Another Roadside Attraction (13 page)

All these thoughts are popping like corn in my brainpan, popping very rapidly, it takes only a second or two, while I'm running in place, my knees pumping but my feet experiencing no forward acceleration, on that rutty old logging road. Just a few seconds of decisions and indecisions, checks and counterchecks. And then, wham! bam! I flood into action.

First, I run to the dead man and relieve him of his packet of papers, the sealed documents mentioned in my previous letter. Then, I drag the body across the road and down a steep embankment on the opposite side. Just as Richard Brautigan finds a trout stream at the foot of every chapter of his memoirs, I find a trout stream at the foot of the embankment. Oh, I knew it was there. Earlier, as I hiked up the road, my ears had registered the kind of music that usually results when the earth is running about in a fluid condition. Hoping to keep the telltale crows away, I dump the body in the creek in a hole about four feet deep that I luckily (pluckily) find a few yards downstream. I weigh it down with stones. Oooops! Goddam it. I forgot about the three hundred bills. I have to fish that heavy cadaver out of the creek and remove the money from his pocket. Now I know what you are thinking, a pox be on you, you are thinking that Purcell claims to stand in opposition to the whole monetary system, yet he goes to quite a parcel of trouble to latch himself onto three hundred tax-free dollars. But, babies, you know that it is a federal offense to mutilate U.S. currency. And leaving a bankroll to decompose in a trout stream is tantamount to mutilation. Anyway, after the resinking of the U.S.S. Brother Dallas, I dry my hands on my jeans, puff up the hill again, find the path and follow it into the woods at a trot. Less than halfway to the monastery I meet the two monks, one of whom is rubbing his neck, looking kind of dazed, and the other—well, he's glowering and passing a .38 Special from hand to hand. That latter cat worries me. Why can't he, when he gets upset, just run a few laps around the beads like any good priest is supposed to do? I mean, Pat O'Brien used to get red in the face and ball up his fists but this friar fingering his firearms is a bit too much.

"Hello,” I say cheerfully. “I found them. That was really careless of me. Ah, but even the saints were not immune to error.” I smile beatifically.

The armed monk snatches the papers from me, subjects them to a ridiculously long scrutiny considering that there are only two lines of type on the exterior and that he doesn't break the seal. “Carelessness is a weakness that isn't tolerated in this order,” he says in a voice that the average housewife would have to take out of the freezer at two in the afternoon if she wanted it thawed in time for supper. “Ah ha,” thinks I, “the Pistol Padre isn't very high in the Wildcat Creek hierarchy; he isn't even authorized to open my papers."

On the way up the path to the monastery, I apologize profusely to the other monk for having laid him low. The blessed wine of Christian forgiveness isn't exactly oozing from the pits of his flesh but he does admit that under similar circumstances he probably would have reacted unpleasantly himself. “Only I'm not as good a chopper as you,” he says with begrudged admiration, still massaging his neckbone.

We pick up the satchel, stuff the robe back in it, proceed to the gate and ring the bell. It has a nice tone, properly religious. We are admitted. The gate locks behind us. It does not have a nice tone. It locks with a gray prison clink—
Clink!
—turning an echo and ghastly against the white noise of my central nervous system. That clink tumbles into echoes, first inside of my head and then—tumbling beyond the bitter reaches of consciousness. Jesus, I don't mean to get poetic about it. That's what I get, Ziller, fraternizing with cats like you. I heard this intellectual theatrical dude rapping at a loft party one night in New York and he said that when Nora slammed the door to walk out on her old man in the last scene of
A Doll's House
, that slam reverberated throughout the whole spectrum of Western drama and that it caused taboos to fall in the theater—and in male-female relations—just as a slammed door might cause a picture to fall from a wall; only it was a permanent alteration. Well, when that monastery gate clinks behind me, I feel that it had permanently altered the theater of Plucky Purcell, that my own little short-run drama, my stiff-kneed dance of life, has been transformed. There is a cold lick of finality about it. The monastery gate, rather than a jail door slamming to shut me in, is a landing-craft ramp lowering to let me out, and I have no choice now but to wade ashore on an alien beach where sooner or later I must confront an inhospitable populace. Fear is moist and sticky in my throat, like berries in a plastic sack; but it is a fear more surreal than real, there is even an element of gaiety in it: my brother told me some of the Marines were whistling show tunes when they hit the beaches at Inchon. And why not? The principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin the greater the adventure), a margin whose width and length may be determined by unknown factors but whose successful navigation is determined by the measure of the adventurer's nerve and wits. It is always exhilarating to live by one's nerves or toward the summit of one's wits. Such stuff I shamelessly confess to you.

But what, really, is there to fear? Inside the compound the scene is not especially strange. Mainly, there are sterile passage ways off which lead heavy doors, all closed. It is like any monastery I've ever seen in the movies except that instead of adobe or stone it is constructed of wood. As we walk the passageways we pass eight or ten monks and if they don't look like Bing Crosby or Pat O'Brien neither do they look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. There is less milk and more iron in their eyes than in most priests I've observed; less gravy in their jowls and less booze in their noses. Aside from that, I detect nothing extraordinary about them except their walk. No humble shuffle, no pious servile plod, no prissy strut. They walk with the easy aggressive grace of trained athletes. Among them in the narrow passageways I feel as if I'm back in the stadium tunnel at Duke and I'm nearly expecting one of them to slap me on the ass the way athletic teammates are always slapping each other on the ass (a gesture almost touching in the innocence of its eroticism) and yell, “Let's go get them bastids, Plucky. Come on, man."

Toward the center of the compound, we stop before a door and old Thirty-Eight Special he bams on it. The man who receives us is Father Gutstadt, a monk about fifty years old with the build and physiognomy of a Chicago butcher—and obviously the top cat hereabouts. Father Gutstadt's face is a balloon full of blood, a smooth red bladder with giblets for eyes and for a nose a round, veiny, sugar-cured lump that could have been pruned from the entrails of a bull. The good father is a steaming blood pudding of a man, but crafty; oh, if there is a Hamburg slaughterhouse sprawled over his exterior there is a University of Heidelberg huddled inside.

He does not slobber on his cigar or flick it about, but holds it for long periods a few inches from his mouth while its ash extends to perilous magnitudes. He sips his brandy as if engaged in demanding but pleasurable intellectual exercise. His simplest pronouncements are like excerpts from a lecture on advanced physics. It is not the content of his speech that is so authoritative and confounding but rather the
weight
of it. His words are heavy. His language is dense. While some men's spoken sentences seem constructed of cardboard and canvas, Father Gutstadt's are of brick and steel. When told of my meeting with the two monks, he erupts into jolly Santa Claus ho-hos that roll about the room like boulders. It tickles the hell out of that red old fart that I whopped Brother Boston two hard ones. I guess if I had broken that monk's neck the father would have busted his belly with mirth. He is not so amused, however, at the disclosure of my having temporarily “lost” my papers in the forest. He gives me a discourse on carelessness. It is a short discourse but it weighs about four tons.

With a magnifying glass he checks the seal on my papers. Satisfied, he breaks it and begins to read. Whatever he is reading—man, I wish I knew!—takes a very long time. He pauses every now and then to sip brandy or to puff cigar. Eventually, he separates the papers, placing the majority of them in a drawer of his desk and returning to me what proves to be a passport. “There is every indication that your assignment in Memphis was a complete success,” Father Gutstadt says. “Brother Baton Rouge comments at some length on your efficiency. You've distinguished yourself in the eyes of Mary, God and the Church. Good job. Good job.” He stands up behind his desk and extends his leg-of-lamb hand. “Welcome to Wildcat Creek Monastery, Brother Dallas. You're now a full-fledged member of the Society of the Felicitator and eventually we shall have some fitting ceremony. In the meanwhile, Brother Boston and Brother Newark will show you to your quarters. Be careful not to startle Brother Dallas, Brother Boston. Ho ho ho.” It isn't a laugh, it's a rockslide.

Well, babies, that's the way it happened. In a matter of moments, I'm sitting on my cot in a little cell with a dresser and desk and wash-table, and tatami mats on the wooden floor, and wondering if that shrewd old butcher is playing games with me, if his gizzard eyes saw through my pretensions; but, of course, I know by now that he did not. I have put them on! Yes, yes indeed. I'm in residence at a monastery where through the damnedest maddest insanest most kooky quirk of bat-blind events I am believed to be Brother Dallas the Texas Chopper, recent initiate in the Society of the Felicitator—the blackest band of friars to kill for Christ since the Holy Office of the Middle Ages. On my passport it reveals that Brother D. is thirty-one. Actually, I've just turned thirty. Close enough. The card says B. D. is six foot three and weighs 200 pounds (or about as much as a good belch by Father Gutstadt). I'm six one and weigh 189. But I was standing tall that day and I'm (ahem) no scrawny chicken so the fact that the dimensions are slightly askew hasn't occurred to my new pals. Brother D. is from the South and I have a Southern accent—an authentic one, thank the gods; I'm sure the Father would have spotted a phony drawl. That helped. But the clincher, I imagine, was that B. D. was a karate expert, and right off the bat I had the opportunity to effectively demonstrate my own facility in that honored Oriental art. Then, too, I happened to arrive on the very day that the real Brother Dallas was due, and with proper papers. Imagine! Obviously, destiny is moving me—Purcell, fate's plucky pawn.

To top it off, I get assigned, as part of my chores, to the supply detail. Meaning that once or twice a week a cat named Brother Omaha and I drove the holy jeep into Humptulips and purchase supplies at the general store. (One day not long after I arrived, I got to drive down to Aberdeen to pick up a part for the short-wave transmitter. That was the day I found in my post office box your letter telling of weenies and roadside attractions, and the day I mailed to you a postcard.) We monks are taken at face value in Humptulips, treated with casual unctuosity by that portion of the citizenry that is neither Indian nor drunk and with utter indifference by that larger portion that is decidedly both. The very first grocery run I'm on I sneak an epistle off to the Bavarian Motor Co., in Aberdeen and tell them to place my bus in storage. Another note to the mill tells them I've sailed to a sunny Mediterranean isle to live in a gypsy cave with an expatriate Vassar girl and would they please donate my back pay to the Salvation Army.

Thus, here I am. In tight at the militant monastery. And you are probably saying in unison, “So what, you dumb damn nut?” And maybe I can convince you I'm not a jackass and maybe I cannot, but at the moment it's getting dark out here in the woods and every time a twig snaps, my hair climbs a tree. So the other goodies I have to share with you will have to wait until a later edition.

Meantime, take care, my little friends. Onward the zoo and up the sausage! Brother Dallas bestows bountiful blessings upon you, but please don't write him no grateful regards because if his brothers ever catch him passing notes they'll dig a hole in his head and bury his boots in it.

Love and Kisses,

Plucky P.

"Well,” said Amanda, “what do you think?"

“What
is
there to think?” asked Ziller.

“Oh, I don't know. You could think that Plucky Purcell has treated us to an elaborate performance of personal fantasy. Except you know that he's telling the truth. So, you could think that Purcell is on a binge of self-destruction and has deliberately stuck his head into the jaws of the Church, knowing as he must that those jaws do not have rubber teeth. Or, you could think that Purcell had lucked—or plucked—upon a secret so hot it could shake the foundations of Christianity from Humptulips to Rome, and that he's on top of it and he knows he is and that he isn't climbing down until he's ridden it to wherever it's going. Or, you could think that it is an unusual and interesting situation which might eventually prove to have some bearing on our own spheres of activity. You could think that it's our duty to go down to that place and rescue the Mad Pluck before something real bad can occur. You could think that what will happen will happen, according to its divine plan and that we have no right to interfere, but must sit back in our privileged seats and watch it through. Or, you may think, as others have thought before you, that I am a young woman of great curiosity.”

Amanda smiled demurely and stooped to pick up a toy that Baby Thor had abandoned on the Persian carpet. As she stooped, she felt the swallows circling inside the dome of her womb.

Ziller said nothing but went to his drums and began to tease them into sound. He beat them and banged them and rattled them and caressed them and evoked from them a substance of duration. He looped a garland of high bright rat-a-tat around the collar of a primitive thud that seemed to thud in chain reaction all the way back to the belly of the beast whose membrane it was that gave life to the empty circle of drum.

“The whole universe is a complex of rhythms,” mused Amanda. “We each of us feel a need to identify our bodily rhythms with those of the cosmos. The sea is the grand agency of rhythm. The grain-tops in the wind, the atoms in orbit are rhythmic. The uterus, which is a strong muscular organ, contracts with the birth of the baby—the rhythmic contractions, in fact, are the important motivations for the baby to emerge into the world. Rhythm is how it all begins.”