Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Part III

32.

THE BROWN PAPER BAG is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.

Crumpled into a wad of wrinkles, like the fossilized brain of a dryad; looking weathered; seeming slow and rough enough to be a product of natural evolution; its brownness the low-key brown of potato skin and peanut shell — dirty but pure; its kinship to tree (to knot and nest) unobscured by the cruel crush of industry; absorbing the elements like any other organic entity; blending with rock and vegetation as if it were a burrowing owl's doormat or a jack rabbit's underwear, a No. 8 Kraft paper bag lay discarded in the hills of Dakota — and appeared to live where it lay.

Now empty and leathery-wrinkled, the bag had been twice full. Once, long ago, it had borne a package of buns and a jar of mustard to a kitchenette rendezvous with fried hamburger. More recently, the bag had held love letters.

As a hole in an oak hides a squirrel's family jewels, the bag had hidden love letters in the bottom of a bunkhouse trunk. Then, one day after work, the button-nosed little cowgirl to whom the letters were addressed gathered bag and contents under her arm, slipped out to the corral, past ranch hands pitching horseshoes and ranch hands flying Tibetan kites, saddled up and trotted into the hills. A mile or more from the bunkhouse, she dismounted and built a small fire. She fed the fire letters, one by one, the way her boy friend had once fed her french fries.

As words such as sweetheart and honey britches and forever and always burned away, the cowgirl squirted a few tears. Her eyes were so misty she forgot to burn the bag.

Back at the bunkhouse, in the twilight, her companions pretended they didn't know where she had gone or why. Big Red offered her a piece of homemade fudge and showed no surprise when she refused it. Kym, before retiring, smeared a fast kiss across her lips — very casual, as if she were brushing off a piece of lint. And Jelly, who'd been trying to plunk a carefree song on a hard-timed old Gibson, looked up at her and said, “You know, podner, you can tune a guitar but you can't tuna fish.”

She was one of them now. God but it's good to be a cowgirl!

33.

THE OUTHOUSE RADIO WAS PLAYING “The Starving Armenians Polka.” Rain, a sudden downpour, a regular Dakota summer cloudburst, had trapped Bonanza Jellybean and Delores del Ruby in the privy. First Delores and then Jelly finished her business and pantsed up, but still they sat there.

“Well, I'm not scared of a little rain,” announced Jelly.

“Me neither,” said Delores, who would never admit to being afraid of anything.

But neither made a move to leave. Instead, they stared out the door at the staircase of water that so resembled the one on which mermaids greet drowned sailors ("Would you like to come up to my room?” asks a mermaid, not much older than a cowgirl. “You bet, you bet,” glubs the excited sailor, silently thanking his hometown recruiting officer that he hadn't had the misfortune to die on dry land). The stairs of water hung there, in what used to be air, as if waiting for a midget submarine to slide down its banister.

“Might as well brave it,” said Jelly, moving to the door. She was the ranch boss and had to set an example.

“Right,” agreed Delores, the forewoman. “I don't know about you but I'm sure not sweet enough to melt.” She flicked her whip at a sweat bee that had also taken refuge in the privy. (Actually, she had been trying to wound not the bee but the photograph of Dale Evans upon which it had lit.)

A meeting had been called in the bunkhouse that Saturday morning, a meeting that all cowgirls except those watching the birds were expected to attend, and over which Jelly and Delores had to preside. If the chief cowgirls hadn't stopped off, independently, to unburden their bowels (a habit that should be practiced by all presiding officers before they take the floor) and gotten trapped by a cloudburst, the meeting would now be underway. As Rubber Rose meetings went, this one was not likely to be unusual. Mary would complain that some of the cowgirls had been sleeping two to a bunk again, in violation of the agreement that “crimes against nature” were to be confined to the hayloft. Debbie would say that she didn't care who lay with whom or where or how, but that the moaners, groaners and screamers ought to turn down their volume when others were trying to sleep or meditate (here and there a blush). Big Red would proffer an unsolicited testimonial as to the quality and quantity of Rubber Rose cuisine, a testimony in which each boiled potato, every dab of gravy, was described as smaller and less appetizing than the one before. And several of the cowgirls would voice their anxieties about the possible consequences of riding herd on the birds. But Jelly would pacify everyone, as usual, and by meeting's end there would be general smiling, hugging and expressions of solidarity. It promised to be a meeting with a familiar ring, but it had been called and therefore must be held. Jelly and Delores hadn't the right to delay it further just because it was raining Coke bottles and bananas. Let them take their soaking.

Bracing themselves for a tall drink of water, straight, no chaser, they were poised in the shithouse doorway when all at once they saw a barefoot cowgirl — Debbie it was — run across the yard in her karate robe, jump on the Exercycle that was rusting in the weeds and begin pumping the pedals furiously in the yammering rain. “My sacred crocodile!” exclaimed Delores. “She's flipped.”

But, ho, in a minute others followed Debbie, everyone of them, in fact; the entire bunkhouse load of them, some thirty young cowgirls, squealing, giggling, naked or near naked, all full of dimples and hormones. They slid and rolled on the wet grass, pushed each other into the mud that was forming by the corral fence, chased one another in and out of the thick folds of rain draperies, stamped their cute feet in puddles and did bellyflops into the overflowing horse trough. The downpour became a crystal chandelier, they its flickering candleflames.

Boss rancher and forewoman eyed each other in astonishment. The hands called to them. Jelly felt minnows flash in her bloodstream. She undressed quickly. More reluctantly, Delores stripped down to her viperskin underthings. Together they dashed into the warm rain.

The cowgirls frolicked until, as suddenly as it had come, the rain went away. Play ceased. The sun placed its horns in their dripping curls. They were panting like puppies as they leaned against one another or picked clods of mud from one another's hair.

“I move that the meeting be adjourned,” panted Elaine.

Debbie seconded the motion, and tacked on a Zen proverb: “At the end of the endless game, there is friendship.”

“What the heck did she mean by that!” asked Heather, who made use of the privy while Jelly gathered up her clothes.

Jelly studied the tired and sopping cowgirls walking arm and arm back to the bunkhouse. “Just that in Heaven all business is conducted this way,” she explained.

34.

WHILE BONANZA JELLYBEAN was cross-state in Fargo, closing the goat cheese deal, she stopped at a rummage sale and picked up a gang of old dresses and hats. The cowgirls were trying them on in front of the bunkhouse mirror. Kym mugged in a floppy pink chapeau that looked like a cross between a strawberry chiffon pie and a bloodhound. Using up her mirror time, Jody palpitated in a frilly green kimono. Delores inquired sullenly if there was anything in black. Elaine and Linda. .

Wait. Wait a moment, please. Even though we agree that time is relative; that most subjective notions of it are inaccurate just as most objective expressions of it are arbitrary; even though we may seek to extirpate ourselves from the terrible flow of it (to the extent of ignoring an author's plea to “wait a moment, please,” for a moment, after all, is a little lump of time); even though we pledge allegiance to the “here and now,” or view time as an empty box to fill with our genius, or restructure our concepts of it to conform with those wild tickings at the clockworks; even so, we have come to expect, for better or worse, some sort of chronological order in the books we read, for it is the function of literature to provide what life does not. In light of that, then, your author is calling “time out” to inform you that those events described in the opening chapters of Part III, as well as most of those reported in the various Cowgirl Interludes of Parts I and II, occurred after Sissy Hankshaw Gitche had come to the Rubber Rose and gone again.

Conditions at the ranch were a bit different when Sissy arrived for her modeling assignment back in September 1973. Ostensibly, Miss Adrian was still in charge then, the Rubber Rose still functioned as a beauty ranch and the number of cowgirls there was no more than fifteen. Drastic changes had been made, to be sure, in the Countess's original plans for the spread, but it was not the same configuration of appetites nor had it the same mood or significance as the place about which the author has been sporadically writing.

If he has confused you, the author apologizes. He swears to keep events in proper historical sequence from now on. He does not, however, disavow the impulses that led to his presentation of cowgirl scenes out of chronological order, not does he, in repentance, embrace the notion that literature should mirror reality (as the bunkhouse looking glass mirrored young cowgirls in old clothing, whatever the continuity). A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves — all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

Happily, your author is not under contract to any of the muses who supply the reputable writers, and thus he has access to a considerable variety of sentences to spread and stretch from margin to margin as he relates the stories of our Thumbelina, of the ranch a douche bag built and — O my children, cock your ears to this! — of the clockworks and its Chink. For example:

This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagramed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish. . This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called “Speedoo” but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant, it missed its period. This sentence suffered a split infinitive — and survived. If this sentence had been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home. This sentence is proud to be a part of the team here at Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. This sentence is rather confounded by the whole damn thing.

35.

THE TROUBLE with seagulls is that they don't know whether they are cats or dogs. Their cry is exactly midway between a bark and a meow.

No such ambivalences exist in the Dakotas. The Dakota sky is all of one piece; the Dakota wind is nothing if not direct; the Dakota dust suffers no identity crisis; the whooping cranes that sojourn twice each year in the Dakotas (where gulls don't dare to fly) know precisely what they are — their inimitable whoops attest to that.

As one might expect of such singular, straightforward, no-nonsense territory, the topography of the Dakotas is almost uniformly flat. Vast vistas of arid grasslands, open and unmodulated, thirsty and exposed, as level and smooth as a child's back before the first slouches and pimples set in, stretch from horizon to horizon like the most lonesome old chord on God's harmonica. Neither from danger nor boredom is there a place to hide. No Pan ever chased a tittering nymph across these solitary plains.

At the western edge of the Dakotas, however, the monotony of the landscape, now gradually tilting toward the Rockies, is interrupted by a topographical turmoil so harsh and wild that humans, with a sense of morality that must amuse amoral Nature, have seen fit to call it the Badlands. The Ziegfeld Follies of erosion, the badlands flaunt their geological naughtiness in tall, towerlike buttes — heaping layer after layer of tormented rock and soil toward the sky — and sculptured canyons so deep and chaotic they can break a devil's heart.

(In writing about the Dakotas, it is easy to speak of gods and devils, just as in writing about spiritual matters, it is wise to ignore them.)

Between the forlorn prairie pancake and the eerie badlands ruins, there lies a narrow band of humpy hills, green and pastoral. Less than two miles wide in places, this band seems gentle and friendly in comparison to the physiographic excesses on either side of it. Small lakes glimmer in its hollows, and groves of trees are fairly common. To be sure, it collects a full share of summer scorching and winter blizzards; the near-constant Dakota wind extends it no special privileges; thunderstorms as righteously aloof as a B-52 pilot over an orphanage bomb it heavily with raindrops and hail; tornadoes have its number in their little black books and sometimes call. Nevertheless, if it is not quite an oasis, the ribbon of rises is definitely Dakota's sweeter streak. The hills are carpeted with midlength prairie grass. Cows have a tooth for this grass, as the buffalo did before them, and because the soil here is rich in lime, it provides the calcium that grazing animals need in their forage. Thus, the Dakota hills are partitioned into cattle ranches.

Small by local standards, the Rubber Rose takes up 160 acres of the green hill country, and, said a traveling Texan who saw it once, “Ah think A'll wrap this heah place up in a napkin and take it home.” It also is one of the more isolated ranches: thirty miles from the closest town, sixteen miles from the house next door. At one time, it was part — nearly all — of the Siwash Indian reservation.

The ranch's buildings are clustered at its extreme western end, the badlands end, at the base of a butte higher, broader and longer than any in its vicinity. In fact, it is one of the most outrageous ridges in the entire badlands, and all the more conspicuous because of its position on the eastern perimeter of the badlands proper, a kind of last fling, as it were. Shaped like an unfrosted wedding cake from which misogamists had taken several cynical bites; no, shaped more like a ship that has been heavily shelled and has broken away from a convoy (its fellow buttes) to flounder against the surf of low green hills, the superbutte mellows into patches of grass and bushes here and there, but for the most part it is a barren monolith too rugged and steep for an ordinary human to climb. This mountain is known as Siwash Ridge. If it is a ship, it carries a cargo of limestone and phantoms. If it is a ship, it flies the flag of the forbidden. If it is a ship, the Chink is its captain, for he lives on its flying bridge in solitude.

Siwash Lake is at the opposite, or eastern, end of the ranch, a hazel eye reading and rereading Page One of the prairie.

And somewhere on that prairie, narrowing the miles between her and the Rubber Rose, her thumbs a match for the vastness surrounding her, Sissy Hankshaw Gitche was riffling traffic. A piece of her, perhaps the biggest piece, was flooded with ecstasy at being free, careening across the continent again, doing this crazy and apparently meaningless thing that, even after a nine-month layoff, she did better than anyone alive; but another piece of her missed Julian, ached for the attentions he lavished on her body and mind. And in her ambivalence, she, who was once as unwavering as the whooping crane, was now more like the gull.

36.

SHE ENTERED MOTTBURG in a Chevy pickup with a loose fender. It rattled worse than the Countess's dentures. In contrast, the cattleman at the wheel made no noise at all. He wore grim lips and a far-away squint, both mute. Dakota men are like that.

Deposited at a feed store, she aimed her long strides immediately for the other end of town. It wasn't far. At the outskirts, she stopped to speak to an elderly woman who sat nodding in a wicker chair in front of a little mom-and-pop gas station and general store. The old woman held Indian summer in her lap like a cat.

“Excuse me, ma'am. Could you direct me to a ranch that's called the Rubber Rose? Mottburg is supposed to be the nearest town.”

Her eyes half-closed like a lizard's, the woman raised her chin without raising her lids. “Are they real?” she asked in a voice that was surprisingly perky.

“You mean my thumbs? Yes, they're very, very real.”

“Oh, well, excuse me then, honey, I didn't mean to get personal. Since you're asking about that Rubber Rose Ranch I thought maybe you was part of that moving picture show they're making out there. I figured maybe they was props, make-up, you know. Are you going to be in that moving picture? What's it about, anyway?”

Sissy started to inform the lady that the cinematographers she obviously had seen heading for the Rubber Rose were there to film the whooping cranes, but something — some protective instinct, perhaps — stopped her short. For some reason, she wasn't sure that she should mention the cranes.

The plainswoman noticed Sissy's hesitation. “Aw, it don't matter,” she said. “It'll probably never come to Mottburg, anyway. 'Specially if it's one of them brand X naked pictures. All the show here ever shows anymore are bear-poop-in-the-trail movies put out by the Mormon Church. And then every Christmas they run The Sound of Music again. Lord, I've seen that picture four times. If they try to drag me to it this year I'm going to tell 'em my eyes are too weak. I hate to fib, but enough's enough, don't you think? Now, if they was to bring in a Bette Davis picture. . That's my meat. Do you like Bette Davis?”

Sissy smiled. “I don't recall anything I've seen her in, but I hear she's a marvelous actress.” Sissy didn't know if she liked Bette Davis or not, but she liked the old woman.

“Well, I've seen her many a time, and Joan Crawford, too. I had plans to be a sophisticated lady like them once, but I got stuck out here, got stuck and never got away. I managed the Mottburg Grange for thirty years. They retired me a while back. Figured I was senile. They reckon old Granny Schreiber is out of it now, but I know what's going on, every inch of the way.”

Sissy set her rucksack down. “Say, Miss Schrieber. .”

“Mrs. Schreiber. How else would a woman get stuck in a place like this if it wasn't for a man? Lord!”

“Mrs. Schrieber, then, I'm wondering if you know anything about the Siwash Indians. Aren't they a tribe in these parts?”

“Yes and no. The Siwash? Yes and no. Honey, I'm sorry if I'm staring. I know it's rude; it's just that you're an uncommon sight.”

“That's all right, Mrs. Schreiber. I'm used to being stared at. Why, I bet somebody as sophisticated as Bette Davis would stare at my thumbs. Now about the Siwash?”

“Yes, the Siwash. They wasn't from around here originally. The Siwash was a small tribe that got chased off the Pacific Coast by their enemies. They were said to be working a lot of bad medicine and the other tribes hated 'em. Well, they migrated all the way to Dakota and the Dakota Sioux took 'em in and looked after them; gave 'em a parcel of their own land. Later, after the reservations were established, the Sioux talked the Congress into giving the Siwash two hundred acres for their own little reservation. During the war, World War Two I reckon it was, there's been so dang many I can hardly keep 'em straight, what was left of the Siwash moved to the cities to take jobs. They let Congress sell off their reservation land to white ranchers. All but Siwash Ridge, that is. They claimed that that old butte — you can see it from here if the dust ain't up and you look hard enough — they claimed it was holy and they was going to hold on to it forever. So that ridge is still Siwash territory. But there's no Siwash left around here. Unless you count that old coot that lives up on the butte.”

“You mean the man they call the Chink? Is he an Indian? I assumed he was Chinese.”

The wrinkled woman rocked her body, parrot-style, in the sun. “Maybe he's a Chinaman and maybe he ain't. What I know is, he's got a paper from the Siwash saying he's their number one medicine man, and giving him permission to live on their sacred mountain.” She rocked. “Maybe he's a Chinaman. Maybe he's something else. Folks here where he does his trading don't rightly know what he is. They think he's half-animal, some kind of spook.” She stopped rocking. “But he's always got a wink and a word of flapdoodle for old Granny Schreiber, and that's more'n any the old geezers in Mottburg have got. Lord, I'd go to the Saturday night dance with him any time. Granny Schreiber can still polka, don't you know.”

Sissy laughed and picked up her rucksack. “I'm sure you're a better dancer than I,” she said. “It's been really fine talking with you, Mrs. Schreiber. Could you tell me how to get to the Rubber Rose?”

“Follow the main highway on out of town for a good nine or ten mile. You'll see a bitty dirt road turn off to the right. Look sharp. There ain't any sign, but there's a pile of rocks that's been whitewashed. You follow that road until the land starts getting hilly. Then there's another road branches off, not much wider 'n a path. There's a sign on that one. You haven't told me whether you're going to be in that moving picture, or going to look for the Chink like them other young fools, or whether you going to work on the ranch. It's none of my business. But I know you're not going for a beauty treatment; you're too pretty for that. Unless there's something they can do for your thumbs. .”

Sissy waved as she walked away. “There's nothing I want done for my thumbs, Mrs. Schreiber. Thanks a lot for your help. I'll see if there's a part in the movie for you.”

“Do that. Do that,” said the old woman. She cackled. Then she reached out lazily, as if to scratch Indian summer behind its ears.

37.

SISSY FOUND THE DIRT ROAD. She made little puffs of dust as she walked. A rattler warmed its chill blood on a rock. There was a feeling of yippee and wahoo in the air. In the distance, Siwash Ridge tipped its hat — but it didn't say howdy.

From the supposed direction of the ranch there approached a VW Microbus. It was painted with mandalas, lamaistic dorjes and symbols representing “the clear light of the void" — quite an adornment for the vehicular flower of German industry.

When the Microbus drew alongside Sissy it stopped. It bore two men and a woman. They were approximately twenty-four years old and had intense expressions. The female, who sat in the middle, spoke. “Are you a pilgrim?” she asked.

“No, I'm more of an Indian,” answered Sissy, who had missed a good many Thanksgiving dinners.

The trio didn't smile. “She means are you going to see the Chink?” explained the driver.

“Oh, I may and I may not,” said Sissy. “But seeing him is not my main objective out here.”

“That's good,” said the driver. “Because he won't see you. We came all the way from Minneapolis to see him and the crazy bastard tried to stone us to death.”

“Oh, Nick, you're exaggerating,” said the female. “He didn't try to kill us. But he did throw rocks at us to chase us away. Wouldn't let us within forty yards of him.”

“Just look at Charlie's arm,” said the driver to the woman. Then, to Sissy, “The old goat caused Charlie to fall down. He's got a bruise the size of an orange. Lucky he didn't break his neck.” On the far side of the bus, Charlie was holding his shoulder, brooding.

With a long skinny finger — all the better for probing the more narrow crannies of the cosmos — the woman pushed her rimless glasses up on her nose. “I told you we should have chanted before we started up the butte. We weren't centered-in enough.”

“Balls!” exclaimed the driver. “We're the third group of pilgrims he's chased away this month. A guy from Chicago, a truly mystical person, got as far as the entrance to the cave last spring only to have the Chink crack him over the head with a stick. The Dalai Lama himself couldn't get an audience with that maniac. He's gone bananas up on that ridge.”

“Pardon me,” said Sissy, “but exactly why do you 'pilgrims' want to see the Chink?”

“Why does any pilgrim journey to see any saint? Why does any novice seek out a guru or a master? For instruction. We wished to be instructed.

“And if he had been receptive, we wanted to invite him to lead a seminar at our community. The Missouri River Buddhist Center.”

“Yeah,” said the driver, “but I no longer believe that guy's a master. He's just a dirty, uptight old mountainman. Why, he pulled out his pecker and shook it at Barbara. I'd stay away from there if I were you, lady. Say, you aren't going to the butte in hopes of any kind of faith healing, are you?”

Sissy had to smile. “Certainly not,” she said crisply. “I'm in perfect health.”

She walked on down the road, swinging her thumbs, leaving the pilgrims to argue about whether or not the Chink's rock-shower and pecker-wag actually had been intended as spiritual messages.

38.

IF LITTLE ELSE, the brain is an educational toy. While it may be a frustrating plaything — one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them — it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't have to put it together on Christmas morning.

The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's games, they say that you have “lost your marbles,” not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.

One brain game that is widely, if poorly, played is a gimmick called “rational thought.” Although his ancestors had no knowledge of this game, and probably wouldn't have played it if they had, Julian Gitche was fond of it. He tried to teach it to his wife, whose thumbs-first approach to life he found disturbingly irrational and frivolous (Long live the second phalanx!). Sissy gave it a whirl. She was eager for diversions in the Tenth Street apartment — and having survived nine months of matrimony, how could she feel any terror at “rational thought"? She learned the rudiments of logic and, with Julian's encouragement, decided to apply them to her trip to the Rubber Rose.

Thus, when, nearing her destination, she sat to rest on a hunk of petrified log (all multicolored and looking like a packaged loaf of prehistoric Wonder Bread), instead of letting her mind scat lightly over the pleasures and possibilities of the hitchhike, savoring its unarticulated intonations, rhythms and spatial tensions, she reminded herself of her pragmatic purposes and attempted to outline them, as any golden Greek might have done.

(1) She would pose for the Countess's hired cameras, modeling to the best of her ability.

(2) Mingling with cowgirls, staff and guests, she would attempt to assess the prevailing situation at the ranch.

(3) She would depart from the Rubber Rose as quickly as she might.

There! The primary aims. Now, she would break them down into (1a), (1b) etc. Logic was kind of fun, at that.

Alas, the brain is a toy that plays games of its own. Its very most favorite is the one-thing-leads-to-another game. You know it. It goes like this: when Sissy thought about outline form, that led her to think of being taught outline form by Julian, which led her to think of Julian himself, which led her to think of Julian loving her, which led her to think of love. One thing leads to another. Eyes closed tight inside the pale blue beehive of Dakota sky, waves of grasses whispering her name, meadowlarks squandering their songs on her, she began to squirm on the warm stone. She unzipped her jumpsuit at the crotch, and, as if looking up Eros in the Yellow Pages, let her fingers do the walking.

For you dears who have abused yourselves nowhere but in bed or the john at school, let Sissy tell you it can't be beat in the middle of an empty prairie — an ocean of sunlit grassheads pushing the sky away in every direction, while darting breezes weave the perfumed kisses of the earth. Unbeknownst to Sissy, she was following in the fingersteps of quite a number of little ladies who rode that range. Even cowgirls get the blues.

Unfortunately, Sissy had turned but a few pages when she was interrupted by a Cadillac limousine that popped out of a prairie dog hole.

39.

NO. No no no. Of course not. The Cadillac hadn't come out of a prairie dog hole. It had come down the same dirt road that Sissy had been walking. Only it drove up so suddenly — despite the fact that one could see at least twenty miles in every direction — Sissy barely had time to zip up, and she said to herself, “Where did that car come from, out of a prairie dog hole?"

It was the first time in her hitchhiking career that she regretted seeing an automobile approach.

At the wheel of the Cadillac was a teen-aged girl in a Stetson. It was the rear door of the limousine that opened, however, and a refined, matronly voice that called, “By any chance are you Sissy Hankshaw?”

“Yes I am,” said Sissy Gitche. Who else could she be?

A chic middle-aged woman leaned out of the car. “My goodness. Why didn't you telephone? Someone would have driven into Mottburg to pick you up. I'm Miss Adrian. From the ranch. The Countess wrote that I should expect you. Get in, won't you? You must be exhausted. It's warm today. Gloria, assist Miss Hankshaw with her luggage.”

Gloria nodded amicably at Sissy, but made no move to help her. Sissy swung her rucksack into the roomy vehicle. She started to follow it, but stepped back long enough to flash a thumb (Better to hitch a car that has already stopped than not to hitch at all). Then she entered and sat beside the immaculately groomed Miss Adrian. Something about Miss Adrian reminded Sissy of Julian's white piano. In her mind, Sissy set a vase of roses on top of Miss Adrian. They looked just fine there.

The instant Sissy shut the door, the cowgirl chauffeur floored the Cadillac and it lurched away in a homemovie of out-of-focus dust. The roses fell off the piano. The piano showed its teeth. “Little twit.” The tone was low and deep: F sharp below middle C.

Miss Adrian regained her composure. “You really ought to have phoned. I'm dreadfully sorry you had to walk this long distance, out here in the wilds. You didn't try to reach me, did you? We were just now in Mottburg escorting some guests to the afternoon train.” Miss Adrian sighed. An angry sigh. “More guests leaving ahead of schedule. Three guests checked out today. They decided to transfer to Elizabeth Arden's Maine Chance spa in Phoenix, Arizona. It costs a thousand dollars a week at Elizabeth Arden's. It costs seven hundred and fifty dollars at the Rubber Rose; less if one stays a month. So why are our guests leaving and going to Elizabeth Arden's?” Miss Adrian paused. She pushed a button, sending a partition of soundproof glass gliding shut between the passenger compartment and the driver's seat. Through the glass, Sissy could see but not hear Gloria laughing. “I'll tell you why,” Miss Adrian took up again. “It's that plague of cowgirls.”

“Miss Hankshaw, I can hardly wait for the Countess to get here and attend to this mess. You can't imagine how horrid it's become. At first, when they stayed in their place, it was all right. I must admit, they performed the ranch chores virtually as well as the male hands had. But they've gradually infiltrated every sector of our program. The one named Debbie considers herself an expert on exercising and diet. With Bonanza Jellybean's permission, and against my explicit orders, she's been coercing the guests into trying something called kundalini yoga. Do you know what that is? Let me enlighten you. It's trying to mentally force a serpent of fire to crawl up your spinal column. Miss Hankshaw, our guests can't comprehend kundalini yoga, let alone do it. And Debbie has completely taken over the menu. One month she has us eating nothing but brown rice, the following month it's a so-called nonmucus diet and the next it's something else. Yesterday, in fact, she ordered a new cookbook by a Tibetan Negro, entitled Third Eye in the Kitchen: Himalayan Soul Food. God knows what that will be like. Even the other cowgirls are complaining.

“Miss Hankshaw, I am proud of the Rubber Rose. Basically, we offer the same program as Elizabeth Arden's: mat exercises, swimming exercises, sauna, steam bath, paraffin-wax bath, massage, facials, whirlpool bath, scalp treatment, diet training, manicure, pedicure, hair-styling, make-up classes. But it's more fun here. Arden's Maine Chance is elegant and posh. We offer a rustic, informal dude ranch atmosphere with riding and campouts and so forth. What really sets us apart, however, from the Maine Chance and all other spas is our program of intimate conditioning. Miss Hankshaw, we are adult women, you and I; we can speak frankly about such things. When a woman comes to a beauty spa, she does so to make herself sexually attractive to men. That's it in a nutshell. There often are other considerations, of course, but essentially our client is a mateless bird in need of preening.” (The ornithological allusion set Sissy to thinking of past parakeets and future whooping cranes.) “Other spas recognize this, but they don't go far enough. What use is it to lure a man to bed, pardon me if I am blunt, if he is to be offended or disappointed there? That is why we at the Rubber Rose stress feminine hygiene, vagina-tightening exercises and so forth. Well, this week the cowgirls invaded the sexual reconditioning room, and the uncouth practices they advocated there my tongue refuses to describe. Shocking beyond belief. The little barbarians are destroying all that I've built, mocking all that the company stands for. When the Countess gets here. . I've been afraid to complain in the past. Oh, Jellybean is more bark than bite, and most of the girls, for all their bad manners, wouldn't harm a fly. But there's a new one, one they call del Ruby. She has the good will of a scorpion; oh, if you could see the way she looks at me! Anyway, I've considered it prudent to avoid a confrontation that might further upset the guests. But now that the season is practically over — we operate April through September — and the Countess is finally coming. .”

They were in the hills now. The sun was sinking. Taking its tambourine with it, the wind went home to supper. Grass lost the beat and fell still. An American loneliness, which is like no other loneliness in the world, was spreading on all sides of the Cadillac, creeping out of the cooling soil, out of the air itself; smelling sweet, colored like the pinched feet of tired salesmen, tasting of sweat and beer and fried potatoes, haunted by childhood dreams and the ghosts of Indians — a lonering gloaming coiling like a smoky snake out of the busted suitcase of the continent. The limousine moved through the hush like a dentist's drill.

Inside the vehicle, Miss Adrian continued to talk. Obviously she was distraught. Sissy said nothing. Maybe Sissy was not even listening. Who could tell? Sissy sat as she usually sat, supporting her thumbs affectionately upon crossed legs — and smiling. She grinned the invincible soft grin that some people associate with madness, that others attribute to spiritual depth, but that in reality is simply the grin that comes from the secret heart of very private experience.

40.

BANG! Bang bang bang! Bang squared and bang cubed. Bang conjugated and Bang koked.

They arrived at the ranch to the sound of gunfire.

“O merciful Jesus!” cried Miss Adrian. “They're murdering the guests!”

The main house, the bunkhouse, the stables and outbuildings were deserted. There was no one around the spread at all except for a couple of men in Hollywood sweaters, loitering by the corral. More gunfire.

Miss Adrian was hysterical. She ran up to one of the men and seized him by the shoulders. “Where are the guests?” she shrieked.

The man seemed indignant. “Take it easy, lady,” he said. “They went on a short ride with the cowgirls. Rode over the hill yonder. You're Miss Adrian, aren't you? We need to talk to you about the filming.”

“Not now, you fool, not now. Those crazed bitches have led innocent women out and are slaughtering them at this moment. We'll all be killed. Oh! Ohhhh!”

The other cameraman spat out a wad of chewing gum, launching it on a trajectory that carried it over the corral fence. “There's a slaughter going on all right, but it's not the fat ladies that are getting it. Your hired hands are killing the cattle.” He looked guiltily at the pink cud of gum, lying now among horse droppings and clods. “It'll be okay if a nag steps in that, I guess. Chewing gum is made out of horses' hooves to begin with. Everything has got a homing instinct, even Dentyne.”

In the twilight, Miss Adrian's complexion looked like a silver spoon that had been left overnight in a dish of mayonnaise. “The cattle? They're killing the cows? All of them?”

“That's what they said, Miss Adrian. They invited your guests to go along so's to see what ranch life was really like. They invited the staff, too. It's getting dark. They should be back pretty. . Here they come now.”

As the party rode into sight, Miss Adrian counted the guests. All present. She counted her staff. The manicurist and masseuse were having the time of their lives. They had never been allowed on a Rubber Rose outing before. Had Miss Adrian gone on to count the cowgirls, she would have discovered four missing: the three left behind to guard the slain cattle — and Debbie, who, as a vegetarian, would have no part in the slaughter and was even now over at Siwash Lake in the bird blind with a cinematographer, making love not beef.

41.

THE hearty stew recipe:

Peel onions. Pare potatoes and carrots. Cut meat into bite-size chunks. Drop into boiling water. Add sprinkle of parsley, sage, rosemary, simon and garfunkle. Caution: Under no circumstances use beef from the Rubber Rose Ranch.

To a veterinarian, the Rubber Rose herd was one of the greatest spectacles on Earth.

Threadworms? The Rubber Rose cows had so many threadworms in their bronchial tubes that they coughed from dusk to dawn like an opium den full of Julian Gitches. Hair balls? These cows had hair balls to rival the tumbling tumbleweeds. They had fevers and fissures and gas and gnats. They had hernias of the rumen and hernias of the rennet. The entire herd suffered from variola, displaying its symptomatic pustular eruptions upon their teats and udders. Actinomycosis, known to farmers as “big jaw” or “wooden tongue,” rattled the teeth of these bovines. A peek down their throats would disclose evidence of parotitis, not to mention pharyngeal polypi as large as boysenberries. There were random cases of foul foot, inverted eyelid and scurfy ear, and one of the bulls was so afflicted with orchitis that he walked with a straddling gait, lest his geranium red testicles sound a painful gong against his thighs.

According to Bonanza Jellybean, the Rubber Rose herd was indicative of the Countess's values. He had purchased a cheap, weak strain to begin with, to hear Jelly tell it, whereupon improper care by a succession of uninterested ranch hands had taken its toll. After futile attempts at restoring the herd to health, Jelly decided to put it out of its misery. Actually, it had been Delores's idea. Debbie, who would swat no living thing, and who believed that nature must run its course, opposed euthanasia. Miss Adrian, naturally, opposed it also. She was furious at the deed. “How dare you slaughter the Countess's cattle! Just wait until he gets his hands on you! What is a ranch without cows?” And so on.

Jelly's response—"We're going to replace them with goats" — only made her more angry. She was for telephoning the Countess that very evening, except that the cinematographers managed to squeeze a word in and inform her that they'd already tried, unsuccessfully, to phone the Countess — he was a guest of the President at the White House and couldn't be reached.

The cinematographers were a bit upset themselves. They had received a letter of instructions from the Countess that day, and only then did they realize that the douche bag tycoon expected them to film a mating dance. A mating dance? Oh dear. Like most geniuses, the Countess was a very limited person. Sigmund Freud was so ignorant of art that the Surrealist painters had to explain their use of Freudian symbols over and over again, and still he didn't get it. Einstein never could remember to take the biscuits out of the oven. Those same forces that drive a genius to create the things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has none left for the social graces (Should you invite Van Gogh to your home he might stand on your sofa in his muddy boots and pee where he pleased), and the very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance, and certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as “common sense” has never produced anything worth celebrating. But back to the point. The Countess, in the demands of his genius, had overlooked one small fact of nature—birds mate in the spring.

Birds mate in the spring. No amount of coaxing, libidinous stimulation or aphrodisiac birdseed will cause them to punch in early. Even horned owls will couple only in springtime.

The Countess had retained an expert wildlife camera crew to shoot whooping crane footage. He was a trifle tardy in advising it that he expected film of the mating rite. The cinematographers were vexed, but they offered a possible alternative to moving the operation to the Gulf Coast and waiting for spring. It seems, they told Miss Adrian, that a whooping crane will sometimes dance outside the breeding cycle. They have been known to perform their ballet simply as a physical or emotional outlet. Occasionally a crane may execute a short but dazzling dance just for the hell of it. Perhaps one or more cranes might be inspired to perform during the Siwash Lake stop-over. If the cameramen were alert, they might get enough dance footage to suit the Countess's purposes. But as for this model who was supposed to be in the film, she would have to be shot separately and superimposed.

Miss Adrian didn't know what to tell them. “You'll just have to discuss it with the Countess,” she said. She had a poison headache.

“Come along, Miss Hankshaw,” she uttered through the pain. “I'll show you to your room, and see that you get something to eat — if there is anything to eat besides brown rice and bean sprouts.”

The camermen stared at the pair of thumbs that came swinging around from the opposite side of the Cadillac: pillows of sugar, clouds of meat, filling the lenses of their camera eyes.

One of the men wiped his brow. “Come back, Walt, all is forgiven,” he moaned.

The Rubber Rose. Disney's was never like this.

42.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, the ranch stood on one leg (more in imitation of flamingo anxiety than of what the poet García Lorca called “the ecstasy of cranes"). The ranch wasn't going to set its other foot down until the Countess came.

Meanwhile, the cowgirls dug a lime pit in which to bury the snuffed cattle. After it was dug, they had to fill it up again. That's the way it is with holes; they're insatiable. The hands worked from early morning until sundown. They took their meals from the chuck wagon, and when supper was done, rode to the bunkhouse and bombed directly into bed. From her window, Sissy watched them come and go, heard their weary laughter and observed the dimples in their skintight Levis opening and closing like the mouths of tropical fish.

Taking advantage of the hands' absence, Miss Adrian sought to reestablish her control over the health-and-beauty program. No longer did ladies grunt in carbohydrate confusion, trying to squeeze a “fiery serpent” up their spines.

Sissy was given a tour of the facilities, most of which were in a wing of the main house: the sauna and the buildings that housed steam baths and the mysteries of “sexual reconditioning” were separate, a few yards away. Miss Adrian invited Sissy to use the pool and the sauna whenever she wished, but the manager was busy putting things straight and had little time for the thumby model from New York.

The cinematographers spoke with her the first morning, as they picked up additional provisions for the blinds, which, due to the presumed approach of Crane Hour, they dared not leave again. They offered to show her the pond and the blinds, but repeated what they'd said earlier about having to film her separately. “No whooping crane is gonna let you get that close to it,” they said. “Hell, whoopers don't even like other birds around.” The cameramen weren't entirely sure there was going to be any filming. Nobody would know anything until the Countess arrived.

So the ranch stood on one leg and waited.

And all the while, this clumsy balancing act was being nonchalantly scrutinized — leisurely leered upon, some might say — by a short man with a long white beard, a sure-footed man whose periodic appearances along the eroded poop decks and wind-carved turrets of Siwash Ridge had such an air of the occult, the supernatural, that he may excite the imaginations of many an eager mind, while others may find him merely disconcerting and shake their heads suspiciously.

But now, as we observe events at the ranch, and observe, further, the old gentleman who observed them, now is not the time for either reckless excitement or cynical scoffing. We must regard this business coolly, objectively, with a philosophy of operative wholeness. We must suspend, temporarily, a critical or analytical approach. Let us, rather, gather facts, all the facts, regardless of aesthetic appeal or theoretical social worth, and spread those facts before us not as the soothsayer spreads the innards of a turkey but as a newspaper spreads its columns. Let us be as journalists, then. And like all good journalists, we shall present our facts in an order that will satisfy the famous five W's: wow, whoopee, wahoo, why-not and whew.

43.

ON THE FIFTH MORNING, as the Indian summer sun popped up from behind the hills like a hyperthyroid Boy Scout, burning to do good deeds, Sissy was awakened by the tinkle of breakfast trays. She yawned and stretched and held her thumbs up in the sunlight to make sure there had been no overnight change. Then she propped herself up on pillows — she felt rested but uneasy — and awaited the knock at her door.

Breakfast in bed was a tradition Miss Adrian had installed at the Rubber Rose. It seemed like a nice idea to Sissy until she lifted the cloth cover from her first tray and encountered decaffeinated coffee with saccharine, fresh grapefruit without sugar and a piece of Melba toast: the guests were on a strict 900-calories-a-day regime. At least they were when Debbie was not running the kitchen. Sissy had had more luxurious breakfasts in jail.

The morning maid, who doubled as a bath therapist, delivered her tray this fifth day and stood by, as if to take sadistic amusement in watching Sissy unveil a meal that would piss off the taste buds of a saint. But when our Sis removed the cover, she discovered (in addition to a vase of prairie asters) a double-meat cheeseburger, a package of Hostess Twinkies, a cold can of Dr. Pepper and a Three Musketeers bar; in short, just the sort of repast she might have procured for herself had she been on the road.

A dragon who'd been served Princess Anne on a platter could not have grinned with more gastronomical satisfaction.

“Compliments of Bonanza Jellybean,” said the maid. “She'll be up to see you directly.”

Sure enough, about the time Sissy clinked the last droplet of the Doctor's peppy nectar out of the can and dabbed a final trace of chocolate from her lips, there was a fist against her door and in sailed the tresses, teeth and titties of a cowgirl so cute she made Sissy blush just to look at her. She wore a tan Stetson with as aster pinned to it, a green satin shirt embroidered with rearing stallions snorting orange fire from their nostrils, a neckerchief, a leather vest as white as a corpse, of the same cadaverous leather a skirt so short that if her thighs had been a clock the skirt would have been five minutes to midnight, and a pair of handtooled Tony Lama boots, the toes of which you could pick your teeth with. There were silver spurs fastened to her boots, and encircling her trim waist, just above the slightly bulging baby fat of her belly, a wide, turquoise-studded belt, from which dangled a holster and the holster's inhabitant, a genuine six-shooter with a long nose like bad news from the clinic. She flashed honey thighs when she walked, her breasts bounced like dinner rolls that had gotten loaded on helium and, between red-tinged cheeks, where more baby fat was taking its time maturing, she had a little smile that could cause minerals and plastics to remember their ancient animate connections.

She grasped Sissy's elbow (not daring to get too close to the thumb) and sat on the side of the bed. “Welcome, podner,” she said. “By God, it's great to have you here. It's an honor. Sorry I took so long getting to you, but we've had a mess of hard work these past few days — and a heap of planning to do.” When she pronounced the word “planning,” her voice assumed a conspiratorial, almost ominous, tone.

“Er, you seem to know who I am,” said Sissy, “and maybe even what I am. Thanks for the breakfast.”

“Oh, I know about Sissy Hankshaw, all right,” said Jelly. “I've done a little hitchhiking myself. Ah shucks, that's like telling Annie Oakley you're a sharpshooter because you once knocked a tomato can off a stump with a fieldstone. I haven't done a lick of serious hitching. But starting when I was about eleven, I used to run away from home every couple of months and try to find a place where I could be a cowgirl. Somebody always sent me back to Kansas City, though. No ranch ever let me stay and some of 'em had me locked up. Lot of times the law picked me up before I could get outta Kansas. But I got around enough to hear about you. First time was in Wyoming. Some deputy says to me, 'Who do you think you are — Sissy Hankshaw?' I says, 'No, you dumb fuck, I'm Margaret Meade,' and he whipped me good, but not before he'd aroused my curiosity about this Sissy Hankshaw person. Later, I'd hear tales about you from people I'd meet in jail cells and truckstops. I heard about your, uh, your, ah, your wonderful thumbs, and I heard how you were Jack Kerouac's girl friend. .”

Setting her tray on the bedside table, Sissy interrupted. “No, I'm afraid that part isn't true. Jack was in awe of me and tracked me down. We spent a night talking and hugging in a corn field, but he was hardly my lover. He was a sweet man and a more honest writer than his critics, including the Countess's little playmate Truman, who said such bitchy things about him. But he was strictly a primitive as a hitchhiker. Besides, I always traveled alone.”

“Well, that doesn't matter; that part never interested me anyway. The beatniks were before my time, and I never got anything outta the hippies but bad dope, clichés and the clap. But you, even though you weren't a cowgirl, you were sort of an inspiration to me. The example of your life helped me in my struggle to be a cowgirl.”

New York City keeps its allotment of sunshine in a Swiss bank account and tries to get by on the interest, which is compounded quarterly. In contrast, the Dakota sun is as open as the books of a village church steward, and even in September, after summer's big bucks have all been spent, it is so charitable no one would think of demanding an audit. Sunlight streaked into the credits column of the Rubber Rose, making a series of warm entries upon the bare legs of Bonanza Jellybean and upon the upraised legs of Sissy H. Gitche, bare, too, beneath the quilt. During a sunlit pause in conversation, the puffs and huffs of the guests at their early exercises were heard, and for no good reason, the two women giggled.

“Tell me about it,” said Sissy.

“About. .”

“About being a cowgirl. What's it all about? When you say the word you make it sound like it was painted in radium on the side of a pearl.”

Jelly drew her feet up on the bed, not minding that her boots bore testimony to the digestive facility of the equine species. “I saw my first cowgirl in a Sears catalogue. I was three. Up until then I had heard only of cowboys. I said, 'Mama, Daddy, that's what I want Santa Claus to bring me.' And I got a cowgirl outfit that Christmas. Next Christmas I got another one because I'd worn that first one to shreds. I asked for a cowgirl suit, as we called 'em, every Christmas until I was ten, and then my folks told me, 'You're too big now; Santa doesn't have any cowgirl suits that'll fit you. How'd you like a Barbie doll with her own fashion wardrobe?' 'Bullshit,' I said. 'Dale Evans wears cowgirl suits and she's way bigger than me. I want new cowgirl clothes and a gun that shoots.' I'd been teased by my classmates for some time because of my particular fantasy, but that year was when my real struggle began.”

As if prodded by a hard memory of childhood, Jelly sat up straight, making the bed creak. Sissy realigned her own posture, and another creak was issued. Sissy's creak followed Jelly's creak down the hall of sonar eternity. Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear; some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever — which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes.

“I just said 'fantasy' and 'struggle' in the same sentence, and on one level, at least, I guess that's what it's about. That's what it's about for cowgirls, and maybe everybody else. A lot of life boils down to the question of whether a person is going to be able to realize his fantasies, or else end up surviving only through compromises he can't face up to. The way I figure it, Heaven and Hell are right here on Earth. Heaven is living in your hopes and Hell is living in your fears. It's up to each individual which one he chooses.” Jelly paused. “I told that to the Chink once and he said, 'Every fear is part hope and every hope is part fear — quit dividing things up and taking sides.' Well, that's the Chink for you. What do you think?”

“I'd like to hear more,” said Sissy. She was feeling a certain kinship with this duded-up bundle of wild muscle and baby fat. “Can you be more specific?”

“Specific. Okay. I'm talking about our fantasies. You know the difference between fantasy and reality, don't you? Fantasy is when you wake up at four o'clock on Christmas morning and you're so crazy excited you can't possibly go back to sleep. But when you go downstairs and look under the tree — podner, that's reality.

“They teach us to believe in Santa Claus, right? And the Easter Bunny. Wondrous critters, both of 'em. Then one day they tell us, 'Well, there really isn't any Santa Claus or Easter Bunny, it was Mama and Daddy all along.' So we feel a bit cheated, but we accept it because, after all, we got the goodies, no matter where they came from, and the Tooth Fairy never had much credibility to begin with. Okay. So they let you dress up like a cowgirl, and when you say, 'I'm gonna be a cowgirl when I grow up,' they laugh and say, 'Ain't she cute.' Then one day they tell you, 'Look, honey, cowgirls are only play. You can't really be one.' And that's when I holler, 'Wait a minute! Hold on! Santa and the Easter Bunny, I understand; they were nice lies and I don't blame you for them. But now you're screwing around with my personal identity, with my plans for the future. What do you mean I can't be a cowgirl?' When I got the answer, I began to realize there was a lot bigger difference between me and my brother than what I could see in the bathtub.

“You dig me, don't you? A little boy, he can play like he's a fireman or a cop — although fewer and fewer are pretending to be cops, thank God — or a deep-sea diver or a quarterback or a spaceman or a rock 'n roll star or a cowboy, or anything else glamorous and exciting (Author's note: What about a novelist, Jellybean?), and although chances are by the time he's in high school he'll get channeled into safer, duller ambitions, the great truth is, he can be any of those things, realize any of those fantasies, if he has the strength, nerve and sincere desire. Yep, it's true; any boy anywhere can grow up to be a cowpoke even today if he wants to bad enough. One of the top wranglers on the circuit right now was born and raised in the Bronx. Little boys may be discouraged from adventurous yearnings by parents and teachers, but their dreams are indulged, nevertheless, and the possibilities of fulfilling their childhood expectations do exist. But little girls? Podner, you know that story as well as me. Give 'em doll babies, tea sets and toy stoves. And if they show a hankering for more bodacious playthings, call 'em tomboy, humor 'em for a few years and then slip 'em the bad news. If you've got a girl who persists in fantasizing a more exciting future for herself than housewifery, desk-jobbing or motherhood, better hustle her off to a child psychologist. Force her to face up to reality. And the reality is, we got about as much chance of growing up to be cowgirls as Eskimos have got being vegetarians. I'll tell you.”

Sissy's right thumb, which she'd been hesitant to move lest it disturb Jelly's oration, had gone to sleep — and when a Sissy thumb sleeps it SNORES! She massaged it vigorously. “What about in movies or rodeos?” she inquired.

“Ha!” said Jelly with dramatic disdain. “Movies. There hasn't been a cowgirl in Hollywood since the days of the musical Westerns. The last movie cowgirl disappeared when Roy and Gene got fat and fifty. And there's never been a movie about cowgirls. Delores del Ruby, she's really down on Dale Evans. Says she was just an accessory for the good guy in the white hat, a weakling to be protected, a piece of sex interest who never got laid. I don't know. I thought ol' Dale looked mighty fine up there on that screen. But she did ride second saddle, all right. Well, galloping your pretty ass off trying to escape the hoss thieves was better than nothing. Today, we got nothing.”

As Sissy kneaded circulation back into her thumb, it took on a rosy glow, like the Renaissance cherub that sneaked a bite out of a madonna's halo. Jelly was astonished, but she continued talking.

“Let me tell you about rodeos.” she said. “In the Rodeo Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City there are just two cowgirls. Two. The Rodeo Cowboys Association has more than three thousand members. How many do you suppose are women? You could count 'em on your fingers, thumbs excluded. And all of 'em are trick-riders. Trick-riding is what cowgirls have almost always done in rodeos. Our society sure likes to see its unconventional women do tricks. That's what prostitutes call it, you know: 'tricking.'

“For nine years, from nineteen twenty-four through nineteen thirty-three, females were allowed to enter events just the same as the cowboys: putting up entrance fees, riding bucking broncs, wrestling bulls, roping calves, doing all the things men did. They did okay, too. Tad Lucas, the greatest cowgirl who ever lived, earned ten thousand dollars a year in prize money, and that was at a time when six or seven thousand was a hell of a good season for a rodeo cowboy. But the RCA cut women off in thirty-three. Said it was too dangerous. Well, it was dangerous. Tad Lucas broke nearly every bone in her body at one time or another. The Brahma bulls damn near made chop suey of her. But the men got hurt, too. They were wired together like birdcages, most of 'em. Ah, but it wasn't so brutal when it happened to a man. Why is it men are allowed to do dangerous things and hurt themselves and women aren't? I don't know. But I do know that they outlawed cowgirls, except for trick-riders and parade queens. A woman has not been permitted to compete for prize money in a rodeo in forty years. Say, podner, that's really something the way your thumb kinda shines when you rub it. How do you do that?”

The digit in question was now wide awake. It has been said that consciousness of light is light, which would explain the luminous doughnuts that rolled 'round the heads of Buddhas and Christs, but can thumbflesh have consciousness, have speed, have spirit? “I think it's the blood,” said Sissy. “There're large veins in there, close to the surface.” Although, energized as it was, she would have preferred to stick it in the air by some road where traffic was flying, Sissy stuck the thumb under the quilt. Jelly watched it go with eyes that suggested she would have liked to follow it. “Apparently,” ventured Sissy, “there just isn't any demand for cowgirls.”

“That's not exactly true,” said Jelly, slowly, forcefully. “That's not exactly true. The System has no demand for them; you're right about that. But there is a demand — and that demand comes from the hearts of little girls.

“Cowgirls exist as an image. A fairly common image. The idea of cowgirls prevails in our culture. Therefore, it seems to me, the fact of cowgirls should prevail. Otherwise, we're being ripped off again. I mean, isn't that the way religions mess people's heads around: beautiful concepts without anything factual to back 'em up? When I was a kid and I was told that this role I'd been allowed to love so much was impossible to attain, wow, did I get mad! And I've been mad ever since. So I decided to try to do something about it — to satisfy my own inner needs and to show society it couldn't get away with making me love something that didn't exist.”

Unable to restrain herself, Jelly lay her hand atop the ovoid mound Sissy's thumb made under the cover. It was warm. “How about you, Sissy? Did you want to be a cowgirl when you were small?”

“Can't say as I did. But you have to understand, I was rather a special case.” What would Bonanza Jellybean think were Sissy to disclose that she had wanted to grow up to be an Indian? Take um heap many scalps beside um sky-blue waters. “It's funny. I once hitched a ride on a camel in Afghanistan, but I've never been on a horse in my life.”

“We'll take care of that. You're at the Rubber Rose now. But let me confess something to you before you start thinking I'm another Tad Lucas. Until last year, the only thing I'd ever straddled was the Shetland ponies at the Kansas City Zoo. And a man or two, of course. But I'm a cowgirl. I've always been a cowgirl. Caught a silver bullet when I was only twelve. Now I'm in a position where I can help others become cowgirls, too. If a child wants to grow up to be a cowgirl, she ought to be able to do it, or else this world ain't worth living in. I want every little girl — and every boy, for that matter — to be free to realize their fantasies. Anything less than that is unacceptable to me.”

“You're political, then?” Sissy had been learning about politics from Julian.

“No ma'am” said Jelly. “No way. There's girls on the Rubber Rose who are political, but I don't share their views. I got no cowgirl ideology to expound. I'm not recruiting and I'm not converting. Whether or not another girl chooses the cowgirl path is immaterial to me. It's a personal matter. I'm willing to help other cowgirls; to make it easier for them than it was for me. But don't get the notion I'm trying to create a movement or contribute to one. Delores del Ruby makes a big fuss about cowgirlism being a force to combat cowboyism, but I'm too happy just being a cowgirl to worry about stuff like that. Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.”

Beneath Jelly's dollbaby grip, the Sissy plasma, like a swarm of red bees, followed its charted currents in the thumb's interior passageways. Jelly pressed lightly upon this hive, in which such quantities of blood were buzzing, and gave its owner a look that even upon the countenance of a cowpoke could only be called sheepish. “Did that last comment sound too profound to be coming outta my mouth? It's not original. It's something I picked up from the Chink.”

“Really? The Chink, huh? I've gathered that you sometimes speak with him. What else have you learned from the Chink?”

“Learned from the Chink? Oh my. Ha ha. That's hard to say. We mostly. . Uh, a lot of his talk is pretty goofy.” Jelly paused. “Oh yeah, now that I think of it, the Chink taught me something about cowgirls. Did you realize that cowgirls have been around for many centuries? Long before America. In ancient India the care of the cattle was always left up to young women. The Indian cowgirls were called gopis. Being alone with the cows all the time, the gopis got awfully horny, just like we do here. Every gopi was in love with Krishna, a good-looking young god who played the flute like it was going outta style. When the moon was full, this Krishna would play his flute by a river and call the gopis to him. Then he would multiply himself sixteen thousand times — one for each gopi—and make love to each one the way she most desired. There they were, sixteen thousand gopis balling Krishna on the river bank, and the energy of their merging was so great that it created a huge oneness, a total union of love, and it was God. Wow! Quite a picture, huh? When I repeated this story to Debbie, she got so enthused she wanted us to call ourselves gopis from then on. We discussed it at a bunkhouse meeting, though, and decided 'gopis' sounded too much like 'groupies.' Well, we don't need that. We got enough static, with the folks around Mottburg calling us sluts. And lesbians.”

Sissy's thumb twitched. Jelly swallowed hard. They gazed into each other's eyes, Sissy trying to tell how Jelly felt saying the word, Jelly trying to ascertain how Sissy felt hearing it, and as they gazed, soft little shocks danced between them, like drunken oysters strutting along a harp string.

They might have gazed until the cows came home, except that, in addition to the cows' being lately deceased, a whistle pierced the sunlight just outside the window.

“That couldn't be Krishna, could it?” smiled Jelly. “A bit shrill for a flute. Just our rotten luck.”

She walked to the window and exchanged hand signals with someone outside. Turning to Sissy, she said, “Gotta run now. Delores says I'm needed. Somebody's here. Maybe it's the Countess.” She fast-drew her six-shooter, spinning it expertly in her kewpie fingers. “Sissy, cowgirl history is about to be made. I'm damn glad you're here to witness it.” With her gun-spinning pinkies, she tossed a kiss and was gone.

A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers — its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight.

44.

WHEN HER SWALLOWS HAD FINISHED Capistranoing, Sissy hopped out of bed. From the window, she could see cowgirls gathering in a circle. Someone or something was in the center of the circle. Sissy performed an abbreviated toilet, zipped herself into a red jumpsuit and hurried outside. It didn't bother her much that she didn't know what to expect. She never had.

What was in the center of the circle was a goat. Billy West, Mottburg's three-hundred-pound midnight rambler, had dropped it off as a sample. There were plenty more goats where that one came from, said Billy West. For the cowgirls, a discount price of twenty dollars a goat.

Debbie was scratching the animal's ears. She was hugging it. “I'm like Mahatma Gandhi,” she said. “I'll never be without a goat again.”

“It's cute,” said Kym. “Way cuter than a cow.”

“Goats are always testing you,” said Debbie. “They're like Zen masters. They can tell instantly if you're faking your feelings. So they play games with you to keep you true. People should go to goats instead of psychiatrists.”

“It's so loving,” said Gloria. She cut in on Debbie, gave the beast a hug.

“Goats are the ultimate male and female,” said Debbie. “Watching a pair of goats is understanding what the male-female trip is all about. Every couple ought to be given a pair of goats when they get married. There'd be no more need for marriage counselors.”

“Look at those playfully wise eyes,” cooed Heather.

“When can we get more?” inquired Elaine.

“Oooo! It licked me!” squealed Gloria.

When she tired of watching the goat, Sissy started back to her room. She thought she might hitchhike the wallpaper or something. But Jelly caught up with her. “Looks like we're gonna become goatgirls,” she said.

“Will that make a difference?” asked Sissy. “A difference to your fantasy, I mean.”

“Not a speck,” said Jelly. “It's like the gourmet the Chink told me about who gave up everything, traveled thousands of miles and spent his last dime to get to the highest lamasery in the Himalayas to taste the dish he'd longed for his whole life, Tibetan peach pie. When he got there, frostbitten, exhausted and ruined, the lamas said they were all out of peach. 'Okay,' said the gourmet, 'make it apple.' Peach, apple; cows, goats. You understand?”

Sissy thought that it must have something to do with the primacy of form over function, thus approximating her own approach to hitchhiking, wherein an emotional and physical structure created by variations and intensifications of the act of hitching was of far more importance than the utilitarian goals commonly supposed to be the sole purpose of the act. She was still thinking it over when Jelly said, “Say, there's a sexual reconditioning class in five minutes. Some of us are gonna crash it. To pass on some helpful information and correct some misconceptions. You like to come along?”

The S. R. building was of rustic exterior. It could have been a blacksmith shop. Inside, there were thick rubber mats and harem cushions all over the floor of a single, dimly lit room. At the rear of the room, partly concealed by a brocade curtain, was a flush toilet, gleaming in porcelain ostentation like one of the Countess's incisors. At the front there stood a long, low table, upon which was displayed a harvest of vials, bottles, boxlets, spray cans and ointment tubes, as well as a pair of dainty pink rubber apparatuses that looked like the twin nieces of an enema bag. Approximately a dozen women sat upon the floor, facing the table. Half of them were noticeably overweight, several were as skinny as light verse and appeared to be as burned-out as old sparkplugs although a few of the women seemed to Sissy to be quite attractive and in no need of the Rubber Rose Ranch's ministrations. Sissy wondered what lemons her destiny would have to suck before she might find herself a client of a place such as this.

Led by Debbie, the cowgirls set right to work. “There's only one excuse for ever douching,” Debbie informed her captive audience, “and that's to cure an irritation or infection. In which case, you want to be real careful about what you slosh on the inflamed tissues. There are eleven herbs or natural substances suitable for douching the vagina. These are: fennel, fit root, slippery elm, gum arabic, white pond lily, marsh mallow. .”

“Marshmallow?” asked one of the more obese ladies, incredulously.

Debbie was earnest. “Marsh mallow or Althaea officinalis is a pink-flowering plant that grows in marshy places. It's an excellent medicinal herb, a fact that's often obscured by the sweet white confectionery paste that can be made by boiling down its mucilaginous roots. Now, where were we. Marsh mallow, wild alum root, uva ursi, fenugreek, bayberry bark. .” Debbie clicked off the herb names, but the fat woman was no longer listening. Her eyes had glazed over as she pondered the pleasures of a marshmallow douche, losing her conscious mind in toffee whipped-cream molasses visions of vaginal delight.

Somewhat later in the lecture, Delores grabbed a can of Dew spray mist from the table and slung it in the air. Jelly drew her six-gun and tried to blast it before it hit the floor. She missed, but the class got the point. The shot brought Miss Adrian running from the main house, where she'd been delayed while attempting once again to phone the Countess in Washington, D.C. She arrived in time to hear:

“There isn't a man alive, unless he's some masochistic chemical fetishist, who'd dip his genitals in benzethonium chloride, and any woman who sprays hers with it is a dupe.”

Thinking of the ranch's image, thinking, too, perhaps, of Delores's whip and Jelly's pistol, Miss Adrian struggled to restrain herself. “Girls,” she said. “Girls.”

“Just a minute, ma'am,” urged Jellybean. “We're almost through. We got one more little piece of pertinent info to pass along. A vivacious lady like yourself might find it interesting.” She bade Miss Adrian stand aside, then turned to the audience.

“Now as Debbie has already mentioned, not only is a woman's natural essence nothing to be ashamed of, the truth of the matter is it's a positive thing that works in our favor. Here's a little self-celebration I bet you ladies never thought of. What you do is reach down with your fingers and get them wet with your juices. Then you rub it in behind your ears. .”

“Behind your ears???”

This brought the class to full attention. It even brought the fat lady back from marshmallow land. It brought Miss Adrian to the edge of a dead faint.

“Yeah, behind your ears. And a dab on your throat, if you want. When it dries, there's no whiff of low tide about it at all. It's a wonderful perfume. Very subtle and very mischievous. Men are attracted, I guarantee you. Why, in Europe women have been using it for centuries. That's why Neapolitan girls are so seductive. You don't believe me, do you? Here, I'll prove how nice it is.”

Jelly slipped her hand up inside her skirt and began priming the essence. Before she could complete the demonstration, however, Miss Adrian, pale and shaking, began to blubber. She was raving about something, but nobody could understand her. She made a sudden lunge for Jelly's gun, but Jelly, who was getting pretty good at the fast draw, whisked her hand out of her crotch in time to ward off the older woman's gambit. The cowgirls figured it was time to retreat.

Tittering and jabbering, they went to the stables and saddled up. Jelly and Big Red helped Sissy mount a calm mare. They rode eastward for two or three miles, to where the hills began leveling off into prairie. The breeze in the grasses made a sound like a silk-lined opera coat falling to the floor of a carriage. Continuously. Except that the breeze in the grasses was actually the breeze in the asters, for wherever the party trotted or looked, the ground was wiggling with asters, yellow-eyed and purple-petaled, like daisies wine-stained after an orgy of the gods.

More than one cowgirl thought of old high school English Wordsworth, him wandering lonely as a cloud that floats o'er vales and hills, when all at once he saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils. But these asters were no crowd, and no host, either: they were a planet, a universe, a goddamned infinity of flowers. Who'd have thought that Gary Cooper's prairie; Crazy Horse's prairie; the westward ho the wagons! prairie; the hard, flat belly of America prairie became in September such a garden of gentle blooms? Everywhere, asters waved as if practicing the art of waving. The purity of the movement gave Sissy's thumbs the Big Itch, but the cowpokes were stilled by the solitary sweep of the spectacle, and they, all of them, rode back toward the ranch with a papery noise of peace in their minds, asters of the heart forcing their way to the light.

Upon arrival, they discovered the goat, which they'd tied to the corral fence with a long rope, busily eating the top off the cinematographers' convertible. It had already eaten the front-seat upholstery and part of the steering wheel of Miss Adrian's Cadillac limousine. And, as hors d'oeuvres, perhaps, it had cruised the bunkhouse clothesline, devouring no fewer than fourteen pairs of panties, including Delores's bayou snakeskins, Heather's lace bikinis and Kym's lone pair of Frederick's of Hollywood peekaboos with their valentine-shaped cutout.

That evening, around the fireplace, there were some second thoughts about goats.

45.

"THE COW MILK MOLECULE is one hundred times larger than the molecule of mother's milk. But the goat milk molecule and the human milk molecule are practically the same size. That's why goat milk is easy for us to digest and cow milk is like sand in the gas tank of the gut."

“Did you ever taste 'gator's milk?” asked Delores. Debbie didn't know how to take that question.

“Debbie's right,” said Bonanza Jellybean. “More and more people are discovering that cow's milk isn't fit for human consumption. Billy West says if we can produce enough goat's milk on the ranch to make it worth his while, he'll run it into Fargo regularly. He won controlling interest in a cheese factory there in a crap game. They'd make goat cheese from our milk and supply health food stores throughout the plains states. If we can deal in enough volume — and keep the goats from eating the fucking boots right off our feet — the ranch could be self-supporting.”

“And we'd be performing a service,” added Debbie, ever-mindful of karma. “Goat's milk is so good for babies whose mamas can't nurse.”

“Speaking of babies,” said Delores, “I hope you itchy-clits who are sneaking down to the lake every night are taking precautions.”

Nobody responded vocally, although there was some nervous — and angry — squirming. Delores continued. “I'm aware that Tad Lucas rode broncs until her ninth month, but I don't think pregnant cowgirls are going to be any asset on this ranch. It's bad enough we've got cranes coming; we don't need storks. I feel that those filmmakers should be removed from the Rubber Rose as soon as possible. Men can cause nothing but trouble here. I also feel that our guest" — she nodded her dark curls toward Sissy—"should be excused while we discuss this matter further.”

Jelly started to speak in Sissy's behalf, but, assuring everyone that she understood, Sissy arose and left the bunkhouse.

A moon hung over the ranch like the muzzle of a melancholy mule. Preferring moonlight to the electric shine in the main house, where the guests were playing bridge and reading novels by John Updike, Sissy strolled around the grounds. She considered the fact that that same moon that was pouring its mule milk (data on the molecular relation to human milk unavailable at this time) upon hilltops and willow trees and cowgirl intrigues was the same moon that was beaming on the roof of Julian's remodeled tenement. It was a trite consideration, the kind of thought that escapes from the noodles of amateur songwriters and lovesick fraternity boys. But it placed her in touch with toothier sentiments. She and Julian Gitche, united emotionally and legally (whatever that meant), were also connected by moonlight. And by forces even more tentative and obscure. Perhaps everything was connected to everything, in a discernible if nebulous way, and if one might only trace the fibers and filaments of those connections, one might. . One might what? Observe the Grand Design? Untangle all the puppet strings and discover whose hands (or claws) are pulling them? End the ancient search for order and meaning in the universe? “Criminey,” sighed Sissy, kicking a horse biscuit (or was it a nylon-flavored cookie from the goat's oven?). “If my brain were only as outsized as my thumbs, I might be able to put the whole picture in focus.”

Don't bet on it, Sissy, honey.

Were your brain appreciably larger, large enough to put the strain on your Princess Grace neck that your loppy preaxial digits put upon your wrists, you conceivably would possess a superior intellect. It is also conceivable, however, that, with the nervous system required to fire a brain of that size, you would be so sensitive to the follies of civilization that you would feel compelled to take to the sea the way the big-brained dolphin did. Your death certificate would speak of “suicide” and “drowning,” as if your death certificate were jacket notes for the Golden Gate Bridge. No, big brains are for dolphins, who are great swimmers, and for Martians, who, judging by their infrequent visits, don't seem to get much of a bang out of Earth. Our brains are probably too large as they are.

Recent neurological research indicates that the brain is governed by principles it cannot understand. And if the brain is so weak or timid that it is incapable of comprehending its own governing principles, the physical laws it appears bound to obey, then it is not going to be much use to anyone confronting the Ultimate Questions, not even if it were as big as a breadbox (Ugh, what a sickening thought!). This author's advice to his readers is to make the best you can of your brain — it's pretty good storage space and the price is right — and then turn to something else.

The way that Sissy, for example, having tired of pondering invisible connections, turned to her thumbs and began hitchhiking cricket chirps as she walked back to her room.

46.

IT WAS THE SIXTH DAY, the day upon which, in the Judaeo-Christian version of Creation, God said, “Let there be strict potty training and free enterprise.” Sissy stepped out of the main house. Immediately, her eyes turned, as they invariably did, toward Siwash Ridge.

Sometimes she could distinguish a human figure up there, silhouetted against the multicolored limestone, or emerging, closer to the base, from a clump of juniper bushes, trailing its beard behind it. On this morning she was rewarded by the blurred sight and muffled noise of a commotion.

A group of cowgirls was watching the butte, also. They were leaning against the vehicle known as the “peyote wagon,” a Dodge pickup with a handmade wooden camper on its bed. The eaves of the camper were carved to resemble the open jaws of alligators, and caimans, green-skinned and fearsome of teeth, protruded in bas-relief along both sides of the luridly painted compartment. Images of iguanas and tongue-flickering saurians adorned the rear doors; the hospital white mouths of moccasins yawned from every space that was not already undulating with the killing coils, squamous wiggles and hypnotic eyes of swamp crawlers and other manifestations of the original Totem. There was no mistaking the owner of that vehicle, dressed as she was in darkest black from her Spanish-style riding hat to her mambaskin boots: Delores (with an “e") del Ruby.

It was that same Delores who stomped away upon Sissy's approach, calling back coldly over her shoulder, “The feminine hygiene business takes women for fifty million dollars a year.”

Sissy was stunned by the hostile reference to her Yoni Yum/Dew Girl activities. As if it were a baby adder from the peyote wagon's façade, her lower lip was seized by tiny spasms. She was accustomed to having her thumbs, and the use to which she put them, ridiculed, but her modest modeling career had been the single thing about her life that people had deemed worthy.

“Don't pay any attention to Delores,” said Kym. “She's got a sharp stick up her ass.”

“Yes,” agreed Debbie. “I'll sure be glad when she has her Third Vision.” Debbie's brow made viperine movements of its own. “On second thought, maybe I won't be glad at all.”

The cowgirls half-laughed, half-grumbled. They seemed embarrassed by Delores's rudeness, yet there was plenty of reason, considering the previous day's behavior in the sexual reconditioning class, for Sissy to believe they shared their forewoman's scorn for the industry she represented. Perhaps some re-evaluation was in order. For the moment, however, there was commotion on that ridge that to one sixteenth of her was supposed to be sacred.

“Uh, what's happening up there?” asked Sissy, hoping that her voice did not tremble.

Kym answered. “Oh, it's another bunch of salvation-seekers trying to see the Chink. He's chasing them away, as usual. What a farce.”

“Shit,” swore Big Red. “It's Debbie's fault. Debbie wrote all her friends and told 'em there was this big boohoo livin' up yonder, and the word just spread like hot butter. So's now they come from as far away as Frisco expectin' that old fart to tell 'em what's what. Only he don't ever tell nobody nothin'.”

“He tells Jellybean a lot,” corrected Debbie.

“Maybe he does and maybe he don't,” countered Big Red. “I 'spect Jelly's just humoring him to keep him from causing us any trouble — and he's doing the same with her. Well, there they go! Look at your pilgrims hightailin' it, Deb. Be gettin' too cold for salvation pretty soon; maybe the old geek will get a few months' peace. Not that he deserves it.”

Sissy wondered why Debbie thought the Chink to be some kind of grand boohoo to begin with. She asked about it.

“That's a good question,” said Debbie, who was approximately as darling as Bonanza Jellybean, although, as were her companions, more conventionally attired. “That's a good question. You know, Sissy, every sage or holy man or spiritual leader or whatever you choose to call them does not go around preaching, writing books, gathering disciples or holding rallies in the Houston Astrodome. Some remain almost invisible among us. Swami Vivekananda once said that Buddha and Christ were second-rate heroes. He said the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. They put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools or systems in their name. They never create any stir but just melt down into love. .”

“Love!” interrupted Big Red. “Grease is more like it.”

Debbie smiled patiently. “Vivekananda warned that the statesmen and generals and tycoons who seem so big to us are really low-level figures. He said, 'The highest men are calm, silent and unknown.' Isn't that beautiful? The true masters seldom reveal themselves, except in the vibrations they leave behind, and upon which the lesser gurus build their doctrines. But there are ways to recognize them. The Chink, as he is called, seems a difficult person — he refuses to even snigger in my direction — but in his silence and mysterious manners he gives signs of. .”

“Yeah, if you can call shakin' his dick a sign,” interjected Big Red.

“. . signs of high wisdom,” Debbie continued. “It was wrong of me to write my former sisters and brothers in the League of the Acid Atom Avatar about him, even though many of them are desperate for illumination, I see that now. But I'm not wrong in my estimation of him, of that I'm sure.” She paused, rubbing her ringed fingers along the curves of a carved coral snake. “I've been meaning to ask you, Sissy: I understand that you've done more traveling than just about anybody. In your constant moving among the peoples, didn't you ever come across a person whose wisdom stood out from the others, who seemed to have knowledge about the living of life that the rest of us lack?”

The question was put seriously, so Sissy gave it thought. Oddly enough, she hadn't really interacted with a great many people, nor even observed many carefully. She had collected rides, not drivers. And as for pedestrians. . shadows in the memory of a streak. However, there was that time in Mexico, not far south of the border. Sissy had been hitchhiking down a road so dusty it could have strangled a camel. At one point the road passed the home workshop of a cabinetmaker. Fifteen or twenty pieces of newly carpentered furniture were lined up in the heat alongside the road. A man of indeterminate age was varnishing them. From a two-gallon can, the Mexican was carefully applying varnish with a brush. Whenever a car or truck went by, which was fairly frequently, thick clouds of dust roiled up, settling like Lawrence of Arabia's memories upon the sticky furniture. But the Mexican went on with his work, smiling, singing to himself and paying no more attention to the dust than if it were a radio broadcast in a foreign language. So impressed had been Sissy that she nearly stopped to talk to the man; he let loose elaborate bright balloons in her heart. In the end, though, she had kept on hitching — subsequently thinking of the varnisher only in times of stress, frustration and self-doubt.

To speak of such things was embarrassing to Sissy, but she was about to tell Debbie of the marvelous Mexican when Jelly came trotting up on her horse. Jelly had been observing the Siwash Ridge ruckus from a closer perspective, ascertaining that it would have no repercussions upon the ranch. Now she called to the cowgirls, “Hey, podners, Delores is wanting you in the bunkhouse for drill. Let's be hitting it.”

“Drill!” huffed Big Red. “I should have stayed in the goddamned Wacs.”

“This is a mistake,” said Debbie. “There are higher ways for women to deal with things.”

Some eagerly, some reluctantly, the cowgirls walked off toward the bunkhouse. Jellybean dismounted.

“Aren't they a great bunch of podners?” she asked.

Sissy nodded. “Where do they come from?” she inquired.

“Oh, East, West and the cuckoo's nest. Lot of 'em grew up on farms and ranches and kinda liked the life, but when they got outta high school there was nothing for 'em to do but marry some local jerk or else try to get by in a college that wasn't prepared to teach 'em anything they really wanted to know. A couple of 'em, like Kym and Debbie, came buckin' out of middle-class suburbia. Big Red was the only working cowgirl in the lot; she'd ridden in barrel races all over Texas. 'Course Big Red is twenty-seven years old; the rest of us are a heap younger. Except for Delores. Nobody knows how old she is or what she was doing before she showed up here, but, God, she sure can rope and ride. I was after girls who wanted to be cowgirls and I never asked too many questions. Ones I tried to weed out were the ones that were in love with horses. You know, the Freudian thing. Lot of parents, about the time their baby daughters start pushing out their sweaters in front, they buy 'em a horse to divert their attention from boys. What they really buy 'em is a thousand-pound organic vibrator. A horse is great for good clean hands-above-the-sheets masturbation, and some girls never outgrow the thrill of it. Those kind just don't make real cowgirls.”

Siwash Ridge had become as quiet and inanimate as the geology book that might describe its formation. Indian summer, the ham, was taking yet another curtain call, and the hills, warmed into an expansive mood, heaped bouquets of asters at its feet. Goldenrod, too. And butterfly weed. Giant sunflowers, like junkie scarecrows on the nod, dozed in one spot with their dry heads drooped upon their breastbones. Their lives extended another day, flies buzzed everything within their range, monotonously eulogizing themselves, like the patriots who persist in praising the glory of a culture long after it is decadent and doomed.

Eventually, Jelly spoke again. “You sure brought some cute weather with you. Looking around today, you'd never believe the snow and howling winds that are gonna slam this place in a month or two.”

“New York gets a long case of the won't-quit shivers, too,” Sissy said. “I've never spent a whole winter in one place before, not since I was a kid.”

“One just has to snuggle up,” said Jelly, copping a glance at the bunkhouse. “Miss Adrian, when she first told me you were comin' out here, she said that you'd been recently married.”

“About nine months ago.”

“Hmm. Yeah. I never figured that you'd be the type to marry and settle down.”

“Nobody did,” said Sissy, sort of laughing. “Including me. But it's all right.”

“I've got this theory,” Jelly said. “Men — in general — are turned on by women who are attached. It's an ego challenge to break that attachment and transfer it to themselves. Women — in general — are turned on by men who are unattached. Freedom excites 'em. Unconsciously, they're aching to end it.” She scanned Sissy's face. “It would have been the opposite in your case, though. Or was it like that?”

“I don't know. Maybe. I've never thought about it that way. You see, Jelly, I was alone for a long, long time. Few women are alone by choice — maybe that's our major weakness — but upon the advice of nature I chose not to be boxed in or play it straight. Alone, I was able to shake to the big beat, dance the fourth dimension and make transportation talk out of its head. Only nobody cared. Oh, Jack Kerouac and a dozen other desperate souls, maybe, had a whiff that I was something more than world's champion, but nobody else. Well, so what? I did believe that my accomplishments might have lifted human spirits, the way that a comet fills people with joy for no logical or productive reason when it shoots across the sky. If they had paid attention. They didn't, and that's okay, because I was really hitchhiking for myself. Myself and the great windy powers. Then, all of a sudden, there was somebody who needed me. For the first time in my life, I was needed. It was a powerful attraction.”

Jelly was scratching her horse's ears. The animal was named Lucas, after Tad. “I guess men need wives, all right,” she said. “Just as women think that they need husbands.”

“Julian needed more than a wife,” said Sissy. “By most standards, I'm not even a very good wife. On a conscious level, Julian doesn't appreciate or understand me a drop better than anyone else, but somewhere in him he knows he needs what only someone like me can offer. Julian is a Mohawk Indian who has been deformed by society. He denies being Mohawk, denies any possible physical or psychic benefit from it. He needs to be loved in a way that will put him in touch with his blood. And that's the way I'm trying to love him.”

Taking her time, Jelly mounted. “That makes a certain amount of sense,” she said. “If love can't re-create lovers, what good is it? But let me give you this caution, Sissy, my podner: Love is dope, not chicken soup.”

When Sissy continued to look puzzled, Jelly added, “I mean, love is something to be passed around freely, not spooned down someone's throat for their own good by a Jewish mother who cooked it all by herself.”

With that, Jelly swung down along Lucas's side, in imitation of a stunt once performed at high speeds by the horse's namesake, and kissed Sissy, half upon the mouth, half upon the chin. Then she righted herself and galloped away.

That afternoon, in the bunkhouse, when Gloria made a comparison between Sissy's thumbs and the hunchback of Notre Dame, Bonanza Jellybean slapped her chops.

47.

"THE POLISH SAUSAGE POLKA" was interrupted for a news bulletin about the international situation, which, as listeners in the bunkhouse soon learned, was desperate, as usual. Speaking of desperation, there was an expression of mild despair upon Big Red's face as, without knocking, she opened the door of the main exercise room.

Guests and staff alike stiffened when Big Red entered, for all of them were a bit uneasy about cowgirls by then, and Big Red, the flaming tower of freckles, was the roughest-looking cowgirl on the spread. There was no cause for alarm, however. Big Red had overheard Miss Adrian announce that the final weigh-out was to be held this day. At the close of the day's activities, guests were to assemble in the main exercise room for their last ride upon the Rubber Rose scales. The following day, at the low-cal barbecue that would mark the official end of the ranch's season, prizes would be awarded those women who had squirted off the most poundage into the dry Dakota air. Big Red coveted no award, was not eligible for one and, frankly, deserved none, but she did wish to consult the scales. Wearing her one-piece forest green swimsuit, she took a place in line before the oracle. After easily obtaining the guests' permission, Miss Adrian ushered Big Red to the head of the line.

The hugest cowgirl weighed, winced, grunted and, to everyone's relief, left as she had come. On the way back to the bunkhouse, Indian summer paying its respects to the flesh that bubbled out around the edges of her swimsuit, Big Red had a flash, a mental visitation perhaps no less intense than Delores del Ruby's First and Second Visions. Seized by inspiration, Big Red thought, “Wouldn't it be dadburned wonderful if there was a machine that you could hook up to your plate of food that would extract the flavors from it. After you'd ate all your belly could comfortably hold, you could stick a plastic tube in your mouth, switch on the little machine, and the flavors would continue to run into your mouth for as long as you pleased, without nothin' goin' into your belly to make it fuller and fatter. Mmm, Lord, Lord; ham gravy, cheese 'n onion pie, chili, rice puddin', Lord.”

In the main exercise room of the Rubber Rose, there was an immediate market for such an apparatus, and, no doubt, sales around the world could be counted in tens of millions, the international situation notwithstanding. It would, moreover, constitute an unprecedented boon for mankind, keeping as many people off the streets as television and saving move lives than a cancer cure.

Therefore, in the public interest, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues offers the Big Red flavor device idea free of charge to any inventor who can make it a reality.

48.

"JULIAN, I HAVE A FRIEND."

“A friend you say, dear?” It was a barely tolerable connection. “That's good. New friends are fun.”

“You don't understand. I have a girl friend. I've never had a girl friend before.”

“Oh, now, honey, you exaggerate. Isn't Marie your friend?”

“Marie is your friend. She's only interested in me as an exotic cunt.”

“Sissy! We're on the telephone!”

“Sorry. I just wanted to tell you about Jelly, but never mind.”

“Jelly is that troublemaker you're supposed to be keeping an eye on for the Countess, isn't she? How's it going with those cowgirls? I hope everything is smooth out there. I worry about you constantly.”

“No need to worry about me, ever. I carry my guardian angels around on my hands.”

“Sissy, you mustn't mock yourself like that; it isn't healthy. Well, now, dear, my concern for you hasn't totally prevented me from enjoying myself. Numerous eat-abouts. Elaine's, La Grenouille, La Caravelle. Dancing Friday night at Kenny's Castaways with the Wrights and the Sabols. Howard was working late so Marie came with what's-his-name, Colacello. Cheek-to-cheek dancing is the rage in New York these days. I hadn't realized. I hope you'll go with me after you return. You'd love it if you'd give it a chance. A few people are coming here for a kitchen supper this evening. Cozy. I'm setting up a backgammon table. Wish you were here. Oh, I bought an enchanting doll at the Brooklyn Museum gift shop today — folk art. Wait until you see it. I'm almost finished with the painting I started the day before you left, the big one you thought was going to be a wigwam. It's nothing of the sort of course; it's. .”

“Julian, what's that noise?”

“Noise? Oh, that. That's a surprise, dear. That's. . Can't you guess? That's Butty. Carla and Rupert are together again. God, yes, I meant to tell you. Carla moved back into town and she can't keep Butty in their flat. So the old boy is here again. If you mind, I can always sell him. Dogs such as Butty are the rage in New York now; all the trend-benders own at least two. Andy Warhol brought his miniature dachshund, Archie, to Kenny's Castaways the other night. Imagine. Now, Sissy, about those cowgirls you're running with, watch your step, will you?”

The long-distance wires made those sounds that are part gurgle, part bleep; the sounds a baby robot might make in its crib. Endearments were exchanged and Julian hung up — without a clue that the call he had terminated had been made possible by Bonanza Jellybean, who, as an act of friendship, had postponed snipping the Rubber Rose telephone lines.

49.

IF WE MAY SAY that the civilized man is clever but not wise, we may say, also, that the prairie is dry but not without water. Upon the prairie there are occasional rivers, streams, lakes, ponds and flooded buffalo wallows. Like the American System itself, most of the prairie ponds and lakes are fly-by-night operations. Although they may thrive temporarily, supporting a teeming food chain that can run from aquatic plants to muskrats to owls; from nymphal insects to sunfish to snapping turtles; or from salamanders to magpies to weasels, in time the ponds and lakes are invaded by vegetation, filled with silt and reduced during summer droughts until they gasp (!) and die, changing into marsh and then prairie again. Often a prairie pond is not around long enough to earn a name.

Siwash Lake, since it found a home in a relatively deep depression between the hills of the terminal moraines left by the continental ice sheet, has enjoyed a certain permanence, although as evidenced by its imploding margins of arrowhead, cattail and reed, it, too, is entering the swamp phase of its existence and eventually will be unable to provide enough moisture to freshen a tadpole's highball.

There are a few good years left on the little lake yet, however, and it was shimmering like a blob of invisible ink when Sissy and Jelly caught sight of it from the hill behind the cinematographer's blind. Sissy and Jelly walked over the crest of the hill, having tied their horses at the cherry tree, and there was the lake, laking. Knee-deep in wheatgrass and asters, Sissy and Jelly walked over the crest of the hill naked, having left their clothing at the cherry tree, and the lake was below them, shimmering. Sissy and Jelly walked over the crest of the hill naked, for the sunning that was in it, and it was truly difficult to believe, as they gazed at Siwash Lake, that they, too, Sissy and Jelly, were mostly water. (The brain, with its fragmentary and elusive qualities, yes, water; but body meat?)

Since the hidden cameras were trained on the lakeshore, they could not record the images that moved at the crest of the hill, nor could the concealed microphones steal conversation. Sissy and Jelly were talking when they walked over the crest, and after they had studied the lake for a while, they sat and talked again.

“She was living in Louisiana, in a shack town built by runaway slaves deep in the bayous. That's one story, anyway. I've also heard that she was traveling through Yucatán with a circus, popping false eyelashes off a trained monkey with a bullwhip. It doesn't matter. Wherever it was that she was, she ate peyote one night and had a vision. Niwetúkame, the Mother Goddess, came to her on the back of a doe, hummingbirds sipping the tears she was shedding, crying 'Delores, you must lead my daughters against their natural enemy.' Delores thought about it for a long time — it was one hell of a vivid vision — until she determined that the natural enemy of the daughters were the fathers and the sons. That night she whipped the shit out of her black lover, or the circus owner — it doesn't matter which — and ran away. For a while she drove around, making a living selling peyote buttons to hippies. Then, Niwetúkame came to her again, saying that she must go to a certain place and prepare for her mission, the details of which would be revealed to her in another vision. The place the Peyote Mother directed her to come was the Rubber Rose Ranch. Isn't that incredible? She zonks out on peyote at least once a week, but so far her Third Vision hasn't happened. Meanwhile, she and Debbie are rivaling each other like a couple of crosstown high schools. Tension. Cowgirl tension! What a drag.”

“What is Debbie's position?” Sissy asked. A breeze swatted her ribcage with grassheads.

“Well, as I understand it, Debbie feels that people have a tendency to become what they hate. She says that women who hate men turn into men. Eee! That grass tickles, doesn't it?” Jelly was being swatted, too. “Debbie says that women are different from men and that that difference is the source of their strength. Way back before Judaism and Christianity, women were in charge of everything, government, economics, family, agriculture and especially religion; both Debbie and Delores agree on that. But Debbie says that if women are to take charge again, they must do it in the feminine way; they mustn't resort to aggressive and violent masculine methods. She says it is up to women to show themselves better than men, to love men, set good examples for them and guide them tenderly toward the New Age. She's a real dreamer, that Debbie-dear.”

“You don't agree with Debbie, then?”

“I wouldn't say that. I expect she's right, ultimately. But I'm with Delores when it comes to fighting for what's mine. I can't understand why Delores is so uptight about the Chink; he could probably teach her a thing or two. Or how can anybody dislike Billy West, that good ol' rascal? God knows I love women, but nothing can take the place of a man that fits. Still, this here is cowgirl territory and I'll stand with Delores and fight any bastards who might deny it. I guess I've always been a scrapper. Look. This scar. Only twelve years old and I was felled by a silver bullet.”

Jelly took Sissy's hand, carefully avoiding its first or most preaxial digit, and helped her to feel the depression in her belly. It was as if she had bought her navel at a two-for-one sale.

Ignoring the possibilities that she had piqued Sissy's curiosity or lit up her limbic switchboard, Jelly continued to speak. “God, I dig it out here. This raw space. Nobody has ever nailed it down. It's too big and too tough. Men saw it as a challenge; they wanted to compete against it, to conquer it. For the most part they failed, and now they hate it. But women can regard it in a different way. We can flow with it, merge with it and love it. The Chink says that these plains exist on the edge of meaning, at a zone between meaning and something so great it's got no meaning. I think I understand. Why any cowgirl wouldn't be content with this I don't know, but I reckon some people just can't have fun unless everyone else is having fun, too.”

Sissy kept her hand on jelly's tummy, for as soon as the cowgirl quit talking she wished to inquire how she happened to catch a silver bullet in such a tender spot at such a tender age. Before she had a second to ask, however, Jelly lobbed a question of her own. “Say, Sissy, you working for the Countess and all, I wonder if you've had a chance to try the perfume trick we told the guests about the other day?”

“Er, well, no, I haven't. It actually works, does it?”

“Sure it works. Why don't you try it?”

“You mean now?”

She meant now, Sissy. N for narcissus, N for nasty, N for nigi (Nigi is Japanese for “rainbow.” It also means “two o'clock.” Thus, in Japan there are at least two rainbows daily); O for orchid, O for odoriferous, O for om (The meditation mat is the yogi's horse; git along little yogi, gotta reach El Snuffing Out Candle before sun-downownownownownownownownownownownownowown. . Only mantra west of the Pecos); W for wisteria, W for wet, W for Walla Walla (a city in eastern Washington), Wagga Wagga (a city in southeastern Australia) and Wooga Wooga (a café in the astral dimension where Charlie Parker jams every Saturday night): N*O*W, Now. She wanted to watch you spread it, Sissy, opening like a ballet slipper, a gaping shellfish. She wanted to spread it, Sissy, her petite fingers wading in the swamp of it, raising its temperature, widening its smile. Oh why is it so difficult between women? Between a man and a woman it's yes or no. Between women it's always maybe. One mistake and the other runs away. Even when women embrace they must keep their hearts still, eyes blank. Words are out of the question. But it's worth it, Sissy, worth the pretensions, interruptions and caution. When a man is in you, you cannot imagine what it is his body is feeling, nor can he know your pleasures accurately. Between women, each is precisely aware: when she does that she is certain that the other is feeling this. And it's so soft, Sissy. So soft.

Krishna, or as he is called in the West, Pan, the god Jesus Christ drove into hiding, was the only god who understood women. Krishna/Pan lured maidens into the woods, but he never raped, nor did he seduce with false promises or insincere declarations of love. He awakened them with special ancient vaudeville; he turned them on. It is that way that women visit each other: as music, as clowns.

Woman has not suffered civilization gladly. It has been suggested, in fact, that all of civilization was merely a dike thrown up by men, fearful of sexual competition, in order “to hold back wild and unruly feminine waters.” Now, however, She may be commandeering the shining inventions of civilized man and turning them to Her own dark uses. For example, kissing.

Kissing is man's greatest invention.

All animals copulate, but only humans kiss.

Kissing is the supreme achievement of the Western world.

Orientals, including those who tended the North American continent before the ravagement, rubbed noses, and thousands still do. Yet despite the golden fruit of their millennia — they gave us yoga and gunpowder, Buddha and corn on the cob — they, their multitudes, their saints and sages, never produced a kiss.

The greatest discovery of civilized man is kissing.

Primitives, pygmies, cannibals and savages have shown tenderness to one another in many tactile ways, but pucker against pucker has not been their style.

Parakeets rub beaks. Yes, it's true, they do. However, only devotees of premature ejaculation, or those little old ladies who murder children with knitting needles to steal their lunch money to buy fresh kidneys for kittycats could place bird-billing in the realm of the kiss.

Black Africans touch lips. Quite right; some of them do, as do certain aboriginal tribesmen in other parts of the world — but though their lips may touch, they do not linger. The peck is a square wheel, awkward and slightly ominous. What else did Judas betray Our Savior with but a peck: terse, spit-free and tongueless?

Tradition informs us that kissing, as we know it, was invented by medieval knights for the utilitarian purpose of determining whether their wives had been into the mead barrel while the knights were away on duty. If history is correct, for once, then the kiss began as an osculatory wiretap, an oral snoop, a kind of alcoholic chastity belt, after the fact. Form does not always follow function, however, and eventually kissing for kissing's sake became popular in the courts, spreading to the tradesmen, peasants and serfs. And why not? For kissing is sweet. It was as if all the atavistic sweetness still remaining in Western man was funneled into kissing and that alone. No other flesh like lip flesh! No meat like mouth meat! The musical clink of tooth against tooth, the wonderful curiosity of tongues.

If women took short delight in lesser inventions, such as the wheel, the lever and the blade of steel, they applauded kissing, practicing it upon their men, for fun and profit, and upon each other — within limits. Because they were designed to suckle both male and female child at their breasts, women are not as sexually restrictive as men. They have always been prone to kiss other women, a practice that has made our Faith uneasy and our smut-sniffers pale. In 1899, even so relatively liberal a Victorian as Dr. Mary Wood-Allen felt compelled to write, in What a Young Woman Ought to Know, “I wish the friendships of girls were more manly. Two young men who are friends do not lop on each other, and kiss and gush. Girlish friendships that include fondling and kissing are not only silly, they are even dangerous.”

WHO WILL SING THE PRAISES OF SILLY AND DANGEROUS KISSING? She feared to fondle your secret parts, Sissy, and you feared to fondle them in front of her. But your mouths were bold — and silly and dangerous — and you leaned toward one another slowly, sliding cheeks, and kissed. Meeting with a passing bee's pulsation, you mashed your mouths flat until soon your tongues were entangled in bubbles and breaths. Long, thick tongues painted each other with tongue stuff; painting away gradually the feminine fears so that you could extract your fingers from her sterling scar and slide them down her belly. When the hair and juice whispered against your fingertips — whispered dirty words such as “pussy,” “cunt,” and “snatch" — you thought of Marie, always grabbing you there, and you almost pulled away. But jelly moaned in your mouth, flooding it with sweetness, and in a moment her own hand was exploring the hot folds of your vulva.

Embraced, you toppled over in the wheatgrass. Her Stetson fell off and rolled away in the direction of Oklahoma City. Maybe it wanted to say howdy to Tad Lucas. Your eyes sent an archeological expedition to Jelly's face, and hers to yours; both unearthed inscriptions and pondered their meaning. She whispered that you were beautiful and brave. She called you a “hero,” meaning heroine, but her fingers were not fooled for an instant. You tried to tell her how much her friendship meant to you. Did you get the words out or didn't you? Teeth of foam, lips of pie.

After a hungry stillness, like intermission at a wolf dance, rhythms were established. You were socked into one another now, it had been acknowledged and approved, and so you arched and pushed and corkscrewed and jackknifed, softly but with pronounced cadence. Finger-fucking is an art. Men indulge in it; women excel at it. Ohh. Fireman save my child!

You felt as if your hand were up a jukebox, a flesh Wurlitzer spewing colored electrical sparks as it played itself to pieces on the Dime of the Century. Your clitoris was a switch without an “off.” She snapped it on on on and further on. You crooked your tongue around an erect nipple. She smiled at your quiverings when she parted your asshole.

Everything became scrambled. You rocked each other in cradles of sweat and saliva, until you could see nothing. You imagined her in a bride's trousseau, pictured her a mare. Did you ferment, the two of you? You smelled like it. Fans of funk and fever opened and closed, chins were aglisten with the juice of kissing. You rocked and rocked, your thumb swacking her belly in rhythm, adding to the excitement — hers and yours.

Eyes closed, or maybe only glazed, you pictured her tight young whatdoyoucallit in your mind. Hair by dripping hair, it gaped before you. Your own clitoris felt as swollen pink as a bubblegum cigar. Oh these things were made to be loved!

Suddenly, you were weeping. Noisy breaths bucked out of you. You called “Jelly Jelly” when you intended only to murmur “mmmm.” It didn't matter. Jellybean couldn't hear you. She was screaming. Hysterical from the scalding hot softness of girl-love.

Criminey, how that filly can come, you thought, after your own spasms had subsided. At the same moment, Jelly was wondering how a city apartment house could possibly contain your sex cries. For Jelly, too, was at rest. Only gradually did you both realize that a third auditory ingredient had mixed with Jelly screams and Sissy groans — a brasher, wilder sound, though obviously the work of the same composer.

Sticky fingers were pulled from melons. Soaked inside and out, the two of you sat up. There came that noise again, only louder, more eerie. Had your hairs, short and long, not been so damp they might have stood. It was a mighty trumpeting, a whoop such as the World might have made on the day it was born.

It was then that you ladies, your rosy bodies imprinted with patterns of crushed leaves and stems, looked to see a squadron of white satin airliners circling Siwash Lake, a flock of birds so grand and giant and elegant that your hearts squeezed out eternity's toothpaste.

50.

DESCRIBE THE WHOOPING CRANE (Grus americana) in twenty-five words or less.

The whooping crane is a very large and very regal white bird with long black legs, a sinuous neck and a thrilling trumpetlike voice.

Okay. I'll grade that a C.

Only a C? May I try again?

Go ahead.

The most spectacular of our native wading birds, the whooping crane stands about five feet tall and has a wingspread of nearly eight.

No improvement, I'm afraid. Still a C.

One more try?

Be my guest.

Imagine Wilt Chamberlain in red yarmulke and snowy feathers. .

Hold it. You're assuming that the reader knows who Wilt Chamberlain is. Many people don't follow basketball and wouldn't understand that Wilt signifies size and strength and arrogance made palatable by grace.

I give up. The whooper enters one's spirit the instant it enters one's senses. It is perfect radiant sky monster and I cannot describe it.

Better. Make that a B.

51.

"PAIUTE INDIANS called the crane kodudududududu,” said Sissy. “Isn't that a funny name?"

Jellybean was delighted. “Say it again,” she urged.

“Kodudududududu. Six dus. Kodudududududu.”

They both laughed.

“You know a lot about Indians, don't you?” asked Jelly. She brushed dead cherry leaves from her panties before stepping in.

“A little,” said Sissy. She was slower getting into her undies because of her thumbs.

“And birds, too. I can't get over the way they let you walk up so close to 'em. Whoopers are supposed to be really skittish. 'Specially when they're migrating.”

“Maybe they've never seen a human being nude before. We're different when we're naked. But I do have a way with birds, I guess. I told you about Boy, only parakeet to ever flag down a Diesel rig.” Sissy looked at Jelly's popover tits as they disappeared into glossy shirt of cactus sunset design. In the looking, her blue gaze grew solemn. “I understand a tad about Indians and birds,” she said softly, “but I don't know if I understand what happened up there.”

Jelly's eyes snagged Sissy's, elevated them. “Something nice happened up there.”

“Yes,” admitted Sissy. “It was nice.”

“Do you feel bad about it?”

“No, oh no. I don't feel bad. I feel. . different. Or maybe I don't feel different; maybe I feel like I should feel different.” She was thoughtful. She zipped up. “Have you had sex with girls much before?”

“Only since I've been at the Rubber Rose. Between Miss Adrian and Delores, every eligible male's been scared away from here, and there's usually trouble of one kind or another if we fool around with the hicks in Mottburg. That leaves your fingers or other women, and at least half the cowgirls on the ranch have been in each other's pants by now. There's not a queer among 'em, either. It's just a nice, natural thing to do. Girls are so close and soft. Why did it take me all these years to learn that it's okay to roll around with 'em? It's 'specially good when it's somebody you really like a lot.” She hugged Sissy and sugar-doodled a few kisses around her neck and ears.

A pair of smiles rode across the Dakota hills.

Perhaps a person gains by accumulating obstacles. The more obstacles set up to prevent happiness from appearing, the greater the shock when it does appear, just as the rebound of a spring will be all the more powerful the greater the pressure that has been exerted to compress it. Care must be taken, however, to select large obstacles, for only those of sufficient scope and scale have the capacity to lift us out of context and force life to appear in an entirely new and unexpected light. For example, should you litter the floor and tabletops of your room with small objects, they constitute little more than a nuisance, an inconvenient clutter that frustrates you and leaves you irritable: the petty is mean. Cursing, you step around the objects, pick them up, knock them aside. Should you, on the other hand, encounter in your room a nine-thousand-pound granite boulder, the surprise it evokes, the extreme steps that must be taken to deal with it, compel you to see with new eyes. And if the boulder is more special, if it has been painted or carved in some mysterious way, you may find that it possesses an extraordinary and supernatural presence that enchants you, and in coping with it — as it blocks your path to the bathroom — leaves you feeling extraordinary and supernatural, too. Difficulties illuminate existence, but they must be fresh and of high quality.

To the obstacles that had conspired to prevent Sissy Hankshaw Gitche, white female Protestant of South Richmond, Virginia, from attaining normality, from filling a responsible and orderly role, from operating as a productive, well-adjusted contributor to the human community, now must be added friendship with Bonanza Jellybean. Whether this latest obstacle was to elevate Sissy or nudge her toward the breaking place, as a certain straw is reported to have done to a certain burdened camel, was impossible to judge from her smile, for it was simultaneously gladdened and apprehensive. It is of little or no value to analyze mental states such as this. The kingdom of formal ideas will always be a weak neighbor to the kingdom of thrills, and Sissy was a princess of thrill. Blood bunched in her head like grapes in a wig. It sang there like a popular ballad — even though the only radio station in the area played nothing but polkas. Jelly had promised to come to her room that night, with marijuana and new positions. If those prospects excited her, she was also excited by the memory of the whooping cranes, a sight all the more breathtaking because of the knowledge that those huge, elegant fugitives were so few in number and perched so precariously on the brink of total extinction. No heat, no agony, no bloody struggle, but a band of exquisite creatures (for which the world has no replacement) poised coolly — defiantly! — on the winking eyelid of doom.

Perhaps crane and cowgirl merged in her mind into a single bright-eyed beaky goblin of love. If so, it took flight when she and Jelly rode up to the corral. Delores and Big Red hurried to meet them. “He's here,” announced Delores, pointing with her whip.

Sure enough, across the yard, in the midst of the low-cal barbecue then in progress, monocle reflecting sunlight, cigarette holder stabbing air, stood the Countess. Except for stains of White House ketchup on his ascot, he looked the same as ever, and why shouldn't he, for only a couple of weeks had passed since Sissy last saw him, although it seemed like years.

“Look at him,” hissed Delores. “Perverse as a pink pickle.”

“Sick as a vice squad,” elaborated Big Red.

“He's in a snit,” Delores said. “He wants to see you right after the barbecue.”

Jellybean chuckled sardonically. She dismounted. “Get the girls,” she said. “He's gonna see me right now.”

Left abruptly in the corral with a horse she could not unsaddle, Sissy was alarmed. Obviously, a confrontation was brewing, and she wished no part of it. How many years had the Countess been her benefactor? Many. If not for him, she probably could not have survived. When she caught sight of him, her impulse had been to rush up in fond greeting. Yet she didn't dare. Confused and double-confused, loyalties torn, guilt rising, she abandoned the horse and made her way as stealthily as she could to the rear of the main house, stumbling only momentarily over the chain of the goat.

She slipped inside through the kitchen, where sacks of Debbie-ordered brown rice sat with Oriental asceticism, stoically ignoring the smells of roasting veal that wafted in from the party. She loped down the hall, entered her room, locked herself in. As the latch was turning, she overheard Jelly say something like, “Any of you ladies who would like to join us, you're welcome to stay on as a full working podner at the Rubber Rose. Rest of you get packed — and I mean now. You've got fifteen minutes to move your lard asses off this ranch.”

There were loud gasps, panicky murmurings and barbecued blubberings. The screen door screeched open and Sissy heard a chaos of footsteps in the hall.

From her window, Sissy could see and hear Miss Adrian screaming threats of prison and other punishments at the cowgirls. The Countess, on the other hand, appeared to be taking the incident in his snide. He stood calmly, reducing the material existence of a French cigarette, and observed Jellybean and sisters with an expression of sarcastic amusement. “You pathetic little cutesy-poos,” he seemed to say. “Do you actually suppose this exhibition of childish melodrama is advancing the cause of freedom?”

“You owe us this here ranch, as token payment for your disgusting exploitations,” said Jelly.

“Then take it,” the Countess said tranquilly.

Perhaps he meant it as compliance, but the cowgirls regarded his statement a challenge.

Jelly shouted a command. The hands, who carried axes, picks, pitchforks and shovels, retreated. The Countess, still grinning, reached for an hors d'oeuvre and subjected his cigarette to a measured, self-assured puff. Miss Adrian shook her fist and yelled, “Go to your bunkhouse and remain there!” as if she had just led a rout. The guests were in their rooms packing, save for one lady who had tossed her cup of punch at Miss Adrian and joined the revolution. The masseuse had joined, too, and she egged on the rest of the staff members, who stood off to one side of the barbecue pit, hoping to appear neutral.

When they had retreated about thirty yards, the cowgirls stopped. With astonishing rapidity, they unbuckled, unbuttoned and unzipped — and stepped out of their jeans and underpants. Then, nude from the waist down, thatched pubises thrust forward, up front and leading the way, they began to advance. The Countess's grin went down his throat like bathwater down a drain.

“Better reach for your spray cans!” taunted Gloria.

“Not one of these pussies has been washed in a week!” yelled Jellybean.

Rather pale now, his nose twitching, the Countess dropped the caviar canapé he'd been holding. A prairie ant helped itself to the spoils, the first ant in the history of the Dakotas to make off with a gobule of Iranian caviar. He or she'll go down in the Ant Hall of Fame.

On came the cowpokes, while behind them, in rows, fifteen separate little piles of jeans and panties bowed low to the ground, like a pilgrimage of rag Muslims prostrating themselves to the Mecca of duds. On came the cowpokes, pelvises pumping, laying down what the trembling Countess believed to be a devastating barrage of musk.

Lost in her own hysteria, Miss Adrian charged. A barbecue fork she hurled drew blood from Heather's eyebrow. Quick as a frog's tongue, Delores's whip cracked. Its lash curled around the ranch manager's ankles, pulling her feet from under her. She hit the sod in a jangle of jewelry and an explusion of breath. Then the rampage began.

A Molotov cocktail said good-by to Big Red, hello to the sexual reconditioning building. Within minutes, the structure was blazing. Other cowgirls, bare asses flashing, stormed the wing of the main house where the beauty parlor and exercise rooms were located. Sounds of glass breaking and wood splintering echoed through the house. The air was singed with cries of “Wahoo,” “Yippee,” “Let 'er buck” and “The vagina is a self-cleaning organ.”

Sissy hadn't a clue what to do. Her darling Jellybean had obviously forgotten her. The Countess would be furious with her for failing to warn him of the impending revolt. Julian would not be pleased, either. And for all she knew, she might be in physical peril. Delores and her pals did identify her with the Countess's business. The sauna was burning now and the ranch was swirled in smoke.

Acting on orders from that very large portion of the brain that is completely uninterested in anything but survival, Sissy fled the house by the way she had entered. Crossing the croquet court, passing the pool, she ran to the base of Siwash Ridge and then southward along the mountain's foot. Eventually she came to a place where the juniper bushes were broken to reveal a crude path beginning a steep ascent. Because the butte promised both protection and a view of the proceedings, Sissy elected to climb.

She shouldered her way through low, silvery boughs. The trail was acting funny. It would switch back where there was no reason for it to switch or it would head straight for the edge of the cliff, only to turn aside at the last possible inch and bob up and down as if it were laughing. It seemed to have a mind of its own. A deranged mind, at that.

Sissy walked lightly but firmly, as if she were trying to calm the trail down, as if she were giving it therapy. It did not respond.

Sweating, panting, startled by rabbits and magpies, she accepted the first opportunity — approximately halfway up the ridge and twenty minutes' climb — to rest on a flat rock, from which she might look down upon the Rubber Rose. The ranch was farther away than even the deceptions of the trail had led her to imagine.

The whoopjamboreehoo was still raging. Noise and smoke. The main house had been spared the torch, but several of the outbuildings were in ashes. She thought she could detect cowgirls attempting to quiet horses that had panicked in the corrals. She did see Miss Adrian's Cadillac roar out of the drive, but she had no way of telling what passengers it bore. Somewhat later, the cinematographers' rented convertible and their equipment van also drove away. Had the filmmakers been evicted or had others commandeered their vehicles? Sissy sat and wondered. She also wondered if and when she should return to the ranch. The sun was already kneeling on the doorsill of the West, and as night approached she could feel cold scratchings on her flesh.

After a while she felt something else. Eyes, she felt. Eyes watching her. Not little pink rabbit eyes or jumpy bright bird eyes. Big carnivorous eyes. A wildcat or wolf, for sure. Again, that vast battery of efficient brainpower, insensitive to beauty, romance, fun or freedom; suspicious and careful, as conventional as eggs-for-breakfast, as cheerless as a banker's socks; that stiff-collared DNA fogy who happens to be the major stockholder in human consciousness, issued orders. Obeying, for no commands are as difficult as these to disobey, Sissy picked up a stone and turned around slowly.

“Ha ha ho ho and hee hee,” snickered the thing that was watching her. It stood ten yards away. It was, of course, the Chink.

The Chink's problem was that he looked like the Little Man who had the Big Answers. Flowing white hair and a dirty bathrobe, weathered face and handmade sandals, teeth that would make an accordion jealous, eyes that twinkled like bicycle lights in a mist. He was short but muscular, aged but handsome and O the smoky aroma of his immortal beard! He looked as if he had stolen down from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, by way of a Yokohama opium parlor. He looked as if he could talk with animals, discussing with them subjects Dr. Dolittle wouldn't comprehend. He looked as if he had rolled out of a Zen scroll, as if he said “presto” a lot, knew the meaning of lightning and the origin of dreams. He looked as if he drank dew and fucked snakes. He looked like the cape that rustles on the backstairs of Paradise.

They scrutinized one another with mutual fascination. Sissy held her breath and the Chink said, “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”

At last she thought of something to say, but, as if he sensed that she was about to speak and did not want her words in his strangely pointed ears, he whirled, and scampered up the mountainside whence he had come.

“Wait!” she cried.

Warily, he stopped and turned, poised to flee again.

Sissy smiled.

She raised her ripe right thumb.

And jerking it and swooshing it and wringing every flicker from it, as though this were its farewell performance and it must please the gods, she hitchhiked the hermit and his mountain.

And got a ride to the clockworks.