Another Roadside Attraction (14 page)

If John Paul's drumming cast no particular luminosity on the question of Plucky and the monks, it did at least give Amanda some insight into the musicality of human behavior. To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats. The majority of our actions occur regularly, lack dynamism and are unaccentuated. But occasional actions, such as Plucky Purcell's venture into the Wildcat Creek Monastery, are accentuated due to their intensified stress. When an accentuated beat is struck in relation to one or more unaccentuated beats, there arises a rhythmic unit. Rhythm is everything pertaining to the duration of energy. The quality of a man's life depends upon the rhythmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Einstein understood what Thoreau meant when he spoke of men hearing “different drummers.” Thoreau did not say saxophonists or harpsichordists or kazoo players, mind you, but
drummers
. The drummer deals almost exclusively with rhythm, therefore he is an architect of energy. Art is not eternal. Only energy is eternal. The drum is to infinity what the butterfly is to zero.

Amanda was tempted to relate to Ziller her new comprehension of his drumming, but she did not. Instead, she packed some mushroom cookies in an old Kotex box and the family went down to the flats and flew their kites. Once, however, as she dashed through the slough grass, the wind whipping her yellow dress, she yelled to Ziller, “The kite is the simplest geodetic structure just as the drum is the simplest . . . ,” and she ran on by and her words were lost in the wind.

The total electrical output of the human body is about one two-thousandth of a volt.

That isn't quite enough juice to light up Broadway, now is it, folks?

Hell, it isn't enough to fry a frankfurter.

No wonder God never bills us for electricity. He wouldn't collect enough to pay for the postage.

Happiness gathered at the roadside zoo. Finishing touches were being applied. Still no animals there, of course. Except for two garter snakes and a tsetse fly so dead it lay encoffined in artificial amber, unable even to decompose. As for the rest of the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve, it progressed. Each day another touch or two was added. Applying these touches required usually no more than a twelfth of the day's duration. The remainder of the time could be allotted to redecorating of a more personal nature. Although both Amanda and John Paul now retreated for several hours daily to their sanctuaries, the family knot shrank tighter. Mon Cul had been ill at ease with the first Mrs. Ziller and she with him ("Darling, I don't want to sound stuffy or Kansas City bourgeois—after all, it's the unique difference of your personality that I adore—but taking a baboon along on a wedding trip is somehow, oh I don't know, John Paul, it just gives me the creeps"), but with Amanda the learned ape was relaxed to the point where he scratched her pelt with the solicitude he ordinarily reserved for his own. Baby Thor took to wearing loincloths in proud imitation of his new papa. The four of them played games indoors and out; picked mushrooms and berries, dug roots and clams, made music, performed their chores, coaxed the old cafe into further states of wonder and shared (perhaps) the gleanings of individual investigations into . . . whatever.

Occasional visitors, mostly strangers, called. Attracted by the vibrations or alerted by word of mouth. Young men and women in transit. Moving from California to Canada. Or vice versa. They smiled a great deal, some carrying their belongings in tattered guitar cases, some carrying their heads in bandages. Getting rough out there for the young and free. They were given a good meal and happy words for the road.

Adding seasoning to life at the zoo were Purcell's letters, telling of the wiles of right-wing monks under orders from the conservative nucleus of the Vatican to protect the Church against Protestants, tax-minded governments and liberalizing tendencies. Telling of assassination devices and crafty plots and narrow escapes. Telling of his monkish longing for pussy. Letters somewhat unusual in the nature of their information, letters in a masculine register, letters to be read more than once. Read with ceremony. Incense and drums. Thus the days marched across November serenely, almost ecstatically. And then the rains came.

And then the rains came.

They came down from the hills and up from the Sound.

And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast.

Rain fell on the towns and the fields. It fell on the tractor sheds and the labyrinth of sloughs. Rain fell on toadstools and ferns and bridges. It fell on the head of John Paul Ziller.

Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckle-berries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating.

And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

Rain fell on the Chinese islands. It fell on the skull where the crickets live. It fell on the frogs and snails in the gutters. It fell on the giant improbable pacifying vulnerable sausage. It fell against the windows of the hospital where Amanda had been carried, the blood on her legs diluted with rain water.

The rain had nearly obscured her little yelps of pain as she lay in the brush near the mouse burrows. Rain had fallen on the fetus. Prematurely expelled. In the muddy field-grass. Rain had spattered Amanda's unconscious eyes, as it now spattered the windows of the hospital where for eleven days she lay, some days close to dying.

The hospital corridor glistened with quiet. At the reception desk, the nurse—amicable of countenance if bony of physique—looked up from the
Reader's Digest
in which she had been enjoying an article entitled “What Makes a Good President” by the late Dwight David Eisenhower. Visiting hours would not begin for another forty minutes, so the nurse was not expecting a caller. Especially, she was not expecting a caller such as this one. My God. Most irregular. A tall, vinegar-colored man with a ball of tumble-weed for hair; wearing a raincape of python skin, beneath which was only a . . .
loincloth
.

"Must be some kind of kooky joke,” the nurse thought. “Whatuz he want? How'm I gonna cope with him? How unlike General Eisenhower he is. Make a piss-poor President?” Her thinking was a trifle shredded.

The man turned out to be polite. Had no thought to rape and pillage. He was here to see his wife; oh, yeah, the poor little girl who had the miscarriage. He was aware that visiting hours had not begun but he had only a moment to stay as he had left his young son in the care of a babo—a friend. All the doctors were out to dinner, so the nurse excused herself and disappeared with practiced indifferent efficiency down one of the white-tiled corridors. In a few minutes she returned and announced, “Mrs. Ziller is sleeping. She's very weak. Still on the critical list. I think it would be better, Mr. Ziller, if you came back tomorrow.” ("And for God's sake wear some clothes.") This last statement was made under her bony breath.

"May I please just look in on her?” His voice was tired but so very cultured and strong. “I'd like to leave these.” He held out a bouquet of fly amanita (
Amanita muscaria
)—big, robust mushrooms with white warts distributed about their scarlet caps.

The nurse gulped. “They are poison, aren't they?"

"No. No, they have . . . er . . . abnormal . . . effects on the nervous system, the brain, but there is no death in them. Anyway they're for looking, not for munching.” He smiled. “She'll like them very much."

The nurse tried not to fluster. “Well, okay,” she said. “Just leave 'em in that pot you brought them in. But I'll have to ask the doctor about 'em when he gets back.” She led Ziller through the clean glare and medicinal smell and whiteness to Amanda's room. “We mustunt disturb 'er,” said the nurse. She cracked the door.

Ziller tiptoed into the gloom. He scooped Amanda's face up in his vision, weeding out the paleness, the thinness, the plastic vines running out of her veins and nose, the arms that lay askew like broken wings. He was afraid to burden her with a kiss. The magic words he had to say for her he barely whispered. He left the bowl of blazing mushrooms on the table at her bedside. And with it, a
haiku
written on rice paper, stained by the rain:

They've built their nests

in the chimneys of my heart:

those swallows that you lost.

Plucky Purcell says that sooner or later everything boils down to a matter of a buck. Perhaps Purcell overstates the case, but few are the lives untouched by considerations of economics. A financial crisis arose for the Zillers, for example, as a result of Amanda's hospitalization.

In truth, Ziller had brought a tidy little nest egg to the roadside zoo. He and Amanda had hardly been extravagantly compensated in their employ to Nearly Normal's traveling Tibetan show (although John Paul was paid union scale), nor had Ziller grown rich from the sale of his sculptures (although he had sold a few to collectors of considerable means). However, his associations with the Hoodoo Meat Bucket had been quite profitable. Despite the fact that the band's record album was merchandised under the counter—no reputable distributor would touch it—and was blacklisted by broadcasting stations from coast to coast, it become nevertheless a cult totem, an “underground classic,” so to speak, and sold upwards of fifty thousand copies. With monetary success came an inevitable token of establishment acceptance—and numerous opportunities for compromise. There had been an impromptu meeting at the Annex Bar down on Avenue B. The four musician-heroes quaffing beer and eating the free peanuts. (In leaner days, Ziller and Mon Cul had subsisted on Annex peanuts. Protein is where you find it.)

“Look, Ziller,” whined Ricki-Tick, the lead guitarist, “there's two major record companies wants to sign us. Heavy bread. We don't have to sell out, man. Just tone down the sex trip. Tone down the voodoo trip, the anarchy trip, the trephination trip. Muff the perversities. That's all, man.
Life
magazine wants to do a spread on us.”

And Ziller had skewered his fellows with his fierce pyramid eyes and had displayed his smile as if it were a dagger on a pillow. “You gentlemen do what you wish. The pleasures of exile are imperfect, at best. At worst, they rot the liver. Napoleon's hide turned yellow as a buttercup. I leave on the Midnight Special for the town of my birth.” And with one last handful of free peanuts, he went away to Africa. But as 90 per cent of the songs in the Meat Bucket repertoire were Ziller compositions, he received a handsome settlement prior to departure.

Travel had been costly. The conversion of Mom's Little Dixie Bar-B-Cue into the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve had not been inexpensive. The motorcycle had been traded in on a used but late model Jeep station wagon and quite a few dollars had had to be added to close the deal. Then came Amanda's accident. The sum of the medical bills was staggering. It was Black Friday beneath the colossal weenie.

Now, Amanda's father was probably the most well-to-do overweight Irish immigrant orchid baron in America. As Amanda was his only child, and as he had no wife, alas, he was in an excellent position to alleviate the newlyweds' economic woes. While Papa was not overjoyed with his little one's choice of mate, he gladly would have sent bank notes galloping to her bedside. They would amble up, hats in hand, shaking rain from their green mustaches, and say, in husky voices not the least bit tremulous from the long ride, “Howdy, mam. The bank note brigade. Hallowed protectors of the American way. May we be of service to ye?” Moreover, the Zillers could have touched Nearly Normal for a loan. But if neither of them desired to become dependent upon a relative, the thought of sinking in debt to a friend was even more depressing.

So, Ziller, to whom the telephone was a well-oiled instrument of torture, placed a call to New York City. Heard his hesitant words go limping across the continental span. Heard the twinkle-toe lisp of his dealer come rushing back, oblivious to the hostile stares of cowboys and farmhands as it swished across Iowa and Montana. He endured the pronouncing of his plight into the cold black mouthpiece, endured the lollipop vowels that bunny-hopped into his ear. Endured them. And on the day that Amanda was released by the Mount Vernon clinic, coming home to floral arrangements of cattail and salmon berry branch, to oyster casserole and baby kisses and baboon antics and a favorite tune on the flute, she was told of new wealth in the Ziller domain. She learned that the Non-Vibrating Astrological Dodo Dome Spectacular, formerly on loan to the Whitney Museum, had been sold to an Amsterdam couple for a figure approaching twenty-five thousand dollars. Cheap at the price. The dealer had ladled off a third of those dollars, as dealers do, but a bank draft for the remainder was in the mail.

“There will be a minimum of tourists on this road until spring,” John Paul told his bride. “A minimum of connoisseurs searching for old-fashioned red-hots beneath these sour skies and in these hammering rains. We have funds now. Enough. No hassle. The opening of our enterprise can be delayed. We are here in the Northwest Corner; you brightening it, me poking in it—and vice versa, although I have fewer inclinations to brighten than you to poke. The Northwest, albeit on a fairly superficial level, is one of my sources. You spoke of curiosity about the science of origins, or as I would prefer to call it, the science of godward solutions. Well, aside from my personal tinctures—which would only fog the essences in your crucible—there still seem to me to be qualities in this region worthy of our investigation. Mushrooms, for example, and what is left of the aboriginal culture. Perhaps there is even something to be learned from the rains. Therefore, I suggest that we postpone our grand opening until April first. In the ensuing four months let us become intimate with the spaces and speeds and loops and patterns of the Northwest biosphere of which we have voluntarily become a functioning part. That way we may better serve it as it serves us, just as the Wheel People of Anugi serve the circumferences which in turn supply their sacred rotations.” He paused. “We shan't neglect our usual interests and private projects, of course.”