Still Life with Woodpecker (15 page)

The next day, Bernard’s attorney delivered to her this reply:

Leigh-Cheri went out in the blackberries and wept. “I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth,” she sobbed.

Yes, darling. But the earth doesn’t have any ends. Columbus fixed that.

BLACKBERRIES.

Nothing, not mushrooms, not ferns, not moss, not melancholy, nothing grew more vigorously, more intractably in the Puget Sound rains than blackberries. Farmers had to bulldoze them out of their fields. Homeowners dug and chopped, and still they came. Park attendants with flame throwers held them off at the gates. Even downtown, a lot left untended for a season would be overgrown. In the wet months, blackberries spread so wildly, so rapidly that dogs and small children were sometimes engulfed and never heard from again. In the peak of the season, even adults dared not go berry picking without a military escort. Blackberry vines pushed up through solid concrete, forced their way into polite society, entwined the legs of virgins, and tried to loop themselves over passing clouds. The aggression, speed, roughness, and nervy upward mobility of blackberries symbolized for Max and Tilli everything they disliked about America, especially its frontier.

Bernard Mickey Wrangle took a yum approach.

To the King, during tea, Bernard had advocated the planting of blackberries on every building top in Seattle. They would require no care, aside from encouraging them, arborlike, to crisscross the streets, roof to roof; to arch, forming canopies, natural arcades, as it were. In no time at all, people could walk through the city in the downpouringest of winter and feel not a splat. Every shopper, every theater-goer, every cop on the beat, every snoozing bum would be snug and dry. The pale green illumination that filtered through the dome of vines could inspire a whole new school of painting: centuries from now,
art critics might speak, as of chiaroscuro, of “blackberry light.” The vines would attract birds. Woodpeckers might not bother, but many birds would. The birds would sing. A bird full of berry pulp is like an Italian full of pathos. Small animals might move into the arches. “Look, Billy, up there, over the Dental Building. A badger!” And the fruit, mustn’t forget the fruit. It would nourish the hungry, stabilize the poor. The more enterprising winos could distill their own spirits. Seattle could become the Blackberry Brandy Capital of the World. Tourists would spend millions annually on Seattle blackberry pies, the discerning toast of the nation would demand to be spread with Seattle blackberry jam. The chefs at the French restaurants would dish up duck in purplish sauces, fill once rained-on noses with the baking aromas of
gâteau mûre de ronce
. The whores might become known, affectionately, as blackberry tarts. The Teamsters could try to organize the berry pickers. And in late summer, when the brambles were proliferating madly, growing faster than the human eye can see, the energy of their furious growth could be hooked up to generators that, spinning with blackberry power, could supply electrical current for the entire metropolis. A vegetative utopia, that’s what it would be. Seattle, Berry Town, encapsulated, self-sufficient, thriving under a living ceiling, blossoms in its hair, juice on its chin, more blackberries—and more!—in its future. Consider the protection offered. What enemy paratroopers could get through the briars?

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.

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.”

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.’