Still Life with Woodpecker (28 page)

What do you say to an Argonian space traveler in a pyramid at midnight? Care for a Camel, sailor?

Leigh-Cheri didn’t say anything. She’d lost the ability to speak. She just stood there with the toaster going, trying to decide whether to faint or not, until the Red Beard understood that if there was going to be any conversation he’d have to get the ball rolling, so he opened a mouthful of ruined teeth and said:

“Hello, dragon bait.”

She fainted.

SHE WOKE UP
with her head on a bomb. He’d made her a pillow out of his jacket and hadn’t bothered to take the dynamite out of it.

“You’re dead.”

“Not so.”

“Not so?”

“You can bank on it.”

She was blinking rapidly and swallowing hard. “Well then … a mistake?”

“Only natural.”

“Was this one of your cute tricks?”

“Nope. This was a matter of luck. Good luck for me. Bad luck for Birdfeeder.”

“Who? Bernard, I haven’t seen you in two and a half years. First you’re dead, then you’re not. Who are you talking about? What are you talking about?”

“A con named Perdy Birdfeeder did me what I
thought
was a favor. Apparently I erred—but that’s another story. Perdy the Purse had a mind to retire to the French Riviera. He heard that business opportunities were handsome there. I arranged for him to meet a bartender in Pioneer Square, a pal who was minding my personal papers. Out of fourteen possible passports, Perdy chose the one with my legal alias on it—”

“Your legal alias?”

“Yeah. Alias Bernard M. Wrangle. My
real
name is Baby. Don’t laugh. I’m sensitive. Anyhow, Birdfeeder didn’t fare well on the Riviera. He split for North Africa, still using my passport. He didn’t fare so hot there, either. Algiers must be a rotten place to die, although I suppose it’s preferable to Tacoma.”

“Bernard, what are you doing here?”

“Right now I’m wondering whether or not you’re glad I’m undead.”

Leigh-Cheri rose shakily to her feet. She was practically as tall as Bernard, and she looked him in the eye for a long time. “Once in Hawaii, before I hardly even knew you, I thought you’d been arrested, and for some reason I went running to your boat in a panic. Tonight, I thought you were dead. There wasn’t any boat to run to.”

She intended to continue, but the crybaby in her reared its salty head. Bernard put his arms around her. She put hers around him, and they stood that way for … well,
who knows how long. Long enough for the two eunuchs who’d followed Leigh-Cheri to the pyramid to figure it was a development worth interrupting A’ben Fizel’s bachelor party for.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE,
Bernard?”

“Something corny and dramatic. I have tendencies.”

“Come to rescue me, have you? Peel the dragon bait off the hook?”

“I came to make boom-boom.”

“Jesus! I might have guessed. Here? Right here?” She stepped out of his embrace.

“It’d take a nuke to dent this rock pile. I stopped in here for a nibble of pastry”—he gestured at the many-layered wedding cake that sat upon a table at the far end of the chamber—“while waiting for the coast to clear so I could climb to the top. I was going to blow off the point.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“A wedding present. There was nothing else I could give you that Fizel doesn’t already own six of. Boom-boom. You’d have known it was me?”

“Naturally. You have a talent for bombing the wrong target.”

“Ouch. That stings. But, listen, the pyramid on the dollar bill has had its top lifted off. It’s tradition. Or self-fulfilling prophecy. So what do you mean wrong target?”

“Aside from being incredibly beautiful, this rock pile, as you call it, is the most important structure to be built on the planet in thousands of years. You of all people should understand that.”

“How do you figure?”

“You were alone with a package of Camels. Didn’t you get the message?”

“Which message? I was advised not to look for premiums or coupons and that smoking is dangerous to my health.”

“I was referring to a different message.”

“Which is—?”

“If you don’t know—and I’m not convinced that you don’t—there isn’t time now for me to tell you.”

“That’s right. Zero hour is fast approaching. Leigh-Cheri, I can’t believe you’re marrying a guy with black hair.”

“Hair has got nothing to do with it. But while we’re on the subject, I don’t like your beard. Makes you look like Jack the Ripper.”

“Jack never wore a beard. Are you hostile because I was going to knock the tip off of your pyramid?”

“That. And your note.”

“Ah, the note. That note was all punch and no moves, I admit. It sounded a whole lot harsher than intended. I was annoyed at the publicity, it smacked of the old save-the-world syndrome, but I wasn’t meaning to be cold—”

“Barking at the moon?”

“What about it?”

“That’s all our love was to you?”

“That’s all love ever is. Love is not a harpsichord concert in a genteel drawing room. And it sure as hell isn’t Social Security, Laetrile, the Irish Sweepstakes, or roller disco. Love is private and primitive and a bit on the funky and frightening side. I think of the Luna card in the Tarot deck: some strange, huge crustacean, its armor glistening and its pinchers wiggling, clatters out of a pool while wild dogs howl at a bulging moon. Underneath the hearts and flowers, love is loony like that. Attempts to housebreak it, to refine it, to dress the crabs up like doves and make them sing soprano always result in thin blood. You end up with a parody. There’re lots of pretty sounds that describe
’like,’ but ‘love’ is more on the order of barking. I’m sorry about the note, though. I wrote you another, softer one, but by the time I’d lined up a postman, you’d already galloped out of Seattle on the sultan’s main dromedary. Maybe I couldn’t blame you—but I could ache.”

Leigh-Cheri walked back into his arms. He’d been standing with them open like a bear in a taxidermist’s window. Again they hugged for a long time, holding on to one another and not quite sure why. It was in that position, looking over Bernard’s shoulder, that she saw A’ben Fizel at the chamber entrance. She felt the twitching of certain major nerves, but before she could direct a reaction in any one of her muscles, Fizel slammed the door. She held her breath, straining to hear if the key was going to turn in the lock.

It turned.

“AT LEAST IT’LL BE AWHILE
before we die of hunger or thirst,” said Bernard. He’d popped a bottle of champagne and was making a move for the wedding cake.

“Don’t,” snapped the Princess. She snatched his hand away from the centerpiece.

“Excuse me. I assumed the reception had been cancelled.” He replaced the champagne.

“Of course it’s been cancelled. Of course it has. That was silly of me. Go ahead and eat all the goddamn cake you want. Here.” She tore off a chunk and, dripping frosting, handed it to Bernard. The icing oozing between her fingers reminded him of days in the mountains when the Woodpecker Gang had had snowball fights just to keep its blood circulating.

“Well, I do have a sweet tooth. But don’t worry. I’m gonna have it extracted in the morning.”

“Champagne?” Before offering it to him, Leigh-Cheri took a swig from the bottle. So many bubbles shot up her nasal passages she could barely breathe. She felt as if she were Saturday night television and there were an orchestra up her nose.

“Champagne was discovered by a Catholic monk,” said Bernard. “Took one swallow and burst out of his cellar yelling, ‘I’m drinking stars, I’m drinking stars!’ Tequila was invented by a bunch of brooding Indians. Into human sacrifice and pyramids. Somewhere between champagne and tequila is the secret history of Mexico, just as somewhere between beef jerky and Hostess Twinkies is the secret history of America. Or aren’t you in the mood for epigrams?”

“Bernard, are we in a fix?”

“You tell me. I’m unfamiliar with the gentleman’s habits. How long does he carry a grudge?”

“He’ll have to let us out soon. He’ll have to. My mother’s in town. So’s Gulietta. The press is all over the place. He’ll have to let us out before dawn.”

“In that case, my dear, more champagne. The cake’s delicious, by the way. I feel festive. Inappropriate of me, I’m sure.”

Leigh-Cheri managed a small laugh. “I’m strangely elated myself. It’s weird. Everything I’ve dreamed of and worked for and counted on is falling apart, and I’m happy. I’m also freezing.”

She was wearing blue jeans and a green, sleeveless cotton blouse. Bernard wrapped his black cord jacket around her. Dynamite sticks banged her breasts. She continued to shiver, so he ripped the lace tablecloth from beneath the cake, and they both huddled under it, like a couple in a blanket at the Harvard-Princeton game. “The central chamber of the Great Pyramid is a constant sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit,” she said. “I was aiming to achieve the
same conditions here. Sixty-four is sure a long ways from Maui.”

“Seeing as we have some time to kill, why don’t you tell me about this pyramid? Why it’s important and what I was supposed to learn about it from my cigarettes.”

“It’s a bit late, you big dummy,” she said. But since the champagne was so sidereal and the cake so snowy and slick, and since it was impossible to distinguish Harvard from Princeton by the light of Cleopatra’s lantern, she began to tell him. The whole story.

Meanwhile, the police were poking through her wrecked flat and A’ben Fizel was busily spreading the word that his bride-to-be had been kidnapped by Zionist terrorists.

KIDNAPPED BY FRENCH CHAMPAGNE
was more like it. The champagne had hold of them both, and not a ransom note in sight.

“I’m peeing stars!” the Princess squealed.

Bernard produced a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. He put it through toy UFO maneuvers while making bleeping noises of the third kind.

Leigh-Cheri returned. “I got stars on my shoes,” she complained.

Bernard buzzed her with the package.

“Is this your response to my theory?”

“Remember the couple from Argon? I ran into them last month in the Ranch Market on Hollywood Boulevard. Nina Jablonski wrote a film script based on my life and was peddling it to Jane Fonda and Elaine Latourelle. Teen-Aged Bomber Makes the Big Time. I went to L.A.
to stop it, and there they were in the Ranch Market. Buying piña colada mix. Does that queer your theory?”

“Minor setback. What about what we saw on the
High Jinks?
That was no piña colada, mon amore.”

“We saw what we saw. In the Hawaiian sky
and
at the Ranch Market. I get nervous when you talk about UFOs because I suspect you’re looking for salvation from them. What I like about flying saucers is that we don’t really know if they’re gonna save us or sink us. Or neither. Or both. They
seem
to operate with a sense of humor. I like to think of them as outlaws of space. I like to think they could be launched from the Ranch Market as easily as from Haleakala or Argon. Damn, this stuff is tasty.”

“You’ve opened another bottle? Bernard!”

“Yum!”

“Well, then … how about the Camel pack?”

“How about Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer? It’s a transparent door to experience, too, if you know how to look through it.”

“Yeah … I have to go along with that. Yeah! That’s it!” She clapped her hands.

“You found a key to wisdom in the Camel pack. It’s certainly one of the more portentous of our sacred objects. But there’s lots of others. Personally, I find the kitchen match particularly rich in symbolism, and Dippity-Do hair-set gel is an open invitation to participate in the Tantric aspects of the divine. The thing about Camels, though, is its directness. I mean, it spells it right out. CHOICE. A person’s looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.”

She kissed him impulsively. “I knew you’d understand. Where you been all my life, big boy?”

Bernard passed her the bottle. He began to sing:

“Bernard, I don’t feel like singing.” “Sure you do.

Funny, rivers always give us ballads. None of that E. E. Cummings stuff.”

“Bernard, I want to talk some more.”

“Shoot.”

“You seem to be saying that the ideas I developed in the attic were intrinsic to the Camel pack, that their origins weren’t necessarily Argonian.”

“Maybe the Camel pack
is
Argon. In my father’s house there are many mansions. Get my drift? I’m an outlaw not a philosopher, but I know this much: there’s meaning in everything, all things are connected, and a good champagne is a drink.”

Bernard began to sing again. Timidly, Leigh-Cheri joined in. Between verses, they opened another bottle. The popping of its cork echoed throughout the great stone chamber. Of the three billion people on earth, only Bernard and Leigh-Cheri heard the popping of the cork and its echoes. Only Bernard and Leigh-Cheri passed out under the tablecloth.

WHILE THEY WERE SLEEPING,
the lamp burned down. They awoke in a blackness so dense it would have put the fear of death into coal tar. Bernard struck a match, and Leigh-Cheri gripped his arm.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

“I doubt it. I was thinking about the origin of the word pumpkin. It’s such a cute word. Kind of plump and friendly—and sexy in a farmer’s daughter sort of way. Perfect. I wonder who came up with that word. Some old pumpkin-patch poet in ancient Greece, I suppose. A traveling salesman out of Babylon?”