Still Life with Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  One thing you can say for the inscription, it makes you want to rush to the pantry, seize a box of Cheerios, rip back its tab (being careful not to tear it off lest there come a time to send in the boxtop, which must be entire), part the waxed paper inner bag with both hands, dispatch a significant minority of the Cheerio population head over heels into a bowl, douse them immediately with a quantity of milk (presumedly, they do not perform when dry), sprinkle some white sugar on top, and then, crouch, face close to the bowl, watching, evaluating, as the tiny, tan, lightweight oat doughnuts, irregular in size, tone, and texture, begin to soak up the milk and the sugar granules dissolved therein, growing soft and soggy, expanding somewhat as liquid is absorbed; and you may be thinking all the while about the toroid shape, the shape of the cyclone, the vortex, the whirlpool, the shape of a thing made of itself yet mysteriously distinct from itself; thinking about rings, halos, men overboard, the unbroken cycle of life, the void as nucleus, or, best of all, bodily orifices; thinking about whatever the trove of toroidal trinkets might inspire as, center holes flooded with sugary milk, they relax and go blobby in the bowl; but appraising, even as your mind wanders, appraising, testing, criticizing, asking repeatedly: do Cheerios measure up to Wheaties with beer, would they mix well with batshit in times of strife, would Ed Sullivan have signed them, would Knute Rockne have recruited them, how well do these little motherfuckers perform?

  At times such as these, you understand what the man meant when he said he’d walk a mile for a Camel.

  59

  LEIGH-CHERI BEGAN TO reckon time in terms of Gulietta. When Gulietta brought lunch, it was noon. When Gulietta brought dinner, it was six in the evening. When Gulietta emptied the chamber pot, it was either 8:00 A.M. or 8:00 P.M.—for whatever the difference was worth. When Gulietta fetched her to the third-floor bath (seldom used by Max or Tilli) for a scrubbing, the Princess knew that it was Saturday and another week had passed. After ninety baths, ninety soapings of the peach-fish, her lover would be eligible for parole. Gulietta was her clock and her calendar. Time was a skinny old woman with dilated pupils.

  As for space, it came to be less defined by the walls of the attic, more defined by the Camel pack. The Camel pack was a rectangular solid, two and three-quarters inches high, two and one-eighth inches wide and three-quarters of an inch deep. Imagine Leigh-Cheri’s eyes crawling over every crinkle in the cellophane. Imagine Leigh-Cheri gazing expectantly, her eyes like a couple of goldfish with insufficient water in their bowls.

  As an environmentalist, she might have been more interested in the chamber pot. Not only did the pot have a benevolent, ecologically sound function, but its round shape—as biomorphic as a breast, melon, or moon—evoked the natural world. Yet it was the Camel pack, all right angles and parallel lines (the formal equivalent of the rational mind); it was the Camel pack, born on the drawing board far from the bulrushes; it was the Camel pack, of a shape designed to shield us from the capricious, which is to say, the inexplicable; it was the logically, synthetically geometric Camel pack that enlivened the air of her cell.

  In the morning, about a quarter till Gulietta-empty-chamber-pot, Leigh-Cheri would wake to find the Camel pack beside her cot. It had the poise of an animal. Some mornings, it would be lying on the foam rubber beside her unpillowed head, like a jewel forced out of her ear by a dream. Once, or maybe twice, lying there of a morning, she placed the pack mischievously in the nest of her pubis. What strange bird laid this egg?

  She spent a lot of time tossing the Camel pack in the air and catching it. She became skilled to the point where she could catch it behind her back, over her shoulder, in her teeth, or with her eyes closed. Prancing with it, she incorporated it into some old cheerleader routines. Mostly, though, she just sat holding it, staring into its exotic vistas, populating its landscape, colonizing it, learning to survive there.

  When crossing the desert, she learned to swaddle herself in a burnoose, the way the natives did. Redheads burn easily. She learned which stones one could squeeze water from. She learned to appreciate the special reality of the mirage.

  One day she believed that she heard the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker, but search as she might, she could find no bill holes in the trunks of the palms.

  Whether on foot or camelback, Leigh-Cheri went about with eyes downcast. Leigh-Cheri was looking for matchsticks. She looked for the print of black boots in the sand.

  60

  BATHS WENT BY. Meals passed. Deposits were made in the chamber pot and subsequently withdrawn. The springtime turned slowly to summer. By the end of June, it was so stuffy in the attic it was difficult to breathe—but there was always a cool breeze at the oasis.

  Leigh-Cheri would sit in the shade by the spring, playing toss-and-catch with her package of Camels. For hours on end, she would toss and catch, toss and catch, while from the spring waters big old green amphibians spied on her with that voyeuristic bulbousness that can trap beauty and fix a thing forever. She was reminded of A’ben Fizel, the look he had when he was courting her.

  Periodically, nomads came to the spring. They, men as well as women, wore hand-hammered silver jewelry that jangled like cash registers in a shopkeeper’s dream of heaven. Their antique rifles were as long as fishing poles, and the clay jugs that they filled with water were made back when Jesus was just a gleam in the One Big Eye. Berbers came, and Bedouins, driving their dromedaries to drink. Sheiks came, sheiks without oil wells or sons at Oxford, but who nevertheless wore robes that would pump up the egos of every silkworm in the East, and who vanished in clouds of perfume so thick they made the Princess cough.

  Invariably, she questioned those traders, raiders, belly dancers, ali babas, and caravan executives about any red-haired outlaws they might have passed on their route, while they in turn hit her up for cigarettes.

  “But I can’t open the pack,” she’d try to explain. “If I did, all this would collapse. A successful external reality depends upon an internal vision that is left intact.”

  They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they’re getting is philosophy.

  61

  IT WAS IN JULY—about the time that King Max lost forty dollars on the All-Star Game and Gulietta ran out of cocaine—that Leigh-Cheri realized that her body had made a private compact with the moon. With a minimum of effort, she had begun to rotate on the lunar wheel.

  At night, when the light was off, the attic normally was as black as the franks at a firebug’s weenie roast. In that part of the world, however, the full moon always rose in the east, and on those nights when the moon was biggest and brightest, a shaft of its light would spear the one clear windowpane and pierce her sleeping body. By May, she was menstruating regularly at the new moon, just as the ancients did, and in July she observed that she had begun to ovulate when the moon was full, as will any healthy woman whose nights are not polluted by synthetic lighting. She could always tell when she was about to ovulate because her vaginal mucus would become wetter and more abundant than usual, and more smooth and slippery, too. Her glands were greasing the tracks, as it were, for the Sperm Express. Of course, testing for ovulation can be hazardous, since a primed vagina, in its enthusiasm, can mistake an exploratory finger for a serviceable phallus and try to draw it in. Her resistance was admirable, however, if not quite heroic, and the mucus tests proved that she had begun, inadvertently but successfully, to practice lunaception.

  As an advocate of lunaception, Bernard would have been proud of her. Bernard would have been proud despite this irony: now that her periods were predictable and her ovulation pinpointed, now that she was capable of conceiving or not conceiving at her own discretion, now that she finally had solved the problem of birth control, it was all academic. The Sperm Express didn’t run through the attic on Puget Sperm Express didn’t run through the attic on Puget Sound.

  Still, it was pleasing to her to prove Berna
rd’s theory, and she derived, moreover, a sense of power and well-being from the sensation of being in touch with her biological cycles and of them being in harmony with the rhythms of the cosmos. She wondered how the moon, two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles above the roof, could affect her as profoundly as it did. Being four times larger than the moon, the earth appeared to dominate. Caught in the earth’s gravitational web, the moon moved around the earth and could never get away. Yet, as any half-awake materialist well knows, that which you holds you. Neither could the earth escape the moon. The moon conducts our orchestra of waters, it is keeper at the hive of blood. In a magnetic field, every object exerts force on every other object. The moon is an object, after all. Like a golden ball. Like a pack of cigarettes.

  The fabric of even those objects that seem densest is, in actual fact, a loose weaving of particles and waves. The differences and interactions between objects have their roots in the interference patterns produced along combined frequencies of vibration. What it amounted to was that Leigh-Cheri was exerting force on the Camel pack. And it on her. Surely, such force had to do with the physical nature of the pack—its size, weight, shape, chemical composition, and, above all, proximity—and not with the pictorial content that adorned it. Ah, but pictorial symbols have their own weight and gravity, as the history of religion vividly demonstrates, and while Leigh-Cheri found herself in a relationship with the Camel pack as an object, just as she was in relation to the moon as an object (just as you, reader, have a relationship with this book as an object, no matter if you can tolerate another line of its content), she deciphered from the symbology of the Camel pack design what appeared to be the long-lost message from the redheads of Argon.

  That might have been the major discovery of the last quarter of the twentieth century. On the other hand, it might have been the kind of rat hair in the tuna tin that can eventually confront the person who pays too close attention, who simply looks too hard. Plato did claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.

  62

  IT WOULD BE WEEKS, weeks defined by starchy meals and Saturday baths, before Princess Leigh-Cheri would detect something Argonian about that object with which she was sharing the bloom of her youth. Meanwhile, summer went about its business. Blackberries multiplied. Chihuahuas panted. Fan blades ran around in circles. The attic heated up. So did the revolt in Max and Tilli’s homeland. Of more concern to the King and Queen, or so it seemed to everyone but Chuck (Chuck believed, among other things, that Leigh-Cheri was operating a clandestine radio transmitter from the attic), was a rebellion that was occurring right there in the shoebox palace on Puget Sound.

  Gulietta was demanding a raise. More precisely, Gulietta was demanding that she be put on salary, since in the seventy-some years that she had served the Furstenberg-Barcalona household, she had been compensated only with room and board and had never been paid a dime. Occasionally, the old woman received small sums from abroad, but while those monies might afford her a new bikini here, a pair of running shoes there, a porno movie one Sunday, a ride on a roller coaster the next, they were not nearly enough to keep her in cocaine.

  The Peruvian flake that had filled the plastic frog—the drug had been given to Bernard by a fellow outlaw whose life he’d once saved—would have cost close to ten thousand dollars on the retail market, and Gulietta had tooted through it in four months. Now, deprived, nerve-racked, in a funk, she was demanding wages of fifty dollars a week. Retroactive to somewhere near the beginning of the century.

  “Foul!” screamed King Max. His long horse face quivered from forehead to chin. “Out of bounds,” he screamed. “Dealing from the bottom of the deck.” The noise that his heart valve produced sounded like two mechanical mice making love in a spoon drawer.

  Queen Tilli’s bulk paled. “Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o,” she stammered. She elected not to develop the idea more comprehensively.

  “Forget this silly notion at once,” Max advised.

  “In a pig’s eye I’ll forget,” replied Gulietta. Actually, her reply has lost something in translation. “You owe me.”

  “Owe owe spaghetti-owe,” said Tilli. The rattling of Max’s heart drowned out the rest of her speech.

  “No pay, no work,” said Gulietta.

  “You’re bluffing,” said Max.

  “I’m on strike,” said Gulietta.

  “Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o,” Tilli was about to declare in summary fashion. Then she saw that the others had guessed her thoughts.

  63

  NEWS OF THE STRIKE was a while reaching the attic. Downstairs, the place was in turmoil, it was worse than the time Gulietta went to Maui: dirty dishes piled up, dustballs rolled about freely, laundry fermented in the hamper, and the quality of meals plunged to 1.8 on the gourmet scale. What’s more, Gulietta was picketing the house, marching back and forth outside, completely naked except for a pair of oven mittens. Thanks to the acres of blackberries, she could not be seen from the street, and her picket sign, composed in a language that made Serbo-Croatian seem as simple as Bozo-Cretin, was in no danger of being read by an ordinary passer-by, but her protest parade upon that miniscule portion of lawn that had not been usurped by brambles caused Max and Tilli extreme agitation. “After all these years,” grumbled Max, “America has finally corrupted her.” Tilli’s constant comment hardly bears repeating.

  Up in the attic, however, there were only a few repercussions. Gulietta continued to serve her young mistress, with whom she had no quarrel. In fact, having considerable extra time on her hands, Gulietta, out of boredom as much as anything, began paying unscheduled visits to the attic, thereby totally screwing up the Princess’s clock. Once, the striking servant brought the prisoner of love a stack of magazines, including an issue of Arizona Detective, two issues each of Car and Driver, Fruit and Tarantula, and Pork and Trichinosis, a recent copy of Gentlemen’s Anus, and a dog-eared issue of the People magazine that featured a full-page photograph of the Princess in balmier climes, lounging beneath the lippy leaves of a koa tree, her extraordinarily round breasts lending topographical grandeur to the flat cotton front of a Save-the-Whales T-shirt, her big blue eyes dreamy with visions of a modern Mu. A fifteen-round bout with literary temptation was fought before Leigh-Cheri, determined to read only the Camel pack, ordered the periodicals and their bearer back downstairs.

  On another occasion, Gulietta fetched Prince Charming, terrarium and all, to the attic, insisting that it was unhealthy for a person to live completely without animate companionship. This time, Leigh-Cheri consented. For one thing, she suspected that where frogs were concerned, the old lady had arcane information that had best be heeded. For another, Leigh-Cheri rationalized that there must be something animate, a fly, a flea, a mouse, a roach, an ant, something breathing the air in Bernard’s cell, and therefore her admission of Prince Charming wouldn’t violate her vow to duplicate her lover’s experience. She only insisted that Gulietta attend to the toad’s daily needs, just as, in her role as surrogate jailer, she attended to Leigh-Cheri’s.

  If Leigh-Cheri failed to notice that Gulietta’s recent appearances in the attic were au naturel, it probably was because she herself hadn’t worn a stitch since the weather got warm back in June. When the Princess finally did learn of the strike, she was amused. She was aware of her daddy’s opinion that every commoner in the USA, with the possible exception of center Jack Sikma of the Seattle Supersonics, was overpaid, and she felt that it was good, not bad, for the kingly heart to receive an occasional kick in its pants. Nevertheless, she had to recall with a twinge that Bernard hadn’t much use for labor unions. It wasn’t that Bernard objected to strikes—he approved of just about anything that stirred the stew—but that he believed that the time was long past when unions were effective in controlling the vices of big business, that unions, in fact, had become big business, had perhaps surpassed big business in relative stench of corrupt practices and violent hanky-pankies. It was the Hawaiian mongoose syndrome all over again.
Who shall control those who control those who control?

  As the goat feet of chaos danced on the linoleum of the kitchen below, Leigh-Cheri entertained various thoughts about labor and management. They soon faded, though. The striking crone and Prince Charming notwithstanding, her central focus was upon the Camel pack. And the Camel pack was leading her into the mysterious realm of the pyramids.

  64

  ON AN ATTIC WINDOWSILL, which by then was about as dusty as a literal Sahara, Leigh-Cheri would set the cigarettes. Then she’d kneel so that the pack was at eye level, pyramids on the horizon. Majestic, timeless, enigmatically powerful, the pyramids pulled at her until in a semitrance she’d strike out across the open sands, chanting the pyramid names: Tiahuanaco and Giza; Seneferu and Cheops; Teti, Pepi, and La Huaca de la Luna; Zoser, Khaba, and Ammenemes; Neferirkare and Uxmal and Chicken Itza; on Chephren, on Unas, on Donner and Blitzen; now Dancer, now Prancer, now Sesostris II.

  From a distance, the pyramids gave the impression of being sleek and well-preserved, but up close they were as ravaged by time and despoilers as Gulietta. The capstones and a dozen or more courses had been removed from their apexes, and the entire facing of Tura limestone, with the exception of some sections near the base, had been stripped from the triangular facades. Tunnels had been bored into their sides by treasure hunters, while enterprising builders had hauled off random stones to shore up their bridges and domiciles. Up close, the pyramids were cakes that had been found out by freeloaders. It saddened Leigh-Cheri to think that there was not one pyramid on earth that had not been gnawed.

  “I can’t look at a pyramid without feeling like Perry Mason,” said Leigh-Cheri, meaning that like most people, the mere sight of those immense structures set her to popping questions like a prosecuting attorney on diet pills and beer.