Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

  Dr. Goldman stirred a half-amused little chuckle into his snort, much as a splash of red Burgundy might be stirred into a pot of lard. “We could have an interesting argument about that sometime,” he said. “For the present, however, let's appreciate Mr. Gitche's viewpoint. Mr. Gitche told me once that what bothered him the most about his wife's devotion to hitchhiking was its obviousness. She was afflicted with enlarged thumbs, ergo she hitchhiked. Now, had she decided, instead, to become a fine seamstress or to excel at tennis or to take up painting . . .”

  Speaking of painting, there was a Julian Gitche watercolor on the wall above Dr. Goldman's desk. It was a landscape, a Central Park scene, rather free and airy, like a hose spray of green Easter-egg dye in which some sprite or minor deity was taking a bath. One wondered what would happen to the artist's protoromantic style were he to set up his easel in the Dakota hills. And one suspects that the experience of the Dakotas is too strong for any established aesthetics to withstand. At any rate, the painting quivered a bit on its hanger when Dr. Robbins boomed:

  “There you go again! Transcendence! Wishing her to deny her thumbs by compensating for their limitations instead of affirming them by exploiting their strengths. Jesus!”

  “But hitchhiking, Robbins. What kind of affirmative activity is that? Mrs. Gitche wasn't even interested in travel. It seems to me that fairly early in life she seized upon hitchhiking as a means of coping with an understandable anxiety, and that what began as an ill-chosen defense mechanism gradually evolved into a pointless and somewhat grotesque obsession. Hitchhiking, of all things . . .”

  Dr. Robbins grasped his mustache, as if to prevent it from turning and leaving the room without him. There is a point where even hair can become exasperated. “Hitchhiking, schmitchhiking. Don't you see that it doesn't matter what activity Sissy chose? It doesn't matter what activity anyone chooses. If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. And it doesn't matter what it is that you select, because when it has been pushed far enough it contains everything else. I'm not talking about specialization. To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else. That's not it. That's tame and insular and severely limiting. I'm talking about taking one thing, however trivial and mundane, to such extremes that you illuminate its relationship to all other things, and then taking it a little bit further—to that point of cosmic impact where it becomes all other things.”

  A flicker of comprehension lit up Dr. Goldman's heavy orbs the way a flash of heat lightning might light up the nocturnal droppings of a well-fed mule. “I see,” he said. “You're referring to Gestalt—or to some far-fetched interpretation of Gestalt. Are we leading into a confrontation between Freudian and Gestalt psychology?”

  “Gestalt schmagalt,” growled Dr. Robbins. “What I'm referring to is magic.”

  Dr. Goldman shook his head wearily, even sadly. After a while he said, “In your rather abbreviated report"—he held up a single page of paper against which some rude sentences had been smacked as if slapped there by the nasty tail of a barnyard animal—"You recommend only that Mrs. Gitche be discharged and that she be encouraged to divorce her husband. Surely you're aware that there is no way in which we can therapeutically, ethically or legally encourage a patient to divorce her mate. Our business is preserving marriages, not ending them . . .”

  “Our business should be liberating the human spirit. Or if that's too idealistic for you, if that strikes you as the business of religion—which it should be, too—then our business should be assisting people to function—crazily or not isn't our concern; that's up to them—helping them to function on whatever level or levels of 'sanity' they choose to function on, not helping them to adjust and locking them up if they don't adjust.”

  Past the point of snorting, Dr. Goldman removed his horn-rimmed glasses, rubbed his eyes and said evenly, “Dr. Robbins, our fundamental differences are greater than I had imagined. I'll have Miss Waterworth schedule a conference for us next week and we can give them an airing and decide if they can be reconciled. For the present, however, my concern is for the patient. Encouraging her to divorce is, of course, out of the question. Mr. Gitche is a talented, educated sympathetic man who loves his wife a great deal. Mr. Gitche . . .”

  “Mr. Gitche has pulled his wife away from the edge and into the center. In here with the rest of us. I don't mind the center. It's big and mysterious and ambiguous—perhaps as exhilarating in its soft, shifting complexity as the edge is exhilarating in its hard, stark terminations. But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge. Normality has been a colossal challenge for Sissy and I think she's met the challenge bravely and well. However, normality is a neurosis. Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization. It's rare to discover someone who hasn't been infected, to greater or lesser degree, by that neurosis. Sissy hasn't. Yet. If she continues to be exposed, she'll eventually succumb. I think that would be a tragedy akin to sawing the horn off the last unicorn. For our sake as much as for her own, I believe Sissy should be protected from normality. Freed from the center and left to return to the edge. Out there, she's valuable. In here, she's just another disturbing noise in the zoo. Julian Gitche may be, as you say, kind and sympathetic, but he's a threat to Sissy, nonetheless. He's seduced her into a situation that is the mirror-opposite of what she believes it to be. Julian is driven by material ambitions; narrow, insatiable, intense, systematic, egocentric. In other words, he's a settler. Broad-based, timeless and dreamful, Sissy is the Indian. You're aware, Doctor, of the destruction met by the Indian when the settler lands on his shores.”

  A sigh, not a snort, was what Dr. Goldman issued next: a soft sigh like a trade wind blowing its nose against the sail of a toy boat. “Robbins, you're introducing concepts that are intriguing but, to my mind, irrelevent. Let me ask you one direct question. Do you honestly feel there is no disturbance in the personality of this woman, this woman with these . . . these thumbs, except the effects of a bad marriage?”

  “No, I never meant to imply that.” The younger man flicked the end of his mustache as if he were knocking the ash off an impotent cigar. “Sissy is suffering a bit of confusion.”

  “Ummm. And to what do you attribute this confusion?”

  “To the fact that she's simultaneously in love with an elderly hermit and a teen-aged cowgirl.”

  Dr. Goldman got his snort back. He almost choked on it. “Mein Gott man! Are you joking? Well, why didn't you mention that in your report? Surely you don't regard it lightly? You don't think it's all right?”

  Flicking the other end of his mustache, Dr. Robbins answered, “For many people, maybe for most people, being in love simultaneously with an old hermit and a teen-aged cowgirl might be a horrendous mistake. For other people, it might be absolutely right. For most people, having oral sex with anteaters may be the wrong thing to do; for a few people it may be perfect. You see my point? As for Sissy, she's finding the situation a bit confusing. I'm not sure that it's doing her any real harm.”

  The senior psychiatrist slapped his forehead. Had there been a mosquito there it would have vanished as completely as Glenn Miller, leaving only the memory of its music behind. “Mein Gott: I mean, my God. So. Well. I'd say that this evidence of homosexuality in Mrs. Gitche's libido rather firmly substantiates the fact of her emotional immaturity. You will agree with that?”

  “Nope. Not necessarily. Lesbianism is definitely on the rise. I can't believe that the many who practice it are all suffering from preadolescent fixations. No, I'm more inclined to believe that it's a cultural phenomenon, a healthy rejection of the paternalistic power structure that has dominated the civilized world for more than two thousand years. Maybe women have got to love women in
order to remind men what love is. Maybe women have got to love women before they can start loving men again.”

  Once more Dr. Goldman was rendered snortless. “Robbins,” he said softly, as if drooping from a cross, “never in my career have I encountered anyone, neither psychiatrist nor psychiatric patient, with such a hodgepodge of confounding ideas.”

  “Well, Doctor,” said Robbins, “The Chink says if it gets sloppy, eat it over the sink.”

  “The Chink? Oh, you mean Mao Tse-tung?”

  Dr. Robbins laughed so abruptly he frightened his mustache. “Yeah, yeah, right. Mao Tse-tung.”

  “Heaven help me. It's not enough I've hired a kook. He's a Communist as well.”

  Robbins laughed again. This time the mustache was ready. “So you think I'm a kook, do you? Maybe you're right, Doctor. Maybe you're right. I've never mentioned this to anyone, but as a child . . .”

  “Yes?” There was a sudden gleam in Dr. Goldman's tired eyes.

  “As a child . . .”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “As a child, I was an imaginary playmate.”

  Dr. Robbins escorted his grateful mustache out of the room.

  76.

  YOU'VE HEARD OF PEOPLE CALLING IN SICK. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well?

  It'd go like this: You'd get the boss on the line and say, “Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore.” Call in well.

  That's what Dr. Robbins did, exactly. The morning following his consultation with Dr. Goldman, he called in well and he wasn't faking. You can't fake a thing like that. It's infinitely harder to pretend you're well than to pretend you're sick.

  After telephoning, Dr. Robbins donned an electric yellow nylon shirt, and when he tucked it into a pair of maroon bell-bottoms, it was like lightning striking a full wino. Before he left his apartment, he fed both his alarm clock and his Bulova to the disposal unit. “I'm passing out of the time of day and into the time of the soul,” he announced. Then, when he considered how pretentious that sounded, he corrected himself: “Strike that!” he said. “Let's simply say that I'm well today.”

  Out on Lexington Avenue, Dr. Robbins strolled leisurely. He sat on a park bench and smoked a Thai stick. He ducked into a phone booth and looked up Gitche in the directory. Didn't call; just looked at the number and smiled. Sissy, on her own insistence and with Julian's hesitant permission, was, indeed, being discharged from the clinic that day.

  On Madison, Dr. Robbins went into a travel agency and asked to see a map of the western United States. He stared at the Sierra range of California and at Dakota and not much in between. A travel agent, who looked like Loretta Young and who appeared as if she feared Robbins's mustache had sneaked into the U.S. in a bunch of bananas, was obliged to be of service, but there was little she could do for a traveler with clockworks on his mind.

  Dr. Robbins strolled on. Without knowing it, he strolled beneath the laboratory windows behind which the Countess was pitting the full ray of his genius against that furtive deep-swimming mammal whose sea breath escapes in sultry condensations from the dank lungs of the cunt.

  In a glass display case in the lobby of the Countess's building lay a handmolded red rubber syringe—the very first Rose, the awkward prototype, the blushing original, the progenitor of the line of sensationally successful squeeze-bags whose name still adorned the largest all-girl ranch in the West. In innocence, Dr. Robbins passed it by.

  Dr. Robbins wasn't certain where he was going on that May morning. As to his eventual destination, however, he was clear. He would go to the clockworks. And to the Chink. What's more, Sissy would lead him there. You see, the healthy and unemployed psychiatrist had recently arrived at a twofold conclusion: (1) if there was any man alive who could add yeast to the rising loaf of his being, that man was the Chink; (2) if there was any woman who could butter that loaf, that woman was Sissy. Dr. Robbins was quite convinced, quite determined, quite excited, quite in love. He faced the future with a sparkling mind and a silly grin.

  However, there was a force at work that Dr. Robbins had not reckoned on, a force that Sissy had not reckoned on, a force that had not been reckoned on by anybody in North America, including the Clock People, the Audubon Society and that man who, due to someone's calling in sick (not well at all in this case) at the White House, was soon to be the new President of the United States. That force was: the whooping crane rustlers.

  Part

  V

  This is a bird that cannot compromise or adjust its way of life to ours. Could not by its very nature, could not even if we allowed it the opportunity, which we did not. For the Whooping Crane there is no freedom but that of unbounded wilderness, no life except its own. Without meekness, without a sign of humility, it has refused to accept our idea of what the world should be like. If we succeed in preserving the wild remnant that still survives, it will be no credit to us; the glory will rest on this bird whose stubborn vigor has kept it alive in the face of increasing and seemingly hopeless odds.

  —Robert Porter Allen

  77.

  IT WAS ABOUT TWO MINUTES on the tequila side of sunrise. So early the bluebirds hadn't brushed their teeth yet. Homer referred in The Odyssey to “rosy-fingered dawn.” Homer, who was blind and had no editor, referred over and over again to “rosy-fingered dawn.” Pretty soon, dawn began to think of herself as rosy-fingered: the old doctrine of life imitating art.

  Fingers—and thumbs—of rose were drumming gently, like a Juilliard professor at a jazz club, on the table top of early morning America.

  First light ventured through the windows of the bunkhouse. Softly, cowgirls turned in their beds. They made sleepy little noises, like the love cries of angel food cakes.

  Heather was dreaming about her diabetic mother, who was forever threatening to commit suicide with Hershey bars if Heather didn't come home. Almost inaudibly, Heather whimpered into her pillow. Jody was dreaming she was back in high school, taking a math exam. She remembered that she hadn't studied, and she began to sweat with embarrassment and fear. Mary was dreaming she was ascending to Heaven in a rubber life raft. In the dream, Mary wore flippers on her feet. Mary would wake up puzzled. Elaine was dreaming about the source of her bladder infection. Her nipples were erect. She was smiling. LuAnn was dreaming the dream she dreamed nearly every night, the one in which her boy friend, his dilated pupils as black as Muslim golf balls, approached her with a dripping needle. In real life, she had awakened a few hours after the fix. Two years later, her boy friend still had not come to. LuAnn was on the verge of screaming. Debbie was dreaming she could fly, and Big Red, snoring mightily, dreamed she had found a lot of money lying around on the ground. Linda was dreaming she was in bed with Kym. She woke up and discovered that it was true. She scampered back to her own bunk.

  Just in time. The sack of peyote buttons beneath Delores's head was singing her awake, as it did each morning. The forewoman stretched and rubbed her eyes. Soon she would stride down the aisle cracking her whip. No alarm clocks were necessary at the Rubber Rose. Besides, a clock radio would have played nothing but polkas.

  From the main house there floated the voodoo smell of perking coffee. Donna, whose turn it was, had already begun breakfast. Up, pardners, up. There were goats to be milked and birds to be . . . watched over.

  Plap. Plap plap plap. Bare cowgirl feet began to hit the linoleum. Feet with painted nails and feet with blisters, clean-smelling feet and feet fermenting in toe jam, tender feet, flaking feet, feet that had fidgeted indecisively in shoe stores and feet that had fallen in love with the gym floor at the prom, go-go feet, ballet-lessons-on-Saturday-mornings feet, pink feet, yellowish feet, arched feet, flat feet, massaged feet, neglected feet, beach feet, sneak feet, tickled-by-Daddy feet, feet pinched red by too-tight boots, feet that attracted glass shards and splinters and feet that imagined themselves to be clouds. Plap plap. Bare feet kissed the linoleum an
d pattered girlishly to foot lockers (in which there were no spare feet), to windows (to see what kind of weather was afoot) or out to the shitter (exactly ninety-two feet from the bunkhouse).

  Plap. Plap. Listen. There were other plaps to be heard upon that summer's dawn. Plaps sounded in cities and towns where no barefoot cowgirls trod. The author is speaking now of the plap and plap of morning newspapers, rolled and tucked, plapping against porches as newsboys demonstrated their careless aim.

  Countless newspapers landed with countless plaps on countless porches, bringing to countless readers the ball scores and comics and horoscopes and, on that particular morning, the first public notification of what many would consider a shocking ecological disaster. Different papers played the story in different ways. Perhaps the headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, succinct as it was, told it best. It read: OUR WHOOPING CRANES ARE MISSING.

  78.

  SOME FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO, the North American continent finally got up enough nerve to kick the last of the glaciers out of its parlor. Ice gone, the North American continent called in the decorators and ordered them to create an environment worthy of some classy new wildlife. “Grass is in,” the decorators announced, and they began to assemble a landscape of vast prairies, inland seas and wet savannas. A primitive pre-Pleistocene swamp bird cast a yellow eye upon the endless acres of marshy vegetation, waving grass and shallow waters and decided it liked the new décor well enough to move in. In fact, this bird liked the new décor so much it let out a whoop. Thus, inspired by its surroundings, it evolved into the whooping crane.

  The whooper was classy, all right. It combined great size with majestic beauty and a kind of shy arrogance to produce a total effect that no bird before or since has equaled. The satiny black markings on its dazzlingly white body were economically and perfectly placed; its ruby crown and cheek patches (which were, in fact, red skin bare of all feathers) provided a certain flash without being vulgar; its tapered silhouette and graceful curves were to excite artists and designers not yet born; its powerful voice could spook the spine of a predator from a half-mile away; the aloof pride with which it conducted its daily business invented the word dignity for animal dictionaries. Ranging coast to coast and from the Arctic to central Mexico, the whooping crane was surely El Birdo Supremo in North America during the Golden Age of Grass.