Wild Ducks Flying Backward

by Tom Robbins

  it ain’t for a sissy or a child,

  it’s the hot stuff, not the mild,

  don’t treat it like a poodle.

  You can housebreak your puppy, you can housebreak your cat

  you can even housebreak some bunny rabbits.

  You can teach some old boys to wipe their boots on a mat,

  but love holds on to its bad habits.

  Passion hides in the shadows where it’s damp and it’s dark

  to sneak out and bite you on the leg.

  No, it won’t sit up and beg:

  My heart is not a poodle.

  My love is wild, hog wild,

  it ain’t for a sissy or a child,

  it’s sweet but it’s also vile,

  don’t mistake it for no poodle.

  Real love likes to run free like a fox or a cur,

  it ain’t looking for no master,

  so don’t be tying no fancy ribbons ’round its neck

  or it’s gonna run all the faster.

  I like the way you look, baby, I love how you smell

  I long to be your very own,

  but don’t toss me no old bone;

  my heart is not a poodle.

  My love is wild, hog wild,

  it ain’t for a sissy or a child,

  it’s the hot stuff, not the mild,

  don’t treat it like a poodle.

  (SPOKEN)

  It ain’t nobody’s lapdog.

  Won’t wear no rhinestone collar.

  Don’t even think about calling it “Fifi.”

  WEST TO SATORI

  The meditation mat

  is the yogi’s horse:

  Git along little yoga,

  gotta reach

  El Snuffing Out Candle

  afore sundown

  own

  own

  own

  own.

  WILD CARD

  Between the ace and the trey

  between the raise and the fold

  between the hat and the wand

  down and dirty in Vegas

  or up a magician’s silky sleeve,

  the red deuce bides its time.

  Born under the sign of Gemini

  on Groundhog Day in Baden Baden,

  bipolar double agent

  too wild for just one world:

  two hearts beating in one pale breast,

  diamonds the color of rubies dangling from the Devil’s lobes,

  Euclidean tomatoes,

  jigsaw pasties,

  Rasputin and his clone

  in velvet suits scheming to topple a royal house,

  Saint Valentine’s testicles swaying

  imperceptibly to the fickle rhythms of chance:

  the sagacious player understands

  that these are no mere figures of speech.

  If some night a pair

  of bloodshot eyes

  stare unblinking into yours,

  remember:

  no hand is a winning hand

  ’til you dare to lay it down,

  and He who made the red deuce wild

  knows both your secret names.

  OPEN WIDE

  Jacking the molar free

  of its purchase in the bark-blackened gums,

  the mission dentist made to toss it

  into a pail of slops—

  but the shaman seized it,

  licked it lovingly clean of his own blood,

  used a baby monkey to buff it,

  built a wooden cage for it

  and set it next to the dream pole

  in the center of the village.

  At sunrise the next morning

  the tooth commenced to sing

  in a sweet little Gloria Estefan voice,

  awakening the missionary

  who, chronically dazed by everything around him

  for a hundred miles,

  turned to the first page in his stiff hymnal

  and tried to join in.

  TWO FOR MY YOUNG SON

  I

  If Frankenstein grows tomatoes

  And Dracula farms beans,

  If the Wolfman plants the croutons

  That Kong puts on his greens,

  If the Creature From the Black Lagoon

  Loves carrots, peas, and hash,

  If Godzilla peels the potatoes

  Used in the Monster Mash,

  If Vego the Giant Cauliflower

  Eats people like a fiend,

  Then what is keeping you, my son,

  From licking your plate clean?

  II

  The Abominable Snowman

  Lives far from any city

  Up in the Himalayas

  Where snow falls like confetti.

  Men climb far to look for him

  Their ropes coiled like spaghetti

  But though they’ve looked for years and years

  They haven’t found him, yeti.

  The Towers of St. Ignatz

  A script treatment for a feature film

  Freddie Manhattan is a rock star of moderate magnitude—he has an asteroid talent but a supernova ego. He has just been informed by his manager that he’ll be cutting his new album in N.Y. right after the Christmas holidays (late autumn lies like a frosty leaf upon America). Freddie’s in a snit. N.Y. January is colder than penguin toejam. Okay, okay, L.A., then. No! Freddie wants the Caribbean. Elton John records in the Caribbean, Sting records in the Caribbean, the Caribbean is good enough for Mick Jagger, it ought to be good enough for Freddie Manhattan. Exasperated, the manager says he’ll see what he can do.

  In Minneapolis, meanwhile, Howard, a high-school history teacher, is visiting a former colleague, one Newton Beck. A biology teacher, Newton, thirty-one, got one of his students pregnant. Even though he married the girl, he was fired. Young Mrs. Beck gave birth to twin sons, now about six months old. The twins are fraternal (non-identical) and Newton is explaining to Howard the ways in which they differ, one from the other. Heidi Beck seems uninterested in the Beck twins, her husband, or his guest. She is dancing alone to a Freddie Manhattan album.

  Freddie, back in N.Y., is watching the weather on TV. “It’s already fuckin’ snowing in Minneapolis,” he observes sourly.

  As dawn breaks the next day, the twins begin to fret. Newton gets up and heats their formula. It’s still early when they are fed so he slides back in bed with his teenaged bride and instigates some industrial strength foreplay. Heidi claims she’s too sleepy. Newton rolls over and peeks through the blinds. A light snow, the first of the season, has fallen during the night. “At least I’ll have something new to do at work today,” he says.

  Newton now works as a guide at the Twin Cities Museum of Natural History. On a day like today, as a part of the Wonders of the Universe tour, he will collect fresh snowflakes and project them upon a screen to demonstrate both the intricate beauty of crystal structure and the infinite variety of nature: “Of all the trillions upon trillions of snowflakes that have fallen upon the earth, no two have ever been alike.”

  Freddie’s manager is on the phone to the Caribbean recording studio, arguing about rental time. “Freddie can’t pay what Elton pays. He doesn’t move as much product as Elton moves. Only don’t tell him that.”

  Just before the final guided tour of the day, Newton calls Heidi. She complains that the twins are not taking their nap. “How can they sleep with that music up so loud?” he asks, referring to the blare of one of Freddie Manhattan’s recent CDs. Once more, he collects and projects some snowflakes. “Of all the trillions and trillions…” The visitors laugh. They think it’s a joke. It takes Newton a while to really focus on the fact that two of the projected snowflakes are absolutely identical! He almost faints from astonishment.

  Newton’s life is dramatically transformed. He quickly becomes obsessed with the implications of the identical flakes (which he managed to photograph just as they began to melt). While Heidi practices on her guitar, Newton studies the flake pictures, examin
es thousands of new flakes, meditates on the meaning of it all— does this mean that certain previously inviolable laws of nature are now in question, or is it simply an amazing coincidence without planetary or cosmic significance?—and broods because neither the scientific community nor the public is as excited about it as he is. Minneapolis TV stations give him a few minutes of exposure, but interest quickly fades, and serious scientists treat the photos as if they’re some kind of hoax.

  Due to his obsession, Newton’s in trouble at work. And in more trouble than usual at home. Heidi now thinks he’s crazy as well as old. Then, a telegram arrives from the editor-publisher at the Weekly World Enquirer, offering to pay $300 for exclusive rights to the flake pix. Heidi says ask for $500. Howard (the history teacher) advises against it altogether. Newton decides to hand carry the picture to W.W.E. offices in Miami, so that he might convince the editor to publish a lengthy article. Sleazy publicity is better than no publicity at all. He dumps baby clothes out of Heidi’s guitar case, throws in a change of underwear and the pictures. He buys a bus ticket to Miami.

  On the island of St. Ignatz, Freddie is cutting his album. At about four A.M., there’s a break at the studio and Freddie walks outside in the moonlight to have a smoke. Two wild-looking Rastaesque black men come out of the jungle, subdue him, and carry him off.

  Early the next morning, Freighter and his common-law wife, Cookie, are awakened by a terrible racket. Freighter is a middle-aged white American, a burly, bald giant with sailor tattoos and a red beard. Cookie is a cute, young black woman. Bleary-eyed, Freighter stumbles out of his picturesque shack to see what the hell is going on. Across the clearing, at the equally quaint shack of Zumba, Zumba’s wife, Leroyette, and his brother, Brutha (the location is far back in the hills and nobody else lives within five or six miles), Freddie has been chained to a post in the dirt yard. He has been given a cheap, tinny electric guitar (wired to a car battery), and ordered to perform.

  Freddie is bitching and moaning, not so much at the command performance, as at the quality of the guitar. Freighter stares dumbfounded at the scene. Zumba wears a fiercely triumphant grin.

  Each of the two shacks has an unusually tall, makeshift, eccentric antenna attached to it. The antennae appear to have been built in stages, out of whatever material (mostly junk) that happened to be available at the time of each addition. These twin towers are maybe forty feet high and rather bizarre. Cookie looks from Freighter to the towers to Freddie and back to Freighter again. She is apprehensive about something.

  Arriving at the Weekly World Enquirer office in Miami, Newton catches the publishing tycoon who had wired him, Desmond Hinkley Jr., on his way out the door. Hinkley Jr. (he insists on the Jr.—if you call him Mr. Hinkley, he corrects you: “Mr. Hinkley Junior”) has received a tip that something has happened to Freddie Manhattan down on St. Ignatz Island, and he’s on his way there in hopes of a scoop. Newton refuses to hand over the snowflake pictures without an interview. Hinkley Jr., in a rush, offers to hear him out aboard his Lear jet, so Newton tags along to the Caribbean.

  High above the ground, Freighter is adding to the height of his antenna tower. He keeps glancing down at Zumba, but Zumba is ignoring him. Zumba stands with his arms smugly folded, enjoying Freddie’s forced concert. Freighter yells down to Cookie to turn up the music on his shortwave, but it’s already at full volume and it can’t compete with Freddie’s live performance. Freighter fumes and Cookie looks worried.

  In his hotel room, Hinkley Jr. is on the phone dictating his scoop on the Freddie Manhattan kidnapping. He instructs his subordinates that once they’ve broken the story, they are to announce that Hinkley Jr. is personally organizing and leading a rescue mission. He’ll leave at first light. Meanwhile, that snowflake freak, Newton Beck, is keeping a watch on the recording studio and will alert the paper immediately should a ransom demand be made.

  At the secret clearing, Cookie’s fears have materialized. During the night, Freighter has gone off in the dune buggy. Now he squeals up in front of the shack—and discharges his prize: Newton. His triumph quickly turns into humiliation when Newton backs up his insistence that he’s not a rock star by opening his guitar case.

  “It’s snow,” Newton says. “You know what snow is?” At first, they believe he’s talking about cocaine and start to rough him up. When it’s demonstrated that he possesses neither an instrument nor drugs, but merely some boring photographs, Zumba and Brutha have a great, long laugh at Freighter’s expense. Freighter stalks away to sulk, and Newton tells the story to the rest of them, including Freddie. (It’s here that we learn the details of Newton’s affair with Heidi.) Cookie is the most attentive. Her eyes light up when she hears about the twins. After the rest of them have wandered off, she stays.

  Cookie tells Newton about the obsessive competition between Freighter and Zumba. It is mostly manifest in the radio towers: every time Zumba makes an addition, Freighter adds to his tower (originally, they were trying to see who could get the best reception of Miami rock stations but they have moved well beyond function into pure form). Recently, Leroyette has become pregnant, so Freighter, competitively, is trying desperately to impregnate Cookie.

  Well and good, but all that interests Newton is solving the mystery of the identical snowflakes, and here he is chained to a post in the isolated interior of a backward island, helpless to act upon his breathtaking discovery. Even were he free in the civilized world, however, he would be at a loss to solve the mystery, since science preferred to ignore his discovery, to deny its implications. Cookie listens attentively. Then, as she gets up to go inside (where Freighter is wailing for her), she says, softly, “I knows somebody who might can hep you.”

  Late that night, Cookie slips out and unchains Newton. By moonlight, she leads him into the jungle. After a long trek, they look down upon a shack by a waterfall. “’Fore you go down there you be doin’ something for me, Mr. Twinmaker.” Newton resists, telling her that he knows nothing about making twins, that it was an accident of nature. Cookie seduces him anyway, and there follows a brief but energetic act of coitus beneath a mango tree.

  Afterwards, she takes him to the shack, where their knock is answered by a woman wearing heavy beads, gobs of bright red lipstick, and smoking a big cigar. A black rooster is cradled in her arms. She is stroking it.

  Cookie leaves Newton with her mother. Mama Lo’s shack is dominated by an ornate shrine, in the center of which are lurid pictures of Jesus and Mary. Mama Lo makes Newton puff her cigar. He gets dizzy. With a short cord, Mama Lo ties the rooster to Newton’s ankle. When he looks up, the pictures of Jesus and Mary are gone and the photo of the identical snowflakes has been pinned up in their place. Once again, Mama Lo passes him the stogy.

  Meanwhile, Desmond Hinkley Jr. and his ragtag search party of tourists, rock musicians, and local black policemen have rousted the inhabitants of a mountain village, and, holding aloft Freddie Manhattan albums, are unsuccessfully questioning them. The villagers are sullen. Not a peep. Lionel, the cop who is acting as Hinkley Jr.’s chief aide, announces that clearly it must be Zumba who is responsible for the abduction. According to Lionel, this folk hero, Zumba, and his brother reside—he points to a map—deep in the valley between the twin volcanoes. [NOTE: the island of Montserrat, site of George Martin’s recording studio, is, indeed, dominated by twin volcanoes.] It is only about fifteen miles from the village. “We’ll be there in no time,” Hinkley Jr. encourages his men. But when they return to their two vehicles, they find the tires have been slashed. They’ll have to hike.

  “What I want to know,” Newton confides to Mama Lo, “is whether the snowflake phenomenon is a signal that the Earth is about to enter a new phase of evolutionary development, one in which many traditional scientific truisms will become obsolete, or have we simply been wrong all along in our rigid assumptions regarding the structure of reality.” Mama instructs him to shut up and enjoy the cigar. A faint blue glow has begun to emanate from the shrine.

  At
the clearing, Freighter discovers that Cookie has freed Newton. “What do it matter?” Cookie asks. “He couldn’t play no music no how.” “Zumba has a worthless brother,” Freighter says. “I don’t have no worthless brother. He was gonna be my worthless brother.” “Well,” says Cookie, “he not you brother.” She turns from him, smiles to herself, and places her hands over her womb. “And he not so worthless.”

  Freddie, meanwhile, pleads, whines, and threatens. Until Zumba swings a machete a few inches from his nose. Then he sings and plays. Zumba grins contentedly. Brutha joins in on the bongos. This routine is repeated throughout the day.

  Hinkley Jr.’s rescue party sweats and pants up the steep jungle road. A bit of bravado has drained from its leader.

  The strange blue light has completely enveloped Mama Lo’s shack. Newton writhes on a straw mat on the floor. His eyes are closed. He groans, he writhes.

  Several feet of snow blankets Minneapolis. As a Freddie Manhattan album plays on the stereo, a melancholy Heidi stares out the window. In the distance, a small figure hops across the snowy suburban landscape. As it nears, we see the figure is Newton. He is bound with rope, as if to a mast, to a giant chicken leg. No chicken, just the leg. The leg hops through the snow, toward the house. In their crib, the twins begin to cry. Heidi picks them up, wraps them well, and carries them outside. As they stand in the snow, the chicken leg hops around them. Newton blows kisses at the three of them. The twins goo and smile. Heidi mouths halfhearted kisses at Newton. Then, the chicken leg carries him off into the distance. He disappears beyond the pale horizon.

  At kiosks all over America, the Weekly World Enquirer reveals the news of Freddie’s abduction. Network TV picks it up. The word “terrorists” is used. Dan Rather, a bit bemused, announces that tabloid publisher Desmond Hinkley Jr. is leading a rescue party in the St. Ignatz interior.