Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Wow!” exclaimed Linda, who had approached to refill Jelly's teacup. “That's pretty heavy, but I reckon that's the way it is.”

Sissy looked pleadingly at both Linda and Jellybean. “But you can't possibly slay this dragon.” With her greatest of thumbs, she gestured across the hills, although she might just as accurately have gestured in any other direction.

“Jelly knows that,” said Debbie, who had approached to replace Sissy's sandwich. “What she doesn't seem to know is that it isn't our job to slay the dragon. It's traditionally been the work of the hero to slay the dragon. It's the work of the maiden to transform the hero— and the dragon. I believe that it's not too late to accomplish such a transformation.”

Jelly seemed to have joined the clouds in a vow of silence. “Shit, Debbie,” she said, eventually (the clouds stuck to their vow). “I can't argue with you. The Chink says I shouldn't even try to argue with you. The Chink says I should follow my heart. And my heart tells me that I can't sit back and let a gang of politicians push cowgirls around.”

Noticing that both Jelly and Debbie were collecting tears in their eyes, Sissy asked, “How did this business get started, anyhow? How did you end up with this flock of birds?”

Debbie blew her nose on her embroidered bandanna. “You were aware that we were feeding them weren't you? We fed them brown rice last fall and they stayed over a couple of extra days. This spring we decided to try something different. We mixed our brown rice with fishmeal — whoopers love seafood (minnows and crawdads and little blue crabs), and fishmeal is cheap. Then Delores suggested another ingredient, and we think that's what did the trick.”

“You mean. .?”

“Peyote!” said Debbie and Jelly together.

“Then that professor was right. They are drugged.”

“Aw, come off it, Sissy,” said Jelly. “What do you mean, 'drugged'? Every living thing is a chemical composition and anything that is added to it changes that composition. When you eat a cheeseburger or a Three Musketeers bar, it changes your body chemistry. The kind of food you eat, the kind of air you breathe, can change your mental state. Does that mean you're 'drugged'? 'Drugged' is a stupid word.”

“You've been smoking pot,” said Linda. “You're drugged. How do you feel? Could we make you do something you didn't want to do?”

Debbie joined in. “Look at them, Sissy. Do they look like they're drugged? They hunt, they eat, they crap, they preen, they roost; they laid eggs, hatched them and took care of their young. They dance and whoop from time to time, and every now and then they go up for a flight. Only thing they don't do that they've always done is migrate. Is that so drastic?”

Framing the flock in a hole in her cheese sandwich, Sissy had to say, “No, I guess not. One of the largest whooping crane flocks we know about, the one that once inhabited the yellow grass country of Louisiana, never migrated. So it must not be absolute to the species.” She lowered her sandwich. “But the peyote is obviously affecting their brains. It's made them break a migratory pattern that goes back thousands of years. And it's made them less timid of people. Not even I could get this close to them before, and I have. .”

“A way with birds!” Jelly and Debbie sang together. “A way with birds, a way with birds!” Their little song skittered shrilly over the pond, reminding neither bird nor bird watcher, one hopes, that early American settlers made flutes from the wing bones of cranes.

Sissy blushed.

Jelly kissed her.

“The way I see it,” said Debbie, swinging her reddish brown pigtails from lakeside to hillward, “is that the peyote mellowed them out. Made them less uptight. They were afraid of bad weather and humans. That's why they migrated and kept to themselves. But the peyote has enlightened them. It's taught them there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Now they're digging life and letting the bad vibes slide on by. Don't worry, be happy. Be here now.”

Did Sissy buy that? Not a feather of it. “Fear in wild animals is completely different from paranoia in people,” she argued. “In the wilderness ecosystem, fear is natural and necessary. It's merely a mechanism for maintaining life. If the cranes hadn't had a capacity for fear, they would have disappeared long ago and you'd be having to get loaded with common old everyday meadowlarks and mallards.”

“This here discussion is destined to become academic,” said Jelly, “because we've got less than half a bag of peyote buttons left and Delores's run ended up in the Mottburg jail. So any day now we'll get a chance to see how the whoopers behave when they come down, to see if the peyote experience really changed them or not. But in the meantime, I want to say this about fear. .”

As Jelly pronounced the word fear , it suddenly materialized around about them.

A noisy unstoppable churning wheel of fear that rolls out of the altitudes like the flat tire off God's Cadillac; an ear-filling, stomach-tightening busy beater of death-egg fear that has poisoned the dreams of Southeast Asia's children.

The helicopter came in low over the hills from the south, chopping the blue September sky into war meat. It headed straight for the tea party.

108.

"HOLD YER FIRE!" yelled Bonanza Jellybean. “Hold yer fire!"

Luckily, her cry was heard above the oxygen-slicing swipes of the helicopter rotors, above the fusillade that resounded from the panicky cowgirls at the barricades. The shooting stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The only casualty of the outburst was a horse that was struck in the temple by a ricochet. The horse died with fresh grass in its mouth. Even so, death is the last straw.

Jelly had detected in the amateurish stripes of black and red paint with which the copter was decorated the hand not of law but of outlaw. She was correct. When the machine, having blown the floral display into disarray, settled in the wheatgrass a few yards to the north of the dome foundation, out stepped Billy West. Dressed entirely in black, like Delores, he had all he could do to bend his girth sufficiently to allow him to pass under the whirling blades without being beheaded (The co-pilot, a young man with hair to his waist, remained at the controls).

Jelly jumped off the foundation into an elephantine hug. Held above the ground in Billy's arms, her six-gun clattered against his six-gun.

“Git some gals over here and help me unload,” Billy said. “I brauch ya a few more boxes of ammo. And some Wonder Bread. And some beans. What ya think of my whirlybird? Got it in a deal over in Montana. Shit. Your trigger-happy chicks went and messed up my new paint job.” Fat fingers pointed at a streak of bare metal where a bullet had grazed the helicopter. “Well, c'mon now, let's git unloaded; I gotta git loose and vamoose. The feds are gonna be on my tail for sure.”

Boxes of ammunition, crates of bread, cases of beans were passed hurriedly from the chopper, then from girl to girl, finally to be stacked beside the chuck wagon. Then, blowing a chubby kiss, Bill West oozed back into the helicopter and off it flew for God knows where, its fearful churning agitating the hills.

The quiet that followed was overpowering. Manna from Heaven was never like this. Except for a few Trappist clouds, the sky was empty now. No use looking up there. Look instead at the new provisions. At the dead horse. At stunned and embarrassed faces. At the radio, which alone had the gall to infringe upon this contemplative moment.

Agreeing with the turning Earth that the “time” was now six o'clock, the radio was extracting news from the ether. More than one silent cowgirl heard the news announcer say that Judge So-and-So, at the request of the ACLU, had granted a forty-eight-hour extension of the deadline by which the Rubber Rose cowgirls must comply with his order. Negotiations between the cowgirls and the government were expected to follow.