Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

HER THUMBS HAD STOPPED HIM. Her thumbs were good at that. If the man who cried “Stop the world, I want to get off!” had only had Sissy's thumbs . . .

  She had stopped him cold on the side of Siwash Ridge. So, what next? He wore the wary look of a wild animal. He wouldn't stay stopped long. It was her move. What could she say? His gaze went through her like beavers through a paper palm tree. His was the look of the strong who will not tolerate weaklings. She must speak and she must speak with prehensility, for not even her thumbs would stop him a second time. It was imperative that she say the right thing. He was turning as if to scamper off again.

  “Well,” said Sissy, with what passed for nonchalance. “Aren't you going to shake your whanger at me?”

  It broke him up. He slapped his thighs and giggled hysterically. Ha has, ho hos and hee hees squirted out of his nose and through the gaps in his teeth. When the laughter finally died a nervous chipmunk death, he spoke. “Follow me,” he said, in a voice unaccustomed to invitation. “I'll fix you supper.”

  Follow him she did, although he set a powerful pace up the tricky twilit trail.

  “I'm a friend of Bonanza Jellybean's,” she said between puffs.

  “I know who you are,” he said without looking back.

  “Oh? Well, there's been some trouble on the ranch. I came up here to get out of the way. It's so dark now I doubt if I could find my way back down. If you could help . . .”

  “Save your breath for the climb,” he said. His voice wore no pants.

  From the top of the butte there could still be seen light in the west. The haunted shapes of the badlands were silhouetted navy blue against a pumpkin-colored horizon. To the east, across shadowed hills, the prairie lay on its back in the dark, hidden, yet making felt its awesome flatness, a flatness that flavors so much of America, beginning with her emotions and her taste; a flatness that makes a perfect surface for those wheels of Detroit whose rotations are for millions the only escape from the chronically flat. Sissy turned from east to west and back again. The faintly lit badlands were so tortured and melodramatic they seemed, like the prose in a Dostoyevsky novel, almost a corny joke. The blacked-out prairie, on the other hand, had a style identical to that of rural weekly newspapers throughout the middle of the nation: blandness in such high concentration as to become finally poisonous. An owl flew over the ridge from Crime and Punishment to the Mottburg Gazette, scanning the pages for a literate rodent, asking the librarian for a whooo-done-it.

  Directly below them, lights twinkled at the Rubber Rose. The ranch was quiet. Sissy could imagine showers running full blast in the bunkhouse as glossy pubes, folded labia and hooded clitorises were lathered and scrubbed clean of the perfume that had been allowed to accumulate to plague the Countess. Sissy imagined she heard popping washcloths, girlish laughter.

  When she had caught her breath, Sissy was led to the depression and down a ladder of sticks. The Chink built a fire, an open fire, the depression itself being adequate protection from winds. He roasted yams. He heated meadowlark stew. The stew contained Chun King water chestnuts. Their texture did not change in the cooking. A lesson.

  After supper, eaten in silence upon a rough wooden bench, the Chink went into the cave and returned with a tiny peppermint-striped plastic transistor radio. He switched it on. Their auditory nerves were immediately jangled by “The Happy Hour Polka.” Still clutching the radio in one hand, the Chink hopped into the wheel of firelight and began to dance.

  Sissy in her travels had never seen anything quite like it. The old geezer heeled and toed, skipped and hopped. He flung his bones; he flung his beard. “Yip! Yip!” he yodeled. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Arms swimming, feet firecrackering, he danced through two more polka records and might have had a fourth except that the music was suspended for a news report. The international situation was desperate, as usual.

  “Personally, I prefer Stevie Wonder,” confessed the Chink, “but what the hell. Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to anything if you really feel like dancing.” To prove it, he got up and danced to the news.

  When the music commenced again with “The Lawrence Welk is a Hero of the Republic Polka,” the Chink lifted Sissy by her shoulders and guided her onto his pock-marked dance floor. “But I don't know how to polka,” she protested.

  “Neither do I,” said the Chink. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” In a second they were traipsing over the limestone, arm in arm. Their shadows reeled against the curves of the depression. Night birds flew past with trembling feathers. A bat fluttered out of the cave, took one radar reading and headed for Kenny's Castaways.

  When they had danced their fill, the Chink escorted Sissy to the opposite, and darkest, side of the depression and sat her down upon a pile of soft stuff: dried wheatgrass, faded Indian blankets and old down pillows without cases. The stuff reeked. It was that unmistakable sex blend of mushrooms, chlorine and tide pool. And cutting through that odor, the equally unmistakable smell of Bonanza Jellybean: clove, butterscotch Life Savers and a lotion made from cactus juices, which she rubbed daily upon the spot where she had been shot, so she said, by a silver bullet.

  “So this is how Jelly spends her visits to the Chink,” thought Sissy. She started to wonder whether the other cowgirls, manless as they were, suspected—but halfway through that wonder she interrupted it to wonder if the Chink thought he was going to help himself to her. She had always been passive when it came to being pawed, pinched and the like, but no man had ever taken her against her will. In fact, no man had ever taken her but Julian.

  Just then the Chink did an astonishing thing. Without preamble, without hesitation, the white-maned Jap reached out and grasped her thumbs! He squeezed them, caressed them, covered them with wet kisses. All the while, he cooed to them, telling them how beautiful and exceptional and incomparable they were. Not even Julian had ever done that, you bet. Even Jack Kerouac hadn't dared touch her thumbs, although he had been fascinated by them and had written to them a poem on a cornhusk, an ode that might have been widely published had not it been eaten by a hungry hobo as Kerouac and the boys boxcared into Denver to search for Neal Cassady's daddy, the most missing man in the history of American letters, leaving it up to this author to tell the story of those awesome appendages.

  Even Bonanza Jellybean hadn't loved Sissy's thumbs.

  As we might imagine, Sissy was bowled over. She was frightened, stunned, elated, moved almost to tears. Apparently sincere, the Chink extended his adoration of the digits far into the night. When at last he got around to adoring the rest of her, her heart, like her thumbs, was aglow.

  “If this be adultery, make the most of it,” she cried. As he plunged into her, she arched her spread bottom against the blankets and reared up to meet him halfway.

  70.

  "SO, YOU HAD SEXUAL INTERCOURSE with the old man?” asked Dr. Robbins.

  “Repeatedly,” blushed Sissy.

  “And how was it? I mean, how do you feel about it now?”

  “Er, I'm not really sure. You see, sex with Julian is like hitching a ride around the block on a fire engine. With the Chink, it was like hitching from Chicago to Salt Lake City in a big old nineteen fifty-nine Buick Roadmaster.” She paused to ascertain if her similes had been understood. Dr. Robbins was pulling and releasing his mustache, pulling and releasing, as if his mustache were a window shade in a cheap hotel. The window shade wouldn't hang the way Dr. Robbins wanted it to.

  Sissy decided to elucidate.

  “With Julian, it's fast and furious. It's always been sort of desperate. There's such need. We cling to each other, like we were holding on with our genitals to keep from falling into emptiness, a kind of lonely void. I have a feeling that it's like that with a lot of lovers. But with the Chink, it was completely relaxed and smooth and slow and, well, nasty. He giggled and grinned and scratched all the time, and could go for ages without orgasm. A real Roadmaster. Once, he ate yam puddin
g while he was balling me. Fed it to me, too—with his fingers. He licked it off my nipples; I licked it off his balls. I felt like we were a couple of baboons or something. I liked it. I guess I miss it. But no more than I miss it with Jellybean.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. Umm. Well, let's stick to the Chink. During those three days of . . . of, er, lovemaking . . .”

  “It was lovemaking, Doctor. Even though it was nasty. Maybe especially because it was nasty. Love is smutty business, you know.”

  Dr. Robbins pulled hard on the mustache window shade. It came down with such force it nearly tore loose from its roller. “The old geezer really made you feel something, didn't he?”

  “How could I help feeling something? He adored my thumbs.”

  Dr. Robbins looked hard at Sissy's preaxial digits, then at his own. Magnitude was the only appreciable difference. In both sets of thumbs, Sissy's and his own, Dr. Robbins could see shafts, flat on the volar surface, smooth and rounded on the dorsal surface, that is, semicylindrical in shape. He knew that these bones were bound together with ligaments and cartilages. He remembered that the thumb joint is officially called the carpometacarpal joint, although it is informally referred to as the “saddle joint.” Saddle joint. That's nice. Cowgirls could relate to that.

  He knew that when Sissy bent a phalanx, revolving took place around an axis passing transversely, determining the movement in a sagittal plane, just as it did when he bent a phalanx. It was just more of a production number with Sissy, that was all.

  With effort he could harken back to med school and recall the musculature of the thumb, thinking that a flexor pollicis brevis is a flexor pollicis brevis, regardless of its size.

  But then Dr. Robbins looked at his patient's thumbs again—and suddenly the difference seemed more extensive than scale. He saw a pair of hammerhead sharks, devouring with a sharkish hunger the space around them. He blinked, and in the blinking the sharks were replaced by a couple of pears, full and luscious, swaying there in their outsized sweetness as if Cézanne had painted them on a canvas of air. Again he blinked, and . . .

  Sissy noticed his blinking; perceived the unsatisfactory comparison. “Maybe, Doctor,” she said, “my thumbs have known poetry and yours have not.” She paused. “Or maybe it's simply this: you have thumbs; I am thumbs.”

  The shade shot to the top of the window, wrapping itself noisily around its roller.

  “During those three days of lovemaking,” resumed Dr. Robbins, the stubborn bastard, “the hermit obviously talked to you. He told you about his background and something of his philosophy. You've graciously shared his words with me . . .”

  “I needed to talk about him to somebody. I need to talk about Jellybean, too.”

  “Right. Right. We'll get to her. But I'm curious. Did he say anything else? Did he say anything about uh, well, about life, anything further about, anything that I might . . .”

  Sissy smiled. A skinny bumblebee with Con Edison soot on its fur cruised her psychiatrist's mustache (perhaps a few of the hairs were still sticky with wine), but Robbins paid it no mind. Dr. Goldman was standing in the French doors (perhaps gathering courage to finally interrupt this interview), but Robbins ignored him, too. Sissy's smile broadened. “The Chink said that some people run after sages the way others run after gold. He said we've produced a generation of spiritual panhandlers, begging for coins of wisdom, banging like bums on every closed door. He said if an old man moves into a shack or a cave and lets his beard grow, people will flock from miles around just to read his NO TRESPASSING signs.

  “Is that why you're so interested in the Chink, Doctor? Do you think he knows something that the rest of the world doesn't? Something that can contribute to our salvation?”

  Turning loose the shade, letting it hang any way it damn well pleased, Dr. Robbins retorted, “No, no, a thousand times no! In the first place, I distrust completely any man who holds himself up as an answer to those who can't find the inner resources to overcome their own sense of time-entrapment and loneliness. In the second place, I'm not the least concerned with salvation because I'm not convinced there's anything to be saved from. My position is this: I'm a psychiatrist who has been betrayed by the brain. That's akin to an astronomer betrayed by starlight. Or a cook betrayed by garlic. Nevertheless, I have developed an outlook on life that amounts to both a form of wisdom and a means of survival. It isn't perfected yet, but it gets me by—and to those very rare patients who possess the guts and imagination to pick up on it, it might set a helpful example. Any psychiatrist or psychologist whose own life isn't happy and whole enough to be exemplary isn't worth the hide it takes to upholster his couch. He ought to be horsewhipped and sued for malpractice. But, to return to the point, as soon as you began to speak of the Chink, I sensed a rapport, an overview similar—perhaps—to my own. Maybe he has notions about the ebb and flow of the cosmic custard that are improvements upon mine. Maybe not. If not, c'est la frigging vie. If so, if might be beneficial to both of us, you and me, to rap about them. It sure as hell beats talking about 'inverted compensation.'”

  “In that case,” said Sissy, obviously pleased, “I'd be pleased. To be honest, I don't know whether the Chink has anything of value to offer or not. He didn't claim to, but that could have been a coverup. I'll tell you as much as I can remember of our conversations, such as they were, and you can judge for yourself. Fair enough?”

  “Let 'er rip,” said Dr. Robbins, as if speaking of the window shade that hung in tatters from his upper lip.

  71.

  PRAIRIE. Isn't that a pretty word? Rolls off the tongue like a fat little moon. Prairie must be one of the prettiest words in the English language. No matter that it's French. It's derived from the Latin word for “meadow” plus a feminine suffix. A prairie, then, is a female meadow. It is larger and wilder than a masculine meadow (which the dictionary defines as “pasture” or “hayfield"), more coarse, more oceanic and enduring, supporting a greater variety of life.

  If the prairie may be compared topographically to a rug, then the Dakota hills are prairie with bowling balls under the rug. The flora and fauna of the Dakota hills are much the same as those of the prairie that adjoins them. From a cliff high above, the Chink was pointing out to Sissy some of the organisms that choose to live in those hills. He pointed out different kinds of grasses: wheatgrass and little bluestem, June grass and dropseed, needlegrass and side-oats grama. He pointed out flowers: asters and goldenrod, snakeroot and cone flowers, prairie roses and purple clover. He said clover was delicious; he ate it often for breakfast, grazing in it like a goat. He pointed out prairie dog villages and badger rathskellers. He pointed out where they could find a coyote or a golden eagle if they needed one. He pointed out where his meadowlark traps were set, and the rocks where the best frying-size rattlesnakes hung out. The Chink pointed out the habitats of rabbits and burrowing owls, weasels and grouse. Although the millions of little eyeballs certainly could not be seen from Siwash Ridge, the hills were micey and the Chink told Sissy of mice, too: deer mice, meadow mice, harvest mice, pocket mice and kangaroo rats. The Chink must have spoken, intimately, of every creature that lived in the Dakota hills (not to mention those that, like the whooping cranes, were just passing through) except one. Cowgirls.

  “What's the problem with you and the cowgirls?” asked Sissy eventually. They were perched directly above the Rubber Rose. It looked like a toy ranch from there, a miniature that might have been carved by Norman the pastry chef, had he but toes enough and time. “Why aren't you more friendly to them?” The Chink only shrugged. His gaze was focused on Siwash Lake, where several more whooper flights had joined the early arrivals.

  “You obviously get along with Jellybean, that horny little sneak. And poor Debbie thinks you're some kind of god. But most of the girls agree with Delores. Delores says you're a god, all right. She says the way you sit up here so high and mighty is just like our big daddy macho God: paranoid, ill-t
empered and totally aloof.”

  The shaggy Jap snickered. “Delores is right about God,” he said. “He's best known by his absence. Judaeo-Christian culture owes its success to the fact that Jehovah never shows his face. What better way to control the masses than through fear of an omnipotent force whose authority can never be challenged because it is never direct?”

  “But you aren't like that.”

  “Of course I'm not like that. I'm a man, not a god. And if I were a god, I wouldn't be Jehovah. The only similarity between Jehovah and me is that we're bachelors. Jehovah almost alone of the ancient gods never married. Never even went out on a date. No wonder he was such a neurotic, authoritative prick.”

  “But look at you,” Sissy insisted. “People come from all over to seek your help and you won't let them within forty yards.”

  “What makes you think I have anything helpful to give them?”

  Sissy wheeled on him, turning her slender back to the hills and prairie. “You've told me lots of wonderful things. Don't be coy! You may not be an oracle—I don't know—but you're wise enough to help these people who seek you out, if you chose to.”

  “Well, I don't choose to.”

  “Why not?” By then Sissy was so full of Chink semen she squished when she walked. She felt she had a right to probe his personality.

  The old hermit sighed, though the grin never left his lips. “Look,” he said, “these young people who seek me out, they're wrong about me. They're looking at me through filters that distort what I am. They hear that I live in a cave on a butte, so they jump to the conclusion that I lead a simple life. Well, I don't and I won't and I wouldn't. Simplicity is for simpletons!” The Chink underscored that remark by tossing a fair-sized chunk of limestone over the cliff. Look out deer mice! meadow mice! harvest mice! pocket mice! kangaroo rats! Look out below!

  “Life isn't simple; it's overwhelmingly complex. The love of simplicity is an escapist drug, like alcohol. It's an antilife attitude. These 'simple' people who sit around in drab clothes in bleak rooms sipping peppermint tea by candlelight are mocking life. They are unwittingly on the side of death. Death is simple but life is rich. I embrace that richness, the more complicated the better. I revel in disorder and . . .”