Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Now, Sissy became more awake. Consciousness returned and when it unpacked its bags, there was suspicion in them. She shouldn't be staying, uninvited, in the bedroom of an ill man with whom she'd scarcely spoken. She ought to get back to the Countess's. Did Mr. and Mrs. Barth have her best interests at heart? She had been so relieved to get out of that dress that she hadn't considered hanky-panky. She wondered if this friendly couple could be up to something?

Her question was answered by a hand — she was not sure whose — creeping into her panties. She tried to turn away from its probings, but her cunt, without her knowledge or permission, had grown quite slippery, and a finger fell into it almost as if by accident.

Lowered steadily, like a flag at sunset, her panties were soon below her knees. She thought she felt a second finger slish into her pussy, but before that could be confirmed, still another finger muscled up her asshole. . and. . ohhh. It was like her early days as a hitchhiker. It was nostalgic; it was disgusting; it was. . ohhh.

Philosophers, poets, painters and scholars, debate all you want on the nature of beauty!

Tropical plums. Wine in a rowboat. Clouds, babies and Buddhas, resembling one another. Bicycle bells. Honeysuckle. Parachutes. Shooting stars seen through lace curtains. A silver radio that attracts butterflies; a déjà that just won't quit vuing. Han-shan wrote, after a moment of ecstasy, “This place is finer than the place I live!”

Across Sissy's lips passed Marie's tongue, then Howard's tongue, then Marie's titty, then Howard's. . then Howard's. . Howard's. .!!! One by one, like apartments in a new high-rise, orifices were being filled.

Anima mixed with animus. It was Marie who was climbing her, sliding around on her, pulling down her own panties with a wild hand. Marie nuzzled Sissy's calves, then her thighs. Marie's mouth, oozing hot saliva, apparently had a destination. But before it could be reached, Howard entered his wife from the rear.

Ah, sir penis, that old show-stopper! Chalk up another stolen scene for the one-eyed matinée idol. Marie could not suck for groaning.

Like a disc jockey from Paradise, Howard flipped Marie over and played her B side. Every now and again, he reached for Sissy, attempting to include her, but certain laws of physics insisted on being obeyed. Over and over, Marie called Sissy's name, but her eyes were half-closed and her caresses blind and scattered.

The Barths were really going at it. It would tax a day's output at the Countess's factory to quell the spreading funk in that room. Marie was kind of yowling, sounding so much like a cat that the poodle in the kitchen began to grrr. God knows what the birds in their cage were thinking.

“So this is what it's like,” thought Sissy. Fascinated, she propped herself up on her elbows to observe. Often she had imagined the act, but she was never entirely sure she imagined it correctly, not even after that evening of embracing Kerouac in a Colorado corn field. “So this is what it's really like.” The Great Secret could be returned to its bottle. Perceptual transformations were no longer necessary. This truly was educational.

In truth, Sissy found it more interesting than the canoe races at LaConner, Washington, more interesting than the San Andreas Fault, or Niagara Falls, or Bonnie and Clyde State Park, or Tapioca State Pudding — of course, Sissy never was one for sightseeing. She even found it more interesting than the Tobacco Festival, although not so much a challenge to the wiles of her thumbs.

Before the performance was over, however, and to Howard and Marie's dismay, Sissy debedded on a particularly high bounce and walked out. She pattered to the living room couch and crawled under the cover with Julian. There she stayed three days.

25.

THEY HAD A LOT TO TALK ABOUT.

Julian was still in his formal trousers, cummerbund attached, while Sissy was nude as she had ever been, and was smeared, besides, with those feminine juices, both her own and Marie's, that gave the Countess nose trouble — but the sofa-mates refused to let those differences stand in their way; they had a lot to talk about and there were larger differences than dress.

It would seem that Julian Gitche had dealt with the world by combining pigment with water in varying viscosities and making it spread, leak, splash, pour, spray, soak or fold onto a chosen paper format in selected tones, hues, volumes, shapes and lines. Sissy Hankshaw had dealt with the world by hitchhiking with a dedication, perspective and style such as the world had never seen. It was as befuddling to Sissy that an Indian would spend his life painting genteel watercolors in a bourgeois milieu as it was mind-wrenching to Julian that a bright, pretty, if slightly afflicted, young woman with a promising modeling career would spend hers endlessly hitchhiking.

“You have a romantic concept of Indians,” said Julian. “They are people, like any other; a people whose time has passed. I see no virtue in wallowing in the past, especially a past that was more often miserable than not. I am a Mohawk Indian in the same sense that Spiro Agnew is a Greek: a descendant, nothing more. And believe me, the Mohawk never approximated the glory that was Greece. My grandfather was one of the first Mohawks to work as a steel-rigger in New York City; you know Mohawks are used extensively on sky-scraper construction because they have no fear of height. My dad helped build the Empire State Building. Later, he founded his own steeplejack service, and despite prejudices against him by the unions and so forth for being an uppity redskin, he made a great deal of money. Enough to send me to Yale. I have a masters degree in fine arts and fairly good connections in Manhattan art circles. Primitive cultures, Indian or otherwise, hold a minimum of attraction for me. I cherish the firm order of symmetry that marks Western civilization off from the more heterogeneous, random societies in an imperfect world.”

In the limited space of the sofa, Sissy turned over, dinging one of her Howard-and-Marie accentuated nipples against one of Julian's shirt studs. “I don't know anything about this order and symmetry business. I'm a high school dropout from a race — the Poor White Trash race — that has done nothing for ten centuries but pick up rocks, hoe weeds, sweat in factories and march off to war whenever told to; and each generation has begot a smaller potato patch. But I've spent some time in libraries, not all of it asleep, and I have learned this: every civilized culture in history has discriminated against its abnormal members. 'Schizophrenia' is a civilized Western term, and so are 'witch' and 'misfit'—terms used to rationalize the cruel and unusual punishments doled out to extraordinary people. Yet the American Indian tribes, as you ought to know, treated their freaks as special beings. Their schizoids were recognized as having a gift, the power of visions, and were revered for it. The physically deformed were also regarded as favorites of the Great Spirit, welcome reliefs to the monotony of anatomical regularity, and everybody loved them, enjoyed them and paid them favor. In that ancient Greece that you find so glorious, somebody like me would have been killed at birth.”

“Now, Sissy, you're being overly sensitive and defensive. You saw how you were treated last night by my highly civilized friends. Why, not one of us even looked at your. . your. . your. . thumbs.”

“Exactly my point,” said Sissy.

And so that argument went. The other one went something like this.

“Aside from everything else, Sissy, I fail to see how you've even survived. My God! A girl, alone, on the roads, for years. And not killed or injured or outraged or taken sick.”