"Wylander Jugg's, anyway."
"Jugg. And my tastes are not so limited as you would believe. Look!"
Remo turned to face into the wind and found the bus coming up on the exit for Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee, where the sign promised Mollywood Is Just the Beginning of the Wonders You'll See.
Next to the sign was Molly Pardon herself, re-created as a forty-foot fiberglass automaton. Her upper torso moved from side to side, allowing the nylon ropes of hair to flop this way, then that. Some developer's marketing inspiration had resulted in the Molly-bot getting a genuine red flannel shirt, which was tucked into her disproportionately narrow waist and left entirely unbuttoned. Remo happened to glance over at the exact moment the giant robotic country music star tipped to one side in a strategically programmed manner that allowed her shirt to flap open and provide arriving vacationers a voyeuristic glimpse inside.
"Well, you sure wouldn't get to see nipples as big as beer kegs at the Magic Kingdom," Remo observed.
Chiun sniffed. "It is a cheap display. Perhaps Molly Pardon does not possess the same sincerity as the beauteous Wylander Jugg."
"Yeah, but Wylander doesn't have jugs nearly as bodacious as Molly Pardon."
"We can only hope this monstrosity does not represent what we will find throughout Pigeon Fudge." Remo didn't have time to answer when they merged from the exit ramp onto the thoroughfare that headed directly into the heart of town.
Chapter 22
Remo Williams had seen it all-or thought he had. The long years as the chief enforcement arm of CURE had exposed him to things too bizarre to be explained by science, too incredible to be chalked up to the supernatural. Now, with that wealth of experience under his belt, the Reigning Master of Sinanju was a tough guy to amaze.
But right at that minute he was pretty much stupefied. Even his mentor and trainer, the illustrious Chiun, with his decades of life experience and a breadth of wisdom handed down from all the past Masters, had never seen anything quite like Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee.
Remo observed, "Like it or not, I've heard every Wylander Jugg song that ever was, and not one of them is about dinosaurs."
"For once your feeble mind remembers truthfully. The soulful Wylander does not sing about dinosaurs," Chiun replied.
"Does Molly Pardon?"
"No. She has no dinosaur songs."
The bus stopped at a traffic light near a strip mall with a cigarette store, a pizza place and a purple velociraptor. "So how come that's the fourth dinosaur we've seen so far?"
The next block was dominated by a miniature golf center crowded with people who putted fluorescent orange and pink golf balls through a tropical rain forest. The trees and rocks were plastic. The robotic hippos, elephants and monkeys guffawed, trumpeted and screeched at the players. On the final hole they watched a young boy putt his ball into the hole, which brought an automatronic tyrannosaurus out from the plastic green ferns. The thunder lizard bent at the waist, made a roar like an air horn, stood erect again and slid back into the ferns.
There was a stegosaurus in an enclosed playground at the fast-food restaurant next door. Then came a candy shop with a triceratops holding a giant lollipop in its beaklike mouth.
"I thought this place was about country music," Remo said.
"I, too," Chiun replied. "And what sort of a dinosaur is that?"
Remo blinked and craned his neck at the eight-story pink monstrosity that loomed up out in front of a sprawling hotel. "Flamingosaurus, I guess."
From the beak of the flamingo dangled a twenty-foot sign made to look like driftwood with artificially fading white paint that read Jimmy Jack Jordan's Theater And Water Park.
"Hey, that's one of the guys you listen to," Remo said.
"Absolutely not," Chiun responded as the bus carried them past Jimmy Jack Jordan's complex of low-rise hotel wings with fake thatched roofs.
"Yeah, that one Wylander duet. 'Where the Bayou Meets the Gulf' or something like that."
"You are mistaken," Chiun announced. The water slides were painted brown to simulate logs, and the swimming pools were surrounded with aluminum palm trees.
"No way I'm wrong about this one, Chiun. Thanks to you I know that ugly croaker's repertoire backward and forward."
"And yet you are wrong," Chiun insisted.
Remo wasn't listening. "Holy crap-look at that!" It was a Paul Bunyan figure, complete with blue ox, standing knee-deep in a forest of trees. The entire construction was made of steel-reinforced concrete, and Paul himself was more than fifty feet high. Remo watched a glass elevator rise up and disappear into Paul's gigantic crotch. "It's a hotel."
"It is unsightly."
"Hey, Chiun, look at that! Wailing Mining's Paul Bunyan Resort and Showplace. You listen to Wailing Mining, don't you? Boy, all your favorites are here."
"Wailing Mining never performed with Wylander." Chiun was on the defensive.
"Yeah, he was on that special on pay-per-view-Wylander's Winter Wonderland or something:"
"I never heard of it."
"You tried to get me to watch the damn thing last December. You said it would snap me out of my Christmas depression."
"But you did not watch it-"
"I saw enough of it to get more depressed. And that's the guy who sang the chestnuts-roasting song with Wylander."
"Remo, you are speaking nonsense. You have never paid attention to the music I enjoy and you do not know what you're talking about."
"Hey, I'd be in denial, too, Little Father. This place is sleazier than Las Vegas."
"I am not in denial! The powers behind these monstrosities are not in the same league as the beauteous Wylander. This is trash!"
"White trash?" Remo clarified.
"Exactly!" Chiun exclaimed. "More precisely, American trash."
"Does it get any trashier than that?" Remo asked hypothetically, then answered his own question. "Oh. French trash."
Chiun nodded seriously. "Although that phrase is redundant."
It seemed as if every block contained a resort more extravagant and tasteless than the next. A rotating icecream sundae with picture windows turned out to be the revolving restaurant atop Clarabelle Escalande's Candy Castle and Performing Arts Center, Theatrical Home to the Reigning Queen of Country. All Our Rooms Are Sweets! exclaimed the signboard, which wasn't garish enough to compete with the oddly shaped mass of neon across the street.
The neon lit up one letter at a time until it had spelled the word "Arkansas." The billboard below it exhorted them to stay at the Arkansas Hotel, home to the million-selling band State of Arkansas. Experience All the Thrills of Arkansas-Right Here in Tennessee.
Between every resort were gift shops, T-shirt shops, candy shops, refreshment stands and fast-food restaurants. They all had some extravagant sculpture representing them. Purple elephants and flashing aliens. Even the local dive bar sported a human-sized neon bottle tilting to pour neon beer into a neon mug. When they couldn't think of anything better, they resorted to dinosaurs.
"This place is a joke. Or a nightmare," Remo commented. "I'm not exactly sure which."
"Molly Pardon's Magic Country Kingdom will be a welcome relief to this excess," Chiun remarked. "I am surprised that you are not enamored by it all, Remo. There are many bright colors."