Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You'd be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise.”

“Okay, that may well be true. But what an enterprise! Hitchhiking. Bumming rides. I think of hitchhiking I think of college kids, servicemen and penniless hippies. I think of punks in oily denims and maniacs with butcher knives hidden in their wad of rumpled belongings. .”

“I've been told that I looked like an angel beside the highway.”

“Oh, I'm sure you are a beautiful exception to the rule. But why? Why bother? You've traveled your whole life without destination. You move but you have no direction.”

“What is the 'direction' of the Earth in its journey; where are the atoms 'going' when they spin?”

“There's an orderly pattern, some ultimate purpose in the movements of Nature. You've been constantly on the move for nearly twelve years. Tell me one thing that you've proven.”

“I've proven that people aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.”

“Aimless. .”

“Not aimless. Not in the least. It's just that my aims are different from most. There are plenty of aimless people on the road, all right. People who hitchhike from kicks to kicks, restlessly, searching for something: looking for America, as Jack Kerouac put it, or looking for themselves, or looking for some relation between America and themselves. But I'm not looking for anything. I've found something.”

“What is it that you've found?”

“Hitchhiking.”

That stopped Julian for a while, but on the second day, long after Howard and Marie had tiptoed out of his apartment, he returned to the subject. He could not appreciate Sissy's accomplishments. So what if she had once flagged down thirty-four cars in succession without a miss? What merit in the feat of crossing Texas blindfolded in cyclone season with a parakeet on her thumb? He viewed such deeds as pathetically, sophomorically, wanton. He shook his unpainted and featherless head sadly when he considered the police record (arrests for vagrancy, illegal solicitation of rides and, ironically, suspicion of prostitution) of an essentially respectable woman.

So effectively did he chide her about it that a vaguely guilty gloom arrived in her eyes, its cold feet shuffling in the dampness there. He wrung sniffles out of her, and when she was appropriately unhappy, he comforted her. He held her tightly in protective arms, built a castle around her, dug a moat, raised the drawbridge. Only her mama had ever held her like that, cooing in her ear. He petted her with poodle-petting hands, so soft they could get splinters from eating with chopsticks. He cuddled her as if she were an infant. He insulated her bare wires. And she, Sissy, who had slept in the excesses of every season, uncared for and without a care, snuggled down deeply in Julian's paternal tenderness and let herself be coddled.

It was at this point — Julian cooing, Sissy purring — that the magic that had attended her thumbs from the moment in her youth when she first made her commitment to a life less shallow, safe and small than our society demands of us, excused itself, tiptoed out of the apartment like Howard and Marie and strolled down to Stanley's Bar on Avenue B for a beer.

Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (DELORES DEL RUBY)

Some folks said she had scaled a convent wall in San Antonio and run away with a Mexican circus. Others claimed she had been the favored daughter of a prominent Creole family in New Orleans, until she got mixed up with an alligator cult that practiced peyoteism. Still others said she was Gypsy, through and through, while one source insisted that — like so many “Spanish” dancers — she was actually Italian or Jewish, and had picked up her routines watching Zorro on television in the Bronx.

One thing all the cowgirls agreed on, however, was that their forewoman flicked an educated lash, so none disputed the story that she had acquired her first whip when she was five years old, a gift from an uncle who had said, upon presentation, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

The day Delores del Ruby arrived at the Rubber Rose, a snake crawled across the dusty road that led to the ranch, carrying a card under its forked tongue. The card was the queen of spades.

26.

EACH TIME HE GOT UP, whether it was to go to the bathroom or feed his pets, Julian had removed an article of clothing, so that now, on the third day of their sofaing, he was nearly as naked as she.

The smack of kisses sounded with increasing frequency in the room; discussions and naps were of shorter duration. After she had broken down and surrendered to his protective ministrations, the last faint traces of his asthma evaporated like moth pee off a sixty-watt bulb and he found himself host to an erection.

Sissy knew just how to entertain it. She had been recently educated. She stroked it. She pushed its hood back. She ringed its rosy. She let it throb alongside her thigh, and better yet, alongside her thumb. She maneuvered herself beneath it and guided its crabapple noggin through the seam in her being. Like a bullet of thick fish meat, it went to target.

Alas, Julian's chimes rang before the appointed hour. He was subjected to a sudden attack of the old premature. And Sissy was left with her virginity intact, throttling a sticky wicket. Gitche Goo mee!

The watercolorist apologized with downcast eyes. It was Sissy's turn to comfort. She reassured him so convincingly that he soon cheered up and began to chatter again about such wonders as Shakespeare and Edward Albee, Michelangelo and Marc Chagall. “It is the measure of Western civilization,” said he, “that it can encompass in harmony, balance off, as it were, such divergent masterworks as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The American Dream , as the dome of the Sistine Chapel and the ceiling of the Paris Opera.”

Sissy sat up. Her eyes moped about the apartment, looking at but not seeing the macramé wallhangings, the volumes of Robert Frost.

“What's the matter?” asked Julian.

After a while Sissy answered. “I'm cold,” she said.

“Here. I'll turn down the air conditioner.”

“It's not the air conditioner that's making me cold.”

“Oh. . Well, what is it? Is it. . me?” Eyes downcast again.

“It's the piano.”

“The piano? You don't like my white piano? Well, if you'd prefer, I mean, if you'll be coming here often — and I hope you shall — I suppose I can have it removed. Might as well. I play badly. I've studied for years but I'm rotten. The Countess says I'm the first Indian in history to be scalped by Beethoven. Ha ha.”

“It's not the piano.”

“Oh. . What is it then? Me?”

“It's the books.”

“The books?”

“No. It's the paintings.”

“The paintings? My watercolors? Well, I do use lots of blues and greens.”

“No, it's not your paintings.”

“Not my paintings?”

“It's the stillness .”

“My home is too quiet for you?” asked Julian incredulously, for he could plainly hear Puerto Ricans beating garbage cans in the next block.

“Not quiet. Still . Nothing moves in here. Not even your birds.”

Sissy stood. The Countess had sent a flunky by with her rucksack, and now she walked to it.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting dressed. I've got to go.”

“But I don't want you to leave. Please stay. We can go to dinner. I owe you a dinner. And tonight. . we can. . really make love.”