Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Husband. Will she find a husband?” (The bandleader bravely led the orchestra in “El Rancho Grande,” even as his pet Chihuahua was being trampled in the panic.)

  “Oh, I see.” Madame Zoe took Sissy's hand and gave it the old tall-dark-stranger squint. But she was in too deeply now to be deceptive. “I see men in your life, honey,” she said truthfully. “I also see women, lots of women.” She raised her eyes to meet Sissy's, looking for an admission of the “tendency,” but there was no signal.

  “There is most clearly a marriage. A husband, no doubt about it, though he is years away.” And feeling expansive, she added at no extra charge, “There are children, too. Five, maybe six. But the husband is not the father. They will inherit your characteristics.” Since it is impossible to tell these last two things from the configurations of the hands, Madame Zoe must have been operating on psychic powers long dormant. She might have said more, but Mrs. Hankshaw had heard plenty.

  Mother ushered daughter from the trailer as if she were leading her from the burning El Lizard Club. (At the height of the inferno, a battery of overheated tequila bottles began to explode in the flames.)

  The elder Hankshaw female had difficulty speaking. “I'm gonna take the bus on out to Mabel's, sweetie,” she said, giving Sissy a rare embrace. “You can catch a ride home iffen you want, but you promise me, word of honor, you won't git in a car with no man alone.” Then she thought to add, “And no lady alone, either. Just a married couple. You promise? And don't you worry none about the stupid stuff that woman said. We'll talk it over when I git home.”

  Sissy wasn't worried at all. Confused, maybe, but not worried. She felt somehow—important—in an obscure, off-center fashion. Although she knew nothing of such things then, she felt important in the sense that the clockworks is important. The clockworks is a long way, in every way, from the White House, Fort Knox and the Vatican, but the winds that blow across the clockworks always wear a crazy grin.

  Inside the house trailer, behind the red palm, where once again only jasmine incense and boiled cauliflower battled for olfactory supremacy, Madame Zoe crouched at a window, watching her young subject hitch a ride.

  (The conic tip led the way, cutting through the atmosphere like the bowsprit of a ship, pulling after it the slightly bent phalanx of logic, followed by a fairly gliding phalanx of will and, quivering and rolling at the end of the procession, the ever-voluptuous Mount of Venus.) Suddenly, Madame Zoe recalled a sarcastic saying, a bon mot, that she had not heard in years. It made her laugh pointedly and with little humor; she bit her lipstick and shook her wig. The saying concerned the first or most preaxial digit of the human hand, although it had nothing to do with palmistry. It went like this:

  “If you only had a thumb you could rule the world.”

  COWGIRL INTERLUDE (BONANZA JELLYBEAN)

  She is lying on the family sofa in flannel pajamas. There is Kansas City mud on the tips and heels of her boots, boots that have yet to savor real manure. Fourteen, she knows she ought to remove her boots, yet she refuses. A Maverick rerun is on TV; she is eating beef jerky, occasionally slurping. On her upper stomach, where her pajama top has ridden up, is a small deep scar. She tells everyone, including her school nurse, that it was made by a silver bullet.

  Whatever the origin of the extra hole in her belly, there are unmistakable signs of gunfire in the woodwork by the closet door. It was there that she once shot up one half of an old pair of sneakers. “Self-defense,” she pleaded, when her parents complained. “It was a outlaw tennis shoe.

  Billy the Ked.”

  11.

  SO SISSY LIVED IN RICHMOND, Virginia, in the Eisenhower Years, so called as if the passing seasons, with their eggs hatching and rivers rising, their cakes baking and stars turning, their legs dancing and hearts melting, their lamas levitating and poets doing likewise, their cheerleaders getting laid at drive-in picture shows and old men dying in rooms over furniture stores, as if they, the passing seasons, could be branded by a mere President; as if time itself could toddle out of Kansas and West Point, popularize a military jacket and seek election to Eternity on the Republican ticket.

  In the croaked air of the Eisenhower Years in Richmond, Virginia, she must have been a familiar sight. In clothes that were either too big for her or too small—floppy coats whose hems rubbed the cement, summer slacks that disclosed everything anyone might wish to know about her socks—she moved through the city (the city of which it has been said, “It is not a city at all but the world's largest Confederate museum").

  At all hours and in every weather the girl could be seen, if not admired.

  Her soon-to-be-lovely features were still getting their sea legs and at that unsteady stage of their development must have clung clumsily to the bleached deck of her face (which, due to unusually high cheekbones, appeared as if it were pitched aslant in rough waters).

  Her long, svelte body, as eloquently as it might assert itself, could not have been heard above the funky din of the clothing she wore.

  Certainly her mind didn't count for much: in the sotweed suburb of South Richmond, no mind did. Few were the schoolmates to notice the headlight shine of her eyes and wonder who was driving around inside there.

  When they said, “Here comes” (or “there goes) Sissy Hankshaw,” they meant “not a thumb more, not a thumb less.”

  For wherever she went those wads of meat went with her; those bananas, those sausages, those nightsticks, those pinkish pods, those turds of flesh. She smuggled them around town in her baggy duds, launching them on appropriate corners and regarding them always as if they were manifestations of some secret she alone understood—although in the bank-vault air of the Eisenhower Years in Richmond, Virginia, they must have stood out like sore . . .

  (It is surprising that she was so faintly remembered in Richmond in later years. When the author asked the late Dr. Dreyfus about that, the surgeon replied: “According to the artist Michelangelo, 'The human figure is the ideal ornament for the niche.' I don't suppose that means very much to you.")

  If, like the cat that looked at the world through mouse-colored glasses, she was rather insular, let it not be supposed that she was immune from indulging those heightened hormone flows and colored thoughts that, of all the trillions of visceral/cerebral reactions triggered by the limbic system of our trigger-happy brains, we single out to honor as “true human feelings.”

  One day, one spring Thursday near the end of a semester, more than three years after she had been examined by Dr. Dreyfus and a few months after Madame Zoe's special knowledge had come her way, she was invited to a party. It was to be a costume party, given by Betty Clanton, a druggist's daughter and one of the more privileged kids in that roach-gnawed, white-trash school.

  All day Thursday Sissy thought she would not attend Betty's party. All day Friday and Friday night (when she lay awake on three, yes, three pillows) she thought she would not attend Betty's party. But late Saturday afternoon, with an overtime sun nosing into everything and green froggies peeping and honeysuckle affixing a sweet faint hem to the golden pungency that hung like a curtain over the tobacco warehouses and a typewriter of birds banging out sonnets in the dogwood buds (And wilt thou have me fashion into speech Ding! Line space. Carriage return. The love I bear thee, finding words enough Ding! The birds hacking it out) and spring in general coming on like a geometric progression, she began to get ideas. For the first time in her life, perhaps (although Sunday school had occasionally moved her and although Madame Zoe's bosom and the by-now-customary mobile molestings had certainly stirred her), she felt directed by forces other than her thumbs. She heard music that was not road music; her head swayed to rhythms that were softer and lighter than the rhythms of the hitch. Something in the springtime had telephoned something in her limbic system and reversed the charges. Something had touched Sissy Hankshaw and it doesn't matter what.

  Sissy went out back and gathered feathers where her mama had recent
ly deplumed a hen. Using electrical tape, she fashioned them—slowly and sloppily—into a kind of headdress. With Jerry's old watercolor kit, she painted herself as best she could, not neglecting at the last moment to paint her hands.

  She went to Betty's costume party. She went as Chief Crazy Horse. She drank two bottles of Coke, munched a package of Nabs, listened to the new Fats Domino records, smiled at some jokes and left early. Only two thin rivulets streaked her warpaint to reveal how she felt when Billy Seward, Betty's boy friend and the most popular guy in school, bounded through the door, amid shrieks of laughter, wearing giant papier-mâché thumbs. Ach! Billy had come as Sissy Hankshaw.

  12.

  "WHEN YOU GROW UP with somebody you just sort of accept them, even if they are odd,” said Betty Seward née Clanton. She checked the coffeepot. It was still perking. Over and over the coffee turned in the pot. Its wheels sang in the interviewer's nostrils. They were singing a song of the past.

  “I mean, she wasn't a freak, exactly, or a loony; she was a right smart girl and right polite and nice, but you know, she did have this peculiar development; but what I'm saying is, we got pretty used to it over the years, except that every now and then . . .

  “I remember the night we graduated from junior high. When your name was called you were supposed to get up and walk across the stage and take your diploma from the principal with your left hand and shake hands with him with your right hand. But Sissy wouldn't shake hands. Not even with the principal. It wasn't that she couldn't; she just wouldn't. Mr. Perkins was pretty irritated. And a lot of the kids complained that Sissy was making a mockery of our graduation.

  “There's an old abandoned rock quarry in South Richmond, all filled up with water, you know, and we used to swim there when we got the chance. The day after graduation our class was gonna have a picnic there—unchaperoned, weren't we devils? all on the sly—and some older kids who drove cars were gonna pick us up and take us. We were supposed to pick up Sissy, but just for spite we decided not to. We left her. Well, about noon somebody saw her out on the road catching a ride, hitchhiking like she did, big as life, not scared or ashamed but getting into any car that would stop for her, but she never showed up at the picnic. All day long she hitched up and down the road that runs near the quarry, up and down, back and forth, passing again and again. But she didn't ever stop; she just kept passing it by.

  “And, you know, most of us at the picnic got sunburned, and a third of us got poison oak, and a bunch of us got drunk and sick off beer the older kids bought us and we caught the dickens from our parents, and one boy got bit by a watersnake and somebody sat on broken glass. And I thought to myself, hmmm, that Sissy's the only one that came out of that day okay; nothing happened to her 'cause she just kept moving. You know what I mean?”

  Mrs. Seward left her chair to unplug the coffeepot.

  “Right off, I don't remember how old she was when she found out she was part Indian. Her mama's family, a lot of them, had lived out West, in the Dakotas, and one of them had married a squaw, I don't recollect the tribe . . .

  “Siwash? That's right. That sounds like it. So one time Sissy's aunt—her mama's sister—came here for a visit from Fargo, and there was a lot of fuss about integration here then; everybody was all upset about the Supreme Court telling us we'd have to go to school with the colored, and I guess the Hankshaws were discussing it like everybody else when the aunt let the cat out of the bag about Indian blood in the family. Well!! Sissy's daddy got furious. I don't know why; a Indian's not the same as a nigra. But I guess he just about divorced his poor wife. Sissy, though, was right pleased. She figured out she was one-sixteenth—what was it?—Siwash. She talked about it at school. We'd never seen her so excited. She showed a lot of interest in Indians after that, although not as much as she showed in hitching rides. Of course, she didn't look a bit Indian. She was as fair as an apricot. But for a while about then she started putting designs on her poor thumbs. Mercy! Her own brothers had to hold her down and wash them off.”

  Having perked sufficiently, coffee made the short trip from pot to cup. It traveled direct. There were no other stops on its route. Betty Clanton Seward produced a box of Saltines and a brown and yellow aerosol can.

  “This stuff is the latest thing in the stores,” she said, brandishing the can. “You spray a regular old soda cracker with it . . .” zzzzt zzzzt “. . . and it makes it taste like a chocolate chip cookie. Here.”

  The interviewer declined. He wished to ask clear and concise questions concerning a former classmate of Mrs. Seward's. He didn't want his mouth full of soda crackers, even if they did taste like chocolate chip cookies. (What won't those Japanese think of next?)

  “There were times, I'll admit, when I'd look at her sitting in school, sitting so straight and smiling so secretively and all, and I'd think that maybe there was something special about her, something other than her physical condition, I mean; something positive. She couldn't take the secretarial program because she couldn't use a typewriter; she had good ideas in art class but she wasn't able to bring them off; heck, she only got a C in Home Ec 'cause she couldn't sew, and everybody got A or B in Home Ec. Just the same, and even though her future looked hopeless, I had this feeling that she could teach us others something. Only I never figured out what it was, exactly. And I guess I was as, ah, insensitive to her as the rest. One evening after dark when she thought nobody would see her, she brought a whole armload of yellow jonquils that she'd picked—kicked out by the roots, actually—alongside some road or other and left them on my front porch. She kinda liked me, I think.” Betty Clanton Seward tugged at a strand of her hair as a preoccupied milkmaid might tug at a teat in the dawn. “She was real quiet, but I heard her anyway. I was upstairs putting in curlers and I looked out the window and saw her. I could tell who it was because the moon was shining on her . . . her abnormality.

  “Well, I couldn't keep my big mouth shut. I told the kids at school about it and they teased her pretty hard.

  “That wasn't the worst time, though. The worst time was when I gave a costume party and I invited Sissy, partly because I felt sorry for her but also because she was, I don't know how to put it into words, she fascinated me, in a sense. At any rate, Bill—he's my husband now, he's a chemist at the Philip Morris plant, you oughta talk with him—Bill made himself a huge pair of thumbs outta paper and chicken wire and that was his costume. He didn't really mean to be cruel, but you know how young folks are. Thoughtless.”

  She sighed. She milked another half-pint from her hair. Then, as had the coffee before her, she perked.

  “Goodness, it's nearly two. I've gotta start getting my face on. Can you excuse me? Young Willie has to be at the doctor's at three. He's gotta have a wart burned off today.”

  Whereupon the ten-year-old boy who had been loitering on the edges of the interview glomming crackers by the dozen presented his unshod foot—washed, thank God, in recent times—and sure enough, there was a wart atop it the size of a burr. The interviewer wondered why Mrs. Seward simply didn't spray the wart until it tasted like a chocolate chip cookie and let Willie eat it off.

  The interviewer didn't tell Mrs. Seward that.

  There was something else the interviewer didn't tell Mrs. Seward.

  He didn't tell her that the next time persons adorned themselves with fraudulent thumbs in imitation of Sissy Hankshaw, it would be an act of homage.

  Mrs. Seward would have thought it ridiculous, an homage of tree-bark thumbs waving impertinently in the face of the twentieth century like a forest of prehistoric diplomas that expect no handshake in return. As a matter of fact, it was a bit ridiculous. But because it was ridiculous, we know it must be true.

  COWGIRL INTERLUDE (VENUSIAN)

  On Venus, the atmosphere is so thick that light rays bend as if made of foam rubber. The bending of light is so extraordinary that it causes the horizon to tilt upward. Thus, if one were standing on Venus one could see the opposite side of the planet by looking directly ov
erhead.

  Perhaps it is best that we on Earth resist the temptation to thicken our atmosphere. Maybe we should give second considerations to those leaders who insist we learn to think of smog as our friend.

  Imagine that you are a cowgirl, trotting your pony in the grassy hills of the Dakotas. Suddenly you hear a wild trumpeting cry. You rear back in the saddle and look aloft—expecting to see a flight of whooping cranes, dancing in midair to their own loud music. Instead, you gaze upon a bugler blowing reveille on the other side of the world. The Chinese army is bivouacked all over the sky.

  13.

  ONE JUNE, Richmond, Virginia, woke up with its brakes on and kept them on all summer. That was okay; it was the Eisenhower Years and nobody was going anywhere. Not even Sissy. That is to say, she wasn't going far. Up and down Monument Avenue, perhaps; hitching up and down that broad boulevard so dotted with enshrined cannons and heroic statuary that it is known throughout the geography of the dead as a banana belt for snuffed generals.

  The old Capital of the Confederacy marked time in the heat. Its boots kicked up a little tobacco dust, a little wisteria pollen, and that was it. Each morning, including Sundays, the sun rose with a golf tee in its mouth. Its rays were reflected, separately but equally, by West End bird baths, South Side beer cans, ghetto razors. (In those days Richmond was convoluted like the folds of the brain, as if, like the brain, it was attempting to prevent itself from knowing itself.)

  In the evenings, light from an ever-increasing number of television sets inflicted a misleading frostiness on the air. It has been said that true albinos produce light of a similar luminescence when they move their bowels.

  Middays, the city felt like the inside of a napalmed watermelon.

  Whenever possible, men, women, children and pets kept to the shade, talked little, stirred less, watched the blades of fans go 'round as is the nature of fan business. Only Sissy Hankshaw voluntarily frequented those places where tar was sticky, where fried gravel sparkled, where weeds wilted, where asphalt crumbled (the Devil's leftover birthday cake), where worn concrete translated into Braille long bitter arguments between the organic and inorganic levels of life. (If you have ever licked nickel or kissed steel, you know the arguments.)