Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Part II

17.

NEWSPAPERS KEEP PHOTOGRAPHS of famous persons in their files. When one of the famous dies, a staff artist (the same guy who draws the circles around fumbled footballs) borrows the dead celebrity's photo folder and with an air brush obliterates the highlights in his eyes.

It is standard procedure on most American newspapers. By thus visually distinguishing those with us from those gone, the press shows its respect for, or its fear of, death. Whenever you see a picture of a deceased notable in the papers, chances are his eyes will be dull and flat — as if the sparkle of his living had been divided among his next of kin.

In the official Postal Service photograph of the President of the United States, the process seemed almost to have been reversed. Eyes that originally had been inert and shallow had been made with the retoucher's brush to twinkle warmly and project volleys of paternalism and health.

Sissy Hankshaw was standing beneath that very portrait of the President, in the lobby of the LaConner, Washington, post office. She looked at the President's portrait as if it were the benign fantasy of some Jehovah's Witness cartoonist — while she waited at the counter for her mail.

LaConner, Washington, was one of a half-dozen places around the country where Sissy received letters. The other places were Taos, New Mexico, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Cherokee, North Carolina, Pleasant Point, Maine, and one other town. What these post offices had in common was that they all were on or adjacent to Indian reservations.

The President in the picture on the LaConner, Washington, post office wall that morning was not Ike. Oh no, Ike had led the people during Sissy's childhood and, except as to how they might best grip a golf club, had never thought of thumbs at all. Sissy had fled Richmond just as the Eisenhower Years were dying. (Dying of boredom, we might say — although the Eisenhower Years and the fifties were perfectly suited for one another; they went together like Hi and Lois. It was when the Eisenhower Years returned, in 1968 and, worse, in 1972—times too psychically complex, technologically advanced and socially volatile to endure simple-mindedness on such a grand scale — that a civilization already green around the gills began to flip-flop in earnest.)

More than ten years had passed since Sissy made her move; a decade during which she hitchhiked obsessively, constantly, solitarily, marvelously. Among people who pay attention to such things, she had become a legend.

Being a legend is not always financially gainful. There is no United Federation of Legends union to ensure that members be compensated for their legendary labors at a minimum wage of $5.60 an hour. Legends have no lobby in Washington, D.C. There isn't even a Take a Legend to Lunch Week. Consequently, Sissy had to rely on something other than her legendary hitchhiking for eats (for Tampax and toothpaste and repairs to her shoes). That is why she occasionally worked for the Countess. And it was because the Countess had to have a means of contacting her that Sissy checked post office general delivery whenever she was near LaConner, Taos, Pine Ridge, Cherokee, Pleasant Point or that other place. Certainly, nobody but the Countess ever wrote to her. Sissy had neither heard from nor contacted her family since she had hitched off into the sunset. (Actually, of course, it was night when Sissy made her getaway, but in remembering South Richmond it is easy to confuse the memory of old brick with the memory of sunsets, as it is easy to inadvertently mingle in one's recollections the odor of toasting tobacco with the odor of blood: another of the brain's little practical jokes.)

Sissy wished quite hard for a message from the Countess that day, because there was less than a dollar in her pockets. Wishing made it so. As the President beamed upon her, the postmaster returned to the counter with a slinky mauve envelope, addressed in puce-colored ink and smelling (even as it snuggled against the postmaster's hand) of the boudoir. “Thank you,” Sissy said, and she carried the missive out onto the sidewalk.

Hitchhiking into LaConner, Washington, had been like hitchhiking down a mossy old well. Dark, damp and very green. There were puddles in the street and the smell of mushrooms everywhere. The sky was a crock of curdled cloud. Mallards swam within quacking distance of the village post office and, as if in welcome, ten thousand hitchhiking cattails pointed their fat thumbs in the air.

She could hear foundations decaying as she stood there, and every horizon she tried to focus upon was mysteriously blurred, as if licked by the tip of the tongue of the Totem. Snails advanced upon the woodpiles. Fir trees stood their ground.

Directly across the slough from the village was the Swinomish reservation. Indeed, several Indians walked past Sissy at the post office, distracting her, for the moment, from the Countess's letter.

At last, however, she ripped it open and was surprised to read just this:

Sissy, Precious Being,

How are you, my extraordinary one? I worry so. Next time you are near Manhattan, do ring me up. There is a man to whom I simply must introduce you. Thrill!!

The Countess

Refolding the sheet of expensive notepaper, Sissy warmed it for a while between her palms, as if, like the dirty old man who sat on a Girl Scout cookie hoping to hatch a Brownie, it might metamorphose into a work order. When she read it again, alas, it was the same pointless message.

“You'd think the Countess would know me better than that,” she mused. “I haven't had a paycheck in half a year and all the Countess can come up with is an introduction to a man. Criminey!”

Just then, on the slough, some Indians tore by in a long canoe (an antique shovel-nose war canoe), chanting furiously in the Skagit language. They were Swinomish bucks, mostly high school ballplayers or young unemployed veterans, practicing for the annual Fourth of July longboat race against the Lummi, Muckleshoot and other Puget Sound tribes. Sissy flung the scented letter into a waste can.

On television once, she had seen a cheapo Western called Reprisal. Guy Madison played a half-breed who passed. In the end, however, he soured on the System and went back to the wild old ways. “I deny that part of me that is white!” he cried

Sometimes Sissy had considered following Guy Madison's example. Ah, to wahoo in the fir-shadowed streets of LaConner and deny that part of her that was civilized and pale!

But that would be denying fifteen-sixteenths of her.

What would it be like, living life as a one-sixteenth?

(a) Like that part of the moth the candle burns last.

(b) Like a “slow dance on the killing ground.”

(c) Maybe not so bad at that: in the land of rotting grapes a raisin could be queen.

(d) Like a pair of thumbs to which there is no brain, no heart, no cunt attached.

18.

THAT HER PLEASURE IN INDIANHOOD and her passion for car travel might be incongruous if not mutually exclusive never occurred to Sissy (as it was to occur to Julian and Dr. Goldman). After all, the first car that ever stopped for her had been named in honor of the great chief of the Ottawa: Pontiac.

Perhaps Sissy was one of those who believed that nature and industry could sleep between the same flowered sheets. Perhaps she entertained visions of a future wilderness where bison and Buicks would mingle in harmony and mutual respect, a neoprimitive prairie where both pinto and Pinto would run free.

Perhaps. The visions of a woman in motion are difficult to gauge.

Visionary beliefs were neither expressed nor implied as Sissy, provisioned with Three Musketeers bars, thrilled LaConner's municipal cattails by the manner in which she hitched out of town. As previously suggested, Sissy made it a general practice never to plan an itinerary nor fix a destination — but could she help it if the only road out of LaConner, Washington, ran directly to New York City?

Just as Chief Pontiac's beseeching question, “Why do you suffer the white man to dwell among you?” arrowed straight to the soul of his people, so the only road out of LaConner shot straight to Park Avenue and the Countess.

“I honestly don't know how I got here so fast,” Sissy told the Countess. “When I walked into the LaConner Food Center to buy candy, some Indians at the beer cooler snickered at my hands. I freaked out and the next thing I knew I was approaching the Holland Tunnel. I woke up in the front seat of a convertible. The top was down and my first impression was that we'd been scalped.”

19.

THE COUNTESS HAD A SMILE like the first scratch on a new car. It was immanently regrettable. It was a spoiler. It was a stinging little reminder of the inevitability of deterioration.

As if further vandalizing a marred surface, an ivory cigarette holder periodically pried apart the Countess's prickly jowls. Ashes from French cigarettes sifted onto the white linen suit that he wore daily without respect to season; ashes sifted upon the month-old bloom in his lapel. His monocle was fly-specked, his ascot was steaksauced, his dentures thought that they were castanets and the world was a fandango.

The Countess didn't give a damn. He was rich, and not a penny less. You would be rich, too, if you had invented and manufactured the world's most popular feminine hygiene products.

The Countess had built a fortune on those odors peculiar to the female anatomy. He was the General Motors of body cosmetics, the U.S. Steel of intimate fresheners. As any genius might, he obsessively directed every phase of his company's activities, from research to marketing, including advertising campaigns. That was where Sissy came in. She was his favorite model.

He had discovered her years before in Times Square, where a crowd had gathered to watch her cross Forty-second Street against the lights. In a rare concession, he had wiped off his monocle. She had an ideal figure for modeling, she was blond and creamy, her demeanor was regal — except for her mouth: “She has the eyes of a poetess, the nose of an aristocrat, the chin of a noblewoman and the mouth of a suck artist in a Tijuana pony show,” announced the Countess. “She's perfect.”

“But my God in holy Heaven,” protested the vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, with whom he had just lunched. “What about her hands?”

Bookkeepers should know better than to argue with genius.

The Countess had a fine photographer in his employ. Background was essential to the dreamy, romantic yet slightly suggestive tableaux with which he appealed to potential consumers of Dew spray mist and Yoni Yum spray powder, so he frequently sent his cameraman on location, as far away as Venice or the Taj Mahal. He spared no expense to get the image he wanted, and he learned to wait patiently for Sissy to hitchhike to her assignments.

He never photographed her hands.

Now, in the days when Lucky Strike cigarettes sponsored “Your Hit Parade” on television, the program featured a singer named Dorothy Collins. Miss Collins invariably appeared in blouses or dresses with high collars. Eventually, the high collars led to the rumor that Miss Collins was hiding something. She was said to have a scar or a goiter or one hell of a mole. Perhaps a vampire had given Dorothy Collins a permanent hickey. There were all sorts of stories. After several years, however, the vocalist abruptly appeared on “Your Hit Parade” (singing “Shrimp Boats Are A-Coming” or something like that) in a low-cut gown — and her throat was as normal as yours or mine. Of course, someone in Dr. Dreyfus's profession could have worked a little plastic magic. We'll probably never know.

At any rate, what with Sissy Hankshaw posing for so many picturesque Yoni Yum and Dew ads, it didn't take more than about a year for sharp eyes to ascertain that her hands were never in the picture. They would be behind her back, or cropped out, or some tropical foliage or gondola prow would be obscuring them. And rumors à la Dorothy Collins spread along Madison Avenue. The usual stories — she had warts or birthmarks or tattoos or six fingers where five would do — came and went; but one version, that when she had once accepted an engagement ring from another, a jealous lover had lopped off her hands with a fish knife, persisted. The Countess, of course, wouldn't say. He kept Sissy's identity a secret and paid his photographer extra to develop lockjaw. It was the kind of game the Countess loved. Listening to the rumors about his mystery model, he would probe his nasty smile with his cigarette holder and his dentures would clack like a goose eating dominoes.

Years afterward, when he was no longer using Sissy exclusively, the Countess posed a female impersonator in a Dew ad. He was not above that sort of trick. But he truly was taken with Sissy Hankshaw. Among other things, he believed her responsible for the jumpsuit interest that seized Western womanhood in the late sixties, and he placed her in the avant-garde of fashion. Well, it is true; Sissy wore jumpsuits long before any editor at Vogue, but it is also true that she continued to wear them after they passed out of style. Zippered jumpsuits were, in fact, the only garb Sissy could wear — because she hadn't the facility to button her clothes.

Sissy never complained about the censorship of her hands, although as a matter of pride she would have preferred them in plain view. To the Countess's credit, he often expressed a desire to get Sissy's thumbs into the photo, simply for their phallic counterpoint, but he feared the American public wasn't ready for that.

Maybe he'd test a thumb shot in Japan, he said, for among the Japs his firm already had grossed millions with an ad that paraphrased a haiku by the eighteenth-century poet Buson:

The short night is through:

on the hairy caterpillar

little beads of Dew.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (MOON OVER DAKOTA)

The moon looked like a clown's head dipped in honey.

It bobbed ballishly in the sky, dripping a mixture of clown white and bee jelly onto the Dakota hills.

Coyote howls (or were they crane whoops?) zigzagged through the celestial make-up like auditory wrinkles.

Moonlight fell on Bonanza Jellybean as she bent over the horse trough, still scrubbing out her panties. (A warm day in a bouncing saddle can really stain a girl's underwear.)

Moonlight spilled in the bunkhouse windows, competing with the lampshine that illuminated the pages of Mary's Holy Bible, Big Red's Ranch Romances and Debbie's The Way of Zen.

Moonlight ghosted the cheeks of girls sleeping and girls pretending to sleep.

A single moonbeam quivered timidly on the stock of Delores del Ruby's blacksnake whip, where the stock protruded from beneath the sack of peyote buttons that nightly served as her pillow.

Moonlight lured Kym and Linda outdoors in their nightgowns to lean against the corral fence in silent rapture.

Our moon, obviously, has surrendered none of its soft charm to technology. The pitter-patter of little spaceboots has in no way diminished its mystery.

In fact, the explorations of the Apollo mechanics revealed almost nothing of any real importance that was not already intimated in the Luna card of the tarot deck.

Almost nothing. There was one interesting discovery. Some of the rocks on the moon transmit waves of energy. At first it was feared that they might be radioactive. Instruments quickly proved that the emissions were clean, but NASA was still puzzled about the source and character of the vibrations. Rock samples were brought back to Earth by astronauts for extensive laboratory testing.

As the precise electromagnetic properties of the moon rocks continued to baffle investigators, one scientist decided just for drill to convert the waves into sound. It's a simple process.

When the moon vibrations were channeled into an amplifier, the noises that pulsed out of the speaker sounded exactly like “cheese, cheese, cheese.”

20.

"SIT DOWN, DEAR, do sit down. Take a load off those lovely tootsies. Yes, sit right there. Would you fancy some sherry?” The decanter the Countess lifted was dusty on the outside, sticky empty inside; a stiff fly lay feet-up on its lip. “Shit O goodness, I'm all out of sherry; how about a red Ripple?” He reached into the midget refrigerator beside his desk and removed a bottle of pop wine. After a shameful amount of effort he tore loose its cap and filled two sherry glasses.

“You know what Ripple is, don't you? It's Kool-Aid with a hard-on. Tee hee.”

Sissy managed a polite smile. Shyly, she gazed at her glass. It was impastoed with so many fingerprints it should have been buried with J. Edgar Hoover. (At FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., there is an agent who can go through the fingerprint files and pick out all the trumpet players. Perhaps he is the same agent who kept returning Sissy's file card to the Richmond regional office demanding to know why there were no thumb marks. He was in good shape and didn't know it. There once was a family in Philadelphia that went through four generations without fingerprints at all: they were born without prints, the only known case in history. “This could present quite a problem for law enforcement,” said one public official. “No way,” replied another. “If the police ever find a murder weapon in Philly with no prints on it, we'll know immediately that one of them did it.”

The Countess lifted his glass in salute. “To my own special Sissy,” he toasted. “Cheers! And welcome. So my letter brought you flying, eh? Well, I may have a little surprise for you. But first, tell me about yourself. It's been six months, hasn't it? In some circles that's half a year. How are you?”

“Tired,” said Sissy.

He stared at her sympathetically. “That's the very first time in the eons that I've known you that I've ever heard you complain. You must be tired. You've endured the greatest hardships without a whimper. I've always said, 'Sissy Hankshaw never has any bad luck because nothing seems bad luck to her. She's never been disgraced because there is nothing which she'd acknowledge as disgrace.' And now you're tired, poor darling.”

“Some folks might say I had my hard luck at birth, and after dealing with that everything else was easy. A born freak can only go uphill.”

“Freak, schmeek. Most of us are freaks in one way or another. Try being born a male Russian countess into a white middle-class Baptist family in Mississippi and you'll see what I mean.”

“I understand that. I was being facetious. You know that I've always been proud of the way nature singled me out. It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live with nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters — or mice. Anyway, I'm fine. But I've been steady moving for eleven years and some months, you realize, and I guess I'm a tad fatigued. Maybe I should rest up for a spell. Not as young as I used to be.”

“Shit O goodness, you won't be thirty for another year. And you're more beautiful than ever.”

Her jumpsuit was patterned with robins and apple blossoms. It bore sweet testimony to recent laundering, but there were creases where it had been folded in her rucksack. Her lengthy blond hair fell straight; it would have been more convenient to travel with it in braids, but, alas, how could her fingers braid it? A mask of grime and road filth that no rinsing in service station ladies' rooms could adequately remove clung to her face. In the pores of her crisp nose and high forehead was the residue of various fossil fuels as well as flea's-eye particles of Idaho, Minnesota and western New Jersey: clay, sand, loam, mud, pollen, cement, ore and humus. The dirty veil with which hitchhiking draped her features was one reason why her identity as a model had been fairly simple to conceal. If the Countess wanted her to pose, he'd have to steam her for a day or two in his private bath. Still, the sunshine that was projected in the office windows, having first passed through the green filter of Central Park, showed the Countess to be no snaky flatterer: Sissy was beautiful, indeed.

“Does that mean you might have an assignment for me?”

There was a long pause, during which the Countess tapped his monocle with his cigarette holder, during which a squirrel successfully crossed Park Avenue, during which the twentieth century flicked its pea under another shell, catching a few million more suckers with their bets in the wrong places.

“You were the Yoni Yum/Dew Girl from, let's see, from nineteen sixty-two through nineteen sixty-eight. That's a long time in this business. It was a brilliant campaign, if I do say so, and it was a good association. But it can't be repeated. One can't repeat oneself. Not and dredge any flavor out of life. Now, I've been using you two, three times a year, in trade magazine ads only, ever since. And I may use you again. I probably shall. You're my eternal favorite. Princess Grace herself couldn't be better, not even if she had your personality, which she doesn't; I am by proclamation official feminine hygienist to the Court of Monaco and I know, but that's telling tales out of school. Anyway, dear, I'm out of photography now and into watercolors. Whole new campaign about to start, built around incredibly lyrical watercolor paintings. Ah, how circuitous conversation is! We're back at the beginning. The exact man I've wanted you to meet is my artist, the watercolorist.”

Sissy dared a sip of Ripple. “If I'm not going to pose for him, why do you want me to meet him?”

“Purely personal. I believe you might enjoy one another.”

“But, Countess. .”

“Now now. Don't get exasperated. I realize that you've always avoided all but the most rudimentary involvements with men, and, I might add, you've been wise. Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much — then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal. Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year-old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood. Shit O goodness, how I do go on.”

The Countess refilled his glass. The squirrel started across Park Avenue again but didn't make it. A uniformed chauffeur got out of a limousine and held the crushed animal up where it could be seen by the elderly woman passenger, who next week would make a twenty-five-dollar donation to the SPCA.

“But here you are, still a virgin — you are virginal yet, aren't you?”

“Why, yes, technically. Jack Kerouac and I came awfully close, but he was afraid of me, I think. .”

“Yes, well, what I'm getting at is that there comes a time when it is psychologically impossible for a woman to lose her virginity. She can't wait too long, you know. Now, there's no reason why you must lose yours. You're so much better off than most women. You've remained on the battleground, center stage, experiencing life and, what's more important, experiencing yourself experiencing it. You haven't been reduced to a logistical strategy for somebody else's lifewar. I'm not suggesting that you capitulate. But maybe you should pause — now in your weariness is a perfect opportunity — and consider if perhaps you aren't missing something of magnitude; consider if perhaps you wouldn't want to experience a romantic relationship before, well, frankly, before it may be too late. I mean, just ponder it a bit, that's all.”

“What makes you think this watercolorist and I would develop a romantic relationship?” Sissy's brow was spaghettied.

“I can't be certain that you would. Furthermore, I can't imagine why I would want you to. I mean, you've always smelled so nice. Like a little sister. The irony has just killed me.” The Countess's teeth began a faster clack. “You, the Dew Girl, one of the few girls who doesn't need Dew. I loath the stink of females!” The clatter grew louder. “They are so sweet the way God made them; then they start fooling around with men and soon they're stinking. Like rotten mushrooms, like an excessively chlorinated swimming pool, like a tuna fish's retirement party. They all stink. From the Queen of England to Bonanza Jellybean, they stink.” The dental flamenco hit a delirious tempo, a bulería, a Gypsy flurry of too many notes too soon.

“Bonanza Jellybean?”

“What? Oh yes. Tee hee. Jellybean.” As the Countess's jaw muscles calmed down, his dentures eased into a samba. “She's a young thing who works on my ranch. Real name is Sally Jones or something wooden like that. She's cute as a hot fudge taco, and, of course, it takes verve to change one's name so charmingly. But she stinks like a slut just the same.”

“Your ranch?”

“Oh my dear yes, I bought a little ranch out West. Sort of a tribute to the women of America who have cooperated with me in eliminating their odor. A tax write-off, actually. You'll have to see it sometime. Meanwhile, back to business at hand. Why don't you consider meeting my artist? You admitted you needed a rest. I'm going out to East Hampton to gossip with Truman for a few days. You can light at my place and relax. I'll put Julian in touch with you there. Perhaps you can go out together, have some fun. Come on, Sissy love, give it a try. What have you got to lose?”

The Countess was a genius, all right. He asked the one question that Sissy could never answer: what have you got to lose?

“Well, okay. I'll try it. I don't see the point in it, but I'll try it. Just for you. It's kind of silly, actually, me going out with an artist in New York City. However. .” (Was that old limbic telephone purring on its hook again? After all, she had asked for an unlisted number.)

“Good, good, good,” the Countess cooed. “You'll enjoy it, you'll see. Julian is a gentleman.”

Suddenly, the Countess swiveled in his desk chair and leaned forward. Lowering his wine glass, he focused directly, intensely into Sissy's blue eyes. His rip of a smile widened until it was a job for a body-and-fender shop. He had been waiting for this moment.

“By the way, Sissy,” he said very slowly, accentuating every syllable, clacking one beat at a time. “By the way. He's a full-blooded Indian.”

21.

SHE HAD MADE Mack trucks rear back on their axles, caused Mercedes-Benzes to forget about Wagner, stopped Cadillacs as cold as a snowman's heart attack. Torpedoes changed their courses for her, planes dived, submarines surfaced, Lincoln Continentals straightened their neckties. Wherever traffic flowed she had fished its waters, hooking Barracuda and Stingrays, throwing back Honda minibikes and garden tractors. At her signal, Jeeps and Chryslers fell over one another, Mercurys and Ramblers went into trance, VW's halted with a Prussian exactitude, Chevies executed the shim sham shimmy and toddlers begged to pull her to San Francisco in their little red wagons. Once she made a Rolls-Royce brake so abruptly they had to fly a man in from the factory to scrape up the rubber. While stickers peeled off bumpers, Confederate flags wrapped themselves around radio aerials and exhaust pipes farted the overture from “My Fair Lady,” she had commandeered every vehicle manufactured by man in his manic horsepowerphilia, from a Stutz Bearcat to a Katz Pajama — but she could not seem to attract an elevator.

“Maybe you have to call on the phone to get an elevator to come up to the penthouse. Maybe the buzzer is broken. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.”

Sissy had been waiting ten minutes. She felt trapped. Where was the elevator? Why wouldn't it respond? Teardrops were poking their bald heads out of her ducts.

It was more than just the elevator. Three days before, the Countess had procured a dress and buttoned her into it. She had agreed that it looked very nice. Then he went off — monocle, cigarette holder and everything — to Long Island, leaving her alone. The first evening, the watercolorist hadn't phoned. Sissy couldn't unbutton the dress, and to sleep in it would have left it geriatrically wrinkled. So she had sat up all night. She had watched TV, sipped red Ripple (the only beverage her host had in supply), read the New York Times and chanced pleased looks in the mirror. Alone on a June night in a seven-room penthouse. It had been strange.

At approximately ten in the morning the telephone rang. A voice that might have belonged to a Grecian urn, so soft and round and cultured it sounded, identified itself as belonging, instead, to Julian Gitche. Would Sissy Hankshaw please have dinner with Julian Gitche and friends on Friday next? Yes, Sissy Hankshaw would. The Countess's phone (a Princess — royalty sticks together) and, presumably, Julian Gitche's, had been replaced in the cradle. Dinner on Friday. It was then Wednesday.

As through the second TV-humming night she sat upright in the yoga position known as the dress-protecting asana, she reminded herself of Betty Clanton and the other girls of South Richmond High, setting their hair, combing it out, painting their lips, rouging their cheeks, washing their sweaters, pressing their skirts, primping away the hours and days of their youth in the peahen hope that for one blushing moment they could distract a boy from football. Nature had spared Sissy that as a teen-ager — but, mama, look at her now! Every hour or so, she became angry at herself, sprang up and announced to whatever television personality happened to be facing her that she was going to bed. She did not.

Thursday night was much the same, except that she was sleepier, angrier, more nervous. Newspapers, with their quaint accounts of politics and economics, TV, with its heroic policemen, could no longer amuse her. Red Ripple in hand, she fled to the balcony. She had passed the point where fresh air was of much use in reviving her, but she felt less confined pacing a patio in the New York sky.

“This is stupid, really dumb,” she told herself. “But if I'm going to do it I might as well do it right. I can't go to dinner in a good New York restaurant wearing a wrinkled sack. I'm used to skipping sleep on the road. I can make it.” Serenity once again illuminated the corners of her mouth, although her eyes, over which the lids drooped like detectives' bellies, failed to notice.

It was a cloudless night with only moderate smog. A furry northeaster was blowing in over Coney Island and Brooklyn, bringing to the upper East Side a teasing sniff of the ocean. Trembling with energy, unable to contain itself, Manhattan was popping wheelies beneath her. In every direction, her tired eyes saw flashing lights, lights that caromed off the horizons and joined with the stars in the sky. The city seemed to be inhaling Benzedrine and exhaling light; a neon-lunged Buddha chanting and vibrating in a temple of filth.

It was difficult for her to imagine that an American Indian was at home somewhere down there. Where exactly did he live, she wondered; which lights shone in his windows? What was he doing at this moment? Sleeping? (Sleep was bright on her mind.) Drinking — the way the Indians drank in LaConner, Taos, Pine Ridge, etc.? Performing a clandestine ghost dance or chanting to his private totem as prescribed in the dreamer religion? Watching “Custer” on TV? Painting watercolors? Until the dawn, she paced and pondered.

The day that followed had been a blur of boredom and misery; she was more asleep than awake. She found a loaf of Wonder Bread and wadded the soft individual slices into balls, as she had done when a kid, eating the bread balls on the balcony while watching traffic. Mostly, she sat around. (Were it not such an obvious understatement, we might say that she twiddled her thumbs.) When, however, at 7:45 P.M., Julian Gitche called to announce that he was downstairs, her central nervous system treated itself to a double adrenalin on the rocks. She flashed into consciousness, inspected herself — wrinkle-free! — in the mirror, took a pee and headed for the elevator. She had arranged to meet him in the lobby. Somehow it had seemed inappropriate to her to receive Mr. Gitche in the Countess's penthouse, with its frilly, sloppy and decidedly un-Indian décor.

Now Sissy was waiting for an elevator. She waited with a fatigue-induced approximation of that combination of stoicism and anxiety with which people wait for the Big Event that will transform their lives, invariably missing it when it does occur since both stoicism and anxiety are blinders.

At last, as she was on the brink of weeping, she heard a ping and saw a wink of green. A door slid open with a mechanical slur, to reveal a uniformed elevator operator looking sheepish and not altogether unafraid. Having suffered the Countess's ire on previous occasions, he was on the alert for a walking stick that might be mistaking his skull for a grand promenade. Relieved at seeing Sissy alone, he expressed her to the lobby at maximum speed.

The carpet felt like meadow to her hallucinating feet. The bronze fountain sounded like a mountain creek. Her redman glided from behind a tree (so what if it was a potted palm?). He was wearing a plaid dinner jacket and a yellow cummerbund. Of medium height, his shoulders were narrow, his face babified and puddingish. Approaching her, he smiled shyly. He reached to shake her hand — and fell immediately to his knees with an asthma attack.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (LOVE STORY)

Some of the younger ranch hands — Donna, Kym and Heather; Debbie, too — have wondered aloud why Even Cowgirls Get the Blues couldn't be a simple love story.

Unfortunately, little darlings, there is no such thing as a simple love story. The most transitory puppy crush is complex to the extent of lying beyond the far reaches of the brain's understanding. (The brain has a dangerous habit of messing around with stuff it cannot or will not comprehend.)

Your author has found love to be the full trip, emotionally speaking; the grand tour: fall in love, visit both Heaven and Hell for the price of one. And that doesn't begin to cover it. If realism can be defined only as one of the fifty-seven varieties of decoration, then how can we hope for a realistic assessment of love?

No, the author has no new light to beam on the subject. After all, though people have been composing love songs for at least a thousand years, it wasn't until the late 1960s that any romantic ballad expressed a new idea. In his song “Triad” ("Why can't we go on as three?"), David Crosby offered the ménage à trois as a possible happy remedy for the triangularization that seems to be to love what hoof-and-mouth disease is to cattle (to employ an analogy that any cowgirl can understand). Bold David (Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane recorded his song) sought to transport love beyond its dualistic limits; to accept the three-sided configuration as an inevitability, perceiving it as positive, building upon it, expanding it, drawing lines in different directions (". . in time there may be others"). But Crosby's Euclidean approach complicates love rather than simplifies it. And it is doubtful whether many lovers could endure further complications. As a visitor to the clockworks once heard the Chink say, “If it's sloppy, eat it over the sink.”

So trot your ponies, honeys, and accept the tangled facts, knowing that your author would prefer to write a simple love story if it were possible. How refreshing to deal with something subjective, intuitive or, best of all, mystical! But the serious writer, like his brother the scientist, has been reduced to dealing with the mere objective.

22.

JUST AS a piece of shell can take all the fun out of an egg salad sandwich, just as the advent of an Ice Age can poop a million garden parties, just as a disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business, so can a fit of asthma rather spoil the first date between a young woman and an Indian.

Sissy didn't know what to do. Initially, she thought Julian was reacting to the sight of her thumbs, although the Countess had sworn that he had made his watercolorist fully cognizant of Sissy's anatomical embellishments. At one time or another, folks had sniggered at her, pointed, blanched, blinked, clucked, snapped hurried snapshots, bitten their tongues and fallen off barstools, but this reaction took the cake, and the pie, too. They weren't that big.

Should she try to assist him, or flee?

Conveniently, from the other side of the lobby Julian's friends came to the rescue. They were two well-groomed couples, white, mid-thirtyish and middle-class. The younger of the men took charge. He broke an inhaler of epinephrine under Julian's nose. The epinephrine hormone relaxed the smooth muscles in the small bronchi of the victim's lungs, allowing air to pass more freely in and out. Within moments his breathing had improved. However, the attack was severe and Julian continued to whistle and wheeze. His chest sounded like the trombone section of the old Stan Kenton orchestra. His chest was playing “Stars Fell on Alabama.” Nobody danced.

“We'd better take you home,” the man in charge said to Julian. As it turned out, he and Julian had once been roommates, so that's why he knew how to handle the attack.

Embarrassed, and in the red of embarrassment looking more Indian than he had previously, Julian begged Sissy's pardon. In wheeze-ventilated and cough-derailed speech, he managed to tell her:

“I've been enthralled with your photographs for years. When the Countess hinted that you might like to meet me — he never explained why — I was ready to paint for him free of charge. And now I had to go and spoil it.”

It was Sissy's turn to redden. Her one-sixteenth came swimming to surface, matching Julian's full measure of uncompromised blood. Although uncomfortable, she was moved by his lament. The emotions she felt were almost counter to the ones she had imagined this talented Indian would inspire in her. Once again (as in Madame Zoe's trailer), she found herself on top of a situation that she had expected would dominate her. Through the blush, her mysterious calm smile stirred and slowly beat its wings, a seabird ascending through a spray of tomato soup.

The man who took charge was named Rupert, a salesman for a publishing house. His wife was Carla, a homemaker, as they say. The other couple broke down into Howard and Marie Barth, both copywriters for an ad agency. While Rupert helped Julian to the street, Howard hailed a cab and Carla and Marie fluttered around Sissy. “This is dreadful,” Marie said. She lowered her voice, becoming confidential. “You know, asthma attacks are brought on by emotional stress. Poor Julian is so high-strung. The excitement of meeting you — my dear, you look so stunning! — must have upset his chemical balance.” Carla nodded. “It'll be all right, dear. It isn't as serious as it sounds.” She started to pat Sissy's hand, then thought better of it.

The six of them squeezed into a taxi. Can you guess how humiliating that was for our Sissy, ushered insensitively into a vehicle that she had not snared in her net of meat and gesture? Can you appreciate that she must have felt like a hummingbird stuck in the bubblegum of pedestrianism? Would you invite Thelonius Monk to your house and not let him play your piano? Would you shove an arthritic nanny goat into the ring with El Cordobes? Lord! She sat upon that taxi upholstery in frosty revulsion, like a queen compelled to squat over a ditch latrine; and why not? For she was Sissy Hankshaw, who had carved out an identity for herself in the vast realm of personal idiosyncrasy instead of carving it out of someone else's flesh, as is normally the case; Sissy Hankshaw, who, following a suggestion from nature, had created herself and then paraded her creation before ye gods and planets that whirl above our daily routine; Sissy Hankshaw, who proved that grandiose ambition need not be Faustian, at least not for a woman in motion. Einstein had observed motion and learned that space and time are relative; Sissy had committed herself to motion and learned that one could alter reality by one's perception of it — and it was that discovery, perhaps no less a one than Einstein's, that finally allowed her to smile away humiliation just as a short while earlier she had smiled away fatigue.

The taxi, having no free will, rolled downtown.

23.

NEW YORK CITY. June 21, 1972. Eight-thirty in the evening, according to the position of two mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial. Mars is in the House of Virgo, Jupiter is in the House of Values and Venus is in the House of Pies. The weather: hot hokey puppy poopie with billows of industrial paranoia at 600 feet. Manhattan smells like the litter box for the Kitty of the World. It has twisted its body into the dog-shit asana. Close by but far away, in a world beyond odors, ghosts of the original inhabitants are laughing their feathers off, remembering how they'd stuck the white devils with this doomed piece of real estate for some very chic beads and a box of Dutch Masters. The Big Apple, polished with Rockefeller spit and wiped on the tight pants of a multitude of Puerto Ricans, is ready for the chomps and nibbles of Friday-nighters from everywhere. Junkies are stirring in their warrens, pizzas are primping in their ovens, Wall Street is resting its bloody butthole and the Statue of Liberty wears a frown that won't quit. As City College professors, disgruntled over martinis, talk about dropping out and farming rhubarb in Oregon, neon signs all over town rejoice because it's the shortest night of the year. Headline on the front page of the New York Daily News: THE CHINK SUMS IT UP, SAYS LIFE IS HARD IF YOU THINK IT'S HARD. New York City. In progress. Not a cowgirl in sight.

Taxi cabs are pulling up in front of restaurants and theaters, and one pulls up in front of a remodeled tenement on East Tenth Street, between Third and Second avenues, three blocks west of where young Latins have all but taken away Tompkins Square Park from old Ukrainians and winos of indeterminate age and national origin. This block of East Tenth, freshly painted, maintains some class: behind its barred windows and triple-locked doors with chains à la mode, professional people, some with a creative bent, are holding their own against the constant onslaught of soot, cockroaches and burglars. In this block Hubert Selby, Jr., wrote Last Exit to Brooklyn, and a famous art critic ponders hourly the problem that inherent pictorialism presents to the ongoing mainstream of modernism. The taxi has stopped in front of the building where the wheezy Julian Gitche resides. It discharges its passengers, all too slowly for the taste of Sissy Hankshaw, who holds exhaustion and revulsion at bay only with the aid of the Great Secret (which, as we've determined, is this: one has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter his perception of it; or, more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them).

As tired as she is, Sissy has a single flame-edged longing — to get on the road and hoist her thumbs in the wind. However, she is buttoned into an expensive linen dress, is hemmed in by four persuasive people and is held by fine threads of curiosity and sympathy to this Gentleman's Quarterly parody of an Indian who curds up with mucus every time he tries to speak to her. So she employs the Great Secret to turn her predicament into an educational, if not entertaining, experience.

Julian's apartment is second floor front. It's neat and clean, with waxed hardwood floors, a wall of exposed brick, a white piano, books and paintings everywhere. There is a blue velour sofa upon which Julian is made to lie. While Howard mixes Scotch and sodas, Rupert fills a syringe from a vial of aminophylline he has taken from its place behind a gelatin salad mold in the refrigerator. He gives Julian an injection.

“There, that ought to beat them bronchial buggers into submission,” he says to Julian. Then, to Sissy, “I was a medic in the Army. I really should have become a doctor. Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people's eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers, as it were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society. .”

“Too bad you don't have a pill for bullshit.” Carla smiles as if she were joking, but she'd said it tartly. Rupert glares and takes a big bite of Scotch.

“Where do you live, Miss Hankshaw,” asks Howard, trying, perhaps, to change the subject.

“I'm staying with the Countess.”

“I know,” says Howard, “but where do you reside when you aren't visiting New York?”

“I don't.”

“You don't?”

“Well, no, I don't reside anywhere in particular. I just keep moving.”

Everyone looks a bit astonished, including the recumbent Julian.

“A traveler, eh?” says Howard.

“You might say that,” says Sissy, “although I don't think of it as traveling.”

“How do you think of it?” asks Carla.

“As moving.”

“Oh,” says Carla.

“How. . unusual,” says Marie.

“Mmmmm,” mumbles Howard.

Rupert bites into his Scotch again. Julian issues a watery wheeze.

The silence that follows is soon broken by Carla. “Rupert, before you get too engrossed in your research on Scotch as a cure for aging, don't you think you'd better phone Elaine's and cancel our dinner reservations? We'll never get in again if we just don't show up.”

“What would we do without you, Carla? Without our little efficiency expert, Carla, everything would just go to hell. Carla is thinking about running for mayor next year, aren't you Carla?”

“Up yours, Herr Doktor Book Salesman. Will the demands of your medical practice allow you to call Elaine's or shall I?”

“Oh let me do it,” pipes Marie. The short, vivacious brunette lifts herself out of her platform shoes and glides in stocking feet to the telephone.

“Speaking of running for office,” says Howard pleasantly. “Does anybody think McGovern has a chance?”

“Do you mean a chance to be canonized or a chance to be assassinated?” asks Rupert.

“If Rupert needs a bullshit pill then Hubert Humphrey needs two,” says Carla. “And that might be McGovern's role. If he can turn off Humphrey's fountain of corn then McGovern has done the sensibility of America a great favor, even if he forces his party to nominate a jingoist creep like Scoop Jackson in Miami Beach.”

Like many of their liberal counterparts, the friends of Julian Gitche are disillusioned with politics, but also like their counterparts they have failed to discover an alternative to politics in which to place their faith, channel their humanism or indulge their penchant for conflict and speculation. Thus, the conversation around the red patient on the blue sofa drifts to the upcoming national political conventions. When Marie returns from phoning the restaurant, she joins in.

Sissy leaves her chair and wanders about the apartment. Its full bookshelves remind her of public libraries in which she has napped. Wandering, she holds her thumbs close to her side, lest she nudge an antique, totter an objet d'art, smear a picture glass or agitate the pet poodle. She is intrigued but suffers no illusions; she knows she is in an alien environment.

Eventually her explorations lead her into the bedroom, where there is a covered birdcage of Florentine design. She wishes its inhabitants were not sleeping, for she “has a way” with birds. She recalls Boy, the runaway parakeet who for a time was the sole exception to her rule to go always alone. Boy's owners had clipped his wings, but once Sissy taught him how, he hitchhiked as well as some birds fly. That Boy is a cinch to go down in the Parakeet Hall of Fame.

Hoping to hear a cheep that might indicate insomnia in the cage, Sissy sits upon the double bed. Gradually, she reclines. “No Indian blankets,” she notes. “No Indian blankets.” And that is the last thought she has before she blacks out.

Two hours pass before she is awakened — by a sound softer than a cheep. It is the sound of buttons passing through buttonholes. Buttons that have not breathed freely in three days are sighing with relief, their yokes lifted, their nooses loosened. One by one, button necks are freed from the trap that is the fate of most buttons the way that compromises are the fate of most men. Soon Sissy cannot only hear button liberation; she can feel it.

Someone is undressing her.

And it is not Julian Gitche.

24.

"WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?" asked Sissy, in a voice webby with sleep.

“Oh, Rupert and Carla had a little hassle and went home,” said Howard.

“Julian fell asleep on the couch; we covered him up,” said Marie.

“We thought that we should make you comfortable, too,” said Howard.

“Yes, dear,” said Marie. “We've been watching you here sleeping and you looked so sweet. We thought we should help you get comfy for the night.”

Sissy thought that quite considerate of the Barths. They were a couple as amicable as they were handsome. She did wonder, however, why they were both in their underwear.

Between the two of them, they had her out of her dress in no time.

“There, isn't that better?” inquired Marie.

“Yes, thanks,” said Sissy. She did feel more comfortable, but she also felt as if she should apologize for not having on a brassiere. Bra hooks can test the most agile of thumbs, as many a frustrated boy will testify, and Sissy had been unable to wear that garment whose name in French means, enigmatically, “arm protector,” since she had left her mama. Light seeping in from a crack in the bathroom door gave a strawberry sheen to her gumdrop-shaped nipples. She hoped she wasn't embarrassing these nice people.

Oh my goodness, she must have been, for in a second Marie slipped out of her own brassiere — in an effort, obviously, to make Sissy feel less conspicuous.

Marie moved her bare bosom close to Sissy's. The two sets of nipples stiffened in formal greeting, like diplomats from small nations. “Mine are fuller but yours are more perfectly shaped,” observed Marie. She leaned closer. The envoys exchanged state secrets.

“Highly debatable,” said Howard. “I'll wager they're the exact same size.” Judiciously, in the spirit of fair play that characterizes his profession, he cupped his left hand about a Marie breast and his right about one of Sissy's.

He weighed them in his palms, squeezed them the way an honest grocer squeezes excess water from a lettuce, let his spread fingers sample their circumference. “Hmmm. Yours are larger, Marie, but Miss Hankshaw's — Sissy's — are more firm. You'd think they would have started to droop; I mean, from not wearing a bra.”

“Howard! Watch your manners. You've made her blush. Here, Sissy, let me compare.” Marie seized Sissy's free breast, quickly, like a monkey picking a fruit, rolling it about in her hungry little fingers, rubbing it against her chin and cheeks.

Now, Sissy became more awake. Consciousness returned and when it unpacked its bags, there was suspicion in them. She shouldn't be staying, uninvited, in the bedroom of an ill man with whom she'd scarcely spoken. She ought to get back to the Countess's. Did Mr. and Mrs. Barth have her best interests at heart? She had been so relieved to get out of that dress that she hadn't considered hanky-panky. She wondered if this friendly couple could be up to something?

Her question was answered by a hand — she was not sure whose — creeping into her panties. She tried to turn away from its probings, but her cunt, without her knowledge or permission, had grown quite slippery, and a finger fell into it almost as if by accident.

Lowered steadily, like a flag at sunset, her panties were soon below her knees. She thought she felt a second finger slish into her pussy, but before that could be confirmed, still another finger muscled up her asshole. . and. . ohhh. It was like her early days as a hitchhiker. It was nostalgic; it was disgusting; it was. . ohhh.

Philosophers, poets, painters and scholars, debate all you want on the nature of beauty!

Tropical plums. Wine in a rowboat. Clouds, babies and Buddhas, resembling one another. Bicycle bells. Honeysuckle. Parachutes. Shooting stars seen through lace curtains. A silver radio that attracts butterflies; a déjà that just won't quit vuing. Han-shan wrote, after a moment of ecstasy, “This place is finer than the place I live!”

Across Sissy's lips passed Marie's tongue, then Howard's tongue, then Marie's titty, then Howard's. . then Howard's. . Howard's. .!!! One by one, like apartments in a new high-rise, orifices were being filled.

Anima mixed with animus. It was Marie who was climbing her, sliding around on her, pulling down her own panties with a wild hand. Marie nuzzled Sissy's calves, then her thighs. Marie's mouth, oozing hot saliva, apparently had a destination. But before it could be reached, Howard entered his wife from the rear.

Ah, sir penis, that old show-stopper! Chalk up another stolen scene for the one-eyed matinée idol. Marie could not suck for groaning.

Like a disc jockey from Paradise, Howard flipped Marie over and played her B side. Every now and again, he reached for Sissy, attempting to include her, but certain laws of physics insisted on being obeyed. Over and over, Marie called Sissy's name, but her eyes were half-closed and her caresses blind and scattered.

The Barths were really going at it. It would tax a day's output at the Countess's factory to quell the spreading funk in that room. Marie was kind of yowling, sounding so much like a cat that the poodle in the kitchen began to grrr. God knows what the birds in their cage were thinking.

“So this is what it's like,” thought Sissy. Fascinated, she propped herself up on her elbows to observe. Often she had imagined the act, but she was never entirely sure she imagined it correctly, not even after that evening of embracing Kerouac in a Colorado corn field. “So this is what it's really like.” The Great Secret could be returned to its bottle. Perceptual transformations were no longer necessary. This truly was educational.

In truth, Sissy found it more interesting than the canoe races at LaConner, Washington, more interesting than the San Andreas Fault, or Niagara Falls, or Bonnie and Clyde State Park, or Tapioca State Pudding — of course, Sissy never was one for sightseeing. She even found it more interesting than the Tobacco Festival, although not so much a challenge to the wiles of her thumbs.

Before the performance was over, however, and to Howard and Marie's dismay, Sissy debedded on a particularly high bounce and walked out. She pattered to the living room couch and crawled under the cover with Julian. There she stayed three days.

25.

THEY HAD A LOT TO TALK ABOUT.

Julian was still in his formal trousers, cummerbund attached, while Sissy was nude as she had ever been, and was smeared, besides, with those feminine juices, both her own and Marie's, that gave the Countess nose trouble — but the sofa-mates refused to let those differences stand in their way; they had a lot to talk about and there were larger differences than dress.

It would seem that Julian Gitche had dealt with the world by combining pigment with water in varying viscosities and making it spread, leak, splash, pour, spray, soak or fold onto a chosen paper format in selected tones, hues, volumes, shapes and lines. Sissy Hankshaw had dealt with the world by hitchhiking with a dedication, perspective and style such as the world had never seen. It was as befuddling to Sissy that an Indian would spend his life painting genteel watercolors in a bourgeois milieu as it was mind-wrenching to Julian that a bright, pretty, if slightly afflicted, young woman with a promising modeling career would spend hers endlessly hitchhiking.

“You have a romantic concept of Indians,” said Julian. “They are people, like any other; a people whose time has passed. I see no virtue in wallowing in the past, especially a past that was more often miserable than not. I am a Mohawk Indian in the same sense that Spiro Agnew is a Greek: a descendant, nothing more. And believe me, the Mohawk never approximated the glory that was Greece. My grandfather was one of the first Mohawks to work as a steel-rigger in New York City; you know Mohawks are used extensively on sky-scraper construction because they have no fear of height. My dad helped build the Empire State Building. Later, he founded his own steeplejack service, and despite prejudices against him by the unions and so forth for being an uppity redskin, he made a great deal of money. Enough to send me to Yale. I have a masters degree in fine arts and fairly good connections in Manhattan art circles. Primitive cultures, Indian or otherwise, hold a minimum of attraction for me. I cherish the firm order of symmetry that marks Western civilization off from the more heterogeneous, random societies in an imperfect world.”

In the limited space of the sofa, Sissy turned over, dinging one of her Howard-and-Marie accentuated nipples against one of Julian's shirt studs. “I don't know anything about this order and symmetry business. I'm a high school dropout from a race — the Poor White Trash race — that has done nothing for ten centuries but pick up rocks, hoe weeds, sweat in factories and march off to war whenever told to; and each generation has begot a smaller potato patch. But I've spent some time in libraries, not all of it asleep, and I have learned this: every civilized culture in history has discriminated against its abnormal members. 'Schizophrenia' is a civilized Western term, and so are 'witch' and 'misfit'—terms used to rationalize the cruel and unusual punishments doled out to extraordinary people. Yet the American Indian tribes, as you ought to know, treated their freaks as special beings. Their schizoids were recognized as having a gift, the power of visions, and were revered for it. The physically deformed were also regarded as favorites of the Great Spirit, welcome reliefs to the monotony of anatomical regularity, and everybody loved them, enjoyed them and paid them favor. In that ancient Greece that you find so glorious, somebody like me would have been killed at birth.”

“Now, Sissy, you're being overly sensitive and defensive. You saw how you were treated last night by my highly civilized friends. Why, not one of us even looked at your. . your. . your. . thumbs.”

“Exactly my point,” said Sissy.

And so that argument went. The other one went something like this.

“Aside from everything else, Sissy, I fail to see how you've even survived. My God! A girl, alone, on the roads, for years. And not killed or injured or outraged or taken sick.”

“Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You'd be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise.”

“Okay, that may well be true. But what an enterprise! Hitchhiking. Bumming rides. I think of hitchhiking I think of college kids, servicemen and penniless hippies. I think of punks in oily denims and maniacs with butcher knives hidden in their wad of rumpled belongings. .”

“I've been told that I looked like an angel beside the highway.”

“Oh, I'm sure you are a beautiful exception to the rule. But why? Why bother? You've traveled your whole life without destination. You move but you have no direction.”

“What is the 'direction' of the Earth in its journey; where are the atoms 'going' when they spin?”

“There's an orderly pattern, some ultimate purpose in the movements of Nature. You've been constantly on the move for nearly twelve years. Tell me one thing that you've proven.”

“I've proven that people aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.”

“Aimless. .”

“Not aimless. Not in the least. It's just that my aims are different from most. There are plenty of aimless people on the road, all right. People who hitchhike from kicks to kicks, restlessly, searching for something: looking for America, as Jack Kerouac put it, or looking for themselves, or looking for some relation between America and themselves. But I'm not looking for anything. I've found something.”

“What is it that you've found?”

“Hitchhiking.”

That stopped Julian for a while, but on the second day, long after Howard and Marie had tiptoed out of his apartment, he returned to the subject. He could not appreciate Sissy's accomplishments. So what if she had once flagged down thirty-four cars in succession without a miss? What merit in the feat of crossing Texas blindfolded in cyclone season with a parakeet on her thumb? He viewed such deeds as pathetically, sophomorically, wanton. He shook his unpainted and featherless head sadly when he considered the police record (arrests for vagrancy, illegal solicitation of rides and, ironically, suspicion of prostitution) of an essentially respectable woman.

So effectively did he chide her about it that a vaguely guilty gloom arrived in her eyes, its cold feet shuffling in the dampness there. He wrung sniffles out of her, and when she was appropriately unhappy, he comforted her. He held her tightly in protective arms, built a castle around her, dug a moat, raised the drawbridge. Only her mama had ever held her like that, cooing in her ear. He petted her with poodle-petting hands, so soft they could get splinters from eating with chopsticks. He cuddled her as if she were an infant. He insulated her bare wires. And she, Sissy, who had slept in the excesses of every season, uncared for and without a care, snuggled down deeply in Julian's paternal tenderness and let herself be coddled.

It was at this point — Julian cooing, Sissy purring — that the magic that had attended her thumbs from the moment in her youth when she first made her commitment to a life less shallow, safe and small than our society demands of us, excused itself, tiptoed out of the apartment like Howard and Marie and strolled down to Stanley's Bar on Avenue B for a beer.

Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (DELORES DEL RUBY)

Some folks said she had scaled a convent wall in San Antonio and run away with a Mexican circus. Others claimed she had been the favored daughter of a prominent Creole family in New Orleans, until she got mixed up with an alligator cult that practiced peyoteism. Still others said she was Gypsy, through and through, while one source insisted that — like so many “Spanish” dancers — she was actually Italian or Jewish, and had picked up her routines watching Zorro on television in the Bronx.

One thing all the cowgirls agreed on, however, was that their forewoman flicked an educated lash, so none disputed the story that she had acquired her first whip when she was five years old, a gift from an uncle who had said, upon presentation, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

The day Delores del Ruby arrived at the Rubber Rose, a snake crawled across the dusty road that led to the ranch, carrying a card under its forked tongue. The card was the queen of spades.

26.

EACH TIME HE GOT UP, whether it was to go to the bathroom or feed his pets, Julian had removed an article of clothing, so that now, on the third day of their sofaing, he was nearly as naked as she.

The smack of kisses sounded with increasing frequency in the room; discussions and naps were of shorter duration. After she had broken down and surrendered to his protective ministrations, the last faint traces of his asthma evaporated like moth pee off a sixty-watt bulb and he found himself host to an erection.

Sissy knew just how to entertain it. She had been recently educated. She stroked it. She pushed its hood back. She ringed its rosy. She let it throb alongside her thigh, and better yet, alongside her thumb. She maneuvered herself beneath it and guided its crabapple noggin through the seam in her being. Like a bullet of thick fish meat, it went to target.

Alas, Julian's chimes rang before the appointed hour. He was subjected to a sudden attack of the old premature. And Sissy was left with her virginity intact, throttling a sticky wicket. Gitche Goomee!

The watercolorist apologized with downcast eyes. It was Sissy's turn to comfort. She reassured him so convincingly that he soon cheered up and began to chatter again about such wonders as Shakespeare and Edward Albee, Michelangelo and Marc Chagall. “It is the measure of Western civilization,” said he, “that it can encompass in harmony, balance off, as it were, such divergent masterworks as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The American Dream, as the dome of the Sistine Chapel and the ceiling of the Paris Opera.”

Sissy sat up. Her eyes moped about the apartment, looking at but not seeing the macramé wallhangings, the volumes of Robert Frost.

“What's the matter?” asked Julian.

After a while Sissy answered. “I'm cold,” she said.

“Here. I'll turn down the air conditioner.”

“It's not the air conditioner that's making me cold.”

“Oh. . Well, what is it? Is it. . me?” Eyes downcast again.

“It's the piano.”

“The piano? You don't like my white piano? Well, if you'd prefer, I mean, if you'll be coming here often — and I hope you shall — I suppose I can have it removed. Might as well. I play badly. I've studied for years but I'm rotten. The Countess says I'm the first Indian in history to be scalped by Beethoven. Ha ha.”

“It's not the piano.”

“Oh. . What is it then? Me?”

“It's the books.”

“The books?”

“No. It's the paintings.”

“The paintings? My watercolors? Well, I do use lots of blues and greens.”

“No, it's not your paintings.”

“Not my paintings?”

“It's the stillness.”

“My home is too quiet for you?” asked Julian incredulously, for he could plainly hear Puerto Ricans beating garbage cans in the next block.

“Not quiet. Still. Nothing moves in here. Not even your birds.”

Sissy stood. The Countess had sent a flunky by with her rucksack, and now she walked to it.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting dressed. I've got to go.”

“But I don't want you to leave. Please stay. We can go to dinner. I owe you a dinner. And tonight. . we can. . really make love.”

“I have to go, Julian.”

“Why? Why do you have to go?”

“My thumbs hurt.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. Is it something usual? What can we do for them?”

“I've made a mistake. I've been negligent. I haven't exercised. I have to hitchhike a little bit every day, no matter what. It's like a musician practicing his scales. When I don't practice, my timing gets off, my thumbs get stiff and sore.”

To that, Julian could not respond. Sissy Hankshaw was one of those mysteries that drop onto Earth unasked, and perhaps undeserved, like grace — like clockworks. His ancestors might have known what to do with her, but Julian Gitche did not. All of a sudden her presence seemed completely outside his frame of reference. His apartment was no longer static when she moved about it; tall, jump-suited, globs of air orbiting her like planets of musical roses. She caused sculptures to sway on their pedestals. The bedroom birdies came alive and flitted in their cage. It was incomprehensible to Julian that he had presumed to be her consoling daddy a few short hours before.

Julian had a poodle named Butterfinger, named for the candy bar that F. Scott Fitzgerald was eating when he fell dead of a coronary surprise. Julian called him Butty for short.

Butty had every fault known to dog. He was a face-licker and crotch-sniffer, a hair-shedder and corner-crapper, a shoe-chewer and guest-nipper, a garden-digger and cat-intimidator, a nylon-snagger and chair-muddyer, a scrap-begger and lap-crawler, a car-chaser and shrub-defiler, a bath-hater and air-polluter, a garbage-raider and leg-humper and, moreover, a yapper in that shrill, spoiled, obnoxious yap-style to which poodles alone may lay claim.

(Sissy, unlike most humans who travel on foot — subject to the bites and barks of canine fancy — was not a dog-hater per se; the wild dingo of Australia had her sincerest respect.)

Butty was yapping as Sissy left Julian's apartment. For once, it may have been a tolerable sound. Because of the yapping, Julian could not hear her hurrying, almost sprinting, down the stairs; Sissy could not hear the wheeze that struggled out of Julian's lungs like a wimpy wind that blew between their worlds.

The magic caught up with her on Fourteenth Street as she headed for the George Washington Bridge.

27.

THE COUNTESS WAS PRACTICING DENTAL KARATE. Chop chop chop. His Princess telephone was in imminent danger of being incapacitated by a blow from the teeth.

“So she left town,” he said — chop chop. “Well, that shouldn't surprise you. Leaving town is what Sissy is all about. But tell me, how did she strike you?”

“Extraordinary!”

“She's obviously that. Jesus! Which would you rather have, a million dollars or one of Sissy's thumbs full of pennies?”

“Oh you! I'm not talking about her hands. They're difficult to ignore, I confess, but I'm speaking of her whole being. Her whole being is extraordinary. The way she talks, for example. She's so articulate.”

“It's high time you realized, honey babe, that a woman doesn't have to give the best years of her life to Radcliffe or Smith in order to speak the English language. What's more, those intellectual college girls have got the odor as bad as any others. Worse, I suspect. One healthy waitress probably uses more Yoni Yum each week than the entire dean's list at Wellesley.” Chop!

Julian sighed. “I wouldn't know about that,” he said. “But she is extraordinary. I don't understand her in the least, yet I'm helplessly attracted. Countess, I'm really in a dither. She's turned my head.”

“Ninety degrees to the left, I hope.” Chop clack click. “How does she feel about you?”

Another wheezy sigh. “I think she's disappointed that I'm not more, ah, sort of atavistic. She's got some naíve, sentimental notions about Indians. I'm sure she liked me, though; she gave me many indications that she liked me. But. . then she left town.”

“She always leaves town, you dummy. That doesn't mean anything. What about in bed? Does she like it in bed?”

Evel Knievel's motorcycle could not have jumped over the pause that followed. Finally, Julian asked, “How did she like what in bed?”

“Like what?” Chop!! Clack!! “What do you think?”

“Well. . er. .”

“Shit O dear, Julian. Do you mean to tell me you spent three days together and you didn't get it on?”

“Oh, we got it on. But you might say we didn't get it all the way on.”

“Whose fault was that?”

“I suppose it was mine. Yes, it definitely was my fault.”

“In a way I'm relieved it wasn't hers. I've been worried about her psychological virginity. Only now I'm concerned about you. What do they do to you boys in those Ivy League schools, anyway? Strap you down and pump the Nature out of you? That's what they do, all right. They can even press the last drop of Nature out of a Mohawk buck. Why, send a shaman or a cannibal to Yale for four years and all he'd be fit for would be a desk in the military-industrial complex and a seat in the third row at a Neil Simon comedy. Jesus H. M. S. Christ! If Harvard or Princeton could get hold of the Chink for a couple of semesters they'd turn him into a candidate for the Bow Tie Wing of the Hall of Wimps. Oogie boogie.”

“You needn't stoop to reverse snobbism just because Ol' Miss was the only university in the nation that would take you in. If we Ivy Leaguers aren't earthy enough to suit you hillbillies, at least we don't go around indulging in racist terms such as 'Chink.' Next thing I know, you'll be calling me 'chief.'”

“'Chink' is the guy's name, for Christ's sake.”

“What guy?”

“Aw, he's some old fart who lives in the hills out West. Gives my ranch the creeps, and the willies, too. But though he be old and dirty, he's alive, I'll bet, clear down to his toes. They don't have his juice in a jar in New Haven. That prissy alma mater of yours could pluck the hair off a werewolf. Better Sissy keep her virginity than lose it to the strains of 'The Whiffenpoof Song.'”

“Sex isn't everything, just because it keeps you in business. And speaking of your business, you'd better be concerned. Because that mysterious model of yours has got me too upset to paint.”

“You'll paint, all right, sweetie-poo. You'll paint because you're under contract to paint. Moreover, you'll paint better than you've ever painted before. Nothing like a little suffering to put some backbone into art. Has she got you smoking and drinking? Good! Creativity feeds on poisons. All great artists have been depraved. Look at me! As sure as Raoul Dufy is peeing over the side of Eternity's sailboat, this little affaire is going to inspire the finest watercolors of your career. Now, tell that goddamned poodle of yours to quit whimpering and you get in there and paint!”

“That's not the poodle.”

“Oh,” said the Countess. “Well shit O dear. Just hold on, you hear. Don't go getting asthmatic. We can write her a letter, if you'd like. Send copies to Taos, LaConner, Pine Ridge, Pleasant Point, Cherokee and that other place. I'll pick up some Ripple and come right over.”

The eyes of the sky's potato have seldom looked down on such a frantic epistolary collaboration as occurred that night.

28.

THE CHINCK IS RIGHT: life is essentially playful.

Of course, it plays a bit rough at times.

Maybe life is like a baby gorilla. It doesn't know its own strength.

Life was mashing the big fat drops out of Julian Gitche and Sissy Hankshaw. They had chipmunk festivals inside their stomachs and the fillings in their teeth were picking up signals from sentimental radio. Life is forever pulling this number on men and women, and then acting surprised and innocent, as it it didn't realize it was hurting anybody.

On the surface, to the untrained eye, Sissy was hitchhiking as well as she ever had. She had even developed some new wrinkles. Such as using both thumbs at once, addressing one appendage to the far lanes of traffic while causing the other to beckon wittily to the cars passing closest to roadside. She had also perfected a high bouncing roll to the left, comparable to the “American twist” service in tennis. It was flashy but there was no real joy in it, no substance or spontaneity. It was what is known as a virtuoso performance. It lacked soul. You know. Show biz is teeming with performers like that, all of them with more tiles in their swimming pools than you or I have.

A sense of urgency had crept into her style. Whereas in the past Sissy had kept up her astonishing pace out of sheer exhilaration at being unique and being free, she now kept going because she was afraid to stop. For when biological necessities did force her to stop, time and space, which she had heretofore held in abeyance (as if she were some clockworks personified), fell in on her in a gravitational rush. Time and space fell in on her like a set of encyclopedias falling off a missionary's shelf onto a pygmy. And time brought along its secretary, memory, and space brought its brat, loneliness.

In the past, she had been subjected to ridicule, pity, awe and lust. Now, she was being subjected to tenderness and need. It was better and worse. As do many strong people, she had fallen victim to the tyranny of the weak.

As for Julian, he took to swilling Scotch. In the mornings. Before he had even had his Mother of God Wheat Flakes (or was it his Joyce Carol Oats?) One night he went to Max's Kansas City and created a minor ruckus by yelling, in a wheezy voice, “Jackson Pollock was a fraud!” A sculptor, hardly making an effort, bloodied his nose; and a perverted biology student followed him home because he thought Julian had said Pollock was a frog. (In New York, my dears, there are all kinds.) He listened to Tchaikovsky and stopped combing his hair.

Sometimes one gets the idea that life thinks it's still living in Paris in the thirties.

29.

JULIAN GITCHE'S letter caught up with Sissy Hankshaw in Cherokee, North Carolina, on Christmas Eve. She picked it up at 11:00 A.M., just before the post office closed for the holiday. After reading it twice, she escorted it into a honky-tonk (where aghast drunks reacted to her thumbs as if they were the hellish little reindeer of some kind of anti-Santa Claus) and read it again. The Countess had advanced her four hundred dollars when she got to New York back in the summer and she had enough left to buy a bottle of wine. She chose red Ripple, for old times' sake, and promptly spilled some on the letter. While a jukeboxed Bing Crosby crooned “I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas,” a postage-stamp Ike grinned his I-made-it-all-the-way-to-the-top-but-I-still-don't-understand grin through a puddle of wine. Under the plastic mistletoe, pool balls kissed. Blue lights winked from a metallic silver tree. Vulgarity called, and was answered.

Halfway through the Ripple, Sissy got up to go to the toilet and went to the phone booth instead.

Julian, holding back wheezes with a herculean effort, told her that he loved her. She protested that he didn't even know her. Abandoning all that he'd been taught at Yale, he replied that feeling was superior to knowledge.

“I love you,” Julian said.

“You're a fool,” said Sissy.

“I'm offering love and you're rejecting it. Maybe you are the fool.”

Well!

A week after New Year's, she hitched into Manhattan. With the Countess, who despised the way men behaved and women smelled, as their sarcastic witness, Sissy and Julian went to the Little Church of the Positive Thought and were married by a protégé of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's.

Thus ended for all practical purposes what the author knows to be one of the most remarkable and least understood careers in human history.

But a career, however unusual, is not a story. And Sissy's story, dovetailing as it does with the stories of the Rubber Rose cowgirls and the clockworks Chink, and disclosing as it does the possible pancake beneath the sluggish syrup and slippery butter of life, is far from ended.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (BING)

Under an orchard tree, drooping with cherries, cowgirls lay in the shade. They fed each other fruit. Dark juice dribbled into dimples. Cherry meat stained smiles and nostrils.

Kathy was embroidering a rainbow on the back of Heather's workshirt. Inspired, Linda rendered an all-red rainbow on Debbie's bare waist, and Kym, dipping slightly below the belt, added the pot of gold. Cherry paint.

Fruit goo began to attract flies, so the cowgirls imitated their hobbled horses and brushed them away by flinging their hair. A cloud chugged by. If it was not gone by sunset, it would be painted, too.

The forewoman, Delores del Ruby, was away from the ranch on a peyote run. Big Red was acting forewoman, and she was permitting the hands a very extended break. The goats in their charge were straying far and wide, and as for the birds, they could not be seen from the cherry tree.

Placing her New Testament back in her saddlebag, Mary asked, “Pardners, do you think this is honest, goofing off like this?”

“I don't care if it's honest if it's fun,” said Big Red.

“I don't care if it's fun if it's real,” said Kym.

“I don't even care if it's real,” said Debbie. Not everyone knew what she meant.

30.

IF YOU COULD buckle your Bugs Bunny wristwatch to a ray of light, your watch would continue ticking but its hands wouldn't move. That's because at the speed of light there is no time. Time is relative to velocity. At high speeds, time is literally stretched. Since light is the ultimate in velocity, at light-speed time is stretched to its absolute and becomes static. Albert Einstein figured that one out. There's no need to hang around the clockworks and bug the Chink about it.

Assuming that our brains will get off their fat butts, for a change, and play cosmic ball with us, allowing us to fully comprehend no time, then we might try to picture (if “picture” is the right word) what Einstein meant when he defined “space” as “love.”

Einstein knew a lot about space — he determined, for example, that beyond the expanding volume of the universe space ceases to exist, and so we have no space to contend with as well as no time—and he may have had some special insights into love, as well. The first of his two marriages was a mess, however. Einstein wed a girl with a physical defect.

It was some sort of crazy limp that plagued Mileva Marić, some eccentricity of the foot. A few days after the civil ceremony in Zurich, one of young Einstein's friends confessed, “I should never have the courage to marry a woman unless she were absolutely sound.” Well, for all that fellow might have known, it could have been the daily contemplation of Mileva's wild toes that led Einstein to perceive the wondrous workings of Nature in a way that no other scientist ever had.

But never mind. We know for a fact that it took more than a sardine of courage for the watercolorist Julian Gitche to marry the “unsound” Sissy Hankshaw. The union altered his life almost as drastically as it altered hers.

Good-by to dinner parties. Sissy was clumsy with silverware and, as previously noted, had a tendency to slosh the wine. Invitations were routinely refused, never extended. Julia Child was overtaken by dust. They gnawed Colonel Sanders drumsticks and Big Mac burgers in their apartment, alone. Julian began to complain of his stomach. Grease was giving him ulcers, he said. Sitting at the kitchen table, beneath the paper imitation Tiffany lampshade, he would peer into the hot slit of a taco and wonder who was dining that night at Elaine's.

While her husband painted, Sissy would stare out the windows at traffic. Or she would leaf through the motoring magazines that she brought regularly at newsstands, although Julian, a nondriver, vowed he'd never own a car. Her thumbs ached, and in order to relieve them, she took to imaginary hitchhiking, the game she'd played as a small child. She hitchhiked curtain-bottoms creeping on windowsills. She hitchhiked the black shadow thrown by the white piano. Cockroaches scurried when the bathroom light went on — she tried to flag them down. This return to girlhood beginnings amused her, kept her calm. Julian was sensitive enough to recognize its value to their relationship, although the peculiarity of it caused nervous coughs to punch the bags of his lungs.

She was a ratty housekeeper. She hadn't the experience or the aptitude. So Julian, on top of his picture-making, his conferences with art dealers, collectors and advertising men, had to attend to domestic chores. When he washed dishes, Sissy, a bit embarrassed, would retire to the bedroom to chat with the birds. The birds and Sissy had real rapport. Was it an interest in “freedom of movement” that they had in commom?

One Sunday, the newlyweds went together to the Museum of the American Indian on One hundred fifty-fifth Street. It was Sissy's idea. There was nothing displayed from the Siwash, not even a bead. On the way home, they quarreled.

At least once a week, Howard and Marie dropped in (Rupert and Carla had separated) to play Botticelli and discuss the international situation, which was desperate, as usual. Occasionally, one or the other of them, Howard or Marie, would catch Sissy alone (she was inclined to wander away from the group) and try to kiss her and prowl in her clothes. It wasn't right, but it made more sense to her than politics or Botticelli.

A certain amount of morbid gossip spread about the couple: the elegant and talented Mohawk, the lovely and deformed Yoni Yum/Dew Girl (revealed at last!). Sissy was immune, but the stories made Julian squirm. When questioned about his wife's background, he would lie that the small amount of hitchhiking she had done had been part of a publicity stunt dreamed up by the Countess. Later, he would feel guilty for denying her, and she took his guilt for discontent.

Nights in bed, and mornings, too, beneath blankets no Indian loomed, the strange tensions of their relationship dissolved in tenderness and passion. They caressed one another until their hides shone. They embraced until their 206 bones squeaked like mice. Their bed was a boat in a weird sea.

If space is love, Professor, then is love space? Or is love something we use to fill space? If time eats the doughnut, does love eat the hole?

31.

THERE WAS SOMEONE AT THE DOOR. The buzzer was carrying on like a maraca with a crush on a June bug. It must be the Countess.

As if the Gitches weren't subjected to pressures enough, there was the bitching of the Countess.

No one recognized more lucidly than the Countess the heroism of Sissy's attempt at normal womanhood; no one could list more completely than he the sacrifices Julian made for his marriage (The painter had gone so far as to get rid of his poodle). Still, the Countess couldn't resist digging at them, mocking their motives. Perhaps he suffered the secret shame of those men who dam rivers and break horses. The Countess, after all, had initiated the marriage that had “tamed” Sissy Hankshaw — and all he had to show for his meddling with freedom was the hollow prize of the marriage itself, and another successful advertising campaign: Julian's watercolors were at least the rage that Sissy's poses once had been.

It was the middle of September. The marriage was nine months old. The evening before, they had had such a spat that it took most of the night to patch things. On this morning they were enjoying a fragile, vulnerable happiness. They surely didn't need the Countess's cynical stick stirring things up.

The instant he crossed their threshold, however, it was apparent that the Countess hadn't called merely to indulge himself. He was waving his cigarette holder like a brakeman's lantern; his dentures were chasing his words the way Tom chased Jerry.

“Sissy, Sissy, blushing bride, you can desist from wearing paths in these oaken floors. The Countess has arrived with a job for you, and what a job. .”

“A job for me?”

“Don't interrupt your elders, particularly if they're royal. A job for you, yes. I am once more about to make advertising history. And only you, the original Yoni Yum/Dew Girl, could possibly assist me. Julian, knock it off! Wipe that wounded rabbit look off your face. And if you emit so much as one wheeze, I'll chop you right out of my totem pole. This assignment will in no way interfere with our watercolor campaign. It has eighteen months to run, as you know, and if you're a good little Injun I may renew your contract. No, this project isn't for magazines at all. I'm going to film a commercial such as television has never seen.”

“But you haven't used a TV spot in years,” protested Julian. “I thought you were through with the tube.”

“A countess is entitled to change her mind. Shit O dear, I've got to go back to TV. I've no choice anymore. Didn't you read about it in the papers? Those bleeding-heart do-gooders in the government are out to ruin me! Listen to this.”

From one of the many folds in his crumpled linen suit, the Countess removed a newspaper clipping and commenced to read:

WASHINGTON (UPI) — The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Wednesday female deodorant sprays are medically and hygienically worthless, and may cause such harmful reactions as blisters, burns and rashes.

It proposed a warning label on each can of spray to tell the consumer: "Caution: For external use only. Spray at least eight inches from skin. Use sparingly and not more than once daily to avoid irritation. Do not use this product with a sanitary napkin. Do not apply to broken, irritated or itching skin. Persistent or unusual odor may indicate the presence of a condition for which a physician should be consulted. If a rash, irritation, unusual vaginal discharge or discomfort develops, discontinue use immediately and consult a physician."

In addition to the warning label, the products would not be allowed to make claims on the label for medical or hygienic value.

The agency said it acted because it has been receiving complaints from consumers, some of whom suffered more serious problems after the initial irritation or rash.

"Although FDA judges that the reported reactions are not sufficient to justify removal of these products from the market, they are considered sufficient to warrant the proposed mandatory label warnings," it added.

“Shit O dear, that's enough to make me asthmatic. The nerve of those twits. What do they know about female odor? None of those politicos sleeps with his wife. They all go to whores and whores know how to take care of themselves. They're my best customers. I'll bet Ralph Nader is behind this. Why he's probably got his kiddie corps of Ivy League law students out inspecting vaginas from coast to coast, looking for fresh blisters and unusual discharges. It's an affront to a Christian nation. I'm the one who's trying to clean things up, rid the human race of its most pagan stench. But do you think those dupes understand that? And after my sizable contribution to the President's campaign fund! I'm going to bend ears in the White House about this. I'll get action, too; you wait and see. They accepted my donation, so they're aware they'd better serve my interests or I'll buy some leadership that will. These swine are not the pearls I've dreamed of.

“But it'll take time, precious time, to head off this FDA plot. The government moves slower than a candied turd. So, meanwhile, to offset their monkey business, I plan to hit TV with a commercial that'll spin eyeballs and win hearts by the millions. Don't interrupt!

“Here's my concept. You know about my ranch out West? It's a beauty ranch. Oh, it's got a few head of cattle for atmosphere and tax purposes. But it's a beauty ranch, a place where unhappy women — divorcées and widows, mainly — can go to lose weight, remove wrinkles, change their hair styles and pretty themselves up for the next disappointment. You've heard of such places, surely. Only my ranch is different. It does some real good. My staff teaches its clients how to take care of their more intimate beauty problems, the problems swish salons don't dare tackle, the problems other health spas ignore. You know the ones I mean. Why, my ranch is named the Rubber Rose, after the Rubber Rose douche bag, my own invention, and bless its little red bladder, the most popular douche bag in the world.

“So get this. There's a worthless marshy lake at one end of the ranch. It's on the migratory flight path of the whooping cranes. The last flock of wild whooping cranes left in existence. Well, these cranes stop off at my little pond — Siwash Lake, it's called — twice a year, autumn and spring, and spend a few days each time, resting up, eating, doing whatever whooping cranes do. I've never seen them, understand, but I hear they're magnificent. Very big specimens — I mean, huge mothers — and white as snow, to coin a phrase, except for black tips on their wings and tail feathers, and bright red heads. Now, whooping cranes, in case you didn't know it, are noted for their mating dance. It's just the wildest show in nature. It's probably the reason why birdwatching used to be so popular with old maids and deacons. Picture these rare, beautiful, gigantic birds in full dance — leaping six feet off the mud, arching their backs, flapping their wings, strutting low to the ground. Dears, it's overwhelming. And now picture those birds doing their sex dance on TV. Right there on the home screen, creation's most elaborate sex ritual — yet clean and pure enough to suit the Pope. With lovely Sissy Hankshaw — pardon me, Sissy Gitche — in the foreground. In a white gown, red hood attached, and big feathery sleeves trimmed in black. In a very subdued imitation of the female whooping crane, she dance/walks over to a large nest in which there sits a can of Yoni Yum. And a can of Dew. Off-camera, a string quartet is playing Debussy. A sensuous voice is reading a few poetic lines about courtship and love. Are you starting to get it? Doesn't it make the hair on your neck stand up and applaud? My very goodness gracious!”

Julian was impressed, and Sissy, although she sensed that the big sleeves on her costume would be designed to conceal her hands, was pleased. Scratching his jaw-stubble with his cigarette holder, the Countess went on.

“Grandiose, lyrical, erotic and Girl Scout-oriented; you can't top it. Needless to say, however, it isn't going to be easy. Say, do you happen to have any Ripple on ice? I've hired a crew of experts from Walt Disney Studios, the best wildlife cinematographers around. No Ripple; a pity. Forget it; Scotch won't do. Ugh! Didn't know I spoke Indian, did you, Julian?

“Now, I realize that you two are wallowing in a quagmire of marital bliss, and I hate to pry you apart even for a few weeks. But the deal is, the Disney boys will be heading for Dakota any day now to start setting up; these whooping cranes don't like human beings even a tiny bit — probably have a keen sense of smell, poor birds — and the camera crew has to build blinds and disguise its equipment; this is very tricky business. Well, I want Sissy out there within a week. She must meet the crew and familiarize herself with the unusual requirements of the job. The cranes show up at the lake anywhere from late September to late October. You never know from one year to the next, and we've got to be ready, have everything down pat when they do arrive. Got it?

“Also, Sissy sugar, you can do me a personal favor out there. As if I weren't already as busy as a fiddler's bitch, I've got to go down to Washington, D.C., and sic my boys in the White House on those FDA yokels. I won't get out to Dakota until the last minute. So I'd like you to look the Rubber Rose over real carefully, if you would, and report on what's happening there. I've been having some trouble on that ranch and I could use inside information.”

Julian's eyes narrowed. “What kind of trouble?” he asked.

“It's a long story,” said the Countess, his dentures thrashing in his oral cavity like two hard-shelled marine animals attempting to mate in a pocket of pink coral. “It's a long story and no decent drink to wet it with. Well, I'll try to make it snappy. Sometime ago a cute little hellion, a teen-ager from Kansas City who was dying to be a cowgirl, found out about the Rubber Rose and soft-talked me into giving her a job there. She called herself Bonanza Jellybean, and that should have tipped me off. But like a fool, I hired her anyway and put her to doing odd jobs around the house and stables, sort of a flunky for Miss Adrian. Miss Adrian is my ranch manager; she used to run the Minnie Mouse Beauty Village at Opa Locka, Florida, and really knows the business. Well, it wasn't long before this teenybopper was spending more time in the saddle than she was in the kitchen; she was out riding with the cowhands, going on all the pack trips and taking on more and more responsibility for herself. Julian, it's certainly more pleasant visiting you without that poodle mistaking my left leg for Lassie. Do you hear from old Butty regularly? Good old dog!

“So. Early spring, just before the season opened, Jellybean and a couple of the younger beauticians — Christ knows how she won them over — barricaded themselves in the ranch house, holding Miss Adrian hostage, and started telephoning demands to me in New York. They demanded that I fire all the male ranch hands and replace them with females. Shit O dear! Jelly claimed that my company had been exploiting women for years. She charged that I've made a fortune off women and said it was time I started doing something for them in return — as if my whole adult life hasn't been devoted to improving the female sex. Talk about ingratitude! Gracious! She said if the Rubber Rose was a ranch for women, then it should be operated exclusively by women; women shouldn't be relegated to menial and effete cosmetic tasks while men got to perform all the exciting outdoor work. These were her actual words: 'I'm not a hairdresser or a fucking scullery maid; I'm a cowgirl. And there's gonna be cowgirls riding this range or there ain't gonna be any range to ride.' Now where does a young woman from our Godfearing Midwest learn talk like that? Dr. Spock, I ask you.”

Julian pounded his coffeetable edition of Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation with a soft brown fist. “You didn't let her get away with it, did you? By golly, I'd've. .”

“It would have been simple to notify the Dakota state patrol and have them evict the little snots from the spread. Actually, however, Jelly's idea, although selfishly motivated, was rather sound. You see, most of the guests at the Rubber Rose are pretty well fixed, from insurance settlements, alimony and so forth. A shocking lot of my cowpokes proved to be fortune hunters, out to marry those dumb old broads for their money. And even the ranch hands who were honest family men created a problem because during the moonlight trail rides, chuck wagon campouts and other organized recreation the guests were always falling in love with them, mooning over them, following them around, even fighting over them. Dears, the turnover on that ranch was tremendous. It was a mess. But an all-girl staff would eliminate those hassles. And it would eliminate rude cowboys hanging around sniggering outside the building where guests were receiving super-douche, love oil and nipple-wax training; guests and staff alike found that embarrassing. What's more, it would get the dykes of America off my delicate back once and forever. That wasn't the first time I'd been maligned by them. There're a lot of malcontents in this society of ours, if you hadn't noticed. Yes, the more I considered the idea, the better I liked it. In the end, I told Jelly to go ahead and hire me a gang of cowgirls, if she could find any, and that if they handled the work okay I would pay them men's wages and back them all the way. And that's how I've come to be proprietor of the largest all-girl ranch in the West. Come a cow cow hickey, come a yippee ki yea.”

“How has it worked out?” asked Julian.

“In all truthfulness, I don't know. Communications from the ranch have been few and far between. I've called Miss Adrian several times, but the phone's out of order more often than not — it's a rather remote region — and when I've reached her she's been evasive. I think the cowgirls have her intimidated. On top of that, there's that crazed hermit sitting up on his perch watching the place all the time. The old coot is probably working a Chinese hoodoo voodoo on the whole operation. Gives me the shivers. You can understand why I'm curious. And why I'd like Sissy to check out the scene. What do you say?”

Julian answered for them. “Let us have tonight to talk it over,” he said. “We'll let you know in the morning.”

The Countess wasn't used to being put off, but he agreed. With his monocle casting a harsh glint on the wallpaper, and his good-by mangled by the emery of animated teeth, he departed.

Discussion between the newlyweds erupted almost at once — and for a while it went smoothly enough. They were quick to agree that the offer had merit. They'd been breathing the same air for nine months, night and day, and a short vacation would refresh them both. Sissy's boredom with her new, inactive life was the principal source of their friction. A modeling assignment, especially one as interesting and lucrative as this one, could be a tonic for her. And while she was away, Julian could have some people over for poulet sauté aux herbes de Provence (his speciality), and perhaps join a group at Elaine's. By all means, a short separation could have salubrious effects.

It was when Sissy announced her intentions to hitchhike to Dakota that conversation took on a tin edge, and Julian foamed and wheezed. He couldn't understand it; he couldn't comprehend it; he couldn't fathom it; he couldn't (choose your synonym). It frightened him, saddened him, drove him to the Scotch bottle and even to the medicine cabinet to fondle his nail scissors theatrically (Having no facial hair, Indians seldom own razors). He unleashed barrage after barrage of his heaviest asthmatic artillery. But Sissy stood her ground, and next morning when the Countess phoned, Julian told him:

“She's delighted to be of service. She'll leave on Sunday. She's starting early because (sob) she insists on hitchhiking. God, just when I thought she was getting over it. Those thumbs of hers, those unfortunate redundancies; they are of no significance, yet how they complicate our lives.”

In the bedroom, sorting out her old jumpsuits, Sissy overheard the complaint. Slowly, she turned her hands in the mirror, like stems, like daggers, like bottles missing labels.

They seemed the best part of her body, her thumbs. The substantial, uncomplicated part. No orifices riddled them; no hair hung from them; they secreted nothing and harbored no senses to satisfy. They contained no slimy entrails; ganglia did not adorn them; they produced nothing that might be compared with earwax, tooth decay or toe jam. They were but the sweet, the unadulterated, the thick pulp of her own life, there in smooth volume and closed form, complete.

Trembling while she did so, and blushing afterward, she kissed them. She blessed her life.

These thumbs. They had created a reality for her when only somebody else's crippled notion of reality, some socially sanctioned parody of reality, was to be her lot. And now they were about to transport her to the Rubber Rose Ranch.

Out where tall birds waded in a lake named for her Siwash kin.

Out where Smokey the Bear lay down his shovel to romp with more playful beasts.

Out where starlight had no enemies and the badland wind no friends.

Out where the boogie stopped and the woogie began.