Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (32 page)

“Your husband is a fool. As for you, if you let yourself be subjected to the indignities of psychoanalysis, you're a fool as well. And Goldman is certainly a fool for sending you to me.
I
, however, am no fool. You've told me some of the most fascinating stories I've heard in a long while. I'm sure as hell not going to waste these sunny hours among the flowers listening to your dreary personal problems when I could be hearing more about your adventures with the Chink. Now. Tell me how you met him. And don't hesitate to, uh, to perform the, er, the antics you do with your thumbs. If you'd like.”

“But won't that attract attention?” Without the wine to encourage her, Sissy was hesitant to repeat the digital abandon of the day before.

“Sometimes,” said Dr. Robbins, glancing with bloodshot peepers at the French doors, “sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things that afford us the greatest privacy.” He flopped in the grass.

“Doctor,” said Sissy with a smile, “forgive me but I get the impression that you're a bit of a mental case yourself.”

“It takes one to know one,” replied Robbins. “That's probably why all the penguins ended up at the South Pole.”

68.

PART BADLANDS BUTTE,
part grasslands hill, part high chaparral, Siwash Ridge is a geological mutant, a schizophrenic formation embodying in one relatively small mountain several of the most prominent features of the American West. A willy twisting and unpredictable trail zigs and zags up its eastern side, through thickets of scrub oak and juniper, upward over grassy bumps, finally clinging by its shoelaces to limestone walls. The top of Siwash, though disposed in a few places to jut and peak, is very nearly flat: a calcium carbonate aircraft carrier, a ship that water built from land.

Toward the center of the butte top is a horse-deep, circular depression that in fair weather serves the Chink as a sunken living room. From the northern wall of the depression gapes the mouth of a cave.

A person of Sissy's height has to crawl into the cave on her hands and knees, and almost nowhere in the entrance chamber—covered with Japanese straw matting—is there room for a leggy model to stand up straight. The entrance chamber, however, is merely the top level of three levels of caverns. The bottom level, deep inside the butte, consists of two freight car-sized rooms, heated by thermal updrafts and remarkably dry. On the middle level, there are five or six enormous chambers, connected by narrow passageways. In one of these chambers is the clockworks.

From the walls of the middle-level room, fresh pure water drips constantly. It is as if the walls are weeping. It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping.

Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.

It weeps

for the black people who think like white people.

It weeps

for the Indians who think like settlers.

It weeps

for the children who think like adults.

It weeps

for the free who think like prisoners.

Most of all, it weeps

for the cowgirls who think like cowboys.

69.

HER THUMBS HAD STOPPED HIM.
Her thumbs were good at that. If the man who cried “Stop the world, I want to get off!” had only had Sissy's thumbs . . .

She had stopped him cold on the side of Siwash Ridge. So, what next? He wore the wary look of a wild animal. He wouldn't stay stopped long. It was her move. What could she say? His gaze went through her like beavers through a paper palm tree. His was the look of the strong who will not tolerate weaklings. She must speak and she must speak with prehensility, for not even her thumbs would stop him a second time. It was imperative that she say the right thing. He was turning as if to scamper off again.

“Well,” said Sissy, with what passed for nonchalance. “Aren't you going to shake your whanger at me?”

It broke him up. He slapped his thighs and giggled hysterically. Ha has, ho hos and hee hees squirted out of his nose and through the gaps in his teeth. When the laughter finally died a nervous chipmunk death, he spoke. “Follow me,” he said, in a voice unaccustomed to invitation. “I'll fix you supper.”

Follow him she did, although he set a powerful pace up the tricky twilit trail.

“I'm a friend of Bonanza Jellybean's,” she said between puffs.

“I know who you are,” he said without looking back.

“Oh? Well, there's been some trouble on the ranch. I came up here to get out of the way. It's so dark now I doubt if I could find my way back down. If you could help . . .”

“Save your breath for the climb,” he said. His voice wore no pants.

From the top of the butte there could still be seen light in the west. The haunted shapes of the badlands were silhouetted navy blue against a pumpkin-colored horizon. To the east, across shadowed hills, the prairie lay on its back in the dark, hidden, yet making felt its awesome flatness, a flatness that flavors so much of America, beginning with her emotions and her taste; a flatness that makes a perfect surface for those wheels of Detroit whose rotations are for millions the only escape from the chronically flat. Sissy turned from east to west and back again. The faintly lit badlands were so tortured and melodramatic they seemed, like the prose in a Dostoyevsky novel, almost a corny joke. The blacked-out prairie, on the other hand, had a style identical to that of rural weekly newspapers throughout the middle of the nation: blandness in such high concentration as to become finally poisonous. An owl flew over the ridge from
Crime and Punishment
to the Mottburg
Gazette
, scanning the pages for a literate rodent, asking the librarian for a whooo-done-it.

Directly below them, lights twinkled at the Rubber Rose. The ranch was quiet. Sissy could imagine showers running full blast in the bunkhouse as glossy pubes, folded labia and hooded clitorises were lathered and scrubbed clean of the perfume that had been allowed to accumulate to plague the Countess. Sissy imagined she heard popping washcloths, girlish laughter.

When she had caught her breath, Sissy was led to the depression and down a ladder of sticks. The Chink built a fire, an open fire, the depression itself being adequate protection from winds. He roasted yams. He heated meadowlark stew. The stew contained Chun King water chestnuts. Their texture did not change in the cooking. A lesson.

After supper, eaten in silence upon a rough wooden bench, the Chink went into the cave and returned with a tiny peppermint-striped plastic transistor radio. He switched it on. Their auditory nerves were immediately jangled by “The Happy Hour Polka.” Still clutching the radio in one hand, the Chink hopped into the wheel of firelight and began to dance.

Sissy in her travels had never seen anything quite like it. The old geezer heeled and toed, skipped and hopped. He flung his bones; he flung his beard. “Yip! Yip!” he yodeled. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Arms swimming, feet firecrackering, he danced through two more polka records and might have had a fourth except that the music was suspended for a news report. The international situation was desperate, as usual.

“Personally, I prefer Stevie Wonder,” confessed the Chink, “but what the hell. Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to
anything
if you really feel like dancing.” To prove it, he got up and danced to the news.

When the music commenced again with “The Lawrence Welk is a Hero of the Republic Polka,” the Chink lifted Sissy by her shoulders and guided her onto his pock-marked dance floor. “But I don't know how to polka,” she protested.

“Neither do I,” said the Chink. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” In a second they were traipsing over the limestone, arm in arm. Their shadows reeled against the curves of the depression. Night birds flew past with trembling feathers. A bat fluttered out of the cave, took one radar reading and headed for Kenny's Castaways.

When they had danced their fill, the Chink escorted Sissy to the opposite, and darkest, side of the depression and sat her down upon a pile of soft stuff: dried wheatgrass, faded Indian blankets and old down pillows without cases. The stuff reeked. It was that unmistakable sex blend of mushrooms, chlorine and tide pool. And cutting through that odor, the equally unmistakable smell of Bonanza Jellybean: clove, butterscotch Life Savers and a lotion made from cactus juices, which she rubbed daily upon the spot where she had been shot, so she said, by a silver bullet.

“So this is how Jelly spends her visits to the Chink,” thought Sissy. She started to wonder whether the other cowgirls, manless as they were, suspected—but halfway through that wonder she interrupted it to wonder if the Chink thought he was going to help himself to
her
. She had always been passive when it came to being pawed, pinched and the like, but no man had ever taken her against her will. In fact, no man had ever taken her but Julian.

Just then the Chink did an astonishing thing. Without preamble, without hesitation, the white-maned Jap reached out and grasped her thumbs! He squeezed them, caressed them, covered them with wet kisses. All the while, he cooed to them, telling them how beautiful and exceptional and incomparable they were. Not even Julian had ever done that, you bet. Even Jack Kerouac hadn't dared touch her thumbs, although he had been fascinated by them and had written to them a poem on a cornhusk, an ode that might have been widely published had not it been eaten by a hungry hobo as Kerouac and the boys boxcared into Denver to search for Neal Cassady's daddy, the most missing man in the history of American letters, leaving it up to this author to tell the story of those awesome appendages.

Even Bonanza Jellybean hadn't loved Sissy's thumbs.

As we might imagine, Sissy was bowled over. She was frightened, stunned, elated, moved almost to tears. Apparently sincere, the Chink extended his adoration of the digits far into the night. When at last he got around to adoring the rest of her, her heart, like her thumbs, was aglow.

“If this be adultery, make the most of it,” she cried. As he plunged into her, she arched her spread bottom against the blankets and reared up to meet him halfway.

70.

"SO, YOU HAD SEXUAL INTERCOURSE
with the old man?” asked Dr. Robbins.

“Repeatedly,” blushed Sissy.

“And how was it? I mean, how do you feel about it now?”

“Er, I'm not really sure. You see, sex with Julian is like hitching a ride around the block on a fire engine. With the Chink, it was like hitching from Chicago to Salt Lake City in a big old nineteen fifty-nine Buick Roadmaster.” She paused to ascertain if her similes had been understood. Dr. Robbins was pulling and releasing his mustache, pulling and releasing, as if his mustache were a window shade in a cheap hotel. The window shade wouldn't hang the way Dr. Robbins wanted it to.

Sissy decided to elucidate.

“With Julian, it's fast and furious. It's always been sort of desperate. There's such
need
. We
cling
to each other, like we were holding on with our genitals to keep from falling into emptiness, a kind of lonely void. I have a feeling that it's like that with a lot of lovers. But with the Chink, it was completely relaxed and smooth and slow and, well, nasty. He giggled and grinned and scratched all the time, and could go for ages without orgasm. A real Roadmaster. Once, he ate yam pudding while he was balling me. Fed it to me, too—with his fingers. He licked it off my nipples; I licked it off his balls. I felt like we were a couple of baboons or something. I liked it. I guess I miss it. But no more than I miss it with Jellybean.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Umm. Well, let's stick to the Chink. During those three days of . . . of, er, lovemaking . . .”

“It
was
lovemaking, Doctor. Even though it was nasty. Maybe especially because it was nasty. Love is smutty business, you know.”

Dr. Robbins pulled hard on the mustache window shade. It came down with such force it nearly tore loose from its roller. “The old geezer really made you feel something, didn't he?”

“How could I help feeling something? He adored my thumbs.”

Dr. Robbins looked hard at Sissy's preaxial digits, then at his own. Magnitude was the only appreciable difference. In both sets of thumbs, Sissy's and his own, Dr. Robbins could see shafts, flat on the volar surface, smooth and rounded on the dorsal surface, that is, semicylindrical in shape. He knew that these bones were bound together with ligaments and cartilages. He remembered that the thumb joint is officially called the carpometacarpal joint, although it is informally referred to as the “saddle joint.” Saddle joint. That's nice. Cowgirls could relate to that.

He knew that when Sissy bent a phalanx, revolving took place around an axis passing transversely, determining the movement in a sagittal plane, just as it did when he bent a phalanx. It was just more of a production number with Sissy, that was all.

With effort he could harken back to med school and recall the musculature of the thumb, thinking that a
flexor pollicis brevis
is a
flexor pollicis brevis
, regardless of its size.

But then Dr. Robbins looked at his patient's thumbs again—and suddenly the difference seemed more extensive than scale. He saw a pair of hammerhead sharks, devouring with a sharkish hunger the space around them. He blinked, and in the blinking the sharks were replaced by a couple of pears, full and luscious, swaying there in their outsized sweetness as if Cézanne had painted them on a canvas of air. Again he blinked, and . . .

Sissy noticed his blinking; perceived the unsatisfactory comparison. “Maybe, Doctor,” she said, “my thumbs have known poetry and yours have not.” She paused. “Or maybe it's simply this: you
have
thumbs; I
am
thumbs.”

The shade shot to the top of the window, wrapping itself noisily around its roller.