Another Roadside Attraction (28 page)

“Then why the hell did you get married?”

“What has marriage got to do with it? I married John Paul because I'm knocked out by his style. Because I love him and respect him and enjoy the transformations that take place as a result of our sharing the same dimensions. But, Marx, marriage is not a synonym for monogamy any more than monogamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on the earth, lovers and families must be more flexible and relaxed. The ritual of sex releases its magic inside or outside the martial bond. I approach that ritual with as much humility as possible and perform it whenever it seems appropriate. As for John Paul and me, a strange spurt of semen is not going to wash our love away.”

“Then why do you deny me?” whined Marx. He stared at the floor.

Amanda closed the door and moved closer to him. She kissed his cheek. “Marx,” she said tenderly, “you are as sensitive as you are stubborn. And, you're, well, shall we say—terribly impressionable. Also, you tend to be possessive. Those are basic characteristics of Cancerians. I know you have no use for astrology but you can't deny that those are your traits. And neither John Paul nor I feel that you could handle a simple, free relationship with me. No sooner would we begin than you'd be in love with me, which is beautiful except that you'd make it so complex. You'd demand more of me. You'd be possessive and play ego games. You'd be jealous of John Paul. Before long, you would create tension . . . between all three of us. Then where would we be? Friction at the Captain Kendrick. No, I just don't think you're ready.”

Marx Marvelous slowly, desperately, sank to his knees. He embraced Amanda's legs. He buried his head in her perfumed tunic, in her crotch. His body shuddered. He sobbed against her pelvis, he whimpered. He clung to her tightly, perhaps ashamed now to let go.

For a while, Amanda stood absolutely still. Then she began to caress his fine sandy strands, her fingers twisting his hair in phantom knots. He relaxed a bit. He kissed her through the fabric. (Amanda, if you're leaving, you'd better leave now!) Gradually, like the falling of leaves or the bursting of buds or the other so gradual as to be nearly imperceptible dramas of nature, she pulled up her tunic and slipped her panties down around her calves. When the parachute of love descended, Marx Marvelous was face to face with her enchanted gypsy snatch.

So quietly did Amanda stand that the whole Skagit Valley, animate and inanimate, from the Cascades to the Sound, seemed on the point of standing quietly with her while he kissed and nibbled her about the groin. His tongue made a few exploratory licks, as if he were a child testing the flavor of a lollipop. She grew impatient and thrust her pubus toward him, and then and then . . . His tongue curled and thrust inside of her, his mouth mashed against her, the tip of his nose glistened with her juices. And then and then and then . . . Into the sucking of her went all the bafflement, all the rage, all the immense crazy consuming speechless frustration of his ineffectual genius. He lapped up the sweet darkness, his tongue drum-rolled against her clitoris, he sucked his way toward the plum of her womb. And then and then and then . . .

Her orgasm spanned a career that began with a delicate shudder and ended nearly two minutes later (his face against her all the while) with an volcanic gypsy moan. At first she came gently, as a moth might; then, losing control, she writhed and wallowed in hot cat spasms of crude delight. He thought she would never stop. She feared she would dissolve. Her nectars wet his neck and her thighs. Her clitoris was a ladyfinger cloud pump—and she groaned with animal dignity as it throbbed. Pumped its fishy billows. Its honey and sparks. It was the greatest of the imperfect ventriloquist acts: when his lips moved, her body sang.

After Amanda's pulsations had subsided, she wiped off Marx's face with the hem of her tunic. She pulled up her panties and hugged him good-bye. He was dizzy and ready for sleep. He had come, too. And he never wore those checkered trousers again.

At 3:25 on the afternoon of Thursday, August 6, Marx Marvelous was busy drowning. The Skagit River closed around his lungs like a wedding ring. The Skagit River, which bangs down from the high Cascades, which spills through the wild hills, which is cold and green and silty and (at this time of year) teeming with salmon spawn, which flows sullenly through the croplands as if pouting about the loss of speed, flowing daily, flowing as it did last year, flowing as it did when the three painted duck-hunting chiefs of the tribal Skagit rode upon it in their long canoes, flowing, flowing fearlessly into the future, flowing forever from beginning to end; the Skagit River did not give one watery damn that it was drowning the life of Marx Marvelous, promising (if confused) young scientist who had excelled at Johns Hopkins University and once owned a natty checkered suit.

At first, Marx Marvelous did not like drowning. The water in his lungs was heavy and unnatural. He thought of a cake his father once had baked for his mother's birthday. He felt as if that cake were in his lungs. But drowning is like anything else. You get used to it.

It was a relief to quit struggling. When he struggled his lungs felt overheated and rusted out, like the muffler on an old Ford truck in which he had delivered the
Baltimore Sun
after he grew too big for his bicycle. That passed. When he ceased to struggle his lungs ceased to backfire. It was peaceful. Would they publish his dead picture in the
Baltimore Sun?

Drowning takes a long time. It is not something one does in a fast minute. Don't think it is. There is time to think. There is time to eat a sandwich while drowning. Marx Marvelous would have enjoyed a grilled ham and cheese. Hold the pickles.

A light followed Marx Marvelous down to the river bottom. He did not know from whence it came. Perhaps the fishes are familiar with this light. Marx Marvelous stared into the light. It is possible to drown with one's eyes open, you know. The face of Albert Einstein appeared in the light. Einstein was demonstrating that since motion depends upon the observer no one point can be considered the zero of motion. Einstein's face, baggy beneath the eyes, was very kind. Nevertheless, it made Marx Marvelous nervous. He soon replaced it with the face of Someone We All Know and Love. Marx Marvelous and the face hung in the water as if the river were a museum and they were famous pictures placed opposite one another for contrast. The light dimmed. “Our gallery is closing for the day,” thought Marvelous.

One witness who saw John Paul Ziller dive off the Conway (South Fork) bridge said it reminded him of the Tarzan movies when Johnny Weissmuller would dive in to save Jane and Boy from the crocodiles. Two other witnesses agreed. It was the loincloth, they said. The remaining witness, a Swinomish Indian boy, said it reminded him of a movie, too. He did not say which one. “It was sure no movie when he pulled that feller outta the water,” admitted the first witness. “His face was purple, solid purple. I thought for sure he was gone. I was surprised when they got him to breathing again. Did you see that girl? Her inner tube overturned, too, but she swam to shore okay. She kept calling, 'Marx, Marx.' Then that hairy guy dove off the bridge. Man, that's a long way down. It was like a movie.”

Marx Marvelous regained consciousness. His chest ached. He felt sick. He couldn't hear the music any more. Nor see the light. What for an instant he thought was the light proved to be the great rosy buttocks of Mon Cul baboon. The baboon was bowing to the crowd that had gathered. Each time he bowed his butt ascended like a flaming sun, and when he straightened, the sun set. So the day dawned and ended, dawned and ended, over and over again with only a soft sound in between like Magritte's bowler hat rolling upon a Belgian carpet. Time passed quickly by Mon Cul's rectal reckoning. It was all okay.

Marx Marvelous is going to break the genius machine when he grows up. That's what everyone said. He hasn't, of course. As yet he hasn't put a strain on it. The reader, with his training in psychology (via novels, films, TV, Ann Landers, etc.) knows why.

Our sandy-haired young thinker is desperately searching for something in which to believe. Isn't he? As a child he was too sensitive and too bright to be attracted to his family's Baptist fundamentalism for very long. He turned to science almost as a substitute. How cool it was in comparison, how clean and cogent. But that didn't last. With his understanding of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, he began to realize that every system that science proposed was a product of human imagination and had to be accepted with a faith nearly as blind as the religious beliefs which he had jettisoned. Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationship of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the fish or the Lamb.

What now, dear Marvelous? A fresh examination of traditional religion found it as deficient in function as in creative energy: the wildest scientific postulates seemed sound (and alive!) in comparison. Paradoxically, his investigations in pure science, in abstract mathematics and theoretical physics, frequently led him into areas of thought which he could only describe as . . . well, say it, Marx:
metaphysical
. How could that be? The mental processes of religion and pure science may be similar, but the ends are different. It is not the purpose of science to make a man feel whole, to produce a kind of exalted happiness.

Why not?

It is a pity that Marx Marvelous should amplify that peculiarly Western quarrel of science and religion. But he was so terribly ambivalent. Thrashing about within him were two of the major and vital quests of the human spirit—the search for fact and the search for value. Why did the facts he pursued prove so impoverished in value, why were the value systems he examined so contrary to fact? Could mysticism help him? Various sources informed him that in the life-system known as mysticism there was a harmonium of fact and value. But Marvelous recoiled from mysticism with immediate distaste. Mysticism was so corny, so adolescent, so cluttered with dusty and discredited modes of thought, so clouded with woolly abstractions. No good. No good. He clung to science as a wino clings to a doorjamb. But the deep division within kept spreading its cheeks.

Compounding the spread was yet another side of his personality, the side that had a tooth for the whimsical and outlandish, the side that rutted in him like a lewd and unpredictable springtime compared to the stolid autumn that had settled upon his more public self. The less said about that side the better. Students of Kepler do not stress his lifelong belief in fairies any more than biographers of Benjamin Franklin dwell upon his illegitimate children, his venereal disease. Pass.

After a few months at the Zillers' roadside zoo, however, our boy betrayed a change. Gradually, Marvelous ceased to challenge his employers on every intellectual ground where he suspected them vulnerable. Slowly, even painfully, he fell in step with the rhythms that prevailed at the zoo. In his notebook he himself described the mood at the zoo as one of “intensity within tranquillity.” By that he probably meant that the Zillers generated an atmosphere of rest and harmony through which coursed currents of unnamable excitement as veins run through meat. Marvelous could relax without fear of apathy. If he did not penetrate the mysterious activities that transpired behind the scenes at the roadhouse, he did at least share in the air of adventure that surrounded them. If he did not abandon his own attempts to isolate the psychic ember that would flame into the next religious phase, he did relieve the mission of some of its urgency. Following his tasty liaison with Amanda (how like the wilderness she was flavored) there had been a perceptible easing of strain. He became calmly fatalistic about his desire for her. “I want to roll in the hay with Amanda.” “I wish the sun would shine for two days in a row.” These remarks he made with equal emphasis. Following his rescue from the river by John Paul, he smiled more often at the magician and the magician at him. The three of them became closer friends. Marx gave his checkered suit to the Salvation Army. He let his hair grow long, although he still shaved each morning upon rising. At his baboon-nap trial in Seattle his lawyers wangled a suspended sentence. He developed a tolerance for wild mushrooms and wild music: morels, chanterelles, shaggy lepiotas; the Hoodoo Meat Bucket, the Beatles, Roland Kirk. His hemorrhoids even disappeared. Ah! Sigh!

By the middle of September Marx was secure enough in his new station in life to risk a small vacation. Sure, why not? Tourist season had petered out. The zoo was in fit condition. Might put things in clearer perspective if he got away for a while. Reportedly, a lot of strange things were erupting down around San Francisco, events with religious undertones that might bear looking into. Besides, though life at the roadside zoo was anything but dull, how long had it been since he'd been out on the town, picked up a broad in a nightclub, drank a double martini on the rocks?
Too
long, you bet. John Paul lent him a musician's card that would get him in free to any number of dives. Amanda gave him a scarab for luck and a wet kiss for the joy that was in it. Mon Cul waved good-bye at the airport, and Baby Thor cried to see him go. Marvelous almost cried himself. But what the hell, he wasn't going away forever. Very soon, he consoled himself, he'd be back at the Capt. Kendrick and things would be as they were before, only better. As it happened, however, that was not quite the case.

When two weeks later he returned to the zoo, Amanda was in bed with Plucky Purcell and Jesus Christ was locked in the pantry.

Part IV

AUTUMN DOES NOT COME
to the Skagit Valley in sweet-apple chomps, in blasts of blue sky and painted leaves, with crisp football afternoons and squirrel chatter and bourbon and lap robes under a harvest moon. The East and Midwest have their autumns, and the Skagit Valley has another.

October lies on the Skagit like a wet rag on a salad. Trapped beneath low clouds, the valley is damp and green and full of sad memories. The people of the valley have far less to be unhappy about than many who live elsewhere in America, but, still, an aboriginal sadness clings like the dew to their region; their land has a blurry beauty (as if the Creator started to erase it but had second thoughts), it has dignity, fertility and hints of inner meaning—but nothing can seem to make it laugh.

The short summer is finished, it is October again, and Sung dynasty mists swirl across the fields where seed cabbages, like gangrened jack-o'-lanterns, have been left to rot. The ghost-light of old photographs floods the tide flats, the island outcroppings, the salt marshes, the dikes and the sloughs. The frozen-food plants have closed for the season. A trombone of geese slides southward between the overcast and the barns. Upriver, there is a chill in the weeds. Old trucks and tractors rusting among the stumps seem in autumn especially forlorn.

October scenes:

At the dog-bitten Swinomish Indian Center near La Conner, there is a forty-foot totem pole the top figure of which is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of the queerer projects of the WPA Roosevelt's Harvard grin is faded and wooden in the reservation mist.

Outside of Concrete, boys have thrown crab apples through the colored glass windows of an abandoned church. Crows carry the bright fragments away to their nests.

On the Freeway south of Mount Vernon, watched over by a hovering sausage, surrounded by a ring of prophecy, an audacious roadside zoo rages against the multiplying green damp chill as if it were a spell cast upon the valley by gypsy friends of the sun. Events transpire within that zoo which must be recorded immediately and correctly if they are to pass into history undeformed. Things rot with a terrible swiftness in the Northwest rains. A century from now, the ruins of the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve will offer precious little to reimburse archaeologists for their time. No Dead Sea Scrolls will ever be found in the Skagit Valley. It's now or never for
this
bible.

THE SECOND COMING

The Second Coming did not quite come off as advertised. The heavens opened, sure enough, but only to let a fine pearly rain streak through to spray the valley. Instead of celestial choirs, there were trucks snorting on the Freeway. Instead of Gabriel's trumpet there was John Paul Ziller's flute. Jesus himself showed up disguised as a pop art sculpture, caked with plaster from head to toe. And contrary to advance publicity, he was in no better shape upon his return than he was at his departure. He was, in fact, dead as a boot.

But, reader, do not let this fact escape you: it was him all right. Stretched out in the pantry of the Zillers' roadside zoo was none other than the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Prince of Peace, the Good Shepherd, the Blessed Saviour, the Master, the Messiah, the Light of the World, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, the scandal of history.

"It has recently come to my attention,” said Plucky Purcell, “that Charles IV (Charles the Bland) once said that life is a pickle factory. I cannot accept that, as I find it impossible to determine whether life is sweet or sour."

“Perhaps,” said Amanda, purring as Purcell nibbled her tattoos, “you would prefer the words of Ba Ba of Bow Wow who claims that life is a fortune cookie in which someone forgot to put the fortune.”

And that, reader, pity me, is what I returned to. First off, there was Jesus Christ, the most vertical figure in history, lying (quite horizontal) in the pantry of our roadside attraction. That is, his mummified corpse was lying there, but in the case of Jesus as in the case of no other historical figure, coming upon him dead was even more extraordinary than coming upon him breathing. (What an electric heater perched on the rim of the Bathtub of the World that dead Jesus was!) Secondly, and some readers will find it shocking that I could list this second event in such easy proximity to the first, as if the second were of only slightly less magnitude than the first—secondly, there was Amanda and Plucky in the midst of a marathon embrace, their love-red ears tuned in only to each slish and slurp, oblivious to the fanfare of slamming doors that had accompanied my return to the zoo and oblivious, too, to the blast of silent waves that emanated earth-round from that mummy in the downstairs closet, although Amanda later claimed that she had taken Purcell to bed chiefly to get his mind off the Corpse, the presence of which was shoving him toward nuthood. Speaking of madness, I confess it was a close companion to me, too, those first days back at the roadhouse (some folks might believe it visits me still), but nobody rushed me off to the sack, I'll have you know.

Here, the reader has probably noticed that the author has begun to write in the first person singular, and he may have thought, ah ha, the autobiographical first person singular is always the choice of men in trouble, whereas only those writers who are safely disengaged from their subjects may indulge in third person motifs or that most cowardly of all voices, the first person plural—the pompous and devious editorial
we
. Actually, I have slipped into first person singular on several occasions during the drafting of this report, but always I went back and corrected the oversight. You see, it had been my intention to serve up this report as a strip of lean, rare meat ungarnished by the sauces of my own personality. What has become increasingly apparent, however, is that I am irreversibly enmeshed in the events this document will henceforth describe, so even had I time to restore a third-person treatment to the preceding paragraph (and time is growing precious) it could serve no honorable purpose. It might as well be known here and now that it is I, Marx Marvelous, who is your host and narrator at this most anticipated of all encores, the second appearance of you know who.

Your host and narrator, yes indeed, and I excuse you if you are thinking that of all the persons upon this planet to whom might have fallen the chore of witnessing the Advent (or, more correctly, the prelude to the Advent, for even as I type these words the returned Christ might be revealing himself to the cameras on some strip of Florida sand where heretofore only citrus cuties in bikinis may have posed—and can the shock of world recognition be far behind?), why must it have fallen to this admittedly ambivalent boy scientist to whom the true and powerful workings of language remain a puzzle. No more than an amateur plumber can deny the deepening mess on the bathroom floor can I deny the broken pace of this manuscript, its contradictions, its vagueness, its digressions, its—oh my—its thousand and one shifts in style. As for those stylistic inconsistencies, Amanda told me once that it is the natural state of Cancerians to be easily and tellingly influenced, to let the styles of others rub off on them at will, so if the reader is zodiacally oriented (and I maintain that I am not) perhaps the disclosure that I am Cancer-born will lift me off the hook. Of course, an astrological excuse will never suffice for literary critics or professors of English, but they've no damned business with their snouts in a document like this one anyway.

At any rate, I am indeed impressionable and thus parts of my report turn out written in John Paul Ziller's idiom, parts in Plucky Purcell's idiom and parts in the idiom of the young mistress of the zoo (can you pick out those parts where each holds sway?). And there are times when everybody talks alike and that is like a smart-assed doctor of philosophy candidate at Johns Hopkins U. Oh well. I cannot apologize. Granted the literary atrocities (will I be tried and hung at some future Nuremberg for writers?) still I rejoice that it was I and not some super-journalist with eighty million words on his speedometer who drew the task of describing the apocalypse (it makes me shudder to conceive of
Another Roadside Attraction as The Day Christ Came Back
). And I am gleeful, too, that it was I who drew the task instead of a biblical scholar or instead of one of our bright young novelists, even, for although they, any one of them, might have brought to the historic task skills and insights beyond my command, I greatly fear that they would have been so thunderstruck by the presence of Our Lord, dead and plaster-soiled, that they would have neglected the girl; the girl: Amanda.

Once, a famous European dilettante visited Amanda's town. The dilettante lectured to the Davy Crockett Fine Arts and Hot Lemonade Society. It was a warm evening in early summer. Amanda's father, enormously fat in a white linen suit, took his thirteen-year-old daughter to the talk. The lecture was given in the high-school gym. Father and daughter sat in the front row.

Amanda, in a dainty pink organdy dress with a yellow sash, was perhaps the only member of the audience who did not sweat profusely on this cultural pilgrimage.

The dilettante must have noticed for the following day he called upon Amanda's father at his greenhouse and requested permission to paint the young girl's portrait. The father was honored. Amanda posed in a wicker chair, but the dilettante painted her rising from behind a cloud. The picture pleased Amanda. She agreed to go walking the fields with the dilettante to learn more of art and European culture.

The lesson, as it turned out, had a familiar ring. Amanda, girlishly thirsty for knowledge, was not certain she was learning anything new at all. All at once, however, she saw—fluttering forward without flaw along its own organic line—a most magnificent Arizona swallowtail. “All problems of art are solved,” she thought, for she had found the “line of beauty” in the bumpy line of moth flight. She sprang to her feet and chased after the butterfly while the dilettante stamped and kicked, and shouted at the insect a term which Amanda could not understand, although knowing the dilettante she was certain it was a phrase of a scholarly nature. In fact, years passed before Amanda learned that “coitus interruptus” was not the scientific name for the swallowtail butterfly.

In the evenings, after the zoo had closed, Amanda liked to sit beside the slough and listen to the frogs. Listening to the frogs was like turning the pages of an expensive coffeetable book on Moorish architecture. Each time she turned a page she was met by another mosaic of stupefying density.

“To hear you tell it,” said one of her friends, “you'd think the frogs invented algebra.”

“Well,” said Amanda, turning the loaded pages, “a pollywog is more than a monowog.”

Amanda always brushed her teeth with crushed strawberries. The strawberries pulp whitened her teeth and pinkened her gums.

When death finally sucks her down the drain, as it must suck everyone, Amanda will leave an iridescent ring around the tub.

There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a “discovery."

The “discovery” of the body of Jesus Christ is also a story of plunder. By all rights, it is Plucky Purcell's story and I wish that he were here to tell it. There is no way that I can articulate that little episode and make it sound credible, the way I could make, say, the discovery of the fourth-demensional spin of electrons sound credible, for the mind that directs my typing fingers, nurtured as it was in the safe, sane laboratories of Johns Hopkins University, is not suited to describing quirks in what I have been taught is a rational world. I damn such quirks and wish them the bad luck I wish yogis and astrologers and others who claim to see things in the sky that I and my telescope cannot. In Purcell's mind, on the other hand, reality rushes by like a wild white river, while quirks, like crocodiles or iguanas, sun themselves in grotesque comfort on the shores. Unfortunately, the Pluck penned no letters concerning his discovery (there just wasn't time for that) from which I might quote, and at the moment he is rather occupied with eluding the dragnets of CIA and FBI, not to mention playing his role in whatever worthy plan the magician might have conceived for the Corpse. So, I myself will assume the responsibility of relating how Jesus was found and—dammit, folks, this time I really mean it—I will do it as quickly and simply as possible. Listen.

As most of you recall, there was a fairly severe geological disturbance in Italy on September 27 of this year. The volcano Vesuvius erupted, killing livestock in its immediate vicinity and causing widespread damage to crops. A small tidal wave wrecked boats in the Neopolitan area. And twenty-five or thirty tremors, most of them mild, were felt up and down the Italian boot. The most severe of the earthquakes, although in terms of death and destruction it could hardly be called a catastrophe, was centered in Vatican City. Surely you remember. Windows were smashed, the facades of some buildings were cracked and in Saint Peter's Square a small section of pavement buckled. On the whole, however, damage was light—above ground. But beneath the Vatican proper, the catacombs took a beating. Vast sections of them were harmed. That much you learned from your newspaper and your TV. There was quite a fuss about it on September 28, remember, but journalism is as fickle as a young actress and by the twenty-ninth it was a story the large papers carried deep in their rear sections and the small papers carried not at all. Who, after all, can sustain interest in damaged catacombs in times like these?

There were a dozen injuries in the Vatican tremor, but no deaths, and the only phase of it that provoked conversation around breakfast tables and water coolers in America was the disclosure that its unruly vibrations had bounced His Holiness out of bed. If the papal posterior was bruised in the bouncing the Vatican did not share with the public that intimacy, and thus the incident quickly slipped beneath the sea of reportable events that lap each evening at the feet of the six o'clock news. The caved-in tunnels, the broken art and artifacts, were subjects which only the Vatican paper and some Catholic magazines examined in any great detail. The primary effects of the Vatican quake could hardly, to repeat myself, be called a catastrophe. The secondary effects were something else again. The world has not yet been informed of those secondary effects.