Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (3 page)

Jerry and Junior Hankshaw would have been horrified had their thumbs assumed sisterly proportions; would have been horrified, for that matter, if their peckers had so enlarged. But a
slight
increase, a
reasonable
enlargement, would have been welcome, and indeed, after numerous clandestine consultations in the same scrubby forest where Sissy had learned her business, the brothers decided actively to seek it.

Junior, whose mechanical skills were to lead him in his daddy's gritty footsteps (in the tobacco warehouses of South Richmond there is always a dryer, a humidifier or an exhaust fan that needs repair), began work on a secret apparatus. After no less than three used innertubes had been ripped and stripped in vain, and following the theft of both rawhide laces from Mr. Hankshaw's boots, Junior finally produced a gadget that resembled a mix between a vise, a slingshot and the center tube from a toilet tissue roll. For reasons of discretion, the thumb-stretcher could be used only late at night, and the brothers spent many a sleepy hour in the dark taking turns at the agony dispensed by the device they had fastened to their imitation maple Sears and Roebuck bedstead.

Their endeavor was not without historical precedent. Around 1830, when he was twenty years old, the composer Robert Schumann subjected the fingers of his right hand to a stretching machine. Schumann's purpose was to escalate his progress toward piano virtuosity, his pianist-sweetheart Clara having expressed dismay over the length of his reach. In the sugar-frosted elegance of a nineteenth-century Leipzig drawing room, Schumann would sit stiffly, sipping
kaffee
, while his stubby fingers suffered growing pains in the grips of a contraption that resembled a nightingale harness, a rack for heretic elves. The result was that he crippled his hand, terminating his performing career.

All that happened to Jerry and Junior Hankshaw was that, with thumbs too red and raw to disguise, they soon were questioned by their parents and ridiculed by their peers. Thanking Jesus that he and Jerry had gone through digital intermediaries and not subjected their peckers directly to his invention, Junior threw the device into the James River. Poor Schumann threw himself into the Rhine.

Only one set of thumbs was destined to grow—and glow—in the rickety house of the Hankshaws. One set of thumbs destined to soar and bow, as if that set of thumbs was the prematurely shortened performing career of Robert Schumann, continuing now in a Rhine-soaked frock coat upon the cement stages of America's freeways, O Fantasia, O Noveletten, O Humoreskes, Gas Food Lodging Exit 46.

8.

SOUTH RICHMOND
was a neighborhood of mouse holes, lace curtains, Sears catalogs, measles epidemics, baloney sandwiches—and men who knew more about the carburetor than they knew about the clitoris.

The song “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” was not composed in South Richmond.

There have been cans of dog food more splendiferous than South Richmond. Land mines more tender.

South Richmond was settled by a race of thin, bony-faced psychopaths. They would sell you anything they had, which was nothing, and kill you over anything they didn't understand, which was everything.

They had come, mostly by Ford from North Carolina, to work in the tobacco warehouses and cigarette factories. In South Richmond, the mouse holes, lace curtains and Sears catalogs, even the baloney sandwiches and measles epidemics, always wore a faint odor of cured tobacco. The word
tobacco
was acquired by our culture (with neither the knowledge nor consent of South Richmonders) from a tribe of Caribbean Indians, the same tribe that gave us the words
hammock, canoe
and
barbecue
. It was a peaceful tribe whose members spent their days lying in hammocks puffing tobacco or canoeing back and forth between barbecues, thus offering little resistance when the land developers arrived from Europe in the sixteenth century. The tribe was disposed of swiftly and without a trace, except for its hammocks, barbecues and canoes, and, of course, its tobacco, whose golden crumbs still perfume the summer clouds and winter ices of South Richmond.

In South Richmond, smelling as it did of tobacco, honky-tonk vice and rusted-out mufflers, social niceties sometimes failed to make the six o'clock news, but one thing the citizens of South Richmond agreed upon was that it was not fit, proper or safe for a little girl to go around hitchhiking.

Sissy Hankshaw hitched short distances but she hitched persistently. Hitching proved good for her thumbs, good for her morale, good, theoretically, for her soul—although it was the mid-fifties, Ike was President, gray flannel was fashionable, canasta was popular and it might have seemed presumptuous then to speak of “soul.”

Parents, teachers, neighbors, the family minister, older children, the cop on the beat tried to reason with her. The tall, frail, solitary child listened politely to their pleas and warnings, but her mind had a logic of its own: if rubber tires were meant to roll and seats to carry passengers, then far be it from Sissy Hankshaw to divert those noble things from their true channel.

“There's sick men who drive around in cars,” they told her. “Sooner or later you're bound to be picked up by some man who wants to do nasty things to you.”

Truth was, Sissy was picked up by such men once or twice a week, and had been since she began hitching at age eight or nine. There are a lot more men like that than people think. Assuming that many of them would be unattracted to a girl with . . . with an affliction, there are a lot of men like that, indeed. And the further truth was, Sissy allowed it.

She had one rule: keep driving. As long as they maintained the forward progress of their vehicles, drivers could do anything they wished to her. Some complained that it was the old rolling doughnut trick, which even Houdini had failed to master, but they would take a flyer. She caused a few accidents, taxed the very foundations of masculine ingenuity and preserved her virginity until her wedding night (when she was well past the age of twenty). One motorist, a tanned athletic type, managed an occasional French lick while keeping his Triumph TR3 on a true course in moderate traffic. Normally, however, the limitations imposed by her steadfast devotion to vehicular motion were met with less dexterity.

Sissy neither solicited nor discouraged, but accepted the attentions of random drivers with calm satisfaction—and insisted they keep driving. She would eat the cheeseburgers and Dairy Queen sundaes they bought for her while they fished in her panties for whatever it is men fish for in that primitive space. Personally, she preferred gentle, rhythmic trollings. And automatic transmissions. (No girl likes to be molested by a party who is always having to shift gears.) Being molested was, in a sense, a fringe benefit of her craft, a secondary pleasure pulled like a trailer behind the supreme joy of the hitchhike. In honesty, though, she had to admit that it was also an avocational hazard.

Since the brain has such a high susceptibility to inflammation, there were occasional hotheads who would not or could not abide by her rule. In time she learned to recognize them by subtle symptoms—tight lips, shifty eyes, and a pallor that comes from sitting around in stuffy rooms reading
Playboy
magazine and the Bible—and refused their rides.

Earlier, however, Sissy dealt with would-be rapists in another way. When pressured, she placed her thumbs between her legs. Usually, the man simply gave up rather than try to remove them. The very sight of them there, guarding the citadel, was enough to cool passions or at least to confuse them long enough for her to leap out of the car.

Sissy dear. Your thumbs.
HOLLYWOOD SPECTACULAR. LAS VEGAS. THE ROSE BOWL
. Larger than any one man's desires.

(Incidentally, Sissy's mama never noticed any olfactory traces of her daughter's adventures. Perhaps that is because in South Richmond even a young girl's damp excitement quickly assumed the fragrance of tobacco.)

9.

SHE WAS TAKEN TO A SPECIALIST ONCE.
Once was all that her family could afford.

Dr. Dreyfus was a French Jew who had settled in Richmond following the unpleasantries of the forties. On his office door it was proclaimed that he was a plastic surgeon and a specialist in injuries of the hands. Sissy owned some toy automobiles made of plastic—she used them to set up theoretical problems in hitchhiking. Unlike some children, she took excellent care of her playthings. The notion of a
plastic
surgeon seemed silly to her. The suggestion of injury puzzled her further.

“Do they ever hurt?” asked Dr. Dreyfus.

“No,” replied Sissy. “They feel
goo-ood
.” How could she explain the tiny tingle of power she had begun to perceive in them?

“Then why do you flinch when I press?” inquired the specialist.

“Just because,” said Sissy. Again the schoolgirl could not elucidate the true emotion, but throughout her life she would refuse to shake hands for fear of damaging those digits that were to be to hitchhiking what Toscanini's baton was to a more traditional field of motion.

Dr. Dreyfus measured the thumbs. Circumference. Length. He gave them eyeshine treatment although their skin was not lacking in shine. He tapped them with tiny hammers, registered (without hint of aesthetic preference) the various tints and shades of their coloration, milked them with syringes, pricked them with pins. He placed them one at a time upon the scales, cautiously, as if he were the Spanish treasurer and they musical hot dogs brought from America by Christopher Columbus to amuse the queen. In a hushed voice he announced that they comprised four percent of the girl's total body weight—or about twice as much as the brain.

The x-rays had a go at them.

“Bone structure, apparent origin and insertion of musculature, and articulation are properly proportioned and normal in every aspect but size,” the doctor noted with a nod. The ghost-thumb in the negative nodded back.

Mr. and Mrs. Hankshaw were summoned from the waiting room where
Saturday Evening Post
fantasies had clouded their instinctive parental concern the way that Norman Rockwell's sentimental ideas cloud the purity of a blank canvas.

“They are healthy,” Dr. Dreyfus said. “There is nothing I could do that would not cost you a year's salary.”

The doctor was thanked for his consideration of Hankshaw finances. ("But a kike's a kike,” Sissy's daddy told the swing shift the next time he was sober enough to work. “Iffen he thought we had the money he'd a tried to squeeze us dry.") Parents and child rose to leave. Dr. Dreyfus remained seated. His heavy black fountain pen remained on the desk. His diploma from the Sorbonne remained on the wall. And so forth.

“When he was asked by the French government in nineteen thirty-nine how to design parachutists' uniforms for maximum invisibility, the painter Pablo Picasso replied, 'Dress them as harlequins.'”

The physician paused. “I don't suppose that means very much to you.”

Mr. Hankshaw looked from the specialist to his wife to his high-top Red Wing work shoes (in which stolen laces had recently been replaced) to the specialist again. He laughed, half in embarrassment and half in irritation. “Well, shee-ucks, Doc, it sure enough don't.”

“Never mind,” said Dr. Dreyfus. Now he stood. “The girl has, of course, a congenital abnormality. I am sorry but I do not know the cause. Giantism in an extremity is usually the result of a cavernous hemangioma; that is, a vein tumor that draws excessive amounts of blood into the extremity affected. The more nutrients an extremity gets, the larger it grows, naturally, just as if you put chicken, how you say, manure around one rose bush, it will grow larger than the bush that has no manure. You understand? But the girl has no tumor. Besides, the odds of hemangioma in
both
thumbs is like billions to one. She is, if I may speak frankly, somewhat of a medical oddity. Due to impaired dexterity, her life activities and career potentialities will be reduced. It could be worse. Bring her back to me if there ever is pain. Meanwhile, she will have to learn to live with them.”

“That she will,” agreed Mr. Hankshaw, who, since having been “saved” at the Moore's Field Billy Graham Rally, had begun to look with bitter resignation upon the gnomish blimps moored to his only daughter's hands. “That she will. The Lord made them things big for a purpose. God don't never git tired of testing
our
kind. It's a punishment of some sort, for what I don't rightly know, but it's a punishment and the girl—and us—got to bear that punishment.”

—Whereupon Mrs. Hankshaw began to whimper, “Oh Doc, if you should git a boy in here, if a young man ever shows up here with, a young man with
ugly fingers
, you know, something similar, a similar case, Doc, would you please . . .”

—Whereupon the plastic surgeon remarked, “Remember the words of the painter Paul Gauguin, dear lady. 'The ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never.' I don't suppose that means very much to you.”

—Whereupon Mr. Hankshaw pronounced, “It's a judgment. She's gotta bear the punishment.”

—Whereupon Sissy, like the Christ in the lurid picture that hung above the TV set at home, beamed serenely, as if to say, “Punishment is its own reward.”

10.

OH YES.
She was taken, also, to a specialist of a different discipline.

Commercial practice of the persuasion of palmistry was forbidden by ordinance in the city of Richmond, but in the surrounding counties of Chesterfield and Henrico it was entirely legal. Around the scuzzy edges of the town, where pine groves and truck gardens bumped against roadside honky-tonks and low-bid developments, there were to be found six or seven house trailers and three or four conventional homes within whose confines the testimony of the hands was daily given.

It was simple to recognize the lair of a palm-reader. Outside her trailer or bungalow there would be a sign on which a silhouette of the human hand, wrist to fingertips, palm outward, was painted in red. Always in red. For some reason, and for all the author knows there may be a tradition here whose origins stretch back to the Gypsies of Chaldea, it would have been less surprising to find flesh-colored tights in General Patton's laundry bag than to find a flesh-colored hand on a palmistry sign near Richmond. Every hand was red, and directly below the red wrist joint, where on an actual hand a watch or bracelet might cling, the sign-painter would have rendered the title “Madame” followed by a name: Madame Yvonne, Madame Christina, Madame Divine and others.