Another Roadside Attraction (30 page)

The captain recognized upon Purcell the black robe of Felicitate. Uninformed as he was about the exact nature of the Society of the Felicitator, he knew that it occupied a special place of favor with the Holy Father, perhaps a more special place than his own command. He hesitated, and as is written in
Poor Richard's
, “He who hesitates will never stop Plucky Purcell.” Our hero danced around the soldiers and plunged toward the next stairwell as if it were the Georgia Tech goal line. He was not pursued.

St. Peter's Square was a chaos of searchlights, police cars, fire engines, ambulances, utility trucks, Church officials of high and low standing and emergency personnel of all sorts. At that time, the rumor that His Holiness had suffered grave injury had not yet been denied officially, and the fate of their Pope concerned the policemen to the point where they were emotionally unable to bring any kind of order to the scene in the square. Nobody detained Purcell as he rushed through the milling throngs, though many were the great Italian clucks of pity as bystanders witnessed the limp “nun” in his arms. Plucky hurried to an ambulance parked at the edge of the square and pulled open its rear doors.

“
Spitale!
” he shouted, having somehow during his Roman stay learned the Italian for “hospital.”

“
Devo trovare un dottore
,” explained the driver.

“
Io sono un dottore
,” Purcell lied. “
Spitale! Presto!
”

On the way to the hospital, the ambulance was frequently detained by traffic jams as thousands of Italians, their eyes wide for spiritual experience, poured into Vatican City from throughout Rome. When finally he screeched up to the emergency door of the hospital, the driver found his ambulance empty.
Mamma mia
. The monk, the poor sister! Where? The driver fell to his knees and crossed himself.

After bailing out of the ambulance, Plucky had bailed out of his robe (he wore jeans and sweat shirt beneath it). He wrapped the Corpse in it so that the Corpse no longer looked like a nun. Several pieces of gold fell out on the sidewalk. Plucky left them for the whores and hurried on. He made his way to the studio of George O. Supper, the American pop artist famed for his plaster-of-paris sculptures of anonymous men.

“Now, George O., buddy, what I've got here is an unusual request. I've had the good fortune to get my meat hooks on an Egyptian mummy. A king, I think it was, a great pharaoh. Rather valuable. It's all perfectly legal, George O., it's legally mine—”

“Bullshit,” said Supper.

“. . . excepting that I'm not allowed to take it out of Italy. Now what I'm asking you to do is—”

“I
know
what you're asking. Let me think about it for a few days.”

“George! Tonight. Remember when you came to me with that little Long Island deb? I didn't ask to think it over. She could've had triplets by the time I thought it over.”

Sighing, Supper helped Plucky carry the Corpse into his plastercasting room. “Purcell, if this mummy is full of drugs . . .”

“Word of honor, George O. You can examine it if you wish.”

“Okay. Okay. I'm sleepy.”

“I've got to ship this out on an early morning flight. I'll build a crate while you plaster. Do you have any of those shipping tags that say 'Work of Art'?”

Goaded by his old friend, Supper worked feverishly. Beginning at the feet, the Corpse turned slowly into a ghostly bland every-man or non-man or anti-man, depending upon one's frame of reference: a white blob of a figure, so empty of humanity that the viewers of the figure would have thrust upon them the startling option to fill in the vacancy, to draw in character, to color the blandness from the palette of their own experience. It would be a typical Supper poker-faced marshmallow monolith; not so much a man as a hole in the air where a man had stood seconds before being vaporized. Man disappearing, man reduced to a silent white shadow of his species. As Supper built this latest testimony to the existential impermanence and insignificance of John Doe, he felt queerly moved. No living model had ever affected him that way. Some strange kind of peaceful power seemed to surge from the mummy. By the time he began to plaster the face, Supper's hands were trembling. He felt himself in touch with what he imagined were the ancient forces of Egypt.

“Funny,” he said with little amusement. “It
looks
Jewish.”

It is midmorning. A few minutes ago I took my coffee break. I am speaking figuratively, of course. There's not a drop of coffee in this place and there never has been. As a matter of fact, we are also out of juice. On my coffee break (ha ha) I had a hot dog and a glass of tap water. There are plenty of damn hot dogs, all right. And water, too. Last night, the rains started.

Amanda, as pale as the raindrops but in good spirits, joined me on my coffee break. She sipped her water from an Apache bowl. No hot dog. You know, her vegetarianism no longer annoys me. If she doesn't want her belly to be a graveyard for dead animals, I can appreciate her view.
Her
belly is for the living, not the dead.

But this weenie business I could never understand. I enjoy a good hot dog, myself, but let's face it, it is not an elite cut of meat. They grind up hog hearts in weenies, and cow muscles and chicken fat and the diaphragms of sheep and the esophagi of goats. Of all the meats with which a vegetarian might be reluctantly associated, surely the sausage is among the least respectable. Yet, Amanda had chosen John Paul as her husband and John Paul had chosen the sausage as his trade. Strange bedfellows.

“It's not as strange as all that,” said Amanda. She sipped her water from a clay bowl with mythological designs. The rain stormed against the former roadside zoo (I say “former” because the place has been stripped of its serpents and its fleas) like trolls splashing swamp water on a sight-seeing bus. “The hot dog is not so much a food as it is an institution. President Roosevelt fed hot dogs to the king and queen of England when they visited here in 1939. Babe Ruth ate nothing but hot dogs and soda pop for twenty years. Hot dogs are found wherever Boy Scouts get together. It is hot dogs the packers have in mind when they boast that they use everything but the squeal. It's not what hot dogs are made of but what they symbolize. The hot dog is the pillar of democracy, the pride of the Yankees, the boneless eagle of free enterprise.”

Well, I couldn't refute that. Come to think of it, it is typical of John Paul Ziller that he would choose to work his African magic through the medium of one of America's most beloved institutions. Ziller has turned the weenie into a wand.

It was most agreeable sitting with Amanda. In the mustard pot, I traced the legend of her beauty. Amanda smiled and touched my hand. Life lifted its heavy wheels. I forgot about the task at the typewriter upstairs. I forgot about the rain. But just then two of the agents burst in, shielding their weapons from the wet. They gave us greedy patriotic looks. “Hey,” they yelled. “Fix us a bunch of them dogs.”

Ben Franklin to the contrary, one cannot take a stitch in time. No, not even to save nine. If only it were possible to stitch time, to pull it up tight, to hold it back. You see, I have reason to believe that today is my last at the typewriter. The agents are supremely confident that Ziller and friends will be apprehended at any hour. Suppose they are right? I do not know what that will mean in terms of my fate or Amanda's. But I strongly suspect that have I not concluded this report by tomorrow morning, it will be involuntarily curtailed. Doom rides my typewriter carriage like a fat lady on a rubber horse.

I pine for time because had I more of it I could more successfully metamorphose my vigil with the roadside zoo's quaint realities so that other men might appreciate as well as I the setting and circumstance across which Christ's body continued its silent journey.

If I write no further of Amanda's attempts to train butterflies to unfold dinner napkins (two insects to a napkin, of course), or of the maps with which Ziller traced his origins back to the sun, I'm sure I shall be forgiven. On the other hand, there are facts of daily life at the zoo to which the reader is entitled.

I should like, for example, to tell more of Baby Thor. Forgive me, Thor, if you are grown, a schoolboy, reading this document either on assignment or out of natural curiosity concerning the historic event to which you, a yard-child of less than four, were privy much as little Anastasia was privy to the annihilation of Russian royalty; forgive me if I have neglected you in my chronicles. You were a joy to us always. Ah, the flash upon your eyes. Your eyes summed up for me my studies in science. Your eyes reminded me of experiments in wave physics, of exercises in galactic mechanics. Your eyes reminded me of a dozen different chemical reactions, particularly those which, if not carefully controlled, threaten to blow up the laboratory.

Thor, your stepfather had (perhaps I should use the present tense, for Ziller has extraordinary resources and he may well have survived his present pickle) a special feeling for light. He felt that since energy was the only permanent “thing” in the universe, it was the most (if not only) significant “thing.” And although he had great respect for sound, he believed that the highest form of energy is light. He seldom used color in his art because he had a theory that color was a disease that afflicted light, a parasite that lived off of light and destroyed its purity. He was disturbed by the fact that 400 trillion waves of deep red light enter the human eye every second. What happens to light after it has been absorbed by the eye is a question that has intrigued many scientists. Ziller's attitude was, “To hell with what happens to the light. What happens to the
color?
” In an effort to control “color pollution,” he had trained his pupils to remain stationary for long periods of time. Ziller spoke of light as if it were applicable to living tissue—and since, ultimately, living tissue is a product of solar radiation, he was not entirely mistaken. “But, John Paul,” I cautioned him once, “the temperature of living tissue is much too low to produce the kind of energy that is necessary for radiation. We speak metaphorically of girls having glowing complexions, but flesh is never an actual source of light.” And Amanda said, “How about fireflies?” Your mommy certainly knew her bugs. “Well,” I blushed, “that's true, fireflies make light and some worms glimmer and some toadstools, but living tissue is never, never energetic enough to stand a chance of combining with 'activation' energies such as sunlight.” Then, Thor, your stepfather gently interrupted the game you were playing with Mon Cul baboon and led you up to me so that I could look into your eyes.

Thor, I can't forget your eyes, but neither can I forget your happy heart. I do not know the identity of your true father (your mother is more stingy with her gossip than with her love), but in your almost omnipotent cheerfulness you were every giggle Amanda's child.

Had I time, I also would like to write more of the people who stopped in at the zoo. Gunnar Hansen was typical of the surprisingly sophisticated farmers and fishermen who live in Washington's Skagit Valley: the broad-mindedness and general awareness of the sweet-tempered Skagit folk have made the area a refuge for artists from the generally more provincial metropolis of Seattle. La Conner, a picturesque wooden village built out over the Swinomish Slough, has been an important art colony for forty years. Paintings and poems have sprung from the misty valley in an abundance nearly equal to the salmon, strawberries and peas. It was not until Boeing Aircraft built, in the mid-sixties, a factory on the valley's edge that prejudice and reaction was smuggled into Skagit country, a part of the baggage of technicians and engineers. On those occasions when the sheriff's office or the state patrol were called to investigate the goings-on at that “weirdo hot dog zoo,” invariably it was a newcomer to the valley, some clear-eyed, tight-lipped little wing-tank designer, who was behind the call. Farmer Hansen, although he was mystified by certain elements of the zoo's character (as, in truth, was I), always approached the giant weenie with robust respect. You, Farmer Hansen—and your peers who fish these jade waters, who till this Chinese brushstroke landscape and make it sprout with vegetables and flowers—I salute you. I do not know to what extent your lives are full, or how passionately enlightenment has touched you, but in your rare rural tolerance for eccentric people and new ideas, you have singed the damp air with your honor.

Among the other regulars at the zoo was Salvadore Gladstone Tex, the cowboy who eventually became so familiar we were obliged to learn his name. I recall a mild evening in July. The sky was bent double by a heavy bar of moon-soaked clouds. The cowboy (Salvadore Gladstone Tex) knocked at the roadside zoo. He knocked as if shaking a tambourine. His horse, Jewish Mother, was left to graze in the parking lot. Slim pickings. “Howdy mam,” the cowboy said to Amanda. “I noticed that you haven't added no more attractions to your zoo.” “That's correct,” said Amanda. “We're standing pat.” “Well,” said the cowboy, “I thought you might be of persuasion to buy this here watermelon.” He held the melon in his arms as if it were an infant. “Oh,” said Amanda. “I'll bet it's one you grew yourself.” “I grow lots of watermelons, mam. This one's different. It talks.” Amanda listened politely. She overheard the melon say something like “. . . according to Plan Q . . .” The watermelon had a high, squeaky voice. “I was just meandering through the melon patch when I heard it carrying on. There were three or four melons right snug together and I had to listen real close to find out which one was doing the talkin'. It's this one, all right. To tell the truth"—his voice assumed a confidential tone—"I think it's the space people. They're trying to contact us through watermelons.” Amanda listened again. The watermelon said something like, “Driver, a sizable reward for you if you reach the station in time for the express.” High. Squeaky. “Hmmmmm,” said Amanda. Was the cowboy throwing his voice? She gave him (Mr. Tex) a two-dollar deposit and told him that if she was satisfied she would pay the rest on Saturday. She thumped the melon. At least it was ripe. While Amanda was upstairs giving Thor his bath, John Paul came home from the woods. He had been drumming, jungle style. He was tired and in need of refreshment. He sat at the kitchen table and devoured the melon. Amanda couldn't hear him with the water running. And that was the end of that. Except the next morning at his bowel movement, John Paul swore the first turd said, “Hello.”