Another Roadside Attraction (31 page)

Were I trying to compose the Great American Novel instead of factually documenting a particular event, I would draw my characters not from the Zillers (as worthy as they may be and as much as I've come to care for them) nor from the likes of Salvadore Gladstone Tex, nor even from the young long-haired itinerants who, by the scores, called at the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve as if it were a stopping-off place on a vast socio-religious pilgrimage; no, my subjects would be selected from among the tourists and vacationers—the ordinary clerks and machinists and salesmen, their wives and kids—for just as the zoo could not have thrived without their patronage, the nation itself is wedded to their aggressive mediocrity (they are in the stuff of America as the corn is in the pudding), and it is upon their reaction to the discovery of Christ's body that the future of Western civilization may well rest: whether the revelation of the Corpse will expedite an evolved golden era free of religious superstition, false hopes and crippling guilts or whether it will plunge humanity into a horrible dark age of helplessness and despair, is entirely up to them. Already they sense (as, in a more articulate and less fearful manner, do the young itinerants) that something is amiss in mankind's motor, that enormous changes are swelling on every horizon—and they are skittish. Just observing them at the zoo, munching frankfurters and gathering amusement from the pretty painted fleas tilting their chariots on the sharp turns of the track, I accumulated fair insights into the national mood, and were some perceptive writer to follow them back to their beauty shoppes in Salt Lake City, their barbecue furnaces in Moline, their TV dens in Riverside, Massillon and Fargo, they might be looked through as living microscopes, magnifying in ignorance both the dangerous germs and precious bacteria that advance upon the organs of our race. But that is not my assignment. I simply haven't time for that.

Surely, the reader can understand my hurry. Outside my door are armed agents who delight in reminding me that prison—or worse—awaits me as soon as the magician and the athlete are nabbed with their precious booty in whatever Florida cypress grove they cringe. That, however, is not the only reason why I escalate the drafting of my report. These past few days of constant sitting at the Remington have succeeded in aggravating old rectal troubles. It is said that Napoleon suffered most of his life from similar afflictions, and in fact, may have lost his battle with Wellington due to an acute attack of hemorrhoids. If hemorrhoids could cost Napoleon his Waterloo, what toll might they take on your diligent correspondent? Amanda's butterfly songs do not altogether cheer me as I sit in the smoking wreckage of my second largest, if not second loveliest, orifice.

Jesus crossed the Atlantic on Trans World Airlines Flight No. 115. Despite rumors of his ascension, it was probably the longest trip he ever took.

I write “probably” because there are parties who would have us believe that Jesus got around. Pardon me, but I reject out of hand the notion that the Messiah spent his “missing years” on another planet. I believe that the flying saucer was Jesus' customary mode of transportation no more than I believe that Mon Cul knows an English word that rhymes with orange. There is no limit to the nonsense some people expect you to swallow.

I have heard that Jesus went to India for his missing years. Not likely. Just because, by Hindu and Buddhist standards, his “radical” teachings were old hat does not prove he went to India to formulate them. Jesus read a lot. His favorite subject, next to Jewish culture (he would have been attracted but not sympathetic to
Portnoy's Complaint
), was philosophy. Moreover, his hometown was just off the Great Road that connected the Roman world with the Far East, and caravans were often camped beneath Nazareth hill. An inquisitive young man could pick up a lot of philosophy around a caravan campfire. On the other hand, there is no reason why, at least once, he could not have gone up the Great Road to India himself. If you were Jesus and had missing years to kill, where would
you
go?

Nearly Normal Jimmy is of the opinion that Jesus took his missing years and went to Tibet. Without blinking a lash, Nearly Normal Jimmy will tell you that Jesus spent the prime years of his life on a lamasery prayer rug, charging his spiritual batteries for the work ahead. Nearly Normal Jimmy believes all things enlightened originated in Tibet. Adolf Hitler was of the same persuasion. I'm not kidding, its a fact. Hitler had a mystical streak as wide as the Rhine. Hitler believed the Aryans a super-race and his anthropologists traced the roots of Aryan stock to Tibet. Hitler went all out for Tibetan friendship. In 1939, there were more high lamas in Berlin than any place in the world outside of Lhasa. Nearly Normal Adolf.

Any way you look at it, Jesus was covering new territory. Rome to Seattle. Inside a plaster cast. Inside a wooden crate. Inside the freight belly of TWA Flight 115. The Atlantic Ocean lay beneath him like a frozen sky. And then the land. At the exact moment that his plane crossed over Newfoundland, an elderly St. John's lady, known for her visions of the Virgin, had an epileptic fit.

George O. Supper, taking Jesus to the air freight terminal, almost had a fit himself. His anxiety was unwarranted, however. He had shipped to New York or London at least a dozen of his plaster figures, and the customs officials were used to them by now. (Accustomed to them, I might say if I were of a mind to pun.) At 5
A.M
., after a night of tremors, the customs men welcomed something to joke about. They deserved their laughs. They were men of the Italian tradition. Their culture had produced Michelangelo, Giotto, Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael and Titian, to name but a few old masters. Who could blame them for poking fun at those crude plaster ghosts the Yankee Supper insured so heavily and labeled “Works of Art.” The customs men were laughing so hard they failed to notice that on the Yankee's latest pale, lumpy and baseless “sculpture” the plaster was not yet dry. Nor did they pay particular attention to the fact that this last Supper (gulp!) was addressed not to a museum or gallery but to a “memorial hot dog wildlife preserve.” Crazy Americans, anyway.

Plucky Purcell boarded the Jet Liner and sat down by the only unescorted female passenger on the flight. Her beauty was moderate, but Plucky needed her voice, her scents, to ease his nerves. He had been up all night—building the shipping crate, locating a fence to buy his gold. In the pizza-colored dawn, the implications of his body snatch were coming home to him. A shudder slid down his athletic backbone like a moon-mad snake down an alcoholic's watch chain. He turned to the young woman passenger. He gave her his cement-mixer grin. The plane cleared the field and she fell immediately to sleep.

For the time being, Purcell wasn't terribly worried. He had analyzed the situation and drawn temporary comfort from his reasoning. (A tender “good morning” from his fellow passenger would have helped, but he would get along without it.) Only a few very powerful officials in the Church would know of the existence of the Corpse, he reasoned. It had been a night of chaos. Possibly, they did not know as yet that that most dangerous of skeletons had been liberated from Rome's closet. Even if they had discovered the theft, they would be limited as to steps they might take for recovery. Obviously, they would not be able to spread a general alarm. They would be afraid to alert the Italian police. Oh, if he, the Mad Pluck, were under suspicion, they might ask the help of secular authorities in tracking him down, but in the confusion of the moment they would not have settled on a suspect. Sooner or later, he would be their target and their agents would sniff for his trail, no question of that. But that was a day or two away. Meanwhile, he would have made it to the roadside zoo. He and his cargo. And then . . . ? Plucky lit a cigar. The stewardess ordered him to extinguish it. He snarled at her. “A woman is not always a woman, but a good cigar is a horse of a different feather,” he growled.

Somewhere over the sea, over a pod of whales or a school of anchovy or some flotsam or some other confetti of the sea, the girl beside him awakened. Purcell could tell she had been dreaming, much as he and the Pope had been dreaming only nine hours earlier. “I just had a geographical dream,” the girl said in a voice nearly as soundless as the jet. When he pressed her for details (before she turned to the window), she said, “It was a geographical dream. You know, one to file with your
National Geographics
.”

That was the week for coming out of dreams, trailing clouds of glory.

There is a time in the life of every little girl when she wants to grow up to be a nurse. There may be a time, too, when she wants to be a movie star or a cowgirl, but those fantasies quickly pass, while the nurse fantasy may linger—with intermittent cowgirl and movie star flashes—from kindergarten through the first years of high school. She will nurse her dolls for broken limbs or sawdust hemorrhages, scolding them when they fall out of bed or do not eat their mud-puddle soup. She will daydream of caring for real little babies and of giving aid and comfort to whole hospitals full of nice men like her daddy. The archetypal mother goddess, the ancient image of woman as nature's healer and restorer, stirs early in the breast of the female child. The experience of playing “doctor” with the little boys in the neighborhood in no way diminishes her ambition (O the pre-pubic thrill of the backyard enema!).

Amanda, an exception to the rule, never aspired to be a nurse. She mended the wings of dragonflies and in other ways fulfilled her duties as guardian of the life process, but there was a minimum of charm for her in the notion of wearing starched uniforms and performing mundane chores under orders from ill-tempered spinsters. Amanda did not want to be a movie star or a cowgirl, either.

“What are you going to be when you get big?” her father asked.

Amanda, in an orange sunsuit, had tried of chasing moths and was studying the peculiar afternoon shadow projected across the countryside by Bow Wow Mountain. “There is no name for what I'm going to be when I get big,” she answered.

On the Rand McNally Atlas map of the world, the United States of America is colored pale lime. I assume it was an arbitrary choice of color. Not symbolic and certainly not realistic. As anyone who has flown cross-country well knows, the U.S.A. is greenish brown.

There may be patches of gray, yellow and blue, some solid chartreuses and some solid chocolates; but generally America, from the altitude of an airliner, is a light brown flecked, smeared or mottled with various shades of dull green. That color scheme is maintained from East Coast to West Coast, an admirable if monotonous consistency. One of the few places where the scheme is altered, where it really breaks down and becomes a color experience of a different order, is in the area of northwestern Washington. After hours of flight above lackluster greenish brown, a Seattle-bound plane will eventually cross the Cascade Mountain Range and suddenly find itself gliding over the open throat of an emerald. The scene below is moist and brilliant; a light, bright, pervasive green at once so misty and so vivid that one suffers the illusion that one has come at last to the only region of our nation that is truly green, the place where green turns Zen cartwheels in celebration of the death of brown.

Jesus spent most of his days in brown. Jesus walked on stony places and thin soil. Jesus climbed gaunt hills and naked mounds. Jesus slept in austere deserts and in towns made entirely of clay. Jesus was a child of the scorpionlands, a poet of the dun flanks of Galilee. The Mideast sun had baked brown into his eyes so thoroughly that not even the lush Plain of Gennesaret could relieve his thirsty vision. Now, thanks to Plucky Purcell, Jesus of the ultimate thorny brown was landing amidst the ultimate melting green. It is unfortunate that Jesus was not aware of his new surroundings. It would be interesting to observe what effects such a nebulous, green landscape would have upon the teachings of such a stark, brown philosopher.

As far as Purcell could determine, there were no Catholic agents waiting at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. He rode the limousine to the Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle, took a taxi to a service station that rented U-Drive trucks, leased a van, drove back to the airport (stopping for a Big Mac burger and a root beer), picked up the destined crate and headed north on Interstate 5. It was about 4
P.M
. when his tired eyes caught sight of the giant weenie. “There's the giant weenie,” he said aloud. There was no response from the crate.

Having come finally to the Ziller's fabled roadhouse, Plucky threw himself through the door with an abandon that would have broken the joints of the gods. He traded his exhaustion and anxiety for a bouquet of surprise. “The message sent on the wind” (as the Tibetans call telepathy) had failed to advise Amanda of Purcell's visit, although since moving to the roadhouse she had known that momentous meetings were to transpire there. There was hugging and laughter and poetic exchanges and passings of the hashish pipe. Baby Thor climbed aboard Plucky's broad shoulders, and Mon Cul, bitten by the festive mood, executed a series of the most amazing somersaults. A toasty joy set the zoo aglow as the old friends savored reunion. But then there came the business of the Corpse. . . .

They opened the crate in the pantry. As John Paul, using his sculptor's tools, peeled the plaster from the mummy, Plucky paced. Ziller had never seen him nervous. Tremulous knees seemed incongruous on such a healthy specimen of manhood. Purcell, however, could recall other moments of knee flutter. First game on the Duke varsity. Opening kickoff. The ball seemed to float for hours in the tobacco-yellow Carolina September, hovering against the Indian summer blue sky like a sausage with gland trouble hovering over a meadow of hungry hobbits, lolling toward his end of the field with no more movement than a sailboat in a Dufy watercolor, tumbling finally toward his waiting embrace like a suicidal actress falling in slow motion at the climax of a French film, end over end in lazy lyrical descent while every eye in the bourbon-bathed stadium focused upon the much-heralded sophomore sensation; and eleven angry men, none smaller than himself, thundered toward him at one hundred times the speed of the buoyant football. A muted whump as the pigskin settled in his arms. Squeezed it harder than he had ever squeezed any hot-pants cheerleader in his daddy's old Pontiac. A leap down the field. Five yards. Fifteen. Then the nauseating crush. The breath flew out of him as wildly as if a buffalo in a rocking chair had suddenly rocked back on his lungs. Hit the ground so hard beads of blood rolled out of both nostrils. The crowd moaned with him, and together they, Plucky and the thousands, felt the tension evaporate in the mellow air.