Still Life with Woodpecker Read online

  “Good. Do that. But if you’re interested in experiencing the world as a better place, then stay here with me.”

  “Oh yeah? That’d be fine—maybe—for you and me, but how about the rest of humanity?”

  “A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?”

  That silenced her. She seemed pensive. She unwaded the toilet paper just to have something to do with her hands. As she did so, she was reminded of the yogi who had taken the cobweb apart. “Bernard,” she said, “do you think I’ve been paying attention to the wrong things?”

  “I don’t know, babe. I don’t know what you’ve been paying attention to, because I don’t know what you’ve been dreaming about. We may think we’re paying attention to this, that, or the other, but our dreams tell us what we’re really interested in. Dreams never lie.”

  Leigh-Cheri thought about her dreams. Several episodes came vividly to mind. They caused her to blush again and set the peachfish to oozing from its gills. “I can’t recall any dreams,” she lied.

  “We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we’ve forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That’s why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.”

  “Are you a poet?”

  “I’m an outlaw.”

  “Are outlaws important members of society?”

  “Outlaws are not members of society. However, they may be important to society. Poets remember our dreams, outlaws act them out.”

  “Yeah? How about a princess? Is a princess important?”

  “They used to be. A princess used to stand for beauty, magic spells, and fairy castles. That was pretty damn important.”

  Leigh-Cheri shook her head slowly from side to side. Her fiery tresses swung like plantation curtains—the night they drove old Dixie down. “Come on. Are you serious? That’s romantic bullshit, Bernard. I can’t believe the dreaded Woodpecker is such a cornball.”

  “Ha. Ha ha. You love the earth so much, did you know it was hollow? The earth is hollow, Leigh-Cheri. Inside the ball there’s a wire wheel, and there’s a chipmunk running in the wheel. One little chipmunk, running its guts out for you and for me. At night, just before I fall asleep, I hear that chipmunk, I hear its crazed chattering, hear its little heart pounding, hear the squeaking of the squirrel cage—the wheel is old and rickety now and troubled by rust. The chipmunk is doing all the work. All we have to do is occasionally oil the wheel. What do you think lubricates the wheel, Leigh-Cheri?”

  “Do you really think so, Bernard?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “I—I think so, too. But I feel guilty about it. I feel so fucking whimsical.”

  “Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.”

  The High Jinks ran to forty feet, not including bowsprit. She slept four and could have slept more, but her cabin had been remodeled in such a way as to provide maximum cargo storage without being too obvious about her mission. She was teak with brass fittings and smelled like a spice boat, which, in a sense, she was. Leigh-Cheri sat aft, in the galley, at a glass-topped table. Beneath the glass was a nautical chart of the Hawaiian Islands. Coffee cups and tumblers of tequila had left circular stains on the glass, sticky atolls in a crumb-strewn Pacific. With those fingers that weren’t gripping toilet paper, Leigh-Cheri traced the rims of the unnamed reefs. “You know,” she said at last, “you make me feel good about being a princess. Most of the men I’ve known have made me feel guilty about it. They’d snicker up their sleeves at the mention of beauty and magic tricks and—what else did you say a princess stands for?”

  “Enchantments, dramatic prophesies, swans swimming in castle moats, dragon bait—”

  “Dragon bait?”

  “All the romantic bullshit that makes life interesting. People need that as badly as they need fair prices at the Texaco pump and no DDT in the Pablum. The men you’ve been with probably wouldn’t kiss your nipples correctly for fear they’d suck in some pesticide.”

  Upon hearing their name called, her nipples sprang to attention.

  “Early in my career as an outlaw, it doesn’t matter when, right after my first jailbreak, I helped hijack an airliner to Havana. Castro, that great fox, granted me sanctuary, but I hadn’t been in Cuba a month before I borrowed a small boat with an outboard motor and putt-putted like hell for the Florida Keys. The sameness of the socialistic system was stifling and boring to me. There was no mystery in Cuba, no variety, no novelty and worse, no options. For all the ugly vices that capitalism encourages, it’s at least interesting, exciting, it offers possibilities. In America, the struggle is at least an individual struggle. And if the individual has strength enough of character, salt enough of wit, the alternatives are thicker than polyesters in a car salesman’s closet. In a socialistic system, you’re no better or no worse than anybody else.”

  “But that’s equality!”

  “Bullshit. Unromantic, unattractive bullshit. Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.”

  “You may be right.” She fiddled with the toilet paper. She drew it across the table top and absentmindedly wiped out a whole archipelago. Is that what an “act of God” is? “I certainly don’t feel like I’m the same as everybody else. Especially when I’m around you. But that only inspires me to want to help those who aren’t as lucky as me.”

  “There’s always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn’t get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There’s always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can’t eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That’s when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.” He paused. “Anyway, to hear you tell it, you haven’t been real lucky lately.”

  “That may be changing. You’ve reaffirmed my belief in romantic bullshit, and Ralph Nader speaks in forty minutes. But answer me one more question before I go. If I stand for fairy-tale balls and dragon bait—dragon bait—what do you stand for?”

  “Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, surprise, disorder, unlawfulness, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night.”

  “You’ve really bought the desperado package, haven’t you? I mean, you’ve actually done those big bad things. Hijacked planes, blown-up banks—”

  “No. No banks. I leave banks to the criminal types. Without and within. Outlaws never—”

  “You make outlaw sound so special.”

  “Oh, it’s not all that special, I suppose. If you’re honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you’re forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws. I’ve simply gone one step farther.”

  “Out of the frying pan and into the crossfire, eh, Bernard? I admire the courage of that. I do. But, frankly, it seems to me that you’ve turned yourself into a stereotype.”

  “You may be right. I don’t care. As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren’t the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.”

  “Well, you may get off on being a beautiful stereotype, regardless of the social consequences, but my conscience won’t allow it. And I goddamn refuse to be dragon bait. I’m as capable of rescuing you as you are of rescuing me.”

  “I’m an outlaw, not a hero. I never intended to rescue you. We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves. Even outlaws perform services, however, and I brought my dynamite to Maui to remind the Care Fest that good can be as banal as evil. As for you, well … did you really expect me to
keep my senses after taking a look at your hair?”

  Leigh-Cheri held a strand of her hair to her eyes. As if in comparison, she reached across the table to where Bernard sat opposite her and examined one of his unruly ringlets. The hair of most so-called redheads actually is orange, but it was red, first color in the spectrum and the last seen by the eyes of the dying, it was true-blue red that clanged like fire bells about the domes of Bernard Mickey Wrangle and Princess Leigh-Cheri.

  There followed an embarrassed silence, tense and awkward, broken finally with a snap by the Woodpecker’s abrupt plunging of his hand into his jeans. Patterning his gesture after the successful Jack Horner, he pulled out a single hair and held it aloft. It glowed like a copper filament. “Can you match that?” he challenged.

  Okay, buster. Okay okay okay okay okay okay.

  Beneath the table, beneath a map of Hawaii with extraneous atolls, she submarined a hand into the depths of her skirt and slid it along the flat of her thigh. It winnowed into her panties. She yanked. Ouch! Damn it! She yanked again. And presto, there it was, curly and stiff, and as red as a thread from a socialist banner.

  “What do you think of that?” she asked brightly. Then she noticed that from the tip of the hair there hung, like a tadpole’s balloon, a tiny telltale bead of fishy moisture. O sweet Jesus, no! She released her grip on the crumpled toilet paper. It fluttered to the deck like a stricken dove. Her face heated as crimson as the hair, and then some. She could have died.

  “What do I think of that?” The Woodpecker’s voice was very very gentle. “I think it could make the world a better place.”

  39

  “VERTICAL INTEGRATION by food conglomerates, as in the poultry industry, has moved with great speed in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Yet this incredible ‘poultry peonage’ of the chicken farmer has spread almost without notice by urban America.”

  In the moonlight that soaked through the foliage of the grand banyan tree, the Hero was addressing the multitudes. Dressed in an inexpensive gray suit and a terminally drab necktie, he might just as well have been speaking in Philadelphia as Lahaina, but so enormous was his integrity that the sound of his voice caused the mongooses to cease stalking poodledogs on the grounds of the public library, and even Montana Judy’s mob, which had raised seven kinds of hell at the afternoon session of the Care Fest, sat on the grass in respectful silence. In fact, aside from several plastic Japanese fans and the Hero’s dry lips, the only thing moving in Banyan Park was an ancient chaperon, cruising the crowd, row by row, searching for her responsibility.

  “How, for example, can the housewife detect and do something about residues of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, and nitrates in the meat she purchases, or the excess water added to the chickens, hams, and processed meats?”

  Slurp and slobber, smack and excess water. Leigh-Cheri and Bernard kissed deliriously. They were speaking in tongues. Like an animal at a salt lick, he cleaned up the last of her tears. He even kissed a pearl of her snot away. As if his tongue weren’t enough, he eased a finger as well into her mouth and read the slippery Braille being writ there. She sucked his finger, and pressed her body against his so tightly that he nearly lost balance and toppled to starboard. The ocean in the Small Boat Harbor was feisty with tide, and they hadn’t gained their sea legs yet. Cautiously, centimeter by centimeter, squeezing as he went, Bernard worked a freckled hand up inside her skirt. Her panties all but dissolved in his grip. Oh my! Had King Max telephoned his bookie right then, he’d have found the odds running eight to one against celibacy.

  “The chemical industry and its pushers have ensured that the government go slow on research for alternative and safer methods of pest control.”

  Bernard handed her a capsule and a cup of tequila with which to wash it down. “Here. Swallow this.”

  “What is it?”

  “She-link. Chinese birth control. It’s very old and very safe. One capsule lasts for months. Take it, babe.”

  “I don’t know…. What’s in it?”

  “The Four Immortals.”

  “Only four. I’d feel safer with six.”

  “Take it.”

  “With six you get eggroll.”

  “Take it.”

  She took it, trying, as she swallowed, not to think of that line of marching Chinese, eight abreast, stretching completely around the globe.

  “Later, I’ll teach you lunaception: how to observe the way your hormonal cycle coordinates with light. You can learn to synchronize your body with moon phasing and be knock-up proof and in harmony with the universe at the same time. A whale of a bargain.”

  Leigh-Cheri was so pleasantly surprised by what she was hearing, so delighted by this mad bomber’s concern for her womb, that she threw her arms around him and kissed him like he was going out of style, which to the thinking of many, he was. She found herself laughing, kissing and undressing, all at the same time. Former Republican presidents, eat your hearts out.

  “Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism.”

  Did the Hero realize that as he spoke of symbolic fig leaves, real fig leaves formed the canopy that shielded the sheen of his business suit from the playful rays of the moon?

  Aboard the High Jinks, the last symbolic fig leaf had fallen. Bernard’s shorts—black, naturally—hit the deck moments after Leigh-Cheri stepped out of her panties. Their underwear just lay there, gathering dust, like ghost towns abandoned when the nylon mines petered out.

  They tumbled onto a lower berth. Leigh-Cheri had been this aroused before but never this relaxed about it. Her knees framed her smiling face. She presented a target difficult to miss. The moon, bright as a lemon, entered the sloop via porthole and sparkled on the dripping bull’s-eye. His aim was true. He sank to the hilt. “Sweet Jesus!” she cried. “Yum-mm,” he moaned. The sea rocked the boat, as if egging them on.

  “Rarely revealed publicly, but still operational, are corporate rationalizations that air pollution is the ‘price of progress’ and the ‘smell of the payroll.’”

  As time passed, the air in the cabin was composed of two parts oxygen, one part nitrogen, and three parts slish vapor, French mist, and Cupid fumes. Their funk billowed over them like a sail. It carried them across the crest of spasm after spasm. The aroma of her cunt knocked the hatches back. The scent of his semen swamped the bilges.

  “Ooh,” she marveled. “Don’t we smell pretty?”

  “Good enough to eat,” he answered. He thought about what he had said. It gave him ideas.

  “In all the current environmental concern and groping for directions by students and citizen’s groups, one major institution has been almost ignored or shunted aside as irrelevant.”

  They had been still for a while, catching their breath, letting the tempo of their blood drums slacken, gazing into each other’s eyes in perfect manifestation of hypnotic universal peeper-lock love trance, when Leigh-Cheri said, “You know, Bernard, that was not very nice what you did.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you liked it. Some women are inhibited about having … that part of them loved—maybe it hurts them—but I tried to be gentle, and you certainly sounded like you were liking it.”

  “Not that, silly. I’m not talking about that. I did like it. It was my first time. Not even a finger, can you believe it? It probably never occurred to my boyfriends that princesses even have assholes.” She kissed Bernard appreciatively.

  “I wasn’t talking about that, you silly bomber. I meant your frame job. The poor ambassadors from Argon.”

  “Them. Well, first of all, babe, if they really got here all the way from Argon, they shouldn’t have any trouble getting out of the Lahaina jail. Second, the things they were saying about redheads constituted a crime against nature. Nature demanded retribution. Third, the Woodpecker is proud of his deeds, even those that have a certain overtone of fuck-up about them. He’s not gonna let any glory hog
s from outer space take credit for what was a rather fine piece of journeyman dynamiting. One day he’ll set the record straight. But not right away. There’re eleven months to go before the statute of limitations expires, at which time he plans to enjoy some especially amusing public appearances.”

  “In eleven months you’ll be free?”

  “If that’s freedom, yeah.”

  “For some reason that makes me happy.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  They snuggled closer, and when they were as close as they could get without being behind one another, they commenced to kiss again. His middle finger began to disappear into her vagina, but she pulled it out and forced it instead—with some discomfort and some ecstasy—deep into the royal rectum.

  “Outlaw territory,” she whispered.

  “What is needed is a sustained public demand for a liberation of law and technology that will disarm the corporate power that turns nature against man. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Good night.”

  Did the banyan tree believe that the cheering was for it? Surely, the moon realized that in the last quarter of the twentieth century it could expect no applause. The Hero, nodding more than bowing, stepped down from the podium and in scruffed shoes strode modestly from Banyan Park.

  If success is clapped and failure booed, then Gulietta deserved but catcalls for her evening’s work. An hour’s diligent searching had not located her mistress and charge. Gulietta also left the park.

  Bernard and Leigh-Cheri might legitimately have applauded themselves, but freshly fucked lovers seldom acknowledge “success” in those terms, and besides, they were too pooped to give themselves the standing ovation they deserved. They, too, were preparing to take their leave.

  They sat on the berth. They shared a cup of tequila and a package of Hostess Twinkies. As if they were tourists at a geological site, they watched a flow of translucent lava inch its way down the inside of her leg.

  “You sure were full of it,” she said.

  “A regular Hostess Twinkie,” he replied.