Still Life with Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

  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 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.

  25

  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.

  26

  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 an
d 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.

  27

  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, although 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. His hair was red then, red being the color of emergency and roses; red being the prelate’s top and the baboon’s bottom; red being the blood’s color, jelly’s color; red maddening the bull, red bringing the bull down; red being the color of valentines, of left-handedness, and of a small princess’s newfound guilty hobby. His hair was red, his cowboy boots muddy, his heart a hive of musical bees.

  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 hideout behind the waterfall. For once, the reports failed to entertain him. “I took a man’s legs,” he said to Montana Judy. “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.”

  Another penitent might have joined a grubby religious cult or stood in a dark alley waiting for someone to come along and knock him in the head. As his payment, Bernard embarked on a chemical research project of his own. He tracked down, investigated, and tested various esoteric methods of birth control. “Who knows,” he told Montana Judy, “maybe I’ll come up with something better than that poor bozo’s pill.”

  In herbal literature, it is written that comfrey is good for sprains and fit root for spasms; cascara will end constipation, wild cherry restore loss of speech; for nosebleed, buckthorn is recommended, and for pneumonia, try skunk cabbage. If you are stricken with sexual desire, the cure prescribed is lily root, and assuming that lily root fails, is unavailable, or is forsaken in the delirium of the illness, squaw vine, spikenard, and raspberry leaves all make childbirth a little easier. Western herbal literature is oddly lacking in contraceptive advice, Bernard discovered. Oddly lacking. He suspected tampering by the Church, but Bernard suspected the Church of a great many things.

  In the anthropological texts that he pilfered from public libraries on both sides of the Rockies, it was told how the influence of tree spirits and water nymphs would promote fecundity, and though Bernard did not doubt that—female members of the Woodpecker Gang demonstrated a decided tendency toward fecundity out there in the wilderness where tree spirits abounded—he wondered where the deities were who guarded against the knockup. The Eskimo of the Bering Strait, the Huichol of Mexico, the Nishinam Indians of California, the Caffre tribes of South Africa, the Basuto, the Maori, and the Anno all made dolls in the likeness of the infant that was wanted, and that act of homeopathic magic brought pregnancy galloping. But what image could be fashioned to hold would-be embryos at bay? A decoction of wasp’s nest was administered internally to Lkungen brides to make them as prolific as insects. How much of a rhinoceros would a bride have to eat in order to emulate that animal’s habit of infrequent offspring?

  In ancient times, when a people’s success—its survival, perhaps—depended upon steady multiplication, all available magic was marshaled in the promotion of fertility. It was only after the Industrial Revolution that some deterrent to fertility gradually began to become widely desirable (desirable for whole societies rather than the occasional unlucky lovers), and by the last quarter of the twentieth century, when overpopulation was a major threat to the planet, there was no longer any magic to command. Or was there? Maybe in Asia …

  Bernard saw on television, in a bar in Boulder, on a program called “You Asked for It,” some remarkable documentary footage. There was a village somewhere in India on the outskirts of which a large albino cobra lived in the rocks. For years that snake had played a starring role in a unique fertility rite. The barren women of the village had to make a pilgrimage to the white cobra’s den. There they had to kiss him—on top of his head. Yet it wasn’t enough to kiss him. To guarantee conception, they had to kiss the cobra twice. The village lost a good many of its infertile women. Bernard was fascinated by that powerful scene. He thought it would make a great breath-mint commercial. You know: “If she kisses you once, will she kiss you again?” Bernard mailed a suggestion to the Certs company. Certs responded that his judgment was questionable, not to mention his taste. Montana Judy said the same.

  From India, however, he gathered information that a tea brewed from pennyroyal and myrrh would interfere with conception up to seven days after the act. He went at once to an herb shop in Missoula and shoplifted the ingredients. East Indian sources also supplied the intelligence that regular ingestion of carrot seed was a birth control method whose effectiveness had been proven by countless generations of Hindu women. Reference to “countless generations” did not reassure him, but he acquired carrot seeds from a farmer’s supply store near Billings, and was damn near
caught in the process. Obtaining the astringent ingredients used in She-link, the traditional Chinese herbal contraceptive, further taxed the Woodpecker’s ingenuity, for preparation of She-link required chi je date, She-link flower, ling-shook root, and gomsomchu leaf: the Four Immortals, for God’s sake. Naturally, the Food and Drug Administration frowned upon the introduction of the She-link formula to America. Bernard was forced to jimmy the locks of Chinese doctors as far west as San Francisco to get his freckled paws on some ling-shook.

  Even so, he abandoned She-link as abruptly as carrot seeds and pennyroyal when he learned of lunaception. A drugless method of pinpointing ovulation by training women to resynchronize their cycles with those of the moon, lunaception landed like an astronaut on the green cheese of Bernard’s imagination. Everything about it sounded right to him, especially its lunar foundation. Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon Mythologically, woodpeckers are connected to Mars, the redheaded planet, but the Woodpecker, more so than any delegate to the aborted UFO convention, had a private line to the moon.

  On second thought, everything about lunaception didn’t please Bernard. Lunaception, as did She-link, pennyroyal, and carrot seeds, placed the burden of responsibility for birth control on the woman. Thus, for all of its potential effectiveness, it failed to completely compensate for the loss of the male pill. If Bernard was bothered by that, Montana Judy was bothered more. Understandably, Bernard had scant access to subjects for contraceptive testing. Who was going to trust an amateur gynecologist? Particularly one whose credentials included the Ten Most Wanted list.