Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  “Insects are fascinating. Many of their senses are more highly developed than our own. Our tongues, for example, can't tell the difference between sugar solutions and dissolved saccharine. But bees, wasps and butterflies, while they love sugar water, won't sip a saccharine substitute at all.”

  Meanwhile, Ziller was doing a bit of tasting himself. Amanda was melting from the glory of it. She felt like the frosting left on the spoon that iced the Cake of the World.

  “Insects have hearts and blood circulation systems just as we do. But did you know that it's impossible to take a beetle's pulse?”

  Why had she said that? It was irrelevant. She was losing her rationale. John Paul was out of his loincloth. He hovered over her. His rigid member rested against her belly like a hoe handle against a pumpkin. Looking at it, all she could think to say was, “The European cabbage butterfly has the most remarkable coiled proboscis. Gasp!”

  Amanda was a stubborn woman. She was determined to have her say. With the mental equivalent of a Dutch boy finger, she tried to plug the hole in the glandular dike from whence her hot juices gushed. “Well, look, don't you think it's a sound idea? We could have an ant farm and a flea circus. Some insect species are so beautiful. The giant rhinoceros beetle, the harlequin bug. And all of them needn't be living. We could exhibit our scarab collection. And my rare mounted moths from South America. And, of course, our tsetse fly which isn't even . . . ALIVE!!” At that moment Ziller had entered her, one-twelfth of a fathom deep. The dike broke, drowning the Dutch boy. And countless wondrous insects of the world.

  Amanda shook John Paul awake in the middle of the night. “No,” he thought. “It couldn't be. The baby isn't expected for three more months."

  His bride was propped on one elbow. He could tell she had just come out of trance: Her face was drawn, her eyes were as lifeless as blotters. A silver candle was burning in her sanctuary—behind the perfumed curtains. Damn. She'd been out of bed. “Civilization is dulling my senses,” Ziller mused. “In the jungle nothing could have stirred within a fifty-yard radius without awakening me.”

  “John Paul,” Amanda asked in a soft, tired voice, “are you aware of the animals that are going extinct?”

  “Well, er, yes, I suppose I am.”

  “I don't mean the big beasts of Africa that you miss so much. I'm referring to wildlife right here in this country. Threatened with extinction are: the timber wolf, red wolf, Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel, grizzly bear, San Joaquin kit fox, Florida panther, Caribbean monk seal, Guadalupe fur seal, key deer, Columbian white-tailed deer, Sonoran pronghorn, Indiana bat, black-footed ferret and Florida sea cow (manatee).”

  John Paul jerked with guilt at the mention of “Indiana bat.” He suddenly recalled that when Amanda awakened him he had been dreaming of his former wife. They were carrying her out of the Kansas City Opera House, in the middle of Act II of Die Fledermaus. Her bat cries were obscuring the mezzo-soprano, drool dripped from her gentle mouth like pearls from the anus of an angel. Ziller shuddered and drew the covers around his shoulders.

  “And those are just the mammals,” Amanda continued. “There are birds: Hawaiian goose (nene), Aleutian goose, Tule white-fronted goose, laysan duck, Hawaiian duck, Hawaiian dark-rumped petrel, California condor, Florida Everglade kite, Hawaiian hawk (ii), bald eagle, Attawater's greater prairie chicken, masked bobwhite, whooping crane, Yuma clapper rail, Eskimo curlew, Puerto Rican parrot, ivory-billed woodpecker, dusky seaside sparrow, crested honeycreeper (akohekohe), etc., etc.

  “That's an irony that Plucky Purcell would adore,” added Amanda, sounding a bit brighter. “American economic growth—the cutting of forests, industrial pollution of air and streams, the spread of suburbia—is driving the bald eagle into extinction. And the bald eagle is the very whole and exact traditional symbol of the American Republic. You'd think that a people as hung up on abstractions as ours are would be rather uneasy about the prospects of murdering off its own symbol.”

  If such conversation was an awkward intruder in the 3 A.M. of his consciousness, John Paul did not let on. Rather, he said, “I read in a natural history book once that eagles are cursed with chronic bad breath. Don't smile. It's a fact. One knows, if one reads magazine ads or watches television, how Americans feel about odors of the head and body. Could that explain their lack of concern over the eagle's demise?”

  Life was draining back into Amanda's eyes, as if her pupils had, too, been threatened with extinction only to receive an evolutionary reprieve. “Imagine, a cleanliness-obsessed Puritan society selecting a national symbol with habitual halitosis. But, seriously, John Paul, listen to me. There are reptiles and amphibians going, also: the alligator, blunt-nose leopard lizard, San Francisco garter snake, Santa Cruz long-toed salamander, Texas blind salamander and the black toad.”

  “And fishes?”

  Yes, magi. Fishes: shortnose sturgeon, longjaw cisco, green-back cutthroat trout, Montana West-slope cutthroat trout, Gila trout, Arizona (Apache) trout, desert dace, blue pike, humpback chub, Colorado River squawfish, Devil's Hole pupfish, Owens River pupfish, Gila top minnow, Maryland darter, Clear Creek gambusia . . . you don't want me to list them all?”

  “That won't be necessary.”

  “Well, I thought I'd keep you informed.”

  “Thank you. You believe there is something to consider here? For our zoo, I mean.”

  “Possibly. We needn't try to save them all. Couldn't be done. We might concentrate on one species. Like the San Francisco garter snake. The pair we have now, I think they are more the Los Angeles garter snake. But Smokestack Lightning could get us a couple of the San Francisco variety. He's got connections in the snake world. Perhaps they'd mate.”

  John Paul reached for his bedside drum and made a matrix of sound roll from it with the edge of his right hand and the palm of his left “Rhythm. Creation, evolution, extinction.” He hit the drum again. “Rhythm. Birth, growth, death. Rhythm. Creation, evolution, extinction. Extinction is part of the natural rhythm of the universe. Why screw around with God's rhythm section?”

  “We already have. The creatures that have gone extinct in the past were gradual victims of natural processes, such as changes in climatology, to which they failed to adapt. But man has interfered in the organic, if haphazard, order of things. Through his own greed and indifference—I sound like Plucky again—he is driving dozens of species out of business at a rapid rate.”

  “Everything happens faster these days. Sometime I will explain to you why that is. In the meantime, how do we know that man's actions, and their seemingly dire results, aren't rhythmic; aren't just another ordained manifestation of the universal ebb and flow?”

  “We know because my finer instincts tell me they are not.”

  “You, yourself, determined that the life-span of an individual butterfly is precisely the right length. By extension, wouldn't that determinant also apply to the life-span of a species?”

  Amanda flushed, but not much.

  “My magician, if you hope to embarrass me by calling attention to my contradictions, forget it. I was unenlightened enough at one time to believe in the finality of death. I'm not naive enough now to believe in the finality of extinction. Except on a purely formal level. You've been close enough to the source to have learned that beings never really go extinct. Their forms may become obsolete but their essential energies are eternal. The only thing that ever disappears is the shape of energy. Long after the visible, recognizable garter snake has vanished, its energy will hang on. [Note: Marx Marvelous, who was later to argue mightily with many of the Zillers' mystic pronouncements, would have to concur with Amanda's foregoing statement for it has scientific basis. As the German biologist Ernst Haeckel established, no particle of living energy is ever extinguished, no particle is ever created anew.] Dinosaurs are still with us in the form of energy. There may be some dinosaur energy in you. There is plenty of saber-toothed tiger energy around. And trilobite energy. I ran into some woolly mammoth energy just the othe
r day. So, my sun, what we would be preserving would be merely shapes; containers, as it were, although the containers themselves are composed of energy, are intrinsic and substantial and interwoven communications of energy and do not merely hold it as a jug holds milk. Moreover, the physical appearance of these containers is beautiful; the design, the color, the functions of sensation and movement, the sense action and discernible psychic life. In a way, our zoo of endangered species would be like a museum, but a museum of full containers rather than of empty ones as is usually the case. A museum of living shapes that perhaps have outlived their function; therefore a museum outside of time, above time, above death; therefore a poetics.”

  Ziller put his drum back upon its stand. “Well,” he said eventually, “your proposal is certainly a reasonable alternative. Let's sleep on it, as they say.” He snuggled down in the covers as Amanda pattered into her sanctuary to blow out the candle. He smiled his wily Bushman smile. “It might be nice being the Nearly Extinct San Francisco Garter Snake Capital of the World,” he said.

  The postcard was there waiting, marking time, when the Zillers got back from the mountains. With things shaping up at the cafe—Mom's Little Dixie had been transformed inside and out—they were free to invest a cloudy morning in the pursuit of edible and/or visually pleasing fungi. So, they had driven up the river road, singing ancient prehistoric songs of their own invention in order to attract the mushrooms, and on the lower slopes of Mt. Baker, still singing, filled two knapsacks with chanterelles. Driving home, they were tired and let the river do the singing.

  The moment they returned, Amanda hurried into the kitchen and poured the mushrooms into the sink: it would take a while to scrub off the dirt and fir needles, and the whole family was awash with hunger. John Paul tarried behind to look in the mailbox.

  The postcard was waiting, marking time. It was an old postcard, luridly colored, depicting—in a clumsy, inexact, “touched-up” photographic rendering—a sawmill of certain regional fame. Blurry little workmen in bib overalls had dropped their axes and were lined up on a prize log beside the steaming donkey. They were combed and smiling (we assume) for an insistent cameraman who would reproduce them no larger than gnats. It was a scruffy dog-piss postcard off the postcard rack of broken dreams. The postmark, which could have been Throbbing Wallet, Idaho, or Nouveau Rat's Breath, Minn., was, in fact, Aberdeen, Wash.; the card was addressed to John Paul Ziller:

  Dear Ziller,

  Guess I missed the circus but I've had a show of my own. Oh boy. What has happened to me the past couple of weeks is so weird even a far-out cat like you wouldn't believe it. So guess I won't bother to go into detail. Pray for me. Love to yr. old lady.

  Scoobie doo,

  PP.

  The chanterelle mushroom is a ruffled yellow trumpet. Raw, it smells like apricots. Fried in batter, it smells like breaded kidney but tastes like eggs poached in wood-smoke and wine and has the consistency of fowl. Mon Cul preferred them raw. Baby Thor wouldn't eat them at all. Amanda and John Paul, whose ecstatic appetites underscored their animal unanimity with the ways of the world, ate them fried in batter and ate them well.

  “Oh my,” said John Paul, rubbing his belly.

  “Oh my my,” said Amanda, rubbing hers.

  They stretched out on some cushions and had a pipe of hash. For the first time in that pregnancy, Amanda felt motion in her womb. It wasn't the centrally located, coherent movement that a small animal would make were it to turn in its burrow, but a many-places-at-once stirring such as a flight of swallows would make in torpid air.

  “What are you smiling at?” asked John Paul.

  “The mushrooms have startled the swallows,” she said.

  Then, after a languid interlude during which Thor and Mon Cul feel asleep, Amanda asked, “What do you make of Plucky's postcard?”

  “It will have to do.”

  “Well, at least he's alive.”

  “We can assume that.”

  “And he isn't locked up.”

  “Presumably, although there's little in his message to warrant such a presumption.”

  “When do you suppose we'll hear more from him?” Amanda was sliding into a dream as lurid as the tones of Purcell's card.

  “I haven't a notion. It could be quite a long time.” It wasn't. A letter arrived the following day.

  The magician was at work on his magical things. Sprawled upon a pallet of skins, he attended to his maps, charting a course with feathers and inks and wooden calipers. Unlike poor Rand McNally, Ziller was not obliged to limit his cartograms to representations of the earth's familiar surface; no, his maps could and did indulge in languorous luxuriation, in psycho-cosmic ornament that may or may not be helpful to motorists seeking the most convenient route from there to here. If, with appropriate geographical symbols, they indicated the presence of mountain ranges, forests and bodies of water, they seemed also to indicate psychological nuances, regional flavors, genito-urinary reactions and extrasensory phenomena—those “other dimensions” of voyage so well known to the aware traveler. His charts had the look of embellished musical compositions. Perhaps they were. (The London Philharmonic Orchestra will now perform Map of the Lower Congo by John Paul Ziller; scale, three-quarters of an inch to the mile.)

  Amanda knocked four times before getting his attention. He received her at his sanctuary door. “A letter,” she announced, holding it aloft. “A pudgy one. It's postmarked Humptulips, Washington. They've got to be kidding. Do you think it could be from Purcell?”

  “What other penman among our acquaintances offends the eye with such nasty scrawls?” asked Ziller, checking the cacography that rampaged across the envelope. They took the missive into the living room and slit it open with an ivory blade:

  Dear Ziller (and yummy bride),

  Hello. I decided to give you the details after all. I've got to tell somebody and there's no cat I trust more than you (blush). Trust not only to keep my secret but to take it in stride. Dig this:

  I am now a monk! That is, I am living in a monastery where the inmates believe me to be one of their own order. Don't laugh, you bastard. This is serious.

  This is no ordinary bunch of monks. Oh no. Far from it. They are “Christian,” all right, Roman Catholics. But—dig this—they are spies! And killers! Am I getting through to you? Look. I have unwittingly infiltrated a secret order of militant Catholic monks that serves the Vatican as a combination CIA and Green Beret unit.

  No, I haven't freaked out. I'm not high on anything. I'm laying it on you straight, baby; the truth if ever I told it, and may Tijuana donkeys eat the man who says that Purcell lies. My desk at the moment is a stump in the woods (which is why my handwriting is more grotesque than usual), and if they should catch me corresponding with you it would be murder in the most awful literal sense of that word.

  Guess I'd better start from the beginning, pardon my originality, and tell you how this all came about. It happened so unexpectedly that I've hardly been able to assimilate it myself. The last weekend in September it was, just about a month ago. The circus was performing in Seattle that weekend (I read about the hassle with the city council and the cops, by the way; what an up-tight town that Seattle must be) and I was planning to scoot up to see you guys. The bus developed a bad cough on Friday morning, however, and I admitted it to the VW clinic in Aberdeen; I suspect you are right, Ziller, about the sausage being the ultimate triumph of Germanic technology—God knows I've never had the problems with a weenie that I've had with that bus.

  Anyway, I was in a mood to rationalize. “It's just as well,” I said to myself. “I'll wait and catch the show in Bellingham at the final performance. Probably be a better party.” But there I was, stuck at the bunkhouse some ten miles northwest of town, nothing to read but some old Zane Grey paperbacks and not so much as a faint sniff of snatch (pardon me, Amanda, if you are looking on) in the air. So, on Saturday morning I decide to take a sort of busman's holiday. As if I don't spend enough time in the woods, I decid
e to hike up a ways into the Olympics, camp overnight, look at the moon, spot some bear or elk, maybe find a bee tree and steal some honey. It's different being alone in the woods, no power saw giving the sky a toothache, no dumb-assed loggers constantly telling me how many miles their Mustangs get to the gallon of gas.

  I hitched a ride to Humptulips—there's really such a place! Ziller, what quaint names you Washingtonians bestow upon your villages. Humptulips reminded me that I've always been crazy to do a Dutch girl. You know: well-scrubbed, blonde bangs, china blue eyes, apple cheeks, little cunt that smells like a gouda cheese. She'd have nothing on but wooden shoes and a crushed tulip behind her ear. No kidding. I get an erection every time I pass a gouda cheese in the supermarket. But I digress, and believe me, there's precious little time for digression.

  From Humptulips I follow a silver-green finger of valley, hiking eastward toward the Wynoochee River. Eventually the valley peters out and I'm on a deep-rutted logging road, the terrain getting a bit steep and the timber tall and thick and murmuring to me in six dialects of Gothic. It's midafternoon and I haven't gone too far, maybe nine or ten miles from good old Humptuplips, when I spot some mushrooms in the woods to my left. Now I have nibbled the sacred mushroom of Mexico (that was a snack I'll be a long time forgetting) and I've sucked up my share of buttons with steak, but I am no mycophile and I wouldn't know an Agaricus from an asparagus. But these toadstools fascinate me nonetheless; they look like the kind that little men with green hats sit around on—so, brimming with botanical curiosity, I drop down on my knees for a closer look. Well, have you ever seen a mushroom with five fingers? O, nature is rich and there are strange flora and fauna a-riding on this spaceship of ours. But one of those fingers has a gold ring on it, and even Mother Nature doesn't pull stunts like that.

  If you guessed that I had found a human hand you win a Girl Scout cookie. If you guessed that that hand was connected to an arm which in turn was attached to a body, you win a Girl Scout (with a merit badge for dialectics). And if you guessed that that body was dead, congratulations, you win all the Girl Scouts west of the Mississippi. Old Plucky's luck: out for a weekend of contemplation in the deep woods and he finds a corpse in a mushroom patch.