Still Life with Woodpecker Read online

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying more than I should be saying. I think you put something in my drink to make me talkative.”

  “I think you put something in my drink to make me kissative.”

  They kissed. And giggled like cartoon mice.

  “What time is it?” asked Leigh-Cheri.

  “Why? The police station is open all night.”

  “I have an appointment with People magazine. At first, I was scared, but now it seems funny. Everything seems funny. Even you seem funny.” She pinched the end of his nose as he leaned over to kiss her again. She looked around the room for a clock, but the lounge at the Lahaina Broiler is noted for its absence of walls. The clocks of the trees had too many hands, and the ocean was on moon time. If Bernard had his way, she’d be on moon time, too.

  “When are you turning me in?”

  “When you stop kissing me.”

  “In that case I’m a free man forever.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  She meant that. But this time when he kissed her, his astonishingly resourceful tongue managed to break through the heroic barricade that her teeth had heretofore formed. There was a clean clink of enamel against enamel, an eruption of hot saliva as his tongue made a whirlwind tour of her oral hollow. A sudden jolt shot through the peachfish, fuzz and fin, and inside her No Nukes T-shirt her nipples became as hard as nuggets of plutonium.

  “Jesus,” thought Leigh-Cheri, “how can men be such lummoxes, such wads of Juicy Fruit on the soles of our ballet slippers and still feel so good? Especially this one. This mad bomber.”

  She pulled away. With sunburned knuckles, she wiped a string of spittle—his? hers? José Cuervo’s—from her chin. She asked a passing waitress for the time. She was late.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “How about dinner after your interview? There’s a delicious fish called mahi mahi. The fish so nice they named it twice. Isn’t it charming the way Polynesians double up their language. I’d like to keep a tête-à-tête in Pago Pago, but I’m afraid I’d contract beriberi.”

  “Huh-uh, huh-uh,” said the Princess. “No din-din, no din-din.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be at the Care Fest all day.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Ralph Nader is speaking tomorrow night. I wouldn’t miss that for all the mahi mahi on Maui Maui. Besides, you may be in jail tomorrow night. Maybe you better get your pack of Camels back.”

  “You’re turning me in, then?”

  “I don’t know. It depends. Are you really going to use the rest of your dynamite?”

  “It’s likely.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what I do.”

  “But the UFO conference is over.”

  “I didn’t come here to bomb the UFO conference. That was a mistake. I came here to bomb the Care Fest.”

  “You what?” She felt a bomb go off in her.

  “Boom-boom Care Fest,” he said. He poured tequila through the crack of his grin.

  Abruptly, she stood. “You must be crazy,” she said. “You must really be fucking insane.” She yanked Gulietta away from the sunset and made for the street.

  “You’re turning me in, then?”

  “You’re damned right I am,” she said.

  32

  THE IDEA FOR THE MONARCHY of Mu had come to Leigh-Cheri on Maui. It visited her unexpectedly while she sat in koa shade watching Gulietta play octogenarian mermaid and worrying about what she might possibly say to People magazine that was neither a paraphrase of Care Fest brochures nor a violation of the Furstenberg-Barcalona code. At some moment it occurred to her that there was a fair amount of unemployed royalty in the world, royals whose thrones had gone the way of war or political upheaval, just as her family’s had, and that these persons, although they’d been bred to lead, to preside, or at least to symbolize, were living for the most part the lives of the idle rich.

  For example, the comte de Paris, pretender to the French throne, had eleven children who dabbled in elegant pursuits, such as publishing an art magazine (the duke of Orléans) and running a painting gallery (Prince Thibaut). In Brazil, there were among the royal Orleans Braganza family no fewer than eighteen young cousins with time, energy, and money. Otto von Hapsburg, entitled to be emperor were there any longer an Austrian Empire, had seven sons and daughters riding to the hounds of dilettante culture. Italy’s Prince Enrico D’Assia and Prince Amedeo Savoy managed the family holdings and shared Queen Tilli’s devotion to opera. To the list could be added Yugoslavia’s Prince Alexander, King Leka I of Albania (a relative of hers), and Japan’s imperial family, among others.

  Since deposed royalty no longer had individual kingdoms to serve, why not band together to serve the world? The earth could be their kingdom. And they could combine their talents and skills, their illustrious names and considerable wealth (the Furstenberg-Barcalona clan was by far the poorest of the lot), their influence and glamour in a royal crusade on behalf of ecology, conservation, and preservation; on behalf of the sweet kingdom of Earth. They would aim to be efficient and effective. They would, of course, be celebrated. And if it was crowns they wanted, she’d supply them with crowns. Collectively, they would be known as the monarchy of Mu, after the lost continent, the mother island; the homeland of singsong, whose fragrant temples drowned one day in the sea. Each member of the monarchy would be equally a ruler of Mu, each sovereign in a nation without boundaries.

  “Since the Hawaiian Islands are tips of the drowned peaks of Mu,” explained Leigh-Cheri, “the monarchy should consider setting up headquarters, court, if you will, in Hawaii, perhaps right here in Lahaina, because Lahaina was the royal capital of old Hawaii and is no stranger to the privileges of queens and kings.”

  “That’s a fascinating idea,” gushed Reed Jarvis, the reporter from People. Indeed, Jarvis was pleased. The monarchy of Mu concept gave him a hard kernel of news, a nucleus of serious purpose around which to shape his confection. Now he could layer the goo. On to the human interest stuff—“What was it like for you, a blue-blooded princess, to grow up in a drafty old house in Washington State, attending public schools, becoming a cheerleader?”—and on, farther, to the subjects in which editors and readers of celebrity magazines were almost exclusively interested: money and sex.

  “Are you ever bitter about the loss of your family fortune?”

  “That was a long time ago. Before I was born. There are more important things than fortunes.”

  “Who is your current boy friend? Is there any one beau who is special?”

  “I have no boy friends.”

  “None?”

  “None.”

  “But, my dear, you’re so attractive and intelligent. Have you no love life?”

  “Who does have a love life anymore? These days people have sex lives, not love lives. Lots of them are even giving up sex. I don’t have a love life because I’ve never met a man who knew how to have a love life. Maybe I don’t know how, either.”

  With that, teardrops bucked out of Leigh-Cheri’s eyes like bronco amoebae leaving the chutes in a biology lab rodeo.

  Had Reed Jarvis been aware that Leigh-Cheri’s blue blood was at that instant tinted with streaks of tequila, he might have attributed her tears partially to booze, thus painting her to resemble less a snow statue in a furnace room. As it was, Jarvis’s portrait of her in People as a misty-eyed romantic was still more accurate than the descriptions the gossipmongers would write—“tragic beauty,” “tormented princess”—when she took to her attic.

  There are essential and inessential insanities.

  The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon.

  Inessential insanities are a brittle amalgamation of ambition, aggression, and pre-adolescent anxiety—garbage that should have been dumped long ago. Essential insanities are those impulses one instinctively senses are virtuous and correct, even though peers
may regard them as coo coo.

  Inessential insanities get one in trouble with oneself. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. It’s always preferable to be in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential.

  Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.

  About Leigh-Cheri, it would have made more sense to write a poem than an article. Reed Jarvis, with his Remington SL3, wrote an article. Others would follow. It remained for Bernard Mickey Wrangle, with his dynamite, to write the poem.

  33

  AFTER THE INTERVIEW, the Princess went directly to bed. Gulietta told her a bedtime story. It had the desired effect. She fell quickly asleep and dreamt of Ralph Nader. During the night she awoke but once: when Nader entered a dream restaurant and ordered frog’s legs. “Oh,” she gasped and sat straight up in bed.

  Leigh-Cheri had intended to go to the police the next morning between breakfast and the belated official opening of the Care Fest, but by the time she’d been served in the overcrowded Pioneer Inn dining room, she’d been barely able to eat and get across Hotel Street for the invocation in Banyan Park. Soon she was immersed in Dr. John Lilly’s lecture on the role of marine mammals in the future of the human race. Predictably, the park was jammed. Leigh-Cheri hadn’t arrived early enough to get within the cover of the banyan tree, though its shadow darkened deliciously the better part of an acre. She could hear well enough and with minor optic stress could make out the images that Dr. Lilly projected on a screen, but she was marooned in hot sunbeams. The sun raked her exposed flesh. It made her feel slightly faint. Reed Jarvis had reminded her that she was entitled to VIP privileges at the Care Fest. Ever reluctant to exploit her title, she was reaching the point where she’d pull rank like a little red wagon if it’s get her a place in the shade.

  As if by genie service, a shadow fell over her. Initially, she feared it was the jinx cloud, moving in for the kill. It wasn’t. Bernard was standing beside her, holding above her head a tattered parasol.

  “What are you doing here?” Her whisper didn’t sound half as hostile as she’d have liked it to.

  He nodded his dark curls at the podium screen, upon which an image of a porpoise was projected. “Sharks are the criminals of the sea,” he said. “Dolphins are the outlaws.”

  “You’re bananas,” she said.

  “Then split with me.”

  “Huh-uh. Bananas is not the color of my true love’s hair.”

  The reference to hair color caused him to flinch. She didn’t notice. She’d returned her attention to Dr. Lilly.

  “Okay. If you want to see me, just look up my address.”

  “I don’t want to see you, although the authorities might. Anyhow, where would I look up your address? In the Banana Directory? And I don’t mean the Yellow Pages.”

  “Look up. Look up.”

  She looked up. She couldn’t help it. Chalked in a nasty scrawl on the underside of the parasol were the words LAHAINA SMALL BOAT HARBOR, THE SLOOP HIGH JINKS.

  He shoved the parasol handle into her hand. He leaned his ravaged teeth close to her ear. “Yum,” he whispered. Then he was gone.

  34

  SHE LUNCHED ON papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels. In hot climates, A provides a shady arch, O is a siphon through which to suck liquids, U a cool cave or tub to slide into; A stands like a surfer with its legs apart, O hangs like a citrus from a bough, U rolls its hula hips—and I and E mimic the cries of monkeys and jungle birds from which they were derived. Consonants, like fair-skinned men, do not thrive in torrid zones. Vowels are built for southern comfort, consonants for northern speed. But O how the natives do bOOgIE-wOOgIE while the planters WaLTZ.

  She dined on avocado aloha or, perhaps, guava lava. Gulietta gummed roast veal à la missionary. Beach boys ringed their table, speaking indecencies. Repeatedly, Gulietta flailed her mop-stick arms, waving the young dogs away. Gulietta appeared to be enjoying it. Shooing surfers off the Princess was clearly more fun than shooing flies off the Queen. Leigh-Cheri paid scant attention. She was trying to decide whether to turn in Bernard during the lunch break.

  Okay, so he had saved her from the sun. That princess cannot expect a happy ending who has been rescued by the dragon. Okay, so his exuberant spirits lent him a superficial charm. Lucifer was the cutest angel in heaven, they say, and every death’s head wears a grin. This Bernard character was a menace. Two whole days of the Care Fest had been lost on his account, and who could guess what further outrage he might commit. Her duty was plain. The only question was: now or later?

  “Now,” she snapped. “If I hurry.” She handed Gulietta a bank note with which to settle the check. Gulietta was attacking her missionary veal with missionary zeal. “I’ll meet you in the park in twenty minutes,” said Leigh-Cheri, not forgetting to make the appropriate hand signs.

  As she sped out of the dining room, one of the beach boys called after her, “Hey, Red, where’s the fire? Between your legs? Ha ha.”

  And as she crossed the lanai, she encountered the fair-skinned extraterrestrials from Argon. “Mutant,” hissed the turbaned woman. “You’re branded on every planet in the system,” said the fez-topped man. “Don’t you understand that you’ve been mutated by solar radiation acting upon the excessive sugars and sex hormones in your body? You can’t fool the sun.”

  “Jesus!” swore the Princess. She hurried across the street toward the docks. “Sometimes I feel like buying a quart of Lady Clairol and just changing my goddamned color.”

  When she arrived at the sloop christened High Jinks, she was stunned to find that the familiar face that answered the cabin door was now wearing hair at least as red as her own.

  35

  “IF YOU’VE COME TO ARREST ME again,” said Bernard, twirling his trigger finger in his brilliant curls, “then you should be aware of my true identity. It’s a wise cop who knows her own prisoner. On the other hand, if you’ve come because you like me, it might make you like me more to see what we have in common.”

  “Yeah,” said Leigh-Cheri. “We’re both mutants.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. You’re one of the redheads, all right. Is this really your natural shade?”

  “You mean can I trace my roots back to Henna? This is the color I busted out of the womb with. The last of the black dye just washed down the drain and out to sea. Jacques Cousteau is probably swimming through it, thinking that some squid is writing with a leaky pen again.”

  “Okay, I guess you are as red as I am. But that’s all we have in common.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who’re part of the solution and those who’re part of the problem.”

  “I see. I make messes, you clean ’em up? Well, let me tell you, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who look at life and see the frost on the pumpkin and those who look and see the drool on the pie.”

  (Actually, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better. However, Leigh-Cheri and Bernard were occupied with the nuances of an intricate dance, so let’s be generous and cut them some slack.)

  They were on the deck in the noonday sun, but Leigh-Cheri had raised the parasol, and Bernard crouched in the pencil-nub shadow of the mainsail gaff. The Pacific, tranquilized here by a broken-square jetty, rocked them as sweetly as winos rock wine. “You look familiar now, with your hair red. I think I’ve seen pictures of you.”

  “I do have a good agent. My publicity photos get around.”

  “Where? On post office walls? You’re some kind of infamous hoodlum, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way. When I was younger, I did have a slight brush with the l
aw. You know how boys are.”

  “No. Tell me about it.”

  “Nothing much to tell. A misunderstanding involving a city councilman’s daughter and a borrowed car. But the aftermath … it did leave a mark. After thirty days in the sissies and snitches tank, which is another story, I was made a trustee. The trustee quarters were on the second floor, the same as the jail kitchen. All the trustees had access to the kitchen. Well, I’d been a trustee less than a week when three kitchen knives and a seventeen-inch in diameter meat-slicing blade turned up missing. Naturally, every trustee was suspected of stealing the knives. They completely tore apart our sleeping quarters, and the TV room, too. But they didn’t find the knives. So they lined us up in the hallway, watched over by a squad of guards armed with riot guns and Mace. One by one, we were marched into a small room, where, in front of several more guards and a captain with a flashlight, we were made to strip. They made me turn around, grab the cheeks of my ass and bend over, so they could look up my rectum to make sure I wasn’t hiding three kitchen knives and a seventeen-inch in diameter meat-slicing blade. Of course, they didn’t find the missing cutlery in any of us. But they did find four bars of soap, a Playboy centerfold, three ice cubes, five feathers, Atlantis, the Greek delegate to Boys’ Nation, a cake with a file in it, a white Christmas, a blue Christmas, Pablo Picasso and his brother Elmer, one baloney sandwich with mustard, two Japanese infantrymen who didn’t realize that World War II was over, Prince Buster of Cleveland, a glass-bottom boat, Howard Hughes’s will, a set of false teeth, Amelia Earhart, the first four measures of ‘The Impossible Dream’ sung by the Black Mountain College choir, Howard Hughes’s will (another version), the widow of the Unknown Soldier, six passenger pigeons, middle-class morality, the Great American Novel, and a banana.”

  “Jesus!” swore Leigh-Cheri. She didn’t know whether to laugh or jump overboard. “Look, who are you, anyway? And what’s your game?”

  “Woodpecker’s the name, and outlawing’s the game. I’m wanted in fifty states and Mexico. It’s nice to feel wanted, and I’d like to be wanted by you. In fact, I just blew my disguise in the hopes that it would open your eyes and soften your heart. There. My cards are on the table. An expression your old daddy would surely understand.”