Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Part V

77.

IT WAS ABOUT TWO MINUTES on the tequila side of sunrise. So early the bluebirds hadn't brushed their teeth yet. Homer referred in The Odyssey to “rosy-fingered dawn.” Homer, who was blind and had no editor, referred over and over again to “rosy-fingered dawn.” Pretty soon, dawn began to think of herself as rosy-fingered: the old doctrine of life imitating art.

Fingers — and thumbs — of rose were drumming gently, like a Juilliard professor at a jazz club, on the table top of early morning America.

First light ventured through the windows of the bunkhouse. Softly, cowgirls turned in their beds. They made sleepy little noises, like the love cries of angel food cakes.

Heather was dreaming about her diabetic mother, who was forever threatening to commit suicide with Hershey bars if Heather didn't come home. Almost inaudibly, Heather whimpered into her pillow. Jody was dreaming she was back in high school, taking a math exam. She remembered that she hadn't studied, and she began to sweat with embarrassment and fear. Mary was dreaming she was ascending to Heaven in a rubber life raft. In the dream, Mary wore flippers on her feet. Mary would wake up puzzled. Elaine was dreaming about the source of her bladder infection. Her nipples were erect. She was smiling. LuAnn was dreaming the dream she dreamed nearly every night, the one in which her boy friend, his dilated pupils as black as Muslim golf balls, approached her with a dripping needle. In real life, she had awakened a few hours after the fix. Two years later, her boy friend still had not come to. LuAnn was on the verge of screaming. Debbie was dreaming she could fly, and Big Red, snoring mightily, dreamed she had found a lot of money lying around on the ground. Linda was dreaming she was in bed with Kym. She woke up and discovered that it was true. She scampered back to her own bunk.

Just in time. The sack of peyote buttons beneath Delores's head was singing her awake, as it did each morning. The forewoman stretched and rubbed her eyes. Soon she would stride down the aisle cracking her whip. No alarm clocks were necessary at the Rubber Rose. Besides, a clock radio would have played nothing but polkas.

From the main house there floated the voodoo smell of perking coffee. Donna, whose turn it was, had already begun breakfast. Up, pardners, up. There were goats to be milked and birds to be. . watched over.

Plap. Plap plap plap. Bare cowgirl feet began to hit the linoleum. Feet with painted nails and feet with blisters, clean-smelling feet and feet fermenting in toe jam, tender feet, flaking feet, feet that had fidgeted indecisively in shoe stores and feet that had fallen in love with the gym floor at the prom, go-go feet, ballet-lessons-on-Saturday-mornings feet, pink feet, yellowish feet, arched feet, flat feet, massaged feet, neglected feet, beach feet, sneak feet, tickled-by-Daddy feet, feet pinched red by too-tight boots, feet that attracted glass shards and splinters and feet that imagined themselves to be clouds. Plap plap. Bare feet kissed the linoleum and pattered girlishly to foot lockers (in which there were no spare feet), to windows (to see what kind of weather was afoot) or out to the shitter (exactly ninety-two feet from the bunkhouse).

Plap. Plap. Listen. There were other plaps to be heard upon that summer's dawn. Plaps sounded in cities and towns where no barefoot cowgirls trod. The author is speaking now of the plap and plap of morning newspapers, rolled and tucked, plapping against porches as newsboys demonstrated their careless aim.

Countless newspapers landed with countless plaps on countless porches, bringing to countless readers the ball scores and comics and horoscopes and, on that particular morning, the first public notification of what many would consider a shocking ecological disaster. Different papers played the story in different ways. Perhaps the headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, succinct as it was, told it best. It read: OUR WHOOPING CRANES ARE MISSING.

78.

SOME FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO, the North American continent finally got up enough nerve to kick the last of the glaciers out of its parlor. Ice gone, the North American continent called in the decorators and ordered them to create an environment worthy of some classy new wildlife. “Grass is in,” the decorators announced, and they began to assemble a landscape of vast prairies, inland seas and wet savannas. A primitive pre-Pleistocene swamp bird cast a yellow eye upon the endless acres of marshy vegetation, waving grass and shallow waters and decided it liked the new décor well enough to move in. In fact, this bird liked the new décor so much it let out a whoop. Thus, inspired by its surroundings, it evolved into the whooping crane.

The whooper was classy, all right. It combined great size with majestic beauty and a kind of shy arrogance to produce a total effect that no bird before or since has equaled. The satiny black markings on its dazzlingly white body were economically and perfectly placed; its ruby crown and cheek patches (which were, in fact, red skin bare of all feathers) provided a certain flash without being vulgar; its tapered silhouette and graceful curves were to excite artists and designers not yet born; its powerful voice could spook the spine of a predator from a half-mile away; the aloof pride with which it conducted its daily business invented the word dignity for animal dictionaries. Ranging coast to coast and from the Arctic to central Mexico, the whooping crane was surely El Birdo Supremo in North America during the Golden Age of Grass.

Things change. Even grass goes out of fashion. In the later Pleistocene, trees became a hot item. Forest gradually encroached on the grasslands and the water table subsided. The crane habitat, un-Sanforized, began to undergo a relentless shrinking. The sandhill crane, the whooper's smaller, plainer cousin, made the necessary adjustments, adapting good-naturedly to a less grassy, less watery world. But not our bird. The whooping crane practiced the science of the particular; it enacted the singular as opposed to the general; it embodied the exception rather than the rule. To hell with compromise! It knew what it wanted and that was that. Unlike those integrity-short teemers, including man, the whooper opted for quality instead of quantity, rejected the notion that anything is better than nothing. It would survive on its own terms or not at all. And, indeed, it retreated in numbers as well as range, clinging defiantly to ever-narrowing confines. The whooping crane population had dwindled to fewer than two thousand even before civilization set its hard, polished shoes upon our shores.

Still, two thousand whoopers were two thousand whoopers — enough sheer feather power to stop every show in the nightclub district of birdland — and the crane census might have remained at that approximate figure had not civilization decided to do North America a favor by inviting itself to dinner. Between civilization and whooping cranes there was an immediate and lasting personality conflict. In the luggage of the civilizing process there came farming, shotgun sport, egg collecting, industrialization, urban sprawl, polluting, aviation, oil drilling, military operations, grass fires and the Army Corps of Engineers, those busy little khaki beavers who have set out to turn America's natural waterways into industrial ditches. Added to predators, climate changes and hurricanes, it was a bit too much for the super duper whooper. After 1918, when a Louisiana farmer named Alcie Daigle shot twelve cranes that were feeding on rice fallen from his threshing machine (Alcie Daigle, may sharp beaks scissor your testicles daily in the fried ricefields of Hell!) there were but two flocks of wild whooping cranes left alive in the world. Soon there was only one. By September 1941, this flock, incessantly harassed, was down to fifteen birds. Fifteen, count 'em, fifteen. Extinction music swelled in the background.

Ever since its founding in 1905, the conservationist Audubon Society had taken a special interest in whoopers. It knew an extraordinary bird when it watched one. The Audubon's little old ladies and mild gentlemen in galoshes pecked at the government so tirelessly that finally the politicians, in a weary outburst, decreed, in 1937, that the wintering grounds of the last remaining whooper flock would henceforth be a refuge. Like most prolife gestures on the part of the government, the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast of Texas was not much more than a token. Aransas offered the cranes winter shelter from hunters and egg collectors, to be sure, but the U.S. Air Force was allowed to maintain a bombing range right off shore, and the major oil companies continued to drill and dredge and diddle and daddle all along the edges of the preserve. Also, the flock, though illegal game, had no real protection on their long migratory flights between Aransas and their summer nesting and breeding grounds in the northern Canadian wilderness, and each year several cranes fell to the merry pow-pows of drunken sportsmen. The flock hung on to life by its toenails, although it hung with aplomb.

In the early fifties, however, a hero cometh, a Batman — or Craneman — winging into the arena on a cape of white quills, goosing the government and causing extinction to duck. The hero's name was Robert Porter Allen, research director of the Audubon Society and no galosh-wearing dispenser of birdseed, he. Allen liked whooping cranes more than he liked statesmen or movie stars or Our Father Who Art in Heaven; he was brilliant, thorough, tough, persuasive and, most important, he had a way with the press. When only nineteen whoopers returned to Aransas in October of 1951, he managed to get the media concerned. And after numerous news reports and editorials were broadcast and published, the government magically began to make a more conscientious effort on behalf of those untamed monsters it had declared its official wards.

The government ran some crane-cheek-colored tape through its red tape machine, and after a few years civilization began to go a mite easier on the whooper, not that the whooper gave a high-circling damn. In 1956, there were twenty-eight cranes wintering on the Aransas preserve. In 1957, the flock decreased to twenty-four. In 1959, the number was up to thirty-two. And so it went. Like scores from the ballpark of the Absolute. And each spring and fall, at times of crane departures and crane arrivals, the media dutifully reported the crane scores, giving them space alongside accounts of the international situation, which was desperate, as usual.

When, in 1969, the whooper population hit a big fat fifty, the media cheered wildly. In 1973, there were fifty-five birds wintering at the Texas refuge, a figure that, when announced, caused hardened cons to smile in their slammers. Or so some folks would have us believe.

At any rate, as sometimes happens in this malleable but not self-malleable curious cultural consciousness of ours, a kind of mystique grew up around the whooping crane, around the drama of its survival. Nonfeathered backs were patted all around, and the whooper was called “a symbol of both this country's new-found concern about its wildlife and of its opportunity to atone for its destructiveness in the past.”

It did not set the national thyroid to pumping happily when it was learned that this symbol, the entire last existing flock of whooping cranes, had vanished without a trace.

79.

"IT WAS A ROUTINE FLIGHT," said the official of the Canadian Wildlife Service, as if there was any such thing as a routine flight. The people who see miracles are the people who look for miracles, the people who open their eyes to the miracles that surround us always. The people who have routine flights are the people who believe they are on routine flights. . but now, what with our whooping cranes AWOL, now is not the time for digressions upon the obvious. The official was as skinny and nervous as the last snake out of Ireland as he fumbled with his pipe and tried to make an important mission sound as if it had been a routine flight.

The flight in question had been made in a two-seat, single-rotary helicopter. The pilot was an employee of the Canadian Wildlife Service, as was the passenger, field biologist Jim McGhee. This May, as every May for the past fourteen years, McGhee had made a “routine” flight over the desolate marshes south of Great Slave Lake, near the Alberta-Northwest Territories border, to count whooping cranes. McGhee would compare his count with the number of birds reported to have left Aransas, Texas, to see how the cranes had fared on their twenty-five-hundred-mile migration. Rare was the year when they didn't lose one bird, but conditions certainly had improved since the fifties, when Canada filed formal protests with the U.S. in an attempt to protect the cranes from American hunters, oilmen and bombers. Yes, whooping crane stock was up a half-million points on the big board, and an investor such as McGhee, who had bought cheap, had every reason to feel smug and to fancy himself on a routine flight when he churned in low over the marshes to check the Dow Jones averages that May.

Back in 1744, a French explorer made the following entry in his journal: “We have [in Canada] cranes of two colors; some are all white, the others pale gray, all make excellent soup.” Well, it was as if some fiendish French fatso from the gluttony wards of Hell had cooked up a cauldron of Campbell's Cream of Whooping Crane, for squint as they might, Jim McGhee and his pilot could not spot a single whooper that day.

McGhee was puzzled, a trifle alarmed, maybe, but not freaked-out. The cranes must have moved, he reasoned. Their nesting grounds had been threatened twice by forest fires since 1970, and despite the Canadian government's maneuvers to bar sight-seers from the area, there had been increasing air traffic over the whooper nurseries in recent years. The five-hundred-square-mile enclave in which birds of this solitary flock chose to build their nests of heaped grass, deposit their mushroom-colored eggs and hatch their sparrow-sized chicks was a mere postage stamp on a vast package of forbidding terrain. It was part of a region that was as rugged and remote as any on the North American continent. Dotted with shallow, muddy lakes separated by narrow zones of spiky black spruce and twisting rivers too choked by fallen timber to be navigable, it had been trod upon by neither white man nor Indian. In fact, the whooper domain was so well hidden it had taken airborne searchers from both U.S. and Canadian Wildlife agencies ten years to find it. As McGhee theorized over a bottle of Uncle Ben's malt liquor in Fort Smith that evening, the cranes could have transferred their nesting area to a different part of the wilderness. Since the birds live in isolated family groups, often separated by as much as twenty miles, it didn't seem likely that the entire flock might have rejected the traditional nesting grounds as if of one mind, but McGhee knew that wild creatures sometimes did the unlikely. McGhee liked wild creatures. He had once elbowed his wife awake in the middle of the night to tell her, quite factually, “Wild animals don't snore.” That was a month before the breakup. Ah, well. McGhee ordered another Uncle Ben's, deciding not to sound a crane panic until he and his pilot had looked further.

The following day, the two men applied closer scrutiny to the usual whooper habitat. They flew so low they were practically sodomized by cattails. No birds. The day after that, they surveyed the area south of the traditional nesting grounds, whirring above the banks of the Little Buffalo River and its marshy tributaries, the logical (?) places for a whooper relocation. Not so much as a snowy pinfeather tickled their eyes. That evening, Jim McGhee radioed Ottawa.

From the capital came the skinny, pipe-smoking official of the Canadian Wildlife Service. He was not yet showing signs of nervousness, but he was soon to be rattling like the muffler on a hula girl's convertible. The official enlisted four additional helicopters in the search. For a week they went through the wilderness the way the Errol Flynn Memorial Panty Raid Society went through the coed dorms at Kansas State University that terrible night in 1961—but with nowhere near the success.

At last the official — O champagne of trembles, O waterfall of bones — had no choice but to notify the insufferable Americans. Both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Audubon Society responded at once. It was ascertained and ascertained again that fifty-one whoopers, in groups of one to three families, had left the Aransas refuge during the third week of April. Aransas's superintendent testified that the cranes' mating dances had been unusually athletic that year, but there was no reason to believe that they were having a last fling.

About midway in migration, the whoopers normally stopped for several days of rest and recreation along Nebraska's Platte River. There the stiff-legged birds would stride in agitated dignity, like so many Prince Philips pacing outside the quarters of the queen, as they hunted the river banks for frogs, scratched in the sandbars for mollusks or stalked grasshoppers in the open stretches of high grass. It was standard procedure for governmental agents to take inventory of the cranes during the Platte River stopover, but thereafter to rely for migration information upon voluntary reports from citizens until Jim McGhee made his annual nesting count. This year was no exception, and the wildlife wardens who monitored the cranes in Nebraska now reiterated their reports that the big birds had been all present and accounted for and looking as healthy as rich men's children before the ennui sets in. A farmboy and a telephone lineman had reported seeing separate whooper flights over southwestern South Dakota. After that, nothing.

Between Murdo, South Dakota, and the Alberta — Northwest Territories nesting grounds, the cranes had disappeared. Canadian officials eyed the Americans suspiciously. American officials eyed the Canadians suspiciously. Was the highest card in the Deck of Birds up somebody's sleeve?

An American plane traced the whooping crane flyway from Nebraska to the Saskatchewan border. A Canadian plane followed the migration route from the U.S. line to the nesting grounds. Nada.

“We're scheduling daily flights along the flypath,” announced the Americans. “We're scheduling daily flights along the flypath,” announced the Canadians. The first American flight passed just out of view of the Rubber Rose, where tiny Lake Siwash was shimmering like a pool of cowgirl tears.

The calendar had dipped its muzzle into late May — nearly two weeks after Jim McGhee's infamous “routine” flight — when the craneless news was broken to the public. A terse, unemotional press release from the Department of the Interior, an announcement that urged citizens to cooperate by reporting any and all sightings of tall white birds, hit the media like a ton of human interest bricks. Every TV network and most of the nation's papers gave the story major play. The scope of the coverage caught the government off-guard, as did public response. Interior's switchboards were flashing like a light-show gone stoned mad at the Fillmore, and every ecology-oriented organization from the Sierra Club to the Girl Scouts wired pledges of assistance. The following day the Secretary of the Interior himself was obliged to call a press conference (It made the six o'clock and eleven o'clock news). “Umm, ah, er, hum,” said the Secretary. “No cause for extreme concern.” Although the cranes constitute a single flock, they travel in smaller units of one to three families, the Secretary explained. And the families nest miles apart. There was no probable way the entire flock could have met foul play ("Ahem. No pun intended") either from humans or the natural elements. The whooper flyway passes almost entirely over isolated regions, and the Canadian wilderness is vast. Sooner or later these splendid birds will turn up. Even should they remain incommunicado all summer, they would certainly be back in Texas come fall.

The Secretary believed his remarks, as men of his station sometimes do. His underlings in the Fish and Wildlife Service believed them, too. Up in Canada, the skinny, pipe-puffing official shook like the icecubes in a fire-eater's highball and was not so sure. As for field biologist Jim McGhee, he sucked on a bottle of Uncle Ben's, signed another alimony payment, stared at aerial maps of the terrain he would search next day and muttered to no one in particular, “Wild animals don't snore.”

80.

DESPITE HIS TITLE, the Secretary of the Interior was a shallow man. He was given to surfaces, not depths; to cortex, not medulla; to the puff, not the cream. He didn't understand the interior of anything: not the interior of a tenor sax solo, a painting or a poem; not the interior of an atom, a planet, a spider or his wife's body; not the interior, least of all, of his own heart and head.

The Secretary of the Interior knew, of course, that there was a brain in his head and that the human brain was Nature's most magnificent creation. It never occurred to the Secretary of the Interior to wonder why, if the brain, with its webs and cords and stems and ridges and fissures, with its glands and nodes and nerves and lobes and fluids, with its capacity to perceive and analyze and refine and edit and store, with its talent for orchestrating emotions ranging from eye-rolling ecstasy to loose-bowel fear, with its appetite for input and its generosity with output; it never occurred to the Secretary to wonder why the brain, if it is as awesomely magnificent as it purports to be, why the brain would waste its time hanging around inside a head such as his.

Maybe some brains just like the easy life. The Secretary of the Interior did not put many demands on his brain. Mainly, he wanted only to be informed if this or that action would be politically expedient. For example, the Secretary went to his brain there where it was lolling lazily in its cerebral hammock, sipping oxygen and blood, absently humming some electrochemical folderol culled from two billion years of continuous biological chatter; a brain that bore no neon scars of love, that showed no signs of having ever been dazzled or crunched by art, that obviously was not staying awake nights puzzling over what Jesus really meant when he said, “If a seed goes into the ground and dies, then it will grow"; a brain that would have appeared preponderantly placid were it not for the skinning knife, the automatic rifle, the bazooka, the machete, the napalm, clubs, arrows and grenades that were piled under its pillow where they might be employed instantly to chop, gut, bludgeon, burn and blast the very first mouse squeak that might threaten it; the Secretary went to his brain, prodded it and asked it how he might end this whooping crane hubbub in a manner advantageous to himself.

His brain's immediate reaction (yawn) was that the problem should be passed up the line to some other brain to solve. That, however, was not feasible this time. The only person up the line was the President, and the President's brain, having been finally cornered after a lifetime of cheating, conning, lying, hustling and vampiring greedily on jugulars public and private, was rolled up like a sick armadillo at the moment and could not be enlisted. Should he get through to the President he could expect only that the President would yell, “Shove those fucking birds up your goddamned ass! What are you doing to protect me?” or something, and the Secretary did not wish to be yelled at by the President. Should he speak to one of the President's intimate advisers, he would be told in an aseptic German accent that the matter should be turned over to the CIA, and while the Secretary was not entirely opposed to the high aides' method of putting annoying problems in the hands of the secret police, he wasn't certain that it was expedient to have his own authority thus usurped.

No, sorry, brain, fat old pal, but you and the Secretary must work it out yourselves.

Under normal conditions, the Secretary might have donned the Pendleton wool shirt his wife had given him for their twenty-second wedding anniversary (Or was it the twenty-third? His brain couldn't remember), requisitioned a jet and gone out personally to lead a massive crane hunt. Now that would have been good politics. Ha ha! Then, when those kooky environmentalists got in a snit because his branch of government was allowing industry to develop the land the way God intended it to be developed, he could say, “Trust me, friends; I have proven myself an ardent conservationist. I am the man who rescued our whooping cranes!”

Alas, normal conditions did not prevail. The major oil companies were in the act of pulling off a daring economic coup, a brilliant piece of business, on the whole, but one that had of necessity created a simulated shortage of petroleum products, and the citizenry, not understanding what was best for it, was bemoaning what had been labeled an “energy crisis.” The average working man was a helluva lot more concerned about the energy crisis than he was about a missing flock of goony birds, the Secretary reasoned quite accurately; the Secretary wasn't convinced the average working man gave a moldy tail feather about those missing birds. Were the Secretary to authorize a large-scale air search for the whoopers, there would most surely be adverse reaction to the quantities of fuel an expedition of that size would require. He simply could not justify such an expenditure of precious petroleum.

So he would do this: he would keep a single light plane plying the wide and capricious migration route; one plane, in the air daily. If the working stiffs complained, he could say, “We've got a little bitty economy-sized Cessna looking around for those birds, boys; that's it.” If the conservationists bitched, he could say, “I've got a modern up-to-date reconnaissance aircraft with radar and all the latest equipment in the sky this very moment searching every inch of isolated territory for those marvelous herons, and I won't rest until they are safely back where they belong.” Umm. Yes. Yes, indeed. All bases touched. Good work, faithful brain. You've earned a siesta.

Politics served, the Secretary reassured himself that the herons or cranes or whatever they were would turn up in the near future. Good Lord, there were hundreds of square miles of lowland marsh in Saskatchewan that hadn't even been peeked at yet. The birds were in there, probably, or nestled into some muskeg swamp in the Canuck boonies. They'd show up eventually, safe and sound. If only the media would let the matter drop, the public majority would forget it quicker than a Bufferin can dissolve in the cutaway belly of a TV doll.

Indeed, the media might have let the matter drop. And the masses might have forgotten the vanished birds. If it hadn't been for Jim McGhee.

One evening toward sunset, the Canadian field biologist stood up from his bottle of Uncle Ben's and walked away into the bush without pack or provisions.

On his third morning in the wilderness, after three chill nights among sleepers who do not snore, a bedraggled McGhee was sitting on a log when he saw a snake slink by. The snake was moving fast. It carried a card under its tongue. The card was the jack of hearts. “I must get to Delores del Ruby at once,” hissed the snake. It slithered away toward the south.

Behind in Fort Smith, McGhee had left a note. There was no mention in the note of McGhee's ex-wife or of his two little freckle-faced sons. But the note made numerous references to whoopers, closing, in fact, with the line “I have gone to join them in extinction.”

So, to the Secretary of the Interior's chagrin, the missing flock was once again warm copy. The flurry touched off by Jim McGhee was characterized, somewhat sensationally, by this Page One-filling headline in the New York Daily News: WHOOPING CRANE SUICIDE.

81.

SISSY. You darling. What's happening? You're holed up on East Tenth Street, growing pale. Pale as a phantom tangled in lace curtains. Pale as Easter. Pale as the foam on a maniac's lips. Even your thumbs are losing their cheery sanguine sheen.

What's happening, honey? Outside, it's turning warm. Folks in the less respectable tenements are beginning to take the evening air from their fire escapes. Down the street, below Avenue B, the Puerto Rican husbands have moved their domino games onto the sidewalks. The little bow-wows and woof-woofs are starting to pant again. Always a bad sign. Julian says you won't be using your air conditioner as much this summer. Energy crisis.

Sissy, the sun is making personal appearances daily, hamming it up in typical Leo fashion; but you, what do you think you are, a mushroom? Two mushrooms?

Unquestionably, you have a lot to think over. If you have lived your whole life in an unrealistic manner, as so many people have claimed, then you suppose that for the past year and a half you have been taking reality lessons. You've had some powerful teachers, too. Julian, Bonanza Jellybean, the Chink, Dr. Robbins.

From two of those teachers you have learned that in olden times everything was run by women. And that everything was better then. That is stunning information. You wonder what it should mean to you, personally. Julian says it's rubbish, that most anthropologists dispute the matriarchal theory. On that subject, Dr. Robbins has been silent.

Dr. Robbins does telephone you, however. About once a week. Just checking up on a former patient, he says. His style amuses you. He invites you to lunch, to opium dens, to a flea circus. You refuse. You think he wants to fuck you. It would be fun, but not worth it. Definitely not worth it. You may know next to zilch about reality, but you know a thing or two about magic. Your thumbs taught you. Magic requires a certain purity. Without purity, magic weakens. You still have hopes that you and Julian can create together a magical relationship. So you try now to keep it pure.

Julian has become quite understanding. He doesn't interrupt your thinking anymore. You sit on the bed by the empty birdcage, run through your exercises and let the cow of your mind eat its way out of the haystack that has collapsed on it. You feel that you will stay in this new life that is so much stranger to you than your old strange one. You feel that you will stay with Julian. In a year or two, when the time is right for both of you, you think you might have Julian's baby.

Oh Sissy! Have you forgotten, then, Madame Zoe's prophecy?

82.

SISSY, don't you believe you ought to go out for a hot dog? Or a wedge of pizza? You know, some delicacy that can be balanced between sets of fingers without involving thumbs. Up First Avenue, near Bellevue Hospital, there's a pushcart. The walk would do you good. The sunshine.

Couldn't you think just as well, if you must think, in Tompkins Square Park? On a wino-nourishing bench where pigeons pop their buttons? You have a way with birds.

Clever, isn't it, Sissy, the way the author turned the subject to birds? Have birds been on your mind lately? What was your reaction to the article in this morning's Times? The one that reported that Congress had given the Justice Department the authority to deal severely with any person or persons found to be interfering with the safety or free movement of the world's last flock of whooping cranes.

You say you aren't thinking about whooping cranes? Well, if you say so.

You aren't thinking about cranes this morning. You're thinking about. . time.

The Clock People are waiting for the end of time. The Chink says it's going to be a long wait.

You wonder, as so many have wondered, did time have a beginning? Will it stop? Or are the past and the future manufactured by the present? Such questions are as important as they are unfashionable.

You read where Joe DiMaggio ordered that fresh red roses be placed on Marilyn Monroe's grave every three days, forever. Not for Joe DiMaggio's lifetime, mind you, or the duration of Hollywood, its films and its cemeteries, but forever. And you think, “If there is an end of time, Joe DiMaggio is going to have some money coming back.”

83.

SO. SISSY. You don't go out much. Only occasionally do you even look outside. From your windows as from windows everywhere, nowadays, you can see the cake crumbling.

Julian says we're heading for a depression. Or worse. He mentions famines, plagues, purges. When he says these things, he cocks his dark head to one side, as if, like the Mohawk he ought to be, he can hear famine gathering its dusty forces, preparing to march over from the Sahara, India, Starving Armenia. He hears Panic in the dressing room, putting on its skeleton suit. He hears the sizzling silence of the energy crisis. “Here in America we are reverting to our native fascism,” says this native American, ignoring twelve thousand years of his own people's history. The international situation is desperate, as usual.

Not overly optimistic, Julian feels, nevertheless, that if a liberal Democrat is elected President in 1976, a world economic poop-out can be avoided. As for Dr. Robbins, he just laughs into the telephone. “The cake is crumbling,” he says to you in an awed whisper. “Isn't it grand?”

You don't know if it's grand or horrible. You only know that hitch-hiking didn't bring it on. Hitchhiking can't stop it.

In the tub, you cause a thumb to plow through the scented water. How evenly the bubbles break before its sleek snout; how perfect its wake. Then you jerk your wrist in a special, staccato way, and suddenly the thumb is twitching crazily underwater, like a diver who contacted mercury poisoning sucking off a mermaid.

Thus you amuse yourself. You smile. But there are wrinkled tracks on your brow. Did whooping cranes make them?

What's that? Someone at the door. Julian leaves off his painting to answer. Well, surprise, surprise. You couldn't mistake that nasty drawl.

The Countess hasn't been around in quite a while. Julian painted ahead and has no more to do for him. And since your husband has begun to paint for a German account, it isn't likely he'll get any more calls for pastoral landscapes suffused with the luminous haze of Yoni Yum or silvered with dreamy drops of Dew. The Countess likes to be exclusive, if not unique. As for you, you haven't had a modeling assignment since the Dakota debacle. Your eyes, while still beautiful, have lost some of their innocence; your mouth, while still ripe, has lost some of its perk. Too, your little sojourn in Dr. Goldman's spa for half-rich fuck-ups couldn't have enhanced your career. Oh well. You dry and wrap yourself and patter in to see your old benefactor.

Powdered stubble pricks your face as you kiss. Upon his monocle are the dried deposits of sauces that no French chef will ever stir again. In a voice that sounds the way a can of cheap dog food would sound if a can of cheap dog food could speak, he tells you you are looking swell. “Domesticity, the male's meat, the female's poison, seems to become you,” he says. A can of Skippy with a slight lisp.

And how is the Countess? “Shit O dear!” he exclaims. “Sales are down more than ten percent. Are things so desperate that women can't spend a few pennies to control their atavistic stench? I ask you. A samurai warrior, before going into battle, would burn incense in his helmet so that if an enemy took his head he would at least offer his beheader a pleasant aroma. Now, it appears to me that no matter how bleak a future a woman faces, she could at least face it with an inoffensive vagina.”

“You're convinced, then, the future is bleak?” asks Julian. He had been painting a sprite beside a pellucid pool.

The Countess's store teeth clack compulsively. Rat a tat tat! Dental gangbusters. “Indeed,” he says. “This country is in one hell of a mess.”

“It all depends on how you look at it,” you say.

Julian and the Countess pause and stare at you expectantly. They suppose that you are going to explain yourself, to tell them how national events may be viewed in a light that makes them seem less messy. But you have nothing to add. You meant only what you said, that it all depends on how you look at it, that everything, always, depends on how it is perceived, and that the perceiver has the ability to adjust his perceptions.

Conversation resumes. Julian and the Countess make small talk about small issues: the economy, politics. You are in postbath terrycloth, feeling a bit drowsy.

Suddenly, the Countess whirls at you. He gets right in your face. His smile looks as if it had been rear-ended at an intersection. He cracks a question at you; it is like Delores cracking her whip. “Why haven't you spoken out about the whooping cranes, Sissy?” Crack!

“What. . what do you mean?”

“You know very well what I mean. I've been working day and night in the lab and haven't paid attention to the news. But last evening I heard that the whooping cranes were missing. The whole bloody flock. Truman gave me the details. He was practically in tears. There's been a furor about it. .”

“Yes, it's been in the papers incessantly,” interrupts Julian.

“There's been a furor about it, and rightly so. My question is, why haven't you spoken out? I know where those cranes are, and so do you.”

Julian gawks at you. Bewilderment widens his eyes.

“What do you mean?” Your voice is as soft and tremulous as a butterfly's good-by.

“Sissy, don't play dumb with me! You're a good model but a shitty actress. The cowgirls are involved in this whooping crane disappearance. You know perfectly well they are. Last seen in Nebraska. Didn't make it to Canada. Siwash Lake is between Nebraska and Canada. The cowgirls have possession of Siwash Lake. And who else but Jellybean's wild cunts could possibly conceive of doing something so diabolical as to tamper with the last flock of some nearly extinct birds? Of course they're behind it. Of course they are. How much do you know about it? Have they murdered those cranes the way they murdered my moo cows?”

“I don't know anything about it,” you protest. You sense your pale flesh turning paler.

Julian continues to gawk, but now his eyes have been narrowed by suspicion. The Countess leans so far into your face that you are almost wearing his monocle.

“Sissy, you're either a liar or a fool,” the Countess spits, “and you may be a weirdo but I've never known you to be stupid. You're trying to protect those scuzzy bitches. Well, let your conscience be your guide, as my mommy used to say, but it won't work. I have a call placed to the Secretary of the Interior, a simple jerk but a jerk who never forgets a political favor. I'll be speaking to him right after lunch. And I'm going to tell him where to find his whooping cranes. I'd tell the President directly, if he wasn't busy driving himself berserk trying to avoid stepping in his own shit. But the Interior Secretary will do. He's a law and order man, and he'll take care of it nicely. He'll also take all the credit for it, but don't think he won't find a way to reward me. Of course, it will be nearly reward enough just seeing those cowgirls get what's coming to them. Those stinking sluts are going to suffer. .”

There is then a sound such as neither the Countess nor Julian Gitche has ever heard. They do not know, are never to know, whether the sound issued from your throat or was produced by your first or most preaxial digit as it was thrown through air. In any case, that sound is quickly obscured by another, the sound of your right thumb striking — with astonishing force — the Countess's face.

Immediately, the thumb strikes again, this time shattering the Countess's monocle against his eye.

“Shit O dear,” the Countess gasps. His dentures fall onto the shag rug, as if to graze there.

Then. . O my God and Goddesses!. . Can you believe it?. . The left thumb strikes.

Thumbs that not once in a lifetime had been raised in anger; thumbs that had known risk often but never violence; thumbs that had invoked and mastered secret Universal Forces without acquiring the faintest stain of evil; thumbs that had been generous and artful; thumbs that were considered so delicate and precious that their owner would not so much as shake hands for fear of damage; those same thumbs, wound 'round with the glory of a million innovative and virtuoso hitchhikes, are now smashing the face of a human being.

What are you doing, Sissy? I'll tell you what you're doing. You're swinging them like ballbats, like the legendary swatters of Babe Ruth, socking flaming homers over the left-field fence of Hell. Beads of blood land noiselessly upon the keys of the white piano.

Julian is paralyzed. He cannot stop you. He cannot speak. You continue to swing and swat. The Countess is out on his feet. His eyes are closed. His legs wobble. He does a pathetic dance, like a drunken old fool trying to boogie with a chorus girl. Coagulating polka dots turn his linen suit into clown garb. He topples forward to meet your onrushing thumb (the thumb that once made the Pennsylvania Turnpike into a playground); the thunder of it straightens him up, sends him over backward. Motionless, he lies on the floor, a crimson part in his thinning hair, a bright ooze at each nostril.

The poodledog, Butty, short for Butterfinger, had been awakened by the commotion and had trotted into the living room to check it out. You notice he is growling at you now, baring his teeth at your unprotected ankles. You catch him broadside with a low swing, sending him flying to the opposite wall, where he flattens out with a breathless whimper against a Dufy lithograph. Poodle and print drop to the carpet together, a heap of broken glass, doggy curls and images of sailboats so fanciful they seemed suited only for lakes of lemonade.

Julian finds his voice. “Sissy,” he says, each syllable an organ note of horror, pumped from the pipes at a Dracula matinée, “Oh Sissy. What have you done?”

Of course, he knows what you have done; it is all too obvious. What Julian means is why did you do what you did, how could you have done it. And you are incapable of telling him. You emerge from your trance of fury, observe the aftermath with clear if disbelieving eyes, yet nowhere inside you is there an explanation dying to catch the next bus downtown. The word cowgirls starts to form in your mouth, but it dissolves.

Never mind. This is no time for explanations. Somebody had better call an ambulance.

84.

WHATEVER ONE'S THEORY OF TIME, one had to admit that the big clock in the hospital corridor moved unusually slowly. One could imagine its springs having been French-kissed by the junior jam-taster at Knott's Berry Farm.

Seated on a spotless wooden bench that had known neither pigeon nor wino, Sissy and Julian stared at the clock, waiting for its minutes to chase its hours around — but it was a warm day and the minutes were walking.

How many hours passed before the surgeon emerged from his operating room? Sissy and Julian didn't know. The clock could not be believed. When the surgeon finally did emerge, the Gitches rose to meet him. He addressed them with efficient gravity.

“Well, he's not out of danger, but I think we can safely say he's going to make it. I'd be pretty surprised if he didn't. However, there is evidence of injury to the frontal lobe, and I have reason to fear that this injury may be permanent. The patient may never again function as a normal human being.”

“Brain damage,” muttered Julian, shaking his head. Then, more distinctly, if somewhat hysterically, he asked, “You mean he's going to be a vegetable?”

Sissy, to whom abnormal function was old hat, could not prevent her mind's eye from focusing upon certain apparitions: a monoclewearing asparagus, for example; turnip teeth clamped upon an ivory cigarette holder; a tomato made redder by Ripple; Veggie the Gay Cucumber. To drive these images from view, she re-examined her thumbs. They were sore and bruised, but essentially unimpaired. All those years she had underestimated their physical strength.

“Vegetable?” repeated the doctor. He closed his eyes momentarily, as if he, too, were visited by strange hallucinations from the produce stalls. “Vegetable? I wouldn't say that, no. We won't ascertain the extent of the injury for some days, but there is a genuine possibility of severe and lasting behavioral defects. I wouldn't classify it in the vegetable category, however.” The surgeon didn't mention animal or mineral.

Julian asked a few more questions. The answers added little to what had been said. Preparing to take his leave, the surgeon spoke to Sissy. “Mrs. Gitche, this hospital had no choice but to report this matter to the authorities. You might appreciate being informed that a warrant for your arrest has been prepared. If I were you, I'd go down to police headquarters right now and, er, negotiate. Considering the circumstances, the, ah, unusual and personal nature of the, er, instrument that caused the injury, well, you wouldn't want the press to get wind of this, I wouldn't think. .”

“Oh, we will, Doctor,” blurted Julian. “We'll go immediately.”

Julian was fibbing. He wanted Sissy to turn herself in, but not immediately. “Let's go home first,” he said.

“But why?” protested Sissy. “Hadn't we best just get on down there and get it over with?”

“Sweetheart, you look dreadful. Dreadful. That old jumpsuit. It's even got blood on it. You haven't a trace of make-up. I want you to come home and let me help you into the dress I bought you, the party dress, the low-cut one. And make yourself up. You're a beautiful woman and there's no harm in taking advantage of it. We'll let the authorities know we're citizens of some standing. It's important to impress them. Cops are just as susceptible to physical charm as any other men. Turn them on a bit, if that's what it takes. It'll go easier for you. Here, you wait here. I'll duck into the gift shop” (They were now in the hospital lobby) “and get you some rouge. You never wear it, and you're looking pale.” Julian headed for the cosmetics counter, where he found the selection extensive.

There is an animal called the water mongoose. It inhabits the swamps of Asia. The water mongoose has one grand trick up its sleeve (although up its sleeve is not exactly where the trick is at). It can distend its anal orifice until it (the anal orifice) looks like a ripe red fruit. Then the water mongoose stands very, very still. Sooner or later, a bird will come along and start to peck the “fruit.” Whereupon the water mongoose whirls around rapidly and eats the bird. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues could find a parable in that, if it wanted to — but that might be too far-fetched.

85.

CARNIVAL SEASON REARS ITS MAD, masked head just before Ash Wednesday, the austere first day of the Roman Catholic forty-day Lenten fast. Carnival, whether lasting three days, as it does in most places, or two weeks, as it does in a few looser locales, culminates on Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, with particularly riotous merrymaking.

The commonly accepted view is that carnival originated as a final fling on the part of good Christians before they commenced their forty days of fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter. It is written in encyclopedias and taught in universities that the word carnival is derived from the Latin carne levare, meaning “the putting away of flesh.” Thus, it is thought to refer to some festive, last-minute, pre-Lenten carnivorousness, for during Lent none of the faithful may eat meat.

Poppycock. Balderdash. And flapdoodle. In other words, bullshit.

The carnival celebrated in Catholic lands is actually an adaptation of an ancient pagan whoopdedoohoo, the Festival of Dionysus, which in turn was adapted from the still older Haloa and Thesmophoria, two of the fertility festivals of the mother goddess Demeter.

(In Classical Greece, at the time when paternal rule began to ace out maternal, newcomer Dionysus was elevated to the Olympic Council, replacing the hearth goddess, Hestia, and taking over Demeter's festivals. For untold thousands of years, there had been no male deities in Europe. Dionysus, incidentally, was originally associated with psychedelic mushrooms, first the Amanita muscaria and later the smoother, more delightful Psilocybe. As the paternalistic Christian influence gained power, Dionysus was purged of his mushroom practices and was pronounced the god of wine. The Church, and the political and business interests who found Christianity a perfect front, much preferred the masses to use booze, which depresses the senses, instead of mushrooms, which illuminate them, just as they preferred that the aggressive logic of the paternal stereotype supplant the loving grace of maternalism. If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man's worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and lead Western humanity to its present state of decline. Cha cha cha.)

In truth, the word carnival is derived from carrus navalis, “cart of the sea.” This was a boat-shaped vehicle on wheels used in the processions of Dionysus, and from which all kinds of witty and lust-inducing songs were sung. These ship carts, carri navales, making reference as they did to Dionysus' fabled underwater retreat in the grottos of the sea goddess, Thetis, from which he emerged at festival time, were accompanied by musicians and dancers of both sexes, skimpily clad or nude. They continued to be pulled through the streets in European festivals until the later Middle Ages, and today have their less nautical and less naughty counterparts in Mardi Gras floats.

The pagan festivals were deeply entrenched in the hearts and minds of the people, and they weren't inclined to give them up. Substitute the cross of guilt and suffering for the sea cart of joy and fecundity? Somehow that didn't seem like an A-1 good deal. They ran it up a flagpole and only a few paranoiacs and uncontrolled spastics saluted it. So the Church shrewdly compromised. It permitted carnival, but conspired to give it Christian significance, gradually succeeding in divorcing it from carefree fertility and associating it instead with self-denial and death (albeit, at three days, the shortest death in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records— and as Jesus himself once said, “You're either for us or a Guinness").

Reader, the foregoing information concerning carnival is presented here merely as an example of the sort of facts uncovered by Dr. Robbins during his investigation of paganism. If Sissy was content to sit and think about the meaning of her pagan heritage, as described by the Chink, if she was as passive as a baked turkey in her consideration of the pagan potential in modern America (again, as suggested by the Chink), then Dr. Robbins took a more active approach. In the days since he had called in well at the Goldman Clinic, he had engaged in research. Unbiased data about our pagan past was not extensive — our Christian leadership had seen to that — but Dr. Robbins found enough to fascinate him. He had, as a matter of fact, just returned from a profitable morning of scholarship in the public library when his telephone broke a long silence, shrieking from its stationary pedestal as if it thought itself a flashy car being driven at high speeds over back-country roads. Well, even telephones can dream, can't they?

It was Sissy calling. She was upset. In distress. She had just ditched Julian at St. Vincent's Hospital and must see Dr. Robbins at once.

Naturally, Robbins was willing, but he pressed for further details. So Sissy blabbed the whole bloody thing.

“My, my,” said Dr. Robbins. “My oh my. This is bad, this is very bad, but you mustn't think of it as a razor held to the Dali's mustache of your life. Violence stinks, no matter which end of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan. Sometimes people are just begging for that frypan, and if we weaken for a moment and honor their request, we should regard it as impulsive philanthropy, which we aren't in any position to afford, but shouldn't regret it too loudly lest we spoil the purity of the deed.

“Now. I don't really want you coming to my place, in case the cops trace you here. I've got half a kilo of grass stashed here, not to mention a couple of other embarrassing odds and ends. So, tell you what we can do. We'll meet at six this evening in my aunt's house in Passaic, New Jersey. My aunt's away and I have the keys. A safer place you couldn't find. You can get to Passaic, can't you? It's only twenty minutes from Manhattan. Here's my aunt's address.

“Say, Sissy, by the way. Did you know that Nijinsky once played tennis in Passaic, New Jersey? He did. Only time he played tennis in his life. And the only historical event I would like to have filmed. Nijinsky playing tennis in Passaic, New Jersey. Wow! Now that'd be a movie fit to be shown to Jesus, Dionysus and Demeter.”

86.

AFTER TALKING WITH DR. ROBBINS, Sissy felt better — but not much. To the knapsack of her guilt was now added another rock, this one flecked with running-out-on-Julian.

“Maybe it's just that my perspective is wrong,” ventured Sissy. She thought that she would see if there wasn't some positive way to view her actions. It might take time (ah, time!) to arrive at such a vantage point, however, and urgency was running up her leg like a mouse.

After that thumping she'd given the Countess, the authorities would say she was crazy for sure. And one thing she did not want, could not tolerate, was to be committed to the Goldman Clinic or its state-funded equivalent. She felt guilt, she felt sorrow, shame and confusion, but she did not feel that she owed society any accounting for her behavior, as bad as her behavior might have been. Society had never looked upon her with favor. It had been eager to write her off when she was just a little girl. Society might have institutionalized her way back then if she had cooperated. Society had neither liked her nor believed in her, but luckily she had liked herself and believed in herself, and although she recognized that she had floundered in recent years, erred in recent hours, she still liked and believed, and the reckoning she must make was with herself, not with society, especially not with a society that was willing to put a matter as delicate as this in the kitten-crusher hands of the police.

Thus, Sissy Hankshaw Gitche, a self-recognized ongoing system of uncommon abilities and unexpected vices, headed for New Jersey; for options, alternatives, choices. And didn't it feel sweet to be up to her armpits in traffic again, to be dancing cheek to cheek with traffic, to be charming the deadly snake of traffic, to be sticking her thumb into the pie of traffic, Oh she could bouncy-wouncy baby Volkswagens on her knees and suck on Italian racing cars just to freshen her breath, traffic was her element, her medium, the vocabulary from which she snatched the words of her poem, Oh didn't her hands come back to life with a squeal! and wasn't it swee-eet?

So happy was Sissy to pick that conservative blue Econoline van out of the throng on Canal Street and draw it to her as if on a string that she failed to look over its driver until she was seated and he was stomping the gas-feed. It was with a sense of disgust at her own failure that she scrutinized his sweaty brow, his smug, hot leer, his eyes so starved for erogenous scenery that they did not register her thumbs. Her heart sank another twenty fathoms when she saw his gun and his knife.

87.

LAWS, it is said, are for protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months. (Ford Foundation, are you reading this book?)

The first laws prohibiting hitchhiking were enacted in New Jersey in the 1920s to keep city-bred flapper freeloaders away from selected resorts and rural paradises. New Jersey remains one of two states (Hawaii, the other) where hitchhiking is both completely illegal and the law strictly enforced. It was because of the Jersey ban, and the toughness of its state patrol, that Sissy had selected the blue van. She was on Canal Street, near the entrance to the West Side Highway. She had hoped to get a ride up the West Side Highway and over the George Washington Bridge, putting her as close as possible to Passaic, keeping her hitching — as much as she capital-A Adored it! — to a minimum once in Jersey. The blue van had Jersey plates. That's why she chose it.

It had been a mutual choice, for the blue van's driver had spotted Sissy a block away and had manuevered into the curb lane. He had started talking even before he braked, and once Sissy was aboard he was rapping away at such an amphetamine clip that had he died at that moment the undertaker would have had to beat his tongue to death with a stick.

He was also unzipping his pants.

“I'm going to give it to you like you've never had it before. Oh, you didn't know it could be this good. You're gonna like it. You're gonna like it. You're gonna like it so good. You're gonna love it so much you're gonna cry. You're gonna cry and cry. Do you like to cry? Do you like it when it hurts a little bit? Whatever happens to you, it'll be worth it. The way I'm gonna give it to you, it'll be worth anything. Everything. Go ahead and cry if you want to. I like it when women cry. It means they appreciate me.” Etc., etc.

The van pulled off Canal, down a deadend street between warehouses. In the rear of the vehicle was a soiled mattress.

By then, the driver had his organ out in the late afternoon sunlight. It was erect and of Kentucky Derby proportions.

With a swift swoosh that gave the June air bad memories of winter, Sissy's left thumb came down hard on the penis top, nearly cleaving it to the root. The driver howled. His finger fumbled for gun trigger. Before he could squeeze it, however, the thumb splatted between his eyes. Twice. Three times. He lost control of the van. It lumbered into a street lamp, giving both van and lamppost a taste of what it's like to be organic.

Sissy lept from the vehicle and ran. Four or five blocks away, out of breath but safe in the neon aura of a just-closing working man's luncheonette, she stopped to rest. The tears the rapist had longed for made their appearance, heavy and hot, just the way he would have liked them. The thought of it made her stop crying.

She examined her thumb. Fresh bruises, like blue jellyfish, were floating lazily to the surface. Sore muscles twitched mechanically, as if typing an essay: “The Thumb As Weapon.”

“Twice in one day,” Sissy sobbed. “Twice in one day.”

Abruptly, the sobbing ceased. With a look of determination that could have served as the dust jacket for any number of how-to-succeed manuals, Sissy announced in a clear, hard voice, “Okay! If they want me normal, then normal, by God, is what they're gonna get!”

She hailed a taxi. Rode uptown to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Bought a one-way ticket to Richmond, Virginia.

As the southbound Greyhound hissed through the Jersey flats, she recalled that several centuries ago this fetid fairyland of oil refineries had been jumping with whooping cranes.

88.

THIS NOVEL now has as many chapters as a piano has keys (Eat your hearts out, ye writers of ukuleles and piccolos!), and in point of fact it would be but moderately trite to label this the “piano chapter.” For as Chapter 88 rears its hastily typed head, Julian Gitche is sponging dried Countess blood from the keyboard of his white baby grand, sponging, gulping Scotch and going slightly bananas wondering what has happened to his wife.

And up in Passaic, New Jersey, where Nijinsky once played tennis in ballet slippers, there was another piano, this one a battered old upright in the parlor of an aunt. And there, another man was puzzling where Sissy might be.

Dr. Robbins didn't play the piano. In order to distract his thoughts from the fact of Sissy's lateness (if one's philosophy of time permits one to accept as facts such notions as late or early), he toked on reefers and outlined a movie. Not a movie of Nijinsky leaping twenty-five feet in the air trying to backhand a lob in Passaic, New Jersey: it was too “late” for that, time and brain being the odd couple they are. No, Dr. Robbins was thinking how it might be interesting to make a film from Adelle Davis's perennial best seller, Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit.

Representing a classic confrontation between good and evil — in this case, nutrition versus unhealthy diet — the story had definite box office appeal. The role of the hero, Protein, probably should be filled by big Jim Brown, although Burt Reynolds undoubtedly would pull strings to try to get the part. Sunny Doris Day would be a clear choice to play the heroine, Vitamin C, and Orson Welles, oozing saturated fatty acids from the pits of his flesh, could win an Oscar for his interpretation of the villainous Cholesterol. The film might begin on a stormy night in the central nervous system. Alarmed, the ever-watchful pituitary gland dispatches a couple of trusted hormones with a message for the adrenals. Even though it's all downstream, the going is rough because of boulders of white sugar and passageways dangerously narrowed due to atherosclerosis. Suddenly. .

Oh come on, Robbins, that's enough! If you can't play the piano, why don't you just watch TV?

89.

SISSY'S BUS, transportation obtained with money instead of magic — alas, our heroine seems to be following in the footsteps of the modern world — rolled into a sleeping Richmond with the milkmen.

Dawn lay on the chops of the city like a washcloth: still, damp, heavy, warm. By the calendar, summer was more than a week away, but heat had caught up with Richmond; it had the seat of Richmond's pants in its teeth.

Pretty swell pants Richmond was wearing these days, too. In 1973, Richmond had moved ahead of Atlanta, the South's showcase city, in per capita income. Almost everywhere Sissy looked, there were signs of prosperity. New office buildings, factories, apartment houses, schools, shopping centers. It was a bit difficult, sometimes, to distinguish one from the other — the factories and schools were especially similar — but there they were, showing confident faces, one and all, to the rising sun, brighter, cleaner, more solid than any pine groves that had ever stood in their places. More permanent? Well, we'll see.

Industry in the city was much more diversified than in the Eisenhower Years. In fact, several major tobacco firms, including Larus Brothers and Liggett & Meyers had discontinued operations in Richmond, and only Philip Morris, with its mammoth new plant and research center, had ventured any notable expansion. Nevertheless, a golden effluvium still toasted the air of South Richmond. At least, it seemed so to Sissy. Maybe it was merely memory speaking into her nostrils.

Prosperity had not overlooked South Richmond. Only recently, the angel of economic visions had flapped its wings in Sissy's old neighborhood, knocking rickety houses to and fro with each vital beat. Every dwelling in her old block had been condemned and evacuated, in preparation for the demolition that, miraculously, fifty years of domestic brawls had not wrought.

The Hankshaw residence had been boarded up clumsily, like a box hastily readied for some funky Houdini's escape trick. It was a house dead on its feet. It looked like the shell for a termite's taco.

Sissy paid the taxi driver and walked to the front door. By pushing strenuously with her shoulder, she was able to separate boards from nails to the extent that the door opened four or five inches. She looked inside.

Sagging linoleum. Peeling wallpaper. Dust doing its dust dance in the morning light. Nothing to indicate that a man and woman had once lived here in love and hate, had conceived in one of these rooms or the other, three children; one of them a daughter distinguished by a certain anatomical slapstick that had caused the man and woman much embarrassment until the daughter had grown into a teen-ager, in this very house, here, dribbling jam on the floor, pee in the bowl and dreams on the pillows, had grown into a teen-ager and run away, never contacting her family again, sparing them further discomfort, forgotten by them, finally unknown to them except as a monster girl that sometimes crawled into their nightmares. Or so Sissy believed.

Just as she turned to leave, however, a widening shaft of sunlight illuminated a corner, instantly remembered as the corner where her mama's sewing table had long stood, and there, thumbtacked at eye level on the wall were six or eight bright pages ripped from magazines, advertisement pages, pages upon which a tall blond girl, hands mysteriously hidden, posed in various romantic settings, urging the women of the world to purchase a well-known feminine hygiene spray. None other.

90.

IN RICHMOND, it was almost possible not to hear the cake crumbling, smell the bacon burning. A recent magazine article had stated, “Unlike most of the nation, Richmond is thriving.” The economic and psychic depression that was sucking the smile off of the face of Western civilization could barely be noticed in this proud Southern town. Of course, Sissy seldom noticed such things, anyhow. What she did notice, on her homecoming day, was a lot of spiffy new cars, many of them British imports (Richmond being obsessively Anglophilic). She thought that the hitchhiking would be interesting here, perhaps more interesting than in her girlhood — but she wasn't hitching. It was inside another taxi that Sissy rode to the midtown medical building where she remembered that Dr. Dreyfus had had his office.

The office was still there, all right, but it had changed. Whereas on Sissy's first visit there had been two or three tastefully framed prints on the wall, the place now looked more like an art gallery than a doctor's office. Everywhere there were reproductions of Picasso, Bonnard, Renoir, Braque, Utrillo, Dufy, Soutine, Gauguin, Degas, Rousseau, Gris, Matisse, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Minet, Menet, Munet and others. Many were not framed, but were pinned to the walls in such close proximity that they frequently overlapped, bumping each other like fish in a school. It was as if a survey of modern French painting had gotten mixed up with an aquarium.

The receptionist was away from her desk, so Sissy stared at the tanks full of Gauguin guppies and Picasso triggerfish. Eventually, a woman came in from a rear cubicle to inform Sissy that the office was closed. Closed? Yes. Permanently. Dr. Dreyfus had retired the previous week and the woman was there putting things in order, referring patients to other plastic surgeons, closing the books and so forth.

“I'd be happy to refer you to someone else,” said the woman, who was short, juiceless and gray, like a village school principal's night on the town.

“Only Dr. Dreyfus will do,” Sissy pleaded.

“I'm sorry,” said the woman.

“But if he just retired last week, he could still do one more operation, couldn't he?”

“I'm afraid not,” said the woman. “Not a chance of it.”

“Is he ill or something?”

The woman didn't answer immediately. “That's a matter of opinion,” she sighed at last. “You're not from around Richmond, are you?”

Before Sissy could answer, the woman snapped, “Ma'am, you're wasting your time and mine. Dr. Dreyfus will not be performing any more surgery, and that's definite. Now, if you don't wish a referral, please excuse me. I've got to start taking those fool pictures down. Oh Lord.”

Like a bad habit, another taxi let Sissy fall into it. She gave the cabbie the address the telephone directory had given her. It was in the West End, in one of the better neighborhoods, although not the best. The best neighborhood in Richmond, as in Heaven, is reserved for those of the Christian persuasion.

Dr. Dreyfus himself answered the door. He hadn't changed much, and he remembered Sissy. Rather, he remembered certain parts of Sissy. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have let her in. He had been bothered by journalists, he explained. He didn't inquire why Sissy had called; he seemed to know. “I'm afraid I can't help you,” he said. “Please, child, don't be dismayed. We all have problems these days. But as the painter Van Gogh said, 'Mysteries remain, sorrow or melancholy remains, but the everlasting negative is balanced by the positive work which thus is achieved, after all.' I don't suppose that means very much to you. Here, you read this while I get out of my dressing robe and into my puttering clothes. Some other physician can help you. This will explain why I cannot.”

To his visitor he handed a clipping from a newsprint periodical. “There have been many other articles, but this one says it most objectively.” He left Sissy alone to read:

Frustrated artist blows med career through nose

As a boy in Paris, Felix Dreyfus had dreamed of becoming an artist. An older cousin who was a guide at the Louvre let him tag along on tours, where he acquired a precocious knowledge of art history. Alas, Felix's parents were philistines who constantly deflated the boy's artistic dreams, while grooming him for a career in medicine.

Young Dreyfus gave in, finishing med school with high marks. If his parents saw in his choice of plastic surgery as a medical specialty the remnants of the old artistic urge — plastic surgery is, after all, a rather sculptural, relatively creative discipline — they did not let on.

Emigrating to the U.S. in the Nazi years, Dr. Dreyfus developed a successful practice in Richmond, Va. There, he was fairly active as a patron of the arts, and accumulated an extensive collection of books on painters and sculptors. He married his nurse, and they led a quiet, comfortable life.

Then, last month, Dr. Dreyfus, 66, undertook to perform cosmetic surgery on a 14-year-old boy, Bernard Schwartz. A routine operation, it was to alter the size and shape of the boy's Semitic nose. Although he specialized in injuries to and deformities of the hands, Dr. Dreyfus had successfully completed many "nose jobs."

When the bandages were removed from Bernie Schwartz's proboscis, however, the boy's horrified parents were gaping at what has been called "the most scandalous incident of deliberate malpractice in the recent history of medicine."

Succumbing, maniacally, to his suppressed artistic drives, Dr. Felix Dreyfus, disdaining marble, clay and plaster to work in living flesh, had sculptured upon the face of little Bernie Schwartz the world's first Cubistic nose!

Bernie's new nose had six nostrils, two in front, two on each side, and three bridges, so that in either profile it looked as if you were seeing it frontally. According to the exuberant Dr. Dreyfus, Bernie's nose is "simultaneously viewed from several aspects, all the aspects overlapping, so that what we have is a nose in totality, and that totality manages to suggest motion, even when static; it shatters the classical idea of the face in which the nose is fixed and unchanging; it is a nose in a perpetual state of ultimate noseness, yet it is on the very verge of the abstract."

Dr. Dreyfus's enthusiasm may be short-lived. The Virginia Medical Board has suspended his license, and it is reported that the surgeon may be permitted to retire as an alternative to being barred permanently from practice. Bernie's parents, unconvinced by the creator's glowing aesthetic evaluation of his work, are suing Dr. Dreyfus for three million dollars. Moreover, the "masterpiece" is doomed. As soon as medically feasible, a team of plastic surgeons in Washington, D.C., will restore the world's first Cubistic nose to a realistic style that promises to please even devotees of Norman Rockwell. Meanwhile, Bernie Schwartz spends a lot of time indoors.

When Dr. Dreyfus returned, rather sheepishly, to the living room, Sissy rushed to embrace him. She was smiling for the first time in more than twenty-four hours. “Oh, Doctor!” she cried. “You've got to do it. You and nobody else should be allowed to take away my gift.”

91.

"AH THE THUMB," mused Dr. Dreyfus, yawning his small eyes so that they might take in the full length and breadth of Sissy's prodigious pucky-wucks. “The thumb, yes. The thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb. One of evolution's most ingenious inventions; a built-in tool sensitive to texture, contour and temperature: an alchemical lever; the secret key to technology; the link between the mind and art; a humanizing device. The marmoset and the lemur are thumbless; none of the New World monkeys has opposable thumbs; the spider monkey's thumbs are absent or reduced to a tiny tubercle; the thumbs of the potto are set at an angle of one hundred eighty degrees to the other digits, making them nonfunctional except as pinchers; the orangutan, which is humanlike to the extent that it is called the 'man of the woods,' has a thumb so tiny in relation to its extremely long curved fingers that its manipulation is only nominal; the thumb of the chimpanzee opposes the bent fingers in a clumsy action, and the gorilla lacks a grip precise enough to hold small objects; the baboon comes close — its thumbs are fully opposable and it has a good precision grip — but have you ever observed the thumb of the baboon, how flat and splay-headed and crudely shaped it is; no, there is but one true thumb on this planet and homo sapiens has got it."

Pause.

“And so you are demanding at last the privileges of thumb that nature has perversely denied you?”

“I just want to be normal,” said Sissy. “Give me that old-fashioned normality. It was good enough for Crazy Horse and it's good enough for me.”

“Ah yes,” said Dr. Dreyfus, smiling weakly, like a duck in dishwater, too embarrassed to quack. “Very well, my dear. Here is what we can do.

“Full normality, whatever that may exactly be, is out of the question. But out of the question comes the answer, so to speak. If your thumb bone — actually, two phalanx metacarpal bones — if your thumb bones were of normal size, then we could merely cut away the excess tissue and sew your thumb inside of your chest for a while, for a skin graft, you see. Then you'd have thumbs that were normal in appearance as well as in function. However, as I recall, your thumb bones are enlarged in proportion to the whole. That makes it more complicated. That calls for pollicerization. One thing a surgeon cannot do is reduce volume of bone. Bone can be shortened but not reduced in size. So. In pollicerization, we make a thumb out of your index finger. We shorten the bone of the index finger, alter its angle and move it over. After a time, it becomes a completely acceptable thumb. But your hands, you realize, would still not be quite normal, because they'd have only four digits a piece. Your present thumbs — there certainly is a peculiar glow about them — would, of course, have to be amputated.”

What??? Feel faint. Ooooo, dizzy. Sick to the tummy. A startle of fishes in the seas of the abdomen. A thick black toxin spews from the heart to numb the teeth. Sissy suffers shortness of breath. The author's own fingers tremble on the keys. Amputation. A leaden word. A word with a built-in echo and a built-in ache. A word off Dr. Guillotine's workbench. A lump in God's gravy. Can thumbs understand the word “amputate” the way whooping cranes understand the word “extinct"?

Felix Dreyfus offered the shaken Sissy a glass of sherry. She declined. Probably not a dram of Ripple in the whole West End. In lieu of alcoholic stimulant, then, the good doctor administered the tonic of conspiracy.

“This will be a risky escapade,” he confided, “but I'm old now and can afford to take risks. I'll not run from Nazis ever again. My brother-in-law is a surgeon. Ha! Some surgeon. He couldn't cut the pimento out of a stuffed olive. He ought to have a red and white striped pole outside of his office. He's employed by the Veterans' Administration. Only the government would hire such a boob. Well, as our luck would have it, he's in residence at O'Dwyre VA Hospital over in South Richmond. I'll have him schedule you for surgery. He owes me thousands; he'll do what I say. Then I'll show up to 'assist' with the operations. I'll use an assumed name. Nobody at O'Dwyre will be the wiser. They're understaffed, outmoded, incompetent and corrupt. The follow-up work I can do here at home. Faintly ingenious, yes? Against all rules, but as the painter Delacroix said, 'There are no rules for great souls: rules are only for people who have merely the talent that can be acquired.' But I don't suppose that means much to you.”

92.

ONCE, a young woman was admitted to a hospital, and no birds sang.

Once, blood was analyzed in a laboratory, and no birds sang.

Once, powerful lamps were turned on in an operating room, and no birds sang.

Once, IV tubes were inserted in veins, and no birds sang.

Once, a young woman was wheeled into surgery, and no birds sang.

Once, an anesthesiologist stuck a needle into a curved and creamy ass, and no birds sang.

Once, an anesthesiologist stuck needles into a long, graceful neck, and no birds sang.

Once, a nurse scrubbed an arm for ten full minutes, and no birds sang.

Once, a body and a table were draped with sheets to create a sterile field, and no birds sang.

Once, a tourniquet was placed on a slender right arm, and no birds sang.

Once, an elastic rubber bandage was applied so tightly it squeezed most of the blood out of an arm, and no birds sang.

Once, a tourniquet was inflated, and not a single ornithological peep was heard.

Once, a surgeon outlined in iodine an incision around the base of a thumb, and still no birds were singing.

Once, pale smooth skin was incised along a premarked line and dissected down to the bone, while silence prevailed in treetop and nest.

Once, arteries and veins were divided and tied, and a nerve was separated and allowed to detract into a wound, without an accompanying warble or whistle or tweet.

Once, a joint was opened, and it wasn't a new roadhouse nor were any of our fine feathered friends chirping there.

Once, a tendons were cut, snapped and allowed to retract like rubber bands, a sound that could not have been mistaken for a meadowlark or a thrush.

Once, a metacarpal bone was fractured with a saw, a task that, due to the unusual size of the particular bone, required such exertion on the part of the surgeon that he could not have heard any birds if they were singing, which they weren't.

Once, a drain was placed in a wound, and not so much as a sparrow opened its mouth.

Once, a woman flesh was sewn shut with four-ought nylon suture, and the beaks of the birds must have been sewn shut, too.

Once, a pressure dressing was applied to a hand, but no amount of pressure could induce the birds to sing.

Once, a tourniquet was deflated, a bloody arm bathed, and a numb young woman rolled to a recovery room, four fingers showing from a bandage and not one of them pointing to the silent skies.

Once, a nurse and two surgeons, their attention directed by an intensifying pinkish glow, turned to stare into a metal pan, where a huge human thumb, disarticulated from the hand it had served (in its fashion), was now flopping about like a trout — no! not flopping aimlessly in breathless panic but, rather, arching and thrusting itself in a calculated and endlessly repeated gesture, the international gesture of the hitchhike, as if, to avoid troubling the world with its great white grief, it was trying to flag a ride On Out of Here.

And no birds sang.

93.

THE SKY was as tattered as a Gypsy's pajamas. Through knife holes in the flannel overcast, July sunlight spilled, causing Sissy's eyes to blink when she stepped outside the long, dark corridors of O'Dwyre VA Hospital. The air was so humid, she felt orchids growing in her armpits.

Masquerading as the pensioned widow of a Vietnam hero, Sissy had been in the hospital for three full days. On this, the fourth morning, the drain had been removed from her wound, a fresh dressing applied and a discharge granted.

On this morning, also, Dr. Dreyfus had learned that Sissy had spent the fortnight prior to her surgery sleeping on the warped linoleum of a condemned house, the rat-slobbered old Hankshaw residence in South Richmond. Now he was driving her to his own house, where his wife (who turned out to be the short gray woman from the office) was preparing a room for her. She was invited to stay with the Dreyfus family until the work on her hands was completed. Because of the magnitude of the wound left by amputating such large digits, Dr. Dreyfus had decided that four operations would be necessary. The first, just done, would remove her right thumb. The second would remove the left. The object of the third would be the pollicerization of the right index finger; the fourth, the left. They would allow six weeks between each operation. One doesn't get to be normal overnight.

Mrs. Dreyfus didn't approve of her husband's illegal ministrations to Sissy, but, like many native Richmonders, she was gracious to the point of agony. Margaret Dreyfus did her bust-a-gut best to make the convalescent feel at home. Meals were regular, cheerful and good. With air conditioning, showers and pitchers of limeade, Sissy's armpits were defoliated, fruit bats discouraged from hanging from her sex hairs. In the evenings, a portable TV was rolled onto the screened-in veranda, the programming left to Sissy's wishes. During late-night thunderstorms, discreet inquiries were made as to whether the guest was nervous. The latest magazines appeared on her bedside table.

If Sissy didn't feel completely at home, it was because Sissy wasn't completely at home; she wasn't completely anywhere, she wasn't complete. Part of her — oh such a part! — was literally missing. Even though it felt as if it were still there, it was gone, gone, gone; gone to her questioning eyes, gone to her fumbling touch, gone from all dimensions except the inexplicable dimension of bioenergy, where its heavy aura pulsated and practiced phantom poses just in case some psychic researcher should start taking Kirlian photographs with a wide-angle lens. Sissy was determined to feel no remorse, but shock showed on her eyeballs like a marmalade glaze.

“Lord!” exclaimed Margaret Dreyfus. “She acts like that big ol' thumb had been her child.”

“No,” corrected her husband. “She acts as if she had been the thumb's child.”

Two weeks after the operation, on the day the stitches were removed, Sissy phoned Marie Barth in Manhattan. She learned that the Countess had survived, although some spots seemed to be missing from his dice. There was a warrant for Sissy's arrest outstanding, but as long as she kept away from New York State, she was safe: The crime was not serious enough for extradition; in fact, in the High Renaissance of crime that New York was now enjoying, Sissy's little assault was considered no more important than, say, the after-hours doodles of one of Botticelli's apprentices. By Marie, Sissy sent word to Julian that she was well and that she would be coming back to him some day, but first she had some changes to go through.

After the call, Sissy felt a bit more perky. Several times she accompanied Margaret Dreyfus on shopping expeditions — to Richmond Kosher Meat Market on West Cary Street and to Weiman's Bakery on North Seventeenth. With Dr. and Mrs. Dreyfus and their son, Max, a law student at Washington and Lee University, she attended movies at the Colonial Theater and the Byrd. There had been few visitors to the Dreyfus home since the Bernie Schwartz scandal, and Sissy found the patio private enough for nude sunbathing. Once, she walked as far as Byrd Park, the weight of orchids and bats dragging her down, and fed the ducks. She returned home saturated, panting, her ears resonant with blessed duck music, and beat Dr. Dreyfus at chess. That night she seemed vaguely joyous.

For the most part, however, Sissy had joined the ranks of the Unhappy Waiters and Killers of Time. Oh God, there are so many of them in our land! Students who can't be happy until they've graduated, servicemen who can't be happy until they're discharged, single folks who can't be happy until they're married, workers who can't be happy until they're retired, adolescents who can't be happy until they're grown, ill people who can't be happy until they're well, failures who can't be happy until they succeed, restless who can't be happy until they get out of town; and, in most cases, vice versa, people waiting, waiting for the world to begin. Sissy knew better than to fall into that dumb trap — certainly the Chink had taught her enough about time so that she needn't ever mark it — but there she was, playing the zombie game, running in place, postponing life until normality was achieved — while simultaneously she mourned the decrease in personal magic that had occurred with the loss of that famous Airstream Trailer of digits, the thumb that had launched a thousand trips.

But one afternoon, some twenty days into July, word was flashed into the Dreyfus home, as it was flashed (impartially and regardless of whether the homeowner had ever turned a nice Jewish boy's nose into a six-sided museum piece) into the homes of all Americans, that. . the whooping cranes. . had been found. And Sissy was jostled awake, alive.

94.

SISSY ONE THUMB watched network news early and late, and Lone Thumb Gitche laid her ear to the breast of the radio, and Little Miss Nine Fingers was first person up mornings to retrieve the Times-Dispatch from the delivery boy's pitch. Scarcely anybody followed the whooping crane “story” more closely than Semi-Thumbelina, the single-minded seraph grounded in Richmond's West End.

As news, whooper developments were overshadowed by events in Washington, D.C., where the President was having a little hand trouble of his own. Which is to say, the President had been caught red-handed, hands redder than a travel poster sunset, pimp red, a red that could enrage bulls and stop locomotives, but not blood red, for blood is sacred and the red that ran off the President's hands was the red of lies and deals and greed and arrogant megalomania. The President's hands had been seen, coast to coast, in the till up to the elbows, and the public — hopelessly brainwashed about the true significance of movements — was more enthralled with the frantic scramblings of the President's crimson hands, wringing and jerking and shaking off bribery, diving for a safe pocket, trying to force their way into a distinguished pair of gloves, than it was by the graceful glidings of new-found whooping cranes over the hills of Dakota.

By no means did the media ignore the whopper saga, however; it was the number two news story in the land, rating for a while more time and space than the international situation, which was desperate, as usual. Thus did Our Lady of the Missing Digit, though she had to saw through cords of political punk to get at heartwood, stack the following facts:

The Countess had had nothing to do with it; his brain — and brains have their weaknesses, as we all know — had been involuntarily tuned to another frequency, perhaps to that channel that broadcasts to mongoloids, sleeping beauties and house cats. Nor, to the Interior Secretary's displeasure, had the government search plane located the cranes, although it had passed within an aeronautical whisker of them on several occasions. No, the Walt Disney Studios cinematographers had simply emerged one day from the Florida swamps, where they had been filming Lunch Time in the Everglades, learned of the whooper disappearance and sent word to the authorities: “Hey, why don't you have a look at little Siwash Lake in the Dakota hills; the cranes stop off there, and there're goings on around that place that you wouldn't believe.”

Very next day, two area representatives of the Fish and Wildlife Service attempted to check out the lake. They drove to the gates of a ranch, where they were turned back by a teen-aged girl with a rifle.

The following morning, the Fish and Wildlife agents were flown over Siwash Lake in a U.S. Forestry Service helicopter. Before shots from a band of young women on horseback drove them away, they observed more whooping cranes than any humans had ever seen all in one place (that is, any humans except those crazy girls, and who in Jesus Jumping Hell were they, anyhow?)

That afternoon, the two representatives of the Fish and Wildlife Service returned to the ranch. With them were two Forest Service rangers, a state game warden, the county sheriff, four deputy sheriffs, Mottburg's town marshall, several of his deputies, the editor of the Mottburg Gazette (who doubled as regional stringer for the Associated Press), a couple of bird watchers and a run-of-the-mill thrill-seeker or two. This party was met at the gate by at least fifteen armed females, mostly between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, in jeans, skimpy tops and Western-style hats and boots. One of the young women, described as extremely attractive, identified herself as Bonanza Jellybean, ranch boss, and told the authorities, “Yep, the birds are here all right. They're in fine shape, and as you musta saw from your f— whirly machine, unrestrained, free to go as they please. But this is private property and you aren't laying a foot on it, none of you.” The cops tried to bluff the cowgirls — for cowgirls were what they were — but it didn't work. “We'll be back with a court order and a fistful of search warrants,” warned the sheriff. To which Ms. Bonanza Jellybean replied, “Just come back with a couple of people who know what they're doing and we'll let 'em on for a nice close look at the birds.” Another young woman, carrying a whip and dressed entirely in black, added, “And make sure those two people are female.” Ms. Jellybean amended that demand. “Make sure at least one of them is female,” she said. “And you'd better do as we say or they may be trouble.” The lawmen told the Wildlife agents they'd get them to the lake then and there if they wanted, but the senior federal representative, as level-headed as a chopping block, replied that force could endanger lives, crane as well as human, and he was sure the problem could be safely solved on the morrow. “Let's get to a phone,” he said to his associate, and as if some Mottburg telephone booth was the last coffee break left in the universe, off all of them rushed.

When the rosy fingers of dawn next strummed the string of the horizon, there was gathered at the Rubber Rose gate the entire party from the previous afternoon, plus nine additional thrill-seekers, eight television journalists, seven newspaper reporters, six officials from the nation's capital, five more deputies, four Audubon Society members, three FBI agents, two well-paid consultants and a CIA man in a pear tree.

The cowgirls had gained in numbers, too; the wide-eyed editor of the Mottburg Gazette counted nearly twice as many as the day before. They were sipping cocoa, brushing one another's hair and rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. Bonanza Jellybean, in a leather skirt so short her crotch thought she hadn't dressed yet, advanced to negotiate with an Assistant Undersecretary of the Interior. She spun a six-gun on her tiny fingers as she talked.

Eventually, it was agreed that two observers would be permitted on the ranch. They were to be the man perhaps most familiar with whooper life, the director of the Aransas, Texas, Wildlife Refuge; and the extremely nervous Inge Anne Nelsen, a professor of zoology at North Dakota State University. Professor Nelsen wanted a cowgirl to remain outside the gates in temporary custody, as insurance against the possibility of the professor herself being held hostage. The request infuriated the Rubber Rose forewoman, the darkly dressed Delores (spell it with an “e") del Ruby. Snapped Ms. del Ruby, “One reason we wanted a woman for this job was so we wouldn't have to put up with that kind of male mentality paranoia provocative bull——.” And Ms. Jellybean scolded the zoologist, “Don't be a traitor to your womb.” At that point, a cowgirl known as Elaine scampered over the gate, volunteering to stay with the authorities. Elaine delighted the cameramen and infuriated the cops by proceeding to hug the Assistant Undersecretary flirtatiously about the neck.

The zoology professor and the Aransas director were given horses, and escorted by a half-dozen mounted cowgirls to the lake. After about two hours, a period during which the journalists unsuccessfully pumped Elaine for information and the lawmen ogled, with that mixture of desire and disgust peculiar to men reared in a Puritanical environment, the cowgirls guarding the gate, the Siwash expedition returned. The government's delegates reported in private to the Assistant Interior Undersecretary (whom Elaine persisted in calling the Inferior Undersexed Assistant), and he, in turn, issued an informal statement to his subordinates and the press.

“It will be my extreme pleasure to report to the President, who has been gravely concerned about the fate of our whooping cranes [hee ha hee, snigger snigger] and to the Interior Secretary and to the American people that the entire flock of cranes is, indeed, at Siwash Lake, and in apparently healthy condition. The cranes have built brooding nests around the whole circumference of the small lake, and have hatched chicks there. Counting the young birds, there are now approximately sixty cranes in the flock.” (Loud cheers from the Audubon section and the free-lance bird watchers.) “While this is good news, it is also quite bewildering. Whooping cranes are territorially minded, militantly so. They have never been known to nest as close as a mile to one another, yet here they are virtually side by side. Furthermore, as long as man has been acquainted with this flock it has nested nowhere but in the wilderness of northern Canada. Why did this year it cut its migration short by over a thousand miles and choose to brood cramped up at this little lake, so close to human beings, when whooping cranes are notoriously shy of humans? Those are perplexing questions, which our best experts will attempt to answer in the near future. For now perhaps, it is good news enough to learn that our cranes are alive and [a furtive glance at the cowgirls] apparently safe.”

On the morning after that one — and days do seem to follow days, don't they, students of time? — as the Assistant Undersecretary and his party pushed its way through the throng that milled outside the Rubber Rose, past writers, photographers, ranchers, loafers, mothers nursing babies, rural punks with T-shirt sleeves rolled up to show off the sum total of their personalities, Indians, tourists, bird-lovers, old men chewing tobacco, runaway daughters wishing to join the cowgirls and, of course, shootout enthusiasts from almost every branch of law enforcement; as the Assistant Undersecretary moved through this faintly festive mob, he was in a conciliatory mood. For one thing, his boss, the Secretary, had advised him to be conciliatory. For another, on the previous evening — and days do seem to antecede days — at the Elk Horn Motor Lodge, the Assistant Undersecretary had sounded out the citizens of Mottburg. He had heard that the cowgirls were tramps, lesbians, witches, dope fiends, that they fornicated with farm animals, subsisted on gook rice and flew funny kites. Yet the natives believed that these same cowgirls, trash as they were, had every right to keep “the government” off their land: prairie folk are decidedly opposed to federal interference. The Assistant Undersecretary paid the heed to local opinion that sailors pissing off bowsprits pay to the wind.

Thus was compromise born. Bonanza Jellybean agreed that Professor Nelsen and the whooper warden from Aransas could visit Siwash Lake twice each week to monitor the cranes. In return, the Assistant Undersecretary would see to it that low-flying aircraft were not allowed over the Rubber Rose. Moreover, he would seek the cooperation of surrounding landowners and the sheriff's department in keeping crowds of the curious away.

(Before the ban on aircraft was enforced, however, each major network filmed aerial footage of Siwash Lake and the cranes thereon. The sight of that pert pond, ringed round with cattail, reed and arrowhead, reflecting sweetly plump hills as a Tantric's eye might reflect his goddess's boobs, caused Sissy to squirm before the TV screen, as if being boiled by her own deep fires.)

Publicly, at least, the government was taking this position: the cowgirls seem to be innocent of any overt wrongdoing so far as the whoopers are concerned. The women admit to feeding the birds, but without apparent intention of interfering with their natural habits. Certainly they haven't tried to exploit the cranes in any way. The fact that they withheld information on the whoopers' whereabouts, and the fact that they fired upon federal agents, is suspicious, and in the latter case might result in charges' being filed, but for the time being, in light of the birds' multiplication and the fact that certain compromises have been reached, the ladies of the Rubber Rose would be extended courtesies and benefits of doubt.

Things went well enough for a week. Then Professor Inge Anne Nelsen requested permission — reluctantly, she professed — to kill a crane. Said she, “The birds' behavior is so atypical, their psychology altered so drastically and, I might add, suddenly, that I can only hypothesize that they are being drugged — unintentionally or otherwise. Ms. Jellybean has refused to allow us to inspect the feed with which they supplement the cranes' natural diet. Therefore, the only recourse is to perform an autopsy on a dead bird.”

“Kill a bird that is on the verge of extinction?” asked the Assistant Undersecretary, and moaned. His ulcer came out of the closet. “Why, we'd be lynched on the steps of the Museum of Natural History.” The noose was tightening around his ulcer already. Any last words, ulcer? Yes. Wahwahwahwahwah! it screamed.

“Consider this,” countered Professor Nelsen. “The cranes didn't migrate to Canada for the summer. Suppose they don't migrate to Texas for the winter? You do know, don't you, Mr. Assistant Undersecretary, what winters are like in this neck of the woods? The flock wouldn't last until Christmas. Better one dead bird than sixty. Sixty is all there is.”

“Permission granted.”

When the professor attempted to carry out the deed, however, she was accosted by cowgirls. They called her a disgrace to the nurturing traditions of womankind. They threatened to paint a mustache on her and shoot off her nipples.

At this point, the government decided to apply a pound of pressure. What the hell, the President was on the verge of leaving the White House via the fire escape; what else could go wrong? The FBI uncovered that the cowgirls didn't have title to the Rubber Rose. They sought out the rightful owner so as to persuade him to evict the young women and/or grant the government unrestricted trespass, but that person proved to be a cosmetics tycoon who had recently suffered severe head injuries and now spent his hours making eyes at the figures on wallpaper while listening to distant winds whistling down the necks of ethereal Ripple bottles.

The authorities had better luck with their next ploy. It was discovered that the Rubber Rose was operating as an unlicensed dairy, selling quantities of goat milk to a Fargo cheese factory. One day, the very day the President ducked out the back door with socks and stocks exploding from his suitcase, an inspector from the county health department paid a visit to the ranch, noted sixteen violations and shut down the dairy operation. Ouch! Deprived of their sole source of income, the cowgirls, indeed, were pressed.

All this Sissy learned from the media, and if the media did not inform her whether or not Delores had had her third peyote vision, or whether Elaine's urinary troubles had cleared up or whether Debbie had yet reached, via one path or another, the peace that passeth all understanding, still it was a tall measure, and she carried it in her head when she was readmitted to O'Dwyre for her second amputation.

95.

STOP, SISSY! Stop, you can't do it. It's unfair and irresponsible. We appreciate your motives; we realize that your intentions are good; we can even detect a certain bravery behind your intransigence, an ennobling sense of sacrifice there; and God knows we are sensitive to the suffering that has sometimes broken loose to come billowing forth from your appendages like the pungent vapors of whales — often it appears that in this life of experience and accommodation we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. But Sissy. . hold on!

To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry. To the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its magic. To the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace. As its options (no matter how absurd or unlikely) diminish, so do its chances for the future.

Sissy, the world needs those unflattering digits of yours, those dazed balloon snakes, those ruddy zucchini, those exclamation points that end with such force the understated sentences of your arms; needs your thumbs — one gone already! — the way it needs the rhino, the snow leopard, the panda, the wolf and, yes, the whooping crane; the way it needs headhunters and “wild” Indians and real Gypsies in horsedrawn carts; the way it needs some land without access by road or air, land with jumbo forests left on it forever and oil left in the ground to fulfill without interference its fossil destiny; the way it needs drunks and lunatics and old people with filthy habits; the way it needs the mirrors, hallucinations and metamorphoses of art.

Whether you need the solace of normality more than you need your unique powers is a personal matter, which only you may decide. But Sissy, don't let people such as Julian Gitche influence your decision. Julian needs your thumbs, huge and murmuring like the mouths of unexplored rivers — just the way nature made them — even if he isn't wise enough to understand that he needs them.

Never in history have there been thumbs to match yours, neither in size nor in deed. Answer this: what can replace them? Okay, yes, there are the children prophesied by Madame Zoe, but that's a gamble, like Heaven, the Eternity of Joy and the steady-state economy. Sissy, the mastodons are all gone; so are the Amazons. Timbuktu is now a roadside zoo and nobody ever found El Dorado.

Remember how the Chink venerated those biggies? Wouldn't it benefit others of us to do the same? Your thumbs were not metaphors or symbols; they were real. The one that remains, it still sings of the terror and ecstasy of flesh. Your thumb disorientates us, Sissy, and for the person courageous enough to see it out, disorientation always leads to.

love.

Don't deprive us of an opportunity to love unselfishly that which, like Christ when he was alive, is difficult to love. Don't spoil our fun.

96.

DINNER WAS GOOD that night and Dr. Robbins was again amazed by the purple cabbage, its color making him wonder where all the blue food is.

As he was indulging a genteel burp, the telephone rang. “I'll get it,” he said, which was odd for he had dined alone. Perhaps he was talking to his mustache.

The caller was Sissy Hankshaw Gitche. Her call was two months late.

“I'm sorry I stood you up.”

“Oh, that's all right,” Dr. Robbins replied. “I'm cute when I'm mad.”

Sissy was phoning from O'Dwyre VA Hospital. Her second surgery was scheduled very early the next morning, so Dr. Dreyfus had had her admitted overnight so that she might get a good night's sleep. People still used that phrase, “a good night's sleep.” It was probably a quite old expression, although it seemed to suggest the Eisenhower Years. Before the sixties woke us up.

Cries for help are frequently inaudible. Even when drowning, some people are too shy or embarrassed to yell. There was something Sissy needed to talk about with Dr. Robbins, but she couldn't get it out. So, instead of poking his eardrum with an icicle word such as amputation, she found herself asking, “Well, Doctor, what do you think about the whooping cranes?”

“Oh, I'm pro-whooper,” said he. “They go well with my blue sky.”

“No, what I mean is, how do you account for their tenacity? Why are they holding on like this? I mean, they're out of place in the modern civilized world; if they're going to refuse to attempt to adapt to changed conditions, wouldn't it make more sense just to go ahead and go extinct and avoid the hassles and suffering? What are they trying to prove?”

“Maybe,” said Dr. Robbins very slowly, “maybe they're waiting for us to go away.”

97.

WHEN THE SURGEONS, their blades grinning like piranha in their cases, dropped in for a preliminary examination next morning, Sissy surprised them. “Just go ahead and polli. . polli. . polli wanta cracker my right index finger,” said she. “I think I'm going to live with my left thumb for a while."

The brother-in-law was vexed, but Dr. Dreyfus understood: “As the sculptor Alexander Calder answered when asked if he'd be willing to make a mobile for the Guggenheim Museum out of solid gold, 'Sure, why not? And then I'll paint it black.' But I don't suppose that means very much to you.”

Shortening the finger bone, moving it over, increasing its angle, was tedious precision work, requiring intense concentration, yet throughout the pollicerization the surgeons were aware of the singing of birds.

After the operation, an incision was made in the patient's abdomen and her new quasi-thumb sewn into it to begin the grafting process. The next day, when Dr. Dreyfus entered her hospital room, he found Sissy standing before a full-length mirror in only bikini panties, having a thorough look at herself.

“Well, what do you think?” asked the plastic surgeon, artist and three-million-dollar defendant.

“Criminey,” said Sissy. “Looks like I was in such a hurry to masturbate I missed the hole by a foot.”

98.

LET'S END THIS GOSSIP AT ONCE AND FOR ALL: Richmond, Virginia, is not in love with England, no baby is expected, no wedding in sight. For its part, the internationally renowned England scarcely is aware of Richmond, Virginia's existence, and furthermore, has a Richmond of it's own living under its roof in North Surrey. As for prosperous, conservative, up-and-coming Richmond, Virginia, what it feels for England — many years its senior — is not romantic passion but envy. It admires England's centuries of respectability and wishes they were its own. It longs to wear England's knickers, not get in them. Remember, you read it here first.

One way in which Richmond demonstrates its admiration and envy is through imitation (Don't we all?). For example, Richmond has reproduced tons of English architecture and left it out in the weather, permitting it to be occupied by persons whose accents would drive a proper Englishman to stuff his ears with hasty pudding. In the West End, the most popular house style is the enlarged version of the traditional English cottage, with old beams and storybook roofs, but usually luxurized by such non-Anglo features as swimming pools, patios and porches enclosed with thermal glass.

It was in just such a posh cottage that Sissy waited for her new thumb to come out of the oven.

Meanwhile, she took refreshed delight in the old thumb, the monstrous left one, the one that broke the bank at Monte Weirdo. Sissy oiled it and perfumed it, sunned it and fanned it, flexed it and rotated it, made awful ovoid shadows with it on ceilings and walls, aimed it at stars and planets, let it splash in the tub, rolled it over her erogenous zones, flashed it at imaginary speeders on the Highways of the Heart and talked over old times with it. It was like a second honeymoon. The only occasion when the reconciliated appendage failed to thrill and cheer her was when she thought of it smacking skulls. Then she would shudder like the sanitation man who had to collect the garbage at Frankenstein's castle.

Mostly, though, Sissy carried the left thumb around grandly, a sight that befuddled Margaret Dreyfus, caused Felix Dreyfus to smile. Their reactions mattered little, however, because when Sissy wasn't absorbed with her thumbs — little new one baking, big old one basking — she was equally absorbed with following the whooping crane story in the news.

99.

ONE PRAIRIE NIGHT when the sky looked like a bowl of cream of moon soup, stirred by the long ladle of the wind, the vehicle known to the cowgirls as “the peyote wagon” and to the press as “the reptile-decorated camper” pulled out of the Rubber Rose and didn't return. Delores del Ruby was at the wheel. The media speculated that the departure of the “black-garbed, whip-cracking second-in-command” was significant, perhaps an indication that there was dissension at the “mystery ranch."

For the next few days, reporters watched for signs of disharmony, but as far as they could tell through their binoculars, and in occasional conversations with taciturn guards at the gate, solidarity prevailed. Indeed, the pardners were attempting to enjoy cowgirl life just as if the National Eye never interrupted its scrutiny of the new President in order to blink at them. To the director of the Aransas Wildlife Refuge, who observed them riding, roping, skinnydipping and flying Tibetan tantra kites, they had “every appearance of young girls on a lark.”

In their bunkhouse meetings, however, a certain sobriety overtook their giggles, and as they cleaned firearms and analyzed their situation, no one would have mistaken them for Girl Scouts. Vivid and vulgar curses left their lips, directed at the elements that parched their vegetable garden one week, flooded it the next.

“The prairie gods were never friendly to agriculture,” Debbie reminded her companions. “They were more into buffalo.”

Big Red wasn't placated. “We don't have beans or buffalo,” she complained.

“The goats are our buffalo,” said Debbie. “As long as we got them we got milk, yogurt and cheese.”

“We got milk, yogurt and cheese,” agreed Jellybean, “but we aren't gonna have any Crosby, Stills and Nash — not when the power company cuts our electricity off, we aren't. So those of you that favor the stereo over my old Gibson, why don't you volunteer to work on the windmill this afternoon, even if this is a Sunday?”

“I must observe the Sabbath and keep it holy,” objected Mary.

“Okay, Mary,” said Jelly, “you can spend the afternoon praying for those podners who are out working their butts off. By the way, Billy West is giving us the windmill materials free of charge, bless his heart, bless all three hundred pounds of him; he told me this morning that he isn't gonna charge us. So what you say we get in high gear and get that baby built. Any questions?”

“Yes,” said Heather, “What if every podner on the ranch wore one of those beanies with the little plastic propeller on top? The way the wind blows around here, would that generate enough extra electricity so's I could send away for a vibrator?”

“Vibrators run on batteries, honey,” said Jelly, feeling guilty, perhaps, about her weekly yam sessions with the Chink. “Meeting adjourned.”

A crew of cowgirls set out to build the windmill, singing as they worked. The official observers of the ranch found nothing alarming in that construction. But a short time later, the girls undertook some further building, the implications of which were to bring things squawling to a head at the Rubber Rose.

Oh yeah. . Sissy, back there in Virginia listening to the news, Sissy guessed correctly where Delores had gone. The forewoman was off to New Mexico on a peyote run.

100.

WELL, here we are at Chapter 100. This calls for a little celebration. I am an author and therefore in the same business God is in: if I say this page is a bottle of champagne, it is a bottle of champagne. Reader, will you share a cup of the bubbly with me? You prefer French to domestic? Okay, I'll make it French. Cheers!

Here's to the one hundredth chapter! Hundred. A cardinal number, ten times ten, the position of the third digit to the left of the decimal point, a power number signifying weight, wealth and importance. The symbol for hundred is C, which is also the symbol for the speed of light. There are a hundred pennies in a dollar, a hundred centimeters in a meter, a hundred years in a century, a hundred yards on a football field, a hundred points in a carat, a hundred ways to skin a cat and a hundred ways of cooking eggplant. There also are a hundred ways to successfully write a novel, but this is probably not one of them.

Don't be so quick to agree. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues can still teach you a thing or two. “For example?” you ask snottily, while helping yourself to my champagne. For example, this: on a number of occasions this book has made reference to magic, and each time you've shaken your head, muttering such criticisms as “What does he mean by 'magic,' anyhow? It's embarrassing to find a grown man talking about magic in such a manner. How can anybody take him seriously?” Or, as slightly more gracious readers have objected, “Doesn't the author realize that one can't write about magic? One can create it but not discuss it. It's much too gossamer for that. Magic can be neither described nor defined. Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to slice roast beef.”

To which the author now replies, Sorry, freeloaders, you're clever but you're not quite correct. Magic isn't the fuzzy, fragile, abstract and ephemeral quality you think it is. In fact, magic is distinguished from mysticism by its very concreteness and practicality. Whereas mysticism is manifest only in spiritual essence, in the transcendental state, magic demands a steady naturalistic base. Mysticism reveals the ethereal in the tangible. Magic makes something permanent out of the transitory, coaxes drama from the colloquial.

All right, I'll try to expound, if you insist. And just to prove I'm no sorehead, I'll conjure up another magnum of Dom Perignon. Here. Say when. Mysticism is self-contained and beyond external control. Something either has a mystic emanation or it doesn't. It is present in a single entity, animate or inanimate, where it is known to those who have faith that it is there. Mysticism implies belief in forces, influences and actions, which, though imperceptible to ordinary sense, are nevertheless real.

Magic, on the other hand, can be controlled — by a magician. A magician is a transmitter just as a mystic is rather strictly a receiver. Just as love can be made, using materials no more ethereal than an erect penis, a moist vagina and a warm heart, so, too, can magic be made, wholly and willfully, from the most obvious and mundane. Magic does not seep from within of its own volition (or appear unannounced to someone in a state of heightened awareness); it is a matter of cause and effect. The seemingly unrealistic or supernatural ("magic") act occurs through the acting of one thing upon another through a secret link.

The key word here is secret. When the substance of the link is revealed, the magic fades or can be counteracted by rival magicians. Thus, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues may call your attention to some magic that results from, say, the acting of the smells of the female body upon the last surviving flock of wild whooping cranes, but it may never give away the secret link between them.

Hmm. The author can sense that Chaper 100 displeases you. Not only does it interrupt the story, it says too much and says it too didactically. Well, a book about a woman with sugar-sack thumbs is bound to be a bit heavy-handed.

Come on, now, that's enough champagne. Either give me a kiss or get out of here.

101.

EXPRESSIONS SUCH AS “CHORD FACTORS," “frequency patterns,” “strut lengths” and “A.B.S. plastic joints” began to be heard on the shores of Siwash Lake, where heretofore only the radio signals of froggies, excerpts from Chinese Crane Opera and an occasional girlish “yahoo” or “yippee” had been heard. In addition, there now were the chewing noises of hungry saws and the spock-spock of hammers taking the direct approach in trying to teach some impressionable young nails about the dangers inherent in a permissive society, spock-spock-spock.

On their next regular visit to the lake, Professor Inge Anne Nelsen and the Aransas Wildlife Refuge director were stunned by all this activity taking place practically in the midst of the whooping cranes. They made immediate inquiries.

“We're building a dome,” answered Bonanza Jellybean.

“A dome?”

“Not just any old dome. A four-frequency, hemispheric, geodesic, arctic dome, triple-glazed against the cold. Of course, the very shape of a dome is a defense against cold. A mean mad icesnake of a wind will tend to glide over its rounded surface instead of picking up velocity in an exterior corner where on a rectilinear building it would be tempted to wiggle its way inside. The Eskimos knew that. There's also less surface area through which heat can be lost. .”

“Aw, hell, Jelly, that ain't important,” interjected Big Red. “Most of your heat loss takes place through doors and windows, anyways. Since we're only gonna have one good-sized door and a couple of little bitty windows, that won't worry us a whole hell of a heap. But we're triple-glazing the bastard, like Jelly said. It's gonna be a real arctic-type dome.”

“Just like Santa Claus lives in, right, Red?” said Kym.

“Haw haw,” Big Red laughed.

A foundation of 2–8 joists atop eight-foot beams had already been laid, and from its circumference the government observers could ascertain that the dome was going to be quite large. They were incredulous. “What is it for?” asked the man from Aransas. “Why are you building it so close to the lake?” asked Professor Nelsen.

“For the cranes,” Jelly informed them.

“For the cranes??!” Their incredulousness became triple-glazed.

“Sure. It's almost the end of August, you know. Come winter, these birds are gonna need some shelter. On clear, calm days we'll break the ice for them and they can fart around in the lake. But when the blizzards and the big winds hit, they'll need shelter. This dome is gonna be their winter quarters.”

“Impossible,” gasped the Aransas warden. “They'll never bunch up in there, so close together, with a roof over their heads.” As he looked around at the birds, however, so unusually serene in the vicinity of humans, and with only ten yards or so separating one crane family from the next, he was not so sure.

“This means,” asked Professor Nelsen, pointedly, “that you don't expect them to migrate to their Texas wintering grounds?”

“Can't see as why they should,” said Jellybean.

“Well, I can see many reasons why they should,” stormed Professor Nelsen. Her hands were on her hips, as in the statue of the Ill-Tempered Red-Headed Scorpio Madonna. “Including their well-being and survival. You actually believe you're going to stick this flock of wild whooping cranes in some crazy building. .”

“Not so crazy, ma'am,” said Debbie, who had stopped sawing struts in order to wipe her sweaty brow with a Katmandu prayer cloth. “No, not crazy in the least. This is a round building; it's square buildings that are crazy. Drinks Water, a Dakota medicine man, had a vision back before the whites came that his tribe would be defeated and made to live in square houses. When this came true, the Dakota tribes were miserable. Black Elk complained that it was a bad way to live. 'There can be no power in a square,' he said. Black Elk said, 'You will notice that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.' You're a zoologist; you should know that there are no squares in Nature, not in macrocosm nor microcosm. Nature creates in circles and moves in circles. Atoms and galaxies are circular, and most organic things in between. The Earth is round. The wind whirls. The womb is no shoebox. Where are the corners of the egg and the sky? Look at the nests those cranes made over there. Perfectly round. The square is the product of logic and rationality. It was invented by civilized man. It's the work of masculine consciousness. Primitive tribes and matriarchal cultures always paid homage to what is round. Look at your belly, Professor, there under your girdle. Look at your tits. Woman is a round animal. The male, in his rebellion against what is natural and feminine in the universe, has used logic as a weapon and as a shield. The whole object of logic is to square the circle. Civilization is a circle squared. That's why in civilized societies woman's lot — and Nature's lot — has been such a sorry one. It's the duty of advanced women to teach men to love the circle again. No, ma'am, this won't be a crazy building; it'll be a sane one. Unless you're silly enough to identify rational logic with sanity. In which case, this structure — and everything else we do — will be as crazy as we can make it. The cranes won't mind taking shelter in our dome. It's a round building made by round animals. Yippee!”

Professor Nelsen and associate hurried back to Mottburg to report. A conference was held, in the middle of which phone calls were made to Washington, D.C. Late that afternoon, a federal judge (seated at a square table in a square chamber) issued an order. By sundown, it had been delivered to the Rubber Rose.

The court order called for the cowgirls to cease construction on the dome. It ordered them to move their equipment and themselves away from the lake, to remove guards and barricades from the gates and to make the ranch ready for unrestricted occupancy by government personnel, who would then take whatever steps necessary to restore normal conditions among the population of America's whooping cranes. The cowgirls were given forty-eight hours in which to comply.

102.

THE TUBE PEDICLE — the cylindrical flap of belly skin under which Sissy's pollicerized index finger lay three weeks a-grafting — was snipped at one end, and ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-dum! — a thumb is born!

Along came a thumb, but what kind of a thumb? Crooked and red (a thumb to greet flamingos, not whooping cranes), awkward and stiff, as scrawny as its predecessor had been gross. Sissy was exercising this petrified strawberry licorice whip, trying to teach it some simple thumb routines, when the news of the Rubber Rose court order was announced on NBC.

Sissy stood, little scarlet thumbkin dangling rigidly at her side. “How fast do you think I could get to the Dakota hills?” she asked.

Dr. Dreyfus looked up from the pad on which he was sketching thumbs in the manner of Seurat, dreaming, perhaps, of the first living Pointillist digit. “By hitchhiking, you mean? Well, you certainly couldn't make it within forty-eight hours.”

“Ha ha ho ho and hee hee,' said Sissy, and it was difficult to argue with that.

103.

SOME PEOPLE could not have been more stupefied had archeologists dug up a dinosaur wearing a flea collar. Some drivers thought that the tadpole that conquered Atlantis had escaped from a drive-in movie screen and was making its way to the sea. Others recognized it as a thumb, maybe the ultimate thumb, and accepted it with the same bewildered fatalism with which they accepted tornados and government.

Here it came, there it went, exerting a force with which few could cope, playing with speeding automobiles the way pre-Friskies cats had played with mice. It put new life in old clunkers and caused late model dreamboats to poot like go-carts. One flick of it and radios would blare on automatically, headlights would glaze over as if in shock. It could reach across four lanes of heavy traffic and draw the vehicle of its choice to its side. It could even cause cars that had passed it by so suddenly make illegal U-turns and circle back two miles to obey its wishes. It was Sissy's left thumb, getting its big chance at last, after more than a decade of understudying the right — and a lump inflated in the throat of Creation just to watch it do its stuff. Aw, well, maybe that's exaggerating, but honestly, had anybody ever been as good at anything as Sissy Hankshaw Gitche was at hitching?

There were favorite maneuvers to bring back and enjoy, and a few fresh tactics she wanted to try: in her mind's eye she conceived of intricate patterns that she would like to have weaved over the continent. Alas, she had set a deadline for herself: the Dakota hills in thirty hours. So, although she showed off and experimented more than she should have on a speed run, she actually stopped only once — at a telephone booth in western Pennsylvania.

Her intentions had been to call Julian. She was going to tell him of her compulsion to rush to the Rubber Rose, of the inexplicable longing she had to stand by the cowgirls in their time of crisis, and how she just had to see the Chink again to find out why the clockworks continued to beat so loudly in her blood. She would promise Julian that when she had done what she must do in Dakota, she'd hurry back and rest her new normal-sized thumb against his buzzer. After all, Julian needed her. As she was about to place the call, however, she thought, “Yes, Julian needs me. But I need me, too. And the world needs my need for me worse than it needs Julian's need for me.” She called Dr. Robbins instead.

Dr. Robbins didn't answer. Neither did his mustache. They were both across town at the Countess's penthouse. When Robbins had read in one of the whooping crane stories in the Times that the Countess owned the Rubber Rose, the ranch adjacent to Siwash Ridge, he had called on the feminine hygiene magnate, and, having been informed of the state the poor fellow was in, volunteered his psychiatric services free of charge. The Countess's accountants accepted the offer, and from that day Dr. Robbins had scarcely left the Countess's side. At the instant of Sissy's call, in fact, Robbins and the Countess were propped up on satin pillows, playing cribbage and drinking Ripple. The young shrink was teasing the middle-aged tycoon about the damage his brain had taken from Sissy's thumbing, and the Countess was laughing good-naturedly. The Countess was also winning at cribbage.

Reminding the Countess of Murphy's Law, which states that if anything can go wrong, it will, the unlicensed psychiatrist then introduced him to Robbins's Law, which states that whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, providing it goes wrong enough. The Countess laughed some more and increased his lead. The phone that was ringing was a long way from here.

Sissy hung up and kept traveling.

While Sissy was still on the road, some eight hours before their court-ordered deadline expired, the Rubber Rose cowgirls issued a communiqué. It was sent to the federal judge, copies to the press. This is what it said:

The whooping crane has been driven to the edge of extinction by an aggressive, brutal paternalistic system intent on subduing the Earth and establishing its dominion over all things — in the name of God the Father, law, order and economic progress. From men, the whooping crane has received neither love nor respect. Men have drained the crane's marshes, stolen its eggs, invaded its privacy, polluted its food, fouled its air, blown it apart with buckshot. Obviously, a paternalistic society does not deserve anything as grand and beautiful and wild and free as the whooping crane. You men have failed in your duty to the crane. Now it is women's turn. The cranes are in our charge, now. We will protect them as long as they still require protection — while working toward a day when the creatures of the world no longer have to suffer man's egoism, insensitivity and greed. We refuse your order. We say take your order and shove it. This flock of birds is staying with us. Get lost, mac.

Needless to say, all the hands did not agree on the text of this communiqué. Debbie, for example, thought the communiqué itself aggressive; she said it reeked of the same hostile sexism that the pardners disliked in men. She lobbied for a more enlightened resolution, one firm yet gentle; she said they should set a good example. Debbie was not alone. As for Bonanza Jellybean, she thought it pretentious to claim that she was working toward a day when the creatures of the world would be safe from man, when actually all she was working toward was a time when any little daughter who wanted to could grow up to be a cowgirl.

Had the Rubber Rose been organized as an anarchistic system, rather than along democratic lines, each cowgirl who chose to do so could have issued her own communiqué, each with equal weight. “Majority rule” held sway, however, and the communiqué—drafted mainly by the Delores del Ruby faction — was presented to the court, the press and the public as the collective opinion of “the whooping crane rustlers.”

And the communiqué was not taken lightly. No, it decidedly was not taken lightly. Sissy made it through the gates of the Rubber Rose only minutes before Delores was arrested entering Mottburg with nearly a thousand peyote buttons in her truck — and only hours before two hundred federal marshals, reinforced by at least a dozen agents of the FBI, took positions outside the ranch, loaded guns trained on anything that shook feather, hoof or tit inside the kinetic confines of the largest all-girl ranch in the West.