Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (51 page)

Down by the lake, the cowgirls screamed and cried. They hugged one another in horror. A couple of them, LuAnn and Jody, leaped from the barricades to retrieve their weapons, and were immediately riddled.

A voice bellowed over a bullhorn, “You've got two minutes to come out with your hands over your heads.” But it was obvious there would be no opportunity for surrender. Random G-men already were starting to snipe, and at any second there would erupt an orgy of gunfire intended to seduce with death every cowgirl in the Dakota hills.

Funny no one paid any attention to the helicopter. Those G-men who heard it at all must have assumed it was one of theirs. Its red and black markings would not have been conspicuous in the dim morning. At any rate, nobody took a shot at the chopper, even though it was flying extremely low. It was so weighted down with explosives it couldn't have climbed another inch.

By the time it floundered to a landing, dissolving the semicircle of federal cops, nothing could be done about it. There wasn't enough “time.” The fat boy in the cockpit—it was impossible to tell whether he was laughing or crying—pushed the detonator and a mighty blast took the top off the hill—wheatgrass, asters, little bluestem, dust, mice, armored cars, G-men and all.

In the hush that followed the echoes of the explosion, the whooping crane flock rose in one grand assault of beating feathers—a lily white storm of life, a gush of albino Gabriels—swarmed into the waiting sky, and after circling the pond one time—either a limbering exercise or some primordial ornithological farewell—flapped south toward Texas.

Leaving human friends and human foe to clean up their respective human messes.

117.

AMONG THE CASUALTIES
of the whooping crane war was the Chink.

Sissy had been so worried about Jellybean that she couldn't sleep. The Chink had told her stories, massaged her feet, poured yam wine down her and played a sort of screech owl lullaby on his one-string cigar-box violin, to no avail. At last, she let him seduce her, and sparing no muscle, tendon, ligament or joint, he gave her a real workout: she had four orgasms and by the time the last one had boiled away, her aristocratic nose was packaging little
z
's and shipping them all over. Then the Chink couldn't sleep.

The Chink sensed disaster. Well, so what? Survival, his own or anybody else's, was not a top priority with him. To a man who “kept time” by the clockworks, there were far more interesting and important things. Yet some silly sense of responsibility nagged at him. And nagged. Until he said, “All right, all right, I'll go out and play, just this once. Might as well; can't sleep anyhow.”

He had descended Siwash Ridge after moonset, a feat no one else could have duplicated. There are burros that could not walk down that trail by blaze of noon without ruining their reputation as surefooted beasts. There are some mighty round beer barrels that could not roll down the Siwash trail, and some mighty twisted pretzels that could not do a decent imitation.

At the end of the trail, he had met Delores del Ruby.

Neither of them seemed surprised, but it must have been an act.

They stared one another down, she trying to appear cool, he cooler. He wanted to ask her what she was doing there, but he wouldn't. She wanted to tell him she was on her way to see him, but she couldn't. She anchored her hands on her hips; he wrinkled his nose. The harder they tried not to smile, the more the little mouth muscles struggled to get free. The force of suppressed grins caused their ears to wiggle in the dark.

“So you're the great boohoo, eh?”

“Maybe I am and maybe I'm not. No big deal either way.”

“I suppose I owe you an apology. I've bad-mouthed you from asshole to elbow . . .”

“No big deal.”

“Well, I just wanted you to know that I'm starting to appreciate you. Some of your ideas are not half-bad.”

“
You
like them? I must have been misquoted.”

“Aren't all big boohoos misquoted?”

“Misquoted, distorted, diluted and deified. In that order. At the hands of his worshipers, Jesus suffered a far worse fate than crucifixion. You have a lovely ass.”

“You're not much like Jesus.”

“How do you know?”

“Talking about my ass.”

“You don't think Jesus would have admired your ass?”

“Not the Jesus I've read about.”

“Exactly. Misquoted, distorted and diluted. Actually, if Jesus
had
admired your ass, he probably would have kept it to himself. So you're right; I'm not much like Jesus. I'm not much like Hubert Humphrey, either. Hubert Humphrey can chew two hundred forty-six sticks of gum at one time. I can't do that.”

“Your cute little mouth was probably meant for finer things.” She leaned over and slapped a kiss on his chops. First time she'd kissed a man in a snake's age.

“You're not half-bad yourself. When you leave your whip at home.”

“I don't play with whips anymore.”

“Oh yeah? What
do
do you play with?”

“I'm learning that there's a whole universe of things to play with. Including big boohoos.”

“Boohoos can play rough. What do you want from me? The key to the treasure?”

Delores reached into her black shirt, among the dark nipples, hairs and moles, and drew the jack of hearts.

“Oh, you do card tricks, too. You're a hell of an act.”

“I've had a vision tonight. I didn't come here to solve anything. I came here to celebrate, and for you to celebrate with me.”

“In that case, you can stay for a while. It's a wise woman who doesn't come to the master for solutions.”

“No big deal.”

“Yes, um. It's going to be light soon. I've got to go see some men about some birds. When it gets so you can see, would you mind going up to the cave and keeping Sissy company until I return?”

Delores agreed, and the Chink trotted off through the wheatgrass.

Perhaps he had had a plan, a magic trick to play. He must have had something up his baggy sleeve. But whatever the Chink was going to pull on the G-men never got pulled. When he saw Bonanza Jellybean cut down, the old geezer made a beeline for the government barricades. Nobody heard his shouts. They were obscured first by gunfire, then by bullhorn, next by helicopter and finally by explosion.

The blast threw him back down the hillside, beard, robe and sandals flying, as if the blast was the toughest bouncer in Jerusalem and he a gatecrasher at the Last Supper. His left hip was shattered.

118.

AND SO IT CAME
to pass that Sissy Hankshaw Gitche and Delores del Ruby spent a sorrowful day in Mottburg.

Midmorning, about the time the sun popped above the grain elevators, the two women (one in disguise) hurried past the Sears-suited coffee-breakers in Craig's Cafe; past the plump young mothers, hair in curlers, jawing in the self-service laundry; past the Chevrolet agency and the blank-faced American Legion Post. They arrived at the railroad station just as the casket was being loaded in a baggage car. Bonanza Jellybean (alias Sally Elizabeth Jones) had a one-way ticket to Kansas City. Her father, a short, balding man, had come to accompany the body. Jelly's mom had stayed home out of shame. Chugging out of the station, the train dissolved in teardrops that fell upon the tracks like silver bullets.

Later, while Delores sipped Irish coffee in a dim corner of the Bison Room of the Elk Horn Motor Lodge, Sissy tried to visit the twenty-six cowgirls who were locked up at the Mottburg Grange hall because there wasn't room in the jail. The pardners were being held without bond, awaiting trial. Sorry. No visitors.

At two o'clock, Sissy and Delores joined a curious crowd at the Lutheran Church cemetery for the funeral of Billy West. There was a token coffin, but no corpse. You would think that out of 300 pounds there would be a spoonful left, but there wasn't. The family was tense, the preacher embarrassed, the rites perfunctory. The mourners, if you could call them that, were mostly Billy's peers, who still couldn't believe that the butterball they'd teased in school had become a famous killer outlaw and had learned to fly a helicopter in one afternoon. As the crumbly prairie sod was being shoveled onto the uninhabited casket, Granny Schreiber said in a loud voice that Billy West was the only hero Mottburg had ever produced, and that she wished to hell she'd joined up with the cowgirls. Her grandsons spirited her away.

The next stop for Delores and Sissy was the small hospital. The Chink was plastered like a wall. You could have hung a picture on him, and a mirror, too. Beware the butterfly that could bust out of that cocoon. He was in pain, but winking. The eyes he winked with were as cloudy as semen. The women were too depressed to do him any good. Sissy sobbed on his bedside. “Is everything getting worse?” she cried. “Yes,” answered the Chink, “everything
is
getting worse. But everything is also getting better.”

And so it came to pass that the Rubber Rose Ranch was officially deeded to the cowgirls who had worked it. Each of the surviving hands was made an equal partner. Until the girls were free to do with it what they would, Sissy Hankshaw Gitche was asked to oversee the ranch, at a salary of $300 a week.

Giving away the Rubber Rose was the last piece of business conducted by the Countess before he dissolved his corporation and went to work as an orderly in the maternity ward of a charity hospital, on the orders of his psychiatrist and personal adviser, one Dr. Robbins.

“Get thee back to the aroma of birth,” Dr. Robbins had told the Countess, “for the smells of the female body, the smells you have sought to kill with your totalitarian chemicals, are the very smells of birth, the strong odors of the essence of existence. The nose that is offended by the hot perfume of the cunt is a nose unsuited for this world, and should be sniffing gold on the scrubbed streets of Heaven. The vagina reeks of life and love and the infinite et cetera. O vagina! Your salty incense, your mushroom moon musk, your deep waves of clam honey breaking against the cold steel of civilization; vagina, draw our noses to the grindstone of ecstasy, and let us die smelling as we did when we were born!”

And so it came to pass that, as soon as possible, Sissy and Delores brought the Chink to the ranch to convalesce. They fixed up the master bedroom for him, the room that had slept Jellybean, and Miss Adrian before her. The ranch house held a minimum of charm for the old fart, but he was well aware that the two women couldn't carry him up Siwash Ridge. Delores put the stereo in his room, so he could pass the autumn days listening to rock 'n roll while meditating, chanting, eating deep-fried yams and leafing through
Oui
magazine.

Sissy served him faithfully, and most of the time cheerfully, but she was subject to fits of depression. Once, in a particularly grim despondency, she had turned to him and assigned him partial fault in Jelly's death. “You should have done more!” she charged.

“I did all I could.”

“What was that? I never noticed you do anything—until it was too late.”

“I set an example. That's all anyone
can
do. I'm sorry the cowgirls didn't pay better attention, but I couldn't force them to notice me. I've lived most of my entire adult life outside the law, and never have I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked fights with authority. That's stupid. They're waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful. Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. And it's fairly easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, act lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid—but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the System. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself. You know that, Sissy,”

Of course Sissy knew it. Hadn't the world's greatest hitchhiker always operated on that premise? It's just that she had a brain and our brains are forever having fun with us by making us learn over and over what we've known from the beginning. The brain may have been unjustly criticized in this book, but you've got to admit, the brain has a weird sense of humor.

And so it came to pass that Delores and Sissy became lovers.

They shared the room adjacent to the Chink's, keeping close in case he needed anything during the night.

In time, they found themselves needing something during the night.

Delores slept on the left, Sissy on the right. Before long, there wasn't any middle.

The bed never grumbled beneath them. Even the springs, tattletales by nature, resisted all temptations to squeak. The walls and ceiling auditioned each new position, apparently approving, for nothing cracked or fell. The little squeals that Delores's serpentine tongue pushed and pulled from Sissy's pipes, that Sissy's hitchhiker fingers beckoned from deep in Delores's throat, attracted no more attention from the hills beyond the fluttering curtains than the squeals of rabbits and mice. Sometimes four sets of lips would be smacking at once, but the edition of Amy Vanderbilt that Miss Adrian had left on the mantlepiece never once corrected them or turned up its nose. It was as if the world was absorbing their love, offering no resistance, but was lightly, softly breathing it in. Sighing “ah!”

Or “ha!”

But certainly not “ma!” Girl-love may have its place in the world, but as the bedsprings, walls, ceiling, hills and even Amy Vanderbilt must know, spit doesn't make babies.

And so it came to pass that when Sissy discovered she was pregnant, her thumb pointed at the Chink. Figuratively speaking, to be sure, for she told him nothing of it, nor did she mention her condition to Delores or write of it to Julian (whose drinking problem had become so acute that the “beautiful people” now shunned him, leaving him to wheeze out the effects of civilization in the posthippie hangouts of the East Village).

She concealed her morning sickness by pretending it was emotional, a physical manifestation of worry and grief, and no one was the wiser—except for a certain middle-aged woman who read palms and suffered trances in the drive-in movie outskirts of Richmond, Virginia.