Still Life with Woodpecker (6 page)

When word of the impending Care Fest spread from Lahaina into the Maui interior, the various flying-saucer groups banded together to insist that they be 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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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) of this or that koa tree, checking and rechecking lists and pouting like the koa itself, whose leaves resemble lips or the crescents of moon. There was one black cloud in all the Hawaiian Islands, and it was parked over
her
head. 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.”

As if to sandpaper her burn, an oddly beautiful woman in a turban and robe had stopped her in the lobby to inform her (above the noise of workmen busily replacing window glass) that on the planet Argon redheads were considered evil and that if she had any plans for space
travel, she’d better change her ways. “Red hair is caused by sugar and lust,” the woman, who was blonde, confided. “Highly evolved beings do not indulge in sugar and lust.” It was a rude thing to say, particularly in Hawaii where sugar and lust surpassed even pineapples and marijuana as cash crops. And since Leigh-Cheri only recently had begun to eliminate those very sweets and meats from her life—without any thought to her status on Argon—the woman’s accusations made her defensive and caused an unreasonable guilt to darken the hue of her gloom. She rolled around paradise like four bald tires on an ambulance.

Late Tuesday afternoon there occurred three 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, a reporter from
People
magazine asked her for an interview, and for the first time, she felt she had something to say to those media representatives who had tried off and on for years to make some kind of “story” out of her. Three, 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 omomatopoeia (“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.