Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  I'm not as adept with the fleas as I'd like to be. The chariot races I stage never stay on course. Invariably, they end in embarrassing if not dangerous collisions. I am pleased to report, however, that John Paul has only slightly better results. Amanda alone is capable of harnessing the full strength and concentration of the fleas, of causing them to hop with precision, with poetry, with passion and wit.

  The Zillers spend more time downstairs in the zoo-cafe than I had anticipated they might. Any suspicions I harbored that the zoo was merely their source of funds—an economic ploy in which they had little real interest—have evaporated. What now appears fact is that Amanda and John Paul, whatever their private pursuits here, are more than a trace concerned about the tourists who stop by. They deliberately interact with the customers, always—I think—with a definite goal in mind, although they move with such subtlety, the Zillers, that I could not hope to prove premeditation of any kind. Yet, there they are: John Paul softly playing one of his flutes or drums, condescending to make small talk that gradually metamorphoses into some vigorously curving and folding monologue that embraces in its dark syntax both coasts of Africa (or is it India?): Amanda charming young and old with the tone of her aliveness.

  There are times when, for monetary reasons, I would prefer the Zillers remain upstairs or out back in the grove. Their effect on customers is not always positive. In fact, I would estimate that 30 or 35 per cent of the motorists who stop at the Kendrick Memorial retreat shortly thereafter in fear or disgust. They're wearing their long-billed toyo caps and their canvas yachting shoes, they're packing their travelers checks and their Enco maps, they've got their litter bags and their first-aid kits; they are equipped and ready, don't you know, for the caprices of the open road. But oh heavens, they hadn't prepared for that hussy in her gypsy colors, for that tall man with the bone in his nose; not here, not in the gentle croplands of northwestern Washington; how unexpected, how . . . “well, frankly, we wouldn't trust the food in a place like this.” One minute Amanda will be chatting informatively about fleas and tsetse flies, and the next (as if she used the habits of insects as parables of human behavior), she will be talking about life and the potentiality of living it. There are men who do not take off and leave their departments in the hands of incompetents for two whole weeks in order to be reminded in some ding-a-ling little roadside dive of the greater possibilities of existence. They stop for coffee and feel cheated if served the meaning of meaning instead.

  On the whole, however, the Zillers' impact on our visitors is stimulating if a bit uncommon. Sometimes it is the customer himself who provides the thrust of the exchange. Like, for example, what happened today when a Protestant minister dropped by. As the preacher looked over our snakes (thinking God knows what serpentine thoughts about Eve and her herpetological humdingery in Eden), Amanda floated up and engaged him in conversation. It was five minutes or more before I could get away from the counter, but when I had the chance I moved in close. That was one exchange I did not want to miss. A three-dogs-with-everything motorcyclist (a three-dog knight?) soon arrived so I didn't have long to linger, but while I was in hearing distance, I recorded the following dialogue.

  MINISTER: No, I had no connection with the military forces in Vietnam. I was a civilian missionary. My wife and I ministered to the Bahnar tribesmen. The Bahnar are a primitive people and were not involved politically in the war.

  AMANDA: How did you enjoy the Bahnar?

  MINISTER: We weren't there to enjoy them. We were there to help them. But they were very friendly to us, if that's what you meant. The Bahnar Vietnamese are basically fine, simple folks. Of course they had some extremely backward ideas.

  AMANDA: Could you please give me an example?

  MINISTER: Well, for example, your Bahnar believed that good souls go live under the earth when they die and bad souls go live in the sky. You can see what that implies. They thought Heaven was down and Hell was up.

  AMANDA: But you changed all that?

  MINISTER: Oh, yes. Of course. That's what we were there for. We taught them it was just the other way around.

  It was a peekaboo summer. The sun was in and out like Mickey Rooney. One day the Puget wind would lug monoliths of quartz in from the Pacific and leave them lying about all over the sky. The next day, as if some fastidious crew of giants had worked through the night, there wouldn't be a boulder cloud in sight; the atmosphere would be high, wide and blue; sunlight would salt the turgid old sloughs and the air would be so warm and still you could hear a woodpecker for three miles and a squirrel for two. Hear them above the pea-field tractors, hear them above the Freeway traffic even.

  The sunny side was up on the Thursday afternoon that Marx Marvelous squatted (keeping his hemorrhoids safely aloft) beside John Paul Ziller in the parking lot. The Capt. Kendrick Memorial etc. closed every Thursday, and on this day off Ziller had been working on the building. Amanda had wanted to go inner-tubing on the river, but Ziller had asked her to wait a couple of hours while he performed some carpentry that seemed to have less to do with the roadhouse's function than with its identity. The edifice was in a constant state of change. It seemed to lollop and dive through space, to bloom each fortnight into a new experience of extent, color, mass and direction.

  Maybe scientists and artists can never fully understand each other's pursuits, thought Marvelous, squatting beside the resting Ziller. The grape-thick spheroids that John Paul had just added to the building seemed to Marvelous to be entirely unnecessary, a waste of energy and material. He pondered them in vain. Would he ever fathom the mind of this man? “John Paul,” he asked, “didn't you once do a painting on the inside of a parachute? And then repack the chute? So that the only way anyone could enjoy your painting was to jump out of an airplane and look up at it on the way down? What was the purpose of that?”

  Ziller wiped his dark brow with a square of Nigerian cotton. He gazed long across the tidal flats the way an aborigine scans for game. “I wanted to test the art lover's commitment,” he answered with unexpected straightforwardness. “It might be desirable for museums and galleries to devise a similar test.”

  “In that case there would be damn few visitors to museums and galleries,” Marx suggested.

  “Are you more interested in quantity than quality? In the laboratory, isn't one good catalyst preferable to dozens of substances that produce unsatisfactory reactions or no reactions at all?”

  “I can see your point, I guess,” said Marx. “Did anyone ever go to the trouble to look at your painting?”

  “Oh yes. A young Italian contessa paid me five hundred dollars for the privilege.”

  “And what was her reaction?”

  “I don't know,” said Ziller. “The chute failed to open.”

  The sun sounded its alarm at the two men, the one of them stroking his chin in befuddlement, the other gazing toward the distant Chinese outcroppings, a smile sliding across his face the way a Louisiana black snake slides across a cemetery lawn. The sun's alarm went off in their brains. In a matter of minutes, the flesh of Marx Marvelous would pinken. Tropic treks had awarded Ziller a quantum of immunity, but he, too, was completely aware of the beam of heat.

  “John Paul, 'source' is a word that people associate with you. You are forever seeking out your sources.” Marx squinted at the white blur of sun. “Now as you must know, solar radiation is the basic source of life. The rays of the sun are converted through photosynthesis into chemical bonds responsible for producing the carbohydrates and other tissue components whose energies directly maintain the existence of both plants and animals. Solar radiation is the source of all biological energy, and ultimately it is the source of you.”

  Marvelous paused. Ziller nodded ever so slightly and continued staring into the west.

  “You do see what I'm getting at,” Marx went on. “If you persist in returning to your sources, then sooner or later you'll have to go back to the sun.”

  Marx meant it more or less as a joke, but Ziller ac
cepted it at face value. “Yes,” he said through his arsenal of teeth. “Returning to sunlight is an inevitability that I've been reckoning with.”

  His eyes kept patrolling the horizon, as if he expected something of great interest to appear there. Something . . . or someone. Could Ziller, do you suppose, have been anticipating the Corpse? No, that couldn't be. Amanda is the clairvoyant. Besides, the Corpse came from the opposite direction.

  Because he was a fugitive from an alimony decree, Marx Marvelous was nervous about visiting Mount Vernon and Seattle. If his friends had any illegal botanical matter on their persons—as they sometimes did when they went into town—he was doubly apprehensive. He practically walked with his head in a swivel. Consequently, he was soon the recipient of what might be called

  AMANDA'S UNIVERSAL ADVICE FOR PARANOICS

  “About those men who are following you around and watching your house at nights: don't be alarmed. Try to think of them as talent scouts from Hollywood.”

  "It's here,” announced Amanda.

  “Omebeddo gigi?” said John Paul. “Pardon?” He opened his eyes with jungle swiftness and rolled over to face his wife. The date was July 5 and the Zillers had slept quite late, having on the previous day entertained hundreds more customers than normal and dispensed a record number of hot dogs.

  “It has arrived,” said Amanda. “I can feel it.” She bounced from bed and was halfway down the stairs, trailing her silver robe behind her, when she met Marx Marvelous. Had it not been for the item he was fetching, had it not been for the charisma of the letter in his paw, Marvelous surely would have seized her. Seeing her nude for the first time—and seeing her obvious pleasure at being seen—bronco desire bucked again in his glands, yippie! Sexuality ringed Amanda the way a penumbra rings a shadow. She became aware of his checkered erection in the manner that Salvador Dali became aware of the rhinoceros horn (calling it “the perfect logarithmic spiral"). She longed to collar it with her fingers, but when she reached out for it Marvelous extended the letter and her hand closed on it instead.

  In the outer circle of postmark were the words “Città del Vaticano.” The stamp bore the inscription “Poste Vaticane.” The handwriting was the mortal imprint of L. Westminster “Plucky” Purcell.

  Leaving poor Marx Marvelous alone on the steps with his hard-on, Amanda dashed back to the bedroom. “It is here,” she said. “I knew it had arrived.” She tossed the letter onto the bed. “Read it to me while I dress.”

  “So, Brother Dallas has contacted us at long last,” said Ziller calmly. He slit the envelope with a fingernail and spread its contents on the bedspread before him the way a soothsayer might spread the entrails of a fowl.

  “Wait,” said Amanda, pulling on her panties. “I'll call Marx Marvelous. You can read it to him as well.”

  She did. And he did. And this is how it went.

  Dear Far-away Friends,

  As you no doubt have determined, I am writing from the Vatican. Ho-hum. What can I say? I took one look at this place and surrendered. Just gave up.

  What earthly difference could it make whether my ambition was to help destroy the Church or help reform it. Can you imagine an ant trying to decide whether to remodel Chicago or tear it down? It's the same. If only you had been permitted to write and alert me to the delusions I was suffering.

  From the air, Vatican City looked like a marble Monopoly set. The Church owned all the property from Boardwalk to Illinois Avenue, had three hotels on every lot, and no matter how often it tossed the dice you just knew it would never land on Go to Jail, it would be forever passing Go and collecting $200. From the air, Vatican City looked also like a street dance to which the libraries of New York and Philadelphia had been exclusively invited, those sooty old neoclassical stone depositories paired off in a dignified promenade, too stiff any more to swing their partners, their voices too hollow with centuries of library hush to manage even the most perfunctory do-si-do. Vatican City looked like a Disneyland for zombies and it looked like a drag.

  Later I stood in St. Peter's Square with the enormous old Basilica bell-donging above me and the pageantry breaking in velvet waves around me and somewhere in the jeweled bowels of his castle the Pope reading the Italian edition of the Wall Street Journal while eating caviar with a golden fork—and I surrendered. What's the use? A guy might see possibilities of effective action when he is up against a small band of ecclesiastical Nazis at Wildcat Creek Monastery, but here at the home office, well, it's just too big and too wealthy and too entrenched and too powerful. Why bother? Maybe shooting peas at the sun is someone's idea of a fine poetic gesture but it's a bore to me. So the Roman Catholic Church is out to Catholicize the world. What of it? Communism is out to Communize the world and Capitalism is out to Capitalize the world. Let them fight it out among themselves. I've got life to live and I can't be bothered. Now that I think about it, I guess that has been your philosophy all along. Oh well. I'm slow to learn.

  At any rate, it's one hell of a grand joke, me being here, me working at the Vatican in an official and privileged position. So I decided I'd just relax and enjoy the joke and play it for all it's worth.

  A couple of days after I arrived, however, I did discover something that inspired a final twitch of hope, that proved to me the Church was not entirely invulnerable. It wasn't the court of law or the jail that sits right off St. Peter's Square. Although I didn't realize that the Vatican maintained those institutions, I guess I've associated courts and jails with churches for so long that the presence of them at the Holy See didn't come as any great surprise. No, the real chink in the churchly armor is something else. It's the time clocks. In 1956, forty time clocks were installed in Vatican offices. Today, there are about sixty. The official explanation of the time-control system was that it was “to end late arrivals and early departures by staff members of Vatican bureaus and to regulate absences.” The only dudes who are exempt from punching in and out are, according to the handbook, “the Cardinal Secretaries of Congregations, the Episcopal heads of other offices, and the Swiss Guard.” (Of course, we Felicitate Brothers are also exempt but then we aren't publicly acknowledged as an existing order.) Now I ask you, when a religion has to make its own priests punch a clock, when it so much as admits that its own oath-bound holy fathers have been sneaking off the job early, coming in late and playing hooky, wouldn't you say that that religion has a soft white underbelly? Can you imagine Jesus punching a clock? If he had, would it have prevented his “early departure"?

  They claim their church is built on a rock, but it looks to me like its foundation isn't all that solid. I mean, show me a religion with time clocks and I'll show you a religion that has shot its spiritual wad. Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I'll topple it.

  ["Purcell won't have to topple it,” interrupted Marx Marvelous. “It obviously is toppling on its own accord."]

  So far, no one has handed me a crowbar or shown me a spot to push, and I'm not really expecting to budge this colossus, but every time I pass one of those clocks I smile with the comforting knowledge that God's biggest billy club has a crack in it.

  Things are changing here at the home office and a lot of my brothers are shocked, but I don't know whether the changes are for the better or worse. For one thing, the Pope is toning down the pomp. Not long ago, he ordered cardinals, bishops and monsignors to prune much of the regal splendor from their dress. He threw out red shoes, silver shoe buckles, galerum hats, sashes, tassels, capes and ermine-trimmed cloaks. His instructions also allow the title “monsignor” to be used in addressing a cardinal or bishop instead of “eminence” or “excellency.” The result is, things aren't as fancy around here as they used to be. However, they are still far from plain. There is gold everywhere, and silver and precious gems and long limousines and valuable art. They could unload just a third of this treasure and feed every hungry mouth in Europe for the rest of the century. And, you may have noticed, the Pope didn't cut any of the frills from his personal wa
rdrobe.

  Couple years back, a papal decree was issued to clean up the roster of venerable saints. More than forty of the dudes were dropped from the liturgical calendar, mostly because they never existed in the first place but were merely the invention of fanatics and souvenir salesmen. Among those that got the ax was St. Christopher, the blessed buddy of cruise-ship casanovas, astronauts and six-day bicycle racers.

  Scuttlebutt down in the catacombs is that a lot of powerful Catholics, including those responsible for the Society of the Felicitator, are unhappy about those reforms. However, the word is the Pope had to enact them because criticism of ostentation and hypocrisy in the Church has grown so voracious.

  [At this point, Marx Marvelous intruded again to contend that such reforms were desperate last-ditch efforts to revive a dying institution. Amanda, who was pinning violets in her hair, silenced Marx with a special look. Sometimes our scientist friend gets carried away.]

  Here I am, scribbling a hundred words a minute about internal problems of the Catholic Church and you guys probably couldn't care less. Sorry if I'm boring you but, you know, ever since the freak accident that turned me into Brother Dallas I've found myself getting hung up on churchly matters. It'll pass. I keep telling myself that it'll pass. Someday I'll be a plucky dope dealer again, ministering to my own stoned flock.