Another Roadside Attraction (25 page)

Amanda whistled with admiration, although due to her crooked teeth she did not whistle well. It was more of a blow. “O my O my,” she blew admiringly. “How do you manage to talk like that in clear weather. For me, it would take the most rambunctious thunderstorm these parts have ever seen. It would play hell with the pea fields. Lightning might strike the big sausage. In which case it wouldn't be worth it, no matter what I said.”

Marvelous didn't fully understand. “I don't imagine it storms much in this climate,” he noted. “But do you admit there's truth in my observations?” The “but” that crouched like a strange sailor in the doorway of his second sentence did not in any way tie his first remark to his second one. It was a “but” more ornamental than conjunctional.

“A speech as fancy as that one doesn't have to have truth in it,” said Amanda, busily sewing. “It's like asking if there's truth in the Imperial Russian Easter eggs.” Without looking up from the microscope she could tell Marx was disappointed with her reply, so she added, “I will admit to a lifelong and regular fascination with freedom. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Maybe you're in rapport with William Blake,” offered Marvelous. “Blake once wrote, 'I must invent my own systems or else be enslaved by other men's'.”

“Not to get your mind back on the Vatican and Christianity,” said Amanda (who, as curious as she might be, was nevertheless showing signs of weariness with all this hubbub about religion), “but our friend Plucky Purcell is an admirer of William Blake. Plucky says one
has
to admire a man who for 175 years can get away with rhyming 'eye' and 'symmetry.'”

While awaiting news from the Mad Pluck at the Holy See, Amanda herself had an encounter with the Christian ethos. Let Marx Marvelous tell it.

Through the loosest of verbal agreements, I am now manager of the Zillers' roadside zoo. My duties have not been formally defined, but they consist chiefly of explaining to customers why we serve nothing but hot dogs and juice. I've become quite efficient at preparing our wares and were it not for the troublesome explanations I could refuel a couple dozen tourists in about five minutes. In between slipping weenies into buns—and indulging the Freudian fantasies concomitant to such occupation—I lecture on the attractions of our establishment. My San Franciso garter snake lecture includes a pitch for conservation and is popular with little old ladies; my talk on
Glossina palpalis,
the African tsetse fly, is fraught with allusions to bloodsucking jaws and headachy natives who drop off into eternal slumbers, although in fairness to scientific findings—and to Amanda's fondness for insects (indeed, for all living things)—I add that the tsetse fly is not poisonous but merely a communicator of infected parasites and that both the prevalence and severity of sleeping sickness have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the anticlimax, the kids enjoy the tsetse fly talk.

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 accepted 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.