Another Roadside Attraction (40 page)

“The idea of a spiritual—invisible—being was the result of the new and unnatural fear of death. And the idea of a
Supreme
Spiritual Being is the result of becoming alienated from the workings of nature: when man could no longer observe the solid, material processes of life, and identify with them, he had to invent God in order to explain how life happened and why death happened.”

“Now just a minute,” snapped Jesus.

“Maybe I should run along,” said Tarzan, sticking his harmonica into the myrrh-stained Arab silk that girded his loins.

“No,” said Jesus. “If you have more to say, then out with it. Where does Pan fit into this blasphemy? And I?”

“If you're sure you want to hear it. Confidentially, you look a bit under the weather to me, pal. You could use a pound of steak and some fries.”

“Do continue,” sputtered Jesus through his drool.

“The point is, J. C., we had a unified outlook on life. We even figured out, in our funky way, how the sun and moon and stars fit in to the process. We didn't draw distinctions between the generative activity of seeds and the procreative cycles of animals. We observed that growth and change were essential to everything in life, and since we dug life, when it came time to satisfy our inner needs we naturally enough based our religion on the transformations of nature. We were direct about it. Went right to the source. The power to grow and transform was not attributed to abstract spirits—to a magnified ego extension in the sky—but was present in the fecundity of nature. We worshiped the reproductive organs of plants and animals. 'Cause that's where the life force lies.”

Jesus kicked a pebble with the worn toe of his sandal. “I've heard of the phallic and vegetation cults,” he said. “Not very sophisticated. My father expects more of man than a primitive adoration of his carnal nature. He must rise above . . .”

“Rise to what, Jesus? To abstractions? And alienation? Your scroll there, your book of Genesis, says that in the beginning was the Word. The simplest savage could see that in the beginning was the orgasm. Life is reproduced from life, while resurrection—the regeneration of seeds, the return in the spring of the leaves that fell in the autumn—is of matter, not of spirit. Unsophisticated? Maybe it's unsophisticated to venerate mountains and regard rivers as sacred, but as long as man thinks of his natural environment as holy, then he's gonna respect it and not sell it out or foul it up. Unsophisticated? Hell, it's going to take science a couple of thousand more years to determine that life originated when a cupful of seawater containing molecules of ammonia was trapped in a pocket in a shore rock where it was abnormally heated by ultraviolet light from the sun. But we pagans have always sensed that man's roots were inorganic. That's why we had respect even for stones.”

Jesus looked up sheepishly from the pebbles he'd been kicking. “But you hadn't been saved,” he protested.

“Didn't need to be,” said Tarzan. “Wasn't of any use to us.”

“Well, in the old days the female archetype was the central religious figure. Man had the power of creation, but it was in women that we observed the unfolding of the life cycle: reproduction, death and rebirth. So we celebrated the sensuality of God the Mother. Agriculture is umbilically tied to the Great Belly. Whereas the domestication of animals, a later pursuit, is more of a phallic activity—it was a step away from God the Mother and a step toward God the Father. But a harmonious balance was maintained. And Pan personified that balance. He kept things unified, him with his beautiful music and his long red erection.

“But when you came along, well, the way I hear it is your coming represented the triumph of God the Father over God the Mother, the victory of the Judaic God
of
spirit over the old God
in
flesh. Your birth-cry signaled the end of paganism, and the final separation of man from nature. From now on, culture will dominate nature, the phallus will dominate the womb, permanence will dominate change, and the fear of death will dominate everything.

“Pardon me, Jesus,'cause I know you're a courageous and loving soul. You mean well. But from where I swing, it looks like two thousand miles of bad road.”

Jesus looked to the heavens for guidance, but he saw only the angel, hanging in front of their parley the way a sign hangs in front of a TV repair shop. “Then that explains why you have withdrawn into your private nirvana,” he said at last.

“You might say that,” said Tarzan, standing up to stretch. “Why beat my head against a penis abstraction? And you, what are you doing out here in this snaky wilderness, frying your butt on a hot rock?”

“I'm preparing myself for my mission.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“To change the world.”

Tarzan slapped his side so hard he bent his harmonica. “The world is perpetually changing,” he roared. “It doesn't do much else
but
change. It changes from season to season, from night to day, from ice to tropics. It changed from a pocketful of cosmic dust into the complicated ball of goof and glory it is today. It's changing every celestial second with no help whatsoever. Why do you want to stick
your
nose into it?”

“The peoples of the world have become wicked and evil,” Jesus said gravely. “I believe, in all modesty, that I can eradicate their evil.”

“Evil is what makes good possible,” said Tarzan, hoping that he didn't sound too trite. “Good and evil have to coexist in order for the world to survive. The peoples haven't become evil, they've lost their balance and become confused about what they really are.”

He jumped on the back of his goat and gave it a smack. “I'm afraid, Jesus baby, that you're gonna confuse them all the more.”

The jungle yogi started to ride off, but Jesus leaped up and grabbed the goat by its tail. “Whoa, now, whoa,” he called in his rich olive-green baritone. The animal stopped and Tarzan looked Jesus in the eye, but Jesus had difficulty articulating the activity in his brain. “If you think carnally then you are carnal, but if you think spiritually then you are spirit.” He just blurted it out, but it didn't sound too bad, and the odor of the goat obscured any desire he might have had to develop his idea more comprehensively.

Tarzan rattled the nanny's rib cage with his heels and she bolted out of the prophet's grasp. “Any law against thinking both ways?” he asked. He began to ride toward the south.

“You're either for me or against me,” yelled Jesus.

“Well, adios then. I've got to beat it on back to the Congo. Jane promised to lay out a luau when I returned. Been gone two weeks now, a-riding over the good earth and a-playing for anybody who'd listen. Bet Jane's as horny as a box of rabbits. Git along, nanny!”

The goat galloped off in comic-strip puffs of dust. Jesus returned to his rock and shooed an entwined pair of butterflies off of the Law. His heart felt like the stage on which some Greeks had acted a messy tragedy. So occupied was he with swabbing the boards that several minutes passed before he thought to look after the angel. When his eyes found it, it was flapping erratically in the high, dry air, first soaring after the disappearing strains of Tarzan's harmonica and then returning to hover over Jesus, back and forth, again and again, as if it did not wish the two to part—as if it did not know whom to follow.

On Sunday morning, I overslept. The day was rumpled and dreary. It looked like Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas.

Oddly elated, I hurried through the back door of the roadhouse. The session had not begun, he pantry was locked. Purcell sat on the floor playing checkers with Mon Cul. “The baboon cheats,” he complained. I did not hear the other side of the story.

“How was your Saturday?” Plucky asked, and promptly lost a king.

“Weird. Full of strange visions, stupors, dreams. I felt like I was tangled in witchcraft.”

“Probably fallout from Amanda's trance,” said Plucky. He watched the baboon move in for the kill. A banana that the wily human drew suddenly from his pocket kept it from happening.

I inquired as to the whereabouts of Amanda and John Paul, only to learn that they had hiked across the fields to the foothills to gather mushrooms and herbs. It appeared that the fast had been called off. Amanda had spent half of Saturday in trance, and upon awakening professed a complete lack of interest in the Corpse. “No more father figures,” she had proclaimed. “The world has had enough father figures. I wanted to give him a lovely burial but no one would have it. Now I wash my hands of him. No more father figures.” She didn't wish to participate in further discussion.

For unclear reasons I was not surprised. “What about Ziller?” I asked. “He's watched that mummy like a hawk. He must be interested.”

Plucky moved two checkers simultaneously. The baboon didn't seem to notice the excess. “You know what interests John Paul most about Jesus? That he was called the
light
of the world.”

“But that's just a metaphor,” I protested.

“To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar,” said the Pluck. Mon Cul moved three checkers so rapidly that his opponent saw him move only two. Even with one move recalled, the game was won. And while the victor howled, Purcell and I adjourned to the pantry.

How nice it would be for you, reader, if the two men hunched over Jesus' body were famous philosophers or theologians. How exciting if one were Eric Hoffer and the other Jean-Paul Sartre. Or if one were Reinhold Niebuhr and the other Alan Watts. Or if one were Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the other old what's-his-name. Then you'd get your money's worth, by golly. There'd be dialogue that would ring in the ear of the world.

As it is, however, it was just Plucky Purcell and I who met to negotiate the Corpse's future that Sunday. And as it turned out, we didn't have a lot to say.

We agreed that Amanda was probably correct when she intimated that most Christians would persist in their beliefs even if confronted with the lifeless body of their Saviour. The majority would dismiss the news as “preposterous” and nothing could change their minds. The Vatican could simply issue an outraged denial. The U.S. government would follow suit. The press would call down the wrath of the ink gods. And we at the roadside zoo, upon whose unprepared shoulders fell this monstrous burden, would be widely despised as the perpetrators of an especially noxious hoax. We might be imprisoned. Or murdered. Or committed to institutions where shock treatments and heavy tranquilizers would leave us as burned out as the unfortunate rabbi who lay on our table.

On the other hand, we agreed that a portion of the population would be severely affected. Maybe a portion of sufficient size (considering the trouble the Church was in already) to demolish what was left of national and Christian unity. Most significantly, the young would believe us. I was positive of it. And the young were increasing in number and influence . . .

Any way you sliced it, it amounted to a furor in the making, perhaps a furor of unprecedented scope and consequence. We agreed on that. Where we disagreed was on the necessity of the furor. I wished to avoid it. Plucky looked forward to it the way King Kong looked forward to a date with Fay Wray.

If our initial arguments were animated by a frenzy of social (and personal) concern, an epidemic of silence soon broke out in the pantry. It was as if the tsetse fly had escaped its translucent depository and stilled us with its lullaby bite.

For hours we sat saying nothing. The only sound in the zoo was the gimp-legged rhumba of the wall clock. And an occasional checker flung by an impatient sentry against the kitchen wall. Purcell grew bored with sitting. The ruby claws of my hemorrhoids began to rustle. So we dissolved the think tank and went out to welcome the Zillers home from harvest.

You might say that it was intermission at the Second Coming. A break for a Coke, a cigarette, some chit-chat. Then back to the final act, which, if you could believe the program notes, was scheduled to go on forever.

The zoo reopened on Monday. Considering the season, traffic was heavy. We served sausages to a hundred or more customers, all of whom, children included, looked like undercover investigators to me.

As a result of the four-day layoff, the fleas were rusty and undisciplined. Their chariot races ended in helter-skelter collisions; on the ski jump some fleas went down backwards and others not at all; the prima ballerina—our most lovely insect—danced Joffrey's
Astarte
with one slipper missing and turned it into a fiasco: luckily our tourists were not connoisseurs of ballet.

By the close of business, I was a walking greenhouse of neurotic flora. Here a rare potted tic, there a twitch in full petal, everywhere exotic tropical wrinkles digging their anxious roots into the humus of my flesh. Even Purcell jerked nervously when Amanda suggested after supper that we Jeep over to Anacortes and take in the drive-in movie.

The Pluck and I argued mightily against it, but the Zillers insisted that entertainment was what Plucky and I needed. They made it sound as if the trip to the movies was all on our account. And they would do no less than bring the Corpse along.

Jesus was wrapped in one of Smokestack Lightning's Apache blankets and propped upright in the backseat between Plucky and me. “If the police should stop us for a narcotics check,” said Amanda, “we'll say that the Corpse has consumed excessive firewater and that we're driving him back to the La Conner reservation.” Beautiful logic. Back to the reservation by way of a drive-in show. And what if the police should decide they want to deliver the “Indian” themselves?

As it was, it cost us an extra dollar to get Christ into a performance which for him was some centuries late.

I can scarcely recall the films we saw. One was entitled
Return of the Squirrel Bride
and was about taxidermists and reincarnation. Amanda giggled a lot and Purcell commented that one reason aborigines have keen eyesight is because they never watch movies or television. “Well, what are we doing here?” I asked. “Movies are made of light,” John Paul reminded us and he leaned toward the screen amidst a fluster of popcorn. In the second feature a boy named Chuck brought his girl friend home late from the prom. The father was furious. Especially when the girl missed her next period. As it turned out, it was only nerves that made her miss. I sympathized completely.