshal had lain down and then left suddenly, for the bed was rumpled and the suit jacket that Wiggler had provided was on the floor beside a chair. Clearfather headed downstairs. A funky odor lingered in the air that made him think of Walt Whitman.
The table and stage were gone, the street vacant. The sky was darker but not dark, although he saw that the Canyon walls were flocked with phosphorescent mosses. They made complex patterns like maps and faces among the eroded columns. He figured that the watchful eyes he’d sensed before were still present and set out in the opposite direction from the way they’d gone earlier.
Passing the creosote-smelling mill house, he heard a sound. It reminded him of the rats in the abandoned honky-tonk in Texas. In the gloom inside he could just make out the steam engines that had once powered the concentration tables and the direct-current dynamos that had provided electricity for the mine. He heard the sound again behind the furnace stamps and felt an instinctive sense of revulsion and fear.
When they’d come back for the tea party, the town had looked freshly painted and repaired. Now certain buildings, like the dry goods store, had deteriorated again. The schoolhouse was back to being a single room. There was a billiard hall and a warped-floor duckpin bowling alley, but the windows had turned to sand. It was as if the town couldn’t maintain belief in itself. He could feel eyes up in the caves watching him but was more curious about what was happening at ground level. He sensed he was being followed.
He wandered through a junkyard of shattered greenhouses and rusted mobile homes, solar panels, transformers, and mounds of optical fibers. For a genius who was supposedly amazingly rich, Wiggler tolerated a lot of mess. Where did he actually live? Clearfather wondered. Then he spied a shadow sliding over an old camper shell.
“All right, come out,” he called. But nothing moved. He waited, but all was silent. He kept exploring.
Another quarry pit opened up before him, filled with prehistoric animal bones—mastodons, cave bears, and enormous elk—but more unexpectedly, an ornate sandblasted roller coaster. It was just like the antique contraption he’d seen in the sepia postcard back in Dustdevil. The gimcracked swirls and filigrees had faded. The side of the rail scaffolding that remained was crusted in broken lantern globes, like barnacles or the sucker cups of an octopus, but the engineering was the same—and it looked like the machine was still functional.
The rails disappeared into the sandstone face of the cliff, from which a cool smell of damp rock and the sound of machinery emanated. The noise grew louder—a rhythmic whoosh and clang—and ping. He followed the rails down into the earth. The track led into a cave system filled with crystalline hairs of white zinc silicate. Many of the rocks gave off their own light, great chunks of fire opal and glimmering prisms of blood crystal jutting out of the petrified skeletons of plesiosaurs. But even more remarkable was the light from the ceiling, which smeared like the Milky Way—the result of innumerable threads of tiny glowworms clinging to the rock.
The cave mouth opened into a vast subterranean cathedral containing an amusement park. Over the great entryway of granite was the name LABYRINTHIA, spelled out in the same phosphorescent moss he’d seen on the Canyon walls. It was the name Dr. Tadd had mentioned—Sitturd’s lost estate in South Dakota.
Where above was dust and wreckage, here there was splendor that daunted perception—a glorious kinetic playground inhabited by hydraulic marionettes, steam-driven dancing girls, stilt-legged automatons with birdcages on their shoulders—or gumball machines and the torsos of insanely detailed Dutch dollhouses.
The subjects of this glittering kingdom acknowledged him with brisk Victorian formality and then went on about their clicking and whirring business. There was a miniature Ferris wheel fabricated out of diamonds, guarded by armor-suited soldiers with the heads of stuffed deer. Shining titanium and veranium slides intermingle
d with marble fountains full of ingenious mechanical fish and luxuriant emerald turtles. An attraction called Anxiety—a blacklight centrifugal cylinder—whirled beside a gravity ride called Paranoia—leading to the midway—filled with masterpieces—from the paintings of Brueghel and Rembrandt to Van Gogh and Picasso. Echoing through the chamber was a kind of calliope music.
His eyes picked out a shadow among the baroque robots. It vanished between two large wicker cages in the shape of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, which were filled with hundreds of tiny zebra finches. Was it the person or creature following him? Something about the movement made him think not. It was too confident—too knowing. Whatever or whoever was still behind him seemed to hesitate. He heard the off-putting sound again but now it was receding—as if the presence of the other figure had frightened it. The deeper he went into this maze of bright machinery, the darker he felt the way was growing. His curiosity was greater than his fear but he was not at ease. Then he caught a definite glimpse of the figure in front of him and saw that it was Wiggler—striding determinedly. Clearfather slipped behind.
A catwalk took him through a passage lit by panels made of the swim bladders of some sea creature. There was a bubbling sound and whiffs of sulfur and musk. In the distance, he saw that Wiggler had arrived at the “Grotto of Eros,” which featured canoes in the shape of penises, advancing on a sunken gear chain into a cave decorated to look like a vagina. The fleshy pink tones and temperfoam wrinkles had the tacky aura of an old haunted house. Oblivious to his presence, Wiggler climbed into one of the boats. Clearfather waited a minute before following.
Inside the tunnel, the walls were lit with lurid cabaret globes revealing naked bodies writhing in the rocks. Smoldering red arc lights shone over the water on the other side. From chains anchored in the ceiling dangled huge crystal hourglasses in the shape of men and women having sex. They were filled with red and black sand and set into gleaming brass brackets that allowed them to rotate when the weight of the sand had shifted—so that a man atop a woman appeared to empty himself of colored sand, becoming almost invisible as she gained color—only to rotate beneath her—the glass couples endlessly exchanging color and position.
The canoe reached a small stone island and paused at a pier. Wiggler was nowhere to be seen. Torches glowed. On an inner island across ten feet of water was a carousel, shimmering in a golden-green mist rising from the lagoon. The perimeter frame of the carousel took the shape of a golden snake swallowing its own tail—and on the oval panels set into the crown canopy were erotic paintings in lush Gauguin and Rousseau colors.
On the platform of the mechanical whirlwind danced animals seemingly made of moist, sculpted light: black horses, white tigers, slender unicorns, monstrous roosters, insane sphinxes, swans, dromedaries, goats, bulls, rams, reindeer, tortoises, hares. Astride each of the creatures was a naked woman. Every race was represented and all the bodies appeared real, although in a trance. Up and down the animals rose on their golden pumping pistons, undulating in a ceremonial cyclone around and around. Clearfather watched, hypnotized. At the center of the carousel, naked among the tangle of monsters and machinery—stood Wiggler.
Clearfather fled back to the pier, back to the canoe, back to the light. Once off the boat he ran down the midway, dodging between the machine-men and clockwork chorus girls, back up the track to the quarry pit. It was getting dark now, and the Canyon walls glowed—the sounds of the underground amusement park fading out behind him. He was positive he’d retraced his steps but instead of the trailer-park junkyard he came to a section of pillars, a cross between giant termite mounds and human effigies—like sand-castle men. Or women. Their features were grotesque but there was about their bulk and alignment a definite attitude of barricade. He stepped cautiously between them. The river flowed alongside. In the distance he saw a small village of tepees and sandstone bunkers. Lights were on in the structures, although fires burned outside and shadows moved in and out of them. He crept nearer, edging up against the cliff face—then darting between the boulders that dotted the riverbed. When he drew close enough, he saw that the inhabitants were deformed—like radiation victims—able to move about via miniature all-terrain wheelchairs. Others slithered in the sand like worms. There was another creature—walking erect but gruesomely misshapen—a composite mutant he was glad that he couldn’t see clearly. He fled back the way he came.
This time, running the other way, he still didn’t find the debris he’d passed earlier—but at last he saw the lights of the town, the Red Cloud Hotel shining. Then he saw Calamity Jane, the downsized giant sloth. Despite her bulk, Clearfather could see in her gestures and demeanor—a little girl. Had she been the one following him? It was hard to tell now because the light was failing, but it was clear that she was playing beside a section of cliff that gave off a peculiar sheen—different from the luminous moss he’d seen. She made strange noises, quivering with excitement—and then she did something he hadn’t anticipated. She disappeared—or a part of her did. She drew back out of the rock, wiggling and even more rambunctious than before—and then inserted something, which the wall seemed to accept and engulf. Then the sloth pulled back, dancing with enjoyment. She straggled off toward the town. Moments later he did the same. On the steps of the hotel Clearfather heard a mournful clang from down the street, and when he reached the sheriff’s office the sound grew louder.
CHAPTER 11
The Entities
The Marshal couldn’t hide his relief that it was Clearfather who found him locked in the jail, although he was reluctant to provide much of an explanation of how he’d gotten there—other than to say that he’d gotten up and seen Wiggler disappear into a coffin in the funeral parlor. Then when he went exploring, he’d heard “mighty peculiar” sounds down the other end of town—and in going to investigate he’d discovered the local lawman’s office, which he was surprised to find was just like what his was going to look like on Star City. One thing led to another. Then he couldn’t get out.
On top of everything else he was coping with, this surprised Clearfather, because the door to the jail cell simply opened at his touch—despite the Marshal’s protestations that it had been locked solid. In any case, Clearfather led the old-timer back to the hotel without either of them saying what he’d learned in the other’s absence.
They found Maggie soaking in a bath, with two more steaming tubs waiting for them and a note from Wiggler inviting them to dinner along with fresh white robes with the wheelbarrow-of-fire logo and a pair of deerskin moccasins in each of their sizes. Clearfather was pleased that the robes contained pockets, as he refused to leave the tiny ivory ball behind.
By the time they were finished dressing it was truly dark outside and antique lanterns had come on down the street. The church bell chimed and the carriage that had carried Yo-Yo arrived, driven by a Harijan dressed as a Victorian-era footman.
Up in the caves in the Canyon walls, Neanderthal fires burned and between the ledges, the swirling patterns of luminous moss shone. The carriage passed the radio shack they’d seen earlier, only now it was painted and filled with light and sound—the needle of the transmitter tower gleaming silver, “Soul Limbo” by Booker T. and the MG’s throbbing out between the palisades.
The mystery of where Wiggler lived was resolved spectacularly when the Canyon wound around to a palatial residence carved into the rocks like an ancient Middle Eastern temple—only in the shape of the American White House. It was lit with an honor guard of Neanderthals and Harijans beneath a gigantic flag like the one they’d seen before, showing a skunk and the words LOCO FOCO—MAKE A STINK.
Wiggler was on the stairs, wearing a Singapore linen suit that changed color and pattern as he moved. “Greetings, my friends.” He smiled as they stepped from the carriage. “All refreshed, are we?”
“How about you?” Clearfather asked, thinking of the carousel.
“Absolutely.” Wiggler beamed and gestured for them to follow him.
Insi
de the mansion built into the rocks they found an environment that made Maggie’s eyes glaze over and the Marshal whistle through his nose. Wiggler was a collector of oddities and treasures—from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American circus memorabilia to blues and rock-and-roll artifacts, with hefty doses of astronautica, Hollywood nostalgia, Renaissance masterpieces, and surely the most complete presentation of apparently taxidermized heads of the U.S. presidents.
“My God,” gasped the Marshal. “They look so real!”
Against one wall was Jelly Roll Morton’s piano. Mounted on another, the boxing gloves that the then–Cassius Clay had used to knock out Sonny Liston. At last Wiggler ushered them into a wood-paneled dining room where the giant skunk Walt Whitman was asleep on a Persian rug and Blind Lemon was already seated at a long table of American walnut.
“Calamity Jane will not be joining us tonight—perhaps to your relief. She’s gotten into a bit of trouble again—and I confess I’m disheartened. Fancy parenting a kleptomaniac sloth!”
Wiggler shook his head and gestured for them to sit down. Clearfather thought back to the section of wall the sloth had seemed to vanish into.
“You look peeved, Marshal. Things not to your satisfaction at the hotel?”
“You know very well what happened to me, Wiggler,” the Marshal grumbled. “I bet you’ve got spies and cameras all over the joint.”
“His name’s not Wiggler,” Clearfather said quietly.
“Marshal, if I know what’s happening on my island, as it were, you can hardly blame me. I just assumed you were reenacting one of the key moments in your father’s saga. You’ll note that no tear gas or SWAT team was supplied.”
“Whot happened?” Maggie wondered.
“Hah,” Wiggler grinned. “Our friendly lawman locked himself inside the town pokey. Isn’t that one of life’s most cunning and persistent metaphors? Locking ourselves inside our own jails!”
Zanesville: A Novel Page 37