Still Life With Woodpecker Still Life With Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  “What is this golden ball of which you have the curiosity?” asked A’ben the night the subject abruptly arose.

  Leigh-Cheri didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer. She was immersed in the silent zone, where to become motionless is to be elsewhere.

  “If you want this golden ball, I buy it. Do not to worry of expense.”

  Still she didn’t reply. Noticing that she was holding the Vaseline jar, transfixed by the bashful yet sensuous glow of its contents, and recalling that in America “ball” was a slangy euphemism for coitus, A’ben began to wonder if “golden ball” didn’t refer to some special kind of sexual intercourse in which he wasn’t versed. Maybe it referred to sexual perfection, the ultimate ball, and maybe he had failed to provide it, and maybe Vaseline was supposed to help. Smitten for the first time in his life with pangs of self-doubt, he asked sulkily, “This golden ball, it is something you have had with the Woodpecker man?”

  A’ben had never mentioned the Woodpecker before, and it was jolting enough to cause Leigh-Cheri to come back from her reverie, although the phrase “come back” is misleading because in the realm of meditative daydream the only way to “go there” is, paradoxically, to totally “be here.”

  “Er, uh, not exactly,” she stammered. She returned the Vaseline to the bedside table, withdrawing her gaze from the sea light of its luminous goo. “He, ah, he said something to me once. I only just now understood what he meant.”

  Accepting her explanation in all of its inadequacy, Fizel permitted the subject to be changed to limestone. The next morning, however, he fired messages to customs officials at every point of entry in the Arab world demanding that any traveler bearing a passport in the name of Bernard Mickey Wrangle be turned away. Forcefully, if necessary.

  83

  LESS THAN A MONTH LATER, believe it or not, a man bearing just such a passport stepped off a plane in Algiers. When informed that he could not enter Algeria, he put up a fight and was taken into custody.

  A’ben Fizel was notified. Fizel sent the Algerian police commissioner a case of cognac, a tub of caviar, and a pearl-handled riding crop that had once belonged to King Faruk. “Wrangle is a dangerous international thug with Zionist affiliations,” cabled Fizel. “He should be detained in maximum security. Indefinitely. Which most suits your taste in motor cars, commissioner, the American Lincoln Continental or the German Mercedes-Benz?”

  Fizel then proceeded to add a hundred workmen to the crew at the pyramid. Work was to continue around the clock until the limestone facing was on and the inner chambers met Princess Leigh-Cheri’s specifications. Fizel also ordered his palace staff to speed up preparations for the wedding.

  84

  YOU WOULD THINK that an electric typewriter would know better than to bite the hand that pays the light bill. Yet the Remington SL3, in its wanton dedication to humdrum technological practicality, persists in obstructing attempts at old-fashioned literary genius. You would think that a woman obsessed with building a full-sized pyramid in the last quarter of the twentieth century would know better than to cross the one man who could make it possible. Yet Leigh-Cheri had refused A’ben’s embrace and was speaking to him sharply.

  “Why the hell am I being guarded?” she demanded. “Why do I trip over those two lummoxes every time I turn around?”

  Leigh-Cheri’s enthusiasm for sex simultaneously delighted and frightened A’ben Fizel. Months before, he had secretly assigned a eunuch to keep watch on her, assuring that her passions were not so rudderless as to allow her to drift into another’s arms. She was, after all, left alone a great deal, and he was uncertain if two services a week were sufficient to cool her racy motor. Upon learning that a Bernard Mickey Wrangle had been apprehended in Algiers, A’ben had doubled the guard. It became obvious to Leigh-Cheri that the pair was camping outside her door.

  “Those men of which you call dumb oxes are trusted by me. They are to—”

  “Spy on me.”

  “No. No!” He shook his head forcefully. “They are to protect you.”

  “From what?”

  “From the bad men. You could be kidnap. Men that your television call ‘terrorist’ do such things. Ways of Middle East are not familiar to you.”

  That should have calmed her. She was aware that abductions and skyjackings were fairly common political tactics in that part of the globe. But red hair is slow to lay back once it’s got its dandruff up, and her bitchy mood required further opportunity to express itself.

  “I’m familiar enough with Middle Eastern customs to know that Moslems don’t eat or make love on Saturdays. Why do you always visit me on a holy day? A day you don’t dare to be seen in a disco, right? Your countrymen refuse to work on the pyramid on Saturdays, you have to hire Greeks. I’ll bet they don’t know how you spend your holy day. No meat on Saturday, A’ben. Right? No meat on Saturday.”

  The lids drooped like paper wrappers over his chocolate-drop eyes. A guilty tic began to palpitate in the left corner of his mouth. “Perhaps I am too long in America,” he said softly. “Perhaps I am too much confuse Mecca with between your thighs.”

  Leigh-Cheri had to laugh. “Thighs, A’ben.” She opened her negligee and patted herself. “These are called thighs.”

  His eyes watered. His lower lip quivered like a snail that had just learned the meaning of escargot. Sorry now, she set about to kiss the quivers and tics and tears away. Soon the forgotten guards were nudging one another and grinning at the sacrilegious yet not unholy noises escaping from the flat.

  85

  “IT WON’T BE LONG NOW,” said Leigh-Cheri to a spoon. Moorish architects were wont to make their windows look like keyholes, and the redheaded Princess stood at such a window as if she were a bloodshot eye keyhole-peeping at the pyramid while it was being dressed. It was Sunday, a day as milky and muffled in the Moslem world, oddly enough, as it was in Christendom. The day shift, made up mostly of Greek and Yugoslavian masons—the sun-wise Arabs chose to work nights—was on the job, affixing limestone facing, but Leigh-Cheri had given herself a day off.

  “It won’t be long now,” said Leigh-Cheri. If there was a trace of anxiety in her voice, the spoon couldn’t tell.

  A’ben had loved her well the previous evening, and she’d slept quite late. She lingered over her breakfast tea, then devoted some time to playing with the teaspoon. It was as noon as noon could be when she stood at her window, staring across the shadowless city, low and blanched and jumbled as a boneyard, as a retirement picnic for used-up schoolroom chalk. In the noonday sun, the pyramid, too, gleamed white. Despite the intense heat, the city seemed cold. It was eternally alien to her American temperament. But the pyramid…. The pyramid was real to Leigh-Cheri in a way that buildings of her own society were not.

  How can one thing be more real than any other? Especially when it is inscrutable and mysterious? Maybe when a thing is perceived as being absolutely direct yet absolutely unnecessary it becomes absolutely genuine. It is real unto itself and does not depend on outside attachments or associations for its reality. The more emotional values attributed to a thing, the more uses to which it can be put, the more effects it produces, then the more illusions it creates. Illusions, like many values themselves, are cloying and false. But straight lines and flat surfaces exude perpetual reality. Especially when no utilitarian function can be perceived. The geometric figure of a pyramid permits the eye to flow around its corners. We don’t have to walk around it to know it completely. To see its front is to see its back. In fact, its front is its back. A pyramid is primary. It is form, not function. It is presence, not effect. We can see it in an instant, yet we continue to read it. It nourishes us over and over. A pyramid is inscrutable and mysterious not in spite of being elemental but because it is elemental. Free from the hypnotic hysteria of the mechanical, the numbing torpor of the electronic, and the mortal decay of the biological, it rests in vapid splendor between time and space, detached from both, representing neither, and helps to devaluate the myth of pro
gress.

  Of course, Leigh-Cheri never thought of the pyramid in terms of geometric truth. Even the mental processes that nurtured her theory hadn’t carried her that far into the ozone of explanation (academic analysis is the true “outer space,” frigid light years away from the solid joys of the earth), and she was too young to remember Connie Francis singing “Is it really real?” When Leigh-Cheri looked at the pyramid, her pyramid, she simply experienced the giddy sensation of having thrust her hand into the hip pocket of destiny.

  She held the teaspoon in front of her eyes and moved it along the horizon lines until the distant monument appeared to be sitting in its hollow. Then she pretended to feed the pyramid to herself. “Mmmm,” she said. “Needs salt.”

  If there was anxiety in her jest, the spoon couldn’t tell.

  86

  ONCE UPON A TIME (to borrow a phrase from the story with which Gulietta imprinted Leigh-Cheri) a rickety, mistreated old drudge of a truck, rusty, dusty, and packed, headlamp to tailgate, with the few possessions and many children of a family of Okie fruit-pickers, rattled to a halt across the highway from a crossroads gas station in the Walla Walla Valley. A child about two years old, still in diapers—in fact, wearing nothing but diapers—climbed down from the truck, which was beanshooting out its exhaust pipe drops of oil the size of the grapes of wrath. The child toddled across the blacktop. Although apparently male, it pushed into the station’s women’s toilet, where it remained for what seemed like an inordinately long time. Perhaps it was having trouble with the diaper pins. Meanwhile, the Okie at the wheel was mashing the gas feed impatiently, and the dirty kids in the rear were pounding on top of the cab. Finally, just as the bare feet of the toddler emerged from the restroom, the driver popped the clutch, and the truck lurched away. The child stared in disbelief at the disappearing vehicle, then went pattering after it. “Wait for Baby,” he yelled. “Wait for Baby, you sons of bitches!”

  This scene was witnessed by one Dude Wrangle, a former rodeo contender and failed Hollywood cowboy (hence the snazzy name, Dude’s original moniker was something on the order of Bernie Snootch) who had become, in mid-life, a prosperous onion rancher. When the truck neither stopped nor turned around, Dude bought the tot a Pepsi and invited him to sit in his Cadillac convertible. The kid was suspicious, but the lure of the Caddy was more than he could resist. Dude both pitied the child and admired his spirit. He also liked his red curls and the freckles that were as rosy as hypodermic wounds. So he sat with him, playing the radio for him and feeding him Hostess Twinkies, until dusk. Then, convinced that the migrant family wouldn’t return, Dude drove him, freckles and all, to the Cry-Me-a-River Onion Farm.

  “Hi, Kathleen. Hi, Kathleen. Sorry I’m late, but it’s hard work making a young’un all by yourself. Specially when the little bugger’s damn near two years old. Here, come tell me how I done. Tell me how I done.”

  A few years before, Dude Wrangler had swept the feet out from under a young philosophy professor at Whitman College, and she’d given up Spinoza for a satin-shirted satyr, an unpainted ranch house, and all the famous Walla Walla sweet onions she could eat. (Prior to teaching at Whitman, she’d thought Walla Walla sweets played pool with Minnesota Fats.) Kathleen had a pretty face and a shiny intellect but bum plumbing. Try as they might, they couldn’t get her pregnant. She was overwhelmed by this ready-made kid that Dude thrust at her. She hastened to give him a bath, then tucked him into her own bed. She stayed awake all night watching him. Baby whimpered a little before falling asleep, but morning found him cheerful and none too eager to be reunited with the sons of bitches.

  This was in the Walla Walla Valley in the eastern part of Washington State, two hundred miles and two hundred yawns from Seattle, out where the apples were knocking their chins together and the sky was just too blue to be in good taste. In the dialect of the local Indians, walla meant water. When the Indians first discovered, cutting through the hellish hills, a fertile valley yodeling with brooks and rivers, they doubled up and called the place Walla Walla. “Water here and plenty of it,” “A far greater abundance of moisture than one would have expected to find in these dusty parts,” or, in the ethno-lingo that white folks enjoy, “Land of many waters.” Had the valley been really wet, had it canals, swamps, and lagoons, they might have named it Walla Walla Walla. Maybe even Walla Walla Walla Walla. Had those same Indians ever hit Puget Sound in the rainy season, there would have been virtually no end to their wallaing.

  Dude Wrangle had been born and raised in Walla Walla, which might account for the fact that as a child he developed a tiresome habit of saying everything twice. “Please can I? Please can I?” “I hate stinking stewed tomatoes. I hate stinking stewed tomatoes.” “Pee. Pee.” It was an idiosyncrasy that he never outgrew, and it was his habit of repeating his lines that was as responsible as anything for his failure in the movies. No director wanted to have the posse told to “Head ‘em off at the pass” two times in succession, and it somehow spoiled the mood of a tense evening in Comanche territory when the hero said, “Sure is quiet out there tonight. Sure is quiet out there tonight.” Yeah, Wrangle, it was quiet until you started babbling.

  Adopted by the Wrangles, Baby became accustomed to Dude’s repetitions, which is probably why, years later, he had felt so at home in Hawaii with its loma loma and mahi mahi.

  Growing up on the Cry-Me-a-River Onion Farm, the abandoned redhead learned philosophy from Kathleen and the wiles and ways of the drugstore cowboy from Dude. Everybody around Walla Walla called him Baby, for he had no other name until he was fifteen, at which time he was shipped off to a fancy academy in Switzerland because Kathleen didn’t want him turning out to be another Walla Walla hayseed and Dude was upset by both the quantity and quality of the mischief he was getting into in public school. On the night before his departure for Geneva, Dude and Kathleen shared a quart of sour-mash hootch with him and christened him Bernard Mickey.

  Being a bit hungover, the three of them arrived late at the Spokane airport the next day, and Bernard Mickey had to run to catch his flight. As he dashed toward the boarding gate, he yelled, “Wait for Baby! Wait for Baby, you sons of bitches!” He looked over his shoulder at his foster parents, laughed wildly, and threw them a kiss.

  They laughed and threw kisses, too.

  “Keep your nose clean, darling,” sang Kathleen.

  And Dude bellowed, “Do us proud, you hear. Do us proud, you hear.”

  Now, even though he was reared amidst redundancy, it would seem that the kind of hip guy Bernard Mickey Wrangle turned out to be wouldn’t have had to be ordered to halt more than once by an Algerian jailer with a machine gun. Wouldn’t it seem that way?

  87

  LEIGH-CHERI DIDN’T LEARN of the shooting until a month after it happened. Then, it was Queen Tilli who informed her.

  At Gulietta’s request, Max’s homeland paid him a substantial sum so that he might retire in dignity, independent of the American government. Max immediately divided the funds, giving half to Tilli and taking his half to Reno, where he intended to gamble until his valve blew out. He checked into a modest hotel and went every morning to the casinos, committing suicide by wheel of fortune. He telephoned Tilli twice a week, ever assuring her that he was winning money and enjoying good health. “I feel better away from the blackberries,” he said. The Queen suspected that he was fibbing to ease her worry, so she arranged to stop off in Reno on her way to the Mideast for Leigh-Cheri’s wedding.

  To her surprise, she found her husband the toast of the town. He was the season’s big winner, and everybody from casino managers to star entertainers to taxi drivers always greeted King Max. He demanded little but tipped large. He made donations to local charities. He bought drinks for doormen, sent the kind of flowers to coffee-shop waitresses that other big winners sent to showgirls. As for his heart, it was chugging along, although the doctors warned that it could derail at any moment. “I only pray that it goes at the roulette table,” said Max, dropping a third lump of
sugar like a depth charge into his tea. “I’ll place every last cent on red thirteen and, win or lose, expire like a monarch.”

  It was while Tilli was sitting in the hotel lobby waiting for Max to come down for breakfast—he’d gambled until 3:00 A.M.—that she’d noticed the article. She’d picked up a copy of an underground newspaper, the Philadelphia Drummer, that a couple of bearded young men with backpacks had forgotten on a lobby sofa. Tilli intended to spread the paper on the floor of her room so that her Chihuahua might do its little business thereupon and not soil the rug. As she was folding the Drummer into her handbag, her eyes came to rest on an article concerning an incident in Algiers. According to an exclusive report, Algerian guards had machine-gunned an American citizen, Bernard Mickey Wrangle, thirty six, who, as the Woodpecker, had led a notorious gang of bomb-throwing war resisters during the late sixties and early seventies. Algeria was covering up the incident, the article said, but, it went on to say, it was common knowledge in the Casbah that Wrangle, arrested earlier on a passport violation, had been killed while trying to escape.

  “Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o,” uttered Queen Tilli. The yelps of her doggie as it slid off her lap made short work of her next remark.

  88

  “YOU KNOW, Tilli, I can’t help but feel a little sad about Wrangle.” The King poured maple syrup on his waffle. The syrup puddled the depressions in the waffle the way that desire puddles the folds in the brain. “I detest what he stood for, but I have to admire the fact that he stood for something, that he was prepared to carve the roast instead of waiting for some superior to toss him a bone. He was better company than those serious-minded environmentalists that Leigh-Cheri was always dragging home. Except that he wanted to plant blackberries on the rooftops of Seattle. My God! Barbaric!” Max’s heart valve did an imitation of a robot having a bowel movement.