Another Roadside Attraction (38 page)

My belly did two rolls and a spin. A ripple of notes twisted and squirted up my digestive tract as if my digestive tract were a horn and that black guy, that Roland Kirk, was on the other end. I squeezed myself around the middle and choked off Roland Kirk in mid-solo. If I don't eat soon there's going to be trouble with the musicians union, I thought.

“Remember Sister Elizabeth and Sister Hillary?” I asked Purcell. “They said marriage vows to Christ. How do you think this unresurrected Jesus is going to affect them? How's it going to affect the other brave nuns and priests you met during your year with the Church? Is death and fear what they deserve, Plucky? What about your parents and your brother and your sisters, they're good Episcopalians, aren't they? Do they deserve to suddenly have their most vital beliefs kicked in? What about my parents, my momma and daddy? They're fine people, they've always done the best they could for me and everyone else they knew. They're kind and generous,
feeling
human beings. Religion is all my mother has in this world. Because she has given herself heart and soul to a doctrine that's largely myth, does that mean we have the right to destroy that doctrine for her? After all, that doctrine includes principles of the highest ethical degree. She's lived a better life because of her Christian standards, despite the falseness of their accompanying lore. What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today. My code of ethics—and yours, too, if you'll admit it—grew directly out of Christianity. Don't we owe it anything? Do we have the right to pollute our wellspring of morality? Do we have the right to destroy my mother? A million other mothers?

Plucky could not answer right away. He was silent and brooding. Even his stomach hushed. Plucky's mood was a boardinghouse the night the cook fixed liver and onions; it was five below outdoors and the TV was on the blink. Eventually, he said, “I've got nothing against Jesus. It wasn't his fault that all this killing and cheating has been done in his name. He was one of the greatest dudes who ever was. You know what I dig about him? He lived what he preached. He taught by example. He went all the way and there was no compromise and no hypocrisy. And he not only was against authority, he was against private property, too. Anybody who opposes authority and property is sweet in my heart. Jesus? Hell, I
love
the cat.”

“Yes, Pluck,” I said, “we know that. We realize it isn't Christ or his original teachings that have you riled.”

“No, it isn't. It's what he's come to stand for that pisses me. It's the perversions and the tyranny and the lies. What I can't understand about you, Marvelous, is how you can defend the lies just because some good has come out of 'em. And you're supposed to be a scientist. I thought scientists insited on facts—regardless of the consequences.”

It was my turn to brood. Before I could articulate a reply, Purcell spoke again.

“You said yourself that the world's in a mess and we're running out of options. We have radical problems and radical problems demand radical solutions. Our leaders aren't gonna solve our problems, that's obvious. It was leaders, the good ones right along with the bad, who got us into this mess to begin with. And not one of 'em has vision enough or guts enough to push a program radical enough to get us out of the mess. That's why my plan for exposing the Corpse seems so important. It's radical as all hell, and it's gonna hurt a lot of technically innocent people and all that, but it's the
one
solution that might work. It could jolt society so hard that it'd be forced to try a whole new approach to life. It could free us from our authorities and free us from our superstitions that keep us in the Dark Ages even though our technology is putting us on the moon. To me, it's the only way out. I honestly don't think it was an accident that I found the Corpse. I'm starting to think that I was
supposed
to find it, that it's part of a divine plan to rescue the human race. And if some of the species has to be destroyed in order to save the species as a whole, well, that's the way evolution has always worked. But if you all don't want to help me with my plan, if you're afraid to accept the responsibility, if you just wanna stick the Corpse in the ground and forget about it . . .”

“I've never intimated that I wanted to stick the Corpse in the ground,” I objected.

“That's right. You don't know
what
you want to do with it.”

“Yes, I do. I do now. You've given me an idea. I have a plan by which we may be able to use the Corpse to improve human conditions without ripping the entire social fabric to shreds in the process.”

Purcell looked skeptical. “What's that?” he asked.

“Simply this. We reveal the Corpse only to certain key figures in world government. We let the Pope know we have it, if he doesn't know already. We let the President of the U.S. know, and a few other powerful authorities. And we make sure that they are cognizant of the full consequences of the Corpse becoming public knowledge. Right? Then we make demands. We demand of the Pope, for example, that he rescind the papal encyclical banning artificial contraception. That would go a long way toward solving the population problem. We demand of the President that he withdraw all U.S. troops from foreign soil, and that he scrap provocative defense systems. And we demand of the Pope, again, that he issue an encyclical excommunicating any individual who serves in the armed forces of any nation. That would help to take care of the war and aggression problem. We demand Congress shut down Detroit until it agrees to produce electric automobiles exclusively. Think of how that would help the pollution and ecology problem. Are you getting the picture? We demand that the authorities themselves overhaul society and start making it healthier and happier. Or else. Or else we make public the mortality of Jesus and break up the ball game.”

Plucky roared. “Blackmail! Marvelous, you sneaky bastard, you're a blackmailer. Aren't you ashamed? I'm surprised at you, I really am. You're suggesting that we blackmail the President and the Pope.” Purcell shook from the laughter the way a rosebush would shake beneath a dodo seduction. The pantry was draped in extinct feathers. “It might work. I don't know. We'd have to devise a foolproof scheme so that they couldn't just kill us and end the threat. We'd have to sit down like we were Leonardo da Vinci inventing the parachute and polish every little detail and make it fool-proof. It'd be one bodacious bitch of a caper to pull off—but it might work. At least we should think about it.” He slapped his thigh. The dodos were at it again.

The clock struck (if you could call it that) 6:50. We had been cooped up in the pantry for ten hours. Baby Thor was fretting for attention. Mon Cul was complaining about the length of his shift (in the wilds a baboon sentry is relieved after five hours). I was hungry, tired and damn near suffocated by cigar smoke. Purcell and I had at last reached an area of relative agreement. It seemed the appropriate moment to adjourn the meeting, and I was about to do so when Amanda motioned that she wished to speak. “By all means,” I said, for she had said little that day and I was anxious for her opinions.

“I was on a butterfly hike through Mexico,” began Amanda, “when I was offered a ride by a young American and his elderly grandmother. The young man taught school in Ohio. He lived with his grandmother who was over eighty. He wanted to travel in Mexico during summer vacation, but there was no one to look after Granny. Besides, the school-teacher earned a small salary. The grandmother had all the money. So he took her along.

“For several days I rode with them. It was extremely hot. One day about noon, the grandmother had a stroke and died. We were in the desert, miles from any settlement. What to do? Well, we put the grandmother in my sleeping bag and zipped it up all around. Then we tied her to the top of the car. On we drove. Followed by vultures.

“Toward dusk we came to a fair-sized town. Our throats were parched, so we stopped at a cantina for cold beer. When we came outside, we found that the car had been stolen. Sleeping bag, grandmother and all.

“The schoolteacher and I stayed in the town for a week. We bribed the police daily. But our possessions were never recovered. Even today, there is a missing Ohio schoolteacher's car somewhere in Mexico. A missing sleeping bag. A missing grandmother. Perhaps she is still tied on the top of the car.”

“That's an interesting story,” I admitted, “but I fail to see how it relates to—”

“I haven't finished. The schoolteacher and I became lovers. We rented an adobe house with the grandmother's money and lived like Mexicans. Every morning I got up and made tortillas. While I worked, the schoolteacher sat in the shade in his undershorts and read aloud to me from books. I did not care for his taste in literature, which ran toward the classical and the morbid, but it made him happy to read to me so I did not object.

“One morning he read me a story by a pessimistic Russian. It was about a man who wished to test the intelligence of religious believers, so he began to practice asceticism and to utter ersatz profundities. He quickly attracted thousands of disciples to whom he preached his made-up doctrines. They proclaimed him a saint. Then one day, to show his followers how easily they'd been duped, he announced that all he had taught them was nonsense. Unable to live without their belief, they stoned him to death and went right on believing.”

Amanda got up to leave.

“I get the point,” I said.

“I get it, too,” said Plucky Purcell.

Had our negotiations been in vain?

Would society regard the Corpse as a hoax?

Would Jesus fail to save mankind in death as he had in life?

Would we get our butts shot off?

Where could we go from here?

Darkness had fallen. The duck hunters had long since left the waterways. Green-scented clouds obscured the moon.

I followed Amanda upstairs to watch her give Thor his bath. It excited me when she scrubbed his private parts.

Despite Amanda's intimation that our hopes for the Corpse were futile and our fears for it without foundation, I believed that the first pantry session had been beneficial. It had put the situation into frontal perspective, had established guidelines for further discussion and had disentangled some of the strands. That Plucky and I had done 99 per cent of the talking caused me neither surprise nor dismay. The Zillers had been engaged on their own levels of selfhood, levels perhaps more absolute than ours. In time, they would speak. Or act. I remained convinced of their special wisdom, and I was confident that they would make a substantial contribution to whatever solution was reached concerning the mummy. Deadline was still two days away. I was prepared to wait.

Baby Thor giggled when Amanda soaped his balls. His tiny penis grew erect in her slippery hands. “Jesus was nailed to the cross,” said Amanda. She said it matter-of-factly.

“That's how the story goes,” I said. “So what?”

“The cross is a tree, and the tree is a phallus. There's something in that, Marx.” She examined Thor's member as if it were a crucifix. I imagined it on a chain about her neck. (Don't flinch, Thor, I was only kidding.)

“If there's something in it, it's too obscure for me. Can you explain?”

“Jesus was a Jew. Judaism was a father religion. Christianity also grew into a father religion. But the
old
religion was a mother religion. We've had two thousand years of penis power.”

“Is that bad?”

“It isn't a question of bad or good. It never is. But when the phallus is separated from the womb, when the father is separated from the mother, when culture is separated from nature, when the spirit is separated from the flesh . . . then life is out of balance and the people become frustrated and violent.”

“Well, the past two thousand years have been frustrated and violent, all right. What you're saying is that Jesus came into a naturally balanced world and threw it out of line.”

“All I'm saying is, tomorrow when you are alone thinking about Jesus, open your window. Don't sit there in your stuffy room, all full of books and no air. Open your windows to the fir needles and the ducks and the fields and the river. That way your approach will be more unified and your conclusions more exact.”

Her remarks sounded, on the surface of them, straight-forward enough, yet there was something elusive about them, a meaning or pretended meaning which my mind's fist could not close around. I suspected the meaning had as much to do with Amanda as with Christ. However, she would say no more and I'd learned not to pump her, so I thanked her and made my way to my quarters.

In the cool black of the grove I stood and stretched. It had been a long day. A day like no other. And it was just the beginning.

Upstairs in the Zillers' bedroom, lights went on. I found myself smiling. “Soon you'll show me your secrets,” I said to the figures silhouetted against the drapes. “The Corpse will see to that.”

Then I slipped into the garage, where I had stashed four raw weenies and a pint of beet juice.

John Paul Ziller is six and a half feet tall and wears a bone in his nose. He is seldom mistaken for anyone else. The agents can't understand why he has not been nabbed. Neither can I. For the law enforcers have made fine advances in their art. Technology has served them as dutifully as it has served industry. With laboratories, computers, chemical formulae, vast electronic communications networks, college-trained triggermen and millions of informers at its disposal, should law enforcement fail to locate and apprehend a jungle-bred magician, a notorious athlete-outlaw, a ninety-pound baboon and the body of Christ—all traveling together in one convenient package—then it must reconcile itself to a failure of the magnitude of the collapse of Ford or the inability of Standard Oil to turn a profit.

With all my meat and blood and breath, I am rooting for the success of the magician's trick. But the noise of hope is not a racket in my heart.

Meanwhile, Amanda goes about her business. Which is? Which is, if I am honest, what this report is all about. Which is, at the moment, the perfection of the techniques of trance. She falls effortlessly into the trance state now, turning on the “voices” with no more difficulty than turning on the eleven o'clock news. But she always gets the same advice: “Expect a letter.”