Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins Read Free Book Online

included in the conference. The fact that Timothy Leary had been invited to the Care Fest to present his theories on orbiting space colonies pleased but didn’t placate them. “The future of the earth is bound up with the future of the universe,” they reasoned. Some went so far as to state that the future of the earth was entirely in the hands of superior beings on distant planets. The Care Fest would be a sham if UFO scholars and intermediaries weren’t included, they said.
    “The agenda is already set, and it’s crowded as it is,” protested the organizers.
    The saucer people didn’t care. They raced their kryptonite engines, billowed their green exhaust. From the thirteenth floor of the Darth Vader Building, communiqués and manifestoes issued.
    A compromise was reached. The Maui saucerites were granted use of conference facilities on Sunday, the day prior to the official opening of the Care Fest, the day that Leigh-Cheri arrived in Lahaina. As the Princess and her chaperon checked into the Pioneer Inn, a UFO gathering was already in progress there. “How peculiar,” remarked Leigh-Cheri, noticing the flowing robes and wide eyes of the delegates. There was no one in the lobby who looked the slightest like Ralph Nader.
    What the hell, it was Sunday. Sunday is Sunday, even in Hawaii. No volume of orchid nectar, no wardrobe of o-o plumage could change the color of Sunday from that of … buttermilk, toothpaste, Camembert cheese. Leigh-Cheri knew better than to jump to conclusions on a Sunday. After unpacking, she seated herself out on the lanai , where luxuriously awash in tropical twilight, she perused the Sunday edition of the Honolulu Advertiser .
    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 shoreline 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 eleven 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 restored old whalers’ hotel, where the usual crowd of international beach bums, cool kamaainas , sailboat crewmen, amateur adventurers, itinerant waitresses, students on the metamorphose from Midwest bookworms into South Pacific night owls (“The University of Pineapple is my alma papaya, I graduated mango cum laude.”), rock musicians of varying degrees of celebrity and expertise, young divorcées (older ones went to Waikiki), divers (coral, salvage, skin, and muff), puka salesmen, T-shirt air-brushers, and Berkeley radicals with a secret romantic streak made themselves at home, coming and going, flirting and hustling, posing and preening, scheming and letting off steam, a gin or rum never far from the lips, a fortune, a nirvana, or a revolution always just out of reach. Mingling with the regulars on this Sunday evening were