Still Life with Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  “Any windows?”

  “One tiny one, with bars on it, up near the ceiling. It lets in a little daylight, but you can’t see out of it.”

  “Electric lighting?”

  “A single bulb in the ceiling. Far too high to reach.”

  “What wattage?”

  “How the hell would I know? I’d guess forty.”

  The Princess smiled mysteriously. She remembered that Bernard had told her that the light of a full moon was equivalent to a forty-watt bulb at fifteen feet. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing. No books, no magazines, nothing. Except a pack of cigarettes.”

  Again, Leigh-Cheri smiled. “Yes, he smokes Camels when he’s in jail. He said that when you’re locked up, smoking a cigarette is like having a friend.”

  “Well, it’s a lonesome friendship in this case, because he’s not smoking. He demanded cigarettes, it’s a prisoner’s right, but they won’t let him smoke them. The pack hasn’t even been opened.”

  “Why won’t they let him smoke?”

  “Because they’re afraid if he gets his hands on any fire, he’ll make a bomb.”

  “Outta what? A cot? Foam rubber? His clothes? A pack of cigarettes?”

  “Listen, sister, your lover has a reputation. They say the son-of-a-bitch can make a bomb out of anything.”

  On her return trip up First Avenue, where the bride’s maid was overtaking the frost on the pole, Leigh-Cheri ducked into the Born to Lose Tavern and purchased a pack of Camels.

  54

  BERNARD MICKEY WRANGLE’S

  FAVORITE HOMEMADE

  BOMB RECIPES

  THE HEARTS AND DIAMONDS BOMB:

  Take a deck of ordinary playing cards, the old-fashioned paper kind, cut out the red spots and soak them overnight like beans. Alcohol is the best soaking solution, but tap water will suffice. Plug one end of a short length of pipe. Pack the soggy hearts and diamonds into the pipe. One pre-plastic playing cards, the red spots were printed with a diazo dye, a chemical that has an unstable, high-energy bond with nitrogen. So you’ve got some nitro, of sorts, now you’ll be needing glycerin. Hand lotion will work nicely. Glug a little lotion into the pipe. To activate the quasi-nitroglycerin, you’ll require potassium permanganate. That you can find in the snake-bite section of any good first-aid chest. Add a dash of the potassium permanganate and plug the other end of the pipe. Heat the pipe. A direct flame is best, but simply laying the pipe atop a hot radiator will turn the trick. Take cover! The Woodpecker used a hearts and diamonds bomb to release himself from McNeil Island the first time that he was confined there.

  THE DRAINO REEFER BOMB:

  Acquire a can of Draino or any similar household product that contains a high concentration of lye. Roll the Draino in a length of aluminum foil, as if you were rolling a reefer. If you’re serious about wanting an explosion, you’ll have to submerge the reefer in water. In jail, the ideal place for submersion is a toilet tank. When wet lye reacts with aluminum, hydrogen is released in the form of gas. A spark will ignite it. Taking cover is difficult with this kind of explosive. Don’t lose your head.

  THE JUG BAND BOMB:

  You’ll need gasoline for this one, but only a few drops. When Bernard was on work detail washing the sheriff’s car, he siphoned enough through a soda straw in five seconds to buy his way out of Cody, Wyoming, forever. Squirt the gasoline drops into a clean jug, the glass type in which cider is sold. Cap the jug and roll it around so that the inside is coated with the gasoline. Let the gasoline evaporate. Once again, you’ll be requiring a snake-bite kit for its supply of potassium permanganate (in this world, snakes take many forms, and if you aren’t adept at charming them, you must be prepared to counteract their venom). Add a pinch of the p.p. and quickly recap the jug. Roll the jug across the room with enough force so that it will break when it strikes the opposite wall. Goodbye wall. This is a high explosive.

  THE FRUIT LOOPS AND BATSHIT BOMB:

  A Woodpecker original. Sugar is an unstable chemical that loves to oxidize as passionately as sulfur does and in much the same way. In preparing this dish, think of sugar as sulfur. The components of gun-powder are sulfur, carbon, and saltpeter. Fruit Loops, or any similar breakfast cereal, contains a good deal of sugar and carbon. (Bernard endorses Fruit Loops for bombs. For his morning repast, he prefers Wheaties. With beer.) As for saltpeter (potassium nitrate), batshit is a perfect source. If batshit is unavailable, bird doo will do. The older the guano the better. Aesthetic as well as pragmatic considerations make the fresh wet splat inadvisable. Grind up the Fruit Loops. Mix in the batshit thoroughly. When mixing Fruit Loops and batshit, don’t be surprised if you find the color attractive. In fact, you may end up with a clearer understanding of art and its origins. For that reason, this is the bomb recommended to reviewers and critics. Place the mixture in a container and ignite it. Gunpowder, contrary to what you might expect, is not much of a boomer. The Fruit Loops and batshit bomb won’t flatten any buildings, but it makes a marvelous amount of smoke. Certainly it makes more smoke than a pack of Camels. That is, it makes more smoke than a pack of Camels unless … unless the missing race of redheaded Argonians gets its message across.

  55

  WITH A BUCKET OF BLACK PAINT,, Leigh-Cheri went up to the attic. She blacked out the windows, except for one small pane in the east. Into the overhead fixture, she screwed a forty-watt bulb. She cleared out the royal dressmaking dummy, Christmas tree decorations, and trunks of monogrammed junk. She moved in a chamber pot and a cot. The cot had a foam rubber mattress, the pot would be emptied by Gulietta twice a day. Gulietta, also twice daily, would bring in a plate of food. “Starchy food,” ordered Leigh-Cheri. “I want to eat like he eats.”

  In vain, the King and Queen tried to reason with her. “It’s no wonder people lack romance in their lives,” said the Princess. “Love belongs to those who are willing to go to extremes for it. Goodbye.”

  Tilli and Max listened to the attic door slam. To Max, the door sounded like the crack of a bat when the opposition has hit a homerun to beat the Mariners in the bottom of the ninth. His heart, which would never win another pennant, cracked a tinny bat of its own. “Oh-Oh spaghetti-o,” said Tilli. She did not elaborate.

  Briefly, they discussed seeking professional help for the Princess, but King Max was one of those who believed that psychology was at that point in its development that surgery was at when it was practiced by barbers, so the idea was abandoned. Max put his arm halfway around his wife—halfway was as far as he could reach—and they walked out on the porch and stared at the blackberries. The blackberries, if little else in the last quarter of the twentieth century except killer bees and Arabs, were on the move.

  Here, it might be worth mentioning that Bernard Mickey Wrangle, while in agreement with the King’s opinion of the profession of psychology, had developed a psychological test of his own. It was short, simple and, to the mind of its creator, infallible. To administer the test, merely ask the subject to name his or her favorite Beatle. If you are at all familiar with the distinct separate public images of the four Beatles, then you’ll recognize that the one chosen—John, Paul, George, or Ringo—reveals as much about the subject’s personality as most of us will ever hope to know.

  56

  LEIGH-CHERI PACED THE FLOOR. She sat on the cot. She gave to foam rubber its first imprint in history of a royal behind. She walked to the windows and looked into the black. She tried out the chamber pot, although she really had nothing to contribute. She lay on the cot. Ceiling ceiling ceiling. She turned over. Floor floor floor. She got up and, like a vacuum cleaner with insomnia, roamed the room some more. For three days, she did such things. Perhaps she was coming to terms with the space, although surely she realized that space is merely a device to prevent everything from being in the same spot.

  On the fourth day, she decided to think, in an organized manner, about the problem of romance. “When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us.
When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on—series polygamy—until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter. Hey, that’s pretty good. If I had pencil and paper, I’d write that down.” Alas, she had no pencil, while the roll of paper that sat by the chamber pot was destined for a different end.

  Next, she thought, “When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It’s hard work, especially when it seems superfluous or redundant, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.” She was unsure if that idea was profound or trite. She was only sure that it mattered.

  Then, she thought, “The mystics say that as soon as you give it up, you can have it. That may be true, but who wants it when you don’t want it.”

  Leigh-Cheri tried to think more thoughts about romance. Her mind wandered. Toward dawn of the fifth day, she masturbated.

  It was unintentional. She meant only to test herself for signs of numbness, atrophy, shrinkage, aridity. As the damp genital spark flashed from her fingertips, her little hand withdrew in surprise. Cautiously, it returned. It met no resistance. It slithered through the folds of saltmeat and peach. It pressed the seaweed trigger.

  Afterward, she was depressed. She felt that she had violated the purity of her hermitage. Try as she might, she could not imagine Bernard masturbating in his cell. Bernard didn’t require an ad agency to tell him the difference between the sponsor’s product and Brand X. Bernard wouldn’t accept an ignominious substitute. Those cherubs that circle, in an aurora of blue light, the rocking bed of true lovers, those angels do not fly for masturbators. In the future, she would try to channel her sexual energy into something more elevating than the do-it-yourself orgasm.

  But what?

  She tried to name the fifty states and their capitals, but she could never get past South Dakota. She tried to name the nine planets in our solar system and was bewildered to find that she could name ten, counting Argon. She tried to remember why George Harrison was her favorite Beatle—surely it was his sincerity, his deep spirituality, his compassion for suffering humanity—only to discover that for some reason she now preferred the rebellious explorer John Lennon. She played a game in which she was given the power to pass one law to which every person in the world must adhere. What law would she lay down? What one law could change the world? You couldn’t force people to love their neighbors as themselves. There already were laws against killing, yet murders continued. Certainly, to make the internal combustion engine illegal would improve things enormously, but how long before industry would put a nuclear-powered car in every radioactive garage? Suppose she made everything illegal. Then everybody would be outlaws. Would Bernard be delighted or horrified? In another game, she could give Academy Awards to the movies of her choice, the films that really deserved them. She quickly ran out of candidates and began fantasizing a movie. She only knew one plot, however, and she could never quite handle the scene in which the frog was dashed against the wall. Besides, whatever happened to the golden ball?

  Her fantasies gave way to dreams. Or was it the other way around? In either case, she lay on the cot for days and didn’t open her eyes. Gulietta shook her. “Are you dyink?” the old woman asked. “Zee Queen vants to know,” Gulietta said, parroting Tilli, “eef you are dyink.” “Oh no,” answered Leigh-Cheri dreamily. “Tell mama I am living. Living for love.” She fell immediately back into communion with her private totem, a beast that was both frog and woodpecker, and, sometimes, too, the chipmunk that runs its little buns off at the center of the earth.

  Time passed. It must have been a week. Maybe longer. Then, one evening she awoke, clearheaded and refreshed. She stood up and stretched. She jogged around the attic a few times. She bent down and touched her toes. With a sharp appetite, she devoured the soy burger and mashed potatoes on her dinner tray. She put the chamber pot to its proper use. She sat down on the cot. “Yes, I’m alive,” she said. “Alive for love.” She felt fine, although she had to confess she could still feel on her neck the tepid breath of boredom.

  At that moment, something caught her eye. Something snagged the hem of her vision and yanked it like a child. A moon ray had penetrated the one clear pane and was illuminating an object. She walked over and picked the object up. For the first time, she took account of the pack of Camels.

  57

  THE TEMPLES, the minarets, the oasis, the pyramids, the camel itself filtered through her vision without being seen. Her orbs, as if conditioned by years of literacy, settled on the message that federal law required the manufacturer to publish on the left side panel of the package.

  Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.

  … typeface, blue ink, background as white as the eye skin around her blue irises, as white as the library rug used to be.

  In her mind, clumps of tumors bloomed; soft pink lungs took on the appearance of charred firewood; grotesque tubers, oozing blood and spore jelly, spread like mushrooms across an unsuspecting lawn; arteries withered like the tendrils of parched orchids; clots resembling rotten tomatoes or the brains of diseased monkeys choked the organism, each clot emitting faint wisps of smoke from a combustion that would not die until the organism died.

  Leigh-Cheri grunted in disgust. “Yuk,” she said aloud, exercising the alternate mantra. “Bernard claims that a cigarette is a friend when you’re locked away. With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

  To the Princess, it was an enigma why anyone would smoke, yet the answer seems simple enough when we station ourselves at that profound interface of nature and culture formed when people take something from the natural world and incorporate it into their bodies.

  Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, the pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It’s not the tobacco we’re after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

  Does that mean that chain smokers are religious fanatics? You must admit there’s a similarity.

  The lung of the smoker is a naked virgin thrown as a sacrifice into the godfire.

  58

  HAVING NOTHING ELSE TO READ, Leigh-Cheri eventually read the rest of the package. Camel: Turkish & Domestic Blend Cigarettes: Choice: Quality: Manufactured by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Winston-Salem, N.C. 27102, U.S.A.; 20 Class A Cigarettes; and the famous inscription that has graced the rear panel of the package since its creation in 1913 (the year, allegedly, of the last Argonian transmission to redheaded earthlings); Don’t look for premiums or coupons, as the cost of the tobaccos blended in Camel Cigarettes prohibits the use of them.

  She tried to count the e’s in that sentence, running into the same difficulty that has plagued many another package reader: almost nobody counts them accurately the first time. Staring at the camel, she detected a woman and a lion hidden in its body. On tiptoes, she held the pack before the one clear windowpane and saw in its reflection that the word CHOICE reads the same in its mirror image as it does on the pack, it is not turned around by the mirro
r. That might have tipped her off that the Camel package crosses dimensional boundaries, the line between matter and antimatter, but she failed to grasp its significance right away. It was just another parlor game. As when she searched for additional camels on the package. (There are two behind the pyramid.)

  Leigh-Cheri wondered if Bernard read his Camel pack also. She decided that he must, and she felt all the closer to him, just as daily Bible readings maintained a bond between knights and ladies separated during the Crusades.

  Upon rising in the morning and before retiring at night, the Princess read the Camel pack. Sometimes she read it during the day. The words were soothing to her. They were simple and straightforward. They did not set her mind to whizzing, as could the literature on certain other packages. Cheerios, for example.

  On the right side-panel of the verbose and somewhat tautological box of Cheerios, it is written,

  If you are not satisfied with the quality and/or performance of the Cheerios in this box, send name, address, and reason for dissatisfaction—along with entire boxtop and price paid—to: General Mills, Inc., Box 200-A, Minneapolis, Minn., 55460. Your purchase price will be returned.

  It isn’t enough that there is a defensive tone to those words, a slant of doubt, an unappetizing broach of the subject of money, but they leave the reader puzzling over exactly what might be meant by the “performance” of the Cheerios.

  Could the Cheerios be in bad voice? Might not they handle well on curves? Do they ejaculate too quickly? Has age affected their timing or are they merely in a mid-season slump? Afflicted with nervous exhaustion or broken hearts, are the Cheerios smiling bravely, insisting that the show must go on?