Another Roadside Attraction (9 page)

What had gotten into Amanda? She was never moved to pedantry unless . . . She cocked one ear to listen for the telltale thunderclap. But all she heard was Mon Cul shuffling into the room and up to Ziller's side, where he bowed and scraped and grinned apologetically like some creaky old back-porch nigger. Ziller squatted and met the baboon eye to eye, but Mon Cul backed away with an Uncle Tom one-step, opals of spittle popping in the corners of his obsequious smile.

“You Judas creep,” scolded Ziller. “You who've lived a life of hedonistic abandon, you would insinuate that I've held you captive? If there is a master in our relationship it is
you
who has owned
me
.” The baboon barked uproariously and turned four somersaults. And although Ziller laughed and said, “You'd better watch your manners or you'll end up in Detroit and you know what happens to baboons there,” he was mired to his cerebral axle in troubled thoughts.

And over in a corner on a sunflowered pillow, Amanda, too, was subdued as she remembered the thousands of butterflies she had enveloped in her net. “At least,” she thought, “I never once introduced one to chloroform.” Her rationalization only shaded the hues of her shame.

It was a hell of a way to start a roadside zoo.

In the absence (perhaps, alas, permanent) of John Paul Ziller, this writer was about an hour ago allowed to look through the missing magician's possessions. After all, the FBI and CIA have rummaged Ziller's and Purcell's belongings so thoroughly there could be little left of intimacy or value. Your correspondent found what he was seeking, however: an English language dictionary. It should be quite useful in the completion of this document and he should have thought of it sooner. Perhaps from here on out the reader will note some improvement in vocabulary, if not in overall what-do-you-call-it.

Already the author has learned that
dawk
is just another word for
dak
, and that
dawt
is Scottish for
daut
. What do you make of that?

"Magnificent!” exclaimed John Paul Ziller, pronouncing the word like he was a Kansas City intellectual describing the Louvre to his sister-in-law who'd called to tell him to bring his vacation slides over some other night because she'd burned the spaghetti sauce and the baby had colic. “Truly wondrous. Appraising it now I feel a bit like Bernard Berenson standing before Michelangelo's 'Temptation,' 'quaffing rare draughts of unadulterated energy' and itching to get his cultivated meathooks on the heroic buttocks of Eve. Though in truth, due to its humility and patience, it's less a Michelangelo than a Renoir: the roundness, the warmth, the rosy delight, the
joie de vivre
, the casual eroticism, the full and robust charm. It is at once a dramatically overflowing embodiment of the life force and an honest monument to the occasional genius of the plebeian palate."

With that blast of language, Ziller stepped back against a fir trunk to gain a slightly more distant perspective on the thirty-foot hot dog.

Amanda was shocked. She had never seen him like this: smiley, ebullient. Not once in the weeks she'd known him, worked and played with him, listened to his drums and flutes and plans, pored over his maps and charts, mingled her beauty and force with his, trapped explosive ribbons of his semen in her various bodily orifices, not once had he replaced his high jungle pride with such easy enthusiasm. It did not displease her, however. She walked to his side and stood with him, the better to admire the object of his excitement: the mighty mammoth king of weenies which he had painted in oils on thirty-four feet of plywood paneling.

“Note how the wrinkles in the bun—it's a steamed-soft bun, of course—fold dynamically, intuiting hidden movement as if they were folds in silks draped about a Renaissance Madonna. The texture of the bun is soft but not rubbery; it has the luster of a prairie moon. The sausage itself possesses a kind of peasant-folk serenity: it lounges in that bun as plump with confidence as a Polack bowling champion snoozing in a backyard hammock on the afternoon before the Greak Lakes regional finals. A simple fellow, the sausage, but the way his gentle contours catch the light and hold it gleaming, one senses something glorious in his spirit. I have molded his bulk—can you sense the physical participation of the artist in the formal objectification of the weenie's presence?—into a continuous volume that consumes vast quantities of space; it is three-dimensional, tactile, larger than life, as rotund and good-natured as Falstaff but not entirely devoid of Hamlet's rank. And what glamour is lent to the scene by the golden cloak of mustard, by the jazzy, jumpy play of flat patterns in the relish. Ahem.”

Amanda licked her lips in amazement, more at the verbiage than at the inspiration of it, although it was indeed a hot dog of grand proportions. The panel was thirty-four feet long and nine feet high, the red hot was thirty feet in length and a little less than six feet in height and that weenie was not just loitering there in empty space. She perceived at the left end of the bun a green valley with cornfields and a river and some men in a boat on the river drinking beer and trolling for catfish; and across the river was a stadium with a baseball game in progress, probably a World Series because of all the dignitaries in the stands—political figures, movie stars and their counterparts in crime. In the twenty-four-inch space at the right end of the hot dog there was a brown-yellow plain with just a few thorny trees a-thirsting on it and a pride of lions resting in the stingy shade beneath one of those trees, and far in the distance, too far for the warm lions to bother with, a herd of wildebeests was kicking up dust, and even further in the distance Mt. Kilimanjaro jumped up like God's own sugar-tit, and in a modest encampment at the foot of the peak, E. Hemingway was cleaning his Weatherby 375 magnum (not trusting the native boys to handle such an instrument) and slurping his gin. In some mythic gesture of interracial world solidarity, the frankfurter bridged Africa and America in a manner that no United Nations mission or foreign aid program could hope to equal. It quickened the pulse. And reminded Amanda of John Paul's testimonial of a few days prior in which he professed that the sausage was one of the few achievements of Western technology that he could genuinely respect.

Up above that ambassador hot dog, in the night-blue sky above it, was to Amanda's eyes the most thrilling segment of the whole tableau: a skyful of vanilla stars and pastel planets and rushing comets and constellations (Jupiter was in the house of Gemini) and novae and nebulae and meteors dissolving in spittoons of fire and a tropical moon laid out against a cloud bank like a radioactive oyster on the half shell, and dominating the entire sidereal panorama was Saturn—silver and mysterious mushy omelet of ammonia and ice girded by its sharp gas rings like an avatar egg with a hip-hugger aura. And all this astronomical grandeur merely a backdrop for the mustard-draped shoulders of the cosmic colossal weenie, a sight to put a lump in the throat of the most unambitious Nebraska piglets, bar none.

The hot dog was to be erected on the roof of the road-house. Some workmen were coming from Mount Vernon with a crane. In a day or two, as soon as the paint was dry. It would be visible for miles.

The Zillers had reached no decision on the contents of the zoo. They were opposed to cages. Society was opposed to wild animals running loose in restaurants. The proper compromise evaded them. Amanda consulted the
I Ching
. She induced a trance. With no fit results. They had agreed to forget it for a while. In the meantime they could concentrate on what items they would sell in their shop, on what foods they would serve.

Something simple, they both insisted on simplicity. They had no intention of wasting their days cooking and washing dishes for tourist hordes. They shuddered at the thought. “Hot dogs,” John Paul had suggested. “Good old-fashioned hot dogs. With steam-softened buns. We'll keep our buns in a steam cabinet the way they did when men were men and the sausage was the backbone of an empire. We'll offer fresh onions, raw or fried. A variety of mustards, catsups and relishes. Bacon, chopped nuts, melted cheese, sauerkraut—optional at additional cost, like whitewalls or power steering. The sausages we will carefully select for size and flavor; 100 per cent meat sausages (a little heavier on the beef than the pork), the best we can buy, the finest offspring of German technical expertise and American ingenuity.”

Amanda was not at ease with the prospect of operating a hot dog stand. She was a vegetarian.

Due to the fact that she occasionally consumed milk and milk derivatives, she could not be considered a
strict
vegetarian. “Amanda,” purists would scold, “milk is an animal product. How can you drink milk and still consider yourself a vegetarian?” And Amanda would answer, “The label states that this carton contains activated ergosterol. Have you ever heard of a cow that activated ergosterol?” But as vegetarians are a stubborn lot, the argument was never resolved.

At any rate, Amanda protested. “I shan't impose my beliefs on other people,” she said, “but my conscience would turn purple were I, a vegetarian, to earn an income selling meat. There are limits to the decency of irony. Why, I'd feel like a Mormon.” (Not that Amanda had any particular prejudice against Mormons, but she was a curious young woman, as many persons had established, and it confounded her curiosity that a denomination of nonsmoking teetotalers like the Mormons could justify supporting itself through the operation of supermarkets and drugstores in which alcoholic beverages and tobacco are prominent wares.)

John Paul was untroubled by any undue reverence for meat. “Look,” he said, “the world is overrun with animals, great and small, fanged and feathered, all eating one another in happy harmony. Man is the party pooper. He'll eat pig flesh and pretend it's pork. He'll devour a chicken but not a kitten, a turkey but not a Turk. It isn't that he is principled, particularly. In fact, we all gut somebody every day. But it's sneaky, symbolic, unappetizing, ego-supportive, duty to God and country—never with a good pot roast in mind. No cheerful, honest cannibalism. Alas, alas.”

Amanda was not much swayed by John Paul's remarks. Incidentally, though, her vegetarian sentiments received a bit of a shake a few months later when Marx Marvelous said to her: “The cow became a sacred symbol to the Hindu because it gave milk and chops and hides. It nourished the babies and kept the old folks warm. Because it provided so many good life-supporting things, it was regarded as an embodiment of the Universal Mother, hence holy. Then it occurred to some monk or other, some abstract scholarly kook, as you would say, that gee, folks, since the cow is holy we maybe shouldn't be eating it and robbing its udder. So now the Hindu has got sacred cows up to here but no more milk and steaks. They starve in plain view of holy herds so big only Hopalong Cassidy could stop them if they took a notion to stampede. The spiritual man's beef against beef is the result of a classic distortion. It's another case of lost origins and inverted values.” But that was Marx Marvelous and that came later.

For the present, they worked it out. They had to. While the interior of the cafe was now clean and freshly painted, the exterior had hardly been touched. A warning: the sky bulged like the sooty cheeks of an urban snowman—it hadn't rained yet but it wouldn't be long. The downpour was overdue. Action was required. So, Amanda reluctantly gave her consent to frankfurters and, in concession, John Paul agreed to a ban on dangerous fluids such as coffee and soda pop. For beverages they would serve the juices of fruits and vegetables. Amanda would squeeze them fresh in her automatic juicer. She had fun planning zesty combinations. Apple-papaya juice, for example. Carrot-orange. Spinach-tomato-cucumber. Good health to all! “People will think this a real funny place,” said Ziller, “when they can't buy their coffee and Coca-Cola.”

It was a funny place anyway. A roadside zoo with no animals. Except two garter snakes and a tsetse fly. And the tsetse fly was not even alive.

A trailer of rain fell for an hour at sunrise, but the afternoon was dry. The hot dog was erected on the roof of the cafe. It looked good. It could be seen for miles.

Ziller's magnificent sausage became a landmark in Skagit County. Directions were given in relation to it. “Turn right a couple hundred yards past the big weenie,” some helpful farmer might say. From that time on, Mount Vernon school children would be obliged to compose annual essays on “The Sausage: Its Origin, Its Meaning and Its Cure.”

To this day it hovers in plump passivity above the fertile fields. It is a perfect emblem for the people and the land.

A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquillity in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.

Consider the peaceful repose of the sausage compared with the aggressiveness and violence of bacon.

"Er, ah, this quite an interesting place you fixing up here.” The speaker was Gunnar Hansen, a thirty-fivish pea farmer from down the road a ways.

“Thank you, Mr. Hansen,” smiled Amanda.

Gunnar Hansen. Yes. This mystic old Chinese valley (with Dutch undertones) in northwestern America is inhabited almost exclusively by Scandinavians.

“But you folks, your name ain't Kendrick,” Farmer Hansen said with uncertainty.

“No,” Amanda assured him, “our name is Ziller.”

“Well, er, ah, who's this Kendrick?” asked Farmer Hansen, trying to sound jocular through an accent the color of a midwinter suicide. He was nodding his tombstone head at the new neon-bordered sign that stretched across the roadhouse facade just below the great giant sausage:
CAPT. KENDRICK MEMORIAL HOT DOG WILDLIFE PRESERVE
. That's how the sign read, in letters the height of Jewish ghetto tailors.

“Shame on you, Mr. Hansen,” Amanda said. “You don't know your local history.”

“Well, I thought I did.”

“Captain John Kendrick. You can look him up in
History of the Pacific Northwest
by George W. Fuller. Captain Kendrick was one of the first fur traders and explorers to operate in the Puget Sound region. Came here in 1788. On slim evidence he was reported to be the first white man to navigate the Strait of Juan de Fuca and to circumnavigate Vancouver Island. He did quite a bit of exploring but unfortunately he neglected to leave any records of his discoveries. History has repaid him for that oversight by generally ignoring him. After about five years here, he tired of the Northwest skin trade and set sail for the Sandwich Islands. He arrived on December 12, 1794 and was immediately killed by a shot from a British ship which was saluting him.”