Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Fighting a nasty wind all the way, the serpent-encrusted camper made it to the station with only five minutes to spare. The train was already in. “Schedules!” said the Chink. “Ironic how I have to follow timetables in order to get back to the clockworks.” His expression was one of admiration. “Don't ever bet against paradox, ladies. If complexity doesn't beat you, then paradox will.”

Inside Sissy's burning ducts, teardrops were running, not walking, to the nearest exit. “But what about your clockworks?” she asked, sniffling.

“My clockworks? Why, I'm carrying it with me. Aren't you?”

He gave the women kisses of equal duration, although Sissy got a bit more tongue. Then he turned and limped across the loading platform.

Watching him hobble onto the train, Sissy was struck by how small and frail he had begun to look. Delores was weeping now, too.

In the doorway of the railroad car, the Chink suddenly spun, tore open his robe and shook his pecker at them. “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee,” he sniggered.

The old goat.

120.

WITH SISSY AND DELORES snug in the cave, the ranch in good hands, the Chink rewinding the Clock People, the Countess carrying out pans of afterbirth and Jellybean roping clouds on the prairies of Paradise, things seem to have settled down for those entities whose adventures this book has chronicled.

We might conclude that Even Cowgirls Get the Blues has reached maximum entropy, were it not for one unexpected ongoing unsettling phenomenon: the behavior of the whooping cranes.

Following its flight from Siwash Lake, the crane flock stopped at its Aransas wintering grounds but briefly. Hours before the commencement of a gala celebration to welcome the big birds home, they took to the air again, leaving the Secretary of the Interior, the Governor of Texas, the Corpus Christi Chamber of Commerce and thousands of patriotic bird-lovers in the lurch.

Continuing southward, they rested in Yucatán for a while, then flapped on down to Venezuela and lunched on leopard frogs in the swamps of the Orinoco. In Bolivia, their droppings fell on a revolution. Over Paraguay, they stained the cathedrals of Asunción. Attempts by Latin-American scientists to get close to them invariably resulted in their moving on. They veered into Chile, maybe to pay tribute to the assassinated poet Pablo Neruda; next stop, Patagonia.

In the U.S. and Canada, many people were aghast. The head of the Audubon Society began to make noises that his fellow birdmen identified as loon and cuckoo. Was it the aftereffects of the peyote diet, or something at once more mysterious and more ominous that was making the cranes act so? Naturalists argued in laboratories and conference rooms — and the whoopers, crossing the Atlantic toward Africa, paid a call to the South Sandwich Islands.

After several of them were shot down by Congolese poachers, the United Nations passed a unanimous resolution making harming the cranes a prison offense in every country in the world. Just in time, too, for soon the great white flock was traveling through heavily populated regions. The whoopers ruined a beach in the south of France, upstaged the famous pigeons at St. Mark's in Venice and are said to have looked picturesque wading in the Thames.

The birds moved on — and are still moving. Nobody knows where they'll turn up next. Their whoops, greeted with religious fervor along the Ganges, could barely be heard above the horns and squealing tires of Tokyo traffic. At this writing, they are believed to be somewhere in the interior of China, where poems about cranes (non-whoopers, of course) once were produced at the rate of a thousand a day. But precious few crane poems are written in China anymore.

Is the most spendid and sizable American bird searching for a new home, scouring the globe in quest of a place where it can be private and free? That is one theory. Naturally, legends have sprung up around the travels of the whooper. In Burma, a woman claims to have had sexual intercourse with one of the cranes. Shades of Leda and the Canadian Honker.

Perhaps the whooping cranes carry a message, bearing it far and wide. A message from the wild to the wild-no-more. Is such a thing possible?

All's possible. And all's well. And since all's well that ends well, are we to conclude that this is the end?

Yeah, almost. Except to pass along the news that the cranes have just crossed the border into Tibet. Whooping.

121.

TIME HAS PASSED. Months. Seven to eight months, by the size of Sissy's belly.

It is midnight at the clockworks. A June midnight, warm enough for sleeping on the cave's upper level. Sissy and Delores are dreaming, and oddly enough, for they have grown apart in recent weeks, they share a similar dream.

Delores has told Sissy that she wants to go away. She won't go until after the baby has come, until Sissy is able and well; she loves Sissy, after all, but she doesn't feel complete with her. It is of completeness that Delores now dreams — of the two opposites of One that, in balance, enable It to both exist and live. A woman without her opposite, or a man without his, can exist but cannot live. Existence may be beautiful, but never whole. Beneath Delores's pillow is the card, the jack of hearts.

The swell of Sissy's belly forces her to sleep on her back, the ideal position to attract the dream. Sissy, too, dreams of the opposite that can complete her, that she can complete. Having a way with birds, Sissy knows that the spirit cannot soar with only one wing. From the Chink, she has learned how a thing's opposite holds it together. In Sissy's dream is a man who does not deny himself, as Julian did, but who is himself to the full limit of himself, as she has been.

The two women are restless. Delores tosses and squirms like a postcard with an illegible address. Sissy mews like a kitten with vodka in its milk dish. Their lids flutter but do not open.

In the cave, a third person is sleeping. Since birth is completion as well as beginning, perhaps that person, too, dreams of being complete. It wakes and gives Sissy a good jolt. Not with its foot but with its. . In embryonic life, digits are formed as radiating ridges on the lateral surfaces of the hand and foot segments. Since these ridges grow more rapidly than the bodies of their segments, they soon project beyond the margin as definitive fingers and toes. Sissy has known for quite a while that the baby has her characteristics. It will come into the world half-Japanese, one-thirty-second Siwash and all thumbs. So be it. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. The moving thumb beckons, and having bect, moves us with it.

The fetus hitchhikes Sissy's cervix. Her lumbar region. Her bladder. Even that does not wake her. What finally causes her to abandon her dream is not a gesture but a noise.

A strange noise, loud though far away. Possible sources of the noise are considered by the generals in her brain. It was a rumbling noise. Could it have been a long-awaited earthquake, breaking off the edges of the continent and propelling the Clock People into the Eternity of Joy? Could it have been the first nuclear firecracker of the war that is in the back of everyone's mind: the international situation is desperate. Sissy considers waking Delores and moving to the lower level of the cave.

She hears the noise again. It sounds closer this time, and the rumble less apocalyptic. It is, in fact, followed by a higher, more organic sound. Are the whooping cranes coming back? she wonders. Or is some cowgirl caught in another cowboy jam?

The noise is closer. .

Maybe it's the clockworks. Beating out an entirely new rhythm, measuring unexpected developments in the continuum — such as a fit of laughter on the part of the collective unconsciousness, or sudden cosmic vibrations that defy the more sophisticated measuring devices of science because they are tender and obscene.