Still Life With Woodpecker Still Life With Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  In any event, although she was too obsessed with the implications of her theory to attribute it to a spinoff from outlaw bullshit, she felt the need for Bernard more strongly than ever. It was occurring to her that if she had cracked the code of the Camel pack in her contemplative cell, Bernard must have accomplished at least as much. Maybe Bernard had seen things there that she’d overlooked. Even if he hadn’t, she was wildly anxious to share her information with him, to seek his opinions and advice. She felt as if she’d bootlegged a tape of the Golden Eternity Vibrating Ethereal Choir, that group that sings on the soundtracks of bad movies based on the Bible, and she couldn’t wait to play it back on Bernard’s machine to see if it still had the ring of truth, the ring of truth being the finest sound there is, although there are noises some women make in bed that are definitely in contention. The tracks of her tears led farther than the end of her nose, for a change, and she’d be damned if she could hold off another fourteen months to share her discovery with that man whose redheadedness surpassed her own.

  So the Princess made a choice. She would go to him.

  Nina Jablonski, the redheaded attorney, had a new baby. She was on leave from her firm. Leigh-Cheri would borrow her credentials. She would go down to McNeil Island and impersonate her. She’d wear wide spectacles, paint on extra freckles, put up her hair in a bun. Easy as toast. Although technically Jablonski was off the case, the guards wouldn’t know that. Bernard would be curious enough about “Jablonski’s” sudden appearance, after six months, to agree to see her. And Leigh-Cheri would end up in his cell.

  Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She could have been visiting him weekly in the guise of his attorney. Leigh-Cheri went limp imagining making love with Bernard every Thursday in his cubicle.

  As excited as she was, it still wasn’t easy, after so long a time, to just up and leave the attic. She thought perhaps she’d better come out slowly, like a diver coming up from flatfish territory, on the lookout for the bends.

  Several mornings later, as preparation for her reemergence into the outside world, she walked to the window, whose nails she’d pried loose the evening before, and opened it slowly. Not slowly enough, however, to avoid dumping Chuck off the forty-foot ladder from whose top rung he’d been peering in through the single clear pane, searching for her radio transmitter—and masturbating vigorously. Chuck plummeted into the blackberry brambles, where he sank from sight, his still stiff member learning rudely and repeatedly that “prick” has more than one definition.

  Dumbfounded, Leigh-Cheri listened to Chuck’s moans for a minute or two before, leaning out of the window, she began to cry for help. Her cries attracted the attention of a faded man in a Sears suit and an amateur haircut who was just then shuffling up the palace lane, bringing terrible news from jail.

  72

  CHUCK WAS HOSPITALIZED for nearly a month, during which time the CIA assigned a full-time professional to spy on the Furstenberg-Barcalona family. The operative kept showing up in different disguises, first as a fire inspector, then as an encyclopedia salesman, next a county health nurse wanting to put an ear to Max’s valve, until Queen Tilli, petting her Chihuahua all the while, finally confronted the guy and said, “Vhy don’t you just take zee leetle camera and der notebook und go leesen in on zee upstairs extension like Chucky did? You gonna get a tension headache, alvays changing your looks like dis.”

  It was academic, of course. Short of direct armed intervention, there was nothing further the United States could do to preserve right-wing tyranny in Tilli and Max’s homeland. And Max, suspecting that right-wing tyranny would only be replaced with leftwing tyranny, as was usually the case, had washed his royal hands of the whole affair. As for Princess Leigh-Cheri, who, the CIA had learned, was an unwitting candidate for reigning monarch once the revolution was complete, Leigh-Cheri, far from getting herself prepared to rule a nation, Leigh-Cheri was in the condition a Camel pack is in once it’s been dropped in a barnyard and chawed up and puked out by a goat.

  As news of her self-internment had circulated, via the pages of such periodicals as National Enquirer, Parade, and Cosmopolitan, the Princess had begun to attract more and more imitators. Women whose men were in prison or military service or Alaska working on the pipeline began bolting themselves in their rooms as public proclamation of lonely devotion. Several men did the same. Eventually, misguided romantics started taking to stripped-down boudoirs, garrets, basements, woodsheds, doghouses, and fallout shelters when their lovers were not away at all but could have been in their arms nightly if they hadn’t elected to sequester themselves as proof of their subjugation to the authority of Love. A wife in Unionville, Indiana, a woman known to have spent thirty dollars a week on Hallmark greeting cards, repaired to an unlighted cellar creeping with black widow spiders to demonstrate the depth of her feeling for her husband and three hungry children. Some people who locked themselves away didn’t even have sweethearts. By autumn, almost a hundred “princess prisoners” were staring at wallpaper in improvised “love attics” across the land, and some sort of competition was underway, radio stations offering cash prizes for endurance records. Leigh-Cheri had an inkling of this activity, but her mind had been on pyramids and cosmic mystery, and she hadn’t given it much thought. Well, the news finally traveled as far as solitary at McNeil Island, where evidently it did not sit well at all.

  In fact, Bernard, who’d been behaving relatively straight in hopes of securing an early release, was so perturbed by the reports that he availed himself of the illegal but commonplace prison-system underground post office and risked his record to sneak out a letter to Leigh-Cheri. The missive, in the handwriting of the bribed guard to whom it was dictated, was delivered by Perdy Birdfeeder, a middle-aged malefactor from Tacoma freshly freed after doing fifteen years for purse-snatching. Birdfeeder, who’d grabbed hundreds of purses over a period of many years before he got careless and snatched a colostomy bag—he might have gotten away even then had he not stopped to count the change—helped tug the bleeding Chuck out of the blackberries, severely snagging his new government-grant suit in the process, and then handed over the letter to Gulietta. Birdfeeder could thank his lucky stars that the royal custom of executing messengers who bore ill tidings was no longer observed.

  “Yuk!” That was how the note began.

  Yuk! If you think the Black Hole is bad, you should try it with baby ferrets hanging by their teeth from the skin of your testicles. That’s how I felt when I learned that our personal relationship has become public soap opera, a low-budget interview with Barbra Streisand, and a sport on the order of flagpole sitting and phone-booth stuffing. Babe, it appears that you and I are no longer sucking the same orange. Romance is not a bandwagon to be jumped on by lost souls with nothing more interesting to ride. I thought you’d learned by now that “romantic movement” is a contradiction in terms and that, if prompted, society is all too eager to turn the deepest, most authentic human experiences into yet another shallow fad. You prompted. I guess you can take the girl out of the movement, but you can’t take the movement out of the girl. Even in solitary, you couldn’t curb your herding instincts. Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon.

  73

  THE TEARS OF THE PRINCESS, if placed end to end, would have circled Seattle like a moat.

  The tears of the Princess, if dammed, would have provided refuge for the hunted whale and moorage for the Ship of Fools.

  Among the Berbers, it was held that since there is no memory in the grave, earth from a burial mound can help a person forget his or her sorrows, especially the heartbreak of unhappy love. But Bernard included no grave dirt with his letter, and if he had, the tears of the Princess would have turned it to mud.

  After she had completely soaked the foam rubber mattress with her bitter weeping, she hurled the mattress out of the window into the blackberries below. (Too bad for Chuck it hadn’t been there when h
e fell.) Then she smashed the chamber pot against the wall. Later, pacing frantically, she slashed her feet on its shards.

  Seizing the Camel pack, she squeezed it in her small fist, toppling the pyramids and busting the dromedary’s hump. Mummies ran from the pyramids in panic, dragging their wrappings behind them. Water spewed from the camel’s cracked hump like a fountain of tears.

  For hours she would cry softly, almost imperceptively, rubbing her eyes raw with her knuckles. Then she’d leap to her feet and scream. Helpless, King Max and Queen Tilli (and the CIA agent, disguised now as a Roto-Rooter man) kept vigil at her door, while inside the attic Gulietta stood quietly, cupping Prince Charming in her hands, perhaps protecting him from redheaded rage, perhaps invoking the magic of the frog.

  After three days of such carrying on, Leigh-Cheri grew calm. She was, after all, in close harmony with lunar rhythms, and that which wanes must wax. Three days of darkness is as much as the moon will tolerate before it yelps, “Enough already,” and begins slowly to reopen the antique refrigerator from whose icy innards will shine the transformative light of the world.

  Outside, the rains had come, the rains that like a blizzard of guppies would pelt the creaky old house until spring. There is no weeping that can compete with the Northwest rains.

  So Princess Leigh-Cheri blew her nose. She sat her bare buttocks on the cot wires, careful not to snag anything. She thought for a while. She uncrumpled the Camel pack. Then she smiled. She turned to Gulietta. Her voice was determined and gay.

  “Bring me A’ben Fizel,” she said.

  INTERLUDE

  IF THIS TYPEWRITER can’t do it, then … what? Can the Muse punt?

  The Remington SL3 needs a verb job. It clearly can’t write between the lines. It’s insensitive to the beauty of fungoid alkaloids—the more I ingest the more inarticulate it becomes. And despite my insistence upon traditional literary values, it remains petulantly moderne.

  Believe me, I’d have few qualms about switching machines in the middle of the stream, but nothing’s open at this hour except Mom’s All Nite Diner and the contraption that taps out Mom’s menu spells “greese” with three e’s. Besides, I’ve been informed that the Remington warranty doesn’t cover “typing of this nature,” whatever that might mean. (I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised: when I went to buy a policy from Mutual of Omaha, they’d only insure my typing finger for fire and theft.)

  I guess there’s nothing left to do but ram in the clutch on this bourgeois paper-banger and try to coast to the finish line. In the event that I don’t make it, in the event that you, dear reader, must finish without me, well, you’ve been a good audience, probably better than an underdeveloped novelist with an overdeveloped typewriter deserves, and I’d like to leave you with one perfect sentence, one memorable image to fold in violet silk at the back of your brain box. Something on the order of a drop of tropical jelly oozing from a love bite on a concubine’s lip. Alas, there’s not enough juice for us to indulge ourselves—a familiar complaint in the last quarter of the twentieth century—so at the risk of being coy, I’ll thank you quickly and arrivederci on out of here. As they say in my country, have a nice day.

  PHASE

  IV

  74

  THE DAWN CAME UP like a Have-a-Nice-Day emblem. The sun shone like Mr. Happy Face himself, and the horizons were all smiles. From boundary to boundary, the people arose as if they’d been given champagne enemas, convinced that they were going to have a nice day. A nation traditionally, historically, anciently monarchal was about to seat its first sovereign in thirty years. It was Coronation Day, hooray.

  Everyone had the day off. The hotels and boarding-houses were full. Along the procession route, crowds began thickening before dawn. All seats in the stands had been reserved as soon as booking opened, and tickets were selling on the black market for the equivalent of ninety dollars each. Balconies overlooking the route cost even more. School children had been given mugs, plates, pamphlets, and badges, and they carried them as if they had supernatural properties, pressing them to their new spring outfits. From the radio aerials of automobiles, little flags fluttered chirpily. Soldiers, heroes of the revolution, wore brand-new boots of squeaky leather, and women, young and old, smiled at them from behind bouquets. By eight o’clock, there were in the streets more flowers than people. And as common as roses were the dark blooms of cameras.

  At ten, the bees inside the camera heads began to whirr furiously, announcing the approach of the State Coach, gilded, curlicued, emblazoned with baroque pastoral scenes by Cipriani, attended by scarlet-and-gold coated postilions, and drawn by six white horses. Silver trumpets blared, cathedral bells went dizzy clanging. Frightened, the capital’s pigeons took to the sky, only to find the sky occupied by balloons, confetti, and the acrobatic secondhand jet planes of a fledgling air force.

  In ceremonial tunic, the newly elected premier stepped from a less ornate carriage and climbed the lily-festooned stairs to the throne platform. The premier, military leader of the revolution, was cheered and cheered mightily, but it was obvious that the crowd was saving its thunder. All at once a wave of exultation akin to religious ecstasy swept through the throng. Tears catapulted like crystal jumping beans from fifty thousand sets of eyes, and in half a million breasts an enormous sigh took shape. “God save the queen!” shouted the premier, and it mattered little that the premier did not believe in God. “God save the queen!” roared the dignitaries, the soldiers, the weeping women, the workers, and the children. And there she was, ascending, her ermine train piling up behind her, a holy puppet clothed in magic robes for the comfort of the masses and the pride of the state, ascending in an aura of accumulated history, the visible and human aspect of government, the emerald cap on the toothpaste tube of nationality, the beauty mark on the contorted face of race. “God save Queen Gulietta! Long live Gulietta! Long live the queen!”

  75

  MAX’S FATHER, King Ehrwig IV, had impregnated a kitchen maid. Captivated by the skinny child who grew from his careless seed, he went often, before Max was born, to the scullery where, among cabbage leaves and leeks, he bounced her on his elegant knee. Ehrwig offered to adopt her, but the child’s mother, as spunky and obstinate as Gulietta herself was to be, wouldn’t have it. “You’re content to leave me in the kitchen,” she charged. “The baby stays here, too.”

  After Max’s birth, when King Ehrwig had at last a proper heir, he sought out Gulietta, then eleven, and into her jam-sticky, bony little hand pressed a document admitting paternity. “There may come a time when you will need this,” he said. A copy of the document was placed among his secret papers where many decades later it was found by a member of the revolution’s monarch selection committee investigating the Furstenberg-Barcalona lineage.

  All along, Gulietta had known that she was Max’s half sister, but she chose to honor her mother, in life and in death, by never revealing that fact. However, when she was approached by agents of the revolution—they found her splitting cedar kindling beside a fireplace on Puget Sound—she chose to honor her father by freely confessing to the purple in her veins.

  “We’ve lost faith in Max and Tilli,” they told her, “and besides, Max has renounced the crown. Their sons are beneath consideration, they are trash. We would have liked Princess Leigh-Cheri, but you’re aware of what she’s gone and done. You are left. And you will be perfect. You are representative of both our proud royal heritage and our good common folk. Upon your head, the crown will not be just a piece of autocratic hardware, it will be an adjunct of democratic, socialistic rule. You will be a queen for the people because, though genetically royal, you come from among the people. Why, you even speak the mother tongue, the old language. On top of that, when it comes to Furstenberg-Barcalonas, you’ve got more sense than any of them.”

  At first her age had worried them, but when they observed the vim with which she swung her hatchet, they nodded at one another and smiled. “She’ll outlast the twentieth century,” they pr
edicted.

  So, shortly after Christmas, old Gulietta acceded to the throne, and in the spring, she publicly accepted the elaborate tokens of regal responsibility—the scepter, the ring, and last, the crown itself. It was such a glittering, emotion-charged occasion, pompous in the best sense of the word, that not a soul, not even the premier, noticed that the old woman never at any time during the coronation un-clinched her left fist. And in the unlikely event that they had noticed, nobody would have suspected that inside the fist was a living frog. When the creature croaked, they attributed the sound to the excitement of ancient bowels and went right along with the ceremony.

  Upon being crowned, Gulietta’s first act was to reaffirm diplomatic ties with Peru and Bolivia, to whose envoys she hinted strongly that some nice fresh cocaine, for medicinal purposes only, would be regarded a proper tribute.

  Her second act was to personally request of the president of the United States of America the commuting of the sentence of a certain “political prisoner” held in federal jail in Washington State. As a matter of protocol, the president had little choice but to comply.

  76

  “HELLO, DARLING. Any word about the limestone?” Leigh-Cheri embraced A’ben Fizel. She kissed his mouth and welcomed the hands that slid immediately inside her negligee.