Another Roadside Attraction (4 page)

For several hours, the couple walked in the landscape. They held hands but did not speak. They dared not speak. Vast energies flowed between them. With the sun, they formed the points of a radiant triangle. Bloodpools sang in their temples, their hot breath was dispersed in the fields.

Toward midafternoon, one of the pangs in Amanda's belly became gradually familiar. For her, it was the recognition of a single instrument in a symphonic crescendo. Assuming Ziller was hungry, too, she broke his hold at last and began to forage. She gathered acorns and puffballs in the skirt of her dress, she dug dandelion roots with her nails. These items, with cloves of wild garlic, she skewered on silvers and toasted over a fire that Ziller made without matches. A farmwife approached cautiously and offered them peaches and almonds. Amanda presented her her Madame Blavatsky wristwatch in return. The country woman declined but accepted a peacock plume. It was the first time Amanda saw Ziller smile. She detected filed teeth and a reserve of joy.

“I am told you are somewhat of a wanderer,” she said. Her tongue was thick with peach juice. It turned in his ear like a key.

“That is not correct,” he answered. “I travel a great deal but I never wander.”

“Then I assume that you move about with direction. What is your usual destination?”

“The source. I am always voyaging back to the source.”

“You must initiate me in the science of origins. I suspect your travels are soaked with adventure.”

Ziller drew from a hidden pocket in his cape a journal (Yes!
The
journal.) and began to read random passages aloud:

“At a cruel souvenir stand beside a dry water hole, we check our maps against the extended umbilicus of a shaman. He reveals to us the hidden meanings of our moles and the deeper significances of our snoring.”

“From the vines upon which he travels first class in the free space between heaven and earth, the Lord of the Jungle dives into the translucent river. Disappears with her beneath the giant lily pads. Quiet. A few bright birds throw themselves against the cheek of the humidity. Silence. A hippopotamus slumps like a lobotomy in the vegetating stream. Not a sound. The hippo yawns, disclosing his marshmallow gums. Peace. The bubbling of Jane's orgasm.”

“We breakfast at the All-Night Sanskrit Clinic and Sunshine Post. Phosphorescent toadstools illuminate the musicians. Ghost cookies sparkle with opium. We learn the language of the Dream Wheel.”

“Forward the march. The burden and the glow. We are approaching our destination. The sky is filled with messages the color of spires. Butterflies as big as tennis rackets flap around the base of the volcano. We stop long enough to synchronize our religions. A white hunter shows up and fills our pockets with omens. And terrible trophies of Felix the Cat.”

Fragments. They had Amanda bubbling like her baby. First she wanted to inquire about those big butterflies. Larger than Brooke's birdwing? Surely she would have read of them. But before she could blurt out one thrilled question, Ziller said to her, “I am told that you are a gypsy, and a clairvoyant in the bargain. Does that mean that you, too, are a traveler?”

“I'm a gypsy in spirit only,” she confessed. “I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, up stairs, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heroes; perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified.”

Ziller was pleased. He played his flute for her, gave her a ring whose ruby setting had been chipped from the Great Eye of Deli, whispered his secret name to her, stood guard each time she went behind a bush (the day's excitement added to the pressures on her bladder) and asked her to become his wife.

Amanda sang for him the seven peyote hymns of the Arapaho, gave him the scarab out of her navel, told him
her
secret name and said, “Of course.”

Flushed with sun and passion, they floated back to camp and into the flailing arms of a celebration.

When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.

Obviously, Nearly Normal Jimmy had sensed the union for he had driven into Sacramento and procured gallons of Eleven Cellars sauterne. The new roustabout contributed a quarter kilo of locally grown grass ("Rio Linda green"), a portion of which Takamichi, the tiny Zen tea master, had boiled, whisked and steeped into a most expressive brew. Under the direction of Nuclear Phyllis, motor-scooter dare-devil (and granddaughter of a U.S. senator), the women had concocted an immense stew of potatoes, onions, burdock tubers and frsehly netted trout. Having served its culinary functions, the cookfire had subsequently been built into a roaring, spitting, leaping blaze that rouged the evening sky with foxy hues and made the river canyon seem a caldron not unwitchlike in character. Near the fire, the band—with Smokestack Lightning sitting in on Palumbo's abandoned drums—was into something ornamental and ceremonious: an adaptation of a rare hours-long Tantric raga which the ancients had reserved exclusively for lunar eclipses and the nuptials of important personages.

Amanda and John Paul were seated on a painted log and garlanded with chrysanthemums that had been recently liberated from a suburban lawn. The lovers refused stew and wine but accepted bowls of tea. After toasts, Amanda's son—dressed in a tunic of rabbit fur and yellow brocade—was fetched from the nursery van to meet his new father and to kiss his mother good night. (Ziller could scarcely believe the child's eyes: they seemed almost electric.) Ten or fifteen minutes of silence followed the climax of the band's special selection—the players were exhausted and the listeners transfixed. Then Nearly Normal, sweet with wine and giggly with grass, delivered a short address in which he attributed the events of the day to Tibetan intervention, although exactly how that far-off nation interposed itself he did not say. “Up is up, down is down, and Tibet is Tibet,” said Jimmy, reasonably. “You may scoff but I know what I know.” He introduced Ziller to the musicians and troupers, for most of them had encountered him only in myth and innuendo. And he announced officially this time—the union. In word and smile and kiss, the performers paid their respects: it was apparent that Amanda was sharply loved by all.

When the band began again to play, it worked into an impromptu arrangement of “Barbie Doll's Hysterectomy,” a little number from the repertoire of the Hoodoo Meat Bucket. This, of course, in honor of Ziller, who, toward the end of the piece, was persuaded to relieve the old Apache on drums. Oh my. Yes, yes. Everything they'd heard was true. In and out of the melody, crossing the beat like a jaywalker dodging taxicabs, accentuating the offbeats, creating counterbeats, he drummed like a thousand-handed deity: Kwan Yin, all arms and bliss.

Next, a raga-rock rendition (sans Ziller) of “Back Door Man,” the rhythms of which pulled dancers, singularly or in pairs, into the reeling wheel of firelight. Most of the troupers were rolling their own ectasy now. Dancing. Singing. Climbing trees. Moonwatching (it was mango orange and as thin as a tortilla). Eating. Drinking. Necking. Dreaming. Goofing. Groping. Trephinating: frescoing their pineal glands with the cardinal brush. Takamichi swaying in an American flag hammock intoning his great wooden beads. Nuclear Phyllis and the new roustabout skinny-dipping in the stream. Only Amanda and Ziller, arm in arm on the log-of-honor, seemed restless. Noticing this, although his spectacles were sticky with wine, Nearly Normal led them away.

Now Amanda, who traveled in the nursery truck, owned a lovely little goat-wool tipi, and on the rear of his motorcycle John Paul carried an Arabian tent. But believing that honeymooners should engage on neutral territory, Nearly Normal and some other troupers had taken the liberty of constructing a hasty hut of sticks and boughs. It sat the length of a spaghetti dinner outside the laager (as Ziller, with his knowledge of South African wagon trains, called the circular camp), protected by an outcropping of rock. Inside, the ground was covered with Amanda's own Persian carpet. In a corner sat a small wedding-gift table of carved quartz, on the top of which were carefully arranged Ziller's compass, sextant, charts, telescope, French ticklers and other navigational instruments. From the ceiling hung a brass saucer in which Nearly Normal had thought to burn incense until he remembered Amanda having once told him that smell was 80 per cent of love.

Here, the couple was left—the sounds of the festivities seeping through the walls like some disjointed Musak of Mars. Moonlight pressed in on them like a hungry ghost, feeding on the wholeness of their hearts and brains. But as they sat undressing on the edge of the bedroll, each trying to please the other with gesture and look, a spike of tension suddenly drove between them, prying them apart.

“It appears that the gypsy traveler has taken on a passenger,” Ziller said dryly, observing her through his antique spyglass.

“Yes. I'm afraid I have been outfitted as a vessel.”

Amanda lowered her lashes and crossed her arms in front of her slightly bulging belly.

“Was it someone in the circus or band?”

“No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Theolonius Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later, I heard he killed himself to avoid the draft.”

A moment of fidgety silence. A tentative embrace. Then, Amanda's turn.

“I've heard that you were married before, John Paul. What happened? Where is she now? And so forth.”

“She was the daughter of a Kansas City meat-packer. A frail debutante sopping up culture while working as a secretary for my gallery in New York. On our wedding trip we went to Ceylon to hunt flying foxes, a species of bat. One became entangled in my bride's hair and I awoke to find her squeaking like a dying bat while hanging naked upside down from a rafter. Soon afterward, she entered an asylum. Her daddy had everything efficiently annulled. Now I understand she's one of the leading socialites in Kansas City. Though subject to embarrassing attacks. One night at the opera . . .”

Another sickening silence. Both were ashamed of their indulgences. They could sense a taint on their karmas. Gradually, however, Ziller climbed into a smile. From Amanda, a diffident giggle. In a moment, the two of them were laughing—freely and deliriously, like children tickled in their cribs by a roguish uncle. Their mouths mashed together, hotly, moistly. His gentle hand kneaded her breasts, then slid down her belly and into her panties. Her clitoris perked like a bud, buzzed like a cicada. He grew masculine to an improper degree.

Most of the night they did it, laughing and biting. Waking in the morning with rhinestone crustations on their eyelids and the butt end of a rainbow filling their tiny room.

The Pelican, in Bryte, California, is one of those taverns that function as a neighborhood social club. There is a coin-operated pool table of less-than-regulation size. There is a shuffleboard table that seems as much too long as the pool table seems too short: it looks like a landing strip. There is a bowling machine and two pinballs. There is a library of punchboards: Black Cat, Texas Charley, Lucky Dollar. There is a jukebox stuffed with country-and-western hits and the kind of tin pan alley laments that sound poignant to the jilted and juiced. There are revolving wire Christmas trees laden with beef jerky and beer nuts; there are jars of boiled eggs and hot sausages and a larger jar in which pickles lounge like green Japanese in a bath. There is an animated plastic trout stream advertising Olympia beer (It's the Water"). There is a friendly middle-aged couple behind the bar.

A lot of brewy laughter and first-name calling jostles the smoke bank that hangs in the Pelican almost from ceiling to floor: the Pelican is in a shuffleboard league and competition is keen and boisterous when its team is matched against a tavern from Sacramento. But on that particular September evening, at a table near the bar, three men in their mid-twenties were in conversation grave and angry. “They've got a big fire of some kind going,” said Bubba. “Canyon's lit up like the streets of Hell.”

“Yeah, and you can hear that stupid music all the way over by Ritchy's dairy,” complained Fred.

“Hell, I heard it right out here in the parking lot,” said Bubba. Andy grunted and nodded.

“Well look,” said Fred, “if a bunch of queers and niggers and sluts want to have an orgy that's their business. But let 'em have it in San Francisco or L.A. or wherever they come from. Don't let 'em come around here and spread their filth. Folks around here don't want that shit. We've got sisters out on dates tonight, Andy and I have, out with decent boys. Those weirdos get full of that LDS, God knows what they might do. Got no morals, no respect for property—”

“There, you said it,” Bubba jumped in hotly. “No respect. No respect for authority, no respect for law and order, no damned respect for nothing. That's what the trouble is in this country today. Bunch of niggers and weirdos trying to tear down everything this country stands for. Falling right into the hands of the Commies. Uncle Sam's in a bind overseas, you think they'll help? Shit no. They want to dress up like cowboys and Indians. Go pick flowers. Make a bunch of loud noise and call it music. Want everybody to work and support 'em. While they take a bunch of drugs and attack innocent people and God knows what all.”

Andy's big blond head was bobbing like it was on the end of a pole. The other two took long pulls from their schooners. Wiping his mouth, Fred said, “Ain't there something the sheriff can do about that riffraff? Let's go have a talk with the deputy. Those scum been around for three weeks now. What are we paying the cops for?”

“Already talked to Dick,” said Bubba, belching. “They already nailed 'em once, you know. Searched 'em took 'bout eight of 'em off to jail. Rest of 'em hid their dope and needles somewhere. God, you shoulda heard what Dick said about those broads. None of 'em wears any underwear. Anyway, they can't bother 'em for a while, I guess. Unless they get some complaints. The queers got permission to be on that land. And the Cleevers who own the closest ranch, they ain't gonna complain. Liberal Democrats and Unitarians to boot. Hell, their oldest boy Billy's joined up with 'em.”