Another Roadside Attraction (22 page)
Before Amanda could respond, Marvelous came upon a small chicken pen at the outer edge of the grove. There was in the pen a pavilion under whose roof a solitary rooster stood. “My God,” exclaimed Marvelous. “That's the most bowlegged chicken I've ever seen. It's outrageous. Why don't you put it on display in the zoo?”
Amanda shook her head. “No,” she said. “He's done a lot of walking. He deserves a rest.”
"Why has Mr. Marvelous chosen to join us here at our zoo?” asked John Paul Ziller. The hour was midnight. He closed the book with the savage cover (the journal?) and lay down beside his naked wife.
“Mr. Marvelous has misplaced something and wants to make sure that we have not found it,” Amanda answered. As was her nightly custom in cool climates, she was massaging her lower body with Mother Blacksnake's Sunrise Oil. Her tattoos glistened like a new model of the universe.
“I trust that it was nothing important,” muttered John Paul.
“Were it important, he would not have lost it,” Amanda said.
Hello, reader. May the author once again intrude upon whatever mood his narrative might have established long enough to report on current events? This is the fifth day that Amanda, Baby Thor and your correspondent have been officially held prisoner. We were surrounded for a day or two prior to that, but it was not until John Paul and Plucky fled five days ago that those of us who remained at the zoo were bluntly notified of our quarantine.
Due to the liberation early this morning of the garter snakes—after warming them into a state of hyperactivity with a heating pad we shooed them one by one out the back door past the dozing guards—the agents are unusually hostile. Their pornographic taunting of Amanda has become increasingly sadistic, and the writer has been assured that only a (temporary?) restraining order from a higher echelon is preventing him from being mauled.
Apparently, however, their orders bid them maintain a reasonable distance, for not since the devastating search of four days ago has an agent set foot upstairs. Thus, unless they spot us at a window, or we venture down to the kitchen for food, we are spared their harassment, although their menacing vectors seem at times to penetrate our walls.
Taking his cue from Amanda, who, in between trances, has spent the day teaching Baby Thor the songs of gypsies and Indians, the author has tried to proceed with his writing, aloof from the threatening forces that encircle him. He has done rather well, too. His Remington has been yapping since breakfast and he has grown to appreciate the beauty of its bark. Just one more day! At the rate he is working that is all it will take to finish this. One more good day like this one. Will they grant it?
The reader may be perplexed to discover that this document is fairly near completion while there yet remains so much to learn. Please do not despair. All pertinent data concerning the Corpse will be imparted ere the author brings his account to term—providing, as he has said, that the authorities grant him one more day at the typewriter minus unpleasant interruption. To those readers who may be also annoyed because this report is somewhat remiss in linear progression and does not scurry at a snappy pace from secondary climax to secondary climax to major climax as is customary in our best books, the writer is less apologetic. He is dealing with real events, which do not always unfold as neatly as even our more objective periodicals would have us believe, and he feels no obligation to entertain you with cheap literary tricks.
For those of you who may have come to these pages in the course of a scholastic assignment and are impatient for information to relay to your professor (who, unless he is a total dolt, has it simmering in his brainpan already), the author suggests that you turn immediately to the end of the book and roust out those facts which seem necessary to your cause. Of course, should you do so, you will grow up half-educated and will likely suffer spiritual and sexual deprivations. But it is your decision.
As we drive up the river road, there are sixty thousand trees which I see but do not touch. Like me, Amanda is confined in the speeding Jeep, but she touches every tree.
Entry—May 10
Notebook of M. Marvelous
“The morel is a very wary little mushroom,” explained Amanda. “It hides under fallen leaves as if it were willfully avoiding the hunter's pluck. Like many of nature's noblest creatures it is a fugitive kind.”
The Jeep, piloted by John Paul, was speeding up the river road. Amanda had executed rough sketches of the morel. She was showing them to Marx Marvelous.
“As you can see, the cap of the morel is shaped rather like a thimble. A withered thimble. It is pitted, carved with irregular indentations; honeycombed, as it were. The color of the cap ranges from tan to creamy brown to a dishwater gray—colors that echo equally the decaying leaves underfoot and the sodden skies above. The stem is ivory-white, long and hollow. Frequently, you will come upon stems alone and you may wonder where the caps have gone. To the deer, that's where. Morel caps are the deer's spring tonic. They spurn the stems and leave them standing. We are not as particular as the deer.”
A short distance from the roadside zoo, they had wheeled east-northeastward off the Freeway and motored for a ways through fields and pastures of stinging green. Past Burlington, trees grew more plentiful and there were bright green bogs in which the skunk cabbage looked like exploding canaries or lemons that had been hammered into sheaves. After leaving the town of Sedro-Woolley (site of Northern State Hospital for the Insane), they began to climb, climbing as if the concentrated pressure of those locked-up crazies was propelling them to loftier altitudes. Higher, higher.
The river was an oxide green and buzzing with silvery silt. If there were fish in it they were well concealed, but occasional steelhead fishermen stood in their flat-bottomed boats, silhouetted in the Skagit mist like mackinawed wraiths. Landward, alders, vine maple and cottonwood thronged down the hillsides to the edge of the road. Where these budding deciduous treelings were mixed with larger, older conifers, there Amanda would point and say, “In April, morels lurked in those groves by the hundreds. The weather is too warm for them now. If we hope to catch morels today, we must go to higher elevations. Even there we won't find many. If we apply ourselves we should get enough for one fine dinner, but this is definitely the last morel hunt of the season.”
Marx Marvelous looked over the sketches. He read the morel's botanical name (courtesy of Madame Lincoln Rose Goody):
Morchella esculenta
. He re-examined the drawings. Something dark and ill-defined rustled its arms (or wings or tail) in the hollow behind his heart. He was unconvinced that he wished to dine on these demonic fruits. Morel season could have ended sooner for all he cared. “How can we be sure we aren't picking toadstools?” he asked.
“Specialization is such general tyranny,” thought Amanda. “Was it when man initiated the division of labor that he lost contact with the complete reality and began to fragment and go numb? Here we have a scientist, a man who has sacrificed this lifetime to the study of the Earth and its workings, and he does not know that 'toadstool' is just another name for mushroom, edible or toxic. How puny his particular knowledge. Still, I suppose it is necessary. Isn't it?” She thought these thoughts to herself as in her mind's eye she ran naked through the woods, hugging trees.
To Marvelous, she said: “If it is poison you are worried about, you had better stay away from supermarket foods with their preservatives and pesticides.”
“Oh, I feel totally at ease in supermarkets,” said Marvelous lightly.
You would, thought Amanda. Canned peas are not a very potent image. A package of frozen french fries lacks roots that reach into the deep chambers of human consciousness. Ah, but mushrooms! They are standard equipment for sorcerers and poisoners, eh, Marx? Associated in art, literature and folklore with the wicked and exotic, the mushroom has been used since primitive times to represent death—and death's fair sister, sex. Mushrooms have been called “devil's fruit” and “satan's bread.” They do not take to domestication. They lurk in the forest, as-sume skeleton hues and smell of rot and Pan. Our dear scientist obviously is uncomfortable dabbling in the black arts of yore. She thought these thoughts to herself as in her mind's eye she hugged each further tree trunk, bark and lichen flaking off in green-red scrumbles against her breasts.
To Marx Marvelous she said: “Frankly, there is a poisonous species which is sometimes confused with the morel. It is commonly called the brain mushroom (how Madame Goody refers to it I do not know) and its cap is convoluted like the lobes of the organ for which it is named. That is how one distinguishes it from the morel, in fact. It is folded into many convolutions, rather than depressed as is the morel. If you examine your quarry with this distinction in mind, you cannot possibly make an unpleasant mistake.”
“I don't know,” said Marvelous, scratching in various places his living statue of natty checks. “Mushrooming sounds to me like a risky proposition.”
“A bit like life itself,” said Amanda.
Although it hasn't rained for two days, the forests are still sopping. The underfooting is spongy, the tree-moss drips and drips. An eerie sunlight filters through dense tangles of ominously serpentine branches. Shadows are soaked with suggestions of primordial menace and obscure, slinking malignity. White snail shells—some vacant, some stuffed with mucus—are scattered beneath the huckleberry bushes like aquatic curds, and sweating tendrils of ivy choke everything that does not move. In this rank garden of vegetable death, Amanda—more goddess than Hecate herself—rakes the nettles and ferns with her fingers, emitting eeeeeks of minnie mouse surprise whenever she uncovers a treasured fungus. I dread the forest for its universal reminders: it is simultaneously an open womb and an open grave. But Amanda is as at home here as if it were in her own mold that was cast the vast greenfrog jelly of eternity.
Entry—May 10
Notebook of M. Marvelous
“Eeeeek!” squealed Amanda, as underneath a great old shaggy-assed cedar she came upon a morel nearly nine inches tall. Earlier, Amanda had told Marx, “The other popular edible mushrooms grow in the autumn. The morel has springtime all to itself.” Well, this morel must have had itself one hell of a spring. It was the largest find of the day, the largest of the season. It was a whopper, a prizewinner, a champ, a box-office bonanza, but destined to be dropped right in the basket with the smaller, less glamorous specimens—no star treatment here at Fungus Studios, sorry.
From another part of the woods John Paul materialized, as magicians will, and gave
ex cathedra
sanction to the prize. Even Baby Thor was impressed. He jumped up and down yelling, “Big one! Big one!” Mon Cul caught the fever and slapped his thighs, bowing in the exaggerated manner that he had learned at the Timbuktu Opera. He acted as if the mammoth morel were his own invention, though in truth he had not picked a single mushroom (after all, he was a famous baboon, not some truffle pig). Marx Marvelous had found only about a dozen morels, but with each discovery the thrill increased and he strutted with scientist pride to demonstrate how he had outwitted nature. They were a happy band of food-gatherers, damp and smeared with humus, but happy with the harvest, happy enough to dance, the five of them. And about that time a sudden wild wind gust roared up the Cascade highlands, sounding like a hillbilly hoot, like a Saturday night wahoo; and the shadows grew more tentacular and the sunlight more nocturnal, and the sky thickened like cornstarch and curdled around the tops of the darkening trees. “Let's get home,” they hollered, almost in harmony, and singing and chanting four different mushroom hymns in what appeared to be four different tongues (Ziller, as usual, was silent), they Jeeped it on back to the low country, just ahead of the moon.
We are driving home by a different route, not following the river back but cutting through the mountains on what is known as the Darrington road. This is logging country, as I ascertain by the bark chips strewn on the highway, by the timber trucks snorting around the twilit curves with one last day's load for the mills. Our own vehicle navigates a curve, and suddenly it is as if we have trespassed into the shattered heart of a no-man's land. Suddenly there is no more forest. Every hillside, every ridge is bare except for stumps and slash: a cemetery of forlorn stumps; low-spreading barricades of rain-rotted, sun-bleached slash. We are in the midst of an enormous bone yard, a battleground where armies of creatures bigger than dinosaurs might have fought and died. These murdered hills were for untold centuries green. Deer and bear and cougar and dozens of smaller animals lived here; eagles nested in the tops of the firs. Now, they are barren, devastated, splintered, twisted, silent: not even a magpie sings. They look to be grotesque Golgothas on which have been crucified a thousand Christs. I am no lover of the wilderness; the dark, dank woods hold for me a repertoire of unnamed fears. But if the forest is the product of satanic forces, then those forces have been surpassed by the graspings of man. No devil ever dreamed a landscape more terrible than
Entry—May 10
Notebook of M. Marvelous
The barbaric spectacle of the logged-off hills stunned them mute. No one spoke until, stopped at one of Darrington's three traffic lights, they saw a small crowd of lumberjacks and their families lined up before a quonset-hut movie theater, waiting for the show. There were children, some no larger than Thor, licking eskimo pies; friendly gossip ran along the line from wife to unfashionable wife; the big men seemed quiet and shy, maybe tired, maybe beaten down by their role in life, their faces already reddened by the spring sun, their Thom McAn shoes muddy, their jaws shiny with Aqua Velva—the medicine cabinet stink was detectable as far as the Jeep.
“They look to be decent folks,” observed Marx Marvelous. “Probably not a guilty conscience among them. Our society
needs
timber and these loggers are merely doing their jobs. They probably believe they're performing a patriotic service, and maybe they are. But I wonder if deep down inside they are completely insensitive to the brutality of their operation. I wonder if those beautiful kids will grow up and repeat the slaughter. That is, if there're any trees left to ravage. I realize, you know, that the logging companies are replanting. But a tree farm is not a forest. Is it?”