Another Roadside Attraction (3 page)

In those days he blew jazz, chiefly of the Afro-Cuban variety. Such was his ability that he was welcomed at jam sessions of the top jazzmen in New York, and on occasion he sat in during gigs at famous clubs such as the Half Note, the Five Spot and the Village Gate, drumming in the
bata
fashion while using an African thumb harp for orchestral effect. Since it was rumored that he had turned down chairs in some very fine combos, there was an eddy of interest in the musical undercurrent when word flashed around that Ziller was about to organize his own band. Zollie Abraham, who both promoted jazz and wrote books about it, visited Ziller with a twofold plan: (1) he would contract Ziller's group for a New England campus tour and (2) he would write an article on the aims of the new band for
Downbeat
magazine. It was a warm autumn day and Ziller and his baboon were seated on a Nigerian cotton cushion in front of an open window, eating plums and listening to the sounds that bounced in off the streets. There was a smell of carbon in the air. Upon hearing Abraham's proposal, Ziller, yellow berries of plum juice hanging from the hairs of his mustache, replied, “The jazz was the very same shape as the keyhole so that went through, the blues was lean and conditioned to suffering so it snugged through, but the rock was big like a sausage and got stuck in the middle ear to the ground.”

Pretty pissed, Abraham went away and informed all the jazzheads that Ziller was insane and an opportunist to boot. He had sold out to rock-and-roll.

In the mashed banana sunlight of Labor Day morning, Amanda basked on a log in the Sacramento River, talking to her two closest friends in the Indo-Tibetan Circus: Nearly Normal Jimmy and Smokestack Lightning. A burly redhead whose walrus nose and oxblood mustache both drooped wearily as if overpowered by the weight of his ice-cube-thick spectacles, Nearly Normal Jimmy was manager and ringmaster of the circus. An administrative genius, Nearly Normal had been a childhood playmate of Amanda's and had befriended her again after he dropped out of the University of Arizona Business School to manage and produce the Capitalist Pig. It had been this myopic red pug who introduced Amanda to Stanislaw. And it was the same Nearly Normal who recruited her for the circus. It was he, too, who found a job for Palumbo, the ill-fated drummer, after Stanislaw had been deported and the Capitalist Pig disbanded.

At seventy-three, Smokestack Lightning could still do a dance that lowered the blood temperature of the most urbane and confident white American. In the circus arena, lit only by a dry twig fire, the old Apache would don his Ghost shirt, its blue-dyed buckskin adorned with thunderbirds and fat white stars (a design that had been revealed to the shirt's original owner in a vision). Then he would commence a performance of calculated frenzy, identifying his bodily rhythms with the historical migrations of his people, recalling both their triumphs and their tribulations, insinuating their glories and humiliations, howling myths in the shadows like a coyote, clacking his peyote-stained teeth like a beaver, arching his back like a mesa, planting his toes like a dawn of agriculture, weeping like a long winter, laughing like the mouth of a river, stalking with his arrowed eyes some unlicensed prey in the faces of the audience. And the audience would sit chilled, bound to the stake of congenital guilt, its thoughts paddling along some quiet piney lake or spurring a pony around the bend of a canyon, all trails however clean and simple leading to the scene of slaughter; the woodsmoke ribboning from the dancer's tiny fire filtered through Cinemascope and dime novels and TV tubes and Jungian memory to sting spectators' eyes with metaphors of barbaric lust, as if it were the gunsmoke and torchsmoke still lingering from some old wounded knee meadow of battle, cooking their hearts over the embers of once-bright genocide. And when the drums suddenly froze and the hard mahogany Indian stilled his dance at the summit of its demonic power to shriek in perfect magpie Trickster, to scream in flawless American,
"Hi'niswa'-vita' ki'-ni"
—"We shall live again!"—the stoutest of mechanics coughed nervously and children and women were known to pee in their pants.

Smokestack Lightning also executed an expurgated version of the Hopi rain dance, using live rattlesnakes when he could get away with it: the deputy sheriffs in some towns forced him to substitute nonpoisonous serpents in the interest of public safety. Incidentally, it was a couple of those garter-snake substitutes that the newlywed Zillers purchased to stock their roadside zoo, although the reader doesn't have to be burdened with all these details, now does he?

Amanda plopped her feet in the cool water. “What truly mystifies me,” she confided to her friends, “is the way things are always happening to me during thunderstorms. My oddest experiences, the ones that are most occult or that seem to seep out of the deepest cracks in my psyche, invariably happen just before or in the middle of some storm. I mean it's spooky. As if there's some connection between my innermost karmic structure and violent electrical disturbances. Why do you suppose that is?”

All squinty-eyed, Nearly Normal Jimmy was wiping river spray from his glasses with a brakeman's bandanna. “People's heads are always affected by thunderstorms,” he allowed. “It's the negative particles released in the atmosphere. Ozone gas is released, too. It activates the mind. Makes you feel kinda high, haven't you ever noticed feeling kinda high just before a storm? People dream more, dream more vividly when there's a heavy concentration of ozone in the air. They've proved this in scientific experiments. Did you know that if you take an IQ test during a thunderstorm, or just before one hits, you'll make a higher score than you normally would? That's a fact. Activates the brain. Shit, baby, you're like everybody else, just more sensitive, that's all.”

“Thunder is sky power,” said Smokestack Lightning. “Very different from powers of earth or underearth. Much war come between power above and power below. Maybe war between head of Amanda and body of Amanda? No, maybe not so. Thunder is season power. Always come before spring season. Make corn grow, make trees catch flower. Thunder friendly spirit but big, clumsy, sometimes break things. Maybe Amanda have big spirit in her. Big power. Sky power. But she cannot understand. Because she woman. Also have earth power. Earth is woman. Woman is earth. What so big sky power doing in woman . . . ?” The Indian's voice faded. It was nearly noon. The day had an edge of real heat now. Amanda was wearing a little shift of off-white organdy which she had picked up at the Sears store in San Luis Obispo and to the neckline of which she had sewn peacock feathers and beads of black glass. It was a thin textile and she wore no bra. The sun warmed her chest like a VapoRub. Very relaxed, she had mulled over her companions' explanations of the thunderstorm syndrome for just a minute or two when she became aware of a fourth person, a stranger, in their midst.

Smokestack had noticed the intruder first, but said nothing. Finally, Nearly Normal turned to see him, too. The man was Caucasian but the color of a good cigar. He was quite tall, maybe six four or five, and slender. Two pounds of Fiji hair sat upon his head like the barbed-wire nest of a mechanical bird. His face was long and gaunt and wild; his eyes piercing, his mouth fierce, his mustache mockingly extravagant. He wore a sorcerer's cape—yellowed celestial secrets on a field of sidereal blue—over a vest shirt of some reddish leather which Amanda could not identify; trousers, he wore none but rather a parrot-green loincloth; his feet were sandaled; about his forehead was tied a narrow band of giraffe skin; in one bejeweled hand he held a primitive clay flute. Towering above the trio on the river log, he was an imposing figure—a bit like an ancient Egyptian ruler, especially Egyptian because of his strange tomb-wall eyes: his pupils seemed to remain in the center even when his face was in profile.

Nearly Normal was so startled by the presence of the man that it was a moment before he recognized him. Of course, it wasn't the man's attire that surprised the ringmaster: among Nearly Normal's troupers eccentricity was the uniform of the day. No, it was his stealth, the manner in which he suddenly had materialized on the log without a warning sound. (Like a magician, eh?) But shock speedily gave way to pleasure.

“Amanda. Smokestack Lightning. Let me present the legendary John Paul Ziller. I've been telling you about him. Self-exiled from the international art scene. Leader and drummer of the Hoodoo Meat Bucket. Until he split for Africa. Or was it India?”

The lean man stared only at Amanda. He was pensive. When finally he spoke, the voice that fell from his ferocious lips was both jarring and vulnerable: like a bloodshot eye. There was something of the Negro bluesman in it and something of the Shakespearian stage. No one recalls his exact language but they remember that it was spicy with portent. He awakened in Amanda's consciousness the image of the monarch, the far-ranging, high-flying black-and-orange butterfly that is one of our most familiar insects. He reminded her that the monarch's nickname is “storm king.” That it is always most active before a storm. She had seen them, hadn't she? Sailing in the electrified air, beating head-on into the gusty thunderclouds, reveling in the boisterous winds. And did she not know that monarchs usually emerge from their cocoons just prior to thundershowers? The first sound they hear is likely the rumble of thunder. They are literally born of the storm. No other creature is so susceptible to the tense vibrations of a summer squall. A butterfly. Somewhere in its minute mechanism is a device that responds to and perhaps assimilates the gestalt of storm. If there were some psychological or physiological link between Amanda and this butterfly, some unusual rapport . . .

Amanda's mouth eased into a long slow smile. Her eyes grew as bright as violet silk. “Yes, Yes,” she muttered. “The monarch.” She stared at Ziller. He at her. They modified each other by their looking. Something almost angelic danced on the abrasive surfaces of his face. She carried her excitement lightly, the way a hunter carries a loaded shotgun over a fence. Warm chemical yokes burst in their throats. Ziller had the stink of Pan about him. Amanda heard the phone ring in her womb. In the magnetized space between them they flew their thoughts like kites. At last he reached out for her. She took his hand. As they disappeared far down the riverbank, the ringmaster and the Apache sat, stunned, in the kind of vacuum that forms in the immediate wake of an historic turn.

For all his courtly title, the monarch (Danaus plexippus, thank you, Madame Goody) is the most down-home of butterflies. That is, before they were virtually extirpated by air pollution and pesticides, monarchs were familiar figures in most American neighborhoods. They fluttered their zigzag course (as if under the orders of some secret navigator whose logic was as fanciful as true) across backyards and vacant lots and swimming holes and fairgrounds and streets of towns and cities: they have been spotted from the observation deck of the Empire State Building by surprised tourists from Indiana who thought they had left such creatures down by the barn. Indeed, wherever there is access to milkweed (Asclepias syriaca: let's not carry this too far, Madame G.) there you will find monarchs, for the larvae of this species is as addicted to milkweed juice as the most strung-out junky to smack. His appetite is awesome in its singularity for he would rather starve than switch.

But if the monarch is (or was) a common domestic, as old shoe as the folks next door, he is by no means a stay-at-home. Monarchs, in fact, constitute the jet set of the insect world. These butterflies, stronger fliers than many birds, are spectacularly migratory. In the first autumn chills they gather—having cruised about individually all summer—in enormous flocks. Millions of them in good years, literally millions, mass for the journey south. On four-inch wings they may trek for more than a thousand miles. Monarchs have migrated, in all kinds of weather, from Canada to Florida, from California to Hawaii, from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf of Mexico. At twenty miles an hour it has taken some monarch movements five hours to pass a given point. Tides of them; miles-wide galaxies; vast flowing rivers of insects staining the wind with their moody hues; force fields of haphazardly modulated entities; notes in a numerical narrative; syllables of equal inflection, rhythmically pulsating, decreasing in optic tempo only on their peripheries where instensity and density finally slacken—as at the edge of a Jackson Pollock painting or the frayed ends of a patchwork quilt.

To science, the migratory flights of the monarch remain a mystery. An enigma of tactics if not of strategy. There are certain channels of communication that operate outside the frequencies of the most prying investigators. A hundred blackbirds will evacuate a tree at precisely the same second—without a discernible signal of any kind. A variety of orchid, lacking nectar as an enticement but needing to be pollinated, attracts male bees by emitting odors like that of the female bee. A wasp will bore for an hour into the hard wood of a tree at the exact spot where hides the tiny grub in whose body she lays her eggs: there is no outward sign that the grub is there, yet the wasp never misses. At the disposal of the “lower” animals are invisible clocks and computers about which science can only speculate. Similarly, scientists have discovered and recorded “laws” to which electricity, gravity and magnetism adhere—but they have practically no understanding of
what
these forces are or
why
. It would seem that there exists in the time-space grid a system of natural order, a mathematics of energy whose “numbers” are even more a riddle to us than their progressions. It is this arithmetic of consciousness that more simple men call the “supernatural.” The mystery of migrating butterflies, the mystery of gravity and dreams are but operating arms of the Great Mystery, the perpetuation of which sustains us all. If that declaration has a taste of corn about it, so be it. Language grows a bit sticky in areas such as these. However, concerns of this nature can be quite practical and concrete, as we shall see. It is in the realm of High Mystery that certain men and women are destined to act out their lives.