Still Life With Woodpecker

Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins Read Free Book Online
Authors: Tom Robbins
freshly arrived Care Fest delegates, famous and unknown; plus a man and woman from the planet Argon who had slipped away from the UFO conference to have a piña colada. Plus the Woodpecker.
    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.
    Now, tequila may be the favored beverage of outlaws, but that doesn’t mean it gives them preferential treatment. In fact, tequila probably had betrayed as many outlaws as has the central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!
    Without doubt, it was the tequila that made Bernard impatient, that befuddled him into mistaking the UFO conference for the Geo-Therapy Care Fest.
    As a consequence, the saucer conference was blown ass over teacup.

23
    EVEN WHEN INTOXICATED, Bernard Mickey Wrangle was a master of blast. He planted the dynamite in such a place and in such a way (breaking four sticks in half, then laying them outside the walls at twenty-foot intervals) that the Pioneer Inn shook like a wet mutt; every window in one end of it shattered, wallboards cracked, lighting fixtures and potted plants plummeted to the meeting hall floor, smoke and dust roiled for half an hour, and saucerites, scorched and scratched, scattered as if the Jewish Mother Ship had landed in their midst, spraying scalding jets of chicken soup—yet not one person was seriously hurt.
    On one hand, it was a masterpiece of delicate dynamiting, on the other a faux pas. When he 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.” Then he said “Yikes” again, not pausing to ponder that there might be three mantras. “Yikes, that was close. Of course, close calls are the only calls an outlaw should accept, but O my Woodpecker, that business last night bordered on the crazed. 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 twentieth century miracles occurred—although this was not one of them. There was a witness to Bernard’s deed. Old Gulietta had watched the whole thing.

24
    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. On the European estates where she was reared, it was common practice for servant girls to lift their skirts outside. Gulietta had seen no reason to alter her habits in Seattle. Despite the difficulty there of doing one’s natural duty without being rained upon or receiving from a blackberry bramble a bite as sharp as hemorrhoids, she felt comfortable—happy, even—when she could squat in fresh air. Besides, it was an opportune way to spy frogs.
    Leaving Leigh-Cheri in their

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