Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Now she stood before the mirror. She couldn't hear the bands blaring “Dixie” as the talking cigarette package kicked up its silver slippers over town on Broad Street, but she could still hear the noise of the Goodwill Industries Ball, though weeks had passed. Perhaps sound carries farther across time than across space. No matter. There was a more pressing noise: the voice of her daddy in the adjoining room. Sissy's daddy was speaking in his Carolina voice, his booze voice, the voice that sounded as if it had been strained through Daniel Boone's underwear. He was speaking about the Colonel, the elderly man in the yellow sport coat who for years had petitioned to manage Sissy's show biz career. “We'll begin with my carnival, of course,” the Colonel would purr, and then he would chart a path up the golden staircase that led all the way to Ed Sullivan. The Hankshaws were embarrassed by the Colonel's overtures. They had discouraged his interest. Recently, however, Mr. Hankshaw had had a change of mind. For two reasons: Sissy was starting to cause him trouble, and the Colonel had doubled his offer. Mr. Hankshaw was a working man, after all, and in his breast, as in the breast of working men everywhere, there beat the fatty heart of a profiteer (Could Marxist stethoscopes be so universally faulty? Do all socialist heart specialists have gum in their ears?). Sissy's daddy and mama were arguing at that moment about the contract, already signed by the Colonel, that lay like a freshly ironed pillowcase atop the TV set.

Her brothers were not home to defend her. Junior was watching the parade with the girl he was soon to marry. Jerry was in traction (no wonder the Hankshaws needed the Colonel's money) at the Medical College of Virginia. Refused enlistment into the paratroopers because of his size, Jerry had stood up in a ferris wheel seat at the Atlantic Rural Exposition — he had to do something —and gravity, that old scene-stealer, had once more gotten into the act.

Other things were bothering Sissy. Things as minor as her inability to locate information pertaining to the Siwash Indians, about whom she wished to write a paper in school. Things as annoying as the fact that teen-aged boys in the neighborhood had begun to follow her whenever she set out to hitchhike, burning to halts beside her, trying to coax her, as much out of malice as lust, into their vulgar Fords.

Many things had changed in Sissy Hankshaw's world, including her own physical image. Suddenly, in the seventeenth year of a life that had begun with a doctor's doubletake and a nurse's gasp, she had become lovely. A perfect compromise finally had been worked out between her predominantly angular features — high cheekbones, classically fine nose, fragile chin, peaceful blue eyes — and her decidedly round mouth — a full, pouty mouth that the Countess was later to compare to a mink's vagina at the height of the rut. Her figure had come to correspond to the average measurements of the high-fashion model: she stood five-nine in her socks, weighed 125 pounds and taped 33-24-34; one of those bony beauties of whom wags have said, “Falling downstairs, they sound like a cup of dice.”

She had given herself completely to the hitchhike because heretofore she had nothing else nor any hope of else. Ah cha cha, but now there was a choice. Or the possibility of a choice. She was pretty. And a pretty girl can always make her way in a civilized society. Perhaps she should somehow find a job, work and work and save her money — even if it took years — so that she could return to Dr. Dreyfus for that complex operation; so that she could lead a normal human female life.

Every time she said it to herself, however (there before the mirror), every time she thought “Dr. Dreyfus” or “normal life,” her thumbs talked back to her in thumbtalk: tingles, throbs and itches. Until at last she knew. Accepted what she had always sensed. She had been correct when she had howled at the dance. They were not a handicap. Rather, they were an invitation, a privilege audaciously and impolitely granted, perfumed with danger and surprise, offering her greater freedom of movement, inviting her to live life at some “other” level . If she dared.

Well, about the time the steam calliope was wheezing like emphysema through the lungs of Tobaccoland, Sissy decided to dare. And about the instant she decided to dare, she commenced to laugh. She was laughing with such abandon, such secret delight, she could scarcely wiggle into her panties, even though her daddy stalked in from the living room and took a long, granite look.

Her parents warned her not to go out, but their attentions were on the TV screen when she stood at the refrigerator and coaxed a package of Velveeta cheese into her coat pocket. Some olives jumped in also. An apple joined up. A half-loaf of Wonder Bread said, what the hell, it'd go along, what was there to lose. “Nothing,” said Sissy.

She made it out the back door during a shootout on “Gunsmoke.” Silently, she thanked Marshal Dillon for the cover, but it didn't occur to her then to lament for Miss Kitty, ever a saloonkeeper, never a cowgirl.

On a dead run, olives bouncing out of her jacket, she reached the corner where Hull Street was intersected by U.S. Route 1—in 1960 still the principal north-south interstate highway.

By the time she got her arm in the air, the light had changed and the first car, a boatish, blue Lincoln with Jersey plates, was already passing. For a second, it appeared as if she were late, as if the driver had missed her gesture. But no, some aspect of it — a glint of neon on the nail, perhaps — snagged the hem of his vision. He glanced back in time to see the entire appendage, immense, scrubbed, lubricated, zeppelinlike, looking as fresh and newborn as an egg, invoking a strange interplay between the joyful and the ominous, as it swam at eye-level past his opposite rear window.

He braked.

What else could he do?

“Going north?” asked Sissy for openers as the door swung toward her like a slab of candied sky. Were it any other direction she wouldn't have cared.

“You bet your raggedy white ass I am,” said the driver, grinning sardonically. He was black-skinned and beret-topped, and it was difficult to ascertain which there were the more of, saxophones in his back seat or gold teeth in his mouth. Sissy hesitated. But what the hell? In imitation of the Wonder Bread, she said to herself, “This is it; what is there to lose?” She boarded.

Actually, there was a fine style about the driver, about the tingle of treasure when he grinned, about the billow of marijuana smoke in which he sat (how different from the celebrated smokes of Richmond!); about the gardenia in his lapel and the flask by his side, about the degree to which his cameoed fingers turned up the volume on the radio, about the speed at which he made that big Lincoln rocket out of the tobacco slums, forever and forever, bearing Sissy Hankshaw up to the heights.

And Sissy Hankshaw, knees knocking with thrill and fear, and not knowing what else to do, reached into her scrawny coat and offered the black man a slice of cheese.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (CHUCK WAGON)

Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy. To smoke a cigar is to end a long separation; to burn down a police station is to hold homecoming for billions of happy molecules.

Beside a marshy lake in an obscure sector of the Dakotas, a campfire was smiling its head off. Around it, however, there arose from a group of cowgirls several flares of discontent. Some of the girls were complaining that their stew was tasteless and bland.

“This stew is bland,” said one girl.

“It's like milk from a sick cow,” said another.