Still Life with Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  The King’s heart had rattled like spook chains in a horror show. Trembling, he had changed the subject to basketball.

  “Oh-oh, spaghetti-o,” muttered Tilli under her breath.

  Had the ink remained upright in its bottle, had the carpet’s innocence been preserved, it was still doubtful if Bernard would have been invited back to the palace.

  Now, following Chihuahua slaughter and publicized arrest, it was futile for Leigh-Cheri to expect sympathy from her parents, let alone help. She wept against Gulietta’s bricklike breasts. And when the tear barrel was finally empty and every available frog had been consulted, she made-up, dressed-up, and caught a bus into town. She was going to keep an appointment with Bernard’s attorney. She was embracing the blackberry as her emblem, her symbol, her exemplar, her muse. In other words, she would persist to the wildest lengths of persistence. She was going to blackberry her way to her man.

  48

  THE SUBURBAN BUS let her off on First Avenue, a street as old as the city itself, though far younger than the tawdry commerce that for many Seattleites the very name of the street implied. A slim, steady rain was falling. Neon reflections on the wet concrete gave First Avenue the appearance of an underwater burial ground for parrots. As Leigh-Cheri walked south, the mood of the avenue grew increasingly rowdy. Mouth holes of saxophones and pistols gaped at her from pawnshop windows. “Adult” bookstores and porno cinemas promised further gapings. Smells of stale hot dogs and soaked mackinaws wafted by on zephyrs of exhaust. If she had drunk just one beer in each of the taverns she passed, she could have consumed a case in a very few blocks, but though beer, in its foamy neutrality, may have been the perfect beverage for the last quarter of the twentieth century, Leigh-Cheri did not drink beer and wouldn’t have drunk it in the Born to Lose Tavern, the Broken Jaw Tavern, or the Sailors Have More Fun Tavern if she did.

  Passing a tattoo parlor, she paused to window-shop the mermaids, screaming eagles, and macabre tributes to Mom. Through the raindrops that streaked the plate glass, she saw that phrase again, Born to Lose, this time on the tattoo artist’s flash card: Born to Lose, a slogan so expressive, so deeply relevant that men have it permanently etched into their hides, and she thought of her own flaccid biceps, imagining the slogan stenciled there. She wondered if one lost one’s royal privilege if one had one’s royal epidermis inscribed. She did know that once tattooed one could no longer expect to lie for all eternity in an orthodox Jewish cemetery. They wouldn’t even bury women with pierced ears. A strange theory of mutilation from the people who invented cutting the skin off the pee-pee.

  The Princess walked on.

  She met sailors who hunkered. She met lumberjacks who cursed. She met the original cast of the Food Stamp Opera, who tried to lure her up to their three-dollar hotel rooms, where the light bulbs were dying and the wallpaper was already dead. She met many winos. They were at various stages of wino development. Invariably, however, they seemed to have made peace with the rain, as if the wino ambassador had negotiated a treaty with the rulers of rain, a compromise henceforth known as the Tokay Accords. The Indian winos, in particular, were unhurried by the weather, and she recalled that Bernard had said, “White men watch clocks, but the clocks are watching the Indians.”

  The Princess was wearing a yellow vinyl slicker with matching hat. It looked great with her red hair. She walked on.

  First Avenue lay on an incline. Steeper toward the north. Traveling south, she moved downhill. Like the rainwater. Like the twentieth century. At the foot of First, where it crossed Yesler Way, there was a small cobble-stoned square, watched over by the several wooden eyes of a totem pole. There, at Pioneer Square, the mood changed abruptly. Once as rough and raunchy as upper First Avenue, Pioneer Square had been hit by restoration. Now, art galleries, boutiques, and discos were replacing the storefront churches, and the déclassé luncheonettes were giving way to restaurants that featured imported mineral waters and a gay waiter behind every fern.

  In Pioneer Square, where the seedy collided with the chic, was where Nina Jablonski had her law office. Being somewhat of radical temperament, Nina Jablonski had volunteered to defend Bernard Mickey Wrangle against the United States of America, although Mrs. Jablonski did not fully share her client’s view that he against the United States of America was a fair match. Actually, the Woodpecker regarded the contest a bit one-sided in his favor, and he would have liked to take on Japan, East Germany, and the Arab nations as well.

  Nina Jablonski had red hair. Not as red as Bernard’s or Leigh-Cheri’s, but definitely red, and the Princess was certain that it was on account of Jablonski’s hair, and perhaps the fact that she was seven months pregnant (he maintained a residue of regret about destroying the prospective male pill), that Bernard had agreed to allow her to defend him. Leigh-Cheri had to confess that she, too, was irrationally assured by Mrs. Jablonski’s tresses—a fellow victim of sugar and lust? another ally against Argon and the sun?—but the swell of the attorney’s belly merely reminded her that she herself hadn’t had a period since she left for Maui, an omission that made her as nervous as the Queen’s lapdog.

  Ah, but there was good news! Jablonski, whose features were so strong that no amount of freckles could burden them, had been successful in her petition to have Bernard’s rights to be visited restored. Leigh-Cheri could go see him on the following Sunday, three days away.

  “There are conditions, however,” said Jablonski, handing the Princess a tissue to mop up her happy tears. “Conditions set not by the court but by Mr. Wrangle and me.”

  “Like what?” asked Leigh-Cheri.

  “My dear, you must realize that your conversation will be bugged. For some reason, Mr. Wrangle is suspected of being involved in an international plot to return your father to the throne. Anything you might say regarding your family, or, for that matter, your personal relationship with Mr. Wrangle, might be misconstrued in such a manner as to deepen those suspicions, which would hurt our chances for a minimal sentence. I wanted to establish some safe guidelines for your conversation. Mr. Wrangle went one step further. He doesn’t feel it would be emotionally beneficial—for either one of you—to converse at all. He feels that poignant dialogue will merely make your separation all the more difficult. And he certainly doesn’t believe the CIA should be privy to the private tenderness you share. He does very much want to see you. And he longs to hear your voice. But he desires that nothing in the way of personal conversation pass between you.”

  “But—what’ll I do? I can’t just sit there and talk about the rain on the fucking blackberries. What’ll I say?” (Tears of joy, exit stage right. Tears of bewilderment, enter stage left; advance to footlights.)

  “Mr. Wrangle suggests that you tell him a story.”

  “What? A story?”

  “Yes, a story of some sort. He wishes to look at you. He wishes to hear you speak. You’ll have ten minutes. Just tell him a story. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

  Leigh-Cheri stared at the antinuclear posters on the office wall. Nuclear power was one of the most sinister frauds ever perpetrated on the American people, and yet its implications meant little to her now.

  Mrs. Jablonski removed her fashionably large spectacles and stood. “I asked Mr. Wrangle what you were like. He said you were hornet juice and rosebuds in a container of gazelle meat. He does speak colorfully, doesn’t he?”

  Leigh-Cheri pulled on her dripping slicker and departed. As she sped back up First Avenue in a taxi—she was not in the mood for any more Born to Lose—she thought, “A story? I do know one story. I know one story. It’ll have to do.”

  49

  SO IT CAME PASS that on the next Sunday afternoon, a Sunday afternoon carved, like most Sunday afternoons, from a boiled turnip, Princess Leigh-Cheri sat in the austere visiting room at the King County Jail, separated from Bernard Mickey Wrangle by a panel of thick, clear glass, telling him, through a closed-circuit telephone, a story, the story, the story that Gulietta had told her at
bedtime almost every night of her life.

  They gazed at one another with fixed, intense smiles; their pulses fluttered, and the ancient hormonal soup hissed in their glands, yet Bernard was silent, and Leigh-Cheri, in a surprisingly even tone, stuck to the story. No sooner had she sat down across from him, her lips aching to pucker their way through the glass, than she picked up the phone and spoke into it bravely, “Once upon a time …” He noticed that she had put on a few pounds, she noticed that some of his freckles looked as if they’d gone bad, but they didn’t betray their observations. He listened intently, and she went on with the tale.

  “Once upon a time….” Just the way Gulietta would have begun, although in Gulietta’s language, “Once upon a time” sounded as if it were a rubber apple on which some barnyard animal was choking.

  “Once upon a time, a long time ago, when it was still of some use to wish for the thing one wanted, there lived a king whose daughters all were beautiful, but the youngest was so lovely that the sun itself, who had seen so much and forgotten so little, simply marveled each time it shone on her face.

  “This daughter had a favorite plaything, a golden ball, that she loved dearly. When the days were hot, she would go out into the dark forest near the palace and spend many an hour tossing and catching her golden ball in the shade of a leafy tree. There was a spring in the forest, and usually the princess played near the brink of the spring so that when her play made her thirsty she might take a cool drink.

  “Now it happened one day that the golden ball, instead of falling back into the maiden’s little hands, dropped to the ground and bounced into the spring. The princess followed the ball with her eyes as it sank, but the spring was very deep, and it soon sank out of sight. The bottom of the spring could not be seen. Thereupon she began to cry, and she wailed louder and louder as if her little heart were broken.

  “While she was lamenting in this way, she heard a throaty voice call to her. ‘Hey, now, king’s daughter, what is the matter? I’ve never heard anyone cry so hard.’

  “She looked around to see where the voice came from, but all she saw was a frog, holding its fat, ugly head out of the water. ‘Oh, it’s you, you old croaker,’ she said. ‘Well, if you must know, I’m crying because my wonderful golden ball has fallen into the spring and has sunk so deeply I’ll never get it out.’

  “‘Relax, don’t cry. I think I can be of some assistance. What will you give me if I can recover your toy for you?’

  “‘Oh, anything, anything. Whatever you’d like most, dear frog. My fine clothes, my pearls, my carriage, even the bejeweled crown I wear.’

  “The frog replied, ‘I have no use whatsoever for your clothes or your pearls or even your crown, but I’ll tell you what. If you will care for me and let me be your playmate and companion, let me sit beside you at your little table, eat from your little plate, drink from your little cup, and sleep in your little bed beside you, if you will promise me that, then I will dive straight down and bring back your golden ball.’

  “The princess stopped weeping immediately. ‘Ofcourse, ’ she said. ‘Of course. I promise you anything you want if you’ll only bring back the ball.’ But she thought, ‘What nonsense that silly creature talks. As if he could do anything but swim and croak with the other frogs, as if he could possibly be anyone’s companion!’

  “The frog, however, as soon as he heard the promise, drew his green head under the water and sank down out of sight in the spring. After what seemed like a long while, he surfaced with a splash, the golden ball in his wide mouth. He threw the ball onto the grass.

  “Needless to say, the king’s daughter was overjoyed to have her ball back. She scooped it up, and tossing it and catching it, she ran off with it toward the palace.

  “‘Stop, stop!’ cried the frog. ‘Pick me up, too. I can’t run as fast as you.’

  “His pleas were futile, however, for croak as he might, she paid no attention. She hurried on home and before long, forgot completely about the poor frog, who was left, presumably, to go on living in the spring.

  “The next day, as the princess was sitting at table with the king and all the court, having a fine dinner, there came a pitter-patter up the marble stairs, and then there came a knocking at the door and a voice crying, ’King’s youngest daughter, let me in!”

  “Naturally, the princess went to the door to see who it might be, but when she found the frog sitting there, panting, she slammed the door in his face and returned to her meal, feeling quite uneasy.

  “Noticing that she was acting a bit strange and that her heart was beating quickly, the king said, ’My child, what are you afraid of? Was there a giant at the door wanting to take you away?”

  “‘No,’ answered she. ‘No giant, just a nasty frog.’

  “‘Really? And what does the frog want?’ asked the king.

  “Tears began spilling out of the youngest daughter’s eyes. She broke down and told her father everything that had happened the previous day at the spring. When she had finished, she added, ‘And now he is here, outside the door, and he wants to come in to me.’

  “Then they all heard the frog knocking again, and crying out:

  King’s youngest daughter,

  Open to me!

  By the deep spring water

  What promised you me?

  “‘That which you have promised you must always honor and perform,’ said the king sternly. ‘Go at once and let him in.’

  “So she went and opened the door. The frog hopped in, following at her heels until she reached her chair. Then he looked up at her and said, ‘Lift me up to sit by you.’ But she delayed lifting him up until the king ordered her to.

  “No sooner was the frog in the chair than he demanded to get up on the table, where he sat, looking about hungrily. ‘Push your plate a little nearer so that we can eat together,’ he said.

  “Reluctantly, she did it, and the frog feasted heartily, although for her part, every morsel seemed to stick in her throat.

  “‘I’m stuffed,’ said the frog at last. ‘And I’m tired. You must carry me to your room and make ready your silken bed so that we can lie down and sleep.’

  “The princess began to fret and moan and cry and complain. She didn’t want that cold, creepy frog in her pretty, clean bed. The king became angry with her. ‘You made a promise in a time of need,’ he said. ‘Now, as unpleasant as it might be, you must honor it.’

  “Making a terrible face, she picked up the frog and carried him upstairs, where she placed him on some soiled linen in a corner. Then she slipped into bed. Before she could fall asleep, however, the frog came pitter-patter up to her bedside. ‘Let me in with you or I will tell your father,’ he said.

  “She had had enough. Flying into a rage, she grabbed the frog. ‘Get out of my life, you slimy frog!’ she shouted. With all her strength, she threw him against the wall.

  “When he fell to the floor, he was no longer a frog. He had become a prince with kind eyes and a beautiful smile. The frog prince took her hand and told her how a vengeful witch had bound him by her spells and how the princess alone, in her innocent beauty, could have released him. Then he asked her to marry him, which, with her father’s consent, she did. And they went off to the prince’s country, where they became king and queen and lived happily ever after.”

  As the story ended, the way that even that unhappy fartre Sartre knows that stories ought to end, a guard strode up to Bernard and tapped him on the shoulder, signaling him to return to his cell. Bernard appeared to be lost in thought. He continued to stare at Leigh-Cheri, smiling all the while, and ignoring the guard. The guard gripped him by the collar—which wasn’t black—and yanked him to his feet. It was too much for Leigh-Cheri. Shrieking, she sprang up and flattened herself against the window, as if she spread herself thin enough she could squish through the loose-knit silicone molecules the way that mayonnaise squishes through the holes in Swiss cheese. Bernard elbowed the guard in the jaw and seized the telephone. He was going to sp
eak to her! Quickly, she picked up the phone on her side of the glass and jammed it against her ear. A whistle had been blown, more guards were rushing up, and she realized that he would be able to get out only a word or two. “Yes, sweetheart, yes?”

  “Whatever happened to the golden ball?” asked Bernard.

  That’s what he said. “Whatever happened to the golden ball? Argggg!” And then they wrestled him from the room.

  50

  OVER THE YEARS, Leigh-Cheri had had some questions about the story herself. Mainly, she wondered why the handsome prince would want to marry a lying little am-phibiaphobe who couldn’t keep a promise. Leigh-Cheri had thought that frogs became princes through the transformative magic of osculation. Why did this prince escape the frog spell only after being splattered against a wall? Was he a masochist, maybe? In which case, it was small wonder that he was attracted to such an ill-tempered snip, and they probably did live together happily ever after, perhaps with leather accessories.

  In truth, the story had never made a lot of sense to Leigh-Cheri, and she resented the Brothers Grimm for portraying a princess in such an unflattering light. It was bad enough being dragon bait. For all her reservations about the tale, however, it had never occurred to her to puzzle over the fate of the golden ball. True, the story initially made a big deal about the ball, only never to mention it again, but it was the characters who were important, the ball was just a prop, a toy, an object.

  Maybe the princess put aside the golden ball until her own children were old enough to play with it, or maybe once she had a prince to play with she simply abandoned her beloved toy (she was certainly capable of that), and it got packed away in an attic, thrown out with the garbage, stolen by a chambermaid, or donated to Goodwill Industries. In any case, Leigh-Cheri had never been curious about it, and the psychiatrists and mythologists who’d analyzed the story—they claimed the spring (“so deep its bottom could not be seen”) symbolized the unconscious mind; the frog, of course (talk about typecasting), symbolized the penis, ugly and loathsome to a girl-child, but to an emerging woman a thing of some beauty that could contribute to her happiness and fulfillment—those analysts were sure that the golden ball represented the moon, but they never asked what became of it, either.