Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  Alas, that never came to pass. For within a month, Plucky Purcell was to unwittingly instigate the chain of events which was to put Amanda and John Paul Ziller in their present jeopardy, which was to threaten the well-being of millions, which was to lead to the drafting of this very report.

  In the manner that is common among newlyweds, Amanda and John Paul exchanged many confidences during the early days of their marriage. The magician showed his bride how one could alter reality by rubbing mercury on one's feet or by sniffing uranium. The bride, her tattoos resplendent as never before, showed the magician how one could chew wintergreen Life Savers in a dark room and make sparks with one's teeth.

  Peppermint won't work.

  L. Westminster “Plucky” Purcell is the youngest son of an old Virginia family, a once-aristocratic clan which, instead of floundering in Faulknerian funk when it ran out of money, simply blended with good-natured resignation into the lower middle class. Unlike the desperate daughters of those unfortunate Virginia families that have sold their pottage for a mess of birthright, Plucky's sisters made no attempt to marry the clan back into wealth and society, but settled instead for a barber and a civil engineer, whom, presumably, they loved. Plucky's brother, rather than scrambling to rescue a bit of family prestige by entering the medical or legal professions or, preferably, the Episcopalian clergy, played and later coached pro football.

  In fact, the elder Purcell son was a three-time All-American halfback at Duke University. Plucky received an athletic scholarship to the same institution, for scouts who'd seen him in action at Culpeper High were of the opinion that he would develop into a harder runner if not a more accurate passer than his big brother. That is, scouts who'd seen Plucky in action on the gridiron. Had they seen him in action on the back roads of Culpeper County, they might have more accurately forecast his future.

  After a mediocre start his sophomore year at Duke, Plucky blossomed toward the end of the season. In the last three games he scored ten touchdowns, four of them on carries of more than fifty yards. Sportswriters from all corners predicted confidently that Plucky Purcell would run off with national scoring honors the following season. Who among them could have guessed that a week before the season opened, Plucky Purcell would run off to Mexico with the backfield coach's wife?

  It was decided that Mon Cul would travel in the nursery truck. Although he was well past the age when his peers were said to grow cantankerous, and although he was a chacma—the largest of the baboon families—Mon Cul was considered a fit companion for the circus tots. “My friends has shared private amusements with children on five continents,” Ziller assured the parents. “He has romped with heirs to a hundred fortunes and a dozen thrones. There will be no unpleasantries."

  In a canvas jump suit decorated with watercolor landscapes and embroidered Indonesian butterflies, Amanda mounted the BMW behind her husband, who was in loincloth and leather. She had been warned by Nearly Normal that the harsh bouncing of the motorcycle might jar the embryo loose from its moorage, but rather than be separated from Ziller, she elected to assume the risk.

  The day was an Indian summer showpiece. In the sunny calm, the canyon seemed a gallery of bronzes and jades. High overhead a hawk traced a helix on unblemished newsprint blue. A frictional vitality burnished the guts of everyone in the caravan. It quickened when Nearly Normal sounded the move-out command on the Tibetan devil horn. The show was back on the road! As Ziller was about to kick the BMW into action, little Pammie, the goat and yak girl, ran up to his side.

  “Mr. Ziller,” she cried, “Mr. Ziller, I just wanted to tell you how much I dug the Hoodoo Meat Bucket. Oh, it was super groovy. All my friends have your record album. Got it on the black market. My mother wouldn't allow it in the house. Said it was the sickest thing she'd ever heard. But I love it. So beautiful and funny. Why did you break up? I mean just when you were getting accepted? What led you to take off to Africa?”

  The sun gleamed on Ziller's opal-studded helmet. He stood erect over his motorcycle as though he were about to bend it to his will. To Pammie he handed a page that had been ripped from some kind of journal. And as the BMW roared to the front of the motorcycle, she read:

  The invitation to

  Tarzan's bar mitzvah,

  written in nut juice

  and wrapped in a leaf

  Arrived in my mailbox

  with an organic rustle,

  smelling of camel dung

  but promising a feast

  And evoking immediate

  black jungle visions:

  The hair of the cannibal

  and the sweet of the beast

  A rather anxious football coach flew to Mexico in pursuit of his wife and her famous athlete lover. While the sporting world reeled from the delicious blow of the scandal, the lovers ate mangoes and fondled one another in the streets of Guadalajara; and that is where he, the husband, caught up with them—in the plaza of the city. Officials had taken his Colt from him at the border, but he had purchased a cleaver from a native butcher and upon spotting the fugitives, sought to put it to grim use.

  His wife was so weak from love and diarrhea she could neither fight nor flee. “I'm like a cream puff with the cream squeezed out,” she sighed, and slumped on a bench to accept her fate. “I'll take care of you later,” said her husband and he made a move for Plucky Purcell. Plucky, too, was experiencing a touch of Montezuma's revenge but he nevertheless gave the greatest broken-field running performance of his career. Now, the coach, though a bit out of shape, was no lead-footed mover himself, yet after sixteen wild minutes through the narrow streets of old Guadalajara he fell to his knees panting frantically and watched Purcell stiff-arm an orange-juice vendor and disappear down an alley.

  That midnight, as he nervously checked out of his hotel, Purcell paused to share a short tequila with the desk clerk. He gave the Mexican a true account of the day's adventure. “You are preety lucky, señor,” the clerk confided. “Not lucky,” said Plucky. “Plucky.”

  As the careful reader might have supposed, Amanda has been a bit distraught of late. In fact, so preoccupied has she been with the fate of her husband—and the Corpse that accompanied him in his flight—that she just this hour noticed the writer's efforts at reportage, although all afternoon his typewriter has been bobbing before him like a rubber duck in a tub. At her belatedly expressed curiosity, the writer disclosed that he was attempting to record the bizarre and momentous events in which they seemed so irredeemably entangled. He did not, of course, tell her that it was she who was the substance of his accounting. To reveal that would be to reveal the breadth of his esteem for her—which she would consider excessively misplaced in light of the Corpse, who, dead as it was, was the true and important protagonist in this drama.

  The extent of the author's regard for Amanda is a bagged cat to which he cannot grant amnesty at this time. There are too many unknown quantities. Not just the matter of the Corpse, which is scary enough, but personal considerations. What is to be Ziller's lot? What, for that matter, is to be the writer's lot? One does not sit at ease with one's future when one is trapped in a roadside zoo by agents of an unfriendly government, even when that government is one's own.

  At any rate, it was admitted to Amanda that the report was only in its preliminary stages (otherwise, how can the writer explain his planned return to the keyboard in the morning?). She inquired if might not the report one day be of interest to historians and such. “Yes,” replied the author, “that's a possibility—providing it is not suppressed.” Silently, he added, “But if it's history they want, they'll have to accept it on my terms. I'm not without a sense of duty in this matter—but duty to whom is quite another business.”

  It was then asked of Amanda if there was not some comment she might like to insert here at the onset of the account: no, it wouldn't interrupt continuity, no, not at all. In cutoff jeans that hung below her belly button and a gypsy cape that barely concealed her breasts, she was paler than the writer had ever s
een her; a moistly gleaming ivory like the neck of a clam.

  “Well,” she said brightly, “do you notice anything odd about these crackers?” She held them out in the woven Haida basket from which she was snacking.

  “No, they look like ordinary sesame crackers to me.”

  “If you were more perceptive,” she said, “you would have noticed that they have seeds on only one side.”

  “That's true. Why don't sesame crackers have seeds on both sides?”

  “They do at the Equator,” she said. “But in the Southern Hemisphere, all the seeds are on the other side.”

  Sailing a lighter-than-air kiss at the author, Amanda vanished into her meditation room to try once more to induce a husband-locating trance. “How do you suppose the seeds are distributed at the poles?” she called through the perfumed curtains. Then the writer heard no more. Except a gentle fanning. Like the passage of a moth.

  Part II

  ALONG THEIR MIGRATORY routes, monarch butterflies stay nights in certain trees. The “butterfly trees,” as they are called, are carefully chosen—although the criteria exercised in their selection are not known. Species is unimportant, obviously, for at one stopover the roosting tree may be a eucalyptus, at another a cedar or an elm. But, and this is what is interesting, they are always the same trees. Year after year, whether moving south or returning north, monarchs will paper with their myriad wings at twilight a single tree that has served as a monarch motel a thousand times before.

  Memory? If so, it is genetic. For you see, the butterflies who journey south are not the ones who come back. Monarchs lay their eggs in sunny climes. Then they die. The hordes who flutter northward in spring are a succeeding generation. Yet, without hesitation, they roost in the same trees as did their ancestors.

  Scientists have examined butterfly trees and found them chemically and physically identical to the trees surrounding them. Yet no other tree will do. Investigators have camouflaged a tree's color, altered its scent. The monarchs were not fooled. Another of nature's mysterious constants. A butterfly always knows when it is there.

  They found the zoo site on an October Sunday: a soft burpy day on which they crossed many bridges. Bridges over rivers and bridges over sloughs. The sky sagged like an udder. The air had a feel of heavy birds. Their motorcycle was a flash of overheated color in the damp green landscapes. At seventy miles an hour, it whined like a spinning top—and rattled Amanda's kidneys like dice in a box.

  Amanda had peed in Seattle, she had peed in Everett. And now as they sped through the Skagit River Valley, she had to pee again. Already, she and John Paul were far behind the caravan that motored to Bellingham (near the Canadian border) where, on the campus of Western Washington State College, the circus was to unfurl its canvases for the last time. But when she rapped her code on Ziller's ribs, he dutifully braked the BMW and turned into the big fir-ringed parking lot of Mom's Little Dixie Bar-B-Cue. Luckily, Amanda's biological urgency became manifest on that rare stretch of Interstate 5 where the limited access rule had, for some reason, been suspended. Along that one fifteen-mile section of the Seattle-Vancouver Freeway (between Everett and Mount Vernon), there were scattered gas stations, general stores and restaurants. Not many, however, for this was farming country of almost unequaled lushness and the black juicy soil was far too valuable to be relegated to commerce.

  The motorcycle engine died with a prolonged series of soft smoky gasps—like a dwarf choking on a burning rag. The couple dismounted. Only to discover that Mom's was closed. Not shuttered for the Sabbath but permanently shut down. Padlocked. Vacant. In a cobweb-frosted window corner a faded FOR RENT sign hung by one ear from a snipping of tape. So, while his young bride went around back to water the ferns, Ziller scrutinized the roadhouse—noted its spaciousness, its quaint but sturdy construction, the broad fields behind it, the grove in which it sat—and surmised that it was a likely edifice in which to house a zoo, a family and secret world headquarters.

  “I am always voyaging back to the source,” Ziller had said. He was a source-rer. Internally, he pursued the bright waters of his origins with whatever vehicles he could command. “In our human cells are recorded every single impulse of energy that has occurred since the beginning of time,” Amanda had said. “The DNA genetic system is the one library in which it is really worthwhile to browse.” Although he never said as much, Ziller seemed to find the key to that library in various mental disciplines, in capsules, powders, symbols, songs, rituals and vials. Externally, the source-search proceeded on a more obvious level. Ziller had pilgrimaged several times to Africa, place of his birth. Now, it was time to reassimilate the Pacific Northwest, the rained-on, clam-chawed land where he had lived his childhood. (Although it could be said that considering his books and films and daydreams and maps he was “in Africa” all those child-years, too. Or was it India?)

  When Amanda returned, John Paul clasped her suspiciously moist fingers and led her across the Freeway—traffic was sparse and there was little danger of their being struck—to the edge of a lemonade-colored slough. Clotted with eelgrass and driftwood, the slough curled forlornly through the cropland like a moat that had been abandoned by its castle. The newlyweds stood with their backs to the water, stood on the muddy shoulder and gazed across four lanes of asphalt at the cafe, its two-story Cowboy Gothic facade silhouetted against the god's-belly clouds like the fortifications of a forbidden city. Amanda squeezed her husband's hand. She knew that they were there.

  In the wash of the afternoon they perceived dimly that once, before the paint began to flake, the wood-frame facade of Mom's Little Dixie had been festooned with cartoon pigs, all wearing chef's hats and carrying steaming platters of barbecue and buns. Which caused Amanda to announce that she could never trust a pig that sold pork sandwiches. Which prompted Ziller to point out to her the parallels between such swine and businessmen everywhere.

  On Monday evening, October 2, the Indo-Tibetan Circus & Giant Panda Gypsy Blues Band offered its final performance. And a rather good performance it was. Stimulated by sentiments of finality—in a short while Nearly Normal Jimmy would be taking the band to New York for a recording session and the troupers realized that the circus would probably never be reorganized—each performer uncorked hidden geysers of adrenalin and functioned at the summit of his potential.

  Krishnalasa balanced himself on one thumb atop a twenty-five-watt bulb for sixty seconds. (Or was it atop a sixty-watt bulb for twenty-five seconds?) Master Ying swallowed (and disgorged unharmed) six frogs instead of the usual two. The monkey pipers blew until their faces turned black. Jugglers called for sharper blades, taller lampshades, additional marbles. With what clarity Elmer sang the Bhagavad-Gita, the Song Celestial, the ecstasy of the Divine One. Pursued by a gang of drooling amazons, the sugar-breasted Pammie led her yaks and goats to safety through the Tunnel of Hades. (The audience gasped as she braved the fire.) Clowns were stuffed into their suits like sausages. White mice dropped by toy parachutes from the wings of model airplanes. (One mouse broke a leg and was carried off in a tiny ambulance manned by a crew of parakeets.) In the center ring, a collection of paradoxes was exhibited. Déjà vu displays. Infinity chambers. Firecrackers. Chants. Cave paintings. Symbologies. Obscurities. Meditations. Inscrutabilities. Zen Yo-Yos. Kabuki kut-outs. Visions from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Nuclear Phyllis roaring her scooter in and out among the blues chords looking for the peace that passeth all understanding. And so forth.

  All this time Amanda lay napping, wrapped in a bulky tapestry. Outside her tipi, a dank October breeze raised goose pimples and flapped flags. The insect yammer of the crowd squirmed through the woven walls. Even into sleep the music followed her: she could hear her husband drumming, drumming as if freed from all the fetters that bind men to life. If she did not visibly respond it was because she was exhausted. Long insistent lines had formed before Amanda's booth that evening, and she had failed no one. Her trances had been crisp and short and accurate—almost staccato machine-gun
glimpses of consciousness. And she had dazzled her clients with the data she had dredged from the cards. “I feel like a pressed duck, a squeezed grape,” she sighed when it was over.

  Now here was Nearly Normal awakening her. He brought a cucumber sandwich and a half-pint of milk. Good. Food would revive her. The bread slices collapsed like movie-set walls beneath her bite; the mayonnaise squished, the cucumber snapped tartly like the spine of an elf. She held aloft the milk carton and read aloud from it, “Four hundred U.S.P. units Vitamin D added per quart from activated ergosterol.” Amanda winced before drinking. “Activated ergosterol? Jimmy, I'm not sure about this activated ergosterol. Do you suppose it could be a euphemism for strontium 90? Maybe it'll make me sterile?”

  “That might be something less than a tragedy,” said Nearly Normal. He patted her discreetly ballooning belly. “At any rate, the information on milk containers is highly educational. My first concepts of infinity were developed from looking at Pet milk cans when I was a kid. On the label there was a picture of a cow in a can, her big mooey head hanging out of one end of the can—another Pet milk can, naturally—and on the label of that can was the same cow in another Pet milk can. And that can also had a cow-in-can design on its label. And those cow cans, one inside the other, just went on, growing progressively smaller, as far as the eye could see. It walloped my little mind.”

  “They've changed the label,” Amanda pointed out.

  “Yeah. They have,” sighed Jimmy as he left to return to the show. “To Madison Avenue even infinity is expendable.”

  On Tuesday morning, there was an unseasonal frost. The grass looked as if it had been chewing Tums. Across the antacid residue, Nearly Normal's boots jitterbugged from camp to camp: paychecks to dispense, good-byes to exchange. From camp to camp he trotted through his own breath like a riot cop charging tear gas. His glasses steamed over, his nose was its own gas mask. “Beautiful show last night,” he hollered to every performer he saw. “Beautiful.” When he ducked into the Ziller tent he found its occupants still abed, although Amanda and Thor were awake playing mommie-baby games in the puffy Christmas of quilts.