Another Roadside Attraction (41 page)

We drove out during the happy ending.

For me, the true happy ending was when Ziller's whopper weenie appeared in the distant sky. Bathed in neon, the steamed sausage rode the misty horizon as the soft side of man's nature sometimes rides over the raw hamburger of his depravity.

We pulled into the parking lot just in time to see two large male figures run from the roadhouse and vanish in the shadows of the pea fields.

After an uneasy night during which every dream was a bad one, I labored out of bed early Tuesday morning and drove to a telephone booth at a Chevron station on the outskirts of Mount Vernon. There I called the lab at Johns Hopkins and secured the results of the radiocarbon test. If I am not mistaken, I have already shared these with the reader.

The zoo looked peaceful enough upon my return. A trio of elderly ladies—widows perhaps—sat at the counter sipping juice. They were on their way to Victoria, B.C., to tour the gardens. At least that is what I gathered, for Amanda was conversing with them about the Butchart chrysanthemums. She was telling them that the Japanese consider the chrysanthemum a gastronomical delicacy. “Cannibals,” exclaimed one lady beneath her breath.

Over by the snake pen, where I did not notice him at first browsed a massive middle-aged man with a face as crimson as Mon Cul's behind. He aroused my suspicion, but who didn't: those old ladies could have had swords in their knitting bags. Poison gas. Napalm. As I passed through the door into the kitchen the man boomed, “Waitress! Two more wieners, please. These gorgeous reptiles give me an appetite.”

His voice was like a steel dog barking bricks.

I have never heard the voice before but I knew instantly to whom it belonged. Forty Hell's Angels roared up my colon. Parked their bikes in my diaphragm. Swaggered into my esophagus, ordered beer from my larynx and began shoving my tongue around.

Purcell was hiding behind the kitchen door. I could tell from his expression that he knew. Father Gutstadt had found himself a roadside attraction.

Father Gutstadt hung around the main room for a half-hour longer. He munched up four or five more hot dogs and asked morbid questions about the feeding habits of the snakes. Amanda treated him cheerfully. And eventually he went away. From an upstairs window I watched his Buick station wagon—a vehicle favored by nuns in the archdiocese of Seattle—proceed in the direction of Mount Vernon. He had made no overt attempt to pry into affairs at the zoo. However . . .

The remainder of the day was a jittery blur. Visitors, including Farmer Hansen and his oldest boy, were in and out with regularity, prohibiting a closure of the zoo or discussion between the four of us human adults who lived there. While the Zillers attended to business, Purcell and I huddled in their flat. Around four in the afternoon, we noticed an armed man in a skiff on the slough directly across the Freeway. He pretended to be after ducks, but we determined his target was in actuality the roadhouse. No local duck hunter would assume a post so close to the highway.

From the bathroom window we then observed two men working at a tractor, as if repairing it, in the field to the rear of our building. “They're closing in,” said Plucky. “We're being surrounded.”

At dinner, where only Amanda and Mon Cul consumed their mushroom soup with gusto, Purcell outlined a plan to bolt with the Corpse to the studios of Channel 5, Seattle's liberal TV station. I proposed to go out and confront the men who were spying on us, demand to speak with their leader, and offer to return the Corpse if certain concessions were made in Washington and Rome. Amanda thought we were both courting unnecessary risk. John Paul suggested that we wait another twenty-four hours before action of any kind. When asked to justify the delay, he uttered an African (or was it Indian?) proverb which, in its atavistic convolutions, made so little sense I cannot remember it.

Nothing was resolved. At one moment the zoo seemed like a place under siege, and the next it seemed, well, as “normal” as it had ever been.

Amanda brewed herb tea that had a calming effect, and then went up to sing Thor to sleep. Ziller took up watch at his sanctuary window and assigned Mon Cul a station at the front door of the roadhouse. Purcell was to remain close to the pantry and I was to retire to my quarters above the garage where I would have the most favorable view of the eastern perimeter: our flank. When I requested a weapon, John Paul gave me a blowgun. “Just don't inhale,” he warned. Thanks, pal.

Deciding that a second cup of the tranquilizing tea might prevent me from boring myself to death with spontaneous imitations of popular earthquakes, I lingered a while in the kitchen. Plucky and I fell to talking. He told me about growing up in rural Virginia, about fast cars and moonshine and free-for-alls after football games, about fishing in the Shenandoah and about the bitterness that sometimes tinged his relatives' reminiscences of the days when they had been landed gentry. He talked about his lifelong weakness for women. And about drugs and abortions and how, in dealing in them, he honestly was trying to do some good in life—to minister in areas where the more respectable humanists would not venture. He reiterated his theory that in our culture everything sooner or later boils down to a matter of a buck. But he expressed a desire to learn something about science from me. He said he realized that his knowledge of religion, politics, economics, art, philosophy and so on was fragmentary, and that he supposed someday he should make another stab at formal education, although he wasn't sure it would make him any happier. He quoted some lines from his friend Sund the poet to the effect that “it's surprising how many people are laughing once you get away from universities and stop reading newspapers.” Then he laughed himself.

I told him that he should at least devote some time to reflecting on the year he had spent as a monk of the Church, as that was an unusual educational experience in itself.

“Yeah, man,” he said, “I'd sure dig holing up in a cabin somewhere to sort and sift it for a few months. And I'll do it, too. If I get out of this mess with any fuzz on my balls.”

We parted warmly.

Not remembering which end of the blowgun was which, and as afraid to pick up one of the poison darts as I would have been afraid to goose a hornet, I put the crude weapon aside and crouched unarmed at my rear window. Every fifteen minutes or so the harvest moon would bleed through the tourniquet of cloud cover that conspired to squeeze every droplet of pictorial sentiment out of the Skagit landscape in order that a more refined Chinese mood might brush the countryside. In the aloof washes of moonlight no form seemed to stir. After what felt like thirty hours of uneventful scrutiny, I dropped asleep, awakening in the dishwater light of dawn with my head on the window ledge. I was as stiff as the drainpipe that gargled embalming fluid.

A ragged round of calisthenics set my blood to circulating again. Then, after ascertaining that the coast was clear, I hobbled across the dewy grove to the roadhouse. In the kitchen I found Amanda scalding the teapot. She wore a look of intense curiosity and little else. Just a pair of panties, as a matter of fact. The blood which I had just managed to set flowing only with great effort and with a sluggish and insubordinate lack of cooperation, now surged into my penis with such merry abandon that it caused it to stand on end.

I wondered what Amanda was doing up at such an early hour—but I needn't wonder long. The pantry was unlocked. And I could see in the dawn light that the Corpse was gone.

I feared the worst, but Amanda assured me that there had been no invasion while I slept. It was an inside job. John Paul and Plucky had fled with the Corpse. Mon Cul, too. They had all disappeared in the middle of the night.

“Well, I'll be damned,” I said. “I'll be double damned.”

Clues—and Amanda's noted intuition—led us to believe that the abduction was Ziller's idea. With the baboon's aid, he had attempted to steal away with the Corpse, but despite his jungle stealth, Plucky had caught him in the act and insisted on joining the caper. Of course, it was possible that Purcell had been in on it all along.

Perhaps Ziller had removed the Corpse in order to protect his wife, Baby Thor and me. Perhaps he had decided to dispose of it. Perhaps he and Plucky planned to expose it in some sensational or novel way. Perhaps he was going to display it in New York, where the art world had been clamoring for his comeback. I recalled his exhibition of ace-of-hearts magnetism and clockwork duckbills three seasons ago.

We could only guess why the body had been removed. And to where.

All we knew was that Christ Jesus was loose on the planet again; Jesus the mysterious powerhouse of the spirit, who having been betrayed once by a kiss and then by a religion, seemed destined to suffer less from his pagan opposites than from those kindred forces of righteousness who claimed to love him best. Ah, but he had a different set of disciples with him this time. Maybe they would stand him in better stead.

I felt a strong urge to pray, an equally strong urge to rip Amanda's panties off and make love to her on the floor, and a third urge that insisted that I leave the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve as swiftly as possible. But then there came a thunderous pounding at both the back door and the front, and I realized, like the president of the Amos 'n' Andy fan club, that my desires had become obsolete.

As with an odd mixture of subtlety and brute arrogance, the agents went about their business of search-and-interrogation, it became apparent that they were ignorant of the Corpse. They knew that occupants of the roadside zoo had been in possession of a piece of property on which the Vatican State placed highest premium, and on which hinged issues of international moment. They understood that it was of great concern to the United States government that the culprits be apprehended and the property returned to the Holy See. They understood that matters of national security and prestige were at stake. But—
but
—they had not been briefed as to the nature of the property at large. Nor were they likely to be. Therefore, the raid upon, and subsequent occupation of, the roadside zoo had its delicate side.

For example, though Amanda and I were questioned maliciously and at length, all questions concerned the whereabouts and intentions of Ziller and Purcell. Not once did the agents refer directly to the Roman “property,” and if it appeared that one of us was about to discuss it, they scrupulously changed the subject. (I teased them unmercifully, but Amanda refused to be unkind.)

They knew John Paul and Plucky had flown, the missing “property” with them. I gathered that our boys had clobbered an agent during their flight and had left him bound and gagged in the slough grass. When he was discovered at daybreak, he reported the escape. I gathered, further, that Father Gutstadt and the Felicitate monks had then taken up pursuit, anxious as they were that the Corpse should never be revealed, not even to their federal friends, and that co-operating FBI and CIA men had been left behind to guard Amanda and me and to seek information regarding the destination of the fugitives. The Felicitators were obviously calling the shots, and they had ordered their secular counterparts to steer clear of the issue of the “property.”

The zoo, particularly John Paul's sanctuary, was ransacked thoroughly. The agents had a huge amount of data on the fugitives, which is not surprising considering that Purcell had for some while been on the government's long list of undesirables, and that Ziller, as a result of his musical and artistic activities, was a mythic figure in certain circles of Americana. Ziller, especially, seemed to intrigue the agents, almost to obsess them; they referred to him darkly by his chosen title, “magician,” and regarded his very existence as a threat of an almost personal nature. On the other hand, they knew virtually nothing about Amanda and me, although they fingerprinted us and vowed that our pasts would not remain a secret long.

The zoo was closed and locked while throughout the day and night the agents searched and questioned. The following day, fresh orders must have arrived, for our captors moved their gear into my garage quarters (I am not permitted to leave the roadhouse) and from then on have not actively fraternized with us, although they have concocted schemes both crude and ingenious to continue their intimidation and harassment.

So (whew!) that brings the reader up to date. I had prayed (to whom I'm not sure) for one more day of writing, and now that day is ending and this report is current. I'm going to give my hemorrhoids a rest, if you don't mind. I'm going to soak my hemorrhoids in a tub of warm tap water, exactly as Lord Byron soaked his in the peacock surf of the Aegean Sea. And I shall not return to the typewriter until there is a break in developments here—or in the Sunshine State of Florida, where I understand a new class of celebrities are vacationing this year.

Well, I'm back. My Remington and I were parted less than four hours, during which time the letter arrived: the letter from John Paul Ziller about which Amanda's “voices” had prophesied. In reality, it was not a letter, nor was Ziller the author of it. Moreover, it did not “arrive” in any usual sense. Nevertheless, the “voices” were accurate enough to merit our respect if not our total trust. The circumstances of the contact were so:

The Puerto Rican timepiece, the one with the inlaid carnivals and overpopulated face, is what is known as a ninety-day clock. That is, it is designed to require rewinding every ninety days. This particular clock, however—due, no doubt, to its Latin temperament—invariably runs down after seventy-seven days. It, in fact, begins dragging its heels after seventy-five. Thus, when seventy-six days have passed, Amanda takes up its key, which is shaped like a bishop's gaudy staff, and tightens its springs. Today was the day of the winding ritual.

When Amanda reached behind the wall clock to grasp its key, she accidentally caressed the smooth cheek of a paper envelope. Retrieved, the envelope proved to be addressed to her in John Paul's handwriting (who else writes with a tailfeather plucked from a rosy spoonbill, so that each character penned seems to wade knee-deep in the very ink that nurtured it?). Lest an agent glimpse it, Amanda secreted the envelope in her small but aggressively feminine bosom, and hurried it upstairs. There, she ripped it open and removed its sole contents: a clipping snipped from a Seattle newspaper of some weeks past.