Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

  “Maybe not,” agrees the Brain, “but you do contribute. And my point is, the commands I give you and the rest of the body are largely my natural reactions to the sensory stuff you're always feeding me. Largely. But not wholly. Because the truth is, my neurons occasionally fire spontaneously in the absence of a stimulating signal. I'm subjected to a fair amount of randomly generating currents. It isn't as orderly in here as you might imagine. Often I'm at the mercy of random forces.”

  In the eerie light of the indefinable dimension, the Thumb twiddles. At last, it says, “You're trying to tell me you aren't in control.”

  “Exactly! Jeeze, I thought you'd never catch on.”

  “Well, if you aren't in charge, what is?”

  “I don't know,” says the Brain, softly, solemnly. The blob seems genuinely sad.

  “Oh come off it. Those thirteen billion cells that are cooking in you, you make use of no more than ten percent of them. Ninety percent of your resources lies dormant at all times. If you'd just bother to put that awesome mass to work, if you'd quit being so damn conservative—Christ, it's no wonder you're gray!—and stop worrying about survival all the time; if you'd start sifting through those vast regions of your slimy self that haven't been explored, then you'd find out rather quickly where Central Control is located, I'll bet, and you'd find the answers to the philosophical and spiritual questions that are driving you—and the rest of us—bananas, and that because they've been answered wrongly (by that ten percent of you that makes an effort) have fostered the worst features of civilization. You're holding out, that's all.”

  “Thumb, old buddy, you don't know the Ass from the Elbow. Sure, I'm a bit conservative; I have to be. It's my assignment to preserve and perpetuate the species . . .”

  “Assignment from whom?”

  “From the DNA, of course. But don't ask me from where the DNA gets its orders, because I honestly don't know. But the reason I don't know has nothing to do with the fact that about ninety percent of me is dormant. It's dormant because I inhibit it, and I inhibit it because if I didn't I would be swamped by insignificant information. I'd be reacting to so many signals from the external world that I couldn't think at all, and every time humans opened their eyes, they'd have something like an epileptic fit. You see, there is nothing in that dormant portion that isn't already in the rest of me. Just more of it, that's all. More of the same. There're no answers to the Great Mysteries hidden in there, no secret superior systems for evaluating experience; it's quantitative, not qualitative. I narrow the flow of input to keep us from being drowned in excitations, that's all.”

  After that, the Thumb twiddles for a long time. “Then it's hopeless,” it says finally.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if you don't have the answers to the Big Question and don't know who does, if you aren't in control and don't know who is, then we're right back where we started, and it's bloody hopeless; we'll never know What's What, and we'll never figure out how to overhaul civilization.”

  “Don't despair. It's bad form.” Synaptic disturbances cause the Brain to vibrate gently. It resembles the gelatin salad at a banquet for trolls. “I suspect there may be other possibilities. You see, I'm a tool, of sorts, an instrument, an apparatus just as you are. I can be employed. Employed for thinking. Well, mostly I've been used clumsily and all too sparingly. Not that humans haven't thought deep thoughts with me; they have and they continue to. There are probably no deeper, greater thoughts left in me; the best of them have all been thought and rethought many times. But maybe what is needed is not more thinking or even better thinking, but a different kind of thinking. Over the centuries a handful of humans—poets, madmen, artists, monks, hermits, composers, yogis, shamans, eccentrics, magicians, anarchists, witches and rare bizarre subculturites such as the Gnostics and the Sierra Clock People—have used my thinking machinery in unusual and unpredictable ways, with interesting results. Perhaps if more of these 'off-beat' kinds of thinking were done, I might be more useful to the Universe.”

  “Hmm,” murmurs the Thumb.

  “And look here. I spend nearly as much time dreaming as I do thinking. Yet how many put their dreams to any kind of practical or enlightening application? Precious few, I'll tell you. Sleeping/dreaming may be what I do best. It may be my true vocation, and the time I have to spend tending to survival just chore time; taking out the garbage, as it were.”

  The Thumb seems amazed. “You know, Brain, what blows me is that you know yourself and don't know yourself at the same time, and you know yourself knowing yourself and you know yourself not knowing—oh, this is getting ridiculous.”

  “It's the old paradox,” says the Brain, smiling with its many cracks and fissures.

  “But what is the paradoxical force that lets you do that?” asks the Thumb. “What is it that permits you to think about thinking and feel about feeling?”

  “Consciousness.”

  “Okay all right already. If you have all that consciousness, and consciousness is so almighty powerful, why can't you right things, put them in balance . . .”

  “Because, dear Thumbo, I don't have 'all that' consciousness. I have a fair amount. But I certainly haven't a monopoly on it. Everybody assumes consciousness is the exclusive province of the Brain. What a mistake! I've got my share of it, to be sure, but hardly enough to claim special privileges. The Knee has consciousness and the Thigh has consciousness. Consciousness is in the Liver, in the Tongue, in the Prick, in you, Thumb. It's coursing through you, too, and you're acting it out. You're each a part of it. In addition, there is consciousness in butterflies and plants and winds and waters. There is no Central Control! It's everywhere. So, if consciousness is what is required . . .”

  “I'm beginning to comprehend,” says the Thumb.

  Lo! the moment the Thumb recognizes itself as an agency of consciousness, various pieces of the Puzzle begin to fall into place for it, and though the picture they form makes little logical or literal sense, there is a correct and beautiful feeling about it. “Wow!” cries the Thumb. “Everything seems much brighter and righter. If only the other parts of the body realized that they are manifestations of absolute consciousness, then . . .”

  “Maybe we can wake them up,” suggests the Brain. “Only we must do it slowly, gradually, so it doesn't threaten survival.”

  The Thumb ignores the Brain's cautious qualifications. “Let's try to wake them up,” it says, eagerly. “Let's try. Where's the Prick?”

  “Uh, probably over bullying the Cunt around, as usual. Shall we look?”

  In the realm of body light, there is movement, and that is the extent that can be said about it because nothing else can be said.

  105.

  THE RADIO WAS PLAYING “The Day-Old Apple Strudel Polka.” Kym was carrying the radio across the corral. She carried the radio as if it were a suitcase full of skunk lice. It was offensive baggage but Kym wasn't about to set it down. At any moment the song might end and the announcer say something about the siege of the Rubber Rose.

  “Man, this is the stupidest music I've ever heard,” said Kym. “This radio should have stayed in the privy where it belonged.” But Kym roped the radio to her saddle horn and prepared to give it a ride across the Dakota hills, mice, meadowlarks and other auditorily sensitive creatures fleeing before it in the sunlight.

  Kym was taking the radio to Siwash Lake. Hours earlier, the cowgirls had deserted the ranch buildings and withdrawn to the pond. There, where the rippling wheatgrass merged with marsh reeds, they had set up their barricades and prepared to make their stand. Except for Debbie, each of them was armed; except for Big Red, each of them was scared shitless; without exception, each of them was determined. At their backs were the last sixty whooping cranes left on Earth.

  The deadline was up. The American Civil Liberties Union had requested an extension, which news commentators felt would be granted since the government, while it could not allow itself to be defied, was not longing for the kind of publicity
that would follow another shootout. The government was aware that its marshals and agents were all too willing to uncork the bottle of blood. The government was not entirely sure its marshals and agents could be restrained. The government pondered the predicament; the marshals and agents throbbed with the lunatic lust of the law; the cowgirls dispatched Kym back to the outhouse for their radio so that they might tune in their fate.

  In the outhouse, Kym found Sissy, peeing in polka time. Sissy had hitched up to the ranch with a TV crew and, in the midst of some confusion, had simply scrambled over the gate. Howdy.

  Kym hugged Sissy so hard she didn't have to wipe herself.

  “You know what you're getting into if you come over to the lake,” warned Kym.

  “Yes,” said Sissy, “but I want to be there. I want to see Jellybean. I want to see the cranes.”

  “Okay,” Kym agreed. “I'll go tell Jelly you're here. If she says it's all right, I'll bring a horse for you. Meanwhile, I'd stay in the privy if I were you. No telling when those goons might start something. Ta ta.”

  For nearly an hour, Sissy waited in the outhouse. A couple of flies and the photograph of Dale Evans kept her company. The flies kept trying to get familiar, but the photo of Dale Evans, like the bust of Nefertiti, was content to rule over its little niche of eternity. The photo of Dale Evans made America 1945 seem like ancient Egypt.

  The outhouse was warm and rather dim. Sissy might have dozed except for the noise at the gates. The marshals and agents were forcibly ejecting persistent journalists, cowgirl sympathizers and bird-lovers, removing them to the checkpoint two miles down the road. The marshals and agents were deploying themselves militaristically. The noise at the gates sounded like Cecil B. DeMille's garage sale.

  Sissy was not overly curious about the activity at the gates. Had she ignored Kym's warning and stepped outside, she would have looked not to the gates but to Siwash Ridge, hoping for a glance of a dirty bathrobe. We are what we see. We see what we choose. Perceptions are a hypothesis. In a noted experiment at MIT, a scientist outfitted two men with prismatic spectacles that grossly distorted their vision. One man was assigned to walk around, pushing the other in a wheelchair. The man who was active swiftly adapted to his new view of the world, but his passive partner made no adjustment at all. From this, the MIT scientist concluded that in order to perceive an object properly we have to establish some kind of pattern of movement in relation to it. Because Sissy had perceived the events of her lifetime always in relation to her pattern of constant movement, perhaps hers had been a far truer vision than many assumed. Maybe the fact that she would have looked at the crazy old coot on the ridgetop instead of at the besieging forces mounting around her is indicative of . . . well, maybe there is a lesson there.

  At any rate, a cowgirl on horseback trotted up to the privy, and it was Heather this time, leading an extra steed. Heather helped Sissy into the saddle and they set out at a brisk trot. The hills received them. With its skinny million tongues of wheatgrass, the hills whispered to them the secrets it used to share with the buffalo. Like defeated prize fighters waking up after knockouts, asters were starting to open their violet lids all around them. Would prismatic spectacles have made any difference in the way the asters perceived September?

  Swimming through grasses and flowers, the horses carried the two women to the crest of the hill overlooking the lake. From there, Sissy gazed on strange sights. The circular foundation of the aborted dome had been turned into a fort. Barricades of barrels and rusty reducing machines stood ready to perform grim services. Gun metal reflected the sun. Off to one side were hobbled horses and a few goats, chained. The rest of the goats had been left to wander, and even now some of them were grazing their way eastward across the prairie, perhaps heading for Dr. Goldman's clinic to teach psychiatry something about male-female relations. In the lake, and along its soggy shores, whooping cranes strode with primal steps. Although quiet, they seemed as charged with uninsulated electricity as if they had just sprung into life.

  “We heard on the radio that the judge has set Delores's bail at fifty thousand dollars,” said Heather. “Now she won't be here when we really need her.”

  Sissy could only nod and stare at the scene below.

  As Sissy rode into camp, Kym, Bonanza Jellybean, Debbie, Elaine and Linda danced up to meet her. In homage, they had fashioned fake thumbs for themselves out of willow bark and reeds. At first, they waved these goofy appendages wildly, in unrestrained salute, but their antics lost considerable momentum when—what?!—they noticed that Sissy was only half the monster she once was.

  106.

  "I KNEW there was something different about you, but the light wasn't good in the privy and I didn't notice what,” said Kym.

  “I noticed it right away but I didn't know what to say,” said Heather, who still didn't know what to say.

  “What happened?” asked Linda.

  Sissy shrugged. “Just another miracle of modern technology.” It would have required still another technological miracle to have removed her eyes from Jelly's.

  Before Sissy was completely on the ground, Jelly's tongue was in her mouth. She stumbled out of the stirrup into a wiggly embrace.

  “It doesn't matter what happened,” squealed Jelly, shaking off one of her own honorary thumbs. “Let's celebrate!”

  “That's why I was so long in coming for you,” explained Heather. “We had to get a little welcome celebration together.”

  Behind the barricades, in the center of the dome foundation, a floral display had been arranged. There were pots of tea, cheese sandwiches, honeyed rice balls, marijuana cigarettes and yogurt with fresh cherries on top. A daisy chain was looped over Sissy's left thumb as she was led to Debbie's Tibetan meditation pillow and seated there. Giggles, kisses and tea poured forth.

  Facing an imminent battle with federal police, the cowgirls didn't hesitate to party, because, well, Sissy Hankshaw Gitche had returned and a party was only proper.

  “Ain't that just like women,” growled the ghost of General Custer, peering through the grass.

  Yes, oh yes yes yes sweet yes.

  Ain't that just like women, indeed.

  107.

  GHOSTS, because they can walk through walls, have a tendency to generalize. Your author, however, should know better. What should have been said was not “just like women” but “just like some women” or, better, “just like the feminine spirit.” All women do not possess the feminine spirit.

  Some of the cowgirls, for example, conspicuously refused to join the welcome party. They remained at the barricades, as the cranes can bear witness, shooting ugly glances at those who reveled. What was Sissy to them? A noncowgirl. A goofy-handed freak. An older woman who had starred in advertisements that had told them that their cunts smelled bad. Furthermore, what would the enemy think if through its binoculars it could spy this sipping of tea, this weaving of daisy chains, this puffing of pot? Of course, what the cowgirls couldn't have known was that no enemy was watching them, for every attempt the FBI had made to establish an observation post on Siwash Ridge had met with peculiar disaster (Could the brotherhood of Chink and rock have been responsible?). Between the girls and their adversary was a succession of hills, and in the other direction stretched an open prairie that offered no opportunity for concealment and therefore was of absolutely no use to government.

  Ignoring the disdain that her party drew from the barricades, Jelly spooned yogurt and exchanged with Sissy loving expressions. “Looks like every time we get together things are in a mess,” she said.

  “So be it,” said Sissy, who was a trifle giddy from marijuana and affection. “It really looks serious this time, though. All these guns . . .”

  “Billy West got most of them for us. Did you ever meet him? Twenty-two years old and weighs three hundred pounds. Born and raised in Mottburg, every ounce of him. All during his childhood he had the suspicion he was being screwed. When he finally figured out who was screwing him, he decided to b
ecome an outlaw. Not for revenge but for purity.”

  “I never met him,” said Sissy, doodling her new little red thumb down Jelly's bare arm. “But these guns . . . Are you actually prepared to kill and die for whooping cranes?”

  “Hell no,” responded Jellybean. “The cranes are wonderful, okay, but I'm not in this for whooping cranes. I'm in it for cowgirls. It's a rotten shame that things can get to the point of killing and dying being acceptable alternatives, but the script sometimes turns out that way. I mean, Sissy, I look around me and everywhere I look I see people, as individuals or in groups, conservative people, liberal people and radical people, who have been left crippled and soiled inside by their years of surrender to authority. If we cowgirls give in to authority on this crane issue, then cowgirls become just another compromise. I want a finer fate than that—for me and for every other cowgirl. Better no cowgirls at all than cowgirls compromised.”

  “Wow!” exclaimed Linda, who had approached to refill Jelly's teacup. “That's pretty heavy, but I reckon that's the way it is.”

  Sissy looked pleadingly at both Linda and Jellybean. “But you can't possibly slay this dragon.” With her greatest of thumbs, she gestured across the hills, although she might just as accurately have gestured in any other direction.

  “Jelly knows that,” said Debbie, who had approached to replace Sissy's sandwich. “What she doesn't seem to know is that it isn't our job to slay the dragon. It's traditionally been the work of the hero to slay the dragon. It's the work of the maiden to transform the hero—and the dragon. I believe that it's not too late to accomplish such a transformation.”

  Jelly seemed to have joined the clouds in a vow of silence. “Shit, Debbie,” she said, eventually (the clouds stuck to their vow). “I can't argue with you. The Chink says I shouldn't even try to argue with you. The Chink says I should follow my heart. And my heart tells me that I can't sit back and let a gang of politicians push cowgirls around.”