Still Life with Woodpecker (12 page)

“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.”

“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 hogs 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.

She dipped a thumb into the flow and stuck it in her pretty mouth. It made her giggle.

“I hear it tastes like plastic,” Bernard said.

“Cream of bomber soup. Someday I want a whole bowl full.”

“You know how to open the can.”

Dreamily, the Princess stood up. “I’m not sure if I can walk,” she said.

“Then I’ll carry you.”

“Is that what love is?”

“I no longer know what love is. A week ago I had a lot of ideas. What love is and how to make it stay. Now that I’m in love, I haven’t a clue. Now that I’m in love, I’m completely stupid on the subject.”

Leigh-Cheri was feeling stupid, as well. Look as she might, she couldn’t find her underpants. “They must have melted,” she joked as she hugged Bernard goodbye, but secretly she suspected that the gods had vaporized them as a warning, a sign of divine displeasure for her having given her heart and her ass to the outlaw rather than her mind and her soul to a cause. In actual fact, a mongoose, attracted by the primal fragrance emanating from the sloop, had come aboard and carried them off. Having chewed all of the salt out of them, the mongoose abandoned
the panties in a gutter along Hotel Street, where, the following morning, the Hero, hailing a taxi for the airport, stepped on them without noticing, although the lace cried out sweetly to his purposeful shoes.

SHE WAS QUEEN
of Hawaii at last. Hawaii opened up to her as she had opened up to Bernard, like a flower whose bell is deep and sticky, like a book with satin pages, like a fruit so swollen with juice it moans for the prick of the knife. Despite Gulietta’s halfhearted objections, Leigh-Cheri spent Thursday with Bernard, and everywhere the two redheads went, Hawaii was there to receive them.

They picnicked in a forest beneath the volcano. Ants, perhaps bearing tiny leis, swarmed to greet them. Bernard bit into a tomato. He spit out its seeds. The seeds formed a circle on the ground. They sat inside the circle. Intent on wishing them “aloha,” the ants stormed the circumference, but the circle would not yield. Leigh-Cheri passed Bernard the pickles. Bernard handed Leigh-Cheri the cheese. From somewhere in the jungle, the wind knocked bamboo together, making a musical clack-clack-clack like the teeth of a wooden idol. Doors of yellow ginger blossoms, on hinges that never need oiling, opened and closed in the wind.

Bernard popped a can of Primo, the native Hawaiian beer. Although beer is one of the few neutral foods, being neither yin nor yang, acidic nor alkaline, solar nor lunar, masculine nor feminine, wholly dynamic nor wholly inert, although beer perpetually idles in neutral and therefore may be the perfect beverage for the dispassionate and indecisive last quarter of the twentieth century, the Princess did not drink beer. She was content to drink the
warm zephyrs of Maui. And after lunch, the ants looking on in a state of frenzy, she drank her lover’s come. “Hmmm. It doesn’t taste like plastic,” she thought. “It tastes a lot like poi.” Ah, Hawaii.

There is lovemaking that is bad for a person, just as there is eating that is bad. That boysenberry cream pie from the Thrift-E Mart may appear inviting, may, in fact, cause all nine hundred taste buds to carol from the tongue, but in the end, the sugars, the additives, the empty calories clog arteries, disrupt cells, generate fat, and rot teeth. Even potentially nourishing foods can be improperly prepared. There are wrong combinations and improper preparations in sex as well. Yes, one must prepare for a fuck—the way an enlightened priest prepares to celebrate mass, the way a great matador prepares for the ring: with intensification, with purification, with a conscious summoning of sacred power. And even that won’t work if the ingredients are poorly matched: oysters are delectable, so are strawberries, but mashed together … (?!) Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health-food nuts use cupfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic or to be taken for medicinal purposes—only a dullard would hang such a millstone around the nibbled neck of a lay—but to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one’s palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition, the skin of the soul will fester with scurvy, the teeth of the heart will decay. Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure—there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than many lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-months affairs in Paris—but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however marbled with need; an honest
caring
, however singed by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison. Having consumed for years only junk-food sex (some of it undeniably finger-licking good), Princess Leigh-Cheri was now the recipient, in abundance, of both lusciousness and nourishment, and needless to say, it was agreeing with her. Trying to make love standing up in the Kaanapali surf (tourists on the sands were none the wiser), enjoying her lover’s reflection (crimson pubes and all) in a jungle pool near Hana, bouncing her sex-sore bottom along a riding trail at Makawao (she’d never seen anyone stand in the saddle before or bring down a mango with a thrown blade: that Bernard!) it was as if all her travel-poster fantasies had finally come true.