Still Life with Woodpecker

First Look

at a new novel

author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

In the last quarter of the 20th Century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting--with various combinations of dread, hope and ennui--for something momentous to occur.

Something momentous was bound to happen soon. The entire collective unconscious could not be wrong about that. But what would it be? And would it be apocalyptic or rejuvenating? A cure for cancer or a nuclear bang? A change in the weather or a change in the sea? Earthquakes in California, killer bees in London, Arabs in the stock exchange, life in the laboratory or a UFO on the White House lawn? Would Mona Lisa sprout a mustache? Would the dollar fail?

Christian aficionados of the Second Coming scenario were convinced that after a suspenseful interval of 2000 years, the other shoe was about to drop.

And five of the era's best-known psychics, meeting at the Chelsea Hotel, predicted that Atlantis would soon reemerge from the depths.

To this last, Princess Leigh-Cheri responded, "There are two lost continents ... Hawaii was one, called Mu, the mother, its tips still projecting in our senses--the land of slap dance, fishing music, flowers and happiness. There are three lost continents.... We are one: the lovers."

In whatever esteem one might hold Princess Leigh-Cheri's thoughts concerning matters geographic, one must agree that the last quarter of the 20th Century was a severe period for lovers. It was a time when women openly resented men, a time when men felt betrayed by women, a time when romantic relationships took on the character of ice in spring, stranding many little children on jagged and inhospitable floes.

Nobody quite knew what to make of the moon anymore.

•

Consider a certain night in August. Princess Leigh-Cheri was gazing out of her attic window. The moon was full. The moon was so bloated it was about to tip over. Imagine awakening to find the moon flat on its face on the bathroom floor, like the late Elvis Presley, poisoned by banana splits. It was a moon that could stir wild passions in a moo cow. A moon that could bring out the devil in a bunny rabbit. A moon that could turn lug nuts into moonstones, turn Little Red Ridinghood into the big bad wolf. For more than an hour, Leigh-Cheri stared into the mandala of the sky. "Does the moon have a purpose?" she inquired.

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.

Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.

Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.

There is only one serious question. And that is:

Who knows how to make love stay?

Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.

Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time.

Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon.

•

Historically, members of Leigh-Cheri's class have not much fallen in love. They mated for power and wealth, for tradition and heirs, and left "true love" to the masses. The masses had nothing to lose. But this was the last quarter of the 20th Century, and with the exception of a few savage buffoons in Africa, the royalty of the world had long since resigned itself to the fact of its mortal, if not quite democratic, dimensions. Leigh-Cheri's family was a case in point.

Since his exile, more than 30 years before, King Max had made gambling a career. Poker was his work. Recently, however, he had had a taste of open-heart surgery. A major valve had been removed and replaced with a Teflon substitute. The artificial valve functioned efficiently, but it made a metallic noise as it opened and shut. When he was excited, everyone in the room knew it. Due to the audible sound of his heart, he was no longer able to practice poker, a game with necessary concealments and bluffs. "Jesus," he said. "When I draw a good hand, I sound like a Tupperware party." He spent his hours watching sports on television, pining for the good old days when he could have ordered Howard Cosell to the garrote.

His wife, Queen Tilli, once the beauty of seven capitals, was understimulated and overweight. She had attended, in America, so many second-rate society teas, charity fashion shows and gala this and gala thats, that she'd begun to exude a kind of pâté de foie gras gas, and the expulsion of this effluvium propelled her from party to ball as if she were a sausage skin inflated by Wagner. The queen had long ago abandoned her husband to the tube and her daughter to the attic. She had one intimate: a Chihuahua that she clutched to her bosom.

If asked what he expected from the last quarter of the 20th Century, the king would have replied, "Now that it is no longer reasonable to hope for the restoration of the monarchy, my fondest wishes are that the Seattle Mariners win the pennant, the Seattle SuperSonics make the N.B.A. play-offs, the Seattle Seahawks go to the Super Bowl and that the play-by-play announcers be replaced by Sir Kenneth Clark."

The same question directed to the queen would have educed this reaction: "O O spaghetti-o." (Her favorite Americanism.) "Vat can you expect of crazy peoples?"

•

Palace in exile for the Furstenberg-Barcalonas, which was quite their name, was a voluminous three-story yellow frame house on the shore of Puget Sound. The house had been built in 1911 for a Seattle lumber baron who, in reaction to the turrets, cupolas and dormers that embellished the Frontier Gothic mansions of his peers, ordered "an American house, a house without frills," and got just that. It was a barn, a box with a peaked roof. It sat among ten acres of blackberry brambles, like an abandoned radio, broadcasting creaks and whispers to the rain. The house was given to Max and Tilli by the CIA.

The Furstenberg-Barcalona homeland was now ruled by a right-wing military junta, supported by the United States Government and, of course, the Roman Catholic Church. While the U. S. publicly regretted that the junta permitted so few civil liberties, it was loath to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, particularly a nation that could be relied upon as an ally against those left-leaning nations in whose internal affairs the U. S. did regularly interfere. It irritated the U. S. that royalists still loyal to Max and Tilli might disturb political stability in that part of the world. The U. S. paid King Max a modest stipend to keep a low profile and not fan any flames. Each year at Christmas, the Pope sent Queen Tilli a crucifix, candlestick or some other knickknack that he had personally blessed.

Once, Princess Leigh-Cheri used a papal candlestick for the purpose of self-gratification. She had hoped that at the appropriate moment, she might be visited by either the Lamb or the Beast, but, as usual, only Ralph Nader attended her.

•

Old Gulietta was the last living of the servants who had accompanied Max and Tilli into exile. At Leigh-Cheri's birth, in Paris, four of those loyalists were still in service, but all but Gulietta died soon after the royal family took up residence in the Puget Sound palace. Perhaps it was the dampness.

Gulietta was, in her 80s, both efficient and energetic. Miraculously, she had kept the huge house free of cobwebs and mold while doing the royal wash and preparing six meals a day: Since Max and Tilli were carnivores and Leigh-Cheri vegetarian, each meal had been, in fact, two.

Gulietta didn't work on Sundays. It was only fair. Even Friday got Thursday off, thanks to Robinson Crusoe. On Sundays, Queen Tilli would lumber into the kitchen, her Chihuahua affectionately clasped, and make brunch.

The odor of frying bacon, sausage links and ham tiptoed on little pig feet all the way to the north end of the second floor. Inevitably, the odor would awaken Leigh-Cheri. Inevitably, the odor made her simultaneously ravenous and nauseated.

Leigh-Cheri found little to admire about a Sunday. To her mind, Sunday was where God kept His woolly slippers. It was a day with a dull edge that no amount of recreation could hone. Some might find it relaxing, but the princess guessed that a great many people shared her feeling that Sunday generated a supernatural depression.

On a particular Sunday in early January, January being to the year rather what Sunday is to the week, she awoke in mean spirits. She pulled a robe on over her flannel pajamas (she'd discovered that silk had a tendency to agitate the peachfish), brushed the knots out of her hair, knuckled the crunchy granola from the corners of her eyes and descended, yawning and stretching, into the hot hog hell of brunch. (She knew without tasting that her soybean curd would have soaked up some of the essence of bacon.)

As it has for so many for so long, the Sunday paper helped her through the day. Regardless of what else the press might have contributed to our culture, regardless of whether it is our first defense against totalitarianism or a wimpy force that undermines authentic experiences by categorizing them according to faddish popular interest, the press has given us big fat Sunday papers to ease our weekly mental menstrual bloat.

It was in the Seattle paper, on that particular Sunday in early January, that Leigh-Cheri initially read of the Geo-Therapy Care Fest, the what-to-do-for-the-planet-until-the-21st-Century-arrives conference. It was an event that would have speeded up her pulse even had it not been scheduled to occur in Hawaii. As it was, she bounced in her mother's lap--hardly the ultimate mature act--for the first time in years and began her petition to attend; for under the Furstenberg-Barcalona code to which they now strictly adhered, the queen would have to accompany her. Tilli on Maui? O O spaghetti-o.

•

This may be said for the last quarter of the 20th Century: The truism that if we want a better world, we will have to be better people came to be acknowledged, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority. Despite the boredom and anxiety of the period, or because of it, despite the uneasy seas that separated the sexes, or because of them, thousands, tens of thousands seemed willing to lend their bodies, their money and their skills to various planetary rescue missions.

Coordination of those far-flung projects was a primary aim of the Geo-Therapy Care Fest, slated for the last week in February at Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii. Leading experts in the fields of alternative energy sources, organic farming, wilderness preservation, alternative education, holistic medicine, nutrition, consumer protection, recycling and space colonization were to lecture and lead panel discussions and workshops. Proponents of many diverse self-help systems and consciousness cures, ranging from ancient Oriental to contemporary Californian, would also be in attendance. Moreover, certain futurists, artists, visionary thinkers, shamans and poetic seers had been invited to participate, though several of the poets and one of the novelists were suspected by the organizers to register on the lunatic scale. Not the least of Leigh-Cheri's excitement was the information that Ralph Nader would deliver a key speech there.

As the Care Fest date approached, Queen Tilli decided that Maui was simply too barbarous. It was bad enough being stuck on the outskirts of Seattle, it raining trout teeth night and day, blackberry vines trying to force their way into the privacy of her own chamber, without transporting her posh poundage to some jungle island inhabited by surfer boys and vacationing strumpets, to whose company on that particular week would be added a couple thousand coo-coos intent on saving a world they didn't fit into anyway. Since Max dare not travel because of his valve, it was agreed about the middle of February that Gulietta would chaperon the princess in Hawaii.

Gulietta was antique and couldn't mouth ten words of English, but she was so generally competent and so fond of Leigh-Cheri that Max and Tilli were convinced that her chaperonage would be adequate. They looked at each other nervously, however, when the skinny old servant, upon learning of her assignment, went to J. C. Penney and bought herself a bikini.

•

The sky is more impersonal than the sea. Above the bird line, higher than the last referential cloud, at an altitude that oxygen will not voluntarily frequent, across a zone where light drives the speed limit and never stops for coffee, crossing that desert in which gravity is the only sheik, a vehicle, owned and operated by Northwest Orient Airlines, whistled through its nostrils as it bucked the current of the Pacific jet stream. Leigh-Cheri turned from the window through which she'd been gazing down upon cloudtop and oceantop. Leigh-Cheri looked at the old woman asleep in the adjacent seat. Leigh-Cheri had to smile. Rippling the canned air of the first-class cabin with her gentle snores, Gulietta was so serene that it was difficult to imagine her causing all the trouble she'd caused back at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport a few hours before.

Leigh-Cheri had been as surprised as anyone by the frog. Although the frog was relatively large and uncommonly green, there had been no hint of its presence in Gulietta's little wicker case. No sign of frog at all until the sudden shriek of the uniformed woman at the security-check station.

A bit of a row had resulted, please, no jokes, said the sign above the check point, and this must be a joke. Mustn't it? The incident was complicated by the fact that Gulietta could offer no English explanation, that her surname resembled a line from an optometrist's examination chart.

Security guards conferred. Gulietta and the princess were searched a second time. Their hand luggage was re-examined. The frog was X-rayed to ascertain that it wasn't some kind of weapon. Could they be positive it wouldn't explode? "It's her pet," said Leigh-Cheri, who, in fact, had such a dim idea what the frog was doing in the old woman's case that even the memory of a European folk tale couldn't illuminate it. "It's her little pet." Leigh-Cheri batted her lengthy lashes, breathed in such a way that her round breasts seemed to rotate 12 degrees on their axes and smiled so broadly that certain tiny mouth muscles, long neglected, struggled painfully to break free. "It's her little widdle pet."

Having extracted a promise that Gulietta would keep the amphibian enclosed--it was nestled in damp towels inside her bag--the charmed guards decided to let the two women and their widdle pet proceed. Aboard the jetliner, however, moments before take-off, a different set of guards, accompanied by an official of the airline, abruptly appeared and demanded the frog. "You can't take a live frog into Hawaii!" one of them exclaimed. They were quite agitated.

At that point, Leigh-Cheri recalled her previous visit to the islands. She remembered how adamant they'd been about restricting travelers bringing in pets of any kind. She remembered that bringing in fresh fruit or flowers was (continued on page 178) Still Life (continued from page 112) prohibited. She remembered that at Paradise Park, the performing parrots and cockatoos had all had their wings clipped so that they might never escape and breed in the wild. The ecology of the islands was so delicately balanced that the introduction of one new species of mammal, bird or reptile might throw it into chaos; one nonindigenous plant disease or invading female insect might ruin a billion-dollar business, be it pineapples for eating or palm trees for viewing.

Leigh-Cheri motioned for Gulietta to give up the frog. The crone was unconvinced. She hesitated. One of the guards yanked the wicker case from her gnarled hands. The lid flew open. The frog took a tremendous leap. It landed on the head of a stewardess, who sent shocked whispers the length and breadth of the plane by screaming, "Aiii! Get that fucking thing off of me!"

The frog took another leap and came down on an empty seat. Several men dove for it. They missed. Dives and misses continued for a while, until the frog was cornered in the cockpit, where a guard captured it, but not before he had slammed his elbow into a navigational instrument, causing a possible malfunction. The device had to be checked and rechecked. All in all, the flight was delayed one hour and 46 minutes.

Gulietta hadn't flown before. She was confused by the objections to the contents of her luggage. She refused to eat the snack served by the still-flustered stewardess.

How could Leigh-Cheri make Gulietta understand the Great Hawaiian Mongoose Reaction?

Hawaii had once had a rat problem. Then, somebody hit upon a brilliant solution. Import mongooses from India. Mongooses would kill the rats. It worked. Mongooses did kill the rats. Mongooses also killed chickens, young pigs, birds, cats, dogs and small children. There have been reports of mongooses attacking motorbikes, power lawn mowers, golf carts and James Michener. In Hawaii now, there are as many mongooses as there once were rats. Hawaii had traded its rat problem for a mongoose problem. Hawaii was determined nothing like that would ever happen again.

How could Leigh-Cheri draw for Gulietta the appropriate analogy between Hawaii's rodents and society at large? Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

The answer, of course, is that Leigh-Cheri could not draw that parallel at all. That parallel had never occurred to her. It had occurred to Bernard Mickey Wrangle, however.

Bernard Mickey Wrangle sat in the economy cabin of the Northwest Orient airliner and pondered the rat/mongoose, crime/cop analogy. Bernard Mickey Wrangle sat in the rear of the aircraft with seven sticks of dynamite strapped to his body.

Bernard Mickey Wrangle was clever. Most likely, he could successfully have boarded the flight to Hawaii with seven sticks of dynamite strapped to his body under any conditions. Certainly, though, the frog had helped pave his way.

(The frog, incidentally, was released at a pond near the Sea-Tac runways. For being close to a busy airport, it was a pleasant pond. It featured lily pads and cattails and fat mosquitoes for lunch. But let's face it, damn it all, it wasn't Waikiki.)

•

The jetliner, missing one small green traveler but carrying a bonus seven sticks of dynamite, continued its crossing of what every novice surfer knows to be the most inappropriately named body of water on earth. The jetliner whistled to conceal its fear of gravity.

In the rear of the aircraft, Bernard Mickey Wrangle reached inside his jacket ... and pulled from his breast pocket ... not a detonator ... nor a fuse ... not yet ... but a package ... of Hostess Twinkies.

Too bad the queen insisted that you fly first-class, Leigh-Cheri. Too bad you're sitting next to your snoozing old chaperone instead of next to Bernard Mickey Wrangle. Since Hostess Twinkies always travel in pairs, because, like the coyote, the killer whale, the gorilla and the whooping crane, Hostess Twinkies mate for life, there would have been a Twinkie each for you to share.

•

The airliner circled Honolulu the way a typing finger circles a keyboard, awaiting the message from the control center that would instruct it when and where to land.

And they land....

On A.

Runway A.

A for attic.

A for amore.

What we have here is an unexpected touchdown on the runway of the heart. This flight could only terminate in a room close to the moon. Bernard Mickey Wrangle, once known to millions as the Woodpecker, grinned. He grinned because he had reached Hawaii without detection. He grinned because Twinkie cream always made him grin. He grinned because it was the last quarter of the 20th Century, and something momentous was happening.

•

It was midafternoon, a good five hours before moonrise, when the flight touched down in Honolulu, but already the mai tais were swaying, the pineapples were jiggling, the mongooses were mating and coconuts were rolling in ecstasy. The Hawaii sun, in contrast to, say, the Nebraska sun, had obviously fallen under the influence of the moon and was given to disporting itself in a fairly feminine fashion. Not that the Hawaii sun wouldn't fry your hide off should you show it disrespect, but it had a romantic aura, a decidedly lunar attitude toward amore that the sun of Mexico would consider soft and weak. Despite the tangle of traffic, the din of condominium construction, the smoking sugar refineries and the strange spectacle of Japanese tourists roaming the hot beaches in business suits and street shoes, Hawaii was, indeed, a travelog tableau, a living Pap smear for the paradise flu.

So goofy/erotic was the Hawaiian language that the street signs read like invitations to pagan whoopjamboreehoos and "nookie" was on the tip of every sober tongue. Hawaiian was a language that could name a fish humuhumunukunukuapua'a and a bird o-o, and never mind that the bird was larger than the fish. Humuhumunukunukuapua'a still played in Hawaiian waters, not 50 yards from the leather soles of Sony executives, but the o-o, that gorgeous honey-sucker, was long gone. Hawaiian royalty favored the tail feathers of the o-o for their ceremonial capes. Hawaii's rulers were mammoth, their capes were very long. It took a lot of tail feathers to make a king a cape. The o-o was plucked into extinction. O O spaghetti-o.

Although the ecological implications would have appalled her, Leigh-Cheri could fancy herself in o-o. If our pale princess could have chosen a land to be queen of, Hawaii was it. The instant she stepped off the jetliner, her heart began to pump pure hibiscus juice. If her hands were tied behind her and the world had Hawaii in its wall safe, she would have figured a way to get it out. Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water.

Alas, Leigh-Cheri hadn't much opportunity for reverie. Because of frog problems, her plane had landed on Oahu merely minutes before her connecting flight on interisland Aloha Airlines was scheduled to depart for Maui. She and Gulietta had to run, if you could call Gulietta's scurrying a run, from one end of Honolulu's airport to the other.

So intent was their dash that they failed to notice that Bernard Mickey Wrangle was loping along beside them.

•

The flight to Maui was as bumpy as a kite's. As the aircraft bobbed, so did Leigh-Cheri's mind, up and down, from one level to another, thinking one moment of the charms of Hawaii, to which she had a mild addiction; thinking the next of the Care Fest and the great good that might come from it; bouncing to thoughts of herself, who she was and who she might be.

I'm a princess, she reminded herself, with a minimum of conviction, a princess who grew up in a blackberry patch near Seattle, who's never so much as set a tennis shoe in the nation where her royal blood was formed, a princess who doesn't know diddly squat about princessing, a princess who's behaved like a twit and a twat; who's a bit confused, who's got a lot to learn, but a princess, after all; but because I'm a princess, I might be able to do something to help lessen humanity's pain. And the Care Fest just may show me the way to do it. I wonder if Ralph is staying at our hotel. I hope I packed my no nukes T-shirt. Don't Crosby, Stills and Nash hang out in Lahaina? Can I drink more than one mai tai without taking on the aroma of an aroused butterfly?

Her thoughts dipped and lifted in unstable air.

Shortly, they had passed over Molokai and could see the reddish corona of Haleakala rising in the southeast like the stone in a Truman Capote mood ring. "Maui," whispered Leigh-Cheri to Gulietta. "Maui." Her own red top bounced as she sat up straight in her seat. Bernard--the Woodpecker--regarded it with the gaze of an expert.

•

Suspecting that the authorities might run checks on hair-dye purchases, Bernard made his own coloring from roots and bark. It had a peculiar smell, but women did not find it unattractive. He limited the dyeing to the hair on his head and, for that reason, was careful to make love only in the dark. Once, he spilled the dye all over his shoes. From then on, he dyed with his boots on.

•

Aboard Aloha Airlines flight 23, Bernard wasn't the only admirer of Leigh-Cheri. From the seat in front of her, a young man with a long, wavy beard, aloha shirt and hibiscus blossoms intertwined in his ponytail had turned around to engage her in conversation. He was on his way to the Care Fest, he said, to teach meditation techniques at a workshop. The young man tried to interest Leigh-Cheri in his program. He offered to give her personal instruction in meditation, free of charge. She seemed to be seriously considering it.

Bernard leaned forward until his freckled chin rested atop Leigh-Cheri's seat. "Yum," he said.

The princess flinched but did not glance back. The young man in front began showing her his puka-shell necklace. While fingering the pukas, he spoke quietly to her of deep relaxation, inner peace and the wisdom of letting things flow.

"Yum," repeated Bernard. He said it very close to the royal ear.

This time she spun around. Her expression was indignant. "I beg your pardon."

Bernard smiled as sweetly as a retarded jack-o'-lantern. "It's my mantra."

Leigh-Cheri glowered at him, as only someone of the redheaded persuasion can glower. He was dressed all in black and had bad teeth. He was wearing Donald Duck sunglasses. Kiddie glasses. She turned back to the meditation instructor, who at once ceased scowling at Bernard and gave her a sympathetic look.

"There are only two mantras," said Bernard. "Yum and yuk. Mine is yum."

It sounded halfway logical, but the princess refused to respond. She squeezed Gulietta's hand. She asked the junior guru in front how meditation could help alleviate suffering in the world.

"Yum," said Bernard. "Yuu-mmmm." Leigh-Cheri ignored him. The other passengers regarded him strangely.

"Do you need anything, sir?" asked the stewardess.

Bernard shrugged. He looked out the window. He looked at the rosy rim of the big volcano. Haleakala--"House of the Sun." If Haleakala was where the sun called home, what was the moon's address? Did the moon live in France on Main Street?

•

A lanai was a veranda in Hawaii, but Lanai was also the name of one of the smallest of the Hawaiian Islands. The island of Lanai was close to Maui, a sort of veranda of Maui, and was clearly visible from Lahaina. In those days, Lanai was almost entirely in the possession of the Dole Corporation, which planted it in pineapples and limited its visitors, but Lanai hadn't always been a company island. As a matter of fact, there was a time when it was outlaw territory, a refuge for fugitives. If a Hawaiian lawbreaker could make it to Lanai, he was home free. That was the agreement. Police had voluntarily suspended their authority at the shore line of Lanai. Moreover, if an escaped prisoner or a culprit fleeing a crime could survive seven years on the island (which had little food or fresh water), charges against him were dropped and he could return to society a free man.

Maybe that's why Bernard Mickey Wrangle stood on the Lahaina waterfront staring at Lanai--staring hard, shifting weight from one boot to the other, occasionally saying "Yum" under his breath.

The Woodpecker had been a fugitive (this last time) for more than six years. In 11 months, the statute of limitations in his case would expire and he would become, in the eyes of the law, "free."

The Woodpecker stared at the former outlaw island until its margins melted like raw sugar into the steeping tea of night. Then he crossed the street to the Pioneer Inn.

The Woodpecker did tequila drink. The Pioneer bar was so crowded that much dry time elapsed between waiter's visits, so the Woodpecker ordered triples. Lanai, that arid sanctuary, evidently had stimulated his thirst buds. Slurping his tequilas with a noise that sounded not dissimilar to "Yum," he scanned the room in vain for a glimpse of long red hair, and felt the seven sticks of explosive pressing, almost erotically, against the freckles of his flesh.

Without doubt, it was the tequila that made Bernard impatient, that befuddled him into mistaking a UFO conference for the Geo-Therapy Care Fest.

As a consequence, the saucer conference was blown ass over teacup.

•

When Bernard awoke Monday morning, much to his hangover's delight (a hangover without a head to torment is like a philanthropist without an institution to endow), and learned that he'd dropped his load in the wrong bin, the sheepish expression of the premature ejaculator crossed his face.

At breakfast, where, hoping to avoid attention, he tried to conceal from his fellow diners that he was pouring beer over his Wheaties, he said to himself, "Yikes. Considering the tequila level of my gorge and the number of human coconuts that hula around Lahaina at every hour of the clock, it's a miracle I wasn't seen."

Yes, even in the last quarter of the 20th Century, miracles occurred--though this was not one of them. There was a witness to Bernard's deed. Old Gulietta had watched the whole thing.

•

To Gulietta, indoor plumbing was the Devil's device. Of all the follies of the modern world, that one struck her as most unnecessary. There was something unnatural, foolish and a little filthy about going indoors.

Leaving Leigh-Cheri in their room, poring over programs and press releases, the old woman had gone out looking for a sensible spot to void her bladder. The soft, warm, Sweet Lelani night seemed perfectly suited for that. The Pioneer Inn, unfortunately, was in downtown Lahaina and had no grounds. It had a courtyard, however, which at 11 P.M. on Sunday had been fairly deserted, so Gulietta had slipped into the banana trees next to a wall and dropped her drawers.

Before she could direct a stream, Bernard had slipped into the foliage not 20 feet from her. She thought he'd come for a piss, as well, and that was fine with her, but the length of the thing he pulled out of his jeans almost made her gasp. When he snapped it in half, she did gasp.

She was small. She knew how to sit very still. Like a toad. Undetected, holding her water, she had watched the whole thing. After the fuse was lit, the Woodpecker flew. Yanking up her bloomers, Gulietta fled, too. She returned to the room just as the explosion sounded. Suddenly, she knew what it was like to pee indoors.

•

In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them, they're sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them, they're scrambled. In the world according to the outlaw, it was Wheaties with beer for breakfast and who cared which crossed the road first, the chicken or the egg. But any way you turned the Geo-Therapy Care Fest, you had to notice that Bernard's blast had indirectly scrambled it.

With Pioneer Inn's meeting hall in bad state of repair, with cops, news-people and curiosity seekers milling around the place like bargain-minded lemmings at a suicide sale, and with the hotel management indulging a nasty attack of nerves, conference organizers spent all of Monday attempting to relocate.

At last, on Tuesday, Lahaina officials granted permission for the world rescuers to convene under the giant banyan tree whose branches covered three quarters of an acre in the city park. Terrific. By the time anything could get organized beneath the banyan, however, the week was half shot and a number of the luminaries who were to address the gathering had left or had decided not to attend. Many simply couldn't adjust their busy schedules to the amended program; while others were worried about the possibility of further explosions, a not unreasonable concern considering that the Woodpecker was still on Maui with three sticks of dynamite left in his clothes.

•

For her part, Princess Leigh-Cheri spent many hours dragging a freshly sunburned finger up and down the list of scheduled speakers--Dick Gregory, Marshall McLuhan, Michio Kushi, Laura Huxley, Ram Dass, Farrington Daniels, Jr., John Lilly, Murray GellMann, Joseph Campbell, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Marcel Marceau, et al.--wondering who would or would not show.

By all rights, the princess should have been enjoying her beloved Hawaii, Care Fest or no, but it was Gulietta who romped in the surf while her young mistress sat in the shade (redheads do burn easily). She was disappointed, to say the least, by the scrambling of the Care Fest, and considering her disappointments of the past year, she was beginning to suspect that she might be jinxed. She wondered if Gulietta hadn't been bringing that frog along to protect her.

"Goddamn it," she said. "A princess deserves better than this."

Late Tuesday afternoon, there occurred two events to retread her mood. One, Ralph Nader checked into the Pioneer Inn, announcing that he would speak the next evening as scheduled, in Banyan Park. Two, Gulietta, looking as skinny and blue as a jailhouse tattoo as she bounded from the ever-chill ocean in her bikini, pointed out to her a man on the beach and, through gesture and onomatopoeia ("boom-boom" is "boom-boom" in any land, dynamite speaks a universal lingo), identified him as the bomber.

The princess didn't hesitate. She walked right up to the man and placed him under citizen's arrest.

•

Little did Leigh-Cheri know that she was arresting a man whom half a dozen American sheriffs had sworn on family Bibles to see dead, that she had nabbed a fugitive who had eluded the greediest nets of the FBI for a decade, all told, though it must be admitted that in recent years, with the social climate altered and Bernard inactive, interest in his capture had waned.

Leigh-Cheri had heard of the Woodpecker, of course, but in the days when he was making headlines by blowing up draft boards and induction centers, the last days of the Vietnam war, she'd been a schoolgirl, picking blackberries, cuddling Teddy bears, listening to a certain bedtime story, yellowing her nose with buttercups. Curiously excited by an enema that Gulietta had administered to her on Queen Tilli's orders, Leigh-Cheri had masturbated for the first time on the very evening of Bernard's most infamous exploit, and the confusing pleasure of secret fingering--the fresh flush that heated her cheeks, the vague mental images of nasty games with boys, the sticky dew that smelled of frog water and clung like prehensile pearls to the thickening fuzz around her peachfish--this mysterious and shaming little ache of ecstasy eclipsed the less personal events of the day, including the news that the notorious Woodpecker had demolished an entire building on the campus of a large Midwestern university.

Bernard Mickey Wrangle had sneaked into Madison, Wisconsin, in the deep of night. Aided and abetted by the Woodpecker Gang, he blew up the chemistry building at the University of Wisconsin. Allegedly, work performed in that building was helpful to the war the United States Government was then waging in Southeast Asia. The explosion occurred at three o'clock in the morning. The building was supposed to have been unoccupied. Unfortunately, a graduate student was in one of the laboratories, completing research that was to lead to his doctorate.

The diligent student was found in the rubble. Not all of him, but enough to matter. Confined to a wheelchair, he became a stereo jockey in a Milwaukee disco, trading snappy patter with good-timing office workers and playing Barry White records as if he believed in them. He might have been a decent scientist. His project, which was obliterated by the blast, was the perfection of an oral contraceptive for men.

Bernard made it safely back to the West. Only the radio news reports followed him to the hide-out behind the waterfall. For once, the reports failed to entertain him. I took a man's legs, he thought. I took his manhood, I took his memory and I took his career. Worse, I took his wife, who split when he ran out of manhood and career. Worse still, I might have spoiled chances for a male pill. Yikes. I've got to pay. I deserve to pay. But I'll pay in my way, not society's. As bad as I am, there isn't a judge who's good enough to sentence me.

A writer published an open letter to Bernard in a leading liberal periodical. He requested an interview. Utmost secrecy was sworn. It was on the level. The writer was a man of proven courage and integrity. The writer wanted amnesty for dissidents such as Bernard. He said that Bernard had suffered enough. He wrote that living underground was no less punishing than prison. "A person underground exists in a state of controlled schizophrenia," he wrote. "Terror never slackens." The journalist considered Bernard a victim of the Vietnam war. The fact that he had acted against the Government's interests instead of in them was immaterial, the writer said. The sociopolitical realities that drove Bernard to risk his life bombing induction centers were essentially the same as those that led other young men to risk theirs trading shots in rice paddies. As a fugitive, on the run, living in disguise and fear, Bernard was no less a casualty than those poor veterans who had left prime cuts from their physiques to decay in Da Nang and Hué.

Ha ha.

That's how Bernard's infamous response began.

Ha ha.

Victim? The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized.

All people who live subject to other people's laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims. (I am speaking here of revolutionaries.) We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don't merely live beyond the letter of the law--many businessmen, most politicians and all cops do that--we live beyond the spirit of the law. In a sense, then, we live beyond society. Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the nature of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We even raise it a little bit when we fail.

Victim? I deplored the ugliness of the Vietnam war. But what I deplored, others have deplored before me. When war turns whole populations into sleepwalkers, outlaws don't join forces with alarm clocks. Outlaws, like poets, rearrange the nightmare. It is elating work. The years of the war were the most glorious of my life. I wasn't risking my skin to protest a war. I risked my skin for fun. For beauty!

I love the magic of TNT. How eloquently it speaks! Its resounding rumble, its clap, its quack is scarcely less deep than the passionate moan of the earth herself. A well-timed series of detonations is like a choir of quakes. For all of its fluent resonance, a bomb says only one word--Surprise!--and then applauds itself. I love the hot hands of explosion. I love a breeze perfumed with the Devil smell of powder (so close in its effect to the angel smell of sex). I love the way that architecture, under the impetus of dynamite, dissolves almost in slow motion, crumbling delicately, shedding bricks like feathers, corners melting, grim façades breaking into grins, supports shrugging and calling it a day, tons of totalitarian dreck washing away in the wake of a circular tsunami of air. I love that precious portion of a second when window glass becomes elastic and bulges out like bubble gum before popping. I love public buildings made public at last, doors flung open to the citizens, to the creatures, to the universe. Baby, come on in! And I love the final snuff of smoke.

Yes, and I love the trite mythos of the outlaw. I love the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw. I love the black wardrobe of the outlaw. I love the fey smile of the outlaw. I love the tequila of the outlaw and the beans of the outlaw. I love the way respectable men sneer and say "Outlaw." I love the way young women palpitate and say "Outlaw." The outlaw boat sails against the flow and I love it. Outlaws toilet where badgers toilet and I love it. All outlaws are photogenic and I love that. When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free: That's a graffito seen in Anacortes and I love that. There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures, and I love those maps especially. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here, and I love that most of all.

Victim? Your letter reminded the Woodpecker that he is a Woodpecker blessed. Your sympathies for my loneliness, tension and disturbing fluxations in identity have some basis in fact and are humbly appreciated. But do not be misled. I am the happiest man in America. In my bartender's pockets, I still carry, out of habit, wooden matches. As long as there are matches, there will be fuses. As long as there are fuses, no walls are safe. As long as every wall is threatened, the world can happen. Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.

•

As years went by and matchsticks yellowed and splintered in his pockets, Bernard was sustained in his inactivity by thoughts of what fun it would be when the statute of limitations expired and he could go flamboyantly public, rub their noses in it. There came an occasion, however, when he felt compelled to speak, or rather, to let dynamite speak for him. And now, after a slight misfire, he found himself, with but 11 months left on the fugitive calendar, arrested.

Arrested by Her Royal Highness, Princess Leigh-Cheri Furstenberg-Barcalona, environmentalist without portfolio, blue-eyed altruist, grapefruit-breasted celibate, would-be sovereign of Mu, the only woman the Woodpecker had ever met whose hair burned as brightly as his once had.

He would not go quietly.

•

"So it's you. I might have guessed it was you."

"I'm flattered that you remember me."

"The man who goes 'Yum.' ..."

"Only at appropriate moments."

"And blows up hotels and disrupts the most important meeting of minds since God knows when."

"This meeting is more important. This meeting between you and me. Let's retire somewhere for a drink."

"Don't be ridiculous. You're under arrest. I'm taking you straight to the police."

"I must warn you: I won't go quietly. Criminals, because they're plagued with guilt, often will surrender and go quietly. Outlaws, because they're pure, never will."

As in a symphony the brass may suddenly blare and drown out the woodwinds and strings, so fear suddenly blared in Leigh-Cheri, drowning out the anger and frustration that in the opening bars of this concerto of confrontation had served her so well. She glanced around the beach, looking for assistance. Some young men, blond as shampoo commercials, brown-skinned as turds, noticed her looking and waved at her.

"Don't expect any help from those beach boys. They're only interested in snatch and surf. Besides, they'd be no threat to me. I have a black belt in haiku. And a black vest in the cleaners. Black is my favorite color. Aside from red."

Leigh-Cheri didn't know what to say. For the first time, she noticed that he was wearing black swim trunks. And on his feet black thongs. Where does one buy black thongs? She felt disoriented. Goose bumps popped up in her sunburn, making her hide resemble a bird's-eye view of bloody cobblestones. She felt like a street in the French Revolution. She turned to the hag in the bikini. "Gulietta, get the police," she ordered, knowing full well that the police were all in town trying to solve the case of the bombed hotel. Gulietta couldn't understand her, anyway.

"There's nothing to worry about. I won't hurt you. I'm delighted that we're getting to be friends. I would have left Maui right after the boom-boom"--he grinned at Gulietta--"if it hadn't been for you."

"I don't get it. You stayed because of me?"

"Because of you, babe. And because I have some blasting powder that I haven't used yet."

"What?" she laughed in disbelief. "I can't trust my ears. You ... maniac!"

"Mr. maniac."

"You want to blow up something else?"

"What I want is to buy you a drink."

"Buy me a drink?"

"A piña tequila or a tequila tai. If you're old enough, that is. We wouldn't want to break the law."

"I'll bet I'm as old as you are."

"I'm older than Sanskrit."

"Well, I was a waitress at the Last Supper."

"I'm so old I remember when McDonald's had sold only a hundred burgers."

"You win."

"Then I can buy you a drink?"

"What's your name?"

"Bernard."

"Bernard what?"

"Bernard Maniac."

"Listen, Mr. Maniac----"

"I'm listening to nothing unless I'm sitting across a table from you at the Lahaina Broiler. Your grandmother can come, too, although, frankly, I'm a bit shocked by the extent to which her bathing attire reveals her charms."

"Well," she said. She paused. She thought it best to humor him. It'd be easier to raise help in town than out there on the beach. And she must admit that despite the dental neglect it disclosed, he had a wonderful smile. "Well, I do need to get out of the sun. Red-heads burn easily."

"I know," he said. "I know."

•

"I've never been kissed by a man in Donald Duck sunglasses before," said Leigh-Cheri.

"I apologize," said Bernard. "I'm sorry about the Donald Duck sunglasses. They ought to be Woody Woodpecker sunglasses, but nobody makes Woody Woodpecker sunglasses."

The princess didn't know what he was talking about. She didn't really care. She was on her third tequila mockingbird, he on his fourth. They were floating in that blissful phase that characterizes religious transcendence and the onset of alcohol poisoning. Gulietta had turned her back on them and was watching the sunset. Some chaperone.

"Also, I don't normally kiss men who smoke," announced Leigh-Cheri. "Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray."

"So I've heard. I've also heard that kissing a person who's self-righteous and intolerant is like licking a mongoose's ass."

"I'm not a mongoose's ass!"

"And I'm not an ashtray." Removing the unopened pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, he tossed it over his shoulder. "I only smoke when I'm locked up. In jail, a cigarette can be a friend. Otherwise, my cigarettes are just a front. It's an excuse for carrying matches."

"Are you saying what I think you're saying?"

"I'm saying more than I should be saying. I think you put something in my drink to make me talkative."

"I think you put something in my drink to make me kissative."

They kissed. And giggled like cartoon mice.

"When are you turning me in?"

"When you stop kissing me."

"In that case, I'm a free man forever."

"Don't count on it."

She meant that. But this time, when he kissed her, his astonishingly resourceful tongue managed to break through the heroic barricade that her teeth had theretofore formed. There was a clean clink of enamel against enamel, an eruption of hot saliva as his tongue made a whirlwind tour of her oral hollow. A sudden jolt shot through the peachfish, fuzz and fin, and inside her no nukes T-shirt, her nipples became as hard as nuggets of plutonium.

Jesus, thought Leigh-Cheri, how can men be such lummoxes, such wads of Juicy Fruit on the soles of our ballet slippers, and still feel so good? Especially this one. This mad bomber.

She pulled away. With sunburned knuckles, she wiped a string of spittle--his? hers? José Cuervo's?--from her chin. She asked a passing waitress for the time. She was late.

"I've got to go."

"How about dinner? There's a delicious fish called mahimahi. The fish so nice they named it twice. Isn't it charming the way Polynesians double up their language? I'd like to keep a tête-à-tête in Pago Pago, but I'm afraid I'd contract beriberi."

"Huh-uh, huh-uh," said the princess. "No din-din, no din-din."

"Tomorrow?"

"I'll be at the Care Fest all day."

"Tomorrow night?"

"Ralph Nader is speaking tomorrow night. I wouldn't miss that for all the mahimahi on Maui Maui. Besides, you may be in jail tomorrow night. Maybe you better get your pack of cigarettes back."

"You're turning me in, then?"

"I don't know. It depends. Are you really going to use the rest of your dynamite?"

"It's likely."

"Why?"

"Because that's what I do."

"But the UFO conference is over."

"I didn't come here to bomb the UFO conference. That was a mistake. I came here to bomb the Care Fest."

"You what?" She felt a bomb go off in her.

"Boom-boom Care Fest," he said. He poured tequila through the crack of his grin.

Abruptly, she stood. "You must be crazy," she said. "You must really be fucking insane." She yanked Gulietta away from the sunset and made for the street.

"You're turning me in, then?"

"You're damned right I am," she said.

•

Leigh-Cheri had intended to go to the police the next morning between breakfast and the belated official opening of the Care Fest, but by the time she'd been served in the overcrowded Pioneer Inn dining room, she'd been barely able to eat and get across Hotel Street for the invocation in Banyan Park. Soon she was immersed in Dr. John Lilly's lecture on the role of marine mammals in the future of the human race. Predictably, the park was jammed. Leigh-Cheri hadn't arrived early enough to get within the cover of the banyan tree, though its shadow darkened deliciously the better part of an acre. She could hear well enough, and with minor optic stress could make out the images that Dr. Lilly projected on a screen, but she was marooned in hot sunbeams. The sun raked her exposed flesh. It made her feel slightly faint. Ever reluctant to exploit her title, she was reaching the point where she'd pull rank like a little red wagon if it'd get her a place in the shade.

As if by genie service, a shadow fell over her. Initially, she feared it was the jinx cloud, moving in for the kill. It wasn't. Bernard was standing beside her, holding over her head a tattered parasol.

"What are you doing here?" Her whisper didn't sound half as hostile as she'd have liked it to.

He nodded his dark curls at the podium screen, upon which an image of a porpoise was projected. "Sharks are the criminals of the sea," he said. "Dolphins are the outlaws."

"You're bananas," she said.

"Then split with me."

"Huh-uh. Bananas is not the color of my true love's hair."

The reference to hair color caused him to flinch. She didn't notice. She'd returned her attention to Dr. Lilly.

"OK. If you want to see me, just look up my address."

"I don't want to see you, although the authorities might. Anyhow, where would I look up your address? In the Banana Directory? And I don't mean the Yellow Pages."

"Look up. Look up."

She looked up. She couldn't help it. Chalked in a nasty scrawl on the underside of the parasol were the words Lahaina small boat harbor, the sloop high jinks.

He shoved the parasol handle into her hand. He leaned his ravaged teeth close to her ear. "Yum," he whispered. Then he was gone.

•

She lunched on papaya poo poo or mango mu mu or some other fruity foo foo bursting with overripe tropical vowels. Gulietta gummed roast veal à la missionary. Beach boys ringed their table, speaking indecencies. Repeatedly, Gulietta flailed her mopstick arms, waving the young dogs away. Gulietta appeared to be enjoying it. Shooing surfers off the princess was clearly more fun than shooing flies off the queen. Leigh-Cheri paid scant attention. She was trying to decide whether or not to turn in Bernard during the lunch break.

OK, so he had saved her from the sun. That princess cannot expect a happy ending who has been rescued by the dragon. OK, so his exuberant spirits lent him a superficial charm. Lucifer was the cutest angel in heaven, they say, and every death's-head wears a grin. This Bernard character was a menace. Her duty was plain. The only question was: Now or later?

"Now," she snapped. "If I hurry." She handed Gulietta a bank note with which to settle the check. Gulietta was attacking her missionary veal with missionary zeal. "I'll meet you in the park in twenty minutes," said Leigh-Cheri, not forgetting to make the appropriate hand signs.

As she sped out of the dining room, one of the beach boys called after her, "Hey, Red, where's the fire? Between your legs? Ha Ha."

"Jesus!" swore the princess. She hurried across the street toward the docks. "Sometimes I feel like buying a quart of Lady Clairol and just changing my goddamned color."

When she arrived at the sloop christened High Jinks, she was stunned to find that the familiar face that answered the cabin door was now wearing hair at least as red as her own.

•

"If you've come to arrest me again," said Bernard, twirling a trigger finger in his brilliant curls, "then you should be aware of my true identity. It's a wise cop who knows her own prisoner. On the other hand, if you've come because you like me, it might make you like me more to see what we have in common."

"You're a redhead, all right. Is this really your natural shade?"

"You mean can I trace my roots back to henna? This is the color I busted out of the womb with. The last of the black dye just washed down the drain and out to sea. Jacques Cousteau is probably swimming through it, thinking that some squid is writing with a leaky pen again."

"OK, I guess you are as red as I am. But that's all we have in common."

"What makes you so sure?"

"There are two kinds of people in this world: those who're part of the solution and those who're part of the problem."

"I see. I make messes, you clean 'em up? Well, let me tell you, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who look at life and see the frost on the pumpkin and those who look and see the drool on the pie."

(Actually, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better. However, Leigh-Cheri and Bernard were occupied with the nuances of an intricate dance, so let's be generous and cut them some slack.)

They were on the deck in the noonday sun, but Leigh-Cheri had raised the parasol and Bernard crouched in the pencil-nub shadow of the mainsail gaff. The Pacific, tranquilized here by a broken-square jetty, rocked them as sweetly as winos rock wine. "You look familiar now, with your hair red. I think I've seen pictures of you."

"I do have a good agent. My publicity photos get around."

"Where? On post-office walls? You're some kind of infamous hoodlum, aren't you?"

"I wouldn't put it that way. When I was younger, I did have a slight brush with the law. You know how boys are."

She didn't know whether to laugh or to jump overboard. "Look, who are you, anyway? And what's your game?"

"Woodpecker's the name and outlawing's the game. I'm wanted in fifty states and Mexico. It's nice to feel wanted, and I'd like to be wanted by you. In fact, I just blew my disguise in the hopes that it would open your eyes and soften your heart. There. My cards are on the table. An expression your old daddy would surely understand."

"Jesus! The Woodpecker. Bernard Wrangle. I should have guessed."

His cocky smile was finally gone. If smiles had addresses, Bernard's would have been General Delivery, the Moon. He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet. Still, there was genuine tenderness and longing.

"This is too much for me to deal with right now," said Leigh-Cheri. Despite the heat waves that hootchy-kootchied all around her, she trembled. Why had she come to the boat in the first place? She could have just sent the police. "I'm due back at the Care Fest." Indeed, the panel discussion on birth control was scheduled to begin in seven minutes.

He attempted to help her onto the dock, but she spurned his hand. Hustling away, the tattered parasol flapping like a werewolf's shirttail, she called back, "They're going to get you again, you know."

Bernard's smile came part way home. "They never got me and they never will. The outlaw is someone who cannot be gotten. He can only be punished by other people's attitudes. Just as your attitudes are punishing me now."

•

Because the Care Fest was running behind schedule, thanks to that bird-brained son of a bitch Woodpecker, some doubling up was necessary. (If one must double up, then Hawaii, home of mahimahi and lomilomi, was the place to do it.) The panel on birth control had been combined with the panel on child care. The platform beneath the banyan boughs was end to end with experts, facts and figures forming at their lips like froth. The discussion was scarcely under way before a prevailing philosophy was established. It was this: If babies aren't brought by storks, they ought to be, and maybe the storks could be trained to rear them, as well.

To be sure, this viewpoint was proffered by only a couple of panel members, but a large and loud contingent in the audience supported it with such volume and menace that it carried. "We don't want birth control, we want prick control!" shouted a female in the third row. The applause that followed drowned out the woman who was lecturing on, yes, carrot seeds as an oral contraceptive. Oh, dear, thought Leigh-Cheri. I wonder if that isn't overstating the case.

Leigh-Cheri left the park. The palm trees she passed, the romantic palms of Hawaii, were covering their ears with their fronds. Her sentiments exactly. "Jesus," she swore. She felt like the gourmet who was goosed in Strasbourg. "It's my pâté and I'll cry if I want to."

•

"You're crying."

"I am not."

"My mistake. You aren't crying. You aren't out of breath, either. That's fortunate, because this club doesn't admit women with pants. Is that a pun in my pocket or am I just glad to see you? Something's wrong."

Leigh-Cheri merely sniffed. "Have you got a tissue?" she asked.

"Yeah, sure. I'll find you something. Come on in."

Leigh-Cheri stooped and entered the cabin. She ripped a length of toilet paper from the roll that Bernard fetched from the head. She blew her nose, a signal for all tears to return to their homes and families.

"Well, I see you're still here."

"I am definitely here. But that's no reason to cry."

"I wasn't crying. I've had a bad day. Another one. One in a series of bad days. I'm not complaining. Bad days are my bag. They're time-consuming, however, and I'm a busy girl. I only stopped by here because I understood you'd been busted."

"Oh? You turned me in?"

"No, damn you, I didn't. Cops have busted somebody for bombing the UFO conference. Just a stab in the dark, a wild guess, I know, but I thought it might be you."

"I'm hurt that you'd think such a thing, but delighted that you came by to check. It is my privilege to report that if being uncaged is being free, then I am as the birdies in the blue."

"Do you really think dynamite can make the world a better place?"

"A better place than what?"

"You evasive bastard. I'm trying to understand you and you won't give me a straight answer." Her small sunburned fist, in frustration, crumpled the soiled toilet paper with which she'd dabbed her eyes and blown her nose.

"Maybe you're not asking the right questions. If all you're interested in is making the world a better place, go back to your Care Fest and question Ralph Nader----"

"I fully intend to go hear Ralph. Ralph Nader, I mean." She blushed, feeling, perhaps, that she'd betrayed a secret onanistic intimacy.

"Good. Do that. But if you're interested in experiencing the world as a better place, then stay here with me."

"Oh, yeah? That'd be fine--maybe--for you and me, but how about the rest of humanity?"

"A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?"

That silenced her. She seemed pensive. She unwadded the toilet paper just to have something to do with her hands. "Are outlaws important members of society?"

"Outlaws are not members of society. However, they may be important to society. Poets remember our dreams, outlaws act them out."

"Yeah? How about a princess? Is a princess important?"

"They used to be. A princess used to stand for beauty, magic spells and fairy castles. That was pretty damn important. Enchantments, dramatic prophecies, swans swimming in castle moats, dragon bait----"

"Dragon bait?"

"All the romantic bullshit that makes life interesting. People need that as badly as they need fair prices at the gas pump and no DDT in the Pablum. The men you've been with probably wouldn't kiss your nipples correctly for fear they'd suck in some pesticide."

Upon hearing their name called, her nipples sprang to attention.

"Early in my career as an outlaw, it doesn't matter when, right after my first jail break, I helped hijack an airliner to Havana. Castro, that great fox, granted me sanctuary, but I hadn't been in Cuba a month before I borrowed a small boat with an outboard motor and putt-putted like hell for the Florida Keys. The sameness of the socialistic system was stifling and boring to me. There was no mystery in Cuba, no variety, no novelty and, worse, no options. In a socialistic system, you're no better or no worse than anybody else."

"But that's equality!"

"Bullshit. Unromantic, unattractive bullshit. Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently."

"You may be right." She fiddled with the toilet paper. "You've reaffirmed my belief in romantic bullshit and Ralph Nader speaks in forty minutes. Answer me one more question before I go. If I stand for fairy-tale balls and dragon bait--dragon bait--what do you stand for?"

"Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, surprise, disorder, unlawfulness, bad taste, fun and things that go boom in the night."

"You've really bought the desperado package, haven't you? I mean, you've actually done those big bad things. Hijacked planes, blown up banks----"

"No. No banks. I leave banks to the criminal types. Without and within. Outlaws never----"

"You make 'outlaw' sound so special."

"Oh, it's not all that special, I suppose. If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws. I've simply gone one step farther."

"Out of the frying pan and into the cross fire, eh, Bernard? I admire the courage of that. I do. But, frankly, it seems to me that you've turned yourself into a stereotype."

"You may be right. I don't care. As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren't the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve."

"Well, you may get off on being a beautiful stereotype, regardless of the social consequences, but my conscience won't allow it. And I goddamn refuse to be dragon bait. I'm as capable of rescuing you as you are of rescuing me."

"I'm an outlaw, not a hero. I never intended to rescue you. We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves. Even outlaws perform services, however, and I brought my dynamite to Maui to remind the Care Fest that good can be as banal as evil. As for you, well ... did you really expect me to keep my senses after taking a look at your hair?"

Leigh-Cheri held a strand of her hair to her eyes. As if in comparison, she reached across the table to where Bernard sat opposite her and examined one of his unruly ringlets. The hair of most so-called redheads actually is orange, but it was red, first color in the spectrum and the last seen by the eyes of the dying, it was true-blue red that clanged like fire bells about the domes of Bernard Mickey Wrangle and Princess Leigh-Cheri.

There followed an embarrassed silence, tense and awkward, broken finally with a snap by the Woodpecker's abrupt plunging of his hand into his jeans. Patterning his gesture after the successful Jack Horner, he pulled out a single hair and held it aloft. It glowed like a copper filament. "Can you match that?" he challenged.

OK, buster. OK OK OK OK OK OK.

Beneath the table, she submarined a hand into the depths of her skirt and slid it along the flat of her thigh. It winnowed into her panties. She yanked. Ouch! Damn it! She yanked again. And, presto, there it was, curly and stiff, and as red as a thread from a socialist banner.

"What do you think of that?" she asked brightly. Then she noticed that from the tip of the hair there hung, like a tadpole's balloon, a tiny telltale bead of fishy moisture. O sweet Jesus no! She released her grip on the crumpled toilet paper. It fluttered to the deck like a stricken dove. Her face heated as crimson as the hair, and then some. She could have died.

"What do I think of that?" The Woodpecker's voice was very, very gentle. "I think it could make the world a better place."

•

Vertical integration by food conglomerates, as in the poultry industry, has moved with great speed in the last quarter of the 20th Century. Yet this incredible "poultry peonage" of the chicken farmer has spread almost without notice by urban America.

In the moonlight that soaked through the foliage of the grand banyan tree, the Hero was addressing the multitudes. Dressed in an inexpensive gray suit and a terminally drab necktie, he might just as well have been speaking in Philadelphia as Lahaina, but so enormous was his integrity that the sound of his voice caused the mongooses to cease stalking poodle dogs on the grounds of the public library, and even the social militants, who had raised seven kinds of hell at the afternoon session of the Care Fest, sat on the grass in respectful silence. In fact, aside from several plastic Japanese fans and the Hero's dry lips, the only thing moving in Banyan Park was an ancient chaperone, cruising the crowd, row by row, searching for her responsibility.

How, for example, can the housewife detect and do something about residues of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and nitrates in the meat she purchases, or the excess water added to the chickens, hams and processed meats?

Slurp and slobber, smack and excess water. Leigh-Cheri and Bernard kissed deliriously. They were speaking in tongues. Like an animal at a salt lick, he cleaned up the last of her tears. He even kissed a pearl of her snot away. As if his tongue weren't enough, he eased a finger as well into her mouth and read the slippery Braille being writ there. She sucked his finger and pressed her body against his so tightly that he nearly lost balance and toppled to starboard. The ocean in the Small Boat Harbor was feisty with tide and they hadn't gained their sea legs yet. Cautiously, centimeter by centimeter, squeezing as he went, Bernard worked a freckled hand up inside her skirt. Her panties all but dissolved in his grip. Oh, my! Had King Max telephoned his bookie right then, he'd have found the odds running eight to one against celibacy.

The chemical industry and its pushers have ensured that the Government go slow on research for alternative and safer methods of pest control.

Bernard handed her a capsule and a cup of tequila with which to wash it down. "Here. Swallow this."

"What is it?"

"She-link. Chinese birth control. It's very old and very safe. One capsule lasts for months. Take it, babe."

"I don't know.... What's in it?"

"The Four Immortals."

"Only four. I'd feel safer with six."

"Take it."

"With six you get egg roll."

"Take it."

She took it, trying, as she swallowed, not to think of that line of marching Chinese, eight abreast, stretching completely around the globe.

"Later, I'll teach you lunaception: how to observe the way your hormonal cycle coordinates with light. You can learn to synchronize your body with moon phasing and be knock-up-proof and in harmony with the universe at the same time. A whale of a bargain."

Leigh-Cheri was so pleasantly surprised by what she was hearing, so delighted by this mad bomber's concern for her womb, that she threw her arms around him and kissed him like he was going out of style, which to the thinking of many, he was. She found herself laughing, kissing and undressing, all at the same time. Former Republican Presidents, eat your hearts out.

Competition, free enterprise and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism.

Did the Hero realize that as he spoke of symbolic fig leaves, real fig leaves formed the canopy that shielded the sheen of his business suit from the playful rays of the moon?

Aboard the High Jinks, the last symbolic fig leaf had fallen. Bernard's shorts--black, naturally--hit the deck moments after Leigh-Cheri stepped out of her panties. Their underwear just lay there, gathering dust, like ghost towns abandoned when the nylon mines petered out.

They tumbled onto a lower berth. Leigh-Cheri had been this aroused before but never this relaxed about it. Her knees framed her smiling face. She presented a target difficult to miss. The moon, bright as a lemon, entered the sloop via porthole and sparkled on the dripping bull's-eye. His aim was true. He sunk to the hilt. "Sweet Jesus!" she cried.

"Yum-mm," he moaned. The sea rocked the boat, as if egging them on.

Rarely revealed publicly, but still operational, are corporate rationalizations that air pollution is the "price of progress" and the "smell of the payroll."

As time passed, the air in the cabin was composed of two parts oxygen, one part nitrogen and three parts slish vapor, French mist and Cupid fumes. Their funk billowed over them like a sail. It carried them across the crest of spasm after spasm. The aroma of her cunt knocked the hatches back. The scent of his semen swamped the bilges.

"Ooh," she marveled. "Don't we smell pretty?"

"Good enough to eat," he answered. He thought about what he had said. It gave him ideas.

In all the current environmental concern and groping for directions by students and citizens' groups, one major institution has been almost ignored or shunted aside as irrelevant.

They had been still for a while, catching their breath, letting the tempo of their blood drums slacken, gazing into each other's eyes in perfect manifestation of hypnotic universal peeper-lock love trance, when Leigh-Cheri said, "You know, Bernard, that was not very nice what you did."

"I'm sorry. I thought you liked it. Some women are inhibited about having ... that part of them loved--maybe it hurts them--but I tried to be gentle and you certainly sounded like you were liking it."

"Not that, silly. I'm not talking about that. I did like it. It was my first time. Not even a finger, can you believe it? It probably never occurred to my boyfriends that princesses even have assholes." She kissed Bernard appreciatively.

"I wasn't talking about that. I meant your bomb job at the UFO conference. The poor ambassadors from outer space."

"Them. Well, first of all, babe, if they really got here all the way from outer space, they shouldn't have any trouble getting to the drugstore for Band-Aids. I don't want to hurt anybody. Especially you."

They snuggled closer, and when they were as close as they could get without being behind each other, they commenced to kiss again. His middle finger began to disappear into her vagina, but she pulled it out and forced it instead--with some discomfort and some ecstasy--deep into the royal rectum.

"Outlaw territory," she whispered.

What is needed is a sustained public demand for a liberation of law and technology that will disarm the corporate power that turns nature against man. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Good night.

Did the banyan tree believe that the cheering was for it? Surely, the moon realized that in the last quarter of the 20th Century it could expect no applause. The Hero, nodding more than bowing, stepped down from the podium and in scruffed shoes strode modestly from Banyan Park.

If success is clapped and failure booed, then Gulietta deserved but catcalls for her evening's work. An hour's diligent searching had not located her mistress and charge. Gulietta also left the park.

Bernard and Leigh-Cheri might legitimately have applauded themselves, but freshly fucked lovers seldom acknowledge "success" in those terms, and, besides, they were too pooped to give themselves the standing ovation they deserved. They, too, were preparing to take their leave.

They sat on the berth. They shared a cup of tequila and a package of Hostess Twinkies. As if they were tourists at a geological site, they watched a flow of translucent lava inch its way down the inside of her leg.

"You sure were full of it," she said.

"A regular Hostess Twinkie," he replied.

She dipped a thumb into the flow and stuck it in her pretty mouth. It made her giggle.

"I hear it tastes like plastic," Bernard said.

"Cream of bomber soup. Someday I want a whole bowlful."

"You know how to open the can."

Dreamily, the princess stood up. "I'm not sure if I can walk," she said.

"Then I'll carry you."

"Is that what love is?"

"I no longer know what love is. A week ago, I had a lot of ideas. What love is and how to make it stay. Now that I'm in love, I haven't a clue. Now that I'm in love, I'm completely stupid on the subject."

Leigh-Cheri was feeling stupid, as well. Look as she might, she couldn't find her underpants. "They must have melted," she joked as she hugged Bernard goodbye, but secretly she suspected that the gods had vaporized them as a warning, a sign of divine displeasure for her having given her heart and her ass to the outlaw rather than her mind and her soul to a cause. In actual fact, a mongoose, attracted by the primal fragrance emanating from the sloop, had come aboard and carried them off. Having chewed all of the salt out of them, the mongoose abandoned the panties in a gutter along Hotel Street, where, the following morning, the Hero, hailing a taxi for the airport, stepped on them without noticing, though the lace cried out sweetly to his purposeful shoes.

•

Sunset lingered a long while that evening. It was as if a mai tai had been spilled in the sky. Streaks of grenadine, triple sec, maraschino and rum seeped over the horizon, puddled upon the sea. Like a moth with a sweet tooth, the High Jinks glided toward the spill.

A marijuana smuggler and an associate attended to the sailing. Gulietta squatted in the stern, still as a toad. Leigh-Cheri and Bernard sat in the bow and talked.

"This is not an easy time to be a princess," she said.

"No, and it's not an easy time to be an outlaw, either. There's no longer any moral consensus. In the days when it was generally agreed what was right and what was wrong, an outlaw simply did those wrong things that needed to be done, whether for freedom, for beauty or for fun. The distinctions are blurred now, a deliberately wrong act--which for the outlaw is right--can be interpreted by many others to be right, and therefore must mean that the outlaw is wrong. You can't tilt windmills when they won't stand still." He gazed into the sunset briefly, then broke into his dentistry-defying grin. "But it doesn't really bother me. I've always been a square peg in every round hole but one."

"Speaking of that, this is not an easy time for lovers, either. With the divorce rate up to sixty percent, how can anyone attend a wedding with a straight face anymore? I see lovers walking hand in hand, looking at each other as if nobody else was alive on the earth, and I can't help thinking that in a year, more or less, they'll each be with someone new. Or else nursing broken hearts. True, most lovers don't work at it hard enough, or with enough imagination or generosity, but even those who try don't seem to have any ultimate success these days. Who knows how to make love stay?"

He thought for several moments before he answered.

"I guess love is the real outlaw," he said.

She kissed his ear. She pinched his buttocks. "One thing for sure. You and I make love better than ordinary mortals."

"That's a fact."

"But do we know how to make love stay?"

"I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day."

"In times like these, I'm not sure if any lovers have a chance."

"Don't let yourself be victimized by the age you live in. It's not the times that will bring us down, any more than it's society. When you put the blame on society, then you end up turning to society for the solution. Just like those poor neurotics at the Care Fest. There's a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul. It's not men that limit women, it's not straights that limit gays, it's not whites that limit blacks. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don't have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it. Yuk."

"Yuk, Bernard?"

"Yum."

"Yum?"

"Yum. We're now at the end of one epoch and well before the start of a new one. During this period of transition, there will be no moratorium on individual aliveness. In fact, momentous events are hatching in the vacuum. It's a wonderful time to be alive. As long as one has enough dynamite."

"Or enough toot," said the captain, who had just walked up with a plate of cocaine. Bernard did a line. Leigh-Cheri was hesitant.

"Come on," said Bernard. "This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said. Come on, try it."

Leigh-Cheri did a line. Then Gulietta did one. Perhaps Gulietta was remembering the snuff her royal employers used to snort in the good old days. The days when she would watch the swans sailing in the castle moat, never dreaming that one day, frogless, she would sail a moonlit ocean with a cargo of goofiness and love.

The sloop reached Honolulu on Saturday afternoon. The following morning, the princess and Gulietta--and Bernard Mickey Wrangle--flew home to whatever stings or honeys awaited them in the vibrating American hive.

•

Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.

Bernard the Woodpecker, who had mocked if not broken the behavioral codes of an entire civilization, rebelled, naturally enough, against the notion that he must obey the rules and regulations of a house of second-rate royalty. Eventually, however, he put pride aside and obeyed--for he wanted very much to make love stay.

If Bernard wanted so much as to see Leigh-Cheri, he had to formally court her. She loved him wildly, but rules are rules. She was not prepared to abandon royal privilege. "Changes are occurring in my family's country. It's boiling there. Perhaps someday the throne will be restored. I could eventually be queen. Think of the good I could do." When he failed to respond, she added, "Think of the fun we could have. I'd put you in charge of the arsenal."

So he paid court. He would treat her as if her crotch were a piece of Viennese wedding cake, sugar-frosted and rococo. He would behave as if toy soldiers guarded the vaginal gates.

Max and Tilli knew him only as a commoner the princess had met in pagan Hawaii. They wouldn't have granted him suitor status had not Gulietta put in a good word for him.

Bernard resided downtown in Pioneer Square. He leased the Charles Bukowski Suite in the Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Hotel. A bachelor apartment in a building favored by pensioners and mice. The living-room sofa turned into a bed. Sometimes, during the night, with him in it, it would try to turn back into a sofa again. In the bathroom, where he redyed his hair prior to calling on Leigh-Cheri, there were cigar burns on the toilet seat. There was rust in the tub and soot on the curtains. There were spiders, greasy drafts and a calendar so out of date it still believed that holidays could fall in the middle of the week.

Dressed in a black suit, black shirt, black boots, socks and tie, the outlaw drove his battered convertible to the suburbs. The rain had stopped, but the sky hung low. It was the color of moles. Seattle's sky reminded Bernard of prison bed sheets. Using hindsight, we can see that that was ominous.

The king and queen were to receive Bernard in the library. It was a musty room, but on its floor lay a very rare and very expensive white carpet. Whiter than doves, whiter than a toothache, whiter than God's own breath. Bernard hadn't seen Leigh-Cheri in nearly two weeks. He decided to attempt to smuggle a note to her via Gulietta. In the note, he would recommend ingenuity. "May we be eaten by starving baby ostriches if we can't concoct a secret way to meet." Waiting for his prospective in-laws, he went to the desk and commenced to scribble the note. In his nervousness, he knocked an open bottle of ink onto that Easter-white carpet.

The puddle was large. The stain permanent.

Surely, Queen Tilli was gracious about the mishap. Wrong. In fact, she made no effort to conceal her extreme vexation. She caressed her Chihuahua in ivory silence. Awkward and tense, the evening drooped like the sky.

Tea was poured from a silver pot whose spout had once bowed to Winston Churchill. It was excellent tea, but the suitor was craving tequila. The king made small talk about basketball. About blackberries. The princess was afraid to look Bernard in the eye. Birds could not have flown through the longing between them. Blackberry briers could not have penetrated the longing. At nine o'clock sharp, the suitor was dismissed. Suspicious, the king tried to follow him home but lost him when in a snit he ran six red lights, the last two backward.

The next day, Bernard managed to get Leigh-Cheri on the telephone. She told him that Queen Tilli was inconsolable. He would not be invited back. "You've got to think of something."

"I already have. Let's go live in a gypsy cave on an island off the coast of Panama. I'll play my harmonica for you and tie your hair in knots with coca leaves."

"Nothing doing," she said. "You must make amends."

A few days later, Bernard bought two dozen roses and set out for Fort Blackberry. He would call on the queen. He rehearsed the most moving apologies. He was a trifle desperate. He would not settle for less than amends.

An uneasiness was in Gulietta's ancient eyes as she let him in. She gestured that he should wait in the music room. "OK, but I forgot my harmonica," said Bernard. Gulietta reached for the flowers. Bernard said no, he'd just hold on to them. He went into the music room and took a seat on the couch.

As he sat, he felt something warm and heard a soft, dry, snap/crackle/pop, like a singular oversized Rice Krispie being bitten into by a crocodile. He stood up slowly. The dyed hair on his neck stood up with him. Beneath him was the beloved Chihuahua. He had sat on it. And broken its neck.

There was nothing to do but lift the lid of the piano and lay the dead Chihuahua inside on the wires. He stuffed the roses in on top of it and closed the lid. He left without saying goodbye.

Oh, sleep thy doggy nap of ages, wee beastie, yap after Pharaohs' cats in the alleys of the afterworld. For Bernard Mickey Wrangle would neither sleep nor play that night. Fate had punched his ticket, love had bought him a seat on that train that stops only on the dark side of the moon.

This time, Max was successful in tailing him. In his haste for tequila, Bernard nipped into a Pioneer Square watering hole he normally wouldn't have frequented. While Bernard was feeding the jukebox, hoping that Waylon Jennings would restore his sense of reality, Max was around the corner in a phone booth making an anonymous call to the FBI. The agent was elated. The teacup that the king had mailed to him two days before had yielded fingerprints. Once that same cup had worn the fingerprints of Winston Churchill, but now only the prints of the Woodpecker adorned it. "We'll take care of him," said the agent. "He's made monkeys of us for years. Then the CIA, will determine what part he's been playing in the plot to restore King Max. Don't let him out of your sight."

Max hung up with the sinking feeling that he had fed the hand that was biting him. Before he could warn Bernard, however, the outlaw was arrested--ten months to the day before the statute of limitations would have cut him loose. And although he yelled to the barroom crowd as the agents dragged him away, "They haven't got me! It's impossible to get me!" officials at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary were already dusting out a cell from which they claimed Houdini could not have escaped.

•

After a decent interval, Queen Tilli acquired another Chihuahua. Max insisted on it. He couldn't stand it when she blubbered during dog-food commercials, and the little urn of ashes was giving him the creeps. One day he simply blew out the black candles and drove her to a pet store.

An outlaw lover is not so easily replaced.

Leigh-Cheri would see no one. She wished only to see Bernard, and so far the King County Jail, where he was being held while awaiting trial, had refused to allow him visitors.

He was not allowed bail, either. If he had been, Leigh-Cheri would have hocked what was left of Tilli's crown jewels to go it, and the Furstenberg-Barcalona code could take a flying fuck at a rolling tiara.

"The most important thing is love," said Leigh-Cheri. "I know that now. There's no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon."

Leigh-Cheri sent that message to Bernard through his attorney. The message continued, "The bottom line is that (A) people are never perfect, but love can be, (B) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed and (C) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?"

The next day, Bernard's attorney delivered to her this reply: "Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words 'make' and 'stay' become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free."

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.

"Hawaii was, indeed, a travelog tableau, a living Pap smear for the paradise flu."