Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

35.

THE TROUBLE with seagulls is that they don't know whether they are cats or dogs. Their cry is exactly midway between a bark and a meow.

No such ambivalences exist in the Dakotas. The Dakota sky is all of one piece; the Dakota wind is nothing if not direct; the Dakota dust suffers no identity crisis; the whooping cranes that sojourn twice each year in the Dakotas (where gulls don't dare to fly) know precisely what they are — their inimitable whoops attest to that.

As one might expect of such singular, straightforward, no-nonsense territory, the topography of the Dakotas is almost uniformly flat. Vast vistas of arid grasslands, open and unmodulated, thirsty and exposed, as level and smooth as a child's back before the first slouches and pimples set in, stretch from horizon to horizon like the most lonesome old chord on God's harmonica. Neither from danger nor boredom is there a place to hide. No Pan ever chased a tittering nymph across these solitary plains.

At the western edge of the Dakotas, however, the monotony of the landscape, now gradually tilting toward the Rockies, is interrupted by a topographical turmoil so harsh and wild that humans, with a sense of morality that must amuse amoral Nature, have seen fit to call it the Bad lands. The Ziegfeld Follies of erosion, the badlands flaunt their geological naughtiness in tall, towerlike buttes — heaping layer after layer of tormented rock and soil toward the sky — and sculptured canyons so deep and chaotic they can break a devil's heart.

(In writing about the Dakotas, it is easy to speak of gods and devils, just as in writing about spiritual matters, it is wise to ignore them.)

Between the forlorn prairie pancake and the eerie badlands ruins, there lies a narrow band of humpy hills, green and pastoral. Less than two miles wide in places, this band seems gentle and friendly in comparison to the physiographic excesses on either side of it. Small lakes glimmer in its hollows, and groves of trees are fairly common. To be sure, it collects a full share of summer scorching and winter blizzards; the near-constant Dakota wind extends it no special privileges; thunderstorms as righteously aloof as a B-52 pilot over an orphanage bomb it heavily with raindrops and hail; tornadoes have its number in their little black books and sometimes call. Nevertheless, if it is not quite an oasis, the ribbon of rises is definitely Dakota's sweeter streak. The hills are carpeted with midlength prairie grass. Cows have a tooth for this grass, as the buffalo did before them, and because the soil here is rich in lime, it provides the calcium that grazing animals need in their forage. Thus, the Dakota hills are partitioned into cattle ranches.

Small by local standards, the Rubber Rose takes up 160 acres of the green hill country, and, said a traveling Texan who saw it once, “Ah think A'll wrap this heah place up in a napkin and take it home.” It also is one of the more isolated ranches: thirty miles from the closest town, sixteen miles from the house next door. At one time, it was part — nearly all — of the Siwash Indian reservation.

The ranch's buildings are clustered at its extreme western end, the badlands end, at the base of a butte higher, broader and longer than any in its vicinity. In fact, it is one of the most outrageous ridges in the entire badlands, and all the more conspicuous because of its position on the eastern perimeter of the badlands proper, a kind of last fling, as it were. Shaped like an unfrosted wedding cake from which misogamists had taken several cynical bites; no, shaped more like a ship that has been heavily shelled and has broken away from a convoy (its fellow buttes) to flounder against the surf of low green hills, the superbutte mellows into patches of grass and bushes here and there, but for the most part it is a barren monolith too rugged and steep for an ordinary human to climb. This mountain is known as Siwash Ridge. If it is a ship, it carries a cargo of limestone and phantoms. If it is a ship, it flies the flag of the forbidden. If it is a ship, the Chink is its captain, for he lives on its flying bridge in solitude.

Siwash Lake is at the opposite, or eastern, end of the ranch, a hazel eye reading and rereading Page One of the prairie.

And somewhere on that prairie, narrowing the miles between her and the Rubber Rose, her thumbs a match for the vastness surrounding her, Sissy Hankshaw Gitche was riffling traffic. A piece of her, perhaps the biggest piece, was flooded with ecstasy at being free, careening across the continent again, doing this crazy and apparently meaningless thing that, even after a nine-month layoff, she did better than anyone alive; but another piece of her missed Julian, ached for the attentions he lavished on her body and mind. And in her ambivalence, she, who was once as unwavering as the whooping crane, was now more like the gull.

36.

SHE ENTERED MOTTBURG in a Chevy pickup with a loose fender. It rattled worse than the Countess's dentures. In contrast, the cattleman at the wheel made no noise at all. He wore grim lips and a far-away squint, both mute. Dakota men are like that.

Deposited at a feed store, she aimed her long strides immediately for the other end of town. It wasn't far. At the outskirts, she stopped to speak to an elderly woman who sat nodding in a wicker chair in front of a little mom-and-pop gas station and general store. The old woman held Indian summer in her lap like a cat.

“Excuse me, ma'am. Could you direct me to a ranch that's called the Rubber Rose? Mottburg is supposed to be the nearest town.”

Her eyes half-closed like a lizard's, the woman raised her chin without raising her lids. “Are they real?” she asked in a voice that was surprisingly perky.

“You mean my thumbs? Yes, they're very, very real.”

“Oh, well, excuse me then, honey, I didn't mean to get personal. Since you're asking about that Rubber Rose Ranch I thought maybe you was part of that moving picture show they're making out there. I figured maybe they was props , make-up, you know. Are you going to be in that moving picture? What's it about, anyway?”

Sissy started to inform the lady that the cinematographers she obviously had seen heading for the Rubber Rose were there to film the whooping cranes, but something — some protective instinct, perhaps — stopped her short. For some reason, she wasn't sure that she should mention the cranes.

The plainswoman noticed Sissy's hesitation. “Aw, it don't matter,” she said. “It'll probably never come to Mottburg, anyway. 'Specially if it's one of them brand X naked pictures. All the show here ever shows anymore are bear-poop-in-the-trail movies put out by the Mormon Church. And then every Christmas they run The Sound of Music again. Lord, I've seen that picture four times. If they try to drag me to it this year I'm going to tell 'em my eyes are too weak. I hate to fib, but enough's enough, don't you think? Now, if they was to bring in a Bette Davis picture. . That's my meat. Do you like Bette Davis?”

Sissy smiled. “I don't recall anything I've seen her in, but I hear she's a marvelous actress.” Sissy didn't know if she liked Bette Davis or not, but she liked the old woman.

“Well, I've seen her many a time, and Joan Crawford, too. I had plans to be a sophisticated lady like them once, but I got stuck out here, got stuck and never got away. I managed the Mottburg Grange for thirty years. They retired me a while back. Figured I was senile. They reckon old Granny Schreiber is out of it now, but I know what's going on, every inch of the way.”

Sissy set her rucksack down. “Say, Miss Schrieber. .”

“ Mrs . Schreiber. How else would a woman get stuck in a place like this if it wasn't for a man? Lord!”