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

room, pouring 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 11:00 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 twenty 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.

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    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, newspeople, 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. They made a halfhearted effort to obtain space at one or another of the luxury hotels a few miles up the coast at Kaanapali and were partially relieved to learn that there wasn’t room. Old, wooden, and South Sea funky, the Pioneer Inn had been far better suited to the sensibilities of the Care Fest. This was, in truth, the first time since its opening in 1901 that the Pioneer was to host a formal convention, a fact that appealed to the Care Fest staff but an error the inn was not likely to repeat.
    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. Many considered this an even more appropriate site than the Pioneer Inn, which, after all, was built to cater originally to the whaling trade, an irony not lost on those Care Festers to whom preservation of whales and dolphins was an important and rather emotional goal. By the time anything could get organized beneath the banyan, however, it was already Wednesday, 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; a few were put off by the UFO delegates (including the visiting couple from Argon) who remained on the scene, singed and bruised, babbling rumors of the most astonishing conspiracies and plots; 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.

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    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, David Brower, John Lilly, Murray Gell-Mann, Joseph Campbell, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, Marcel Marceau, et al—wondering who would or would not show.
    By all rights, the Princess should have been enjoying her beloved