Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  My decision, I believe, would have been an affirmative one, and Xmas Eve would have been my target date, except that that decision was reversed or altered or, at least, postponed by the arrival at Wildcat Creek of some very charming holiday guests.

  Sister Hillary, Sister Elizabeth and Brother Bruno were Canadians, members of liberal orders that for some time had been administering to Mexican migrants in California. The three of them had left Calif. on temporary assignment to survey conditions among Indians of the Northwest Coast. They had covered Oregon and the Chinook tribes of lower Washington and were at the Quinault reservation near Humptulips when they were granted furloughs to spend Christmas with their families. Well, to these people, “family” meant other brothers and sisters of the Church. They had heard about the monastery on nearby Wildcat Creek, knew that it was isolated, and decided that it might be a charitable act to come over and spend Christmas with us. They arrived bearing oranges and turkeys and three of the nicest Campbell Soup Kids smiles I'd ever seen. They looked like little black tents in their habits, and I wanted to crawl inside and smoke their smiles in my hookah. No fooling, they were lovely gentle folks. I got scared for them right away. They were the very kind of clergy that the Felicitate Society was out to suppress, the very kind, and they had wandered like giddy flies into this Venus trap and I was worried that they were in actual physical danger. But no, old Gutstadt he knew how to handle the situation, he wasn't going to arouse any suspicions, he welcomed those poor innocents with open arms. How hospitable that old pig sticker was! You'd have thought he was St. Nick himself. He was pooping plum pudding and peeing eggnog. Brought out the best brandy, cigars and wine; and after we got the radio equipment and weapons hidden, we had a merry time.

  When I described the sisters and Brother Bruno as innocents, I didn't mean to imply that they were underdone do-gooders. These people had been around, they had been into some heavy trips. They had been cursed and threatened by the landowners in Calif., and Bruno had been beaten up in Mississippi once, and Sister Hillary had been shot at. They had subsisted on bad starchy food and slept on straw beds and endured all sorts of hardships. They were strong people, all three of them, and tough in a very gentle way, and beautiful.

  Especially was Sister Hillary beautiful. She was like a certain early-morning image of Ingrid Bergman, photographed forever in the eye of a swan. I would watch her saying her rosary like maybe a beer can watches the ocean saying its surf, and I wanted to tiptoe up to her and kiss her cheek. She was the only woman that I've ever met that I could kiss without copping a feel. Except for my mama and sisters, of course, and I'm not too sure about my sisters.

  I came onto Sister Hillary kind of rough her second day here. You see, I've spent a little time in migrant labor camps myself; I've picked the apples and grapes and hops. And I know that every Friday night in those camps there is a bingo game sponsored by the Catholic Church. Those poor impoverished, undernourished, ill-clothed chicano migrants can spend half or more of their week's pay on frigging bingo and have nothing to show for it but some tacky little plaster-of-paris Virgin Mary. I've seen it happen, just ask any fruit tramp. So I got on to Sister Hillary about it, and she acknowledged that it was a questionable practice. She wouldn't let herself speak critically of the Church, but she intimated with tender understatement that there were areas in which the Church was failing the poor, and she got very sad-eyed about it and I could tell that it was hard for her to hold back the tears. I felt so low I would have needed a twelve-foot stepladder to get into a Volkswagen.

  Christmas Eve, Father Gutstadt said a midnight mass. I haven't had much experience with such entertainments, but as far as I could tell he did a pretty good job. Except that Gutstadt's Latin was even more dense than his English. His nouns were like cannonballs and his verbs, well it would have taken two men and a boy to carry one. It must have been the heaviest mass on record, a massive mass, if you'll excuse me. It's a wonder we didn't sink through the earth from the weight of it. Afterwards, Sister Hillary and I went outside to look for the Star of the East. It was a mild night and we sat on a log, star-gazing. A piece of moonlight fell through the clouds and hit her wedding band. I remembered then that she was married to Jesus Christ. She was married to a concept of universal love and brotherhood, not intellectually committed to it or emotionally attracted to it, but married to it; she lived with it and it fucked her and filled her with itself and she was part of it and one with it, in private and in public, and for it she lived in poverty and worked long hours and wore unbecoming clothing and risked her very life. She was the blushing bride of Love; the wife who sleeps in the bed of Peace and washes its shorts and packs its lunch. Corny and insane, but by damn, true. She sat on that mossy log in movie-star radiance, and moonbeams flocked around her like birds around Saint Francis. It was damn near a miracle.

  At that moment it became clear to me how my own thinking was distorted. I was filled with hate and disgust for Catholicism, I had progressed from its passive detractor to its active enemy. I dreamed of its fall, I conjured in visions the collapse of its tyranny. But I could not have been thinking of the whole of Catholicism because Sis-ter Hillary was a part of that whole; Sister Hillary and hundreds—thousands—like her. What of them, what of these beings of goodness and courage? The history of the Catholic Church is written on charred pages splashed with gore. It is a history of inquisitions and genocides, of purges and perversions, of ravings and razings. Yes, but through those same bloody pages walk parades of saints playing their celestial radios and sowing their sparkles of love. What of the great enlightened souls zonked out on the Infinite, what of the saints so high on Divine Energy that they kissed those who censured them and blessed those who put them to death? What of the Catholic Christian Buddhas and Roman Hindu Vishnus whose melted hearts are the true gold of Rome? It occurred to me that Catholicism is a duality of good and evil, that it is a microcosm of secular society. One cannot hate society, because within society there are loving and lovable individuals. Similarly, it wasn't the Church I hated, because the Church contained the bravery and enlightenment of many individual priests and nuns and saints.

  The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living—busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing—they are busy taking over. Soon their sour tentacles are around everything: our governments, our economies, our schools, our publications, our arts and our religious institutions. Men who lust for power, who are addicted to laws and other unhealthy abstractions, who long to govern and lead and censor and order and reward and punish; those men are the turds of Moloch, men who don't know how to love, men who are sickly afraid of death and therefore are afraid of life: they fear all that is chaotic and unruly and free-moving and changing—thus, as Amanda has said, they fear nature and fear life itself, they deny life and in so doing deny God. They are presidents and governors and mayors and generals and police officials and chairmen-of-the-boards. They are crafty cardinals and fat bishops and mean old monsignor masturbators. They are the most frightened and most frightening mammals who prowl the planet; loveless, anal-compulsive control-freak authoritarians, and they are destroying everything that is wise and beautiful and free. And the most enormous ironic perversion is how they destroy in the name of Christ who is peace and God who is love.

  Authority is the most damaging trauma to which the psyche is subjected between birth and death. Isn't that true, Amanda? Nobody likes authority. You might object that authoritarians must like it, but they don't, they merely resort to it in order to avenge themselves on those who have imposed it on them. From the first moment a fresh new human hears the command, “Stop that or Daddy spank,” his outraged subconscious begins to plot revenge. Often, his revenge is misdirected and merely perpetuates the sad old cycle of authority-rebellion; sometimes it leads to activity that is cha
racterized as criminal or insane. It was leading me to destructive behavior, I could see that. It's reactions like mine that give anarchy a bad name.

  So, I made a decision that night in the Xmas moonshine. I decided that if the Church could produce people like Sister Hillary and her pals, and if they, however blindly, could serve the Church, then the Church must still be capable of being a mighty force for good. Does that make sense? And if the Church has all this potential magic locked up in its velvet heart, there must be a way to release it. Here I was, non-Catholic anti-Catholic Plucky Purcell, cast with the most extreme extension of the anti-life element of Roman authority. Maybe, just maybe, there was something I could do. What? Hell, I don't know. But maybe something would turn up, maybe there would be an unexpected opportunity to help shift the weight of Catholicism toward Sister Hillary's side. Maybe I could do something more positive than cremating a dozen treacherous monks. At least it wouldn't hurt to stick around a while longer and find out. In event of failure, I could always turn back to the torch.

  What I'm trying to say, gang, is don't bother to put any beer on ice. I'm going to be at Wildcat Creek for a few more months. I may not survive the ordeal, but wouldn't it be a splendidly compensating irony should randy old Purcell meet his end as the result of a promise made silently to a virgin nun?

  Thanks again for the cosmic cookies. You will be rewarded. But in the next life, as is customary among us Christians. Hee hee. Good luck with your sausages, dead and breathing.

  Brother Dallas

  The next three or four letters were less dramatic. Purcell's new cause produced nothing immediately tangible. The only major development at Wildcat Creek was in the way of sexual release. Plucky met a fifteen-year-old Quinault Indian girl who lived about three miles from the monastery in a cabin with her alcoholic grandfather. Their subsequent friendship made for some tangy descriptive passages in Plucky's correspondence. Otherwise, there was little more than further cataloguing of the Felicitate Society's nefarious activities. Despite his obvious pleasure in his underage paramour, Purcell grew bored again. Various schemes for escape were outlined.

  Purcell's waning enthusiasm was not transferred to Marx Marvelous. Marx remained steadfastly goggle-eyed as he trembled through the nearly illegible chronicles. At the bottom of the pile, stuck to the giraffe skin by the deteriorating mucilage on its flap, he found the thinnest envelope in the bunch. Marvelous anticipated an anticlimax. He was wrong.

  Scrawled across a Tootsie Roll wrapper with a marking pencil was the following announcement:

  “Just received my new assignment. In ten days I depart for the Vatican to serve as karate instructor to the Swiss Guard.”

  "You don't eat meat,” observed Marx Marvelous. (This was a week after the reading of Purcell's letters and the ambivalent young scientist could at last talk of something else.)

  “No, I do not,” said Amanda.

  “John Paul eats meat.”

  “That he does. He considers it man's evolutionary duty to devour other species. My husband will never kill anything he is not prepared to eat.”

  “That's a pretty good practice,” admitted Marx Marvelous. “If everyone cultivated that habit there would be fewer murders and no war.”

  “Or a boom in cannibals,” said Amanda. Beneath the big spruce, she and Mon Cul were tossing a fluorescent red rubber football. The baboon's style reminded Marx of a certain pro quarterback he'd seen on television.

  “But you don't touch meat.”

  “Oh, I touch meat all the time,” said Amanda coyly. She lowered her lashes and jived her tongue along the brim of her lip.

  Marvelous blushed. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” laughed Amanda. “I don't ingest meat. Those teachers whom I most admire set that example for me eons ago.”

  “The cow became a sacred symbol to the Hindu because it gave milk and chops and hides,” said Marx Marvelous. And he went on to debunk the spiritual origins of vegetarianism. The author relayed Marx's argument earlier, as the attentive reader surely recalls. Amanda made no immediate response (she glided out past the bowlegged rooster's pen to pull down a pass from Mon Cul), but clearly her vegetarian sentiments suffered a jolt.

  At twilight, Amanda went into trance. She returned in time for dinner. “You are right, Marx Marvelous,” she announced. “Spiritually, it is as proper to eat an animal as a plant.”

  “Well, I'll be damned,” said Marvelous with a smug chuckle. “You saw the light. Here, you're in for a treat.” He passed the platter of sausages.

  “No,” refused Amanda. “I still shall eat no meat. Carnivorousness may be karmically acceptable but stockyards are not. Besides, when an animal is killed, it is usually in a state of panic or fright. Fright releases in a mammal certain hormones which swamp the blood and penetrate the flesh. When you eat meat, you eat the animal's fear. I want as little fear in my system as possible.” She helped herself to the dandelion buds.

  Marvelous was exasperated. “But you did say now that spiritually it's all right to eat meat.”

  “Of course,” said Amanda. “At the higher levels of consciousness all things are one anyway. There is no difference between animal, vegetable and mineral. Everything just blends together in energy and light.”

  Marx Marvelous tried to imagine the sausages in god-state, but though they were as plump and passive as little Buddhas, he could not handle the image. “Pass the mustard,” he said.

  The June morning, thin and gray, arched over Skagit Valley like a plucked eyebrow. At the mailbox of the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve, the postman seemed to linger longer than he did usually. This triggered a faradism of excitement in the roadhouse for whether he expressed it or not, each adult human inhabitant of the Kendrick Memorial was anxiously awaiting word from the Vatican. Plucky Purcell at home with the Pope. A cozy picture.

  Ziller, who had been polishing the tsetse fly, was first to the letter box. He returned, alas, with forced nonchalance, bearing only the water bill, the June issue of Al's Journal of Lepidoptera and Amanda's current selection from the Animal Cracker of the Month Club.

  "Very well, Professor Marvelous,” said Amanda, “you have been with us for a month. Have you figured out what mysterious functions John Paul and I are performing here on our 'psychic frontier'?” She asked the question without looking up from the microscope beneath the lens of which she was sewing a tiny suit-of-lights for a matador flea.

  “Are you kidding? How could I figure out what you're up to when you're so damned secretive? What an outgoing couple! Sometimes I feel like I'm living with Greta Garbo and Howard Hughes, if you can imagine Howard Hughes marrying Greta Garbo and opening a roadside zoo. You and Ziller disappear into your sanctuaries for hours every day. I hear sounds, smell odors—all very strange, none very revealing.”

  “You must have some ideas about our activities.”

  “Oh, I do. You bet I do.”

  “Then tell me one. Please.” He adored the way she said “please.” It was like listening to an alligator bite into a Hollywood bed.

  “Okay, I'll tell you one: freedom. I believe that you people, among other things, are obsessed with recovering a lost model of existence, a total life-style in which there are no boundaries between object and subject, between natural and supernatural, between waking and dreaming. It's involved somehow in a return to a consanguinity of life and art, life and nature, life and religion—a ritualistic, mythic level of living which whole societies once experienced in common. The object of your rituals, I believe, is to break free of the conventions that have chained man to certain cliché images and predictable responses, that have narrowed pitifully—in your opinion, at least—the range of his experience.”

  Amanda whistled with admiration, although due to her crooked teeth she did not whistle well. It was more of a blow. “O my O my,” she blew admiringly. “How do you manage to talk like that in clear weather. For me, it would take the most rambunctious thunderstorm these parts have ever se
en. It would play hell with the pea fields. Lightning might strike the big sausage. In which case it wouldn't be worth it, no matter what I said.”

  Marvelous didn't fully understand. “I don't imagine it storms much in this climate,” he noted. “But do you admit there's truth in my observations?” The “but” that crouched like a strange sailor in the doorway of his second sentence did not in any way tie his first remark to his second one. It was a “but” more ornamental than conjunctional.

  “A speech as fancy as that one doesn't have to have truth in it,” said Amanda, busily sewing. “It's like asking if there's truth in the Imperial Russian Easter eggs.” Without looking up from the microscope she could tell Marx was disappointed with her reply, so she added, “I will admit to a lifelong and regular fascination with freedom. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “Maybe you're in rapport with William Blake,” offered Marvelous. “Blake once wrote, 'I must invent my own systems or else be enslaved by other men's'.”

  “Not to get your mind back on the Vatican and Christianity,” said Amanda (who, as curious as she might be, was nevertheless showing signs of weariness with all this hubbub about religion), “but our friend Plucky Purcell is an admirer of William Blake. Plucky says one has to admire a man who for 175 years can get away with rhyming 'eye' and 'symmetry.'”

  While awaiting news from the Mad Pluck at the Holy See, Amanda herself had an encounter with the Christian ethos. Let Marx Marvelous tell it.

  Through the loosest of verbal agreements, I am now manager of the Zillers' roadside zoo. My duties have not been formally defined, but they consist chiefly of explaining to customers why we serve nothing but hot dogs and juice. I've become quite efficient at preparing our wares and were it not for the troublesome explanations I could refuel a couple dozen tourists in about five minutes. In between slipping weenies into buns—and indulging the Freudian fantasies concomitant to such occupation—I lecture on the attractions of our establishment. My San Franciso garter snake lecture includes a pitch for conservation and is popular with little old ladies; my talk on Glossina palpalis, the African tsetse fly, is fraught with allusions to bloodsucking jaws and headachy natives who drop off into eternal slumbers, although in fairness to scientific findings—and to Amanda's fondness for insects (indeed, for all living things)—I add that the tsetse fly is not poisonous but merely a communicator of infected parasites and that both the prevalence and severity of sleeping sickness have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the anticlimax, the kids enjoy the tsetse fly talk.