Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  “I don't know,” said Marvelous, scratching in various places his living statue of natty checks. “Mushrooming sounds to me like a risky proposition.”

  “A bit like life itself,” said Amanda.

  Although it hasn't rained for two days, the forests are still sopping. The underfooting is spongy, the tree-moss drips and drips. An eerie sunlight filters through dense tangles of ominously serpentine branches. Shadows are soaked with suggestions of primordial menace and obscure, slinking malignity. White snail shells—some vacant, some stuffed with mucus—are scattered beneath the huckleberry bushes like aquatic curds, and sweating tendrils of ivy choke everything that does not move. In this rank garden of vegetable death, Amanda—more goddess than Hecate herself—rakes the nettles and ferns with her fingers, emitting eeeeeks of minnie mouse surprise whenever she uncovers a treasured fungus. I dread the forest for its universal reminders: it is simultaneously an open womb and an open grave. But Amanda is as at home here as if it were in her own mold that was cast the vast greenfrog jelly of eternity.

  Entry—May 10

  Notebook of M. Marvelous

  “Eeeeek!” squealed Amanda, as underneath a great old shaggy-assed cedar she came upon a morel nearly nine inches tall. Earlier, Amanda had told Marx, “The other popular edible mushrooms grow in the autumn. The morel has springtime all to itself.” Well, this morel must have had itself one hell of a spring. It was the largest find of the day, the largest of the season. It was a whopper, a prizewinner, a champ, a box-office bonanza, but destined to be dropped right in the basket with the smaller, less glamorous specimens—no star treatment here at Fungus Studios, sorry.

  From another part of the woods John Paul materialized, as magicians will, and gave ex cathedra sanction to the prize. Even Baby Thor was impressed. He jumped up and down yelling, “Big one! Big one!” Mon Cul caught the fever and slapped his thighs, bowing in the exaggerated manner that he had learned at the Timbuktu Opera. He acted as if the mammoth morel were his own invention, though in truth he had not picked a single mushroom (after all, he was a famous baboon, not some truffle pig). Marx Marvelous had found only about a dozen morels, but with each discovery the thrill increased and he strutted with scientist pride to demonstrate how he had outwitted nature. They were a happy band of food-gatherers, damp and smeared with humus, but happy with the harvest, happy enough to dance, the five of them. And about that time a sudden wild wind gust roared up the Cascade highlands, sounding like a hillbilly hoot, like a Saturday night wahoo; and the shadows grew more tentacular and the sunlight more nocturnal, and the sky thickened like cornstarch and curdled around the tops of the darkening trees. “Let's get home,” they hollered, almost in harmony, and singing and chanting four different mushroom hymns in what appeared to be four different tongues (Ziller, as usual, was silent), they Jeeped it on back to the low country, just ahead of the moon.

  We are driving home by a different route, not following the river back but cutting through the mountains on what is known as the Darrington road. This is logging country, as I ascertain by the bark chips strewn on the highway, by the timber trucks snorting around the twilit curves with one last day's load for the mills. Our own vehicle navigates a curve, and suddenly it is as if we have trespassed into the shattered heart of a no-man's land. Suddenly there is no more forest. Every hillside, every ridge is bare except for stumps and slash: a cemetery of forlorn stumps; low-spreading barricades of rain-rotted, sun-bleached slash. We are in the midst of an enormous bone yard, a battleground where armies of creatures bigger than dinosaurs might have fought and died. These murdered hills were for untold centuries green. Deer and bear and cougar and dozens of smaller animals lived here; eagles nested in the tops of the firs. Now, they are barren, devastated, splintered, twisted, silent: not even a magpie sings. They look to be grotesque Golgothas on which have been crucified a thousand Christs. I am no lover of the wilderness; the dark, dank woods hold for me a repertoire of unnamed fears. But if the forest is the product of satanic forces, then those forces have been surpassed by the graspings of man. No devil ever dreamed a landscape more terrible than

  Entry—May 10

  Notebook of M. Marvelous

  The barbaric spectacle of the logged-off hills stunned them mute. No one spoke until, stopped at one of Darrington's three traffic lights, they saw a small crowd of lumberjacks and their families lined up before a quonset-hut movie theater, waiting for the show. There were children, some no larger than Thor, licking eskimo pies; friendly gossip ran along the line from wife to unfashionable wife; the big men seemed quiet and shy, maybe tired, maybe beaten down by their role in life, their faces already reddened by the spring sun, their Thom McAn shoes muddy, their jaws shiny with Aqua Velva—the medicine cabinet stink was detectable as far as the Jeep.

  “They look to be decent folks,” observed Marx Marvelous. “Probably not a guilty conscience among them. Our society needs timber and these loggers are merely doing their jobs. They probably believe they're performing a patriotic service, and maybe they are. But I wonder if deep down inside they are completely insensitive to the brutality of their operation. I wonder if those beautiful kids will grow up and repeat the slaughter. That is, if there're any trees left to ravage. I realize, you know, that the logging companies are replanting. But a tree farm is not a forest. Is it?”

  The light went green and the Jeep lunged forward. Amanda held Baby Thor tightly in one arm while with her free hand she affectionately fingered morels. Ziller looked over his furred shoulder, first at the logger families in the neoned distance and then at Marx Marvelous. “From little acorns grow the acorn eaters,” he said.

  Morels are ugly in the skillet. The caps look like the scrotums of leprechauns, the stems like the tusks of fetal elephants. Aromatically, the report is more positive. From the pan rises the smell of the whole North Woods stewing in butter. The morels grow friendlier to the nose. But in the mouth, now there is where these dangerous-looking plants really prove themselves. My God, I must confess it: their deliciousness exceeds normal limits of restraint. They taste similar to mealy sweetbreads, to eggplant, to country-style steak, to all three at once. As I munch these delectables, my fearful toadstool prejudices dissolve in a glory of saliva. Perhaps the way to a man's tolerance is through his stomach. Would our relations with China be worse if chow mein were not so popular?

  Entry—May 10

  Notebook of M. Marvelous

  While the mushrooms fried and the rice boiled, Amanda prepared a salad, humming as she worked, filling the kitchen with an hallucinatory light, a feminine splendor that jolted Marx Marvelous' imaginative faculties and made him aware of seraphic appetites in which he professed not to believe. Soon he was on his fifth glass of chablis.

  The Zillers, having long ago discovered alcohol to be a most imperfect drug, sipped their wine slowly and repeatedly refused to have their cups refilled. When it became apparent that they would not help him finish the two bottles he had chilled, Marvelous lifted his glass in their direction and asked, “Do you know what Bertrand Russell said about mystics?”

  “I do not,” said Amanda, ripping the lettuce as gently as if she feared it might cry “ouch.” John Paul continued to let jungle murmurings escape his flute.

  “Russell said that there is no difference between those men who eat too little and see Heaven and those who drink too much and see snakes.” Marvelous leered sardonically into his wine.

  “The difference,” said Amanda serenely, “is that one of them sees Heaven and the other sees snakes.”

  "Howdy again, mam,” said the vaguely familiar cowboy. “I see that you've opened your zoo."

  “That is true,” agreed Amanda. “We have.”

  “Yep, I figured as much,” said the vaguely familiar cowboy, squinting at a pas de deux in the fleas' Swan Lake. “Seeing as how you don't have a real whole lot of attractions in your show, I thought you might be interested in buying this here dog.”

  “What dog?” asked Amanda fairl
y, for there was truly no canine in evidence.

  “That's the novelty of him, mam. He's invisible.”

  Amanda looked about for some sign of doggy activity. “You see,” explained the semifamiliar cowboy, “my nephew came back from San Francisco last week a-fixing to go in business for himself. He buried two thousand capsules of that LSD out by the corral. Well, our ol' dog he dug up that acid and ate it all, two thousand doses. Six hundred thousand micrograms. We figgered for sure he was gonna die. But that ol' hound commenced to glow and get ghostly foggy-looking and get harder and harder to see and pretty soon he just disappeared altogether. Entered another dimension, my nephew tells it. Here Cheny, here boy.” The vaguely familiar cowboy stooped down and began to pet the air.

  Amanda wouldn't give any money for the invisible dog, but she did offer to trade for him four of her wishes and three of her dreams.

  This noon we dispatched the fleas.

  Hmmmmm. Does it astonish you that the author felt a trifle odd typing that sentence? For one thing, he felt as if he were stealing a line from Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. “Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop.” That's how Tropic of Cancer begins. Miller could just as easily have written, “This noon we dispatched the fleas.”

  Amanda's original plan to airmail the subjects of her flea circus to a friend in Palm Springs fell through for reasons about which the writer is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, she was intent upon mailing the fleas to someone, and as it turned out she mailed them to Al's Journal of Lepidoptera in one of the prestamped, self-addressed envelopes which Al provided for the posting of Amanda's occasional (more hallucinatory than scholarly) contributions to his magazine. “Dear Al, Please see to my fleas,” she wrote on violet stationery in a hand that fluttered as lyrically as a silky swallowtail.

  The mailing of the envelope is a story in itself, but your correspondent will keep it brief. For the past five days, all mail incoming to the roadside zoo has been intercepted by federal agents. One of them has met the postman daily and thoroughly examined his delivery before leaving it on the kitchen table for Amanda. Today, Amanda was on hand for the delivery, herself. She floated up to the postman and took the letters (bills, they turned out to be) from his hand before the CIA man knew what she was about. “Give them to me,” the agent snapped, moving toward her like the head of a hammer moves toward a tack. “Certainly,” said Amanda, and she thrust the envelopes in his face while simultaneously, with her other hand, she passed the flea-o-gram to the mailman. It was a sleight of hand trick older than vaudeville—and cruder. But it worked. While the CIA sleuth was checking the sausage bill for coded messages, the less sinister government employee drove innocently away with the fated envelope.

  Even after the success of that hair-raising operation, the author had misgivings. Amanda assured him that the fleas would not be injured on their journey and she is probably correct. If the reader has ever tried to squash one of these evasive insects between his thumb and forefinger, he knows that their armor plating leaves them well nigh unsquashable. Moreover, fleas can go for weeks without a bloody bite, so providing Al treats them to dinner upon arrival they won't die of hunger. Al's envelope is big and bulky so the little passengers should have sufficient oxygen. Well and good. But the envelope did not go via air, and boat mail to Suez (it's halfway around the world, you know) takes longer than Christmas. It's a hell of a trip for a flock of fleas in a plain brown envelope, particularly fleas conditioned to the excitement of circus life. Should they survive the rigors of travel, they still might die of boredom en route.

  “Not likely,” said Amanda, pointing out to the writer that the flea has been called “the sexual marvel of the animal kingdom.” Tiny he may be, but his libido is larger than a whale's. Proportionately speaking, so is his genital equipment. Among fleas, copulation is frequent and long in duration: an average of three hours per set and up to nine hours if their passions are aroused. “Our small friends will suffer no lack of entertainment on their journey,” vowed Amanda.

  Bon voyage, you little fuckers.

  HOROSCOPE

  Jesse James was a Virgo. He became an outlaw out of desperation.

  Belle Starr was an Aquarian. She became an outlaw because she was very ugly and it was the only way she could get laid.

  Billy the Kid was a Sagittarian. He was an outlaw for the fun of it.

  Another Roadside Attraction is also a Sagittarian. But don't jump to any conclusions.

  Since Marx Marvelous was interested in religion—and since in a short time he earned the Zillers' trust if not their unqualified respect—they decided to let him in on the secret exploits of Plucky Purcell.

  One evening after the zoo had closed, they pressed into his hand a bundle of sloppy letters tied with giraffe skin. “Return these in the morning,” they said.

  The electric lamp in Marx's garage apartment burned most of the night. It didn't take all night to read the letters, of course, but he had to stop after each epistle to reassemble his nervous system and scrape his mind off the stars.

  As the reader has already been exposed to the initial Purcell letters, the author naturally will not reintroduce them. Instead, let him reproduce a slightly later correspondence perused by Marvelous that night.

  Dear John Paul, Amanda & Co. (I realize Thor can't read yet, but I'm never sure about Mon Cul),

  First off, I want to thank you for the holiday goodies, yum, goddamn, yum. Amanda's pastries justified their reputation—in the mouth, in the belly and in the brain. Had myself a high old time, all alone in my cubicle with fireballs in my eyes and crumbs on my lips, wow-eeee. The package disguise was perfect, too; not one of these suspicious bastards suspected a thing. Who did you get to mail the parcel from Texas for you? Nuclear Phyllis, I'll bet. Too bad she couldn't have come along in the wrappings. I would have saved the cookies for second.

  I wish I could honestly say that without your gift I would've had one bad bummer of a Christmas, but, for better or worse, that was not the case. Considering the mood I've been in of late (and my position so remote from relatives and friends), it probably surprises you to learn that I had a trippy Xmas—even when I wasn't zonked on your culinary crazies—but I did. As you know, I've been fed up here at Wildcat Creek. I've been playing this monk game for three months now, and I'm worn out from the strain of it and paradoxically bored from the lack of action, not to mention the lack of nookie, that, too. Yes. Uh-huh. Worse, my disgust has multiplied daily for these conniving Catholic cutthroats. Every day, it seems, I learn of another wormy plot that's being hatched or hear another of these pious pigs bragging about a caper he once pulled. It used to make my blood boil to hear these things, but any more it just depresses me, shuts off my joy like I forgot to pay the bill and the joy company sent these monks around to disconnect my service. Let me list a few items and you'll see what I mean.

  [At this point, in an epistolary style that rattles and wobbles like a loose headlamp on a Hell's Angel's hog, Plucky describes in varying degree of detail certain activities of the Society of the Felicitator which he had not previously catalogued. After wrestling with a dilemma that cost him a precious half-hour's writing time, the author has decided to delete Plucky's specific references. That the clandestine Roman Catholic order known as the Society of the Felicitator is a sinister organization engaged in espionage, intimidation and guerrilla warfare has been stated in these pages with sufficient emphasis. Should a reader desire details, or should he have a specific field of interest such as Latin America—where the Felicitate Society plays an adhesive police role in the coalition of the Church and dictatorial regimes—let him look elsewhere. Surely, now that the rosary beads have been spilled, there will be no shortage of anti-Catholic writers willing and anxious to research the Felicitators and expose their practices. That, however, is not the purpose of this report. For all the author knows, the Felicitators may be no more typical of Catholic monks than Bluebeard
was typical of French husbands. While the writer has no intention of sidestepping controversial issues, he wants it made oxygen-clear that his document is not biased against any race, religion, creed, or place of natural origin. In the unsullied shadow of the giant propitious weenie, bigotry is out of the question. Only when it is relevant to the story of the Corpse will information unfavorable to a particular faith be imparted. The author aspires to be as gracious toward Rome as was Nearly Normal Jimmy toward Peking when, upon learning of the Chinese rape of Tibet, he said simply, “What do you expect of a race that invented gunpowder and hot mustard?”

  And now, as the mid-afternoon gray clings to the Skagit landscape the way the shape of Transylvania clings to outdated maps of Europe, let us return to Plucky Purcell's yuletide epistle.]

  Well, when I learned that my next assignment might include assassination, I really went on a bummer. I couldn't take it any more. I had about decided, a week before Xmas, to burn this viper's nest to the ground. There's only eleven monks here now, excluding head butcher Father Gutstadt and me. Rest of them are out spying, compiling portfolios on Father Groppi in Milwaukee and other “bleeding-heart Christians.” Those of us left here are evidently considered hardcore hatchet men, we are the eliminators. So, I fancied I'd just set a torch to the place and eliminate the eliminators. I think I could do it at such an hour and in such a way as to catch all the jackals in their dens. I mean why not wipe them out? Their human qualities were wiped out years ago by their Roman manipulators. They're merely robots, programmed to kill. I could get rid of the cream of the Vatican's shock troops, including ex-Nazi Gutstadt, plus some valuable espionage equipment—all with one paper match. Should I do it? Could I do it?