Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  “You, er, know who this is, don't you?”

  “Yes,” said Amanda slowly. “I think I do.”

  John Paul's head bobbed slightly in a cautious jungle nod.

  Baby Thor and Mon Cul had fallen asleep. The last Beatles record had finished playing twenty minutes earlier and the phonograph had shut itself off. In silence, the three of them stood in the pantry and stared at the withered body.

  “Well, what are we going to do with him?”

  Ziller would say nothing. From his loincloth he pulled a small bamboo flute. He sat at the Messiah's feet and played very softly. The notes could not be heard outside the room.

  Plucky turned to Amanda. “What are we going to do with him?” he repeated.

  Amanda swabbed plaster dust from Jesus' forehead with a sponge. Her gaze was drenched with tenderness. “I think he deserves a decent burial,” she said.

  There are several ways of looking at an FBI agent. One of these ways is over a tsetse fly. Our tsetse fly was moored in a cube of amber, its thin wings frozen in single-minded elegance, its hairy legs straddling eternity. Not a bad way to be preserved, I thought—and then, still looking at the agent over the tsetse fly, I recalled the shabby remains of Our Lord.

  A couple of days after Jesus arrived at the zoo, Amanda gave him a bath in a tub of Mr. Bubble and anointed him with oil of the prune. That helped a lot. When John Paul ran away with the mummy, moreover, he dressed it in Plucky Purcell's $250 pinstripe velvet-collared rock-and-roll suit, hacking inches off pant legs and coat sleeves with his hunting knife to get a fit. No matter how moldily he may for centuries have lain, the Messiah has gone to the apocalypse in style

  From my perspective, the FBI agent's head rose above the coffin of the tsetse fly like a North Atlantic moon rising above a barge of lemon Jell-O. It was a cold moon whose light made lovers shiver and change their minds. The agent, as I saw him over the tsetse fly, was swinging his customary putting iron. He swung with bland concentration. If the agent had wanted to smile at his imaginary golf ball, neither Amanda nor I would have stopped him. But he swung with bland concentration. Perhaps he could not bridge the gap between the real club and the illusionary ball. Perhaps if he were on the links with the turf beneath his feet and a buddy to share his sport and no roadside distractions in his life, he would have gathered some mirth in his swing. He was, after all, a man still in his prime, not without dignity, not without a cleft chin for which any aspiring young actor would have paid dearly at the Cleft Chin Makers to the Stars.

  The agent, as I saw him over the tsetse fly, looked as if he were someone's father. No doubt he was. The tone of his voice, in fact, was fatherly as he, contrary to orders, began to converse with Amanda in the kitchen.

  “I can't understand you young people. I mean I just can't understand you. I guess you've just had it too easy, we've spoiled you 'til you're soft and rotten.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Amanda. She was boiling wheat custard for Thor's lunch.

  “The way you show no responsibility . . .”

  “Responsibility to what?” inquired Amanda.

  “Why, to our democratic way of life, to our tax-supported institutions . . .”

  “To individual human animals,” Amanda ventured.

  “Ours is a government of laws, not of men,” the agent proclaimed.

  “Maybe that's the problem.”

  “What do you mean, problem? You don't know what you're talking about. Our laws are sacred.”

  “Aren't our people sacred?”

  “Until a law is removed legally from the statute books, it must be obeyed blindly by everybody if we want to continue to live in a democratic society and not slide back into anarchy. We've got to have laws and retribution. Ever since we crawled out of caves, retribution has followed wrongdoing as the night the day. When retribution ceases to follow evil, then the fabric of civilization begins to unravel.”

  Amanda stirred the custard. “If we've always had retribution, how do you know what happens when we don't have it?” she asked.

  The agent scoffed. “You people. You people in this, this weirdo place.” He gestured toward the front room, but did not see me behind the shrine of the tsetse fly, resting my hemorrhoids. “You people, that fucking magician, I don't know all it is you've got yourselves into. But you wouldn't be in this mess with your government and with the Church if somebody had raised you with a little guts, if somebody had put the fear of God in you.”

  “You're talking about the fear of authority.”

  “Authority. Damn right. You never learned to respect authority.”

  “In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.” Amanda whipped the custard with a wooden spoon.

  “Oh? Our duly constituted authority isn't respectable enough for you.”

  “The only authority I respect is that one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.”

  “You mean God?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You can't possibly question authority,” said the agent, ignoring the implications of her last remark. “Who are you to question it. You don't remember the war against fascist aggression back in the forties, when America defended herself against Hitler, you weren't even born. Young lady, I risked my life in order that you could have freedom and education and all the good things of our society; the authorities of this nation saved it as a free and decent place for you to live in, but you don't remember that, do you? I risked my life . . .”

  “You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous in risking one's life. So you lose it, you go to your hero's heaven and everything is milk and honey 'til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That's not courage. Real courage is risking something you have to keep on living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's clichés.”

  The agent was thoughtful for a moment. Then he spewed, “What the hell do you know? Who are you, one infantile weirdo girl, to make those charges? What crap! What nerve! The United States of America is and always has been the greatest country on Earth.”

  “The United States of America is less than two hundred years old. There were great civilizations in India and China for four thousand years. Tibet was in a state of advanced enlightenment six thousand years ago.” Amanda talked quietly. She loathed arguments. They were small-scale wars. “Here,” she said. “Have some of this warm custard. There's plenty for all of us.”

  Amanda offered a Haida bowl brimming with custard. The custard steamed and soaked up milk. The custard did its work silently. It made a pleasing contrast to the cool Northwest rain that drummed its countless fingers on the woods and fields outside. That bowl of custard was something you could depend on; something domestic and secure. It would not run off to sea with Jack London or follow a shaman into his hut. That custard was tractable and responsible enough to suit any authority. And its warm diplomacy could conceivably heal ruptures between opposing philosophies. But the mention of China had been too much for the agent. China? Too much! Scorning the custard, he stalked out the back door, putting iron in hand, whirling around in the wet grove to yell, “I'm an American and proud of it!”

  Amanda gently closed the door behind him. “I'm a human animal and prepared to accept the consequences,” she said.

  There are several ways of looking at a lovely young woman tasting custard. One of these ways is over a tsetse fly.

  It is approximately 11 A.M. now but the rain is coming down like high noon. The sky is as gruff as a Chinese waiter. It keeps slamming silverware against the horizon. The sloughs look like spilled tea. Amanda, in a gypsy ensemble as gay as the day is dour, is standing by my table talking about the incident with the agent downstairs.

  �
��Actually,” she was saying, “he was rather fatherly.”

  “Yes, I believe he wants to like you. But the political gulf is too wide for him to cross.”

  “I don't know a thing about politics.”

  “That's all he knows. He's completely power-oriented.”

  “He's a symbol junkie.”

  “A what?”

  “A symbol junkie. People like him—that is, the majority—are strung out on symbols. They're so addicted that they prefer abstract symbols to the concrete things which symbols represent. It's much easier to cope with the abstract than with the concrete; there's no direct, personal involvement—and you can keep an abstract idea steady in your mind whereas real things are usually in a state of flux and always changing. It's safer to play around with a man's wife than with his clichés.”

  Her logic is so simple that I am afraid to trust it. Yet, I want to keep her talking at all costs. “Give me an example,” I say, zeroing in on her nipples which, like revolutionary raspberries, are storming the walls of her shawl.

  “Laws are the most obvious example. Laws are abstractions. Laws symbolize ethical arts, proper behavior toward other human animals. Laws have no moral content, they merely symbolize conduct that does. These symbol junkies are always yelling about how we've got to respect the law, but you never hear one of them say anything about respecting fellow beings. If we respected each other, if we respected animals and if we respected the land, then we could dispense with laws and cut the middleman out of morality. Here in Washington State the government has a slogan, you may have noticed it, 'Drive Legally.' If this were a concrete, realistic (as opposed to a civilized) society, the bumper stickers would not say 'Drive Legally' but 'Drive Lovingly.'”

  “What can we do about the symbol addicts?”

  “Do about them? Marx, you do react to things in a peculiar way. Why, for goodness sake, should we do anything about them?”

  I protest, but it is too late. She is leaving the room, going to her sanctuary (with its scents of Bow Wow scenery), going to try another trance, perhaps. And as she disappears behind the perfumed curtains, I hear her say once more: “I don't know a thing about politics.”

  For once, Amanda did not get her way. Had Plucky and John Paul consented, the lot of them would have left the next morning for the Southwest and lain Jesus to rest on Bow Wow Mountain.

  “I thought about that little knoll overlooking the place where the Skagit north fork enters the Sound. You know, the one with the patch of Amanita muscaria and the mossy rock that looks like Walt Whitman's imagination. But that isn't right. Too much rain. Too much chlorophyll. He wouldn't be comfortable there. If we can't take him back to Nazareth, then Bow Wow is the spot for him. He'd feel at home on Bow Wow Mountain.”

  Sometimes one got the idea that Amanda thought Bow Wow Mountain was the center of the universe. But she didn't have her way. A rapid burial was not quite what Purcell had in mind for his treasure. And Ziller offered no opinion, he just kept blowing his flute.

  Amanda and Plucky tried to talk it out, but Plucky was barely coherent and his voice took a turn toward the shrill. He clearly was experiencing nervous exhaustion. His sudden escape from the Church after a year of cloistered karate; the aftershock of his apocalyptic theft; the harried, sleepless night—these were taking their toll. It was touching to see so robust a man on the verge of hysteria.

  “You'd better get some rest,” Amanda said.

  “Rest, hell, I can't rest.” It wasn't like the Mad Pluck. He had snoozed in a station house swarming with hostile cops following the police riots in Chicago. Now, perched on an alchemist's stool, he lay his head against Amanda's shoulder. “What kind of mess have I gotten us into?” he moaned.

  Amanda slipped her hand into the front of Purcell's jeans. Her arm, bracelets and all, slid down inside his shorts. Her fingers closed with exquisite gentleness around the twin pods of his testicles. She lifted them lightly and let them nest, like the eggs of a rare songbird, in the spoon of her palm. The bird stirred on its nest. The weight upon her hand gradually increased. Her fingers worked their way out to the blunt end of a corona that was ballooning and throbbing like an inflatable tomato.

  “Well,” said Amanda, “at least part of you is unbowed by Christian travails.”

  Plucky grinned sheepishly. His big aristocratic face, which minutes before could have been mistaken for Hamlet's mirror, cracked with a lopsided pool-hall leer.

  “John Paul,” Amanda said, throttling the tomato, “I'm going to take Plucky up and rock him to sleep.”

  Ziller nodded. He motioned with his eyes that they should use Marx Marvelous' apartment above the garage. As for himself, he continued to sit at the feet of the Christ, fluting single notes into the confines of the pantry as if he were feeding the fish in a pond.

  Amanda and Plucky left by the kitchen door. When more than twelve hours later, I, in innocence, returned from vacation, she was still rocking him to sleep in my bed. If the sound I overheard was a lullaby, it was news to Brahms.

  This next chapter begins with the image of a Greyhound bus streaking through a rural valley in the American West. That image is, in my humble estimation, an excellent one with which to begin a chapter (unless one is writing an epic of the Civil War) and I am gratified to have an opportunity to use it. Amanda came in just now to borrow a match for the lighting of incense and candles. I told her about the image with which this chapter begins.

  “Good,” she said.

  “I think that's an excellent beginning image,” I said.

  “It's fine,” agreed Amanda. “You sure you haven't seen the wooden matches?”

  “It's just about as good a beginning image as anyone could come up with,” I said. I was feeling cocky about my bus and my valley.

  Amanda stopped searching for the matches and looked me over. “Yes, Marx,” she said. “One could begin a chapter with an image of feats performed by fairies or an image of immunity from certain disasters or an image of the moonstone and its properties or an image of Don Ambrosio's pact with the Devil or an image of Chinese court dogs in moments of leisure or an image of the origins of virginity or an image of an owl flying in an open window and perching on Picasso's easel or an image of the unexplained appearance of gypsies in Europe in the fifteenth century or an image of what J. H. Fabre in The Life of the Caterpillar called the 'Great Peacock evening.' But you have chosen to begin with a bus and a valley and that is wonderful. Now, where are the fucking matches, dear? I've got my trance to attend to.”

  This next chapter begins with the image of a Greyhound bus streaking through a rural valley in the American West. The bus is rolling toward Canada. It is the Seattle-Vancouver express. Not many passengers on this bus are noticing the huge flocks of ducks that are flying over the bus, flying from the mountains visible miles to the right of the bus and flying toward the salt marshes and inlets miles to the left (and just out of sight) of the bus. Yet the passengers on this bus are interesting if for no other reason than they, like all who travel by Greyhound, believe—for the duration of the trip, at least—in their own immortality.

  Among the passengers on this bus—and, for the moment, believing strongly in his immortality—is a mild-mannered though slightly disreputable-looking young man who is trying to con the driver into making an unscheduled stop. The driver had agreed earlier to let him off in Mount Vernon, which was not a scheduled stop, either, but there is a Greyhound depot there and they could get away with stopping for a second, but now the young man is saying, “That roadside attraction about a mile up the road, the one with the giant enormous weenie, that would be perfect.”

  The driver at last consents. With an irritated stomp of the air brakes, he whooooozzzzeeeees to an unsteady halt in the parking lot of the zoo and, of course, it is I, alias Marx Marvelous, who jumps out.

  According to my calculations, the day was Thursday. Sure enough, the zoo was closed. I walked around back, barely squeezing my suitcase between the trees and the grotesque ends o
f the ever-changing horizontal totems that protrude from the corners of the building. “Oooff,” I said, squeezing through. For a second, I was face to face with a horrible gargoyle bulldog. A string of sausages dangled from the fierce trap of his jaws. In his eyes were purple-red stones that Ziller had brought back from Africa. Or was it India? Carved drool dropped from the bulldog's lips and glistened on the flanks of the sausages. “This is where you live and work?” I asked myself incredulously.

  I went directly to my quarters above the garage. The door was unlocked, but I had turned the knob only halfway when from my bedroom I detected the unmistakable grunts of love. I withdrew my hand. The grunts turned into giggles and the giggles into groans. “Hmmmmmm,” I said. I started down the stairs. Then I thought, “That's my bedroom.” I whirled back to the door and again I grasped the knob. The groans had turned into slobbers. My grip collapsed and fell from the handle. I resumed my descent. On the way downstairs, my brain chug-a-lugged a quart of Tabasco and wiped its lips with a saw.

  In the kitchen, John Paul sat with Thor and Mon Cul, sharing an early lunch. Ziller had made cream of banana soup and they, the three of them, were dunking their doughnuts in it and lapping it from clay bowls. Ziller and his stepson were dressed in loincloths. Mon Cul, in between laps and dunks, would climb on the table and twirl from the light fixture, much as the broads in Ringling Bros. circus twirl from ropes while the band plays “I'm in Love with the Girl in the Moon.” “This is the place where I work and live?” I inquired of myself once more.