Still Life with Woodpecker (11 page)

In an attempt to restore order, a well-known yogi, a Care Fest delegate, strolled onto the platform. He assumed the lotus position. He beamed. Serenely, meticulously, he took a cobweb apart, then put it back together. (There were no parts left over.) He swallowed three butterflies, then burped them up unharmed. Only that portion of the crowd that was already orderly was impressed. The yogi had the stink of eternity about him, and in many circles eternity was simply no longer fashionable.

The situation became increasingly unsavory. Also, tedious. You’ll be spared the details. Enough is enough. A banyan sends its adventitious roots to the ground, sometimes causing it to spread over a wide area. Under proper conditions, it bears figs. Thomas Jefferson was fond of figs. It was Jefferson’s genius that kept the American Revolution
from being sucked into the tunnel faster than it was. Jefferson had red hair. Nothing is implied here. Except the possibility that everything is connected.

With the debate on the verge of violence—or worse, of being turned over to committee—Leigh-Cheri fled the park. The palm trees she passed, the romantic palms of Hawaii, were covering their ears with their fronds. Her sentiments exactly. “Jesus,” she swore. She felt like the gourmet who was goosed in Strasbourg. “It’s my pâte, and I’ll cry if I want to.”

In the Pioneer’s bar, she sat under one of the whaling harpoons that decorated the walls. She asked for a mai tai, then switched her order to tequila. Outside, the ocean banged its head against the jetty. She empathized completely. Inside, a different tide—young men with buzzing glands—swirled around her. From its eddy the news leaped like a sailfish: the police had finally solved the Lahaina bombing case. “Made da bust ’bout da hour ago,” she overheard a kamaaina say.

ACROSS THE WAVES,
in Seattle, it continued to rain. Late at night the rain would harden into snow drops, but by the time the morning shift of engineers, coffee thermoses in hand, sloshed up to the security gate at Boeing Aircraft, there was plain rain again and plenty of it. A gelid wind, Alaska decals on every piece of its luggage, lingered in the rain without a sneeze, muscled through the blackberry brambles without a scratch, called upon the King and Queen without an invitation.

“Little wonder the CIA has so many leaks,” said Max. He was bundled against the drafts. “It knows nothing about insulation.”

Chuck wrote this down in his spy book. King Max watched him laboring over the spelling. “I—n—s—u—l—a—t—i—o—n,” said Max helpfully. If the King was aware of the insurrection afoot in his homeland, he kept it well hidden.

“He ain’t fooling me,” said Chuck. Using the kitchen extension, Chuck eavesdropped on a telephone conversation that Max had had with one A’ben Fizel.

“There’s some kind of deal on with the Arabs,” Chuck reported to the CIA.

“Was there any mention of arms?” asked Chuck’s connection.

“Talk of jet planes and missiles, I believe.”

Max had arranged for A’ben Fizel to meet Princess Leigh-Cheri when she returned from Hawaii. Chaperoned, of course. Tilli and Max would accompany their daughter and Fizel to a basketball game. Seattle Supersonics versus the Houston Rockets. In the Kingdome.

“Said something about battle in the kingdom.”

“I’ll be damned,” swore the agent. He whistled. “This is bigger than we thought.”

To her Chihuahua, whose shivering little frame she had dressed in a purple wool sweater with fur at the collar, Queen Tilli complained. “Baskeetboll. Baskeetboll. You might haf known no Arab vud vant to attend zee opera.”

“YOU’RE CRYING.”

“I am not.”

“My mistake. You aren’t crying. You aren’t out of breath, either. That’s fortunate because this club doesn’t admit women with pants. Is that a pun in my pocket, or am I just glad to see you? Something’s wrong.”

Leigh-Cheri merely sniffed. “Have you got a tissue?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll find you something. Come on in.”

Leigh-Cheri stooped and entered the cabin. She ripped a length of toilet paper from the roll that Bernard fetched from the head. She blew her nose, a signal for all tears to return to their homes and families.

“Well, I see you’re still here.”

“I am definitely here. But that’s no reason to cry.”

“I wasn’t crying. I’ve had a bad day. Another one. One in a series of bad days. I’m not complaining. Bad days are my bag. They’re time-consuming, however, and I’m a busy girl. I only stopped by here because I understood you’d been busted.”

“Oh? You turned me in?”

“No, damn you, I didn’t. Cops have busted somebody for bombing the Pioneer. Just a stab in the dark, a wild guess, I know, but I thought it might be you.”

“I’m hurt that you’d think such a thing but delighted that you came by to check. It is my privilege to report that if being uncaged is being free, then I am as the birdies in the blue.”

“Then who did the police arrest, I wonder?”

“I fear that there’s been an international, or rather, an interplanetary incident. The police have seen fit to incarcerate our guests from the faraway world of Argon.”

“No kidding? Really? How did it happen, I mean, why them?”

“Because an anonymous caller tipped off the cops, who subsequently found two sticks of dynamite in their rented Toyota. Hmmm …”

“Bernard!”

“Shhh. I’m trying to imagine what an Argonian driver’s license looks like. One of them would have had to have a driver’s license in order to rent a car.”

“Bernard, that was your dynamite.”

“Are you sure?”

“But two sticks. You had three.”

“Go ahead, tell me I’m selfish. Call me a bum Christian. I can’t help it. I couldn’t bring myself to give it all away. One never knows when one might need some.”

She tried to respond as if he’d made a perfectly ordinary remark. She took a slow, calming breath. “What are you trying to say? With your dynamite, I mean?”

“Say? Dynamite didn’t come here to teach. It came to awaken.”

“Do you think dynamite can make the world a better place?”

“A better place than
what?
Argon?”

“You evasive bastard. I’m trying to understand you, and you won’t give me a straight answer.” Her small sunburned fist, in frustration, crumpled the soiled toilet paper with which she’d dabbed her eyes and blown her nose.

“Maybe you’re not asking the right questions. If all you’re interested in is making the world a better place, go back to your Care Fest and question Ralph Nader—”

“I fully intend to go hear Ralph. Ralph Nader, I mean.” She blushed, feeling, perhaps, that she’d betrayed a secret onanistic intimacy.

“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.”