Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

At any rate, what with Sissy Hankshaw posing for so many picturesque Yoni Yum and Dew ads, it didn't take more than about a year for sharp eyes to ascertain that her hands were never in the picture. They would be behind her back, or cropped out, or some tropical foliage or gondola prow would be obscuring them. And rumors à la Dorothy Collins spread along Madison Avenue. The usual stories — she had warts or birthmarks or tattoos or six fingers where five would do — came and went; but one version, that when she had once accepted an engagement ring from another, a jealous lover had lopped off her hands with a fish knife, persisted. The Countess, of course, wouldn't say. He kept Sissy's identity a secret and paid his photographer extra to develop lockjaw. It was the kind of game the Countess loved. Listening to the rumors about his mystery model, he would probe his nasty smile with his cigarette holder and his dentures would clack like a goose eating dominoes.

Years afterward, when he was no longer using Sissy exclusively, the Countess posed a female impersonator in a Dew ad. He was not above that sort of trick. But he truly was taken with Sissy Hankshaw. Among other things, he believed her responsible for the jumpsuit interest that seized Western womanhood in the late sixties, and he placed her in the avant-garde of fashion. Well, it is true; Sissy wore jumpsuits long before any editor at Vogue , but it is also true that she continued to wear them after they passed out of style. Zippered jumpsuits were, in fact, the only garb Sissy could wear — because she hadn't the facility to button her clothes.

Sissy never complained about the censorship of her hands, although as a matter of pride she would have preferred them in plain view. To the Countess's credit, he often expressed a desire to get Sissy's thumbs into the photo, simply for their phallic counterpoint, but he feared the American public wasn't ready for that.

Maybe he'd test a thumb shot in Japan, he said, for among the Japs his firm already had grossed millions with an ad that paraphrased a haiku by the eighteenth-century poet Buson:

The short night is through:

on the hairy caterpillar

little beads of Dew.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (MOON OVER DAKOTA)

The moon looked like a clown's head dipped in honey.

It bobbed ballishly in the sky, dripping a mixture of clown white and bee jelly onto the Dakota hills.

Coyote howls (or were they crane whoops?) zigzagged through the celestial make-up like auditory wrinkles.

Moonlight fell on Bonanza Jellybean as she bent over the horse trough, still scrubbing out her panties. (A warm day in a bouncing saddle can really stain a girl's underwear.)

Moonlight spilled in the bunkhouse windows, competing with the lampshine that illuminated the pages of Mary's Holy Bible , Big Red's Ranch Romances and Debbie's The Way of Zen .

Moonlight ghosted the cheeks of girls sleeping and girls pretending to sleep.

A single moonbeam quivered timidly on the stock of Delores del Ruby's blacksnake whip, where the stock protruded from beneath the sack of peyote buttons that nightly served as her pillow.

Moonlight lured Kym and Linda outdoors in their nightgowns to lean against the corral fence in silent rapture.

Our moon, obviously, has surrendered none of its soft charm to technology. The pitter-patter of little spaceboots has in no way diminished its mystery.

In fact, the explorations of the Apollo mechanics revealed almost nothing of any real importance that was not already intimated in the Luna card of the tarot deck.

Almost nothing. There was one interesting discovery. Some of the rocks on the moon transmit waves of energy. At first it was feared that they might be radioactive. Instruments quickly proved that the emissions were clean, but NASA was still puzzled about the source and character of the vibrations. Rock samples were brought back to Earth by astronauts for extensive laboratory testing.

As the precise electromagnetic properties of the moon rocks continued to baffle investigators, one scientist decided just for drill to convert the waves into sound. It's a simple process.

When the moon vibrations were channeled into an amplifier, the noises that pulsed out of the speaker sounded exactly like “cheese, cheese, cheese.”

20.

"SIT DOWN, DEAR, do sit down. Take a load off those lovely tootsies. Yes, sit right there. Would you fancy some sherry?” The decanter the Countess lifted was dusty on the outside, sticky empty inside; a stiff fly lay feet-up on its lip. “Shit O goodness, I'm all out of sherry; how about a red Ripple?” He reached into the midget refrigerator beside his desk and removed a bottle of pop wine. After a shameful amount of effort he tore loose its cap and filled two sherry glasses.

“You know what Ripple is, don't you? It's Kool-Aid with a hard-on. Tee hee.”

Sissy managed a polite smile. Shyly, she gazed at her glass. It was impastoed with so many fingerprints it should have been buried with J. Edgar Hoover. (At FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., there is an agent who can go through the fingerprint files and pick out all the trumpet players. Perhaps he is the same agent who kept returning Sissy's file card to the Richmond regional office demanding to know why there were no thumb marks. He was in good shape and didn't know it. There once was a family in Philadelphia that went through four generations without fingerprints at all: they were born without prints, the only known case in history. “This could present quite a problem for law enforcement,” said one public official. “No way,” replied another. “If the police ever find a murder weapon in Philly with no prints on it, we'll know immediately that one of them did it.”

The Countess lifted his glass in salute. “To my own special Sissy,” he toasted. “Cheers! And welcome. So my letter brought you flying, eh? Well, I may have a little surprise for you. But first, tell me about yourself. It's been six months, hasn't it? In some circles that's half a year. How are you?”

“Tired,” said Sissy.

He stared at her sympathetically. “That's the very first time in the eons that I've known you that I've ever heard you complain. You must be tired. You've endured the greatest hardships without a whimper. I've always said, 'Sissy Hankshaw never has any bad luck because nothing seems bad luck to her. She's never been disgraced because there is nothing which she'd acknowledge as disgrace.' And now you're tired, poor darling.”

“Some folks might say I had my hard luck at birth, and after dealing with that everything else was easy. A born freak can only go uphill.”

“Freak, schmeek. Most of us are freaks in one way or another. Try being born a male Russian countess into a white middle-class Baptist family in Mississippi and you'll see what I mean.”

“I understand that. I was being facetious. You know that I've always been proud of the way nature singled me out. It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live with nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters — or mice. Anyway, I'm fine. But I've been steady moving for eleven years and some months, you realize, and I guess I'm a tad fatigued. Maybe I should rest up for a spell. Not as young as I used to be.”

“Shit O goodness, you won't be thirty for another year. And you're more beautiful than ever.”

Her jumpsuit was patterned with robins and apple blossoms. It bore sweet testimony to recent laundering, but there were creases where it had been folded in her rucksack. Her lengthy blond hair fell straight; it would have been more convenient to travel with it in braids, but, alas, how could her fingers braid it? A mask of grime and road filth that no rinsing in service station ladies' rooms could adequately remove clung to her face. In the pores of her crisp nose and high forehead was the residue of various fossil fuels as well as flea's-eye particles of Idaho, Minnesota and western New Jersey: clay, sand, loam, mud, pollen, cement, ore and humus. The dirty veil with which hitchhiking draped her features was one reason why her identity as a model had been fairly simple to conceal. If the Countess wanted her to pose, he'd have to steam her for a day or two in his private bath. Still, the sunshine that was projected in the office windows, having first passed through the green filter of Central Park, showed the Countess to be no snaky flatterer: Sissy was beautiful, indeed.