Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (45 page)

All right, I'll try to expound, if you insist. And just to prove I'm no sorehead, I'll conjure up another magnum of Dom Perignon. Here. Say when. Mysticism is self-contained and beyond external control. Something either has a mystic emanation or it doesn't. It is present in a single entity, animate or inanimate, where it is known to those who have faith that it is there. Mysticism implies belief in forces, influences and actions, which, though imperceptible to ordinary sense, are nevertheless real.

Magic, on the other hand, can be controlled—by a magician. A magician is a transmitter just as a mystic is rather strictly a receiver. Just as love can be
made
, using materials no more ethereal than an erect penis, a moist vagina and a warm heart, so, too, can magic be
made
, wholly and willfully, from the most obvious and mundane. Magic does not seep from within of its own volition (or appear unannounced to someone in a state of heightened awareness); it is a matter of cause and effect. The seemingly unrealistic or supernatural ("magic") act occurs through
the acting of one thing upon another through a secret link
.

The key word here is
secret
. When the substance of the link is revealed, the magic fades or can be counteracted by rival magicians. Thus,
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
may call your attention to some magic that results from, say, the acting of the smells of the female body upon the last surviving flock of wild whooping cranes, but it may never give away the secret link between them.

Hmm. The author can sense that Chaper 100 displeases you. Not only does it interrupt the story, it says too much and says it too didactically. Well, a book about a woman with sugar-sack thumbs is bound to be a bit heavy-handed.

Come on, now, that's enough champagne. Either give me a kiss or get out of here.

101.

EXPRESSIONS SUCH AS “CHORD FACTORS,"
“frequency patterns,” “strut lengths” and “A.B.S. plastic joints” began to be heard on the shores of Siwash Lake, where heretofore only the radio signals of froggies, excerpts from Chinese Crane Opera and an occasional girlish “yahoo” or “yippee” had been heard. In addition, there now were the chewing noises of hungry saws and the spock-spock of hammers taking the direct approach in trying to teach some impressionable young nails about the dangers inherent in a permissive society, spock-spock-spock.

On their next regular visit to the lake, Professor Inge Anne Nelsen and the Aransas Wildlife Refuge director were stunned by all this activity taking place practically in the midst of the whooping cranes. They made immediate inquiries.

“We're building a dome,” answered Bonanza Jellybean.

“A dome?”

“Not just any old dome. A four-frequency, hemispheric, geodesic,
arctic
dome, triple-glazed against the cold. Of course, the very shape of a dome is a defense against cold. A mean mad icesnake of a wind will tend to glide over its rounded surface instead of picking up velocity in an exterior corner where on a rectilinear building it would be tempted to wiggle its way inside. The Eskimos knew that. There's also less surface area through which heat can be lost . . .”

“Aw, hell, Jelly, that ain't important,” interjected Big Red. “Most of your heat loss takes place through doors and windows, anyways. Since we're only gonna have one good-sized door and a couple of little bitty windows, that won't worry us a whole hell of a heap. But we're triple-glazing the bastard, like Jelly said. It's gonna be a real arctic-type dome.”

“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 that 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.