Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

  “Just like Santa Claus lives in, right, Red?” said Kym.

  “Haw haw,” Big Red laughed.

  A foundation of 2 – 8 joists atop eight-foot beams had already been laid, and from its circumference the government observers could ascertain that the dome was going to be quite large. They were incredulous. “What is it for?” asked the man from Aransas. “Why are you building it so close to the lake?” asked Professor Nelsen.

  “For the cranes,” Jelly informed them.

  “For the cranes??!” Their incredulousness became triple-glazed.

  “Sure. It's almost the end of August, you know. Come winter, these birds are gonna need some shelter. On clear, calm days we'll break the ice for them and they can fart around in the lake. But when the blizzards and the big winds hit, they'll need shelter. This dome is gonna be their winter quarters.”

  “Impossible,” gasped the Aransas warden. “They'll never bunch up in there, so close together, with a roof over their heads.” As he looked around at the birds, however, so unusually serene in the vicinity of humans, and with only ten yards or so separating one crane family from the next, he was not so sure.

  “This means,” asked Professor Nelsen, pointedly, “that you don't expect them to migrate to their Texas wintering grounds?”

  “Can't see as why they should,” said Jellybean.

  “Well, I can see many reasons why they should,” stormed Professor Nelsen. Her hands were on her hips, as in the statue of the Ill-Tempered Red-Headed Scorpio Madonna. “Including their well-being and survival. You actually believe you're going to stick this flock of wild whooping cranes in some crazy building . . .”

  “Not so crazy, ma'am,” said Debbie, who had stopped sawing struts in order to wipe her sweaty brow with a Katmandu prayer cloth. “No, not crazy in the least. This is a round building; it's square buildings that are crazy. Drinks Water, a Dakota medicine man, had a vision back before the whites came that his tribe would be defeated and made to live in square houses. When this came true, the Dakota tribes were miserable. Black Elk complained that it was a bad way to live. 'There can be no power in a square,' he said. Black Elk said, 'You will notice that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.' You're a zoologist; you should know that there are no squares in Nature, not in macrocosm nor microcosm. Nature creates in circles and moves in circles. Atoms and galaxies are circular, and most organic things in between. The Earth is round. The wind whirls. The womb is no shoebox. Where are the corners of the egg and the sky? Look at the nests those cranes made over there. Perfectly round. The square is the product of logic and rationality. It was invented by civilized man. It's the work of masculine consciousness. Primitive tribes and matriarchal cultures always paid homage to what is round. Look at your belly, Professor, there under your girdle. Look at your tits. Woman is a round animal. The male, in his rebellion against what is natural and feminine in the universe, has used logic as a weapon and as a shield. The whole object of logic is to square the circle. Civilization is a circle squared. That's why in civilized societies woman's lot—and Nature's lot—has been such a sorry one. It's the duty of advanced women to teach men to love the circle again. No, ma'am, this won't be a crazy building; it'll be a sane one. Unless you're silly enough to identify rational logic with sanity. In which case, this structure—and everything else we do—will be as crazy as we can make it. The cranes won't mind taking shelter in our dome. It's a round building made by round animals. Yippee!”

  Professor Nelsen and associate hurried back to Mottburg to report. A conference was held, in the middle of which phone calls were made to Washington, D.C. Late that afternoon, a federal judge (seated at a square table in a square chamber) issued an order. By sundown, it had been delivered to the Rubber Rose.

  The court order called for the cowgirls to cease construction on the dome. It ordered them to move their equipment and themselves away from the lake, to remove guards and barricades from the gates and to make the ranch ready for unrestricted occupancy by government personnel, who would then take whatever steps necessary to restore normal conditions among the population of America's whooping cranes. The cowgirls were given forty-eight hours in which to comply.

  102.

  THE TUBE PEDICLE—the cylindrical flap of belly skin under which Sissy's pollicerized index finger lay three weeks a-grafting—was snipped at one end, and ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-dum!—a thumb is born!

  Along came a thumb, but what kind of a thumb? Crooked and red (a thumb to greet flamingos, not whooping cranes), awkward and stiff, as scrawny as its predecessor had been gross. Sissy was exercising this petrified strawberry licorice whip, trying to teach it some simple thumb routines, when the news of the Rubber Rose court order was announced on NBC.

  Sissy stood, little scarlet thumbkin dangling rigidly at her side. “How fast do you think I could get to the Dakota hills?” she asked.

  Dr. Dreyfus looked up from the pad on which he was sketching thumbs in the manner of Seurat, dreaming, perhaps, of the first living Pointillist digit. “By hitchhiking, you mean? Well, you certainly couldn't make it within forty-eight hours.”

  “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee,' said Sissy, and it was difficult to argue with that.

  103.

  SOME PEOPLE could not have been more stupefied had archeologists dug up a dinosaur wearing a flea collar. Some drivers thought that the tadpole that conquered Atlantis had escaped from a drive-in movie screen and was making its way to the sea. Others recognized it as a thumb, maybe the ultimate thumb, and accepted it with the same bewildered fatalism with which they accepted tornados and government.

  Here it came, there it went, exerting a force with which few could cope, playing with speeding automobiles the way pre-Friskies cats had played with mice. It put new life in old clunkers and caused late model dreamboats to poot like go-carts. One flick of it and radios would blare on automatically, headlights would glaze over as if in shock. It could reach across four lanes of heavy traffic and draw the vehicle of its choice to its side. It could even cause cars that had passed it by so suddenly make illegal U-turns and circle back two miles to obey its wishes. It was Sissy's left thumb, getting its big chance at last, after more than a decade of understudying the right—and a lump inflated in the throat of Creation just to watch it do its stuff. Aw, well, maybe that's exaggerating, but honestly, had anybody ever been as good at anything as Sissy Hankshaw Gitche was at hitching?

  There were favorite maneuvers to bring back and enjoy, and a few fresh tactics she wanted to try: in her mind's eye she conceived of intricate patterns that she would like to have weaved over the continent. Alas, she had set a deadline for herself: the Dakota hills in thirty hours. So, although she showed off and experimented more than she should have on a speed run, she actually stopped only once—at a telephone booth in western Pennsylvania.

  Her intentions had been to call Julian. She was going to tell him of her compulsion to rush to the Rubber Rose, of the inexplicable longing she had to stand by the cowgirls in their time of crisis, and how she just had to see the Chink again to find out why the clockworks continued to beat so loudly in her blood. She would promise Julian that when she had done what she must do in Dakota, she'd hurry back and rest her new normal-sized thumb against his buzzer. After all, Julian needed her. As she was about to place the call, however, she thought, “Yes, Julian needs me. But I need me, too. And the world needs my need for me worse than it needs Julian's need for me.” She called Dr. Robbins instead.

  Dr. Robbins didn't answer. Neither did his mustache. They were both across town at the Countess's penthouse. When Robbins had read in one of the whooping crane stories in the Times that the Countess owned the Rubber Rose, the ranch adjacent to Siwash Ridge, he had called on the feminine hygiene magnate, and, having been informed of the state the poor fellow was in, volunteered his psychiatric services free of charge. The Countess's accountants accepted the offer, and from tha
t day Dr. Robbins had scarcely left the Countess's side. At the instant of Sissy's call, in fact, Robbins and the Countess were propped up on satin pillows, playing cribbage and drinking Ripple. The young shrink was teasing the middle-aged tycoon about the damage his brain had taken from Sissy's thumbing, and the Countess was laughing good-naturedly. The Countess was also winning at cribbage.

  Reminding the Countess of Murphy's Law, which states that if anything can go wrong, it will, the unlicensed psychiatrist then introduced him to Robbins's Law, which states that whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, providing it goes wrong enough. The Countess laughed some more and increased his lead. The phone that was ringing was a long way from here.

  Sissy hung up and kept traveling.

  While Sissy was still on the road, some eight hours before their court-ordered deadline expired, the Rubber Rose cowgirls issued a communiqué. It was sent to the federal judge, copies to the press. This is what it said:

  The whooping crane has been driven to the edge of extinction by an aggressive, brutal paternalistic system intent on subduing the Earth and establishing its dominion over all things—in the name of God the Father, law, order and economic progress. From men, the whooping crane has received neither love nor respect. Men have drained the crane's marshes, stolen its eggs, invaded its privacy, polluted its food, fouled its air, blown it apart with buckshot. Obviously, a paternalistic society does not deserve anything as grand and beautiful and wild and free as the whooping crane. You men have failed in your duty to the crane. Now it is women's turn. The cranes are in our charge, now. We will protect them as long as they still require protection—while working toward a day when the creatures of the world no longer have to suffer man's egoism, insensitivity and greed. We refuse your order. We say take your order and shove it. This flock of birds is staying with us. Get lost, mac.

  Needless to say, all the hands did not agree on the text of this communiqué. Debbie, for example, thought the communiqué itself aggressive; she said it reeked of the same hostile sexism that the pardners disliked in men. She lobbied for a more enlightened resolution, one firm yet gentle; she said they should set a good example. Debbie was not alone. As for Bonanza Jellybean, she thought it pretentious to claim that she was working toward a day when the creatures of the world would be safe from man, when actually all she was working toward was a time when any little daughter who wanted to could grow up to be a cowgirl.

  Had the Rubber Rose been organized as an anarchistic system, rather than along democratic lines, each cowgirl who chose to do so could have issued her own communiqué, each with equal weight. “Majority rule” held sway, however, and the communiqué—drafted mainly by the Delores del Ruby faction—was presented to the court, the press and the public as the collective opinion of “the whooping crane rustlers.”

  And the communiqué was not taken lightly. No, it decidedly was not taken lightly. Sissy made it through the gates of the Rubber Rose only minutes before Delores was arrested entering Mottburg with nearly a thousand peyote buttons in her truck—and only hours before two hundred federal marshals, reinforced by at least a dozen agents of the FBI, took positions outside the ranch, loaded guns trained on anything that shook feather, hoof or tit inside the kinetic confines of the largest all-girl ranch in the West.

  Part

  VI

  To live outside the law you must be honest.

  —Bob Dylan

  104.

  THERE IS AN UNEARTHLY GLOW. It comes from a dimension that we do not understand yet.

  Meeting in this supernatural aurora are two animate things. Growing accustomed to the light that is the substance of this “landscape,” we recognize one of the things as a human brain. The other proves to be a thumb.

  The Brain rests placidly. The Thumb, which has only recently appeared on the scene, gives us an opposite feeling. It appears agitated.

  “Why so glum, chum?” asks the Brain.

  “I thought you'd never ask,” snaps the Thumb. “I'm just sick and tired of it, that's all.”

  “Sick and tired of what?”

  “Taking the blame. Being called 'the cornerstone of civilization.' Being treated by one kooky author as if I were a goddamned metaphor for civilization. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that. The civilizing process occurred as a result of advances in technology. Until man had tools, tools to save him labor as well as to give him the predatory edge over other animals, he hadn't the leisure to develop language or to refine his psychic and physical capabilities. You, Thumb, gave man the ability to use tools. If nothing else, you started him down the path to civilization. And were you not with him, helping him, every step of the way?”

  “Yeah, I was, but I was innocent. I had no control. I wanted to help him lift shiny pebbles, to pick fruit, to hold flowers, to build bowls and baskets, to make music, to weave; I wanted to help him remove slivers and to caress the flesh of loved ones. I didn't want any part of that other stuff: that hardware, that killing and maiming, that overdevelopment, that subjugation of Nature and attempts to build monuments against death. I didn't want any of it, but I contributed to it because you made me do it, you prick!”

  The Brain issues a short scornful laugh that undulates its folds. “The Prick had a lot to do with civilization, all right, but you'll have to take that up with the Prick. I'm the Brain. Remember?”

  “How could anyone forget?”

  “Nasty, nasty.” The Brain wags its stem. “You're behaving rather irrationally, aren't you? Are you really blaming me for civilization?”

  “Precisely. That ugly crumpled upper surface of yours, that cerebral cortex, is almost nonexistent in lower animals, but once you got the hang of evolutionary growth and a taste of the inflated abstract thoughts you could make with that cortex, you enlarged it and enlarged it until it became eighty percent of your volume. Then you started cranking out rarefied ideas as fast as you could crank them, and issuing commands to helpless appendages like me, forcing us to act on those ideas, to give them form. Out of that came civilization. You willed it into being because, with your cortex so oversized and all, you lost your common ground with other animals, and especially with plants; lost contact, became alienated and ordered civilization built in compensation. And there was nothing the rest of us could do about it. You were holed up in there in your solid bone fortress, a cerebrospinal moat around you, using up twenty percent of the body's oxygen supply and hogging a disproportionate share of nutriments, you greedy bastard; you had hold of the muscle motor switches and there was no way any of us could get at you and stop you from spoiling the delight of the world.” The Thumb's nail was crimson with anger.

  Slowly shaking its configuration of deep crevices and wide protrusions, the Brain sighed. “Yes, yes, there is some truth in what you say. I am the body's favored organ, but that's because my work load is so heavy and so vital. And I contributed enormously to civilization, as did you. It couldn't have happened without me, as it couldn't have happened without you. But I was just as innocent as you . . .”

  “How could you be? You expressed the desires, you formulated the models, you issued the orders, you were in command.”

  Once again, the Brain sighed. It was the sort of sigh one might expect from a fat and rather affected grub: gray and wet and yukky. “You don't understand me, do you? You think you know me—all that semieducated blather about cerebral cortex evolution—but you don't really know me. Oh, I'm sure you're aware that I've an electrochemical network of thirteen billion nerve cells, and maybe you realize that in some of my nooks and crannies—you're fortunate to be smooth and holistic—these cell bodies are so densely packed that a hundred million fit into a cubic inch, every cottonpicking one of them humming, pulsing and flashing, and none of them exactly alike; yes, you may know that but you can never really know how hard it is to be electrochemical, to be, and I'm not boasting, the most intricate and effective thing in Nature . . .”

  T
he Thumb gestures as if it were bowing a violin. “That's the saddest story I've ever heard,” it says sarcastically.

  “I'm not seeking your sympathy; just your understanding. Bear with me, and if I digress, remember, I'm not as tightly focused as you. Now, listen. There is a constant shower of incoming electrical pulses hammering at me like rain on a tropical roof. I'm subjected to a never-ending barrage of signals that cause my nerve cells—neurons, if you will—to fire in succession, like Chinatown firecrackers. During each of these pulsations, electrical charges are altered, chemicals are expelled, clefts are opened and closed, ions desert one neuron and invade another; it's unbelievably complicated, and the whole cycle takes place in about a thousandth of a second. A thousandth of a second—and man thinks he has a conception of time. Ha!”

  “If I was the Mouth, I'd yawn,” says the Thumb. “Get to the point before you bore me stiff.”

  “And nobody likes a stiff thumb, does he,” teases the Brain. “Well, the point partially is this: the information that activates me, that sets my neurons to firing in chain reaction, is sensory and is sent to me by other parts of the body, including you. How I react to the external world is partly a result of the kind of data you send me as you go around touching our environment.”

  “This is getting specious,” objects the Thumb. “In the first place, the data I give you are completely objective. I can tell you if a blade is sharp, but I can't advise you to have it stuck into another body (I never would)—and in the second place, you get such an infinitely greater supply of info from the Eyes, for example, that there's no comparison.”