Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

It is neither a kneecap nor a torso. It is neither a whisker nor an eyeball. It is not a tongue.

It is not a belly button. (The umbilicus serves, then withdraws, leaving but a single footprint where it stood: the navel, wrinkled and cupped, whorled and domed, blind and winking, bald and tufted, sweaty and powdered, kissed and bitten, waxed and fuzzy, bejeweled and ignored; reflecting as graphically as breasts, seeds or fetishes the omnipotent fertility in which Nature dangles her muddy feet, the navel looks in like a plugged keyhole on the center of our being, it is true, but O navel, though we salute your motionless maternity and the dreams that have got tangled in your lint, you are only a scar, after all; you are not it.)

It is not a ribcage. It is not a back. It is not one of those bodily orifices favored for stuffing, nor is it that headstrong member with which every conceivable stuffable orifice somewhere sometime has been stuffed. There is no hair around it. For shame!

It is not an ankle, for her ankles, while bony, were ordinary, to say the least.

It is not a nose, chin or forehead. It is not a biceps, a triceps or a loop-of-Henle.

It is something else.

2.

IT IS A THUMB. The thumb. The thumbs, both of them. It is her thumbs that we remember; it is her thumbs that have set her apart.

It was thumbs that brought her to the clockworks, took her away, brought her back. Of course, it may be a disservice to her, as well as to the Rubber Rose, to emphasize the clockworks — but the clockworks is fresh and large in the author's mind right now. The image of the clockworks has followed the author through these early sentences, tugging at him, refusing to be snubbed. The image of the clockworks tugs gently at the author's cuff, much as the ghost of Duncan Hines tugs at the linen tablecloths of certain restaurants, little that he can eat now: long time no cheese omelet .

Still, as is well known, our subject's thumbs brought her to myriad other places besides the clockworks and to myriad other people besides the Chink. For example, they brought her to New York City and, there, before the gentleman Julian. And Julian, who looked at her often, looked at her well, looked at her from every angle, exterior and interior, from which man might look at woman — even Julian was most impressed by her thumbs.

Who was it who watched her undress for bed and bath? It was Julian. Whose eyes traced every contour of her delicate face and willowy body, invariably coming to rest on her thumbs? Julian's. It was Julian, sophisticated, sympathetic, closed to any notion of deformity, who, nevertheless, in the final analysis, in the sanctuary of his own mind's eye, had to regard her thumbs as an obtrusion on the exquisite lines of an otherwise graceful figure — as though Leonardo had left a strand of spaghetti dangling from the corner of Mona Lisa's mouth.

3.

THE NORMAL rectal temperature of a hummingbird is 104.6.

The normal rectal temperature of a bumblebee is calculated to be 110.8, although so far no one has succeeded in taking the rectal temperature of a bumblebee. That doesn't mean that it can't or won't be done. Scientific research marches on: perhaps at this moment, bee proctologists at Du Pont. .

As for the oyster, its rectal temperature has never even been estimated, although we must suspect that the tissue heat of the sedentary bivalve is as far below good old 98.6 as that of the busy bee is above. Nonetheless, the oyster, could it fancy, should fancy its excremental equipment a hot item, for what other among Creation's crapping creatures can convert its bodily wastes into treasure?

There is a metaphor here, however strained. The author is attempting to draw a shaky parallel between the manner in which the oyster, when beset by impurities or disease, coats the offending matter with its secretions, thereby producing a pearl, a parallel between the eliminatory ingenuity of the oyster and the manner in which Sissy Hankshaw, adorned with thumbs that many might consider morbid, coated the offending digits with glory, thereby perpetuating a vision that the author finds smooth and lustrous.

The author did not choose Sissy Hankshaw for her thumbs per se, but rather for the use that she made of them. Sissy has provided this book with its pearly perspectives, just as the clockworks — where there is tick and tock enough for everyone — has supplied its cosmic connections; just as the Rubber Rose has generated its rather warm rectal temperature.

4.

SISSY HANKSHAW arrived at the Rubber Rose — and, subsequently, the clockworks — as she had always arrived everywhere: via roadside solicitation. She hitchhiked into the Rubber Rose because hitchhiking was her customary mode of travel; hitchhiking was, in fact, her way of life, a calling to which she was born. Regardless of what luck her other eight digits grabbed onto, her thumbs carried her to many wonderful times and places and finally they carried her to the clockworks as well.

Even had she been common of thumb, however, she might have bummed a ride into the Rubber Rose, for she was without private transportation, and no train, bus or plane goes near the ranch, let alone the clockworks.

A woman came hitchhiking into a remote region of the Dakotas. She rolled in like a peach basket that had swallowed a hoop snake. It was nothing. She made it look easy. She had the disposition for it, not to mention the thumbs.

That woman did not come to stay. She meant to leave no more tracks in the hills of Dakota than a water bug might leave on a double martini. She rolled in effortlessly, her thumbs wiggling like the hula hips of Heaven. She planned to leave the same way.

But plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.

At any rate. . Just as there were ranch hands, politically oriented, who objected to the 8 — 10 glossy of Dale Evans in the Rubber Rose outhouse on the grounds that Miss Evans was a revisionist, a saddlesore (as they put it) on the long ride of cowgirl progress, there were interested parties who objected to Sissy Hankshaw's being identified with the Rubber Rose on the grounds that Sissy is not a true cowgirl and that, despite her friendship with Bonanza Jellybean et al., despite her presence during the revolt, she was only temporarily and peripherally involved with the events that took place on that hundred and sixty acres of lipstick criminal moonlight. Their contention is not without merit. How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of another's personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships. That the axis around which Sissy's daily involvements revolved was a result of her physical condition is obvious, and it is equally true that whatever memorable or epiphanic impact this singular woman has had on us occurred in a context quite removed from the Rubber Rose — or, at least, as the cowgirls themselves saw the Rubber Rose. It cannot be denied, however, that Sissy Hankshaw came not once, but twice, to the ranch, as well as to that place that, because therein occurs both a measuring and a transvaluation of time, we are obliged to call the “clockworks.” She came in different seasons and under different circumstances. But on both occasions she hitchhiked.

5.

SISSY'S EARLIEST MEMORY was of a day when she was four or three. It was Sunday afternoon and she had been napping under sheets of funnies on a horsehair sofa in the living room. Believing that she was still asleep, for they were not intentionally unkind, her daddy and a visiting uncle were standing over her, looking down at her young thumbs.