Another Roadside Attraction (11 page)

Ziller put his drum back upon its stand. “Well,” he said eventually, “your proposal is certainly a reasonable alternative. Let's sleep on it, as they say.” He snuggled down in the covers as Amanda pattered into her sanctuary to blow out the candle. He smiled his wily Bushman smile. “It might be nice being the Nearly Extinct San Francisco Garter Snake Capital of the World,” he said.

The postcard was there waiting, marking time, when the Zillers got back from the mountains. With things shaping up at the cafe—Mom's Little Dixie had been transformed inside and out—they were free to invest a cloudy morning in the pursuit of edible and/or visually pleasing fungi. So, they had driven up the river road, singing ancient prehistoric songs of their own invention in order to attract the mushrooms, and on the lower slopes of Mt. Baker, still singing, filled two knapsacks with chanterelles. Driving home, they were tired and let the river do the singing.

The moment they returned, Amanda hurried into the kitchen and poured the mushrooms into the sink: it would take a while to scrub off the dirt and fir needles, and the whole family was awash with hunger. John Paul tarried behind to look in the mailbox.

The postcard was waiting, marking time. It was an old postcard, luridly colored, depicting—in a clumsy, inexact, “touched-up” photographic rendering—a sawmill of certain regional fame. Blurry little workmen in bib overalls had dropped their axes and were lined up on a prize log beside the steaming donkey. They were combed and smiling (we assume) for an insistent cameraman who would reproduce them no larger than gnats. It was a scruffy dog-piss postcard off the postcard rack of broken dreams. The postmark, which could have been Throbbing Wallet, Idaho, or Nouveau Rat's Breath, Minn., was, in fact, Aberdeen, Wash.; the card was addressed to John Paul Ziller:

Dear Ziller,

Guess I missed the circus but I've had a show of my own. Oh boy. What has happened to me the past couple of weeks is so weird even a far-out cat like you wouldn't believe it. So guess I won't bother to go into detail. Pray for me. Love to yr. old lady.

Scoobie doo,

PP.

The chanterelle mushroom is a ruffled yellow trumpet. Raw, it smells like apricots. Fried in batter, it smells like breaded kidney but tastes like eggs poached in wood-smoke and wine and has the consistency of fowl. Mon Cul preferred them raw. Baby Thor wouldn't eat them at all. Amanda and John Paul, whose ecstatic appetites underscored their animal unanimity with the ways of the world, ate them fried in batter and ate them well.

“Oh my,” said John Paul, rubbing his belly.

“Oh my
my
,” said Amanda, rubbing hers.

They stretched out on some cushions and had a pipe of hash. For the first time in that pregnancy, Amanda felt motion in her womb. It wasn't the centrally located, coherent movement that a small animal would make were it to turn in its burrow, but a many-places-at-once stirring such as a flight of swallows would make in torpid air.

“What are you smiling at?” asked John Paul.

“The mushrooms have startled the swallows,” she said.

Then, after a languid interlude during which Thor and Mon Cul feel asleep, Amanda asked, “What do you make of Plucky's postcard?”

“It will have to do.”

“Well, at least he's alive.”

“We can assume that.”

“And he isn't locked up.”

“Presumably, although there's little in his message to warrant such a presumption.”

“When do you suppose we'll hear more from him?” Amanda was sliding into a dream as lurid as the tones of Purcell's card.

“I haven't a notion. It could be quite a long time.” It wasn't. A letter arrived the following day.

The magician was at work on his magical things. Sprawled upon a pallet of skins, he attended to his maps, charting a course with feathers and inks and wooden calipers. Unlike poor Rand McNally, Ziller was not obliged to limit his cartograms to representations of the earth's familiar surface; no, his maps could and did indulge in languorous luxuriation, in psycho-cosmic ornament that may or may not be helpful to motorists seeking the most convenient route from there to here. If, with appropriate geographical symbols, they indicated the presence of mountain ranges, forests and bodies of water, they seemed also to indicate psychological nuances, regional flavors, genito-urinary reactions and extrasensory phenomena—those “other dimensions” of voyage so well known to the aware traveler. His charts had the look of embellished musical compositions. Perhaps they were. (The London Philharmonic Orchestra will now perform
Map of the Lower Congo
by John Paul Ziller; scale, three-quarters of an inch to the mile.)

Amanda knocked four times before getting his attention. He received her at his sanctuary door. “A letter,” she announced, holding it aloft. “A pudgy one. It's postmarked Humptulips, Washington. They've got to be kidding. Do you think it could be from Purcell?”

“What other penman among our acquaintances offends the eye with such nasty scrawls?” asked Ziller, checking the cacography that rampaged across the envelope. They took the missive into the living room and slit it open with an ivory blade:

Dear Ziller (and yummy bride),

Hello. I decided to give you the details after all. I've got to tell somebody and there's no cat I trust more than you (blush). Trust not only to keep my secret but to take it in stride. Dig this:

I am now a monk! That is, I am living in a monastery where the inmates believe me to be one of their own order. Don't laugh, you bastard. This is serious.

This is no ordinary bunch of monks. Oh no. Far from it. They are “Christian,” all right, Roman Catholics. But—dig this—they are spies! And killers! Am I getting through to you? Look. I have unwittingly infiltrated a secret order of militant Catholic monks that serves the Vatican as a combination CIA and Green Beret unit.

No, I haven't freaked out. I'm not high on anything. I'm laying it on you straight, baby; the truth if ever I told it, and may Tijuana donkeys eat the man who says that Purcell lies. My desk at the moment is a stump in the woods (which is why my handwriting is more grotesque than usual), and if they should catch me corresponding with you it would be murder in the most awful literal sense of that word.

Guess I'd better start from the beginning, pardon my originality, and tell you how this all came about. It happened so unexpectedly that I've hardly been able to assimilate it myself. The last weekend in September it was, just about a month ago. The circus was performing in Seattle that weekend (I read about the hassle with the city council and the cops, by the way; what an up-tight town that Seattle must be) and I was planning to scoot up to see you guys. The bus developed a bad cough on Friday morning, however, and I admitted it to the VW clinic in Aberdeen; I suspect you are right, Ziller, about the sausage being the ultimate triumph of Germanic technology—God knows I've never had the problems with a weenie that I've had with that bus.

Anyway, I was in a mood to rationalize. “It's just as well,” I said to myself. “I'll wait and catch the show in Bellingham at the final performance. Probably be a better party.” But there I was, stuck at the bunkhouse some ten miles northwest of town, nothing to read but some old Zane Grey paperbacks and not so much as a faint sniff of snatch (pardon me, Amanda, if you are looking on) in the air. So, on Saturday morning I decide to take a sort of busman's holiday. As if I don't spend enough time in the woods, I decide to hike up a ways into the Olympics, camp overnight, look at the moon, spot some bear or elk, maybe find a bee tree and steal some honey. It's different being alone in the woods, no power saw giving the sky a toothache, no dumb-assed loggers constantly telling me how many miles their Mustangs get to the gallon of gas.

I hitched a ride to Humptulips—there's really such a place! Ziller, what quaint names you Washingtonians bestow upon your villages. Humptulips reminded me that I've always been crazy to do a Dutch girl. You know: well-scrubbed, blonde bangs, china blue eyes, apple cheeks, little cunt that smells like a gouda cheese. She'd have nothing on but wooden shoes and a crushed tulip behind her ear. No kidding. I get an erection every time I pass a gouda cheese in the supermarket. But I digress, and believe me, there's precious little time for digression.

From Humptulips I follow a silver-green finger of valley, hiking eastward toward the Wynoochee River. Eventually the valley peters out and I'm on a deep-rutted logging road, the terrain getting a bit steep and the timber tall and thick and murmuring to me in six dialects of Gothic. It's midafternoon and I haven't gone too far, maybe nine or ten miles from good old Humptuplips, when I spot some mushrooms in the woods to my left. Now I have nibbled the sacred mushroom of Mexico (
that
was a snack I'll be a long time forgetting) and I've sucked up my share of buttons with steak, but I am no mycophile and I wouldn't know an
Agaricus
from an asparagus. But these toadstools fascinate me nonetheless; they look like the kind that little men with green hats sit around on—so, brimming with botanical curiosity, I drop down on my knees for a closer look. Well, have you ever seen a mushroom with five fingers? O, nature is rich and there are strange flora and fauna a-riding on this spaceship of ours. But one of those fingers has a gold ring on it, and even Mother Nature doesn't pull stunts like that.

If you guessed that I had found a human hand you win a Girl Scout cookie. If you guessed that that hand was connected to an arm which in turn was attached to a body, you win a Girl Scout (with a merit badge for dialectics). And if you guessed that that body was dead, congratulations, you win all the Girl Scouts west of the Mississippi. Old Plucky's luck: out for a weekend of contemplation in the deep woods and he finds a corpse in a mushroom patch.

It was a fresh corpse, too. Still warm. There were no signs of violence on it or about it, so I wasn't particularly scared. The cadaver was male, dressed in a wool plaid shirt and khaki hunter's trousers, boots, pair of powerful binoculars hanging about the neck. First thing I do is check for identification. He's not carrying a wallet—has he been robbed, I wonder, and experience a little ding of fear for if he has the culprit could not be far away. But no, he has a wad of bread in his pants pocket, about $300. I'm breathing easier. Then I see a bulge under his shirt and investigating I find some official-looking papers, folded and sealed. Typed on the outside of the packet is the name 'Brother Dallas, F. S.' and that's all, no address. I don't break the seal.

About that time I notice a satchel, a brown leather valise, lying in the moss about four feet from the body. It's locked, but Dead Man has the key in his pocket and in a wink I've got it open. The contents don't exactly set my thyroid to pumping. Men's toilet articles, underwear, dark socks, pair of nondescript black shoes that could have shod any small-time insurance salesman in America. There is a road map of Washington-Oregon and a Catholic prayer book. Aside from that, just one more item: a long, heavy, silken robe as black as blood.

Still no identification. What to do? He is a big cat and I am not about to lug him back to Humptulips. Best thing, I decide, is to skip on back alone and notify the town marshal or the state patrol, although the idea of getting involved with the pigs doesn't have me tittering with delight. I reshoulder my pack and am in the process of splitting when what to my wondering eyes doth appear but a path. It's about thirty feet from me, leading off from the logging road into the woods, and it not only is a well-worn path, it is lined with stones. It has an air of permanence and use, and on a hunch supported by my reluctance to hike to Humptulips for a chat with the heat, I take it. Now, I'm only a short way up that trail when it occurs to me that I am carrying Dead Man's satchel, but, what the hell, I can see no harm in it and that path is luring me on like it's a siren song and I'm the seven seas' horniest sailor.

In a flash—and baby, it
was
a flash—I'm into a huge clearing, and squatting in the center of said clearing, just as cool and calm as Cleopatra on the royal pot, is a fort! Well, anyway it looks like a fort. It's made of logs, with a ten-foot-tall fence of sharpened poles surrounding it, and if the gates had suddenly flung open and John Wayne had led the 9th Regimental U.S. Cavalry out in a thundering charge, I scarcely would have blinked. But Col. John is in Beverly Hills voting the Conservative ticket and the gates are formidably shut and by this time I see a sign that reads “Wildcat Creek Monastery, Catholic Society of the Felicitator, Sorry No Visitors."

Let me set it straight for you. This monastery-fort is no more than a couple football fields from the logging road, and less than two and a half football fields from where Dead Man is lying, all tuckered out. My steel-trap mind is snapping on connections. Brother Dallas. Black robe. Monastery. Dead Man is affiliated with the monastery. Eureka! I don't have to walk to Humptulips. Here's the logical place to report the cadaver. I'm wondering if they have a lost-and-found department. Anybody here misplace a slightly used monk?

For about five minutes I've been standing at the edge of the clearing, staring at that monastery which is silent except for some low, steady rumbling inside, like that monastery is the world's biggest all-log rustic refrigerator. When suddenly—yipes!—there's a hand on my shoulder, a very much alive hand, a hard hand, and I find myself in between two enormous gentlemen who are standing very close to me but withholding any outward signs of affection: that handhold is no caress. I react instinctively (for experience has taught me 'tis best) and backswing my left arm fast in an arc, a lovely Yokohama chop that knocks the seeds out of the recipient's Adam's apple. As he bends in gurgling pain, I follow through with a rabbit chop to the back of the neck and—thud!—he topples. I whirl to the man on my right, only I don't swing at him because he's holding a cocked .38 Special and it's pointing impolitely at my navel.

For the first time, I notice that the men—the one on the ground and the one putting my vital organs in jeopardy—are attired in blood-black robes. Robes? I glance at my feet for in my impetuous act of self-defense I had hurled Dead Man's satchel to the ground and his robe has spilled out and is curled there in the ferns like the small intestine of a dragon. The gunman stares at the robe, also, and he looks at his buddy whom karate has cut down in his prime, and he says to me in a low chilly voice like he was that log refrigerator talking, “I suppose you are Brother Dallas? Why in Mary's name didn't you identify yourself?"