Another Roadside Attraction (29 page)

When the earthquake hit, Plucky Purcell—like the Pope—was dreaming. Nearly Normal Jimmy once advanced the theory that it was impossible for the man who awakens in the morning to know with certainty that he is the same man who went to sleep at night. Nearly Normal became rather obsessed with that notion and as a result developed insomnia. Amanda thought the whole thing was silly. Said she, “What difference does it make
who
you are when you wake up as long as you wake up
somebody
.” Like the oft-quoted Chinese philosopher, she would have been content to wake up a butterfly. But Nearly Normal Jimmy rested no easier and finally, on the advice of Ziller, called upon a magi who lived in a pyramid in Illinois and had his psyche tattooed. With a small brand inked into the skin of his mind, he could roam far and wide while sleeping and yet always keep tabs on himself. He had belled the cat of his consciousness, so to speak. However, there was one drawback. From the day he was tattooed, Nearly Normal always had the same dream. The only image that ever came to him in dreaming was the image of his tattoo: a leather armchair of the Tibetan variety. It was an image to which Jimmy was attracted, to be sure, but it made for dull hours a-dreaming.

Purcell never had that problem. Whether he lay on a jail bunk, on a motel mattress soaked with sex or on a monk's stingy cot, he slumbered like an old dog and his dreams were as rich and varied as the total output of Hollywood from
Birth of a Nation
until now. “Colossal” is an adjective that could be applied to Purcell's dreams. “I gotta dream spectaculars,” he said, “or someone else will dream them in my place.” The Vatican earthquake shook Purcell loose from one level of spectacle and deposited him on another. The air he awoke in was choked with dust and rent with screams. Of the twelve persons who were hurt in the quake, seven acquired their injuries not two hundred feet from where Plucky lay dreaming. That boy has a knack for being in the thick of things.

Panic moved through the catacombs like a compulsive housekeeper, emptying the ashtrays of reason and mopping up the tracks of experience. The catacombs took on an insect quality. Confusion spun in the debris. But while the others who roomed in the catacombs—the several score underground soldiers of the cross—while they tried in panic to make up their minds whether to run for the ground-level exit before or after gathering up their possessions, before or after ministering to their wounded comrades, impulsive Plucky Purcell not only chose an immediate course of action, he made a long-term decision concerning his future as well. It was a decision that was to affect the destiny of the race, although Purcell could not have known that then.

In Bokonon, it is written that “peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

One two three and four-ah. One two three and four-ah
. Fast and funny were the steps Purcell took down the rumbling corridor. Purcell was not so much running as he was dancing and he was not so much dancing as he was laughing with his feet.
One two three and ha-ha
. He moved not toward the stairs that led to the surface but toward those which led to the next lower level of catacombs. As he moved (hop skip wiggle) through the crumbled stone and fearful echoes, his brainpan sizzled with visions: visions of autumn in New York; visions of San Francisco's doll-faced hills; visions of the wonders of Mexican agriculture; visions of studio doors flung open in welcome; visions of burning herbs and young pussy both in such profusion that his heart sickened and flopped like a musical dove in the odors that the visions brought to his nostrils. Visions of big escape, of throwing off that Catholic curse which for more than a year now had held him in its coils and sent him probing closer and closer to the dark dangerous heart of the One True Church, taunting him with religious riddles until he—once happy-go-lucky hustler—could think of little else but finding some way to cope with an immense and growing world-force that twinkled so tenderly of Heaven and stunk so terribly of Hell. Without consciously intending to, he had hacked into the Roman mysteries as a safari hacks into dense jungle, and he had come down with velvet fevers and been bedeviled by such opulent deliriums that he no longer knew if the evil he saw was actually there or whether his sickness conjured it. Now, like a schizophrenic suddenly made whole, like a harried lover at last emotionally free of the bitch he thought he could not bear to lose, Purcell had awakened from his long Catholic nightmare—shaken from it by an actual seizure of the earth—and the visions that unfolded in his mind were familiar ones of a secular life he could barely wait to resume. Feet laughing beneath him, he approached the treasure vaults. Gold and silver are heavy cargo, but even though he knew he could stuff no more than a few thousand dollars' worth into his belongings, it would get him to America and friends and dope and pussy and . . . However much he plundered it was scant payment for the horrors religion had put him through. He danced over a body. No, it was a toppled statue of a Grecian athlete; its censoring Roman fig leaf had broken away in the fall and now its marble penis pointed at the stars and freedom; dance on, Purcell.
One two three and ha-ha
.

Oh my. Whew! You waltz divinely, Pluck. Just as our hero had anticipated, several of the chambers lay open, their barred doorways bent and sprung or their stone walls reduced to rubble. It took Purcell not many minutes to add substantially to the net worth of his estate. “This is the business the Church should have been about all along,” he thought. “Sharing its gold with the poor instead of its condolences.” Heavier by a good twenty pounds, he nevertheless executed a graceful pirouette and prepared to make his exit. But his choreographer had altered the pattern.

Looking over his right shoulder, for no sound reason, he noticed that the one catacomb chamber that had been permanently sealed now gaped at its seams. The earthquake had squeezed its foreboding face until it smiled like a manic encyclopedia salesman. In imitation not of Nijinsky but of Ben Hur the flea, Purcell hopped directly into the smile. One last probe in the orifices of the Church, as it were. And, of course, that is how he met the Corpse. With bounds that are not within everyone's power, particularly if their pockets are packed with gold, Plucky—pushed by curiosity or intuition or “peculiar travel suggestions"—bounded right into the mysterious compartment, and through the billowing dust observed the mummified body of the Messiah as it rested atop a jewel-encrusted sarcophagus, wrapped about with dry-rotted linens, as if the Messiah were an immense overcooked weenie in a tattered bun; just lying there touched by nothing but time—and gently by
it
—as if the Messiah had been calmly awaiting Plucky Purcell for these two thousand years.

The question the critical reader must raise at this juncture is: How did Purcell recognize the mummy as Jesus? It is not an easy question. I, myself, being a skeptical man of science, did not hesitate in scraping off a sample of the wood fragments and dirt that clung to the Corpse (beneath its more recent coating of plaster) and airmailing it to the radiocarbon laboratory at Johns Hopkins for dating. My friend at the lab found the specimen unsuitable for really exact carbon-14 dating, but was able to approximate its age as from fifteen hundred to three thousand years. Probably, that finding helped support my conviction of the body's identity, but to tell the truth, I was convinced without it. In fact, from the moment I focused vision upon the Corpse I knew that it was who it was. Plucky must have known instantly, too. It looked, to be sure, nothing like the milky portraits we had been shown in Sunday school, looked hardly at all like the handsome gentleman with the Aryan profile and the five-hundred-watt glow who effulged at us from calendars in Protestant parlors all over Dixie. It was short, as swarthy and oily as a Greek olive, and its face was overshadowed by a nose that arched and hooked like the beak of an enlarged buzzard. Yet it was inexplicably familiar. Although dead and withered, the Corpse was animated by the absolute. When one stared at it, one's pupils jangled like alarm clocks that had been set long ago to go off at this moment. Logic was not necessarily suspended nor common sense ignored. This simply, positively was not the body of an ordinary man. In its befouled stupor, it incited awe and marvel. Those of us who spent time with it experienced at least some of the tremendous power it must have held when it walked Galilee. Doubt collapsed in a racket of revelation, and we, most of us, paid homage to the pitiful Hebrew mummy as if it were a living saint.

The chamber in which the Christ was hidden was small and dirty and apparently had not been opened in several centuries. However, the gems embedded in the tomb and the golden candelabra that bristled in the corners suggested that it had once been a shrine of highest (if secret) rank. Perhaps medieval popes had awakened after midnight to traipse in purple splendor down to that deepest catacomb where they conducted clandestine masses for none but the most privileged princes of the Church. Then, one year long ago, it had been decided that the secret was just too hot and the risk too great, so the Holy Office sealed off the remains of its precious figurehead, sealed them off even from itself. Maybe one curious prelate or another had looked in on them, had paid respects, but it seems doubtful if even a pope had peeked at the illustrious body in recent times. Of course, they knew it was there. Or did they? And if they knew,
who
knew? Those are telling questions which we will deal with a little later. For the moment, let us appreciate the discovery: Purcell had chanced (danced) upon the Lamb of God, dead and helpless in Vatican concealment, and he had realized, furthermore, who it was whom he had found; and as stunned as he may have been, and as temporarily ignorant of the full apocalyptic implications of stealing the body as he may have been, he did not tarry, faint or fret but immediately scooped up the mummy tenderly in his arms and prepared to bear it into man's modern world.

No sooner did Plucky spring from the tomb than he became aware of an influx into the catacombs. Up until then, the voices and footsteps had all been moving in the other direction, as the bleeding and confused and the scared made their way to ground level. Now, in the quake's buzzing aftermath, investigating squads and files of guards were cautiously exploring the tunnels. They were still well above Purcell, but there was no way he might avoid meeting them in his ascent. What's this? A person coming? Damn the luck! He hadn't gotten twenty feet with his prize before somebody had spotted him. It was like being tackled at the line of scrimmage, a frustrating failure anytime, but especially when Jesus is one's football. The figure, however, approached without seeing. Well, what do you know? It was one of the blind nuns who stand watch over the forbidden library. The tremor had played havoc with her collection of scrolls and left her in a daze all the more confusing because she was sightless.

“Forgive me, sister.”

Plucky administered to her the most painless knockout in his karate repertoire. Like a rag penguin, she folded at his feet.

Have you ever tried to undress a nun when you were in a hurry? It was maddening—all the tiny black buttons, the stubborn hooks—but he at last disrobed her and clothed the Corpse in her habit. The nun he wrapped in the Corpse's rotten linens and deposited upon the sarcophagus. There he left her, but in case it has crossed your mind to wonder, as some of the purest people have wondered before you, what the good sister wore beneath her habit, let me remind you that Plucky Purcell is a Southern gentleman and while the air he exudes may by some moral standards be excessively sulphurous, he would never ever be guilty of embarrassing or insulting a lady. What, if anything, the knocked-out nun wore closest to her private parts is a secret Purcell is prepared to protect to his grave.

Crashing like a moose calf through the cranberry bogs of its first winter, Plucky crashed through catacomb earthquake debris, his natural running grace blunted by the Corpse in his arms and the heavy gold doodads in the inner pockets of his robe. He made it to the first staircase with no opposition save his excess baggage and the rubble underfoot, but at the head of the stairs, on the second level, he ran into a party of soldiers.

If I have given the impression that the Vatican was a bit casual in its concern for the treasures in its catacombs, you must keep in mind that while the combined contents of those few rooms of gold and silver and gems and art might be worth say, oh, a hundred million dollars, it is but a bubble in the Church's bucket of wealth. The Vatican owns stocks and bonds valued at about seven billion dollars. It is the largest single stockholder in the world. The Vatican also owns property—secular as well as churchly—valued at many billions. It is the largest single real-estate owner in the world. The baubles hidden in the catacombs are artifacts left over from an age when such hardware was the trappings of power. In these times, they are clumsily anachronistic, almost embarrassing. Sooner or later, they will be converted into more efficient tender. Meanwhile, however, they may be slighted but they have not been forgotten. As soon as the quake had subsided, the Pope or one of his senior aides ordered the Swiss Guard into the catacombs to secure the valuables and restore order.

The Swiss Guard filed into the dusty depths, armed not with quaint halberds but with the latest automatic weapons supplied free by the Catholic munitions makers of America and Germany. Thus armed, it met Purcell as he lurched up the stone staircase from his rendezvous with Christ.

Plucky was breathing hard. His breaths rolled through the squad of soldiers like the waves of a second quake. The ocean of his breathing collapsed around the showy soldiers the way the ocean of fame collapsed around the gums of Judy Garland.

“I've got a sister here,” gasped Purcell, trusting that the well-educated captain of the guards understood English. “Must get her to a doctor.”

“Let me see her,” ordered the haughty officer, his English as perfect as a snowflake. “Perhaps she needs first aid.”

“No, no,” stammered Plucky. “She isn't seriously hurt. I think she's just fainted. Got to get her up in the fresh air.”