Still Life with Woodpecker (7 page)

LITTLE DID LEIGH-CHERI KNOW
that she was arresting a man whom half a dozen American sheriffs had sworn on family Bibles to see dead, that she had nabbed a fugitive who had eluded the greediest nets of the FBI for a
decade, all told, although it must be admitted that in recent years, with the social climate altered and Bernard inactive, interest in his capture had waned.

Leigh-Cheri had heard of the Woodpecker, of course, but in the days when he was making headlines by blowing up draft boards and induction centers, the last days of the Vietnam War, she’d been a schoolgirl, picking blackberries, cuddling teddy bears, listening to a certain bedtime story, yellowing her nose with buttercups. Curiously excited by an enema that Gulietta had administered to her on Queen Tilli’s orders, Leigh-Cheri had masturbated for the first time on the very evening of Bernard’s most infamous exploit, and the confusing pleasure of secret fingering—the fresh flush that heated her cheeks, the vague mental images of nasty games with boys, the sticky dew that smelled of frog water and clung like prehensile pearls to the thickening fuzz around her peachfish—this mysterious and shaming little ache of ecstasy eclipsed the less personal events of the day, including the news that the notorious Woodpecker had demolished an entire building on the campus of a large Midwestern university.

Bernard Mickey Wrangle had sneaked into Madison, Wisconsin, in the deep of night. His hair was red then, red being the color of emergency and roses; red being the prelate’s top and the baboon’s bottom; red being the blood’s color, jelly’s color; red maddening the bull, red bringing the bull down; red being the color of valentines, of left-handedness, and of a small princess’s newfound guilty hobby. His hair was red, his cowboy boots muddy, his heart a hive of musical bees.

Aided and abetted by the Woodpecker Gang, he blew up the chemistry building at the University of Wisconsin. Allegedly, work performed in that building was helpful to the war the United States government was then waging in Southeast Asia. The explosion occurred at three o’clock in the morning. The building was supposed to have been unoccupied. Unfortunately, a graduate student was in one of
the laboratories, completing research that was to lead to his doctorate.

The diligent student was found in the rubble. Not all of him, but enough to matter. Confined to a wheelchair, he became a stereo jockey in a Milwaukee disco, trading snappy patter with good-timing office workers and playing Barry White records as if he believed in them. He might have been a decent scientist. His project, which was obliterated by the blast, was the perfection of an oral contraceptive for men.

Bernard made it safely back to the West. Only the radio news reports followed him to the hideout behind the waterfall. For once, the reports failed to entertain him. “I took a man’s legs,” he said to Montana Judy. “I took his manhood, I took his memory, and I took his career. Worse, I took his wife, who split when he ran out of manhood and career. Worse still, I might have spoiled chances for a male pill. Yikes. I’ve got to pay. I deserve to pay. But I’ll pay in my way, not society’s. As bad as I am, there isn’t a judge who’s good enough to sentence me.”

Another penitent might have joined a grubby religious cult or stood in a dark alley waiting for someone to come along and knock him in the head. As
his
payment, Bernard embarked on a chemical research project of his own. He tracked down, investigated, and tested various esoteric methods of birth control. “Who knows,” he told Montana Judy, “maybe I’ll come up with something better than that poor bozo’s pill.”

In herbal literature, it is written that comfrey is good for sprains and fit root for spasms; cascara will end constipation, wild cherry restore loss of speech; for nosebleed, buckthorn is recommended, and for pneumonia, try skunk cabbage. If you are stricken with sexual desire, the cure prescribed is lily root, and assuming that lily root fails, is unavailable, or is forsaken in the delirium of the illness, squaw vine, spikenard, and raspberry leaves all make childbirth a little easier. Western herbal literature is
oddly lacking in contraceptive advice, Bernard discovered. Oddly lacking. He suspected tampering by the Church, but Bernard suspected the Church of a great many things.

In the anthropological texts that he pilfered from public libraries on both sides of the Rockies, it was told how the influence of tree spirits and water nymphs would promote fecundity, and though Bernard did not doubt that—female members of the Woodpecker Gang demonstrated a decided tendency toward fecundity out there in the wilderness where tree spirits abounded—he wondered where the deities were who guarded
against
the knockup. The Eskimo of the Bering Strait, the Huichol of Mexico, the Nishinam Indians of California, the Caffre tribes of South Africa, the Basuto, the Maori, and the Anno all made dolls in the likeness of the infant that was wanted, and that act of homeopathic magic brought pregnancy galloping. But what image could be fashioned to hold would-be embryos at bay? A decoction of wasp’s nest was administered internally to Lkungen brides to make them as prolific as insects. How much of a rhinoceros would a bride have to eat in order to emulate that animal’s habit of infrequent offspring?

In ancient times, when a people’s success—its survival, perhaps—depended upon steady multiplication, all available magic was marshaled in the promotion of fertility. It was only after the Industrial Revolution that some deterrent to fertility gradually began to become widely desirable (desirable for whole societies rather than the occasional unlucky lovers), and by the last quarter of the twentieth century, when overpopulation was a major threat to the planet, there was no longer any magic to command. Or was there? Maybe in Asia …

Bernard saw on television, in a bar in Boulder, on a program called “You Asked for It,” some remarkable documentary footage. There was a village somewhere in India on the outskirts of which a large albino cobra lived in the rocks. For years that snake had played a starring role in a
unique fertility rite. The barren women of the village had to make a pilgrimage to the white cobra’s den. There they had to kiss him—on top of his head. Yet it wasn’t enough to kiss him. To guarantee conception, they had to kiss the cobra twice. The village lost a good many of its infertile women. Bernard was fascinated by that powerful scene. He thought it would make a great breath-mint commercial. You know: “If she kisses you once, will she kiss you again?” Bernard mailed a suggestion to the Certs company. Certs responded that his judgment was questionable, not to mention his taste. Montana Judy said the same.

From India, however, he gathered information that a tea brewed from pennyroyal and myrrh would interfere with conception up to seven days after the act. He went at once to an herb shop in Missoula and shoplifted the ingredients. East Indian sources also supplied the intelligence that regular ingestion of carrot seed was a birth control method whose effectiveness had been proven by countless generations of Hindu women. Reference to “countless generations” did not reassure him, but he acquired carrot seeds from a farmer’s supply store near Billings, and was damn near caught in the process. Obtaining the astringent ingredients used in She-link, the traditional Chinese herbal contraceptive, further taxed the Woodpecker’s ingenuity, for preparation of She-link required chi je date, She-link flower, ling-shook root, and gomsomchu leaf: the Four Immortals, for God’s sake. Naturally, the Food and Drug Administration frowned upon the introduction of the She-link formula to America. Bernard was forced to jimmy the locks of Chinese doctors as far west as San Francisco to get his freckled paws on some ling-shook.

Even so, he abandoned She-link as abruptly as carrot seeds and pennyroyal when he learned of lunaception. A drugless method of pinpointing ovulation by training women to resynchronize their cycles with those of the moon, lunaception landed like an astronaut on the green cheese of Bernard’s imagination. Everything about it
sounded right to him, especially its lunar foundation. Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon Mythologically, woodpeckers are connected to Mars, the redheaded planet, but the Woodpecker, more so than any delegate to the aborted UFO convention, had a private line to the moon.

On second thought,
everything
about lunaception didn’t please Bernard. Lunaception, as did She-link, pennyroyal, and carrot seeds, placed the burden of responsibility for birth control on the woman. Thus, for all of its potential effectiveness, it failed to completely compensate for the loss of the male pill. If Bernard was bothered by that, Montana Judy was bothered more. Understandably, Bernard had scant access to subjects for contraceptive testing. Who was going to trust an amateur gynecologist? Particularly one whose credentials included the Ten Most Wanted list.

Montana Judy grew sick of being a guinea pig for Bernard’s experiments. And she was unrelieved when he expanded his testing to include her younger sisters, the twins: Montana Molly and Montana Polly. Bernard, you see, personally supplied and delivered the squirmy sauce that was the activating agent in the tests. Montana Judy decided that Bernard should pay his debt to society in a more conventional fashion. Montana Judy turned him in.

That book that judges are said to throw at offenders (the rule book, presumably; a Russian novel, possibly; no elegant volume of verse, certainly) was hurled like a bean ball at the red bean of Bernard Mickey Wrangle. He was sentenced to thirty years. The last quarter of the twentieth century might be destined to limp into history, but at least there’d be no Woodpecker around to drill holes in its crutches.

Aware of his reputation for exits, the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington, locked him up quite tight. It took him more than a year to blow out.

In his absence, the world had changed. It was only fair.
Bernard himself had changed. For example, observation of his colleagues in prison had convinced him that thievery, inspired by the basest human impulses, was unbecoming to an outlaw. Let businessmen and riffraff rob and cheat. He vowed never to steal again, unless it was necessary. He also vowed to behave more sensitively toward women, beginning with Montana Judy, could he find her. He couldn’t. She had joined a gang of equality-minded women that spent its evenings terrorizing men, equally, regardless of their degrees of guilt or innocence. These women would accept men only as subservient flunkies, and while Bernard knew only too well that that was how many men had treated many women for many centuries, he couldn’t see a mere reversal of rotten roles as being very equalizing or very helpful to
anyone
. Moreover, he was nobody’s flunky. Not even the moon’s. Montana Polly had joined the same mob of avengers. Montana Molly was enrolled in Spokane Success, a secretarial college. The Woodpecker Gang had disbanded. Four former members were in jail. One had been clubbed to death with folding chairs by members of an American Legion post in Jackson Hole. Three had embraced conventional politics and were working within the system to alter the system. One was selling real estate and had contracted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Willie the Wetback was studying pre-law at Stanford. He was in a fraternity. Starving his nose, although he still smoked grass occasionally. He wanted to work for Nader one day. The world had changed.

Bernard was perplexed. He missed the thrills, chills, and spills. Just because the war was over did that mean everybody had to stop having fun?

Thanks to Montana Judy, the hideout behind the waterfall was hot. Bernard went underground in Seattle. He got a job mixing drinks in a bar frequented by off-duty policemen. Some nights there were dozens of cops in the place. Their presence sprinkled a little spice on his life. Added a tiny tickle of amusement. He poured cheap bourbon. And bided his time.

A writer published an open letter to Bernard in a leading liberal periodical. He requested an interview. Utmost secrecy was sworn. It was on the level. The writer was a man of proven courage and integrity. The writer wanted amnesty for dissidents such as Bernard. He said that Bernard had suffered enough. He wrote that living underground was no less punishing than prison. “A person underground exists in a state of controlled schizophrenia,” he wrote. “Terror never slackens.” The journalist considered Bernard a victim of the Vietnam War. The fact that he had acted against the government’s interests instead of in them was immaterial, the writer said. The socio-political realities that drove Bernard to risk his life bombing induction centers were essentially the same as those that led other young men to risk theirs trading shots in rice paddies. As a fugitive, on the run, living in disguise and fear, Bernard was no less a casualty than those poor veterans who had left prime cuts from their physiques to decay in Da Nang and Hue.

Ha ha.

That’s how Bernard’s infamous response began.

“Ha ha.

“Victim? The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the
refusal
to be victimized.

“All people who live subject to other people’s laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration, or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims. (I am speaking here of revolutionaries.) We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don’t merely live beyond the letter of the law—many businessmen, most politicians, and all cops do that—we live beyond the spirit of the law. In a sense, then, we live beyond society. Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the
nature
of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We even raise it a little bit when we fail.

“Victim? I deplored the ugliness of the Vietnam War. But what I deplored, others have deplored before me. When war turns whole populations into sleepwalkers, outlaws don’t join forces with alarm clocks. Outlaws, like poets, rearrange the nightmare. It is elating work. The years of the war were the most glorious of my life. I wasn’t risking my skin to protest a war. I risked my skin for fun. For beauty!