Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Permission granted.”

When the professor attempted to carry out the deed, however, she was accosted by cowgirls. They called her a disgrace to the nurturing traditions of womankind. They threatened to paint a mustache on her and shoot off her nipples.

At this point, the government decided to apply a pound of pressure. What the hell, the President was on the verge of leaving the White House via the fire escape; what else could go wrong? The FBI uncovered that the cowgirls didn't have title to the Rubber Rose. They sought out the rightful owner so as to persuade him to evict the young women and/or grant the government unrestricted trespass, but that person proved to be a cosmetics tycoon who had recently suffered severe head injuries and now spent his hours making eyes at the figures on wallpaper while listening to distant winds whistling down the necks of ethereal Ripple bottles.

The authorities had better luck with their next ploy. It was discovered that the Rubber Rose was operating as an unlicensed dairy, selling quantities of goat milk to a Fargo cheese factory. One day, the very day the President ducked out the back door with socks and stocks exploding from his suitcase, an inspector from the county health department paid a visit to the ranch, noted sixteen violations and shut down the dairy operation. Ouch! Deprived of their sole source of income, the cowgirls, indeed, were pressed.

All this Sissy learned from the media, and if the media did not inform her whether or not Delores had had her third peyote vision, or whether Elaine's urinary troubles had cleared up or whether Debbie had yet reached, via one path or another, the peace that passeth all understanding, still it was a tall measure, and she carried it in her head when she was readmitted to O'Dwyre for her second amputation.

95.

STOP, SISSY! Stop, you can't do it. It's unfair and irresponsible. We appreciate your motives; we realize that your intentions are good; we can even detect a certain bravery behind your intransigence, an ennobling sense of sacrifice there; and God knows we are sensitive to the suffering that has sometimes broken loose to come billowing forth from your appendages like the pungent vapors of whales — often it appears that in this life of experience and accommodation we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. But Sissy. . hold on!

To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry. To the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its magic. To the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace. As its options (no matter how absurd or unlikely) diminish, so do its chances for the future.

Sissy, the world needs those unflattering digits of yours, those dazed balloon snakes, those ruddy zucchini, those exclamation points that end with such force the understated sentences of your arms; needs your thumbs — one gone already! — the way it needs the rhino, the snow leopard, the panda, the wolf and, yes, the whooping crane; the way it needs headhunters and “wild” Indians and real Gypsies in horsedrawn carts; the way it needs some land without access by road or air, land with jumbo forests left on it forever and oil left in the ground to fulfill without interference its fossil destiny; the way it needs drunks and lunatics and old people with filthy habits; the way it needs the mirrors, hallucinations and metamorphoses of art.

Whether you need the solace of normality more than you need your unique powers is a personal matter, which only you may decide. But Sissy, don't let people such as Julian Gitche influence your decision. Julian needs your thumbs, huge and murmuring like the mouths of unexplored rivers — just the way nature made them — even if he isn't wise enough to understand that he needs them.

Never in history have there been thumbs to match yours, neither in size nor in deed. Answer this: what can replace them? Okay, yes, there are the children prophesied by Madame Zoe, but that's a gamble, like Heaven, the Eternity of Joy and the steady-state economy. Sissy, the mastodons are all gone; so are the Amazons. Timbuktu is now a roadside zoo and nobody ever found El Dorado.

Remember how the Chink venerated those biggies? Wouldn't it benefit others of us to do the same? Your thumbs were not metaphors or symbols; they were real. The one that remains, it still sings of the terror and ecstasy of flesh. Your thumb disorientates us, Sissy, and for the person courageous enough to see it out, disorientation always leads to.

love .

Don't deprive us of an opportunity to love unselfishly that which, like Christ when he was alive, is difficult to love. Don't spoil our fun.

96.

DINNER WAS GOOD that night and Dr. Robbins was again amazed by the purple cabbage, its color making him wonder where all the blue food is.

As he was indulging a genteel burp, the telephone rang. “I'll get it,” he said, which was odd for he had dined alone. Perhaps he was talking to his mustache.

The caller was Sissy Hankshaw Gitche. Her call was two months late.

“I'm sorry I stood you up.”

“Oh, that's all right,” Dr. Robbins replied. “I'm cute when I'm mad.”

Sissy was phoning from O'Dwyre VA Hospital. Her second surgery was scheduled very early the next morning, so Dr. Dreyfus had had her admitted overnight so that she might get a good night's sleep. People still used that phrase, “a good night's sleep.” It was probably a quite old expression, although it seemed to suggest the Eisenhower Years. Before the sixties woke us up.

Cries for help are frequently inaudible. Even when drowning, some people are too shy or embarrassed to yell. There was something Sissy needed to talk about with Dr. Robbins, but she couldn't get it out. So, instead of poking his eardrum with an icicle word such as amputation , she found herself asking, “Well, Doctor, what do you think about the whooping cranes?”

“Oh, I'm pro-whooper,” said he. “They go well with my blue sky.”

“No, what I mean is, how do you account for their tenacity? Why are they holding on like this? I mean, they're out of place in the modern civilized world; if they're going to refuse to attempt to adapt to changed conditions, wouldn't it make more sense just to go ahead and go extinct and avoid the hassles and suffering? What are they trying to prove?”

“Maybe,” said Dr. Robbins very slowly, “maybe they're waiting for us to go away.”

97.

WHEN THE SURGEONS, their blades grinning like piranha in their cases, dropped in for a preliminary examination next morning, Sissy surprised them. “Just go ahead and polli. . polli. . polli wanta cracker my right index finger,” said she. “I think I'm going to live with my left thumb for a while."

The brother-in-law was vexed, but Dr. Dreyfus understood: “As the sculptor Alexander Calder answered when asked if he'd be willing to make a mobile for the Guggenheim Museum out of solid gold, 'Sure, why not? And then I'll paint it black.' But I don't suppose that means very much to you.”

Shortening the finger bone, moving it over, increasing its angle, was tedious precision work, requiring intense concentration, yet throughout the pollicerization the surgeons were aware of the singing of birds.

After the operation, an incision was made in the patient's abdomen and her new quasi-thumb sewn into it to begin the grafting process. The next day, when Dr. Dreyfus entered her hospital room, he found Sissy standing before a full-length mirror in only bikini panties, having a thorough look at herself.

“Well, what do you think?” asked the plastic surgeon, artist and three-million-dollar defendant.