Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Toward the center of the butte top is a horse-deep, circular depression that in fair weather serves the Chink as a sunken living room. From the northern wall of the depression gapes the mouth of a cave.

A person of Sissy's height has to crawl into the cave on her hands and knees, and almost nowhere in the entrance chamber — covered with Japanese straw matting — is there room for a leggy model to stand up straight. The entrance chamber, however, is merely the top level of three levels of caverns. The bottom level, deep inside the butte, consists of two freight car-sized rooms, heated by thermal updrafts and remarkably dry. On the middle level, there are five or six enormous chambers, connected by narrow passageways. In one of these chambers is the clockworks.

From the walls of the middle-level room, fresh pure water drips constantly. It is as if the walls are weeping. It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping.

Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.

It weeps

for the black people who think like white people.

It weeps

for the Indians who think like settlers.

It weeps

for the children who think like adults.

It weeps

for the free who think like prisoners.

Most of all, it weeps

for the cowgirls who think like cowboys.

69.

HER THUMBS HAD STOPPED HIM. Her thumbs were good at that. If the man who cried “Stop the world, I want to get off!” had only had Sissy's thumbs. .

She had stopped him cold on the side of Siwash Ridge. So, what next? He wore the wary look of a wild animal. He wouldn't stay stopped long. It was her move. What could she say? His gaze went through her like beavers through a paper palm tree. His was the look of the strong who will not tolerate weaklings. She must speak and she must speak with prehensility, for not even her thumbs would stop him a second time. It was imperative that she say the right thing. He was turning as if to scamper off again.

“Well,” said Sissy, with what passed for nonchalance. “Aren't you going to shake your whanger at me?”

It broke him up. He slapped his thighs and giggled hysterically. Ha has, ho hos and hee hees squirted out of his nose and through the gaps in his teeth. When the laughter finally died a nervous chipmunk death, he spoke. “Follow me,” he said, in a voice unaccustomed to invitation. “I'll fix you supper.”

Follow him she did, although he set a powerful pace up the tricky twilit trail.

“I'm a friend of Bonanza Jellybean's,” she said between puffs.

“I know who you are,” he said without looking back.

“Oh? Well, there's been some trouble on the ranch. I came up here to get out of the way. It's so dark now I doubt if I could find my way back down. If you could help. .”

“Save your breath for the climb,” he said. His voice wore no pants.

From the top of the butte there could still be seen light in the west. The haunted shapes of the badlands were silhouetted navy blue against a pumpkin-colored horizon. To the east, across shadowed hills, the prairie lay on its back in the dark, hidden, yet making felt its awesome flatness, a flatness that flavors so much of America, beginning with her emotions and her taste; a flatness that makes a perfect surface for those wheels of Detroit whose rotations are for millions the only escape from the chronically flat. Sissy turned from east to west and back again. The faintly lit badlands were so tortured and melodramatic they seemed, like the prose in a Dostoyevsky novel, almost a corny joke. The blacked-out prairie, on the other hand, had a style identical to that of rural weekly newspapers throughout the middle of the nation: blandness in such high concentration as to become finally poisonous. An owl flew over the ridge from Crime and Punishment to the Mottburg Gazette , scanning the pages for a literate rodent, asking the librarian for a whooo-done-it.

Directly below them, lights twinkled at the Rubber Rose. The ranch was quiet. Sissy could imagine showers running full blast in the bunkhouse as glossy pubes, folded labia and hooded clitorises were lathered and scrubbed clean of the perfume that had been allowed to accumulate to plague the Countess. Sissy imagined she heard popping washcloths, girlish laughter.

When she had caught her breath, Sissy was led to the depression and down a ladder of sticks. The Chink built a fire, an open fire, the depression itself being adequate protection from winds. He roasted yams. He heated meadowlark stew. The stew contained Chun King water chestnuts. Their texture did not change in the cooking. A lesson.

After supper, eaten in silence upon a rough wooden bench, the Chink went into the cave and returned with a tiny peppermint-striped plastic transistor radio. He switched it on. Their auditory nerves were immediately jangled by “The Happy Hour Polka.” Still clutching the radio in one hand, the Chink hopped into the wheel of firelight and began to dance.

Sissy in her travels had never seen anything quite like it. The old geezer heeled and toed, skipped and hopped. He flung his bones; he flung his beard. “Yip! Yip!” he yodeled. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Arms swimming, feet firecrackering, he danced through two more polka records and might have had a fourth except that the music was suspended for a news report. The international situation was desperate, as usual.

“Personally, I prefer Stevie Wonder,” confessed the Chink, “but what the hell. Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to anything if you really feel like dancing.” To prove it, he got up and danced to the news.

When the music commenced again with “The Lawrence Welk is a Hero of the Republic Polka,” the Chink lifted Sissy by her shoulders and guided her onto his pock-marked dance floor. “But I don't know how to polka,” she protested.

“Neither do I,” said the Chink. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” In a second they were traipsing over the limestone, arm in arm. Their shadows reeled against the curves of the depression. Night birds flew past with trembling feathers. A bat fluttered out of the cave, took one radar reading and headed for Kenny's Castaways.

When they had danced their fill, the Chink escorted Sissy to the opposite, and darkest, side of the depression and sat her down upon a pile of soft stuff: dried wheatgrass, faded Indian blankets and old down pillows without cases. The stuff reeked. It was that unmistakable sex blend of mushrooms, chlorine and tide pool. And cutting through that odor, the equally unmistakable smell of Bonanza Jellybean: clove, butterscotch Life Savers and a lotion made from cactus juices, which she rubbed daily upon the spot where she had been shot, so she said, by a silver bullet.

“So this is how Jelly spends her visits to the Chink,” thought Sissy. She started to wonder whether the other cowgirls, manless as they were, suspected — but halfway through that wonder she interrupted it to wonder if the Chink thought he was going to help himself to her . She had always been passive when it came to being pawed, pinched and the like, but no man had ever taken her against her will. In fact, no man had ever taken her but Julian.

Just then the Chink did an astonishing thing. Without preamble, without hesitation, the white-maned Jap reached out and grasped her thumbs! He squeezed them, caressed them, covered them with wet kisses. All the while, he cooed to them, telling them how beautiful and exceptional and incomparable they were. Not even Julian had ever done that, you bet. Even Jack Kerouac hadn't dared touch her thumbs, although he had been fascinated by them and had written to them a poem on a cornhusk, an ode that might have been widely published had not it been eaten by a hungry hobo as Kerouac and the boys boxcared into Denver to search for Neal Cassady's daddy, the most missing man in the history of American letters, leaving it up to this author to tell the story of those awesome appendages.