Another Roadside Attraction Read Online Free Page B

you're like everybody else, just more sensitive, that's all.”
    “Thunder is sky power,” said Smokestack Lightning. “Very different from powers of earth or underearth. Much war come between power above and power below. Maybe war between head of Amanda and body of Amanda? No, maybe not so. Thunder is season power. Always come before spring season. Make corn grow, make trees catch flower. Thunder friendly spirit but big, clumsy, sometimes break things. Maybe Amanda have big spirit in her. Big power. Sky power. But she cannot understand. Because she woman. Also have earth power. Earth is woman. Woman is earth. What so big sky power doing in woman . . . ?” The Indian's voice faded. It was nearly noon. The day had an edge of real heat now. Amanda was wearing a little shift of off-white organdy which she had picked up at the Sears store in San Luis Obispo and to the neckline of which she had sewn peacock feathers and beads of black glass. It was a thin textile and she wore no bra. The sun warmed her chest like a VapoRub. Very relaxed, she had mulled over her companions' explanations of the thunderstorm syndrome for just a minute or two when she became aware of a fourth person, a stranger, in their midst.
    Smokestack had noticed the intruder first, but said nothing. Finally, Nearly Normal turned to see him, too. The man was Caucasian but the color of a good cigar. He was quite tall, maybe six four or five, and slender. Two pounds of Fiji hair sat upon his head like the barbed-wire nest of a mechanical bird. His face was long and gaunt and wild; his eyes piercing, his mouth fierce, his mustache mockingly extravagant. He wore a sorcerer's cape—yellowed celestial secrets on a field of sidereal blue—over a vest shirt of some reddish leather which Amanda could not identify; trousers, he wore none but rather a parrot-green loincloth; his feet were sandaled; about his forehead was tied a narrow band of giraffe skin; in one bejeweled hand he held a primitive clay flute. Towering above the trio on the river log, he was an imposing figure—a bit like an ancient Egyptian ruler, especially Egyptian because of his strange tomb-wall eyes: his pupils seemed to remain in the center even when his face was in profile.
    Nearly Normal was so startled by the presence of the man that it was a moment before he recognized him. Of course, it wasn't the man's attire that surprised the ringmaster: among Nearly Normal's troupers eccentricity was the uniform of the day. No, it was his stealth, the manner in which he suddenly had materialized on the log without a warning sound. (Like a magician, eh?) But shock speedily gave way to pleasure.
    “Amanda. Smokestack Lightning. Let me present the legendary John Paul Ziller. I've been telling you about him. Self-exiled from the international art scene. Leader and drummer of the Hoodoo Meat Bucket. Until he split for Africa. Or was it India?”
    The lean man stared only at Amanda. He was pensive. When finally he spoke, the voice that fell from his ferocious lips was both jarring and vulnerable: like a bloodshot eye. There was something of the Negro bluesman in it and something of the Shakespearian stage. No one recalls his exact language but they remember that it was spicy with portent. He awakened in Amanda's consciousness the image of the monarch, the far-ranging, high-flying black-and-orange butterfly that is one of our most familiar insects. He reminded her that the monarch's nickname is “storm king.” That it is always most active before a storm. She had seen them, hadn't she? Sailing in the electrified air, beating head-on into the gusty thunderclouds, reveling in the boisterous winds. And did she not know that monarchs usually emerge from their cocoons just prior to thundershowers? The first sound they hear is likely the rumble of thunder. They are literally born of the storm. No other creature is so susceptible to the tense vibrations of a summer squall. A butterfly. Somewhere in its minute