Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

The Countess hasn't been around in quite a while. Julian painted ahead and has no more to do for him. And since your husband has begun to paint for a German account, it isn't likely he'll get any more calls for pastoral landscapes suffused with the luminous haze of Yoni Yum or silvered with dreamy drops of Dew. The Countess likes to be exclusive, if not unique. As for you, you haven't had a modeling assignment since the Dakota debacle. Your eyes, while still beautiful, have lost some of their innocence; your mouth, while still ripe, has lost some of its perk. Too, your little sojourn in Dr. Goldman's spa for half-rich fuck-ups couldn't have enhanced your career. Oh well. You dry and wrap yourself and patter in to see your old benefactor.

Powdered stubble pricks your face as you kiss. Upon his monocle are the dried deposits of sauces that no French chef will ever stir again. In a voice that sounds the way a can of cheap dog food would sound if a can of cheap dog food could speak, he tells you you are looking swell. “Domesticity, the male's meat, the female's poison, seems to become you,” he says. A can of Skippy with a slight lisp.

And how is the Countess? “Shit O dear!” he exclaims. “Sales are down more than ten percent. Are things so desperate that women can't spend a few pennies to control their atavistic stench? I ask you. A samurai warrior, before going into battle, would burn incense in his helmet so that if an enemy took his head he would at least offer his beheader a pleasant aroma. Now, it appears to me that no matter how bleak a future a woman faces, she could at least face it with an inoffensive vagina.”

“You're convinced, then, the future is bleak?” asks Julian. He had been painting a sprite beside a pellucid pool.

The Countess's store teeth clack compulsively. Rat a tat tat! Dental gangbusters. “Indeed,” he says. “This country is in one hell of a mess.”

“It all depends on how you look at it,” you say.

Julian and the Countess pause and stare at you expectantly. They suppose that you are going to explain yourself, to tell them how national events may be viewed in a light that makes them seem less messy. But you have nothing to add. You meant only what you said, that it all depends on how you look at it, that everything, always , depends on how it is perceived, and that the perceiver has the ability to adjust his perceptions.

Conversation resumes. Julian and the Countess make small talk about small issues: the economy, politics. You are in postbath terrycloth, feeling a bit drowsy.

Suddenly, the Countess whirls at you. He gets right in your face. His smile looks as if it had been rear-ended at an intersection. He cracks a question at you; it is like Delores cracking her whip. “Why haven't you spoken out about the whooping cranes, Sissy?” Crack!

“What. . what do you mean?”

“You know very well what I mean. I've been working day and night in the lab and haven't paid attention to the news. But last evening I heard that the whooping cranes were missing. The whole bloody flock. Truman gave me the details. He was practically in tears. There's been a furor about it. .”

“Yes, it's been in the papers incessantly,” interrupts Julian.

“There's been a furor about it, and rightly so. My question is, why haven't you spoken out? I know where those cranes are, and so do you.”

Julian gawks at you. Bewilderment widens his eyes.

“What do you mean?” Your voice is as soft and tremulous as a butterfly's good-by.

“Sissy, don't play dumb with me! You're a good model but a shitty actress. The cowgirls are involved in this whooping crane disappearance. You know perfectly well they are. Last seen in Nebraska. Didn't make it to Canada. Siwash Lake is between Nebraska and Canada. The cowgirls have possession of Siwash Lake. And who else but Jellybean's wild cunts could possibly conceive of doing something so diabolical as to tamper with the last flock of some nearly extinct birds? Of course they're behind it. Of course they are. How much do you know about it? Have they murdered those cranes the way they murdered my moo cows?”

“I don't know anything about it,” you protest. You sense your pale flesh turning paler.

Julian continues to gawk, but now his eyes have been narrowed by suspicion. The Countess leans so far into your face that you are almost wearing his monocle.

“Sissy, you're either a liar or a fool,” the Countess spits, “and you may be a weirdo but I've never known you to be stupid. You're trying to protect those scuzzy bitches. Well, let your conscience be your guide, as my mommy used to say, but it won't work. I have a call placed to the Secretary of the Interior, a simple jerk but a jerk who never forgets a political favor. I'll be speaking to him right after lunch. And I'm going to tell him where to find his whooping cranes. I'd tell the President directly, if he wasn't busy driving himself berserk trying to avoid stepping in his own shit. But the Interior Secretary will do. He's a law and order man, and he'll take care of it nicely. He'll also take all the credit for it, but don't think he won't find a way to reward me. Of course, it will be nearly reward enough just seeing those cowgirls get what's coming to them. Those stinking sluts are going to suffer. .”

There is then a sound such as neither the Countess nor Julian Gitche has ever heard. They do not know, are never to know, whether the sound issued from your throat or was produced by your first or most preaxial digit as it was thrown through air. In any case, that sound is quickly obscured by another, the sound of your right thumb striking — with astonishing force — the Countess's face.

Immediately, the thumb strikes again, this time shattering the Countess's monocle against his eye.

“Shit O dear,” the Countess gasps. His dentures fall onto the shag rug, as if to graze there.

Then. . O my God and Goddesses!. . Can you believe it?. . The left thumb strikes.

Thumbs that not once in a lifetime had been raised in anger; thumbs that had known risk often but never violence; thumbs that had invoked and mastered secret Universal Forces without acquiring the faintest stain of evil; thumbs that had been generous and artful; thumbs that were considered so delicate and precious that their owner would not so much as shake hands for fear of damage; those same thumbs, wound 'round with the glory of a million innovative and virtuoso hitchhikes, are now smashing the face of a human being.

What are you doing, Sissy? I'll tell you what you're doing. You're swinging them like ballbats, like the legendary swatters of Babe Ruth, socking flaming homers over the left-field fence of Hell. Beads of blood land noiselessly upon the keys of the white piano.

Julian is paralyzed. He cannot stop you. He cannot speak. You continue to swing and swat. The Countess is out on his feet. His eyes are closed. His legs wobble. He does a pathetic dance, like a drunken old fool trying to boogie with a chorus girl. Coagulating polka dots turn his linen suit into clown garb. He topples forward to meet your onrushing thumb (the thumb that once made the Pennsylvania Turnpike into a playground); the thunder of it straightens him up, sends him over backward. Motionless, he lies on the floor, a crimson part in his thinning hair, a bright ooze at each nostril.

The poodledog, Butty, short for Butterfinger, had been awakened by the commotion and had trotted into the living room to check it out. You notice he is growling at you now, baring his teeth at your unprotected ankles. You catch him broadside with a low swing, sending him flying to the opposite wall, where he flattens out with a breathless whimper against a Dufy lithograph. Poodle and print drop to the carpet together, a heap of broken glass, doggy curls and images of sailboats so fanciful they seemed suited only for lakes of lemonade.