Still Life With Woodpecker Still Life With Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  How were they constructed? Why were they constructed? Who constructed them? What is their strange appeal to the human psyche?

  The pyramids of Egypt were said by the experts to be tombs. The pyramids of Peru, Mexico, and Central America were said to have been temples. As for the pyramids of China, Cambodia, and Collinsville, Illinois, archaeologists were reluctant to guess. And as for the four pyramidal structures photographed by Mariner 9 on its fly-by of Mars, most scientists would just as soon forget them. Pyramidologists thought that in addition to their functions as temples and/or tombs, the pyramids also served as solar and lunar observatories. With the increasing evidence of “pyramid power,” that force that apparently accumulates inside the pyramidal cavity, a force that under the right conditions has the proven ability to regenerate both organic and inorganic matter, there was a modern trend to regard the pyramids as collectors or amplifiers of energy.

  “It seems to me,” said Leigh-Cheri, “that whether a pyramid was built over a period of decades by hundreds of thousands of laborers using primitive engineering equipment like wooden levers and ramps and sledges and stuff like that, or in a few months by spacemen with laser beams, in neither instance would they have gone to such trouble to make a six-million-ton device that did nothing but sharpen razor blades and preserve fruit.”

  Further, it seemed to the pyramid-gazing Princess that since the skills and sciences used by the pyramid builders were virtually identical, as were their finished products, that the motive for their construction must have been the same. Moreover, since the construction required highly advanced mathematical and astronomical calculations, some of which were clearly beyond the capabilities of those ancient civilizations, and since the civilizations were separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years, and since no records were left that referred to the methods or purpose of construction, that unknown outsiders must have been behind them.

  Could those outsiders have been the legendary Red Beards? And could the Red Beards have hailed from Argon? Was there even such a planet, or was Argon a room behind an occult bookstore in Los Angeles?

  Suppose there had been a number of Argonian colonies around the ancient world, and that in each colony pyramids were erected. What would have motivated Argon to endow earthlings with pyramids and with the scientific knowledge and near-impossible mastery of masonry that their construction required? Had there been a master plan? Was it still operative?

  What, if anything, did red hair have to do with it?

  And why is it nobody knows what the hell a pyramid is doing on the American dollar bill?

  For that matter, what are pyramids doing on a pack of modern-day cigarettes manufactured from a blend of American and Turkish tobaccos?

  Whenever she reached that point in her questioning, Leigh-Cheri gave up. “Bernard would probably have several ideas,” she said once. “I guess I’m just a dunce.”

  Whereupon it occurred to her that a dunce cap is shaped like a … ! That sent her back to the pyramids again.

  65

  SHE HAD PYRAMIDS on the brain like a tumor. After one too many mornings of waking up with her mind on stone monuments instead of outlaw flesh, she dispatched Gulietta to the Richmond Beach branch of the King County Public Library to pick up books on the history of package design. It wasn’t strictly kosher, a book in the attic, but in the last quarter of the twentieth century what was? The Woodpecker himself had taught her that laws were like buttons—meant to be undone when the moment was ripe—and if you can’t break your own rules, whose can you break?

  Although Gulietta donned a dress to go to the library, she continued to carry her picket sign, not that anyone could read it. Chuck, who’d been drafted to do some minimal housework during the strike, dropped his mop and followed her. She must have known he was behind her because every block or two she’d look over her shoulder and yell “Scab!” in her inelegant tongue. Why Gulietta was bringing the sequestered Princess books on package design was beyond Chuck’s comprehension, but he was to dutifully report the matter to the CIA.

  While Chuck was tailing Gulietta through the library stacks, a nondescript panel truck sped up the bramble-bordered lane to the palace, intrigue hanging out of both windows. Two foreign-looking men emerged. They wore hats and long, dark raincoats, though it was a sunny day in mid-September. The men let themselves in without knocking. Stepping over mop, pail, broom, and piles of newspapers, kicking aside dustballs, Chihuahua droppings, and the occasional poker chip, they made their way straight to Tilli and Max.

  66

  LATER THAT DAY, when there came a rapping at the attic door, Leigh-Cheri opened it without hesitation. She was expecting Gulietta. Instead, there stood her father, his noisy heart rapping upon a door of a different essence.

  The King was exceedingly flustered. Initially, Leigh-Cheri attributed his embarrassment to the fact that he had violated her sanctuary, after not setting eyes on her in five months. Then she realized that she was nude. Due to the heat in the airless attic, her nipples were studded with opals of perspiration, and her pubic hair was damp and swept back from her labia, which glistened as if they’d been recently entertained. Unless shaven, the peachclam scarcely could have been more exposed.

  “Excuse me,” she said. She pulled on T-shirt and panties.

  “Oh, I’m getting used to it. First Gulietta, now you. I trust the Queen isn’t next.”

  “Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o!” exclaimed the Princess. They both laughed.

  “You know that visitors aren’t allowed.”

  “Sorry, dear. Gulietta was about to deliver you this volume. I thought I would bring it instead.” He handed his daughter a book. “Wrapping It: The Art of the Package. I must say, a curious subject.”

  “I can think of curiouser ones. For example, a royal family in exile in America. Shall I elaborate?”

  Max went to shake his head, but his head was so occupied all it did was sway. His Chaplinesque mustache swayed with it. “I shan’t beat around the bush, Leigh-Cheri. I have been wondering if your mental health could be described as sound.”

  “By whom?”

  “Interested parties.”

  “Depends on their criteria.”

  “Responsibility and—”

  “Responsibility to what?”

  “—leadership and—”

  “Since when has leadership been a criterion for sanity? Or vice versa. Hitler was a gifted leader, even Nixon. Exhibit leadership qualities as an adolescent, they pack you off to law school for an anus transplant. If it takes, you go into government. That’s what Bernard says. He says the reason so many assholes go into politics is that it’s a homing instinct. At any rate, I understand that several romantics have started to follow in my footsteps. That makes me some kind of leader.”

  “At last count, seventeen young women and one young man have locked themselves in their rooms in emulation of your lovesick self-indulgence. Monkeys and apes will attempt to copy any moron’s routine. I wouldn’t be too proud. But that is not my concern. I am trying to ascertain if you are playing with a full deck.”

  “It may or may not be full, but at least it’s my deck.”

  The King looked around the attic. The room was dusy, dim, and bare. It was stuffy and smelled like a Skid Row gymnasium. A wino wrestling team might recently have practiced there. The King thought of his beautiful daughter living nude in that filthy chamber. He wondered if she didn’t get splinters. “Leigh-Cheri,” he said. It was almost a moan. “Leigh-Cheri. You are wasting your life.”

  “My life has never been more full, daddy. And it’s seldom been happier. You may tell your ‘parties’ that a life lived for love is the only sane life. Besides, I have other interests in here.”

  Again, Max surveyed the room. A chamber pot, a frog box, a cot without bedding, what appeared to be a pack of cigarettes sitting on the sill of a blackened window. Other interests? He shuddered. He kissed her damp cheek. He left without telling her that he had been visited by agents of the revol
ution, that they wanted her to be queen when they won back their nation.

  67

  AS HE WAS LEAVING, King Max called back to her. “When do you plan to come down from here?”

  “When Bernard’s released.”

  “And what will you do then?”

  “Be with him.”

  “Doing what? A husband and wife demolition team?”

  There was a long pause. “I don’t know what his plans are, daddy. Bye-bye.”

  No, Leigh-Cheri hadn’t a clue what Bernard would do when he got out of prison. He had failed to advise her of his plans, if any, or if they included her. After her father had gone, she took a moment to try to imagine what the Woodpecker might do in life, but of only a few things could she be sure. There was no burger so soggy that he would not eat it. No tequila so mean that he would not drink it. No car so covered with birdshit and rust that he would not drive it around town (and if it were a convertible, he’d have the top down, even in rain, even in snow). There was no flag he would not desecrate, no true believer he would not mock, no song he wouldn’t sing off-key, no dental appointment he wouldn’t break, no child he wouldn’t do tricks for, no old person he wouldn’t help in from the cold, no moon he wouldn’t lie under, and, she hesitated to admit, no match he wouldn’t strike. But what would he do? Perhaps he’ll attempt to find out what happened to the golden ball, she thought, a little wistfully. God knows he’ll stir the stew.

  68

  CALL IT INTUITION, divine influence, or plain dumb luck—any way you sliced it it was still eureka. Eureka! Surely, Leigh-Cheri hadn’t expected to solve cosmic riddles by consulting a book on package design. She merely had a … hunch … that such a book might enlighten her about the reasons for there being pyramids on the Camel pack. As it turned out, there was scant information, but it was pertinent enough to make her cry “Eureka!”

  Camels, it seems, hit the national market in 1914 (the year, according to interpretations of the Book of Revelations by Jehovah’s Witnesses and others, that Jesus Christ was finally coronated as king of Heaven; the same year, incidentally, that Tarzan of the Apes, another king and, like Jesus, a non-smoker, appeared on the scene). These particular cigarettes, an innovative blend of Virginia burley and Carolina bright, with imported Turkish leaf included for taste and aroma, and with a generous amount of sweetening added, were created personally by R. J. (Richard Joshua) Reynolds in Winston-Salem, N.C., the previous year. The package also was designed in 1913. It was Mr. Reynolds’s idea to name the new cigarettes “Kamel” or “Camel” to give them an exotic mystique befitting their Turkish ingredient, and it was Reynolds’s young secretary, Roy C. Haberkern, who talked Barnum & Bailey into letting him photograph Old Joe, the cantankerous circus dromedary, for the title role on the pack. Who placed the pyramids in the background is unclear. The Camel label had been prepared for Reynolds by a Richmond lithography firm, and it was believed that an itinerant lithographer newly in the firm’s employ applied the finishing detail, including the pyramids, shortly before he walked off the job. Nobody remembered his name, but they recalled that he was a talented draftsman and had flaming red hair.

  It must have occurred to Reynolds or his staff that pyramids were unknown in Turkey, yet objections were raised to the misplaced masonries neither at the home office nor anywhere else. If fact, the Camel label went on to become the most beloved in the history of packaging. When, in 1958, the manufacturer tried to alter the label—“Just a few minor changes in the familiar camel and the pyramid symbol to modernize the forty-five-year-old design”—smokers raised a stink more vile than last night’s ashtray. R. J. Reynolds, Jr., son of the deceased founder, was so angry that he sold a block of his company stock, and public reaction was negative to the extent that the directors quickly returned to the original design.

  After Leigh-Cheri had read the story of the Camel label three or four times, she closed the book and placed it atop the chamber pot where Gulietta would be sure to see it and carry it back to the library. Leigh-Cheri was done with the book. Leigh-Cheri had no desire to clutter the pure pyramid of her thoughts with the knowledge that the Baby Ruth candy bar was named for the daughter of President Grover Cleveland and not for the baseball player, or that Double Bubble gum was originally called Blibber Blubber. Her eureka device was jangling and flashing. She was about, as she tossed the Camel pack high in the stale attic air and caught it under her chin, to formulate a theory.

  It was to be a bit on the queer side, as theories go, and a person might need to spend a few months alone in an empty attic contemplating a pack of cigarettes to appreciate it at all. Nevertheless, resonance of the theory was to reach rather far. And it would reshape the life of that princess who had given up the world for the moon, who yearned desperately to make love stay.

  69

  THE THEORY ARRIVED neither full-blown, like an orphan on the doorstep, nor sharply defined, like a spike through a shoe; nor did it develop as would a photographic print, crisp images gradually emerging from a shadowy soup. Rather, it unwound like a turban, like mummy bandage; started with the sudden loosening of a clasp, a scarab fastener, and then unraveled in awkward spirals from end to frazzled end. Several weeks went by in the unwinding. When at last it was stretched out, it looked like this:

  Pyramids, although everywhere in bad repair, are not in the usual sense ruins. That is, they are not simply relics of civilizations that have gone out of business, of concern only to archaeologists, historians, and those who spend the present jacking off the past. Pyramids were built to endure, made to defy both time and humanity. Their stones, jigged into position without mortar, were fit together so snugly you could not slip a bill between them, nor for that matter, a credit card. Oriented with extraordinary precision, so that each of their angles faces one of the cardinal points, we can conclude from the pyramids that for thousands of years the position of the terrestrial axis has not appreciably varied—pyramids are great global reference points, unequaled in technology or nature. But they are more than that. Whether they were utilized as tombs, temples, or astrolabes or all three may be less significant than the discovery that pyramids, apparently as a result of properties peculiar to their particular shape, can generate or amplify an energy frequency that is restorative to what scientists call bioplasm, what philosophers call the life force, what the Chinese have always called ch’i. Pyramid power even enhances inorganic life. Pyramids are giant objects, affecting other objects, animate and inanimate, in ways beyond those normally attributed to gravity and electromagnetism.

  Whatever the intended function of pyramids, they are not obsolete. They remain somehow relevant. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, with the current civilization staggering blindfolded down a rail strewn with banana peels, the mysteries of pyramid power, once solved, might provide an answer to the ubiquitous question, “Where do we go from here?”

  Obviously, somebody wanted us to keep pyramids in mind, because the pyramid symbol has been placed conspicuously upon items that we regularly handle or observe. On any given day there are more than two billion one-dollar bills in circulation. For most of the century, half of the cigarettes smoked in the United States were Camels, something like thirty billion a year. It isn’t likely that pyramids were chosen arbitrarily to adorn two of the most popular common objects of modern times. Somebody knew that dollars and cigarettes would be in wide circulation and saw to it that pyramids would travel with them, constantly reminding a culture separated from the original structures by distance and time that pyramids have something of value to give if we’d learn how to receive it.

  Exactly who was responsible for that prominent and constant pyramidal display? Well, the committee that created the dollar bill in 1862 acted out of tradition and sentiment. It decided to include a pyramid symbol because there had been one on the last paper currency issued in America, some interest-bearing bank notes used to finance urgent undertakings such as the War of 1812. Those early bank notes had been designed by that jack-of-allg
enius, the only enlightened man ever to hold high political office in the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The hand that put the pyramid on the Camel pack in 1913—almost exactly one century later—hung from the inky sleeve of a transient lithographer who departed soon afterward, perhaps to join the military forces being recruited for World War I.

  Looking for connections, we find that both designs were executed in the state of Virginia, less than a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., the most powerful and influential world capital of the era. Ostensibly, the only other similarity between Jefferson and the nameless lithographer was the fact that each had red hair. That might be relegated to the realm of meaningless coincidence were it not for one thing: a certain race of red-haired Caucasians was credited in the myths, legends, hieroglyphs, and oral histories of Chavin, Mochica, Tiahuanaco, Inca, Maya, Olmec, Zapotec, Toltec, Aztec, and other New World pyramid-building peoples with having ordered and supervised pyramid construction. If no redheads are mentioned in connection with Egyptian pyramids, it may be only because not a single legend or historical account concerning pyramids has survived in Egypt. Two hundred years after the last pyramid was reared in their country, Egyptians were as baffled by the big masonries as everyone else.

  Okay. Let’s get this porcupine on the street. A race of carrot-topped demigods, known everywhere as Red Beards, appeared at various places in the ancient world, transforming the natives, spurring them to develop highly advanced civilizations in a very short time, leaving behind vast pyramids and other solar/lunar architecture when they suddenly and inexplicably disappeared. That much is fact. It is also historical fact that the Chavin, Mochica, Olmec, Zapotec, and Toltec peoples also vanished abruptly and without explanation. Apparently, the Red Beards had powerful enemies, capable of zapping whole civilizations into other dimensions. If the Red Beards were extraterrestrial, a lunar race dispatched to earth, for whatever reason, from the planet Argon, then their enemy would have been a solar society, the blonde Argonian ruling class. Call them Yellow Beards. When the Yellow Beards learned what the Red Beards were up to on earth, they immediately zapped the people with whom they were conspiring. Poof! Off went the Chavin, next the Mochica, then the Olmec and so forth, transplanted, each in turn, from the universe to the anti-universe, leaving no forwarding address. Friendship with Red Beards bore a certain liability. Finally, the Red Beards themselves were zapped. This occurred shortly before the arrival of the conquistadors in the New World. When the Spanish priests heard tales of Red Beards, they naturally labeled them devils. It’s no coincidence that Satan is usually depicted as being as red as boiled crabs.