by Tom Robbins
Under normal conditions, the Secretary might have donned the Pendleton wool shirt his wife had given him for their twenty-second wedding anniversary (Or was it the twenty-third? His brain couldn't remember), requisitioned a jet and gone out personally to lead a massive crane hunt. Now that would have been good politics. Ha ha! Then, when those kooky environmentalists got in a snit because his branch of government was allowing industry to develop the land the way God intended it to be developed, he could say, “Trust me, friends; I have proven myself an ardent conservationist. I am the man who rescued our whooping cranes!”
Alas, normal conditions did not prevail. The major oil companies were in the act of pulling off a daring economic coup, a brilliant piece of business, on the whole, but one that had of necessity created a simulated shortage of petroleum products, and the citizenry, not understanding what was best for it, was bemoaning what had been labeled an “energy crisis.” The average working man was a helluva lot more concerned about the energy crisis than he was about a missing flock of goony birds, the Secretary reasoned quite accurately; the Secretary wasn't convinced the average working man gave a moldy tail feather about those missing birds. Were the Secretary to authorize a large-scale air search for the whoopers, there would most surely be adverse reaction to the quantities of fuel an expedition of that size would require. He simply could not justify such an expenditure of precious petroleum.
So he would do this: he would keep a single light plane plying the wide and capricious migration route; one plane, in the air daily. If the working stiffs complained, he could say, “We've got a little bitty economy-sized Cessna looking around for those birds, boys; that's it.” If the conservationists bitched, he could say, “I've got a modern up-to-date reconnaissance aircraft with radar and all the latest equipment in the sky this very moment searching every inch of isolated territory for those marvelous herons, and I won't rest until they are safely back where they belong.” Umm. Yes. Yes, indeed. All bases touched. Good work, faithful brain. You've earned a siesta.
Politics served, the Secretary reassured himself that the herons or cranes or whatever they were would turn up in the near future. Good Lord, there were hundreds of square miles of lowland marsh in Saskatchewan that hadn't even been peeked at yet. The birds were in there, probably, or nestled into some muskeg swamp in the Canuck boonies. They'd show up eventually, safe and sound. If only the media would let the matter drop, the public majority would forget it quicker than a Bufferin can dissolve in the cutaway belly of a TV doll.
Indeed, the media might have let the matter drop. And the masses might have forgotten the vanished birds. If it hadn't been for Jim McGhee.
One evening toward sunset, the Canadian field biologist stood up from his bottle of Uncle Ben's and walked away into the bush without pack or provisions.
On his third morning in the wilderness, after three chill nights among sleepers who do not snore, a bedraggled McGhee was sitting on a log when he saw a snake slink by. The snake was moving fast. It carried a card under its tongue. The card was the jack of hearts. “I must get to Delores del Ruby at once,” hissed the snake. It slithered away toward the south.
Behind in Fort Smith, McGhee had left a note. There was no mention in the note of McGhee's ex-wife or of his two little freckle-faced sons. But the note made numerous references to whoopers, closing, in fact, with the line “I have gone to join them in extinction.”
So, to the Secretary of the Interior's chagrin, the missing flock was once again warm copy. The flurry touched off by Jim McGhee was characterized, somewhat sensationally, by this Page One-filling headline in the New York Daily News: WHOOPING CRANE SUICIDE.
81.
SISSY. You darling. What's happening? You're holed up on East Tenth Street, growing pale. Pale as a phantom tangled in lace curtains. Pale as Easter. Pale as the foam on a maniac's lips. Even your thumbs are losing their cheery sanguine sheen.
What's happening, honey? Outside, it's turning warm. Folks in the less respectable tenements are beginning to take the evening air from their fire escapes. Down the street, below Avenue B, the Puerto Rican husbands have moved their domino games onto the sidewalks. The little bow-wows and woof-woofs are starting to pant again. Always a bad sign. Julian says you won't be using your air conditioner as much this summer. Energy crisis.
Sissy, the sun is making personal appearances daily, hamming it up in typical Leo fashion; but you, what do you think you are, a mushroom? Two mushrooms?
Unquestionably, you have a lot to think over. If you have lived your whole life in an unrealistic manner, as so many people have claimed, then you suppose that for the past year and a half you have been taking reality lessons. You've had some powerful teachers, too. Julian, Bonanza Jellybean, the Chink, Dr. Robbins.
From two of those teachers you have learned that in olden times everything was run by women. And that everything was better then. That is stunning information. You wonder what it should mean to you, personally. Julian says it's rubbish, that most anthropologists dispute the matriarchal theory. On that subject, Dr. Robbins has been silent.
Dr. Robbins does telephone you, however. About once a week. Just checking up on a former patient, he says. His style amuses you. He invites you to lunch, to opium dens, to a flea circus. You refuse. You think he wants to fuck you. It would be fun, but not worth it. Definitely not worth it. You may know next to zilch about reality, but you know a thing or two about magic. Your thumbs taught you. Magic requires a certain purity. Without purity, magic weakens. You still have hopes that you and Julian can create together a magical relationship. So you try now to keep it pure.
Julian has become quite understanding. He doesn't interrupt your thinking anymore. You sit on the bed by the empty birdcage, run through your exercises and let the cow of your mind eat its way out of the haystack that has collapsed on it. You feel that you will stay in this new life that is so much stranger to you than your old strange one. You feel that you will stay with Julian. In a year or two, when the time is right for both of you, you think you might have Julian's baby.
Oh Sissy! Have you forgotten, then, Madame Zoe's prophecy?
82.
SISSY, don't you believe you ought to go out for a hot dog? Or a wedge of pizza? You know, some delicacy that can be balanced between sets of fingers without involving thumbs. Up First Avenue, near Bellevue Hospital, there's a pushcart. The walk would do you good. The sunshine.
Couldn't you think just as well, if you must think, in Tompkins Square Park? On a wino-nourishing bench where pigeons pop their buttons? You have a way with birds.
Clever, isn't it, Sissy, the way the author turned the subject to birds? Have birds been on your mind lately? What was your reaction to the article in this morning's Times? The one that reported that Congress had given the Justice Department the authority to deal severely with any person or persons found to be interfering with the safety or free movement of the world's last flock of whooping cranes.
You say you aren't thinking about whooping cranes? Well, if you say so.
You aren't thinking about cranes this morning. You're thinking about . . . time.
The Clock People are waiting for the end of time. The Chink says it's going to be a long wait.
You wonder, as so many have wondered, did time have a beginning? Will it stop? Or are the past and the future manufactured by the present? Such questions are as important as they are unfashionable.
You read where Joe DiMaggio ordered that fresh red roses be placed on Marilyn Monroe's grave every three days, forever. Not for Joe DiMaggio's lifetime, mind you, or the duration of Hollywood, its films and its cemeteries, but forever. And you think, “If there is an end of time, Joe DiMaggio is going to have some money coming back.”
83.
SO. SISSY. You don't go out much. Only occasionally do you even look outside. From your windows as from windows everywhere, nowadays, you can see the cake crumbling.
Julian says we're heading for a depression. Or worse. He mentions
famines, plagues, purges. When he says these things, he cocks his dark head to one side, as if, like the Mohawk he ought to be, he can hear famine gathering its dusty forces, preparing to march over from the Sahara, India, Starving Armenia. He hears Panic in the dressing room, putting on its skeleton suit. He hears the sizzling silence of the energy crisis. “Here in America we are reverting to our native fascism,” says this native American, ignoring twelve thousand years of his own people's history. The international situation is desperate, as usual.
Not overly optimistic, Julian feels, nevertheless, that if a liberal Democrat is elected President in 1976, a world economic poop-out can be avoided. As for Dr. Robbins, he just laughs into the telephone. “The cake is crumbling,” he says to you in an awed whisper. “Isn't it grand?”
You don't know if it's grand or horrible. You only know that hitch-hiking didn't bring it on. Hitchhiking can't stop it.
In the tub, you cause a thumb to plow through the scented water. How evenly the bubbles break before its sleek snout; how perfect its wake. Then you jerk your wrist in a special, staccato way, and suddenly the thumb is twitching crazily underwater, like a diver who contacted mercury poisoning sucking off a mermaid.
Thus you amuse yourself. You smile. But there are wrinkled tracks on your brow. Did whooping cranes make them?
What's that? Someone at the door. Julian leaves off his painting to answer. Well, surprise, surprise. You couldn't mistake that nasty drawl.
The Countess hasn't been around in quite a while. Julian painted ahead and has no more to do for him. And since your husband has begun to paint for a German account, it isn't likely he'll get any more calls for pastoral landscapes suffused with the luminous haze of Yoni Yum or silvered with dreamy drops of Dew. The Countess likes to be exclusive, if not unique. As for you, you haven't had a modeling assignment since the Dakota debacle. Your eyes, while still beautiful, have lost some of their innocence; your mouth, while still ripe, has lost some of its perk. Too, your little sojourn in Dr. Goldman's spa for half-rich fuck-ups couldn't have enhanced your career. Oh well. You dry and wrap yourself and patter in to see your old benefactor.
Powdered stubble pricks your face as you kiss. Upon his monocle are the dried deposits of sauces that no French chef will ever stir again. In a voice that sounds the way a can of cheap dog food would sound if a can of cheap dog food could speak, he tells you you are looking swell. “Domesticity, the male's meat, the female's poison, seems to become you,” he says. A can of Skippy with a slight lisp.
And how is the Countess? “Shit O dear!” he exclaims. “Sales are down more than ten percent. Are things so desperate that women can't spend a few pennies to control their atavistic stench? I ask you. A samurai warrior, before going into battle, would burn incense in his helmet so that if an enemy took his head he would at least offer his beheader a pleasant aroma. Now, it appears to me that no matter how bleak a future a woman faces, she could at least face it with an inoffensive vagina.”
“You're convinced, then, the future is bleak?” asks Julian. He had been painting a sprite beside a pellucid pool.
The Countess's store teeth clack compulsively. Rat a tat tat! Dental gangbusters. “Indeed,” he says. “This country is in one hell of a mess.”
“It all depends on how you look at it,” you say.
Julian and the Countess pause and stare at you expectantly. They suppose that you are going to explain yourself, to tell them how national events may be viewed in a light that makes them seem less messy. But you have nothing to add. You meant only what you said, that it all depends on how you look at it, that everything, always, depends on how it is perceived, and that the perceiver has the ability to adjust his perceptions.
Conversation resumes. Julian and the Countess make small talk about small issues: the economy, politics. You are in postbath terrycloth, feeling a bit drowsy.
Suddenly, the Countess whirls at you. He gets right in your face. His smile looks as if it had been rear-ended at an intersection. He cracks a question at you; it is like Delores cracking her whip. “Why haven't you spoken out about the whooping cranes, Sissy?” Crack!
“What . . . what do you mean?”
“You know very well what I mean. I've been working day and night in the lab and haven't paid attention to the news. But last evening I heard that the whooping cranes were missing. The whole bloody flock. Truman gave me the details. He was practically in tears. There's been a furor about it . . .”
“Yes, it's been in the papers incessantly,” interrupts Julian.
“There's been a furor about it, and rightly so. My question is, why haven't you spoken out? I know where those cranes are, and so do you.”
Julian gawks at you. Bewilderment widens his eyes.
“What do you mean?” Your voice is as soft and tremulous as a butterfly's good-by.
“Sissy, don't play dumb with me! You're a good model but a shitty actress. The cowgirls are involved in this whooping crane disappearance. You know perfectly well they are. Last seen in Nebraska. Didn't make it to Canada. Siwash Lake is between Nebraska and Canada. The cowgirls have possession of Siwash Lake. And who else but Jellybean's wild cunts could possibly conceive of doing something so diabolical as to tamper with the last flock of some nearly extinct birds? Of course they're behind it. Of course they are. How much do you know about it? Have they murdered those cranes the way they murdered my moo cows?”
“I don't know anything about it,” you protest. You sense your pale flesh turning paler.
Julian continues to gawk, but now his eyes have been narrowed by suspicion. The Countess leans so far into your face that you are almost wearing his monocle.
“Sissy, you're either a liar or a fool,” the Countess spits, “and you may be a weirdo but I've never known you to be stupid. You're trying to protect those scuzzy bitches. Well, let your conscience be your guide, as my mommy used to say, but it won't work. I have a call placed to the Secretary of the Interior, a simple jerk but a jerk who never forgets a political favor. I'll be speaking to him right after lunch. And I'm going to tell him where to find his whooping cranes. I'd tell the President directly, if he wasn't busy driving himself berserk trying to avoid stepping in his own shit. But the Interior Secretary will do. He's a law and order man, and he'll take care of it nicely. He'll also take all the credit for it, but don't think he won't find a way to reward me. Of course, it will be nearly reward enough just seeing those cowgirls get what's coming to them. Those stinking sluts are going to suffer . . .”
There is then a sound such as neither the Countess nor Julian Gitche has ever heard. They do not know, are never to know, whether the sound issued from your throat or was produced by your first or most preaxial digit as it was thrown through air. In any case, that sound is quickly obscured by another, the sound of your right thumb striking—with astonishing force—the Countess's face.
Immediately, the thumb strikes again, this time shattering the Countess's monocle against his eye.
“Shit O dear,” the Countess gasps. His dentures fall onto the shag rug, as if to graze there.
Then . . . O my God and Goddesses! . . . Can you believe it? . . . The left thumb strikes.
Thumbs that not once in a lifetime had been raised in anger; thumbs that had known risk often but never violence; thumbs that had invoked and mastered secret Universal Forces without acquiring the faintest stain of evil; thumbs that had been generous and artful; thumbs that were considered so delicate and precious that their owner would not so much as shake hands for fear of damage; those same thumbs, wound 'round with the glory of a million innovative and virtuoso hitchhikes, are now smashing the face of a human being.
What are you doing, Sissy? I'll tell you what you're doing. You're swinging them like ballbats, like the legendary swatters of Babe Ruth, socking flaming homers over the left-field fence of Hell. Beads of blood land noiselessly upon the keys of the white piano.
Julian is paralyzed. He cannot stop you. He cannot speak. You continue to swin
g and swat. The Countess is out on his feet. His eyes are closed. His legs wobble. He does a pathetic dance, like a drunken old fool trying to boogie with a chorus girl. Coagulating polka dots turn his linen suit into clown garb. He topples forward to meet your onrushing thumb (the thumb that once made the Pennsylvania Turnpike into a playground); the thunder of it straightens him up, sends him over backward. Motionless, he lies on the floor, a crimson part in his thinning hair, a bright ooze at each nostril.
The poodledog, Butty, short for Butterfinger, had been awakened by the commotion and had trotted into the living room to check it out. You notice he is growling at you now, baring his teeth at your unprotected ankles. You catch him broadside with a low swing, sending him flying to the opposite wall, where he flattens out with a breathless whimper against a Dufy lithograph. Poodle and print drop to the carpet together, a heap of broken glass, doggy curls and images of sailboats so fanciful they seemed suited only for lakes of lemonade.
Julian finds his voice. “Sissy,” he says, each syllable an organ note of horror, pumped from the pipes at a Dracula matinée, “Oh Sissy. What have you done?”
Of course, he knows what you have done; it is all too obvious. What Julian means is why did you do what you did, how could you have done it. And you are incapable of telling him. You emerge from your trance of fury, observe the aftermath with clear if disbelieving eyes, yet nowhere inside you is there an explanation dying to catch the next bus downtown. The word cowgirls starts to form in your mouth, but it dissolves.
Never mind. This is no time for explanations. Somebody had better call an ambulance.
84.
WHATEVER ONE'S THEORY OF TIME, one had to admit that the big clock in the hospital corridor moved unusually slowly. One could imagine its springs having been French-kissed by the junior jam-taster at Knott's Berry Farm.
