Still Life With Woodpecker Still Life With Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  “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.

  40

  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.

  41

  AND YET THE PEA under the mattress complained. It broadcast—peep peep peep—through the most luxuriant stuffing its bruising litany: poverty, waste, injustice, pollution, disease, armaments, sexism, racism, overpopulation; a boring inventory of social ills atop which princess meat could never quite get comfortable.

  Nagged by the pea, she thought of returning that night to the Care Fest and to the purpose of her mission to Maui. Through the kamaaina grapevine, however, she overheard a report of the day’s session in Banyan Park that inflamed the least attractive aspects of her redheadedness. It seemed that the Care Fest microphones had been seized, first by Montana Judy’s gang, who harmonized on thirty-eight verses of the popular ballad, “All Men Are Rapists” (oddly enough, many men in the audience sang along); then by Gay Bob and his friends, who read aloud a long poetic manifesto entitled “Everyone Is Homosexual”; then by the Rev. Booker T. Kilimanjaro, who, Bible in one hand, machete in the other, launched into his speciality: a sermon, “Pilate Was a Honky Imperialist, Jesus Was a Nigger,” delivered while performing the latest disco dances. Meanwhile, the seminar on solar energy was eclipsed, and the lecture on immortality drugs was killed. When the yogi who had taken the cobweb apart attempted, at the request of management, to cosmically charm the interlopers into relinquishing the podium, he was hurled from the stage and was last seen limping toward the first-aid tent slouched over in the Broken-Collarbone Asana.

  Leigh-Cheri was furious. “You know what we should do? And I’m serious. Take that last stick of you-know-what over there and just run those rude assholes right out of the park. The Care Fest has turned into a can of worms, anyhow. We might as well finish it off.”

  “Oh yeah? You mean you would have me blow up something just because I didn’t approve of it? What do you think I am, a vandal? A fascist? A fucking critic?”

  “Shit,” said Leigh-Cheri. “No, I don’t think you’re any of those things. I think you’re an outlaw. And I’m starting to think that outlawism, the way you practice it, has got just as many rules as anything else.”

  That one hurt. They were sitting in the second-story window of the Blue Max, and as if to drive off the sting of her accusation, he was tempted to pull that last stick of you-know-what from his clothing, ignite it, and toss it into Front Street. He composed himself, though, and replied, “You obviously acquired your knowledge of explosives from watching cartoons on television. All those barnyard animals and psychopathic house pets shoving TNT in each other’s
beds. Well, real bombs do more than burn your fur off, I’m afraid. And there’s no Hollywood animator to put you back together in the next frame. Dynamite is not some kind of custard pie in the hands of pissed-off pussycats and vengeful ducks. And it’s not a practical joke—”

  “All right, all right. You don’t have to make excuses. Apparently an outlaw has grave responsibilities. Just like a general or a judge.”

  That did it. He jerked the deadly cylinder from inside his shirt and thrust its fuse-end into the candle flame that was dutifully going through the motions of romantic restaurant flick-flick upon the table top between them. Instead of throwing the dynamite into the street, however, he held it over his head like Liberty’s torch while Leigh-Cheri looked on, paralyzed with horror. Other patrons of the Blue Max looked on in horror, too. A waitress found the voice to scream. A surfer dove over the bar. The fuse sputtered and sparked, like a life intensely lived. “This is the way to burn,” the fuse seemed to be saying to the more docile, slow-witted candlewick. “Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn.”

  The fuse had an appointment and could not wait around to see if the candlewick had the courage to follow its advice.

  42

  AT THE LAST POSSIBLE SECOND, Bernard jammed the fuse in his mouth. It sizzled in saliva. He pulled it loose with his teeth.

  “Ouch,” he cried. It was the only word spoken.

  Finishing his tequila mockingbird in a gulp, he assisted the stunned Princess to her feet and ushered her to the stairs. Nobody tried to stop them. The normally clamorous Blue Max was as quiet as a prayer.

  He walked her to the Pioneer Inn. “Go up and pack,” he said. “You and Gulietta meet me at the boat as quick as you can.” He leaned forward to kiss her but thought better of it. There was a nasty burn on his tongue.

  43

  SUNSET LINGERED a long while that evening. It was as if a mai tai had been spilled in the sky. Streaks of grenadine, triple sec, maraschino, and rum seeped over the horizon, puddled upon the sea. Like a moth with a sweet tooth, the High Jinks glided toward the spill.

  The marijuana smuggler and an associate attended to the sailing. Gulietta squatted in the stern, still as a toad. Leigh-Cheri and Bernard sat in the bow and talked.

  “I’m sorry that I upset you,” she said. “This is not an easy time to be a princess.”

  “No, and it’s not an easy time to be an outlaw, either. There’s no longer any moral consensus. In the days when it was generally agreed what was right and what was wrong, an outlaw simply did those wrong things that needed to be done, whether for freedom, for beauty, or for fun. The distinctions are blurred now, a deliberately wrong act—which for the outlaw is right—can be interpreted by many others to be right—and therefore must mean that the outlaw is wrong. You can’t tilt windmills when they won’t stand still.” He gazed into the sunset briefly, then broke into his dentistry-defying grin. “But it doesn’t really bother me. I’ve always been a square peg in every round hole but one.”

  “Speaking of that, this is not an easy time for lovers, either. With the divorce rate up to sixty per cent, how can anyone attend a wedding with a straight face anymore? I see lovers walking hand in hand, looking at each other as if nobody else was alive on the earth, and I can’t help thinking that in a year, more or less, they’ll each be with someone new. Or else nursing broken hearts. True, most lovers don’t work at it hard enough, or with enough imagination or generosity, but even those who try don’t seem to have any ultimate success these days. Who knows how to make love stay?”

  He thought for several moments before he answered.

  “I guess love is the real outlaw,” he said.

  She wanted him to say more, and perhaps eventually he would have, but the next word he uttered was “Yikes!” And her own next words were “Sweet Jesus!” Gulietta’s words were beyond the capabilities of the Remington SL3, and the words of the smugglers were obscured by the whoosh.

  It went “whoosh” as it shot by, a sleek panatela of frozen light, pulsating with polka dots of every color, traveling, a mere thousand feet or so above the water, at incredible speed and mopping up the last of the sunset as if it were a bar rag from outer space.

  Actually, and everyone aboard agreed on this in subsequent discussions, it had not pulsated with lights of every color. One color was notably absent. There wasn’t any red.

  On the ship’s radio that night, they learned that numerous other parties had reported having seen a UFO rise up from Haleakala and disappear over the Pacific. But UFO sightings were old hat around Maui, and this one received little attention on the news. Much more air play was given to a dispatch about a jailbreak in Lahaina. A man and woman charged with dynamiting the Pioneer Inn had escaped from their cell. Noting that Maui was a small island, police predicted the couple’s capture within a few hours.

  44

  ALTHOUGH THE PASSING of the spaceship, if, indeed, that’s what it was (the naval weather station at Pearl Harbor claimed it had been a meteor), set the High Jinks compass needle spinning in wild abandon, it regained its senses after an hour and resumed its obsequious fidelity to the domineering north. In the meantime, to keep them on course, Bernard took fixes on the moon and the constellations of Orion and Buddy Holly. They breezed into Kalohi Channel, making for Honolulu. The wind had its arms around them. The sea dandled them on its knee.

  “Do you suppose,” asked Leigh-Cheri, “that they really were from Argon?”

  “Either there or L.A.”

  “They had a strange smell about them.”

  “Moth balls.”

  “Was that it?”

  “They got their turbans and robes out of an old Shriners trunk—or else naphthalene is used as underarm deodorant where they come from.”

  “Bernard, suppose they were from another planet. Could they be right about redheads? Are we really moonstruck mutants whose weaknesses are betrayed by the sun?”

  “I can tell you this much. In Central America, South America, and Mexico, there are prevailing myths about a race of redheaded Caucasians who appeared thousands of years ago and conquered tribe after tribe with benevolent magic. As a matter of fact, the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayas attribute the development of their highly advanced civilization to the ‘Red Beards,’ as they called them. The pyramids and the other massive New World masonries were built by these demigods, the oral traditions of dozens of major ethnic groups are consistent about that. The Red Beards legend extends into Oceania, as well. The great stone heads of Easter Island are said to be portraits of those same carrot tops—”

  “I hate it when people call me carrot top.”

  “Me, too. The carrot has never lived that could match my top.”

  “Well, go on.”

  “Myth is crystallized history. All these stories couldn’t possibly be coincidence. So, assuming that there was a race of demidivine redheads, and assuming that one day it just up and vanished from the face of the earth—the accounts are consistent about that, too—that leaves us with an inviting hoop through which to slam-dunk our basketballs of romantic bullshit.”

  “Yes?”

  “Okay, one example. The Red Beards had extraordinary abilities. They were masters of, among other things, pyramid power, an incredibly effective harnessing of natural energies so mysterious and complex that modern science hasn’t begun to understand it yet. Where did the Red Beards acquire these abilities, so far removed from the mainstream of knowledge as it has evolved on earth? Could it be that they were extraterrestrials? If our wimpy intellects will permit us to entertain that possibility, then we could nail us together a little hypothesis. The Red Beards come here from Argon, bringing with them the keys to pyramid power and who knows what other Argonian technologies. A revolution then occurs on Argon. The redheaded ruling class is overthrown. Eventually, the rebels send a task force to earth and vaporize the redheaded colonies here. Or maybe the Red Beards were exiled to earth after a revolt or war had already taken place on Argon.
Later, the new Argonian regime—it would be blonde, like the couple on Lahaina—decides that the exiles are growing too strong on our little planet and, wishing to eliminate the possibility of future counterrevolution, dispatch an army to get rid of them with some kind of device that is beyond our conception. Poof! Sayonara Red Beards. We could work up variations on this scenario. But any way you slice it, it would account for both the presence and sudden disappearance of the Red Beards, as well as for the antipathy toward red hair among contemporary Argonians. The Red Beards might have been connected to Mars, the red planet. More likely, though, the conflict on Argon would have been between lunar and solar forces. The Red Beards would have been a lunar people—mystic, occult, changeable, feministic, spiritual, pacific, agrarian, artistic, and erotic. While the Yellow Hairs would have been solar: abstract, rational, prosaic, militaristic, industrial, patriarchal, unemotional, and puritan. It’s a classic struggle here on earth. Since suns and moons are universal, the struggle could extend throughout the universe, or at least throughout our own solar system. It’s a conflict that goes all the way back to the riff between Lucifer and Jehovah. The sun is Jehovah’s, but Lucifer rules dat ol’ debil moon.”

  “Jesus,” said Leigh-Cheri. “That’s good. You ought to write for Acid Comics. But where do we present-day, earthbound redheads fit in? Are we throwbacks, descendants of the Red Beards?”

  “Maybe. They could have copulated with earthlings or in some other more esoteric way have affected the gene pool. However, my guess would be that nature, under the impetus of the moon, is trying to reevolve another superior race, trying to recreate the destroyed Red Beards. It keeps planting red seeds. Some germinate, some don’t. Some grow in eccentric ways. Lots of false starts and imperfections. Lunar nature is trying to get the bugs out of the new model before it moves on to the next stage of redheaded evolution. Meanwhile, the sun takes its toll.”