Wild Ducks Flying Backward

by Tom Robbins

  III

  The setting sun turned the river into a little red schoolhouse. Thus motivated, the frogs got to work conjugating their verbs. The witch-girl handled the arithmetic.

  She divided a woodpecker by the square root of a telephone pole.

  Multiplied the light in a fox’s eyes by the number of umlauts on a Häagen-Dazs bar.

  Added a kingfisher’s nest to the Gross National Product.

  Calculated the ratio of duende to pathos in the death song of a lamp-singed moth.

  Subtracted a mallow from a marsh, an ant from an anthem, a buddha from a peach can shot full of holes.

  IV

  A white plastic bucket in a snowy field. A jackknife of geese scratching God’s dark name in the sky. A wind that throbs but is silent. Candy wrappers silent against fence wire. Stags silent under their fright-wig menorahs. Bees silent in their science-fiction wax. A silent fiddle bow of blue smoke bobbing in the crooked chimney atop the witch-girl’s shack.

  It is on a cold, quiet Sunday afternoon past Christmas that the television crew arrives in our village. By suppertime, everybody but the hard cases at the nursing home knows it’s in town. At the Chamber of Commerce breakfast Monday morning, hastily arranged to introduce the videopersons to the citizenry, the banquet room is overflowing. Understandably, we villagers assume the crew is here to film the new industries of which we are rightly proud. The director is diplomatic when he explains that missile bases and microchip plants are a dime a dozen.

  “We are making a documentary on flatus,” the director explains. The audience is spellbound.

  “A normal human being expels flatus an average of fourteen times per day,” he goes on to say. There is general muttering. Few would have thought the figure that high.

  “We are speaking of all human beings, from babies in diapers to lawyers in three-piece suits. The mechanic billows the seat of his greasy coveralls, the glamorous movie actress poots through silk— and blames it on the maid or the Irish wolfhound. ‘Naughty dog!’

  “You people can do your math. That’s eighty-four billion expulsions of flatus daily, worldwide, year after year. And that’s just humans. Animals break wind, as well, so that wolfhound is not above suspicion. Anyway. We can explain reasonably well what flatus is: a gas composed primarily of hydrogen sulfide and varying amounts of methane. And whence it comes: generated in the alimentary canal by bacterial food waste, and vented through the anus. But where does it end up?”

  Villagers look at one another, shake their heads.

  “I won’t trouble you today with environmental considerations, though I’m certain you can conceive of an upper atmospheric flatus layer, eating away at the ozone. This will be covered in our film. What I want to share with you is the difficulties we have encountered in trying to photograph the elusive trouser ghost, a genie as invisible as it is mischievous.”

  The director (a handsome man who wears a denim jacket and smokes a pipe) explains that attempts at spectrographic photography, while scientifically interesting, failed to produce an image with enough definition or optic impact to hold the attention of a lay viewer. And computer-generated animation seemed silly and fake. He goes on to explain how he and his staff fed a live model on popcorn, beer, and navy beans, then lowered her buttocks into a vat of syrup. Those of us who have just eaten pancakes for breakfast smile uneasily. “We got some marvelous bubbles,” the director says, “but a gas bubble per se is not a fart.

  “On Saturday, we heard from a reliable source that a resident of this community, or someone who lives nearby, has succeeded in actually netting a rectal comet and maintaining it intact. We were skeptical naturally, and on deadline, but also excited and a trifle desperate, so we impulsively dropped everything and traveled here at once. Now we are asking for your help. Does this person— and this preserved effluvium—exist? We were told only that the captor in question is some rich girl…”

  “Witch-girl!” the audience cries out as one. Then, in gleeful unison—“Witch-girl”—they sing it out again.

  As for what happens next, the village is of two minds. The village, in fact, has split into a pair of warring camps. We have come to refer to the opposing factions as “Channel A” and “Channel B.” Here are their respective versions.

  CHANNEL A

  A week passes. The television crew fails to return from the river. Suspecting foul play, the sheriff and his deputies tramp through the leafless forest and across the frozen bogs.

  The witch-girl has disappeared. So have the director and his camerawoman. The audio technician is found sitting on a stump, a depraved glaze coating his eyes. When asked about the whereabouts of the others, the soundman mumbles, “The hole in the cheese.” Over and over, “Hole in cheese. Hole in cheese.” Until they take him away to a sanatorium. (Some joker at the feed store said they hoped it was a Swiss sanatorium.)

  Eight months later, on Crooked Angle Island, a prospector stumbles across three skeletons, strangely intertwined. Inside the skull of each of them, rattling like a translucent jade acorn, is a perfectly crystallized fart.

  CHANNEL B

  The witch-girl is a big hit on PBS. Millions see her play the cello beside a bonfire, an owl perched on her shoulder. This has nothing to do with the subject of flatulence, but the director is obviously in her thrall.

  She has a second fart-bottle on her nightstand now.

  And throughout our township, television reception has significantly improved.

  CODA

  Perhaps it should be noted that sometime during this period, on an Argentine Independence Day, a notorious playboy fell to his death from one of the numerous gilded balconies of his Buenos Aires apartment. According to his mistress of the moment, he lost his balance while trying to capture with a gaucho hat a particularly volatile green spark that had escaped from a fireworks display in the plaza. “Es mío!” he cried as he went over the side. It’s mine.

  After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, Penguin Books, 1995.

  THE ORIGIN OF CIGARS

  On the morning after the lunar eclipse,

  she awoke with a funny feeling,

  massaged her belly with hurricane drops,

  rubbed barbecue sauce on her eyelids,

  donned a necklace of alligator bones

  and walked down to the Caribbee

  where, asquat in a spice canoe,

  she gave birth to a green banana.

  “Not mine!” growled her husband,

  pitching the new baby overboard

  into the path of a barracuda,

  who seized it like bait

  just as lightning’s alchemical zippo

  ignited the infant’s nib.

  Transformed into a pufferfish,

  the ’cuda was soon upstaging cookfires

  as it puffed past the strand

  in luxurious loopy-doops,

  languid, masculine,

  respiring like some kind of don

  —waiting for a cognac rain.

  STICK INDIANS

  You’ll never really see them

  and there’s nothing left behind

  to identify them in the labs of DNA.

  And that footprint beneath your window

  where in the night you saw the shadow

  of a shadow of a shadow on the pane?

  Just a heron with a gimpy

  leg or some scarecrow run away to look for love.

  When the owl suddenly freezes

  on its perch atop the fir,

  little ears cocked like nacho chips waiting for the cheese,

  you yourself will listen hard

  but only hear a scratching,

  a clawing and a rasping

  of the wind that wants to jimmy your locked door.

  It’s said they’re a tribe of hermits

  (whoever heard of such a thing?),

  professors from the university of mud.

  On paths of old mischief

  they steal down from the hills,
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  bird nests for moccasins,

  roadkill for their totem,

  broken twigs like broken vowels spelling out their name.

  While anthropology prays for day

  to break and bring an end to nights it can’t explain,

  you have to ask “Where are they,

  then, and are they any different from the rain?”

  Well, they seem to have an interest

  in all those things you do

  when you suspect that no one is around.

  And somehow you know they’re out there

  beyond the porch light’s reach,

  in the brambles,

  in the hedge,

  or out behind the woodpile

  where they certainly appear to feel at home.

  You imagine them raw and willowy,

  you imagine them splintered and dry,

  you imagine them witch brooms come to life.

  But no matter how you picture them

  or joke that they’re your friends,

  you can’t begin to grasp the shtik of stick.

  The Stick Indian casino

  is in your skull

  —and you’ve already lost.

  HOME MEDICINE

  Last night

  we attempted

  a lint

  transplant

  but

  her navel

  rejected

  it.

  Clair de Lune

  The old wolf trotted over the hill with a little pink heart in its teeth. A pattern appeared in the snow—a trail made by paws and tail and drops of candy-colored blood—and that pattern could be read as if it were a fairy tale, although the night was much too cold for fairies.

  From behind a surf of clouds, the moon skitted into view like a boogie board. Cautiously, glancing left to right, the wolf set its treasure down on a fallen tree trunk, raised its muzzle toward the sky, and through dandelion parachutes of its own frozen breath, issued a long wail that sounded like the siren on a 6000-year-old ambulance.

  Suddenly, the moon howled back.

  For a long moment, the wolf held itself so still it might have been a cardboard cutout in a theater lobby (a sequel to Dances with Wolves, told from the animal’s POV). The hairs of its mangy pelt were as erect as toy soldiers. Its eyes turned radioactive. Its breath was no longer visible. Its lame leg ached. Involuntarily, it pissed in the snow, affixing a new and perhaps not-so-happy ending to the fairy story previously written there. The old wolf waited.

  As for the moon, it too was still, at rest on a cloudtop like some buttered skillet in which Vincent van Gogh was frying an egg.

  Gradually, the lunar silence reassured the wolf, for while it, like its ancestors before it, had spent its life addressing each full moon without fail, it had never once, not even when a cub, expected or desired a reply. If there was a response, it resounded in the blood, in the spinal fluid, in the wolf juice, not the ears. Wolves did the vocalizing. Among beasts, as among men, the moon was understood to be mute.

  But was it? Had the moon merely been biding its time all these years, patiently waiting for the right moment to make itself heard?

  The wolf was straining so hard to learn what might have finally loosened the moon’s tongue that it very nearly missed the small, squeaky voice that piped up only a few inches from its nose.

  “Well,” said the little heart, which had unobtrusively begun to beat again, puffing itself out like self-blowing bubblegum, “now that you’ve gotten the news, don’t you think you ought to return me to the breast from which I was ripped?”

  Although hungry and perplexed, and despite the fact that its conscience was as clean of guilt as a nun’s bratwurst of mustard, the old wolf wearily complied, limping down the mountainside, squirming under the locked gate of the village, clambering atop a snowdrift, and stealing for the second time that night through a half-open nursery window.

  And the next morning, my christening took place as scheduled.

  ALOHA NUI

  Drawn by the bloomy lights

  of Honolulu,

  the giant passenger moth

  flies for a thousand miles,

  through typhoon spray and volcano smoke,

  sailors firing at it for sport,

  barracuda snapping at its ass;

  until, at last,

  frazzled of antenna, salty of wing,

  it wobbles into brief climactic orbit

  around the 500-watt

  coconut:

  bachelor at a wedding

  the bride never knew.

  Are You Ready for the New Urban Fragrances?

  (Headline in an Italian fashion magazine)

  Yeah, I guess I’m ready, but listen:

  Perfume is a disguise. Since the middle ages, we have worn masks of fruit and flower in order to conceal from ourselves the meaty essence of our humanity. We appreciate the sexual attractant of the rose, the ripeness of the orange, more than we honor our own ripe carnality.

  Now, today, we want to perfume our cities, as well; to replace their stinging fumes of disturbed fossils’ sleep with the scent of gardens and orchards. Yet, humans are not bees any more than they are blossoms. If we must pull an olfactory hood over our urban environment, let it be of a different nature.

  I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes.

  I want to sip in cafés that smell like comets.

  I want to sleep in hotels that smell like the pheromones of sixteen-year-old girls.

  Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace.

  I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve.

  I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein’s brain.

  I want a city’s gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods.

  And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella.

  HONKY-TONK ASTRONAUT

  (Country song)

  My wife up and left me a long time ago,

  it’s just as well that she’s gone.

  I’ve smoked out my windpipe with cheap cigarettes,

  I can barely sing you this song.

  But last night I saw more strange lights in the sky,

  got so excited I thought I would die,

  and it gave me the strength to go on.

  I got a car with no brakes or transmission,

  I usually travel by thumb.

  Since I walked out on that job laying carpet

  I’ve felt a bit like a bum.

  But when I think of that great whirling saucer

  and all the things it surely will offer,

  my heart starts to beat like a drum.

  Some people think I’m a leftover hippie, a loser, a drifter, or worse.

  But I’m just a loner from Sedona, Arizona,

  the center of the known universe.

  I met a blonde in a bar up near Phoenix,

  thought I’d found someone to love.

  But when she laughed at me I climbed on a bridge,

  hoping whiskey’d give me a shove—

  —cause a cowboy with no job and no money

  can’t expect to convince any honey

  that his friends rule the earth from above.

  (SPOKEN)

  The whole world’s howling like a Tijuana dog,

  everthing’s a little bit insane.

  Them spaceships had better hurry on down and get me,

  before I drown in this hard-hearted rain.

  But, hey, I just got the message that they’re a-gonna,

  they’re a-gonna land right here in Sedona, Arizona,

  And we can say adios to our pain.

  Now some people think I’m a leftover hippie, a loser, a drifter, or worse.

  But I’m just a loner from Sedona, Arizona,

  The center of the known universe.


  CREOLE DEBUTANTE

  She went to the School of Miss Crocodile,

  learned to walk backwards,

  skin a black cat with her teeth.

  Soon, she could dance with dead pirates,

  cook perfect gumbo,

  telephone the moon collect.

  But it took 23 doctors to fix her

  after she kissed that Snake.

  MASTER BO LING

  Sinking his fingers

  like rat fangs

  into the round black cheese

  (O moon that orbits Milwaukee!)

  he heaves it onto

  the path

  the Tao

  the waxy way

  at whose end there awaits

  amidst thunder

  the ten buddhas.

  R.S.V.P.

  The invitation to

  Tarzan’s bar mitzvah,

  written in nut juice

  and wrapped in a leaf

  Arrived in my mailbox

  with an organic rustle,

  smelling of chimp dung

  but promising a feast

  And evoking immediate

  hot hoppy visions:

  The hair of the cannibal

  and the sweet of the beast

  MY HEART IS NOT A POODLE

  (Country song)

  My love looks in the window and watches you sleep,

  can’t you hear it scratching at your door?

  My love howls at the full moon down by the creek,

  it ain’t for sale in any store.

  My love is a wild thing and it can’t be trained

  to do tricks to entertain your group

  so put away that leash and that hoop:

  my heart is not a poodle.

  My love is wild, hog wild,