Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (24 page)

To the obstacles that had conspired to prevent Sissy Hankshaw Gitche, white female Protestant of South Richmond, Virginia, from attaining normality, from filling a responsible and orderly role, from operating as a productive, well-adjusted contributor to the human community, now must be added friendship with Bonanza Jellybean. Whether this latest obstacle was to elevate Sissy or nudge her toward the breaking place, as a certain straw is reported to have done to a certain burdened camel, was impossible to judge from her smile, for it was simultaneously gladdened and apprehensive. It is of little or no value to analyze mental states such as this. The kingdom of formal ideas will always be a weak neighbor to the kingdom of thrills, and Sissy was a princess of thrill. Blood bunched in her head like grapes in a wig. It sang there like a popular ballad—even though the only radio station in the area played nothing but polkas. Jelly had promised to come to her room that night, with marijuana and new positions. If those prospects excited her, she was also excited by the memory of the whooping cranes, a sight all the more breathtaking because of the knowledge that those huge, elegant fugitives were so few in number and perched so precariously on the brink of total extinction. No heat, no agony, no bloody struggle, but a band of exquisite creatures (for which the world has no replacement) poised coolly—defiantly!—on the winking eyelid of doom.

Perhaps crane and cowgirl merged in her mind into a single bright-eyed beaky goblin of love. If so, it took flight when she and Jelly rode up to the corral. Delores and Big Red hurried to meet them. “He's here,” announced Delores, pointing with her whip.

Sure enough, across the yard, in the midst of the low-cal barbecue then in progress, monocle reflecting sunlight, cigarette holder stabbing air, stood the Countess. Except for stains of White House ketchup on his ascot, he looked the same as ever, and why shouldn't he, for only a couple of weeks had passed since Sissy last saw him, although it seemed like years.

“Look at him,” hissed Delores. “Perverse as a pink pickle.”

“Sick as a vice squad,” elaborated Big Red.

“He's in a snit,” Delores said. “He wants to see you right after the barbecue.”

Jellybean chuckled sardonically. She dismounted. “Get the girls,” she said. “He's gonna see me right now.”

Left abruptly in the corral with a horse she could not unsaddle, Sissy was alarmed. Obviously, a confrontation was brewing, and she wished no part of it. How many years had the Countess been her benefactor? Many. If not for him, she probably could not have survived. When she caught sight of him, her impulse had been to rush up in fond greeting. Yet she didn't dare. Confused and double-confused, loyalties torn, guilt rising, she abandoned the horse and made her way as stealthily as she could to the rear of the main house, stumbling only momentarily over the chain of the goat.

She slipped inside through the kitchen, where sacks of Debbie-ordered brown rice sat with Oriental asceticism, stoically ignoring the smells of roasting veal that wafted in from the party. She loped down the hall, entered her room, locked herself in. As the latch was turning, she overheard Jelly say something like, “Any of you ladies who would like to join us, you're welcome to stay on as a full working podner at the Rubber Rose. Rest of you get packed—and I mean now. You've got fifteen minutes to move your lard asses off this ranch.”

There were loud gasps, panicky murmurings and barbecued blubberings. The screen door screeched open and Sissy heard a chaos of footsteps in the hall.

From her window, Sissy could see and hear Miss Adrian screaming threats of prison and other punishments at the cowgirls. The Countess, on the other hand, appeared to be taking the incident in his snide. He stood calmly, reducing the material existence of a French cigarette, and observed Jellybean and sisters with an expression of sarcastic amusement. “You pathetic little cutesy-poos,” he seemed to say. “Do you actually suppose this exhibition of childish melodrama is advancing the cause of freedom?”

“You owe us this here ranch, as token payment for your disgusting exploitations,” said Jelly.

“Then take it,” the Countess said tranquilly.

Perhaps he meant it as compliance, but the cowgirls regarded his statement a challenge.

Jelly shouted a command. The hands, who carried axes, picks, pitchforks and shovels, retreated. The Countess, still grinning, reached for an hors d'oeuvre and subjected his cigarette to a measured, self-assured puff. Miss Adrian shook her fist and yelled, “Go to your bunkhouse and remain there!” as if she had just led a rout. The guests were in their rooms packing, save for one lady who had tossed her cup of punch at Miss Adrian and joined the revolution. The masseuse had joined, too, and she egged on the rest of the staff members, who stood off to one side of the barbecue pit, hoping to appear neutral.

When they had retreated about thirty yards, the cowgirls stopped. With astonishing rapidity, they unbuckled, unbuttoned and unzipped—and stepped out of their jeans and underpants. Then, nude from the waist down, thatched pubises thrust forward, up front and leading the way, they began to advance. The Countess's grin went down his throat like bathwater down a drain.

“Better reach for your spray cans!” taunted Gloria.

“Not one of these pussies has been washed in a week!” yelled Jellybean.

Rather pale now, his nose twitching, the Countess dropped the caviar canapé he'd been holding. A prairie ant helped itself to the spoils, the first ant in the history of the Dakotas to make off with a gobule of Iranian caviar. He or she'll go down in the Ant Hall of Fame.

On came the cowpokes, while behind them, in rows, fifteen separate little piles of jeans and panties bowed low to the ground, like a pilgrimage of rag Muslims prostrating themselves to the Mecca of duds. On came the cowpokes, pelvises pumping, laying down what the trembling Countess believed to be a devastating barrage of musk.

Lost in her own hysteria, Miss Adrian charged. A barbecue fork she hurled drew blood from Heather's eyebrow. Quick as a frog's tongue, Delores's whip cracked. Its lash curled around the ranch manager's ankles, pulling her feet from under her. She hit the sod in a jangle of jewelry and an explusion of breath. Then the rampage began.

A Molotov cocktail said good-by to Big Red, hello to the sexual reconditioning building. Within minutes, the structure was blazing. Other cowgirls, bare asses flashing, stormed the wing of the main house where the beauty parlor and exercise rooms were located. Sounds of glass breaking and wood splintering echoed through the house. The air was singed with cries of “Wahoo,” “Yippee,” “Let 'er buck” and “The vagina is a self-cleaning organ.”

Sissy hadn't a clue what to do. Her darling Jellybean had obviously forgotten her. The Countess would be furious with her for failing to warn him of the impending revolt. Julian would not be pleased, either. And for all she knew, she might be in physical peril. Delores and her pals did identify her with the Countess's business. The sauna was burning now and the ranch was swirled in smoke.

Acting on orders from that very large portion of the brain that is completely uninterested in anything but survival, Sissy fled the house by the way she had entered. Crossing the croquet court, passing the pool, she ran to the base of Siwash Ridge and then southward along the mountain's foot. Eventually she came to a place where the juniper bushes were broken to reveal a crude path beginning a steep ascent. Because the butte promised both protection and a view of the proceedings, Sissy elected to climb.

She shouldered her way through low, silvery boughs. The trail was acting funny. It would switch back where there was no reason for it to switch or it would head straight for the edge of the cliff, only to turn aside at the last possible inch and bob up and down as if it were laughing. It seemed to have a mind of its own. A deranged mind, at that.

Sissy walked lightly but firmly, as if she were trying to calm the trail down, as if she were giving it therapy. It did not respond.

Sweating, panting, startled by rabbits and magpies, she accepted the first opportunity—approximately halfway up the ridge and twenty minutes' climb—to rest on a flat rock, from which she might look down upon the Rubber Rose. The ranch was farther away than even the deceptions of the trail had led her to imagine.

The whoopjamboreehoo was still raging. Noise and smoke. The main house had been spared the torch, but several of the outbuildings were in ashes. She thought she could detect cowgirls attempting to quiet horses that had panicked in the corrals. She did see Miss Adrian's Cadillac roar out of the drive, but she had no way of telling what passengers it bore. Somewhat later, the cinematographers' rented convertible and their equipment van also drove away. Had the filmmakers been evicted or had others commandeered their vehicles? Sissy sat and wondered. She also wondered if and when she should return to the ranch. The sun was already kneeling on the doorsill of the West, and as night approached she could feel cold scratchings on her flesh.

After a while she felt something else. Eyes, she felt. Eyes watching her. Not little pink rabbit eyes or jumpy bright bird eyes. Big carnivorous eyes. A wildcat or wolf, for sure. Again, that vast battery of efficient brainpower, insensitive to beauty, romance, fun or freedom; suspicious and careful, as conventional as eggs-for-breakfast, as cheerless as a banker's socks; that stiff-collared DNA fogy who happens to be the major stockholder in human consciousness, issued orders. Obeying, for no commands are as difficult as these to disobey, Sissy picked up a stone and turned around slowly.

“Ha ha ho ho and hee hee,” snickered the thing that was watching her. It stood ten yards away. It was, of course, the Chink.

The Chink's problem was that he looked like the Little Man who had the Big Answers. Flowing white hair and a dirty bathrobe, weathered face and handmade sandals, teeth that would make an accordion jealous, eyes that twinkled like bicycle lights in a mist. He was short but muscular, aged but handsome and O the smoky aroma of his immortal beard! He looked as if he had stolen down from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, by way of a Yokohama opium parlor. He looked as if he could talk with animals, discussing with them subjects Dr. Dolittle wouldn't comprehend. He looked as if he had rolled out of a Zen scroll, as if he said “presto” a lot, knew the meaning of lightning and the origin of dreams. He looked as if he drank dew and fucked snakes. He looked like the cape that rustles on the backstairs of Paradise.

They scrutinized one another with mutual fascination. Sissy held her breath and the Chink said, “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”

At last she thought of something to say, but, as if he sensed that she was about to speak and did not want her words in his strangely pointed ears, he whirled, and scampered up the mountainside whence he had come.

“Wait!” she cried.

Warily, he stopped and turned, poised to flee again.

Sissy smiled.

She raised her ripe right thumb.

And jerking it and swooshing it and wringing every flicker from it, as though this were its farewell performance and it must please the gods, she hitchhiked the hermit and his mountain.

And got a ride to the clockworks.

Part

IV

I am not of your race. I belong to the Mongol clan which brought to the world a monstrous truth: the authenticity of life and the knowledge of rhythm . . . You do well to hem me in with the hundred thousand bayonets of Western enlightenment, for woe unto you if I leave the dark of my cave and set about in earnest to chase off your clamorings.

—Blaise Cendrars

52.

FOR CHRISTMAS THAT YEAR,
Julian gave Sissy a miniature Tyrolean village. The craftsmanship was remarkable.

There was a tiny cathedral whose stained-glass windows made fruit salad of sunlight. There was a plaza and
ein Biergarten
. The
Biergarten
got quite noisy on Saturday nights. There was a bakery that smelled always of hot bread and strudel. There was a town hall and a police station, with cutaway sections that revealed standard amounts of red tape and corruption. There were little Tyroleans in leather britches, intricately stitched, and, beneath the britches, genitalia of equally fine workmanship. There were ski shops and many other interesting things, including an orphanage. The orphanage was designed to catch fire and burn down every Christmas Eve. Orphans would dash into the snow with their nightgowns blazing. Terrible. Around the second week of January, a fire inspector would come and poke through the ruins, muttering, “If they had only listened to me, those children would be alive today.”

It was a fascinating gift and not inexpensive, but Sissy might have known there was a catch to it.

Julian couldn't keep to himself very long the information that the village had been made by a young man who had had both arms amputated after a tricycle accident at age three. He had made the village with his toes. Moreover, the fellow was in trade school, studying to be a pastry cook. In another year, he would be decorating cakes.

Naturally, this was supposed to be inspirational to Sissy.

Julian even arranged for Sissy to meet the student chef, whose name was Norman. He left the disabled pair alone in a coffee shop, where they might speak heart to heart for half an hour. When Julian returned, he found that Sissy had talked Norman into carving a Tyrolean with enlarged thumbs to hitchhike up and down the streets of her village.

53.

THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS
were mellow and cozy for the Gitches, after a rather tempestuous autumn.

Sissy had returned to New York on October 8, to face an angry, anxious husband and an incredulous Countess. Where had she been; why hadn't she telephoned; had she aided and abetted the Rubber Rose coup d'état and so forth. She was Perry Masoned from pillar to post, and Franz Krafkaed, too. Only when she threatened to leave again did the interviews finally cease.