Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“And, you know, most of us at the picnic got sunburned, and a third of us got poison oak, and a bunch of us got drunk and sick off beer the older kids bought us and we caught the dickens from our parents, and one boy got bit by a watersnake and somebody sat on broken glass. And I thought to myself, hmmm, that Sissy's the only one that came out of that day okay; nothing happened to her 'cause she just kept moving. You know what I mean?”

Mrs. Seward left her chair to unplug the coffeepot.

“Right off, I don't remember how old she was when she found out she was part Indian. Her mama's family, a lot of them, had lived out West, in the Dakotas, and one of them had married a squaw, I don't recollect the tribe. .

“Siwash? That's right. That sounds like it. So one time Sissy's aunt — her mama's sister — came here for a visit from Fargo, and there was a lot of fuss about integration here then; everybody was all upset about the Supreme Court telling us we'd have to go to school with the colored, and I guess the Hankshaws were discussing it like everybody else when the aunt let the cat out of the bag about Indian blood in the family. Well!! Sissy's daddy got furious. I don't know why; a Indian's not the same as a nigra. But I guess he just about divorced his poor wife. Sissy, though, was right pleased. She figured out she was one-sixteenth — what was it? — Siwash. She talked about it at school. We'd never seen her so excited. She showed a lot of interest in Indians after that, although not as much as she showed in hitching rides. Of course, she didn't look a bit Indian. She was as fair as an apricot. But for a while about then she started putting designs on her poor thumbs. Mercy! Her own brothers had to hold her down and wash them off.”

Having perked sufficiently, coffee made the short trip from pot to cup. It traveled direct. There were no other stops on its route. Betty Clanton Seward produced a box of Saltines and a brown and yellow aerosol can.

“This stuff is the latest thing in the stores,” she said, brandishing the can. “You spray a regular old soda cracker with it. .” zzzzt zzzzt “. . and it makes it taste like a chocolate chip cookie. Here.”

The interviewer declined. He wished to ask clear and concise questions concerning a former classmate of Mrs. Seward's. He didn't want his mouth full of soda crackers, even if they did taste like chocolate chip cookies. (What won't those Japanese think of next?)

“There were times, I'll admit, when I'd look at her sitting in school, sitting so straight and smiling so secretively and all, and I'd think that maybe there was something special about her, something other than her physical condition, I mean; something positive. She couldn't take the secretarial program because she couldn't use a typewriter; she had good ideas in art class but she wasn't able to bring them off; heck, she only got a C in Home Ec 'cause she couldn't sew, and everybody got A or B in Home Ec. Just the same, and even though her future looked hopeless, I had this feeling that she could teach us others something. Only I never figured out what it was, exactly. And I guess I was as, ah, insensitive to her as the rest. One evening after dark when she thought nobody would see her, she brought a whole armload of yellow jonquils that she'd picked — kicked out by the roots, actually — alongside some road or other and left them on my front porch. She kinda liked me, I think.” Betty Clanton Seward tugged at a strand of her hair as a preoccupied milkmaid might tug at a teat in the dawn. “She was real quiet, but I heard her anyway. I was upstairs putting in curlers and I looked out the window and saw her. I could tell who it was because the moon was shining on her. . her abnormality.

“Well, I couldn't keep my big mouth shut. I told the kids at school about it and they teased her pretty hard.

“That wasn't the worst time, though. The worst time was when I gave a costume party and I invited Sissy, partly because I felt sorry for her but also because she was, I don't know how to put it into words, she fascinated me, in a sense. At any rate, Bill — he's my husband now, he's a chemist at the Philip Morris plant, you oughta talk with him — Bill made himself a huge pair of thumbs outta paper and chicken wire and that was his costume. He didn't really mean to be cruel, but you know how young folks are. Thoughtless.”

She sighed. She milked another half-pint from her hair. Then, as had the coffee before her, she perked.

“Goodness, it's nearly two. I've gotta start getting my face on. Can you excuse me? Young Willie has to be at the doctor's at three. He's gotta have a wart burned off today.”

Whereupon the ten-year-old boy who had been loitering on the edges of the interview glomming crackers by the dozen presented his unshod foot — washed, thank God, in recent times — and sure enough, there was a wart atop it the size of a burr. The interviewer wondered why Mrs. Seward simply didn't spray the wart until it tasted like a chocolate chip cookie and let Willie eat it off.

The interviewer didn't tell Mrs. Seward that.

There was something else the interviewer didn't tell Mrs. Seward.

He didn't tell her that the next time persons adorned themselves with fraudulent thumbs in imitation of Sissy Hankshaw, it would be an act of homage.

Mrs. Seward would have thought it ridiculous, an homage of tree-bark thumbs waving impertinently in the face of the twentieth century like a forest of prehistoric diplomas that expect no handshake in return. As a matter of fact, it was a bit ridiculous. But because it was ridiculous, we know it must be true.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (VENUSIAN)

On Venus, the atmosphere is so thick that light rays bend as if made of foam rubber. The bending of light is so extraordinary that it causes the horizon to tilt upward. Thus, if one were standing on Venus one could see the opposite side of the planet by looking directly overhead.

Perhaps it is best that we on Earth resist the temptation to thicken our atmosphere. Maybe we should give second considerations to those leaders who insist we learn to think of smog as our friend.

Imagine that you are a cowgirl, trotting your pony in the grassy hills of the Dakotas. Suddenly you hear a wild trumpeting cry. You rear back in the saddle and look aloft — expecting to see a flight of whooping cranes, dancing in midair to their own loud music. Instead, you gaze upon a bugler blowing reveille on the other side of the world. The Chinese army is bivouacked all over the sky.

13.

ONE JUNE, Richmond, Virginia, woke up with its brakes on and kept them on all summer. That was okay; it was the Eisenhower Years and nobody was going anywhere. Not even Sissy. That is to say, she wasn't going far. Up and down Monument Avenue, perhaps; hitching up and down that broad boulevard so dotted with enshrined cannons and heroic statuary that it is known throughout the geography of the dead as a banana belt for snuffed generals.

The old Capital of the Confederacy marked time in the heat. Its boots kicked up a little tobacco dust, a little wisteria pollen, and that was it. Each morning, including Sundays, the sun rose with a golf tee in its mouth. Its rays were reflected, separately but equally, by West End bird baths, South Side beer cans, ghetto razors. (In those days Richmond was convoluted like the folds of the brain, as if, like the brain, it was attempting to prevent itself from knowing itself.)

In the evenings, light from an ever-increasing number of television sets inflicted a misleading frostiness on the air. It has been said that true albinos produce light of a similar luminescence when they move their bowels.

Middays, the city felt like the inside of a napalmed watermelon.

Whenever possible, men, women, children and pets kept to the shade, talked little, stirred less, watched the blades of fans go 'round as is the nature of fan business. Only Sissy Hankshaw voluntarily frequented those places where tar was sticky, where fried gravel sparkled, where weeds wilted, where asphalt crumbled (the Devil's leftover birthday cake), where worn concrete translated into Braille long bitter arguments between the organic and inorganic levels of life. (If you have ever licked nickel or kissed steel, you know the arguments.)