Still Life with Woodpecker (17 page)

“I think you better let me call you a cab.” Jablonski gave Leigh-Cheri that uncomfortable half-amused, half-resentful look that people always give you when they’re remaining sober and you are getting looped.

As a matter of fact, Jablonski had begun to look increasingly at Bernard in that same fashion, although a rabbi’s dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in the King County Jail. Jablonski had come to believe that Bernard simply had too much fun. It was one thing to be a bomber, quite another to enjoy it. “Fighting the system is serious business,” the lawyer had reminded her client. “It’s serious business that
creates
the system,” answered Bernard. He seemed to regard his impending trial as a party the government was throwing for his amusement, to look forward to it the way a frustrated amateur actor awaits the annual skit at the Elks Club. Eventually, Jablonski decided that it would best serve her client, as well as radicalism in America, if a trial (due to changes in the social climate since Bernard’s previous conviction, the judiciary had offered him a new trial) could be avoided. She asked Bernard if he would mind pleading guilty. He was delighted. “If society is considered innocent, then any person who isn’t guilty isn’t leading a meaningful life,” he said. “Besides, an outlaw is guilty by definition.” She took his admission of guilt into plea bargaining, where she traded it for a reduced sentence. It was all arranged at a meeting with the prosecutor in the judge’s private chambers.

“Nina,” said Leigh-Cheri, her birthday blood swarming with the liquid locusts of libation, “you’ve got to get me to him before the trial. And we’ve got to get him out, even if I have to blast him out.”

“Hush!” Jablonski glanced around the bar. “Don’t ever so much as mention blasting, not even in a joke. Sister, listen, I’ve got some good news. Bernard isn’t going to have to stand trial. He’s being transferred to McNeil Island. Tomorrow morning. To begin serving a ten-year sentence. That means he’ll be eligible for parole in only twenty months.”

Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack.
Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl’s gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord’s last pratfall, and after all that time we still don’t know where passion goes when it goes.

A WOODPECKER’S MOVEMENT
around a tree trunk defines a perfect spiral. To connect the hoppity helix of the woodpecker to the macrocosmic spiral of our stellar system or to the microcosmic spiral of the DNA molecule or, for that matter, to the hundreds of natural spirals in between—snail shells, crowns of daisies and sunflowers, fingerprints, cyclones, etc.—may be assigning to geometry more meaning than the mundane can abide. Suffice to say that a woodpecker is first on one side of a tree and then the other; disappearing, then reappearing at a point slightly higher up the trunk.

Bernard Mickey Wrangle had disappeared again, this time into the maximum security wing of McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, but nobody, with the possible exception of Princess Leigh-Cheri, was expecting him to reappear any time close to soon. True, he could be paroled in twenty months, if he behaved, but who could expect Bernard to behave? Certainly not officials at McNeil. They isolated him in solitary confinement. The only person permitted to see him there was Nina Jablonski, and she saw him only once because he fired her when he found himself imprisoned without the fun of a trial. Jablonski explained that if tried he could have been made to serve the remainder of his previous thirty-year sentence plus time for his escape, or he could have drawn a new sentence that was nearly as bad, particularly had he turned the courtroom into some outlandish celebration of
outlawism as he had been hinting he would do. “You’re lucky,” said Jablonski. “You could come out of McNeil looking more like a bald eagle than a woodpecker. This way, I’m going to have you back in circulation while your hair’s still red.” Bernard thanked her for her concern, but he felt betrayed, nonetheless, and he dismissed her. “That’s the trouble with political people,” he said. “There’s not one of you, left, right, or center, who doesn’t believe that the means are justified by the end.”

With that, he spiraled out of view.

On the day of his transfer to McNeil, the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
had published a one-column picture of him, grinning, as usual, as if mouthing a pulpy newsprint “yum,” his snaggleteeth and freckles ghosted out but his eyes frictional, even in gray ink, with the special hungers of the terminally alive. Leigh-Cheri tore the picture out of the paper and pressed it beneath her hangover pillow. It did little, if anything, to relieve her headache—her temples were banging like her daddy’s valve—but during the night she awoke to the unmistaken sound of the chipmunk that lives at the center of the earth, and it seemed unusually close to her ear.

THAT YEAR,
spring came to the Puget Sound country as it frequently does, like a bride’s maid climbing a greased pole. After a gradual, precarious ascent, spring, in a triumph of frills and blooms and body heat, would seem to have finally arrived, only to suddenly slide down into the mud again, leaving winter’s wet flag flapping stiffly and singularly at the top of the seasonal staff. Then, girlish bosom heaving, spring would shinny slowly back up the pole.

When Leigh-Cheri took to bed with her hangover, spring was riding high. She arose two days later to an un-seasonal frost. It had numbed the bejeepers out of insects and buds. It had thrown the fear of February into batteries and birds. So inanimate was Prince Charming that Leigh-Cheri believed him deceased, although when the first sunbeam to drill through the window frost caused his flipper to twitch, she sat the terrarium in front of an open oven and watched as he stoically revived. It was the middle of April. Except for the faithful who are always sounding alarms about the return of the Ice Age, nobody in the Pacific Northwest was prepared for such a frost.

Down in Pioneer Square, where the Princess bussed for one last meeting with Nina Jablonski, frosty cobblestones gave the area the appearance of a marshmallow plantation. Shrubs and winos seemed startled in the morning light. Even the
D
-note of the ferry horn had a frosty edge as it blared up from the waterfront. As for the manholes, they looked as if they’d been snorting cocaine. The manholes, Leigh-Cheri noted, bore an enlarged resemblance to Gulietta’s nostrils of late. Leigh-Cheri had been waiting to catch Gulietta when she wasn’t buzzed so that she might ask the old woman if she knew whatever happened to the golden ball, but such an opportunity hadn’t presented itself.

Leigh-Cheri was dressed warmly in a heavy green sweater and jeans, yet she was inadequately insulated for the coolness of Jablonski’s response when she revealed to the attorney her new plans. Jablonski called the Princess selfish, frivolous, narcissistic, indulgent, and immature.

“The monarchy of Mu was a half-assed idea,” said Jablonski. “It would never have worked because all those dethroned kings and deposed duchesses own chunks of the big corporations whose excessive profits are threatened by a clean, healthy environment. It’d never work, but at least it was a move in the right direction, at least it was a decent impulse, an attempt to get yourself involved
with something more important than your own emotions. This, however …”

“You don’t think love is as important as ecology?”

“I think ecology
is
love.”

On the campus of Outlaw College, professors of essential insanities would characterize the conflicting attitudes of Nina Jablonski and Leigh-Cheri as indicative of a general conflict between social idealism and romanticism. As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic—the supremacy of the organization over the individual—is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities. Without the essential (intimate) insanities, humor becomes inoffensive and therefore pap, poetry becomes exoteric and therefore prose, eroticism becomes mechanical and therefore pornography, behavior becomes predictable and therefore easy to control. As for magic, there’s none at all because the aim of any social activist is power over others, whereas a magician seeks power over only himself: the power of higher consciousness, which, while universal, cosmic even, is manifest in the intimate. It would seem that a whole human being would have the capacity for both intimacy and social action, yet sad to say, every cause, no matter how worthy, eventually falls prey to the tyranny of the dull mind. In the movement, as in the bee house or the white ant’s hill of clay, there is no place for idiosyncrasy, let alone mischief.

A romantic, however, recognizes that the movement, the organization, the institution, the revolution, if it comes to that, is merely a backdrop for his or her own personal drama and that to pretend otherwise is to surrender freedom and will to the totalitarian impulse, is to replace psychological reality with sociological illusion, but
such truth never penetrates the Glo-Coat of righteous conviction that surrounds the social idealist when he or she is identifying with the poor or the exploited. Since, on a socio-economic level, there are myriad wrongs that need to be righted, a major problem for the species seems to be how to assist the unfortunate, throttle the corrupt, preserve the biosphere, and effectively organize for socioeconomic alteration without the organization being taken over by dullards, the people who, ironically, are best suited to serving organized causes since they seldom have anything more imaginative to do and, restricted by tunnel vision, probably wouldn’t do it if they had.

Dullards can put a pox on the most glorious moral enterprise by using that enterprise as a substitute for spiritual and sexual unfolding. Finally, it is dullness and not evil that begets totalitarianism, although some at Outlaw College go so far as to contend that dullness
is
evil. Of course, whether something is dull can be a matter of taste (one person’s ennui is another person’s coronary), and there are a lot of ostensibly boring chores that
somebody
has to attend to, but when you bring that up to a scholar at Outlaw C., you’ll find the sucker has just resigned in order to enter business in Tijuana, is too stoned to talk, has been arrested on some complicated charge, or is up to his mustache in a love affair and doesn’t wish to be disturbed. Well, we don’t need any help from those guys to see that Leigh-Cheri, once resplendent with social idealism, had fallen off a dream cliff, slipped into the vision pit, or nibbled forbidden fruit, because Nina Jablonski’s declaration that a lover is one who first of all loves the earth simply didn’t move her. All she wanted from the lawyer was a detailed description of Bernard’s cell.

“It’s small but big enough to stretch his legs in, so they don’t have to take him out for exercise. There’s nothing in it but a steel cot with a piece of foam rubber on top. That’s it. Guards shove in a piss pot two times a day. Ten minutes later, I think it’s ten minutes, they remove it. Once a
week they take him to a stall next door where he can shower.”

“Any windows?”

“One tiny one, with bars on it, up near the ceiling. It lets in a little daylight, but you can’t see out of it.”

“Electric lighting?”

“A single bulb in the ceiling. Far too high to reach.”

“What wattage?”

“How the hell would I know? I’d guess forty.”

The Princess smiled mysteriously. She remembered that Bernard had told her that the light of a full moon was equivalent to a forty-watt bulb at fifteen feet. “Anything else?”

“Nothing. No books, no magazines, nothing. Except a pack of cigarettes.”

Again, Leigh-Cheri smiled. “Yes, he smokes Camels when he’s in jail. He said that when you’re locked up, smoking a cigarette is like having a friend.”

“Well, it’s a lonesome friendship in this case, because he’s not smoking. He demanded cigarettes, it’s a prisoner’s right, but they won’t let him smoke them. The pack hasn’t even been opened.”

“Why won’t they let him smoke?”

“Because they’re afraid if he gets his hands on any fire, he’ll make a bomb.”

“Outta what? A cot? Foam rubber? His clothes? A pack of cigarettes?”

“Listen, sister, your lover has a reputation. They say the son-of-a-bitch can make a bomb out of anything.”

On her return trip up First Avenue, where the bride’s maid was overtaking the frost on the pole, Leigh-Cheri ducked into the Born to Lose Tavern and purchased a pack of Camels.

BERNARD MICKEY WRANGLE’S
FAVORITE HOMEMADE
BOMB RECIPES

THE HEARTS AND DIAMONDS BOMB:

THE DRAINO REEFER BOMB: