Another Roadside Attraction (10 page)

“Oh, awful,” said Farmer Hansen, with a Nordic insensitivity to irony. He drove away in his truck. Farmer Hansen had five children attending public schools in Mount Vernon and Conway. Perhaps that explains why it is now common belief among Skagit County pupils that Capt. John Kendrick invented the weenie sandwich in 1794.

Amanda climbed to the top of a big spruce tree, the better to absorb the Skagit twilight. She climbed slowly, using only one hand, for with the other arm she cradled her belly much as an avid bowler holds his favorite ball.

The sky was afloat with raw oysters and dead nuns, a grim canopy beneath which flew wild ducks by the dozens. It was a green sunset. The reds, the oranges, the purples which Amanda automatically associated with sunsets had been snuffed out in the soggy cloud pile, and the nearly invisible sun that sank—beyond the fields, sloughs, rock islands and tide flats—into Puget Sound, it looked like an unripe olive photographed through gauze.

From her perch Amanda could watch Baby Thor as he played on the moss near the base of the tree. And she could watch John Paul as he nailed silhouettes of sausages to the newly painted facade of the cafe. The sausages, about two feet in length, had been cut from plywood and covered with diffraction grating, a thin, synthetic, metallic silver material that picks up light and diffracts it so that its shiny surface is constantly rainbowed with moving spectra.

It is amazing, thought Amanda, how John Paul's weenie cutouts succinctly advertise our good common indigenous merchandise while at the same time suggesting the virility fetishes of numerous African tribes. I'm glad that John Paul recognizes that they are images of pleasure not of domination.

Amanda rested quietly in the boughs. Although the mid-October skies were gray, the air remained mild and mellow and she was comfortable in a cactus-colored corduroy jump suit beneath which there was not a thread of hampering underwear. She had devoted the day to arranging furnishings in the upstairs apartment, caring for Thor and baking panfuls of her notorious breads. Now she was due a rest. As she rested, she thought of many things. She thought of Life and said to herself, “It's okay. I want more of it.” She thought of Death and said to herself, “If I fall out of this frigging treetop, I'll soon enough learn its secrets.”

She thought of the planar fields—some plowed dark brown, others yellow-green with cabbage or broccoli left deliberately to seed—that straightened toward the horizon in every direction, the ones to the east tilting into hills, the ones to the west falling off into the Sound with a slow fuzzy expansiveness, and she said to herself, “Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that's no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it's to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.”

She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear. And she thought, as she often did at dusk, of the Infinite Goof. Mostly, however, she thought about the dilemma of the roadside zoo. A zoo without animals was no zoo at all.

It was peaceful in the spruce. The breeze about her was buttery; tropical in texture if not in temperature. A Canadian goose flapped over so close she could have reached up and grasped its honk—over the sloughs she'd fly, hanging on to the dark arch of that primordial noise as a subway passenger holds to a strap.

The moments passed. It was very nearly night when she suddenly began to descend the tree, climbing faster than she had moved up it; letting her silken bellyball bounce where it might. “John Paul,” she called. “John Paul.”

The sausage hammering ceased. Ziller answered:
"Umbatu jigi"
Or was it
"Ombedoo gigi"?
Or
"Ambudu geki"?
It was a Swahili phrase, probably, or Nilo-Hamitic or from a Bantu dialect and Amanda couldn't pronounce it, couldn't spell it and couldn't define it, but her husband always answered with it when she called, so it made sense.

“Insects,” yelled Amanda, squirreling down the spruce trunk.

“Insects? In the tree?”

“No. In the zoo.”

By this time she had reached the lowest limb and John Paul helped her down onto his shoulders. Her crotch pressed against the back of his neck. She hadn't bathed yet that day although they had made love the night before. She smelled like the leftovers from an Eskimo picnic. He was inflamed. (Didn't someone once say that odor is 80 per cent of love?)

“Insects in the zoo,” Amanda repeated.

John Paul took Baby Thor's hand and he walked mother and son toward the back door. “What do you mean?” he asked, interest as faint in his voice as scruples in a letter from a collection agency. She felt his long Egyptian neck arching back against her, forcing the lips of her vagina apart, and she was determined to resist until she could present her new idea. They were in the kitchen now. John Paul was lifting Thor into his high chair, on the tray of which awaited a fat banana. Amanda was still riding John Paul's shoulders.

“An insect zoo,” said Amanda. “Insects. The most numerous creatures on earth and perhaps the least understood. They don't require the space for their freedom that animals do. Most of them would be content to range over quite small areas. We could build wondrous cages for them, little palaces and pagodas, labyrinths and landing strips, jewel-like enclosures. Uh. Ummmmm.” The pressure against her vulva was unrelenting.

“Am I to ascertain that you are proposing a hexapodium, a roadside attraction of beetles and bugs?” Ziller was walking upstairs. Amanda had to duck to protect her head. Bony Watusi fingers kneaded her thighs.

“Why not? The cricket, the tarantula, the praying mantis, all thrive in captivity and make interesting pets. Many insects live relatively long lives and their upkeep is no problem. Bedbugs have been known . . . Oooops!” John Paul had dumped her onto the mattress. “. . . have been known to live for a year on a single meal. Oh my God.”

“I could live for many years on these,” said Ziller, nibbling madly.

Amanda's jump suit was unzipped, throat to crotch. Between the parted corduroy her pink belly rose like the mushroom that conquered Hollywood.

“Insects are fascinating. Many of their senses are more highly developed than our own. Our tongues, for example, can't tell the difference between sugar solutions and dissolved saccharine. But bees, wasps and butterflies, while they love sugar water, won't sip a saccharine substitute at all.”

Meanwhile, Ziller was doing a bit of tasting himself. Amanda was melting from the glory of it. She felt like the frosting left on the spoon that iced the Cake of the World.

“Insects have hearts and blood circulation systems just as we do. But did you know that it's impossible to take a beetle's pulse?”

Why had she said that? It was irrelevant. She was losing her rationale. John Paul was out of his loincloth. He hovered over her. His rigid member rested against her belly like a hoe handle against a pumpkin. Looking at it, all she could think to say was, “The European cabbage butterfly has the most remarkable coiled proboscis. Gasp!”

Amanda was a stubborn woman. She was determined to have her say. With the mental equivalent of a Dutch boy finger, she tried to plug the hole in the glandular dike from whence her hot juices gushed. “Well, look, don't you think it's a sound idea? We could have an ant farm and a flea circus. Some insect species are so beautiful. The giant rhinoceros beetle, the harlequin bug. And all of them needn't be living. We could exhibit our scarab collection. And my rare mounted moths from South America. And, of course, our tsetse fly which isn't even . . .
ALIVE
!!” At that moment Ziller had entered her, one-twelfth of a fathom deep. The dike broke, drowning the Dutch boy. And countless wondrous insects of the world.

Amanda shook John Paul awake in the middle of the night. “No,” he thought. “It couldn't be. The baby isn't expected for three more months."

His bride was propped on one elbow. He could tell she had just come out of trance: Her face was drawn, her eyes were as lifeless as blotters. A silver candle was burning in her sanctuary—behind the perfumed curtains. Damn. She'd been out of bed. “Civilization is dulling my senses,” Ziller mused. “In the jungle nothing could have stirred within a fifty-yard radius without awakening me.”

“John Paul,” Amanda asked in a soft, tired voice, “are you aware of the animals that are going extinct?”

“Well, er, yes, I suppose I am.”

“I don't mean the big beasts of Africa that you miss so much. I'm referring to wildlife right here in this country. Threatened with extinction are: the timber wolf, red wolf, Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel, grizzly bear, San Joaquin kit fox, Florida panther, Caribbean monk seal, Guadalupe fur seal, key deer, Columbian white-tailed deer, Sonoran pronghorn, Indiana bat, black-footed ferret and Florida sea cow (manatee).”

John Paul jerked with guilt at the mention of “Indiana bat.” He suddenly recalled that when Amanda awakened him he had been dreaming of his former wife. They were carrying her out of the Kansas City Opera House, in the middle of Act II of
Die Fledermaus
. Her bat cries were obscuring the mezzo-soprano, drool dripped from her gentle mouth like pearls from the anus of an angel. Ziller shuddered and drew the covers around his shoulders.

“And those are just the mammals,” Amanda continued. “There are birds: Hawaiian goose (nene), Aleutian goose, Tule white-fronted goose, laysan duck, Hawaiian duck, Hawaiian dark-rumped petrel, California condor, Florida Everglade kite, Hawaiian hawk (ii), bald eagle, Attawater's greater prairie chicken, masked bobwhite, whooping crane, Yuma clapper rail, Eskimo curlew, Puerto Rican parrot, ivory-billed woodpecker, dusky seaside sparrow, crested honeycreeper (akohekohe), etc., etc.

“That's an irony that Plucky Purcell would adore,” added Amanda, sounding a bit brighter. “American economic growth—the cutting of forests, industrial pollution of air and streams, the spread of suburbia—is driving the bald eagle into extinction. And the bald eagle is the very whole and exact traditional symbol of the American Republic. You'd think that a people as hung up on abstractions as ours are would be rather uneasy about the prospects of murdering off its own symbol.”

If such conversation was an awkward intruder in the 3
A.M
. of his consciousness, John Paul did not let on. Rather, he said, “I read in a natural history book once that eagles are cursed with chronic bad breath. Don't smile. It's a fact. One knows, if one reads magazine ads or watches television, how Americans feel about odors of the head and body. Could that explain their lack of concern over the eagle's demise?”

Life was draining back into Amanda's eyes, as if her pupils had, too, been threatened with extinction only to receive an evolutionary reprieve. “Imagine, a cleanliness-obsessed Puritan society selecting a national symbol with habitual halitosis. But, seriously, John Paul, listen to me. There are reptiles and amphibians going, also: the alligator, blunt-nose leopard lizard, San Francisco garter snake, Santa Cruz long-toed salamander, Texas blind salamander and the black toad.”

“And fishes?”

Yes, magi. Fishes: shortnose sturgeon, longjaw cisco, green-back cutthroat trout, Montana West-slope cutthroat trout, Gila trout, Arizona (Apache) trout, desert dace, blue pike, humpback chub, Colorado River squawfish, Devil's Hole pupfish, Owens River pupfish, Gila top minnow, Maryland darter, Clear Creek gambusia . . . you don't want me to list them all?”

“That won't be necessary.”

“Well, I thought I'd keep you informed.”

“Thank you. You believe there is something to consider here? For our zoo, I mean.”

“Possibly. We needn't try to save them all. Couldn't be done. We might concentrate on one species. Like the San Francisco garter snake. The pair we have now, I think they are more the Los Angeles garter snake. But Smokestack Lightning could get us a couple of the San Francisco variety. He's got connections in the snake world. Perhaps they'd mate.”

John Paul reached for his bedside drum and made a matrix of sound roll from it with the edge of his right hand and the palm of his left “Rhythm. Creation, evolution, extinction.” He hit the drum again. “Rhythm. Birth, growth, death. Rhythm. Creation, evolution, extinction. Extinction is part of the natural rhythm of the universe. Why screw around with God's rhythm section?”

“We already have. The creatures that have gone extinct in the past were gradual victims of natural processes, such as changes in climatology, to which they failed to adapt. But man has
interfered
in the organic, if haphazard, order of things. Through his own greed and indifference—I sound like Plucky again—he is driving dozens of species out of business at a rapid rate.”

“Everything happens faster these days. Sometime I will explain to you why that is. In the meantime, how do we know that man's actions, and their seemingly dire results, aren't rhythmic; aren't just another ordained manifestation of the universal ebb and flow?”

“We know because my finer instincts tell me they are not.”

“You, yourself, determined that the life-span of an individual butterfly is precisely the right length. By extension, wouldn't that determinant also apply to the life-span of a species?”

Amanda flushed, but not much.

“My magician, if you hope to embarrass me by calling attention to my contradictions, forget it. I was unenlightened enough at one time to believe in the finality of death. I'm not naive enough now to believe in the finality of extinction. Except on a purely formal level. You've been close enough to the source to have learned that beings never really go extinct. Their forms may become obsolete but their essential energies are eternal. The only thing that ever disappears is the
shape
of energy. Long after the visible, recognizable garter snake has vanished, its energy will hang on. [Note: Marx Marvelous, who was later to argue mightily with many of the Zillers' mystic pronouncements, would have to concur with Amanda's foregoing statement for it has scientific basis. As the German biologist Ernst Haeckel established, no particle of living energy is ever extinguished, no particle is ever created anew.] Dinosaurs are still with us in the form of energy. There may be some dinosaur energy in
you
. There is plenty of saber-toothed tiger energy around. And trilobite energy. I ran into some woolly mammoth energy just the other day. So, my sun, what we would be preserving would be merely shapes; containers, as it were, although the containers themselves are composed of energy, are intrinsic and substantial and interwoven communications of energy and do not merely hold it as a jug holds milk. Moreover, the physical appearance of these containers is beautiful; the design, the color, the functions of sensation and movement, the sense action and discernible psychic life. In a way, our zoo of endangered species would be like a museum, but a museum of
full
containers rather than of empty ones as is usually the case. A museum of living shapes that perhaps have outlived their function; therefore a museum outside of time, above time, above death; therefore a poetics.”