Still Life with Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  “Yeah, it probably is.”

  “Doesn’t it upset you?”

  “Hell, no. I’m not gonna worry about it. No more than I worry about any aspect of politics and economics.”

  “You’re sticking your head in the sand. If Russia conquered America, it’d be terrible.”

  “In many ways it would be. There’s nobody on earth half as boring as the Communists, no matter what their nationality, and the Slavs were on the dark and dreary side to start with. Communism is the supreme example of how political idealism can transform human beings into androids. You can bet the bright lights would dim if those robots ever got their iron paws on our switch. But I don’t have to leave my house to have fun. I’d still find ways to rock and roll.”

  “Selfish. Frivolous. Imma—”

  “Wait a minute. Hold on. What I’m saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There’s the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun—which is to say, preserving the human spirit. Let me tell you a story. In the nineteen-forties in Nazi-occupied Paris, an artist named Marcel Carné made a movie. He filmed it on location on the Street of Thieves, the old Parisian theater street where at one time there was everything from Shakespearean companies to flea circuses, from grand opera to girlie shows. Carné’s film was a period piece and required hundreds of extras in nineteenth-century costume. It required horses and carriages and jugglers and acrobats. The movie turned out to be over three hours long. And Carné made it right under the Nazis’ noses. The film is a three-hour affirmation of life and an examination of the strange and sometimes devastating magnetism of love. Romantic? Oh, babe, it’s romantic enough to make a travel poster sigh and a sonnet blush. But completely uncompromising. It’s a celebration of the human spirit in all of its goofy, gentle, and grotesque guises. And he made it in the very midst of Nazi occupation, filmed this beauty inside the belly of the beast. He called it Les Enfants du Paradis—Children of Paradise—and forty years later it’s still moving audiences around the world. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from the French resistance. Its brave raids and acts of sabotage undermined the Germans and helped bring about their downfall. But in many ways Marcel Carné’s movie, his Children of Paradise, was more important than the armed resistance. The resisters might have saved the skin of Paris, Carné kept alive its soul.”

  Leigh-Cheri squeezed Bernard’s hand until the freckles turned color. The freckles gathered up their belongings and made for the fingertips. The freckles were ready to abandon ship. “You must take me to see that movie some day. Will you promise?”

  “I promise, Leigh-Cheri. And we will find a way to see it, no matter what the politicians and the generals do. Communist totalitarianism won’t stop us and neither will capitalist inflation. If tickets cost a thousand dollars each, we’ll pay without batting an eye. And if we can’t afford to pay, we’ll sneak in. Afterwards, we’ll have Hostess Twinkies and a jug of wine. And if Twinkies and wine are too expensive, we’ll grow grain and grapes and make our own. And if they confiscate our little vineyard and our Twinkie patch, why we’ll steal what we need from those who have excess. Ah, Leigh-Cheri, life is too short for us to be deprived of any one of its joys by the sad, sick androids who control laws and economics. And we won’t be deprived. Not even in totalitarianism. Not even in a pyramid.”

  With that, he popped the last remaining bottle of champagne and swigged an amount four times the size of his daily allotment. He handed it to Leigh-Cheri, and she did the same.

  “Yum,” he said.

  She apparently concurred.

  101

  FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS Bernard drank no champagne and Leigh-Cheri sipped only enough to wet her lips. Even so, there was so little left….

  Of the cake, the cake whose snowy tiers had once seemed as inexhaustible as a natural resource, only crumbs remained. Crumbs and the broken sugar wing of a confectionary cherub.

  What’s more, the oil had been used up in all but one of the lamps. They restricted themselves to an hour or two of lamplight daily and spent most of the time in darkness.

  A month had passed—though they had no way of reckoning—and it was starting to tell on them. They seldom mentioned the possibility of death, yet it was in their eyes when the lamp flickered, it was in the way they stared at the dwindling food and drink.

  They couldn’t imagine why no one had come for them. The thick granite walls prevented them from hearing the workmen who swarmed over the pyramid with spray guns. A’ben Fizel was having it painted black. Nobody would ever be allowed inside the pyramid again, Fizel decreed. It was permanently closed, a memorial to his beloved.

  Once, Leigh-Cheri went so far as to say, “If they should find us in here many, many years from now, we’ll look the same as we do now. Thanks to pyramid power, our corpses will be perfectly preserved.”

  “Good,” said Bernard. “Beauty like mine deserves to last. I want the children of tomorrow to be able to gaze upon my teeth.”

  “It’s ironic, isn’t it, how this starts and ends with pyramids? I mean, we wouldn’t be trapped inside this thing if it weren’t for the Camel pack. And, of course, your crazy story about the Red Beards from Argon. I guess it goes back further than Camels. It goes back to our red hair.”

  “Which will be perfectly preserved, thank God.”

  “Yeah, sure. But it is ironic. I wanted to solve the mystery of the pyramids, and here I am locked up inside one, maybe going to die in one, and I’m as far from the answer as ever.”

  “You mean that’s all you wanted? To learn the meaning of pyramids?”

  “What are you implying, all I wanted? That’s a lot. I suppose you know the meaning of the pyramids.”

  “I do.”

  She halfway believed him. “Then will you please enlighten me? How come you found the meaning when so many others have failed?”

  “Simple. It’s because others—like you yourself—have looked at pyramids wrong.”

  “Looked at them wrong?”

  “Yep. You’ve looked at a pyramid as if it were a finished product, the whole item, the thing itself. But a pyramid is just part of the thing, and the bottom part at that. Pyramids are pedestals, babe. A pyramid is merely a base for something else to stand on.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, Jesus, Bernard. What stood on the pyramids?”

  “Souls. Souls like you and me. And we have to stand on them now. The pyramid is the bottom, and the top is us. The top is all of us. All of us who’re crazy enough and brave enough and in love enough. The pyramids were built as pedestals that the souls of the truly alive and truly in love could stand upon and bark at the moon. And I believe that our souls, yours and mine, will stand together atop the pyramids forever.”

  In the darkness she found him and hugged him until once again the captain of his freckles sounded the alarm to man the lifeboats. (Freckle the lifeboats?) He hugged her back. Their lips touched, surprising them both with the volume of juice produced. Soon, faces were not spacious enough to contain their kisses, and their mouths ranged freely over one another’s soiled bodies. He slipped inside of her with an audible slish, and, weakened as they were, they made love slowly and sweetly for more than an hour.

  Afterward, he fell asleep on the stones beneath the tablecloth. It was when he had begun to softly snore that she slipped away and prepared the dynamite.

  102

  “BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER,” thought the Princess. “Now I’m the bomber.” She had braided the fuses—not an easy feat in the darkness—and leaned the dynamite sticks against the door. “I’m the Woodpecker.”

  She struck one of the last of his wooden matches and held it to the tip of the braid. When it began to sputter, she threw down the matchbox and felt her way quickly back to Bernard. She had turned the reception table, the table that had supported the cak
e and champagne, onto its side. It formed a flimsy barricade alongside Bernard’s sleeping form. She stepped over the table and lowered herself down on top of him. He was sleeping on his back. With all of her might, she pressed her nude, goose-pimpled body against his own, shielding it, protecting it. Her face covered his face, her arms cradled his head.

  Initially, he thought she had more sex on her mind, and he mumbled a happy protest. As the pressure she was exerting began to alarm him, he struggled to free his head. “Leigh-Cheri, I can’t breathe,” he said. His voice was muffled. She bore down harder.

  “You’re better equipped for this world than I am,” she said. “I’m always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.”

  Now he was fully awake. He smelled, then heard the sputtering fuse. He realized what she’d done. He’d been planning the same thing. Only he’d chosen to give himself one more day, one more chance to make love with her. She’d beaten him to it! She was sacrificing herself to save him. The princess as hero. “I’ve found one way to make love stay,” she said.

  He struggled to roll over, to exchange positions, but she’d braced her legs, and he couldn’t turn her.

  Pumping adrenaline faster than any Fizel well pumped oil, he reached for every volt and ore of strength left in him and, muscles tearing, sinews stretching, teeth grinding sparks, began willing himself to his feet. He was halfway there, Leigh-Cheri still leeched on tight, when she reached between his legs and grabbed his balls. She squeezed them so ferociously that he nearly lost consciousness. Pain rushed in the front door, and strength slipped out the back. They toppled together. Galaxies and teddy bears swooshed by as they fell, frogs leaped from star to star, the moon danced a fandango, they saw Max and Dude, Tilli and Kathleen, A’ben and Ralph Nader, blazing blackberries, solid gold onions, and the musical mountain tips of Mu.

  They landed on the Camel pack with a single, painful thud. “Yum,” she said, insistently, into his beard.

  Then the bomb went off.

  103

  THE MOON CAN’T HELP IT. It’s only an object. The moon doesn’t mean to set things sloshing—in every ocean’s basin, in every female’s uterus, in every poet’s jar of ink, in every madman’s drool.

  “It’s only a paper moon/Sailing over a cardboard sea.” The moon can’t help it if the best toys are made of paper. And the best metaphors made of cheese.

  They say that lost objects end up on the moon. Is a siren responsible for a sailor’s taste in song?

  The moon can’t help it. It’s only a fat dumb object, the pumpkin of the sky. The moon’s a mess, to tell the truth. A burnt-out cinder the color of dishwater; a stale gray cookie covered with scars. Every loose rock in our solar system has taken a punch at it. It’s been stoned, scorched, golf-clubbed, and inflicted with boils. If lovers have chosen this brutalized derelict, this tortured dustball, this pitted and pimpled parcel of wasteland as the repository of their dreams, the moon can’t help it.

  Solar enthusiasts are fond of pointing out that the moon merely reflects the light of the sun. Yes, the moon is a mirror. It can’t help it. The moon is the original mirror, the first to refuse to distort CHOICE. Objects can’t think. They employ other methods. But we human beings use objects to think with. And when it comes to the moon, you are free to think as you choose.

  If the moon hung over Fort Blackberry like an omen, like a cheap literary device, it couldn’t help it. The moon just hung there. Bernard Mickey Wrangle and Princess Leigh-Cheri drove up in a cab.

  104

  BERNARD WAS THE FIRST to regain consciousness. He woke up in an Arab clinic that featured goatskin bedpans and snot-green walls. It took him an hour to understand why the swarming flies didn’t buzz. He was tipped off when the police began interrogating him via note pad. He was deaf.

  Naturally, they believed that he was the kidnapper. They asked him if his motives were political or sexual. He wrote on the pad, “Take a flying fuck at a rolling oil barrel. Take a flying fuck at the Koran.”

  The police looked at one another and nodded. “Political and sexual,” they said.

  He thought only of escape. First he had to find out what they’d done with Leigh-Cheri’s corpse. He intended to take her ashes to Hawaii. He’d build a sand castle in the shape of a pyramid on the beach near Lahaina. He’d sprinkle her ashes on top of the pyramid and watch as the waves came for them and carried them away to Mu.

  His mind was as chained to that morbid scheme as his legs were chained to the bed. On the third day, they unlocked his leg irons. His mind remained chained.

  “She say you innocent,” the police wrote.

  Bernard bolted up. “You mean she’s alive!” he said. He couldn’t hear himself say it.

  They nodded. They led him down the hall to her room.

  Two-thirds of her hair was singed off. Her right cheek was as torn as the moon’s. But she was awake and smiling.

  He pointed to his ears. She pointed to hers. She was deaf, too.

  She reached for the note pad.

  “Hello, dragon bait,” she wrote.

  105

  THE CLINIC WOULDN’T release them. A’ben Fizel ordered them held. A’ben was rushing home from an American business trip. They both knew what his return would mean.

  Gulietta arrived before A’ben. Her prime minister, a bearded giant with a gun belt, accompanied her. And twenty-five rebel commandos, as well. Queen Gulietta advised Ihaj Fizel to turn over the young couple. She threatened an international incident. The old sultan followed her logic. Many times he’d warned his son that redheads were nothing but trouble. “Get them out away from here at once,” he told Gulietta. “I’ll handle my boy. Shalom.”

  They recuperated at Gulietta’s palace. Except for their eardrums, healing was swift.

  At a desk in their room (Queen G. was no prude), Bernard wrote Leigh-Cheri a letter. Impatient, she read over his shoulder.

  He was describing a dream. Or a hallucination. He wrote that when he and Leigh-Cheri fell to the floor right before the blast, he experienced the sensation that they had fallen into the Camel pack.

  “All the time that I was unconscious,” he wrote, “I was dreaming—I guess I was dreaming—that we had escaped through the package of Camels. That we went inside of it and caught the camel and rode it bareback to the oasis—”

  She took the pad from him. “We had to ride fast,” she wrote, “because we were naked and the sun was hot. Redheads burn easily.”

  Bernard recovered paper and pen. “Yes,” he wrote. “That’s right. Well, we made it to the oasis, where we rested by the water hole in the shade of the palms.”

  Leigh-Cheri yanked the pad back. “There was a frog in the pool. And we wondered how a frog got out there in the middle of the desert.”

  Bernard grabbed the pad. “How did you know that?”

  It was her turn. “We ate fresh dates. You made a droll remark about dates being a laxative. Some Bedouins came through, and they gave us an old camel blanket. One blanket between us. We wrapped in it—”

  “It was tan,” wrote Bernard. He was so excited that the pen shook.

  “With a few stripes of blue.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I had the same dream. It seemed more real than a dream. A hallucination? A—”

  “At dusk, we made love.”

  “You started it by sucking my toes.”

  “Your toes are cute. And then the dates took effect.”

  The Princess laughed. “You wondered if there was a men’s room over at the pyramid.”

  “We decided to avoid pyramids. Except as pedestals. We slept by the pool. How do you know this? How do we know it? Could we both have had the exact same dream?”

  “Was it a dream, then?”

  They were staring at one another in silent disbelief, trembling a little, when Gulietta entered. There would have been no point in her knocking first.

  Gulietta brought a cable from Tilli. It was news about Max. The disappearance
and resurrection of his daughter had been too much for the King. His valve had gone bingo. “I bet you zat you’re soon okay,” Tilli had told him when he slumped. “Two will get you five I am not,” answered Max. He’d won.

  For the time being, Bernard and Leigh-Cheri forgot about the Camel pack—and whether at the instant of explosion it had sheltered them from death.

  They’d have the last quarter of the twentieth century, and more, perhaps, to bother their noodles with that one.

  106

  KING MAX WAS BURIED IN RENO. Far from blackberries. Bernard and Leigh-Cheri attended the funeral. Later, they put Tilli on a plane for Europe. Gulietta had named her manager of the national opera. “I gun to be a vorking girl,” said Tilli. “Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o.”

  Bernard and Leigh-Cheri flew to Seattle. Arriving at the Furstenberg-Barcalona house, they discovered that it had been engulfed by blackberry vines. Chuck, who still lived over the garage, had hacked a tunnel to the front door. Chuck tunneled through the brambles in order to watch game shows on Max’s old Magnavox. The taxi driver offered to take Bernard and Leigh-Cheri to a hotel. They refused. They entered the tunnel by moonlight.

  They set up their lives in the house. In the thorns and berries. They seldom went out except to go shopping. They enjoyed supermarkets. Pharmacies. Vegetable stands. Tobacco shops. Val-u-Marts. Meat-o-ramas. Family Shoe Centers. Buddy Squirrel’s Nuts & Candies. Appliance stores.

  Wherever they looked, something momentous was happening.

  They made love at all hours and in every corner of the house. Sometimes Chuck had to step over them to get to the TV.