Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

117.

AMONG THE CASUALTIES of the whooping crane war was the Chink.

Sissy had been so worried about Jellybean that she couldn't sleep. The Chink had told her stories, massaged her feet, poured yam wine down her and played a sort of screech owl lullaby on his one-string cigar-box violin, to no avail. At last, she let him seduce her, and sparing no muscle, tendon, ligament or joint, he gave her a real workout: she had four orgasms and by the time the last one had boiled away, her aristocratic nose was packaging little z 's and shipping them all over. Then the Chink couldn't sleep.

The Chink sensed disaster. Well, so what? Survival, his own or anybody else's, was not a top priority with him. To a man who “kept time” by the clockworks, there were far more interesting and important things. Yet some silly sense of responsibility nagged at him. And nagged. Until he said, “All right, all right, I'll go out and play, just this once. Might as well; can't sleep anyhow.”

He had descended Siwash Ridge after moonset, a feat no one else could have duplicated. There are burros that could not walk down that trail by blaze of noon without ruining their reputation as surefooted beasts. There are some mighty round beer barrels that could not roll down the Siwash trail, and some mighty twisted pretzels that could not do a decent imitation.

At the end of the trail, he had met Delores del Ruby.

Neither of them seemed surprised, but it must have been an act.

They stared one another down, she trying to appear cool, he cooler. He wanted to ask her what she was doing there, but he wouldn't. She wanted to tell him she was on her way to see him, but she couldn't. She anchored her hands on her hips; he wrinkled his nose. The harder they tried not to smile, the more the little mouth muscles struggled to get free. The force of suppressed grins caused their ears to wiggle in the dark.

“So you're the great boohoo, eh?”

“Maybe I am and maybe I'm not. No big deal either way.”

“I suppose I owe you an apology. I've bad-mouthed you from asshole to elbow. .”

“No big deal.”

“Well, I just wanted you to know that I'm starting to appreciate you. Some of your ideas are not half-bad.”

“ You like them? I must have been misquoted.”

“Aren't all big boohoos misquoted?”

“Misquoted, distorted, diluted and deified. In that order. At the hands of his worshipers, Jesus suffered a far worse fate than crucifixion. You have a lovely ass.”

“You're not much like Jesus.”

“How do you know?”

“Talking about my ass.”

“You don't think Jesus would have admired your ass?”

“Not the Jesus I've read about.”

“Exactly. Misquoted, distorted and diluted. Actually, if Jesus had admired your ass, he probably would have kept it to himself. So you're right; I'm not much like Jesus. I'm not much like Hubert Humphrey, either. Hubert Humphrey can chew two hundred forty-six sticks of gum at one time. I can't do that.”

“Your cute little mouth was probably meant for finer things.” She leaned over and slapped a kiss on his chops. First time she'd kissed a man in a snake's age.

“You're not half-bad yourself. When you leave your whip at home.”

“I don't play with whips anymore.”

“Oh yeah? What do do you play with?”

“I'm learning that there's a whole universe of things to play with. Including big boohoos.”

“Boohoos can play rough. What do you want from me? The key to the treasure?”

Delores reached into her black shirt, among the dark nipples, hairs and moles, and drew the jack of hearts.

“Oh, you do card tricks, too. You're a hell of an act.”

“I've had a vision tonight. I didn't come here to solve anything. I came here to celebrate, and for you to celebrate with me.”

“In that case, you can stay for a while. It's a wise woman who doesn't come to the master for solutions.”

“No big deal.”

“Yes, um. It's going to be light soon. I've got to go see some men about some birds. When it gets so you can see, would you mind going up to the cave and keeping Sissy company until I return?”

Delores agreed, and the Chink trotted off through the wheatgrass.

Perhaps he had had a plan, a magic trick to play. He must have had something up his baggy sleeve. But whatever the Chink was going to pull on the G-men never got pulled. When he saw Bonanza Jellybean cut down, the old geezer made a beeline for the government barricades. Nobody heard his shouts. They were obscured first by gunfire, then by bullhorn, next by helicopter and finally by explosion.

The blast threw him back down the hillside, beard, robe and sandals flying, as if the blast was the toughest bouncer in Jerusalem and he a gatecrasher at the Last Supper. His left hip was shattered.

118.

AND SO IT CAME to pass that Sissy Hankshaw Gitche and Delores del Ruby spent a sorrowful day in Mottburg.

Midmorning, about the time the sun popped above the grain elevators, the two women (one in disguise) hurried past the Sears-suited coffee-breakers in Craig's Cafe; past the plump young mothers, hair in curlers, jawing in the self-service laundry; past the Chevrolet agency and the blank-faced American Legion Post. They arrived at the railroad station just as the casket was being loaded in a baggage car. Bonanza Jellybean (alias Sally Elizabeth Jones) had a one-way ticket to Kansas City. Her father, a short, balding man, had come to accompany the body. Jelly's mom had stayed home out of shame. Chugging out of the station, the train dissolved in teardrops that fell upon the tracks like silver bullets.

Later, while Delores sipped Irish coffee in a dim corner of the Bison Room of the Elk Horn Motor Lodge, Sissy tried to visit the twenty-six cowgirls who were locked up at the Mottburg Grange hall because there wasn't room in the jail. The pardners were being held without bond, awaiting trial. Sorry. No visitors.

At two o'clock, Sissy and Delores joined a curious crowd at the Lutheran Church cemetery for the funeral of Billy West. There was a token coffin, but no corpse. You would think that out of 300 pounds there would be a spoonful left, but there wasn't. The family was tense, the preacher embarrassed, the rites perfunctory. The mourners, if you could call them that, were mostly Billy's peers, who still couldn't believe that the butterball they'd teased in school had become a famous killer outlaw and had learned to fly a helicopter in one afternoon. As the crumbly prairie sod was being shoveled onto the uninhabited casket, Granny Schreiber said in a loud voice that Billy West was the only hero Mottburg had ever produced, and that she wished to hell she'd joined up with the cowgirls. Her grandsons spirited her away.

The next stop for Delores and Sissy was the small hospital. The Chink was plastered like a wall. You could have hung a picture on him, and a mirror, too. Beware the butterfly that could bust out of that cocoon. He was in pain, but winking. The eyes he winked with were as cloudy as semen. The women were too depressed to do him any good. Sissy sobbed on his bedside. “Is everything getting worse?” she cried. “Yes,” answered the Chink, “everything is getting worse. But everything is also getting better.”

And so it came to pass that the Rubber Rose Ranch was officially deeded to the cowgirls who had worked it. Each of the surviving hands was made an equal partner. Until the girls were free to do with it what they would, Sissy Hankshaw Gitche was asked to oversee the ranch, at a salary of $300 a week.

Giving away the Rubber Rose was the last piece of business conducted by the Countess before he dissolved his corporation and went to work as an orderly in the maternity ward of a charity hospital, on the orders of his psychiatrist and personal adviser, one Dr. Robbins.