Another Roadside Attraction (35 page)

Next, Amanda came unfrozen. She rushed agilely about the kitchen blowing out candles. The roadhouse fell into blackness. Trembling, I stood and braced myself, for what I did not know.

The scent of peril was so thick in the zoo that it snatched Mon Cul from his sleep. However, the baboon contributed no foolishness. Instinctively wise in the ways of the hunted, he merely growled very low in his throat and readied himself for fight or flight without betraying his whereabouts. In the front room, we could hear the garter snakes stirring in their pen. Perhaps the fleas, too, sensed danger, but, of course, we had no way of gauging their reaction.

Baby Thor slept peacefully. In the dark, I could make out Amanda standing over him as a tigress stands over a threatened cub. Something cold had invaded the roadhouse, like a wave unbound by ocean. We entertained our separate fears and listened to the urgent roar of blood.

Knock! Knock! Knock!

On our psyches if not on the door, it left the imprint of the gestapo glove.

When at last Ziller flung the door open, my heart fell like one of those sets of false teeth that periodically are dropped off the Golden Gate Bridge. The figure silhouetted in the doorway was in uniform. Why did I find the attire of our visitor less than assuring? Hadn't I been taught that the policeman was my friend? At least there was only one of them, as far as I could tell. Would he go for his gun—or what?

“Special delivery for Ziller. Mr. and Mrs. Ziller.”

John Paul accepted the letter and returned to the kitchen far less hastily than he had left it. Amanda switched on the lights. To hell with candles.

“Aren't we a pretty pack of paranoiacs?” said Purcell. I didn't share his embarrassment. Considering what we had to hide, I didn't find our shyness a bit misplaced.

We heard the mailman drive away. Then, as Plucky and I finished off the wine straight from the bottle, John Paul used his dagger to slice the envelope. It bore a blue stamp with a picture of a hooded cobra on it and a postmark that read New Delhi, India. Due to the jitters of the moment, I neglected to obtain a copy of the letter or to successfully memorize its contents. However, if the reader will trust me, I am certain that I can accurately summarize the message.

The author of the letter was a young woman serving with the Peace Corps in India. She was writing on behalf of Nearly Normal Jimmy. Jimmy could not attend to the correspondence personally, as he was otherwise occupied. He sent his love.

Disappointment, it seems, had marred Nearly Normal's sojourn among the Tibetan refugees in New Delhi. He had failed to receive an audience with the Dalai Lama, who had taken to reading
Time
magazine and
Reader's Digest
and had publicly expressed doubts concerning his own divinity. The god-king drove around in a Nash Rambler and talked about a trip to Europe or America to learn more of the West. In the papers, he spoke of investing his followers' funds in Swiss securities. Among his aides at Tibet House, the conversation was not of
tumo
or
Myanghdas
or the coil of birth and death or the Thousand-spoked Wheel of the Good Word of Buddha, but of politics, economics and international diplomacy. It appeared that a whole new sphere of interest had opened up for the theocrats. “They've discovered the Mickey Mouse
bardo
,” Jimmy complained bitterly. “Contrary to the old saw, you cannot only take the lama out of Tibet, you can also take Tibet out of the lama.”

So, on October 2, a disillusioned and desperate Nearly Normal Jimmy did what no white man had done in two decades, and few ever. He crashed across the most forbidden frontier on Earth.

Jimmy, O Jimmy! Son of Arizona's most successful insurance salesman. Born with a silver policy in his mouth. Honor student, class president and voted “most likely.” Admitted to U. of Arizona at age sixteen on full scholarship. Precocious wizardling of finance. Wall Street gritting its paper teeth in anticipation of his onslaught. Weekend house guest of the Goldwater clan. Despite bulldog nose and acute myopia, Southwest debutante's delight. Jimmy. Who, on his palomino with expensive saddle, followed Amanda's motorcycle up the Bow Wow trail—and learned a different arithmetic. Jimmy, Jimmy.

The Peace Corps girl had watched him go. Crossing the prohibited mountains by the shine of midnight moon. Darting like a jack rabbit through the Himalayan ice, cowboy boots kicking up stones and churning snow, footsteps flying in cataract against the crusted banks of the river bed, glasses fogged, giggling madly, long red hair flapping in the thin air at the rooftop of the planet. Jimmy! Defying Communist machine-gunners and forty centuries of esoteria, arcane fancies dancing in his head, he sprinted furiously toward the fabled holy city of Lhasa . . . clutching under arm as if it were the jewel in the lotus, a rattling tin canister containing four reels of
Tarzan's Triumph
. Nearly Normal Jimmy. Barrel-assing toward Buddhahood.
Om mani padme hum
. Yippie!

We awoke the next morning to the sound of distant guns. Perhaps more than one of us imagined, as we toppled out of dreams, that the armies of the Vatican were advancing across the pea fields. For sure,
I
leaped to the window and searched the horizon for gaudy standards, for frenzied Latin temperaments, for canteen wagons crammed with pasta and peppercorns.

Of course, it was merely the opening of the duck season that had aroused us. Hunters' skiffs plied the river and the sloughs. Men and boys under red hats tramped the marsh-meadows and the low dikes that delineate the cattail-and-sedge-lined pockets of backwater. From my window, the red hats looked like polkadots that had escaped from a bandanna and run to the marshes in an effort to elude the bloodhounds. There was not a mallard in sight.

Unencumbered by breakfast, the four of us gathered in the pantry. Thor had been fed and left to play in the kitchen. The toy he selected that morning was a wooden duck. I suggest that we consider it a coincidence. Mon Cul had been assigned to guard duty outside the pantry door. As scouts and sentries, baboons are reputedly better than Indians, although a cowboy-and-baboon movie is too much for us to expect from television.

The Corpse lay on the butcher's table right where we had left it. It looked like something that had been dragged out of the storeroom in an Egyptian flophouse. Nevertheless, it had a presence. Nothing you could offer me, not even two weeks with Amanda in a honeymoon resort, could persuade me to say that it had an “aura.” Aura schmaura. But it had
something
. An intensity of being that went beyond psychological suggestion or wishful thinking. If the Christ in life had had, as the cliché goes, “leadership written all over his face,” then death had been a bum eraser.

John Paul Ziller sat at the head of the Corpse. Tall, thin, dark, gaunt and bushy. He wore low on his hips a sun-brilliant white loincloth, from the waistband of which protruded a dagger and a flute. His long neck was ringed by a collar of monkey fur, and teeth that some witch-dentist had plucked from a reptile.

At the feet of Our Lord, closest to the exit, sat Plucky Purcell. Husky, handsome, Aryan, forehead broad and manly beneath tight curly hair that was receding at a gallop. An occasional grin upset his fine features like linoleum yanked from under the feet of an emperor. He was dressed in logger's pants and a faded sweatshirt that bore the legend “Tijuana Jail.”

On the right hand of Jesus was Amanda. Fat-cheeked, pouty-mouthed, paganized, poised, vulnerable and regal, the full sweet funk of womanhood rising like steam from her open pores. Her green eyes shone like Renaissance icons. She wore a pound of jewelry, a peasant blouse, and a skirt of many colors in the lap of which she folded her hands as might a pious nun.

Yours truly sat at the left side of Christ. I had previously recommended that we approach the problem of him much as the problem might be approached in a think tank, and since no one else had a better plan, we concurred. As I was the only person here familiar with a think tank's operation, I was elected to officiate at the proceedings. Fair enough.

“To begin with,” I said, facing my three friends and the mummy from Rome, “to begin with, Plucky has assured me that we have a minimum of three days to attack our problem. Considering the nature of the problem, that is far from adequate time, but we must do with what we have. Ahem. Today, I thought we could engage in some elementary group discussion about the, eh, matter, while tomorrow each of us will remain alone to read and ponder and to think out a solution as best he can. The third day, we shall meet together here in the pantry again for deep and conclusive discussion. At the end of the third day—that will be Sunday night—we must come to a final decision as to what is to be done about the . . . Corpse.” (Note: from that time on we seldom referred to our guest other than as “the Corpse.") “Is everyone agreed?”

Ziller nodded inscrutably, Amanda nodded coyly and Purcell said, “That's okay by me, man. Let's get into it.”

“Well, then. I suppose the logical point of departure is to ask ourselves if our Corpse is really whom we suspect it is. Could such a thing be possible?”

“You know how I feel about it,” said Plucky. “Even if your radiocarbon dating report comes back that the dude died in 1918, I'll still believe he's who I believe he is and not the Unknown Soldier Goes Italian.”

Amanda giggled. “Why couldn't it be possible?” she asked.

“While I was in Mount Vernon yesterday, I picked up a copy of
Jesus
by Charles Guignebert at the public library. Let me read you this passage.”

“My goodness, Marx,” exclaimed Amanda.

“What?”

“I don't know. I mean you're just so
efficient
.”

Not knowing if she was complimenting me or putting me down, I opened the hefty book and commenced to read aloud: “'There are many serious contradictions in the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It is evident that the one statement that they have in common—
the tomb in which Jesus was placed the night of his death was found empty the next morning
—has been amplified by various (after the fact) details intended to explain how it took place, and which, because they vary so greatly in the different accounts, are all suspect. Suspect at the least of not corresponding to any memory and of arising from apologetic considerations.'

“Let me read another short passage: 'Much ingenuity has been wasted in an attempt to establish the probability of the removal of the body either by the Jews who had commanded the crucifixion; or by Joseph of Arimathaea, the rich believer who, having provisionally deposited the body in the tomb near Calvary, would come and remove it in order to give it a final burial elsewhere; or by some of the women; or by some disciple without the knowledge of the others. The eviction of the body by the owner of the tomb has also been suggested; or that Jesus was only apparently dead, and that, having fallen into a comatose state, he might have been awakened by the chill of the tomb, escaped, and taken refuge with the Essenes sect, or elsewhere, and survived forty days or more.'”

“I'll bet the women did it,” said Amanda. “I'll bet they took him out of the tomb and cared for him and gave him a decent burial in some little garden somewhere. That's what
I
would have done.”

For the moment, I ignored her.

“Professor Guignebert goes on to personally testify—in a more pessimistic vein—that the whole story of the empty tomb was a myth. He says, 'The truth is that we do not know, and the disciples knew no better than we, where the body of Jesus had been thrown after it had been removed from the cross, probably by the executioners. It is more likely to have been cast into the
pit for the executed
than laid in a new tomb.'”

I closed the book. “So much for that. The conclusion we can draw from the scholars is that nobody really knows what happened to the body. There is no historical proof and not even any biblical agreement as to what was done with the body. So, if we don't accept the story that Jesus ascended into the heavens, either assisted by flying saucers or under his own steam—and I for one don't believe that anybody, Jesus, Buddha, Captain Marvel or anybody else, ever went skydiving in reverse—then we can entertain the idea that somebody might have snatched the body, hidden it, and later whisked it out of the country. Paul or Peter might have had reason to harbor the body, and they could have smuggled it into Rome even more easily than Plucky smuggled it out. Or some other early Christian could have taken it abroad for safekeeping any time during the forty years that elapsed between the crucifixion and the destruction of Jerusalem. In fact, that is the more likely explanation since, as the body is mummified, it probably lay for a long while in a hot, dry climate: Palestine instead of Italy. I'm not saying that is what happened, mind you, or even that it is probably. But we can rest on the knowledge that it is possible.”

Purcell squinted his eyes and rubbed his expansive brow with his fist. “Marvelous, my man, I don't want to cool your trip,
but
. . . all you've said is academic bullshit. It doesn't matter one damn bit how the Corpse got to the Vatican. Dig? All that matters is that I found it there. It might be interesting to study the background; yeah, it might be a real groovy subject to write papers on and lecture about someday. But save that for your old age, man. Right now, we've got a much hotter item on our agenda.” He tapped the Corpse on its kneecap, respectfully but gingerly. “This here is the body of Jesus Christ. I found it. We've got it. Some real shook-up folks are gonna come looking for it. What are we gonna do with it? That's the question, and everything else is academic.”

Very, very much I longed to dispute Purcell's assertions. I wanted to deny that there was more than the wispiest circumstantial evidence that our mummy had been the man celebrated as Christ. But when I touched the wrinkled victim and felt the centuries of distance between us throb with light, the margin of rational disbelief slimmed before my eyes and protest died in my throat the way sleepy-lagoon wallpaper dies in the hall of a cheap hotel.