Still Life with Woodpecker (26 page)

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 progress.

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.

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?

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.

“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.

“It says in this article—pass the butter—that Wrangle was suspected of helping hijack an airliner to Cuba back in seventy-one. Yet he was not a Marxist. He did it out of general contempt for government. What makes an intelligent, courageous man disrespect the law to such an extent? In games of chance, one plays by the rules. Rules give poker its shape, its substance, its tension, its life. Poker without rules would be pointless and boring. And those who cheat the rules cannot be allowed to play. In the old days they were shot. I guess that is what happened to our Mr. Wrangle. More syrup.”

“In health there ees also rules,” said Tilli, “und you are zee vorse ven it come to breaking dem. No! No more syrup, you break-lawer.”

“When I disobey the doctor’s orders, Tilli, it affects no one but me. Should I break the rules in poker, everybody at the table would feel the effects. That is what Wrangle did, and that is why he is dead. Surely I will be dead soon, too, but I am forty years older than he, and death is not my punishment, it is my reward.” Like metal fatigue, a smile creased the fusilage of Max’s DC-10 face. “Well, should I run into him in the next world, we shall have an amusing chat. He was—”

“All zis is not zee point,” said Tilli, wiping syrup off three of her four chins. “Zee point is dat he ees killed and I spoke wif Leigh-Cheri on der phone two nights ago und she don’t know nuffin of thees. Should I tell her or not?”

“Of course you should tell her. She has a right to know. There is no reason to conceal his demise. She is not in love with him any longer.” A pause ensued during which Max pondered his statement. “But, uh, Tilli,” he said at last, “I would wait to tell her until after she is married. Okay?”

“Eef you tink zo.” Tilli wrapped bacon slices in a napkin to carry to her pooch.

“Did you read this? Allegedly, Wrangle landed in Havana in the month of December. He was surprised to find that since going Communist the Cubans no longer observed Christmas. So when he met Fidel Castro, Wrangle called him a rebel without a Claus. Ha ha. Quite the joker, eh?”

Tilli didn’t get it.

THERE HAD TO BE ONE MOMENT,
a single isolated moment, pear-shaped, quivering, and outlined in radium, when Beethoven inked the final note of his
Fifth Symphony
, when Shakespeare chose the word (“shoot”) that
completed
Hamlet,
when Leonardo applied the brush stroke that shoved Mona Lisa onto the Louvre express. Such a moment occurred, at least in the mind of Princess Leigh-Cheri, when the last slab of facing was cemented in place on the capstone point of the modern pyramid. Both depressed and elated (as Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Leonardo must have been), all she could say was, “Done.”