Still Life with Woodpecker Page 3

  It was in the Seattle paper, on that particular Sunday in early January, that Leigh-Cheri initially read of the Geo-Therapy Care Fest, the what-to-do-for-the-planet-until-the-twenty-first-century-arrives conference. It was an event that would have speeded up her pulse even had it not been scheduled to occur in Hawaii. As it was, she bounced in her mother’s lap—hardly the ultimate mature act—for the first time in years and began her petition to attend, for under the Furstenberg-Barcalona code to which they now strictly adhered, the Queen would have to accompany her. Tilli on Maui? Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o.

  14

  THIS MAY BE SAID for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledged, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority. Despite the boredom and anxiety of the period, or because of it, despite the uneasy seas that separated the sexes, or because of them, thousands, tens of thousands seemed willing to lend their bodies, their money, and their skills to various planetary rescue missions.

  Coordination of those far-flung projects was a primary aim of the Geo-Therapy Care Fest, slated for the last week in February at Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii. Leading experts in the fields of alternative energy sources, organic farming, wilderness preservation, alternative education, holistic medicine, nutrition, consumer protection, recycling, and space colonization were to lecture and lead panel discussions and workshops. Proponents of many diverse self-help systems and consciousness curses, ranging from ancient Oriental to contemporary Californian, would also be in attendance. Moreover, certain futurists, artists, visionary thinkers, shamans, and poetic seers had been invited to participate, although several of the poets and one of the novelists were suspected by the organizers to register on the lunatic scale.

  Don’t think the news of that conference didn’t melt the ice off the dog dish at thirty paces. If her life span were a salad, Leigh-Cheri would have dived into the dressing to present that conference with a perfect crouton. Not the least of her excitement was the information that Ralph Nader would deliver a key speech there and that one whole evening would be devoted to the subject of alternative methods of birth control. Even in the Siberia of celibacy, Leigh-Cheri was concerned with contraception. The problems associated with it had been more frustrating to her than the aggressive, competitive, assertive, egocentric, and crude behavior of the men with whom those problems should have been shared, and although she was presently free of the problem, she was too intelligent to mistake flight for victory.

  The King and Queen hadn’t seen their daughter so animated in months. True, this animation was a relative thing: Leigh-Cheri moved about like a zombie, yet a few days earlier she had more closely resembled a corpse. That was progress. Now there were moments when, speculating about the Care Fest, she actually appeared on the verge of smiling. What would any compassionate parents do? Give in, of course. Allow her her conference.

  As the date approached, Queen Tilli decided that Maui was simply too barbarous. It was bad enough being stuck on the outskirts of Seattle, it raining trout teeth night and day, blackberry vines trying to force their way into the privacy of her own chamber, without transporting her posh poundage to some jungle island inhabited by surfer boys and vacationing strumpets, to whose company on that particular week would be added a couple thousand coocoos intent on saving a world they didn’t fit into anyway. The Seattle Opera Company was opening Norma with Ebe Stignani that same week, and although Stignani was well past her prime, she provided true legato, a rare commodity in those jagged times, and the Queen had been invited to be honorary hostess at a reception for the aging soprano. Since Max dare not travel because of his valve, it was agreed about the middle of February that Gulietta would chaperon the Princess in Hawaii.

  Gulietta was antique and couldn’t mouth ten words of English, but she was so generally competent and so fond of Leigh-Cheri that Max and Tilli were convinced that her chaperonage would be adequate. They looked at one another nervously, however, when the skinny old servant, upon learning of her assignment, went to J. C. Penny and bought herself a bikini.

  15

  THE SKY IS MORE IMPERSONAL than the sea. Above the birdline, higher than the last referential cloud, at an altitude that oxygen will not voluntarily frequent, across a zone where light drives the speed limit and never stops for coffee, crossing that desert in which gravity is the only sheik, a vehicle, owned and operated by Northwest Orient Airlines, whistled through its nostrils as it bucked the current of the Pacific jet stream. Leigh-Cheri turned from the window through which she’d been gazing down upon cloud top and ocean top. Leigh-Cheri looked at the old woman asleep in the adjacent seat. Leigh-Cheri had to smile. Rippling the canned air of the first-class cabin with her gentle snores, Gulietta was so serene that it was difficult to imagine her causing all the trouble she’d caused back at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport a few hours before.

  Leigh-Cheri had been as surprised as anyone by the frog. Although the frog was relatively large and uncommonly green (a distant cousin, at best, of Prince Charming), there had been no hint of its presence in Gulietta’s little wicker case. No sign of frog at all until the sudden shriek of the uniformed woman at the security check station.

  A bit of a row had resulted. PLEASE, NO JOKES said the sign above the checkpoint, and this must be a joke. Mustn’t it? The incident was complicated by the fact that Gulietta could offer no English explanation, that her surname resembled a line from an optometrist’s examination chart.

  Security guards conferred. Gulietta and the Princess were searched a second time. Their hand luggage was re-examined. The frog was X-rayed to ascertain that it wasn’t some kind of weapon. Could they be positive it wouldn’t explode? “It’s her pet,” said Leigh-Cheri, who, in fact, had such a dim idea what the frog was doing in the old woman’s case that even the memory of a European folk tale couldn’t illuminate it. “It’s her little pet.” Leigh-Cheri batted her lengthy lashes, breathed in such a way that her round breasts seemed to rotate twelve degrees on their axes, and smiled so broadly that certain tiny mouth muscles, long neglected, struggled painfully to break free. “It’s her little widdle pet.”

  Having extracted a promise that Gulietta would keep the amphibian enclosed—it was nestled in damp towels inside her bag—the charmed guards decided to let the two women and their widdle pet proceed. Aboard the jetliner, however, moments before takeoff, a different set of guards, accompanied by an official of the airlines, abruptly appeared and demanded the frog. “You can’t take a live frog into Hawaii!” one of them exclaimed. They were quite agitated.

  At that point, Leigh-Cheri recalled her previous visit to the islands. She remembered how adamant they’d been about restricting travelers bringing in pets of any kind. She remembered that bringing in fresh fruit or flowers was prohibited. She saw in her mind’s eye the Honolulu airport’s exhibition of insects, a collection of mounted bugs and beetles that had been discovered aboard visiting aircraft. She remembered that at Paradise Park the performing parrots and cockatoos had all had their wings clipped so that they might never escape and breed in the wild. The ecology of the islands was so delicately balanced that the introduction of one new species of mammal, bird, or reptile might throw it into chaos; one nonindigenous plant disease or invading female insect might ruin a billion-dollar business, be it pineapple for eating or palm trees for viewing.

  Leigh-Cheri motioned to Gulietta, who was lashing the guards furiously with the vilest invectives in her strange language. Leigh-Cheri motioned for Gulietta to give up the frog. The crone was unconvinced. She hesitated. The captain, copilot, and flight crew had joined the administrator and guards in the first-class cabin. Passengers in coach and economy were in the aisles, peering up front to learn what the commotion was about. One of the guards yanked the wicker case from Gulietta’s gnarled hands. The lid flew open. The frog took a tremendous leap. It landed on the head of a stewardess, who sent shocked whispers the length and breadth of t
he plane by screaming, “Aiii! Get that fucking thing off of me!”

  The frog took another leap and came down on an empty seat. Several men dove for it. They missed. Dives and misses continued for a while, until the frog was cornered in the cockpit, where a guard captured it, but not before he had slammed his elbow into a navigational instrument, causing a possible malfunction. The device had to be checked and rechecked. All in all, the flight was delayed one hour and forty-six minutes.

  Gulietta hadn’t flown before. She was confused by the objections to the contents of her luggage. She refused to eat the snack served by the still-flustered stewardess.

  How could Leigh-Cheri make Gulietta understand the Great Hawaiian Mongoose Reaction?

  Hawaii once had a rat problem. Then, somebody hit upon a brilliant solution. Import mongooses from India. Mongooses would kill the rats. It worked. Mongooses did kill the rats. Mongooses also killed chickens, young pigs, birds, cats, dogs, and small children. There have been reports of mongooses attacking motorbikes, power lawn mowers, golf carts, and James Michener. In Hawaii now, there are as many mongooses as there once were rats. Hawaii had traded its rat problem for a mongoose problem. Hawaii was determined nothing like that would ever happen again.

  How could Leigh-Cheri draw for Gulietta the appropriate analogy between Hawaii’s rodents and society at large? Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

  The answer, of course, is that Leigh-Cheri could not draw that parallel at all. That parallel had never occurred to her. It had occurred to Bernard Mickey Wrangle, however.

  Bernard Mickey Wrangle sat in the economy cabin of the Northwest Orient airliner and pondered the rat/mongoose-crime/cop analogy. Bernard Mickey Wrangle sat in the rear of the aircraft with seven sticks of dynamite strapped to his body.

  Bernard Mickey Wrangle was clever. Most likely, he could have successfully boarded the flight to Hawaii with seven sticks of dynamite strapped to his body under any conditions. Certainly, though, the frog had helped pave his way.

  (The frog, incidentally, was released at a pond near the Sea-Tac runways. For being close to a busy airport, it was a pleasant pond. It featured lily pads and cattails and fat mosquitoes for lunch. But let’s face it, damn it all, it wasn’t Waikiki.)

  16

  THE JETLINER, missing one small green traveler but carrying a bonus seven sticks of dynamite, continued its crossing of what every novice surfer knows to be the most inappropriately named body of water on earth. The jetliner whistled to conceal its fear of gravity. Leigh-Cheri read magazines to conceal her excitement.

  Excitement widened in her eyes like periods at the end of billboard sentences. Commas of excitement wobbled in her tummy, and question marks squirmed in there as well. Every once in a while, she felt as if she were sitting on an exclamation point.

  Such a wonderful idea was the Geo-Therapy Care Fest that it was surprising to her that it hadn’t happened before. An assembly of the best thinkers, the most advanced technicians, the most concerned scientists, the most enlightened artists, pooling their knowledge and their dreams for the betterment of all. That was what the United Nations would be were the United Nations not in the hands of the dull and the corrupt. Were it not in the service of ego-politics.

  At the Maui conference, Buckminster Fuller would deliver a paper on “Harvesting Pollution: Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Spills.” Gary Snyder would talk about “The Buddhist Approach to Fighting City Hall.” The lecture by the environmentalist Dr. Barry Commoner (his name induced in the Princess a twinge of superiority followed by a deeper twinge of guilt) would be entitled, “There’s No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.” The Alternative Birth-Control Workshop would be led by Linda Coghill, the woman who singlehandedly slashed the illegitimacy and abortion rates in Portland, Oregon. On the morning of February 26, Leigh-Cheri would have to choose between a demonstration of the photovoltaic cell (a breakthrough in reducing the expense of solar power) and a panel discussion led by Dr. Linus Pauling on Vitamin C as a prevention and a cure. Oh my, this was exciting. Was there any planetary problem of significance that the Care Fest overlooked? Leigh-Cheri couldn’t think of one.

  Maybe Leigh-Cheri would admit nothing significant in the fact that the articles in the magazines she was perusing were largely about romance: who was breaking up—or taking up—with whom, what to do when husbands lose interest, how to cope with loneliness and rejection, and so forth. The advertisements in the magazines were almost exclusively concerned with making oneself attractive to the opposite sex. Moreover, the movie that was screened aboard the plane was a love story. The movie had an unhappy ending and thus was considered “realistic.” And when the Princess put on a headset to listen to the taped music that Northwest Orient provided its passengers, the songs she heard were about hearts breaking and hearts aching, or hearts quaking as they slid, spewing sparks, across the electrified threshold of new love.

  Maybe Leigh-Cheri elected to disregard the evidence because it was just too personal. If beneath the great issues and all-encompassing questions (as underplayed as they were in the last quarter of the twentieth century) a more intimate struggle raged, a struggle whose real goal was romantic fulfillment, maybe it was courageous and honorable to attempt to transcend that struggle, to insist on something more than that.

  Maybe.

  In the rear of the aircraft, Bernard Mickey Wrangle reached inside his jacket … and pulled from his breast pocket … not a detonator … nor a fuse … not yet … but a package … of Hostess Twinkies.

  Too bad the Queen insisted that you fly first-class, Leigh-Cheri. Too bad you’re sitting next to your snoozing old chaperon instead of next to Bernard Mickey Wrangle. Since Hostess Twinkies always travel in pairs—because like the coyote, the killer whale, the gorilla, and the whooping crane, Hostess Twinkies mate for life—there would have been a Twinkie each for you to share.

  17

  THE AIRLINER CIRCLED HONOLULU the way a typing finger circles a keyboard, awaiting the message from the control center that would instruct it when and where to land.

  And they land …

  … on A.

  Runway A.

  A for “attic.”

  A for “amore.”

  What we have here is an unexpected touchdown on the runway of the heart. This flight could only terminate in a room close to the moon.

  The No Smoking sign was on. (In the attic, the Camel cigarettes were never to be lit.) The signal to Fasten Seat Belts was given. (In amore, belts fasten and unfasten at delicious intervals.) Gulietta clutched her wicker case, which now bore but the slightest spoor of frog. Leigh-Cheri clutched her thighs, as dry now as princess thighs ought to be. Bernard Mickey Wrangle, listed on the passenger manifest as T. Victrola Firecracker but once known to millions as the Woodpecker, clutched nothing, not even his black powder underwear. The Woodpecker knew better than to clutch and to hold. The Woodpecker simply grinned. He grinned because he had reached Hawaii without detection. He grinned because Twinkie cream always made him grin. He grinned because it was the last quarter of the twentieth century, and something momentous was happening.

  INTERLUDE

  MAYBE I’M MISTAKEN ABOUT the Remington SL3. I’m no longer convinced that it will do. Oh, it’s a superb tool—for the proper desk in the proper office. If there’s a treatise you wish to compose, a letter to the editor, an invoice, a book review, why it will cross your t’s before you come to them, and I’m positive that there are secretaries who would prefer it to their mates. But for the novelist, any typewriter is a formidable thing; and the Remington SL3, with its interchangeable printing units, its electric margins, variable line spacer, paper-centering scale, personalized touch control, automatic paragraphing button, vertical and horizontal half-spacing, express backspacer, skip tabulation, improved umlaut maker, and misspell alarm, well, to face that degree of mechanical sophistication in the midnight of your sanctum is to know a brand of fear.

  First of all, it hu
ms, purrs like a seductive housecat, fairly trembles upon the table; it seems eager—too goddamned eager—to get to work. Hey! Relax, fella. I’m thinking. Don’t push me.

  Then there’s its color: blue. Not matte black; mysterious, deep, absorbent, accepting, noncommittal, priestly black like typewriters of old, but a harsh, chill, modern blue that causes it to affect, even by candlelight, the suspecting, censorious glare of the customs inspector or efficiency engineer. It appears to be looking over my shoulder even as I am looking over its.

  All right, those toadstool spores I inadvertently snorted while cleaning out my refrigerator may be magnifying sensation, but this is not the first time that intimidation by typewriter has caused me to consider the pen. Pencils are out of the question, their marks are impermanent. Of course, fountain pens leak; ballpoints have no style, and, moreover, always run away from home. The peacock quill appeals to me, the woodpecker quill even more so, but the last are hard to come by and the first scratchy and slow.

  Perhaps what a novelist needs is a different sort of writing implement. Say, a Remington built of balsa wood, its parts glued together like a boyhood model; delicate, graceful, submissive, as ready to soar as an ace.

  Better, a carved typewriter, hewn from a single block of sacred cypress; decorated with mineral pigments, berry juice, and mud; its keys living mushrooms, its ribbon the long iridescent tongue of a lizard. An animal typewriter, silent until touched, then filling the page with growls and squeals and squawks, yowls and bleats and snorts, brayings and chatterings and dry rattlings from the underbrush; a typewriter that could type real kisses, ooze semen and sweat.