Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Part VI

104.

THERE IS AN UNEARTHLY GLOW. It comes from a dimension that we do not understand yet.

Meeting in this supernatural aurora are two animate things. Growing accustomed to the light that is the substance of this “landscape,” we recognize one of the things as a human brain. The other proves to be a thumb.

The Brain rests placidly. The Thumb, which has only recently appeared on the scene, gives us an opposite feeling. It appears agitated.

“Why so glum, chum?” asks the Brain.

“I thought you'd never ask,” snaps the Thumb. “I'm just sick and tired of it, that's all.”

“Sick and tired of what?”

“Taking the blame. Being called 'the cornerstone of civilization.' Being treated by one kooky author as if I were a goddamned metaphor for civilization. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Well, now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that. The civilizing process occurred as a result of advances in technology. Until man had tools, tools to save him labor as well as to give him the predatory edge over other animals, he hadn't the leisure to develop language or to refine his psychic and physical capabilities. You, Thumb, gave man the ability to use tools. If nothing else, you started him down the path to civilization. And were you not with him, helping him, every step of the way?”

“Yeah, I was, but I was innocent. I had no control. I wanted to help him lift shiny pebbles, to pick fruit, to hold flowers, to build bowls and baskets, to make music, to weave; I wanted to help him remove slivers and to caress the flesh of loved ones. I didn't want any part of that other stuff: that hardware, that killing and maiming, that overdevelopment, that subjugation of Nature and attempts to build monuments against death. I didn't want any of it, but I contributed to it because you made me do it, you prick!”

The Brain issues a short scornful laugh that undulates its folds. “The Prick had a lot to do with civilization, all right, but you'll have to take that up with the Prick. I'm the Brain. Remember?”

“How could anyone forget?”

“Nasty, nasty.” The Brain wags its stem. “You're behaving rather irrationally, aren't you? Are you really blaming me for civilization?”

“Precisely. That ugly crumpled upper surface of yours, that cerebral cortex, is almost nonexistent in lower animals, but once you got the hang of evolutionary growth and a taste of the inflated abstract thoughts you could make with that cortex, you enlarged it and enlarged it until it became eighty percent of your volume. Then you started cranking out rarefied ideas as fast as you could crank them, and issuing commands to helpless appendages like me, forcing us to act on those ideas, to give them form. Out of that came civilization. You willed it into being because, with your cortex so oversized and all, you lost your common ground with other animals, and especially with plants; lost contact, became alienated and ordered civilization built in compensation. And there was nothing the rest of us could do about it. You were holed up in there in your solid bone fortress, a cerebrospinal moat around you, using up twenty percent of the body's oxygen supply and hogging a disproportionate share of nutriments, you greedy bastard; you had hold of the muscle motor switches and there was no way any of us could get at you and stop you from spoiling the delight of the world.” The Thumb's nail was crimson with anger.

Slowly shaking its configuration of deep crevices and wide protrusions, the Brain sighed. “Yes, yes, there is some truth in what you say. I am the body's favored organ, but that's because my work load is so heavy and so vital. And I contributed enormously to civilization, as did you. It couldn't have happened without me, as it couldn't have happened without you. But I was just as innocent as you. .”

“How could you be? You expressed the desires, you formulated the models, you issued the orders, you were in command.”

Once again, the Brain sighed. It was the sort of sigh one might expect from a fat and rather affected grub: gray and wet and yukky. “You don't understand me, do you? You think you know me — all that semieducated blather about cerebral cortex evolution — but you don't really know me. Oh, I'm sure you're aware that I've an electrochemical network of thirteen billion nerve cells, and maybe you realize that in some of my nooks and crannies — you're fortunate to be smooth and holistic — these cell bodies are so densely packed that a hundred million fit into a cubic inch, every cottonpicking one of them humming, pulsing and flashing, and none of them exactly alike; yes, you may know that but you can never really know how hard it is to be electrochemical, to be, and I'm not boasting, the most intricate and effective thing in Nature. .”

The Thumb gestures as if it were bowing a violin. “That's the saddest story I've ever heard,” it says sarcastically.

“I'm not seeking your sympathy; just your understanding. Bear with me, and if I digress, remember, I'm not as tightly focused as you. Now, listen. There is a constant shower of incoming electrical pulses hammering at me like rain on a tropical roof. I'm subjected to a never-ending barrage of signals that cause my nerve cells — neurons, if you will — to fire in succession, like Chinatown firecrackers. During each of these pulsations, electrical charges are altered, chemicals are expelled, clefts are opened and closed, ions desert one neuron and invade another; it's unbelievably complicated, and the whole cycle takes place in about a thousandth of a second. A thousandth of a second — and man thinks he has a conception of time. Ha!”

“If I was the Mouth, I'd yawn,” says the Thumb. “Get to the point before you bore me stiff.”

“And nobody likes a stiff thumb, does he,” teases the Brain. “Well, the point partially is this: the information that activates me, that sets my neurons to firing in chain reaction, is sensory and is sent to me by other parts of the body, including you. How I react to the external world is partly a result of the kind of data you send me as you go around touching our environment.”

“This is getting specious,” objects the Thumb. “In the first place, the data I give you are completely objective. I can tell you if a blade is sharp, but I can't advise you to have it stuck into another body (I never would) — and in the second place, you get such an infinitely greater supply of info from the Eyes, for example, that there's no comparison.”

“Maybe not,” agrees the Brain, “but you do contribute. And my point is, the commands I give you and the rest of the body are largely my natural reactions to the sensory stuff you're always feeding me. Largely. But not wholly. Because the truth is, my neurons occasionally fire spontaneously in the absence of a stimulating signal. I'm subjected to a fair amount of randomly generating currents. It isn't as orderly in here as you might imagine. Often I'm at the mercy of random forces.”

In the eerie light of the indefinable dimension, the Thumb twiddles. At last, it says, “You're trying to tell me you aren't in control.”

“Exactly! Jeeze, I thought you'd never catch on.”

“Well, if you aren't in charge, what is?”

“I don't know,” says the Brain, softly, solemnly. The blob seems genuinely sad.

“Oh come off it. Those thirteen billion cells that are cooking in you, you make use of no more than ten percent of them. Ninety percent of your resources lies dormant at all times. If you'd just bother to put that awesome mass to work, if you'd quit being so damn conservative — Christ, it's no wonder you're gray! — and stop worrying about survival all the time; if you'd start sifting through those vast regions of your slimy self that haven't been explored, then you'd find out rather quickly where Central Control is located, I'll bet, and you'd find the answers to the philosophical and spiritual questions that are driving you — and the rest of us — bananas, and that because they've been answered wrongly (by that ten percent of you that makes an effort) have fostered the worst features of civilization. You're holding out, that's all.”

“Thumb, old buddy, you don't know the Ass from the Elbow. Sure, I'm a bit conservative; I have to be. It's my assignment to preserve and perpetuate the species. .”

“Assignment from whom?”

“From the DNA, of course. But don't ask me from where the DNA gets its orders, because I honestly don't know. But the reason I don't know has nothing to do with the fact that about ninety percent of me is dormant. It's dormant because I inhibit it, and I inhibit it because if I didn't I would be swamped by insignificant information. I'd be reacting to so many signals from the external world that I couldn't think at all, and every time humans opened their eyes, they'd have something like an epileptic fit. You see, there is nothing in that dormant portion that isn't already in the rest of me. Just more of it, that's all. More of the same. There're no answers to the Great Mysteries hidden in there, no secret superior systems for evaluating experience; it's quantitative, not qualitative. I narrow the flow of input to keep us from being drowned in excitations, that's all.”

After that, the Thumb twiddles for a long time. “Then it's hopeless,” it says finally.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you don't have the answers to the Big Question and don't know who does, if you aren't in control and don't know who is, then we're right back where we started, and it's bloody hopeless; we'll never know What's What, and we'll never figure out how to overhaul civilization.”

“Don't despair. It's bad form.” Synaptic disturbances cause the Brain to vibrate gently. It resembles the gelatin salad at a banquet for trolls. “I suspect there may be other possibilities. You see, I'm a tool, of sorts, an instrument, an apparatus just as you are. I can be employed. Employed for thinking. Well, mostly I've been used clumsily and all too sparingly. Not that humans haven't thought deep thoughts with me; they have and they continue to. There are probably no deeper, greater thoughts left in me; the best of them have all been thought and rethought many times. But maybe what is needed is not more thinking or even better thinking, but a different kind of thinking. Over the centuries a handful of humans — poets, madmen, artists, monks, hermits, composers, yogis, shamans, eccentrics, magicians, anarchists, witches and rare bizarre subculturites such as the Gnostics and the Sierra Clock People — have used my thinking machinery in unusual and unpredictable ways, with interesting results. Perhaps if more of these 'off-beat' kinds of thinking were done, I might be more useful to the Universe.”

“Hmm,” murmurs the Thumb.

“And look here. I spend nearly as much time dreaming as I do thinking. Yet how many put their dreams to any kind of practical or enlightening application? Precious few, I'll tell you. Sleeping/dreaming may be what I do best. It may be my true vocation, and the time I have to spend tending to survival just chore time; taking out the garbage, as it were.”

The Thumb seems amazed. “You know, Brain, what blows me is that you know yourself and don't know yourself at the same time, and you know yourself knowing yourself and you know yourself not knowing — oh, this is getting ridiculous.”

“It's the old paradox,” says the Brain, smiling with its many cracks and fissures.

“But what is the paradoxical force that lets you do that?” asks the Thumb. “What is it that permits you to think about thinking and feel about feeling?”

“Consciousness.”

“Okay all right already. If you have all that consciousness, and consciousness is so almighty powerful, why can't you right things, put them in balance. .”

“Because, dear Thumbo, I don't have 'all that' consciousness. I have a fair amount. But I certainly haven't a monopoly on it. Everybody assumes consciousness is the exclusive province of the Brain. What a mistake! I've got my share of it, to be sure, but hardly enough to claim special privileges. The Knee has consciousness and the Thigh has consciousness. Consciousness is in the Liver, in the Tongue, in the Prick, in you, Thumb. It's coursing through you, too, and you're acting it out. You're each a part of it. In addition, there is consciousness in butterflies and plants and winds and waters. There is no Central Control! It's everywhere. So, if consciousness is what is required. .”

“I'm beginning to comprehend,” says the Thumb.

Lo! the moment the Thumb recognizes itself as an agency of consciousness, various pieces of the Puzzle begin to fall into place for it, and though the picture they form makes little logical or literal sense, there is a correct and beautiful feeling about it. “Wow!” cries the Thumb. “Everything seems much brighter and righter. If only the other parts of the body realized that they are manifestations of absolute consciousness, then. .”

“Maybe we can wake them up,” suggests the Brain. “Only we must do it slowly, gradually, so it doesn't threaten survival.”

The Thumb ignores the Brain's cautious qualifications. “Let's try to wake them up,” it says, eagerly. “Let's try. Where's the Prick?”

“Uh, probably over bullying the Cunt around, as usual. Shall we look?”

In the realm of body light, there is movement, and that is the extent that can be said about it because nothing else can be said.

105.

THE RADIO WAS PLAYING “The Day-Old Apple Strudel Polka.” Kym was carrying the radio across the corral. She carried the radio as if it were a suitcase full of skunk lice. It was offensive baggage but Kym wasn't about to set it down. At any moment the song might end and the announcer say something about the siege of the Rubber Rose.

“Man, this is the stupidest music I've ever heard,” said Kym. “This radio should have stayed in the privy where it belonged.” But Kym roped the radio to her saddle horn and prepared to give it a ride across the Dakota hills, mice, meadowlarks and other auditorily sensitive creatures fleeing before it in the sunlight.

Kym was taking the radio to Siwash Lake. Hours earlier, the cowgirls had deserted the ranch buildings and withdrawn to the pond. There, where the rippling wheatgrass merged with marsh reeds, they had set up their barricades and prepared to make their stand. Except for Debbie, each of them was armed; except for Big Red, each of them was scared shitless; without exception, each of them was determined. At their backs were the last sixty whooping cranes left on Earth.

The deadline was up. The American Civil Liberties Union had requested an extension, which news commentators felt would be granted since the government, while it could not allow itself to be defied, was not longing for the kind of publicity that would follow another shootout. The government was aware that its marshals and agents were all too willing to uncork the bottle of blood. The government was not entirely sure its marshals and agents could be restrained. The government pondered the predicament; the marshals and agents throbbed with the lunatic lust of the law; the cowgirls dispatched Kym back to the outhouse for their radio so that they might tune in their fate.

In the outhouse, Kym found Sissy, peeing in polka time. Sissy had hitched up to the ranch with a TV crew and, in the midst of some confusion, had simply scrambled over the gate. Howdy.

Kym hugged Sissy so hard she didn't have to wipe herself.

“You know what you're getting into if you come over to the lake,” warned Kym.

“Yes,” said Sissy, “but I want to be there. I want to see Jellybean. I want to see the cranes.”

“Okay,” Kym agreed. “I'll go tell Jelly you're here. If she says it's all right, I'll bring a horse for you. Meanwhile, I'd stay in the privy if I were you. No telling when those goons might start something. Ta ta.”

For nearly an hour, Sissy waited in the outhouse. A couple of flies and the photograph of Dale Evans kept her company. The flies kept trying to get familiar, but the photo of Dale Evans, like the bust of Nefertiti, was content to rule over its little niche of eternity. The photo of Dale Evans made America 1945 seem like ancient Egypt.

The outhouse was warm and rather dim. Sissy might have dozed except for the noise at the gates. The marshals and agents were forcibly ejecting persistent journalists, cowgirl sympathizers and bird-lovers, removing them to the checkpoint two miles down the road. The marshals and agents were deploying themselves militaristically. The noise at the gates sounded like Cecil B. DeMille's garage sale.

Sissy was not overly curious about the activity at the gates. Had she ignored Kym's warning and stepped outside, she would have looked not to the gates but to Siwash Ridge, hoping for a glance of a dirty bathrobe. We are what we see. We see what we choose. Perceptions are a hypothesis. In a noted experiment at MIT, a scientist outfitted two men with prismatic spectacles that grossly distorted their vision. One man was assigned to walk around, pushing the other in a wheelchair. The man who was active swiftly adapted to his new view of the world, but his passive partner made no adjustment at all. From this, the MIT scientist concluded that in order to perceive an object properly we have to establish some kind of pattern of movement in relation to it. Because Sissy had perceived the events of her lifetime always in relation to her pattern of constant movement, perhaps hers had been a far truer vision than many assumed. Maybe the fact that she would have looked at the crazy old coot on the ridgetop instead of at the besieging forces mounting around her is indicative of. . well, maybe there is a lesson there.

At any rate, a cowgirl on horseback trotted up to the privy, and it was Heather this time, leading an extra steed. Heather helped Sissy into the saddle and they set out at a brisk trot. The hills received them. With its skinny million tongues of wheatgrass, the hills whispered to them the secrets it used to share with the buffalo. Like defeated prize fighters waking up after knockouts, asters were starting to open their violet lids all around them. Would prismatic spectacles have made any difference in the way the asters perceived September?

Swimming through grasses and flowers, the horses carried the two women to the crest of the hill overlooking the lake. From there, Sissy gazed on strange sights. The circular foundation of the aborted dome had been turned into a fort. Barricades of barrels and rusty reducing machines stood ready to perform grim services. Gun metal reflected the sun. Off to one side were hobbled horses and a few goats, chained. The rest of the goats had been left to wander, and even now some of them were grazing their way eastward across the prairie, perhaps heading for Dr. Goldman's clinic to teach psychiatry something about male-female relations. In the lake, and along its soggy shores, whooping cranes strode with primal steps. Although quiet, they seemed as charged with uninsulated electricity as if they had just sprung into life.

“We heard on the radio that the judge has set Delores's bail at fifty thousand dollars,” said Heather. “Now she won't be here when we really need her.”

Sissy could only nod and stare at the scene below.

As Sissy rode into camp, Kym, Bonanza Jellybean, Debbie, Elaine and Linda danced up to meet her. In homage, they had fashioned fake thumbs for themselves out of willow bark and reeds. At first, they waved these goofy appendages wildly, in unrestrained salute, but their antics lost considerable momentum when — what?! — they noticed that Sissy was only half the monster she once was.

106.

"I KNEW there was something different about you, but the light wasn't good in the privy and I didn't notice what,” said Kym.

“I noticed it right away but I didn't know what to say,” said Heather, who still didn't know what to say.

“What happened?” asked Linda.

Sissy shrugged. “Just another miracle of modern technology.” It would have required still another technological miracle to have removed her eyes from Jelly's.

Before Sissy was completely on the ground, Jelly's tongue was in her mouth. She stumbled out of the stirrup into a wiggly embrace.

“It doesn't matter what happened,” squealed Jelly, shaking off one of her own honorary thumbs. “Let's celebrate!”

“That's why I was so long in coming for you,” explained Heather. “We had to get a little welcome celebration together.”

Behind the barricades, in the center of the dome foundation, a floral display had been arranged. There were pots of tea, cheese sandwiches, honeyed rice balls, marijuana cigarettes and yogurt with fresh cherries on top. A daisy chain was looped over Sissy's left thumb as she was led to Debbie's Tibetan meditation pillow and seated there. Giggles, kisses and tea poured forth.

Facing an imminent battle with federal police, the cowgirls didn't hesitate to party, because, well, Sissy Hankshaw Gitche had returned and a party was only proper.

“Ain't that just like women,” growled the ghost of General Custer, peering through the grass.

Yes, oh yes yes yes sweet yes.

Ain't that just like women, indeed.

107.

GHOSTS, because they can walk through walls, have a tendency to generalize. Your author, however, should know better. What should have been said was not “just like women” but “just like some women” or, better, “just like the feminine spirit.” All women do not possess the feminine spirit.

Some of the cowgirls, for example, conspicuously refused to join the welcome party. They remained at the barricades, as the cranes can bear witness, shooting ugly glances at those who reveled. What was Sissy to them? A noncowgirl. A goofy-handed freak. An older woman who had starred in advertisements that had told them that their cunts smelled bad. Furthermore, what would the enemy think if through its binoculars it could spy this sipping of tea, this weaving of daisy chains, this puffing of pot? Of course, what the cowgirls couldn't have known was that no enemy was watching them, for every attempt the FBI had made to establish an observation post on Siwash Ridge had met with peculiar disaster (Could the brotherhood of Chink and rock have been responsible?). Between the girls and their adversary was a succession of hills, and in the other direction stretched an open prairie that offered no opportunity for concealment and therefore was of absolutely no use to government.

Ignoring the disdain that her party drew from the barricades, Jelly spooned yogurt and exchanged with Sissy loving expressions. “Looks like every time we get together things are in a mess,” she said.

“So be it,” said Sissy, who was a trifle giddy from marijuana and affection. “It really looks serious this time, though. All these guns. .”

“Billy West got most of them for us. Did you ever meet him? Twenty-two years old and weighs three hundred pounds. Born and raised in Mottburg, every ounce of him. All during his childhood he had the suspicion he was being screwed. When he finally figured out who was screwing him, he decided to become an outlaw. Not for revenge but for purity.”

“I never met him,” said Sissy, doodling her new little red thumb down Jelly's bare arm. “But these guns. . Are you actually prepared to kill and die for whooping cranes?”

“Hell no,” responded Jellybean. “The cranes are wonderful, okay, but I'm not in this for whooping cranes. I'm in it for cowgirls. It's a rotten shame that things can get to the point of killing and dying being acceptable alternatives, but the script sometimes turns out that way. I mean, Sissy, I look around me and everywhere I look I see people, as individuals or in groups, conservative people, liberal people and radical people, who have been left crippled and soiled inside by their years of surrender to authority. If we cowgirls give in to authority on this crane issue, then cowgirls become just another compromise. I want a finer fate than that — for me and for every other cowgirl. Better no cowgirls at all than cowgirls compromised.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Linda, who had approached to refill Jelly's teacup. “That's pretty heavy, but I reckon that's the way it is.”

Sissy looked pleadingly at both Linda and Jellybean. “But you can't possibly slay this dragon.” With her greatest of thumbs, she gestured across the hills, although she might just as accurately have gestured in any other direction.

“Jelly knows that,” said Debbie, who had approached to replace Sissy's sandwich. “What she doesn't seem to know is that it isn't our job to slay the dragon. It's traditionally been the work of the hero to slay the dragon. It's the work of the maiden to transform the hero—and the dragon. I believe that it's not too late to accomplish such a transformation.”

Jelly seemed to have joined the clouds in a vow of silence. “Shit, Debbie,” she said, eventually (the clouds stuck to their vow). “I can't argue with you. The Chink says I shouldn't even try to argue with you. The Chink says I should follow my heart. And my heart tells me that I can't sit back and let a gang of politicians push cowgirls around.”

Noticing that both Jelly and Debbie were collecting tears in their eyes, Sissy asked, “How did this business get started, anyhow? How did you end up with this flock of birds?”

Debbie blew her nose on her embroidered bandanna. “You were aware that we were feeding them weren't you? We fed them brown rice last fall and they stayed over a couple of extra days. This spring we decided to try something different. We mixed our brown rice with fishmeal — whoopers love seafood (minnows and crawdads and little blue crabs), and fishmeal is cheap. Then Delores suggested another ingredient, and we think that's what did the trick.”

“You mean. .?”

“Peyote!” said Debbie and Jelly together.

“Then that professor was right. They are drugged.”

“Aw, come off it, Sissy,” said Jelly. “What do you mean, 'drugged'? Every living thing is a chemical composition and anything that is added to it changes that composition. When you eat a cheeseburger or a Three Musketeers bar, it changes your body chemistry. The kind of food you eat, the kind of air you breathe, can change your mental state. Does that mean you're 'drugged'? 'Drugged' is a stupid word.”

“You've been smoking pot,” said Linda. “You're drugged. How do you feel? Could we make you do something you didn't want to do?”

Debbie joined in. “Look at them, Sissy. Do they look like they're drugged? They hunt, they eat, they crap, they preen, they roost; they laid eggs, hatched them and took care of their young. They dance and whoop from time to time, and every now and then they go up for a flight. Only thing they don't do that they've always done is migrate. Is that so drastic?”

Framing the flock in a hole in her cheese sandwich, Sissy had to say, “No, I guess not. One of the largest whooping crane flocks we know about, the one that once inhabited the yellow grass country of Louisiana, never migrated. So it must not be absolute to the species.” She lowered her sandwich. “But the peyote is obviously affecting their brains. It's made them break a migratory pattern that goes back thousands of years. And it's made them less timid of people. Not even I could get this close to them before, and I have. .”

“A way with birds!” Jelly and Debbie sang together. “A way with birds, a way with birds!” Their little song skittered shrilly over the pond, reminding neither bird nor bird watcher, one hopes, that early American settlers made flutes from the wing bones of cranes.

Sissy blushed.

Jelly kissed her.

“The way I see it,” said Debbie, swinging her reddish brown pigtails from lakeside to hillward, “is that the peyote mellowed them out. Made them less uptight. They were afraid of bad weather and humans. That's why they migrated and kept to themselves. But the peyote has enlightened them. It's taught them there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Now they're digging life and letting the bad vibes slide on by. Don't worry, be happy. Be here now.”

Did Sissy buy that? Not a feather of it. “Fear in wild animals is completely different from paranoia in people,” she argued. “In the wilderness ecosystem, fear is natural and necessary. It's merely a mechanism for maintaining life. If the cranes hadn't had a capacity for fear, they would have disappeared long ago and you'd be having to get loaded with common old everyday meadowlarks and mallards.”

“This here discussion is destined to become academic,” said Jelly, “because we've got less than half a bag of peyote buttons left and Delores's run ended up in the Mottburg jail. So any day now we'll get a chance to see how the whoopers behave when they come down, to see if the peyote experience really changed them or not. But in the meantime, I want to say this about fear. .”

As Jelly pronounced the word fear, it suddenly materialized around about them.

A noisy unstoppable churning wheel of fear that rolls out of the altitudes like the flat tire off God's Cadillac; an ear-filling, stomach-tightening busy beater of death-egg fear that has poisoned the dreams of Southeast Asia's children.

The helicopter came in low over the hills from the south, chopping the blue September sky into war meat. It headed straight for the tea party.

108.

"HOLD YER FIRE!" yelled Bonanza Jellybean. “Hold yer fire!"

Luckily, her cry was heard above the oxygen-slicing swipes of the helicopter rotors, above the fusillade that resounded from the panicky cowgirls at the barricades. The shooting stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The only casualty of the outburst was a horse that was struck in the temple by a ricochet. The horse died with fresh grass in its mouth. Even so, death is the last straw.

Jelly had detected in the amateurish stripes of black and red paint with which the copter was decorated the hand not of law but of outlaw. She was correct. When the machine, having blown the floral display into disarray, settled in the wheatgrass a few yards to the north of the dome foundation, out stepped Billy West. Dressed entirely in black, like Delores, he had all he could do to bend his girth sufficiently to allow him to pass under the whirling blades without being beheaded (The co-pilot, a young man with hair to his waist, remained at the controls).

Jelly jumped off the foundation into an elephantine hug. Held above the ground in Billy's arms, her six-gun clattered against his six-gun.

“Git some gals over here and help me unload,” Billy said. “I brauch ya a few more boxes of ammo. And some Wonder Bread. And some beans. What ya think of my whirlybird? Got it in a deal over in Montana. Shit. Your trigger-happy chicks went and messed up my new paint job.” Fat fingers pointed at a streak of bare metal where a bullet had grazed the helicopter. “Well, c'mon now, let's git unloaded; I gotta git loose and vamoose. The feds are gonna be on my tail for sure.”

Boxes of ammunition, crates of bread, cases of beans were passed hurriedly from the chopper, then from girl to girl, finally to be stacked beside the chuck wagon. Then, blowing a chubby kiss, Bill West oozed back into the helicopter and off it flew for God knows where, its fearful churning agitating the hills.

The quiet that followed was overpowering. Manna from Heaven was never like this. Except for a few Trappist clouds, the sky was empty now. No use looking up there. Look instead at the new provisions. At the dead horse. At stunned and embarrassed faces. At the radio, which alone had the gall to infringe upon this contemplative moment.

Agreeing with the turning Earth that the “time” was now six o'clock, the radio was extracting news from the ether. More than one silent cowgirl heard the news announcer say that Judge So-and-So, at the request of the ACLU, had granted a forty-eight-hour extension of the deadline by which the Rubber Rose cowgirls must comply with his order. Negotiations between the cowgirls and the government were expected to follow.

Well, that development wasn't entirely unexpected. The next one was, though. The announcer informed his listeners that Rubber Rose forewoman Delores del Ruby was free on bond, her bail having been paid by the owner of the besieged ranch, Countess Products, Inc. The surprising and puzzling announcement that the Countess was going Ms. del Ruby's bail came from the tycoon's personal adviser, a certain Dr. Robbins of New York.

109.

THAT NIGHT, Sissy and Jelly lay under the same stars, under the same clouds, under the same blankets, under the same spell. Like political candidates, they frequently switched positions. In the campaign of 69, the polls didn't close until dawn.

As dawn's famous rosy fingers grasped the life preserver of the horizon, the early-rising cranes overheard Jelly say, “Every time I tell you that I love you, you flinch. But that's your problem.”

Answered Sissy, “If I flinch when you say you love me, it's both our problems. My confusion becomes your confusion. Students confuse teachers, patients confuse psychiatrists, lovers with confused hearts confuse lovers with clear hearts.” She chuckled at her awkward aphorism. “I think I need to see the Chink,” she added quietly.

“I think so, too,” said Jellybean. “We cowgirls got two days now with nothing to do but play word games with lawyers. Why don't you slip away for the ridge?”

“I will,” said Sissy. And as the new day pulled itself onto the deck of the prairie, she did.

110.

SHE HADN'T INTENDED it to go like this. When it had happened in her mind, it had happened differently. In her mind, there had been a fond embrace, a cool dipper of water to tame her thirst after the steep climb, a restful sitting in the shade of a rock and wise words filtered through a Sunday school beard, words that barked and snapped at the fleeing heels of confusion.

In her mind, he had kept his robe on, at least until bedtime. There had been no hand in her pants, not right off the bat. And certainly he had had more to say than “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”

Expectations v. Realizations. We all remember that old case. In truth, he had spoken more than sniggerese. Immediately upon seeing her — only the rocks know how long he had been watching her climb — he had laughed “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee,” but then he had nodded from thumb to thumb and said, “That's wonderful. I like that combination. Now you're balanced.”

“Balanced?” Sissy had asked. “Balanced? but one's short and skinny and the other long and plump.”

“Don't confuse symmetry with balance,” he had answered.

In vain, Sissy waited for an elaboration. Instead of a discourse on opposites and paradox, however, there had been another snigger. Then it was off with jumpsuit and robe. The reader can guess what followed, although the reader probably couldn't guess with what frequency and duration. Were he obliged to do so, the author could describe it: each drip of sweat, each contraction of muscle, each pant, each moan, each slish of slippery tissue. Were he of a mind to, the author could make you hear slurps as plainly as if you were the briny Popsicle that was being licked; could make you smell the rising tide of toadstool musk as sharply as if he had pulled the funky blankets over your head. However, such descriptive passages might be misconstrued to be an appeal to your prurient interest. Moreover, the author has other data to impart, and the twentieth century is running out of pages. So, let what is sufficient suffice. Until Sissy and the Chink are on their feet again, the author is going to turn his back on them and read the newspaper. Here, I'll read it aloud. On page 31, we find

HOUSEHOLD HINTS

Dear Heliose: What does one use to polish rosebuds?

G.S.

Dear G. S.: Bluebird spit and sugar should do the trick. Apply with a bee muff.

Heloise

111.

OKAY, THEY'RE THROUGH NOW. They can barely walk to the cliff edge to watch the sunset, the naughty kids. In retrospect, though, we must consider that the Chink was trying to help Sissy chase her confusion. Having spent the night making love with Jellybean, had she not then spent the day making love with the Chink there could have been no accurate comparison. And the Chink might have thought a comparison necessary, although he would not have seen any necessity for a choice.

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need. Perhaps there are times when the contradictions of love are so intermingled that the only way to see the truth of love is to pit it against the irreducible reality of lust.

Of course, love can never be stripped bare of illusion, but simply to arrive at an awareness of illusion is to hold hands with truth — and sometimes the hard light of lust affords just such an awareness.

At any rate, it was a calm and satiated Sissy who stood on the parapets of Siwash Ridge, watching snowy specks of whooping cranes melt in the dusk. Neither Jelly nor the Chink occupied her thoughts; instead, a quiet ecstasy gathered around her immediate sense of awareness of her own illusions, and that ecstatic overview filled the spaces between her and the distant lake.

“What do you think of this business of the cowgirls and the cranes?” she asked. It no longer seemed absurd to her that it had taken an entire day for them to broach the subject.

Was that a sigh that elbowed its way through the tangles of the smoky beard, or was it the higher octaves of an exhausted snigger? “The cranes are beautiful. For that matter, so are the cowgirls. It's a shame they're relating to each other in such a compromising way.”

“I think I share your feelings,” said Sissy. “The cranes are still skittish — they insist on a certain distance and maintain some integrity — but I can't help seeing them as being rather like pets now. Domesticated. It was you who taught me. .”

“I've never taught you anything.”

“Oh, shut up, you old turkey!” Sissy laughed. It was almost a snigger. To keep the Chink from turning away and escaping the dialogue, she seized his limp member and held fast. She was learning how to deal with him. “It was you who made me aware that the domestication of animals was one of history's major mistakes, a devastating error not only in terms of ecology, but in terms of the psychological and philosophical consequences that are still being suffered. You know, I don't really hate dogs per se, or even dog owners; it's the idea of pethood that turns me off, the taming of wild things, the use of animals as surrogate children — or surrogate lovers.” She pondered a moment, without loosening a fraction her grip on the Chink's dick. “It's ironic, isn't it? All the great agrarian cultures of old Europe were matriarchal; then along came the nomadic herds-men from Central Asia with their love of the bull and their concomitant belief in penis power. The herding tribes gradually overran the feminist states, replacing the Great Mother with God the Father, substituting the Christian death trip for the pagan glorification of life, venerating beasts ahead of vegetation and oh, yeah, let's see, placing the notion of spirit ahead of the fact of matter — you first called my attention to this, you fart. The women who planted, cultivated, harvested and got high were crowded from their central position by men who drifted from worn-out pasture to virgin pasture, fighting and getting drunk. Well, it's ironic. Because cowgirls are, by their very name, herders. And these particular Rubber Rose cowgirls not only keep horses and goats, they've semidomesticated the grandest, wildest flock of birds in the world. Ironic.”

The Chink shook his beard in the evening breeze. He was hairy inside and out. His beard sent out shocks of milkweed and mutton. “Yes, ironic, finding women who would be women imitating men. But there are other aspects of this saga that I bet you haven't considered.”

“If you'll tell me, I'll turn you loose.”

“Makes no difference to me. Actually, I was hoping you'd hold on, just in case I yield to this impulse to jump off the cliff.”

She let go.

“Ha ha ho ho and hee hee,” said the Chink. Then he swept his smirk under the rug. “I was merely thinking about the significance of the fact that there are cranes involved in this confrontation between girls and government. The crane is the bird of poetry. It was Robert Graves who pointed out that the crane has been traditionally connected with poetry all the way from China to Ireland. The crane is the national animal, the totem animal of Hungary — and as Graves wrote, there are twenty times more poems written and published in Hungary each year than in any other country. Obviously, cranes bring luck to poets, and vice versa. The only country in Europe where cranes are still breeding is Hungary. The last crane in the British Isles was shot in nineteen six. Russia's cranes are hiding in Siberia. Japan's, too. And we know the state of U.S. cranes. Graves says, 'While there are still cranes in Hungary, poetry is bound to continue.' He's right. And if poetry continues, Hungary will continue. Religion and politics are unnecessary to the culture — or the individual — that has poetry.”

“You really don't believe in political solutions, do you?”

“I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.”

Sissy thought she had the old goat this time, and not just by the pecker, either. “Well, then, what are the philosophical solutions?”

“Ha ha ho ho and hee hee. That's for you to find out.” She didn't have him. “I'll say this much and no more: there's got to be poetry. And magic. Your thumbs taught you that much, didn't they? Poetry and magic. At every level. If civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the shithouse of existence, then statesmen are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry. Bankers are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry. Time magazine is going to have to write about magic and poetry. Factory workers and housewives are going to have to get their lives entangled in magic and poetry. As for policemen and cowgirls. .” The Chink wagged his beard at the ranch below. It was a beard that a nesting crane might enjoy.

If Sissy failed to comprehend completely, at least she no longer felt confused. Through a pinhole in the peace that dropped like the dusk around them, she squeezed one last question. “Do you think such a thing can ever happen?”

“If you understood poetry and magic, you'd know that it doesn't matter.”

The moon rose.

The clockworks struck.

A crane whooped.

She understood.

111A.

POETRY IS NOTHING more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the Great Order of Love. How is this done? By fucking around with syntax.

[Definitions are limiting. Limitations are deadening. To limit oneself is a kind of suicide. To limit another is a kind of murder. To limit poetry is a Hiroshima of the human spirit. DANGER: RADIATION. Unauthorized personnel not allowed on the premises of Chapter 111a.]

112.

BREAKTHROUGHS ON SIWASH RIDGE notwithstanding, there was precious little communication down on the Rubber Rose. All day, attorneys from the ACLU tried to build bridges between the government and the cowgirls, but each bridge was burned before it was crossed.

As their final and most generous offer in a series of overtures, Justice Department spokesmen at last promised that no charges would be filed against the cowgirls were they to withdraw peacefully and allow the Interior Department to take whatever steps it felt necessary for the present well-being and future preservation of the crane flock. As a sort of bonus, the Assistant Undersecretary of the Interior said that if a bird was killed for an autopsy, it would be later mounted and presented to the Rubber Rose Ranch as a symbol of that place's concern for America's vanishing wildlife.

“Just what we've always needed,” snapped Delores del Ruby. “A stuffed whooping crane.”

Yes, Delores was back. And with her return there disappeared any hope for settlement. Many of the pardners, concerned for the safety of themselves and one another, concerned for the birds, concerned, even, for the men at the gates, were growing increasingly willing to accept the government's terms. Bonanza Jellybean herself conceded that the cowgirls had made their point, had made it repeatedly, had made it before a worldwide audience — so there might be little additional to gain by pushing it any further.

Ah, but Delores. A dark shadow of a woman. With nocturnal eyes. And a midnight voice. A smile like a hiss of asps in the rain. It is said that a long ebony hair curled from the nipple of each of her perfectly formed breasts. Delores was adamant.

“It isn't for ourselves that we take this stand,” she said, her voice as heavy and slow as the lids of a crocodile. “It isn't for cowgirls.” She flicked her arrow tongue at Jelly. “It's for all the daughters everywhere. This is an extremely important confrontation. This is woman-kind's chance to prove to her enemy that she's willing to fight and die. If we women don't show here and now that we aren't afraid to fight and die, then our enemy will never take us seriously. Men will always know that, no matter how strong our words and determined our deeds, there's a point where we'll back down and give them their way.”

Cracking her whip to obscure Debbie's gentle protests, Delores paraded proudly before the barricades. “I'm prepared to battle!” she cried. “Furthermore, I'm prepared to win! Victory for every female, living or dead, who's suffered the temporary defeats of masculine insensitivity to their inner lives!”

A few of the cowgirls cheered. Donna said, “I'll fight the bastards.” Big Red was opening a can of beans with a bowie knife. “I'll fight 'em with bean gas, if necessary,” said Big Red.

Delores and her whip shared a grin. Said the forewoman, “The sun's going down. Let's those of us not standing watch get some sleep. In the morning we'll plan our fight. Tomorrow afternoon those of you who'd like can join me in the reeds, where the cranes and I will be sharing the last crumbs left in the peyote sack.”

113.

IF YOU WANT details of the secret White House whooping crane meeting, you'll have to read the exposé Jack Anderson will write as soon as he can get his hands on the tapes. If there were any tapes. Seymour Hersh says the conference wasn't taped; says that, after the taping experiences of the prior President, nothing will ever be taped in the White House again, not a Mantovani concert or an Xmas package or a sprained ankle — and that is why Seymour Hersh plans no in-depth article on the subject. Face it; you may never get the details of the secret White House whooping crane meeting. Are you positive you want them?

The author knows generally what took place in the conference room off the Oval Office that morning in late September, and although he's been warned to keep mum, he is going to divulge it here. It ought to satisfy you. Many small streams empty into these pages. I never promised you the Potomac.

One thing that is certain is that the President, the new President, was an uncertain man that morning. In the salts of his bile, he felt lumpy. Somehow, he had a nagging suspicion that the last President wouldn't have allowed himself to be called into a meeting on whooping cranes and cowgirls. The last President, thought the new President, would have ordered his aides to take whatever action was most politically expedient in regard to the cranes, while he, the last President, never one to relish the intimacy of social problems, jetted off to Peking or Moscow or Cairo to make historical hay from the international situation, which was desperate, as usual. The new President felt cheapened, felt wimpy about being expected to preside over a meeting on long-legged birds. Indeed, he would have refused had he not been informed that Pentagon and Petroleum wished him to confer. New on the job though he was, he sensed that as President he could no more ignore Pentagon and Petroleum than he could as congressman, but he sensed, too, in the bubbles of his bile, that he would regret that goddamned meeting on whooping cranes.

The interest of the military and the oil lobby in the Rubber Rose affair was recent. Heretofore, the matter was the concern of the justice Department, which sought to end (in its usual fashion) what it regarded as defiance, subversion and criminal misappropriation of federal property, and of the Interior Department, which sought to get the cranes back on the job and out of its hair. When the generals and oil men suggested a different approach, however, Justice and Interior were, for the most part, in accord.

The meeting opened with the director of the FBI explaining to the new President how the cowgirls had set up their barricades directly in front of the crane flock. “A devilishly shrewd tactic,” he called it, for were federal agents to fire on the young women, the lives of the cranes would be jeopardized. “They're holding the cranes as hostages, as it were,” the FBI chief said. “They've got us over a barrel.”

He yielded the floor to Pentagon, represented by a four-star general from the Air Force. The general, with facts and figures pulled from a blue plastic folder, explained to the new President that this flock of whooping cranes had been a thorn in the flesh of the military for more than thirty years. Since 1942, by far the finest and most used bombing range in America had been the one on Matagorda Island, off the Gulf Coast of Texas. The majority of the B-52 crews that served in Vietnam had trained over the Matagorda range, for example. In addition, helicopter gunships had made frequent and effective use of Matagorda target runs. Because these whooping cranes winter on Matagorda, or on the nearby mainland across San Antonio Bay in what is known as the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, the Air Force and Army had been frequently blamed by conservationists for the threatened extinction of the birds. Under pressure, even the Interior Department had begun to harass the Air Force about the bombing range. Naval and Coast Guard operations in the area had also been criticized and curbed, said the general. He told the new President that Pentagon considered the cranes detrimental to the best interests of America's defense.

The new President was not a thing of beauty, though, in truth, he was fairer to look upon than his predecessor. The new President possessed a face that might have comforted a lonely orangutan. One could draw a good likeness of the new President with a weenie dipped in fingerpaints. There was something close to farce in the manner in which the new President nodded his head quasi-sagely at the conclusion of Pentagon's testimony and in the way that head jerked to exaggerated attention when the oil lobbyist, pulling facts and figures from a black leather briefcase, began his spiel.

It was hardly necessary to remind the new President of the energy crisis, but the petroleum-pusher did so. Then he proceeded to inform the chief executive of large quantities of oil that lay wasting in the seabed because off-shore drilling in the Matagorda-Aransas region had been disallowed due to this one lousy flock of birds, birds that contributed not a copper to the Gross National Product and that held not a feather's weight in negotiations with the Arabs. You get the picture? The new President did. Maybe it was an overstatement to say the whooping cranes were crunchy granola in the bedsheets of the economy, but they were certainly one more obstacle to smoothing out that badly rumpled bed.

Once again, the FBI director took the floor. It was almost certain, said he, that there would be a showdown on the Dakota ranch. He described the so-called cowgirls as fanatical subversives violently opposed to the American way of life. These women wanted bloodshed, he said. They had mocked a court order, had refused to negotiate, were at that very moment pointing firearms, possibly of Communist origin, at government agents.

It seemed inevitable to the FBI director that federal lawmen would be fired upon. This did not worry the top cop, for the vastly superior firepower of the U.S. marshals and FBI agents would quickly and thoroughly prevail. Furthermore, there might be positive benefits from a shootout. Suppose that, in returning the cowgirl's fire, the marshals and agents should “accidentally” pepper the whooping cranes with shots? Suppose that canisters of extrastrength tear gas ostensibly lobbed at the cowgirls were to land in the midst of the birds, who were known to be fatally susceptible to tear gas? In the process of routing the rustlers, the crane flock could be so decimated that the government would be obliged to capture the few survivors and place them in zoos. Thus, in one fell swoop, the U.S. could rid itself of a band of troublemakers and the whooping crane nuisance. Could the President — in secret, of course — support such an action?

The new President wished he was on the golf course, wished he had a glass of whiskey, wished an aide would hand him a statement to read, wished this and wished that, but no fairy godmother attended the new President. It was September 29, Brigitte Bardot's birthday; perhaps all the wish-granters were in France waiting for Brigitte Bardot to blow out the candles on her cake.

At last the President opened his banana-biters to concede that the plan had merit, but that he did not believe the public would stand for federal agents shooting teen-aged girls.

The half-dozen others in the conference room disagreed. They pointed out that these girls were lawbreakers, armed, dangerous, immoral, disruptive influences, enemies of the public good — not unlike the young women who had been annihilated in Los Angeles. There would be no more of a public outcry than in the L.A. executions, and much less than in the suppression at Kent State. Moreover, with a little help from the press, the government should have no difficulty in blaming the tragic fate of the whooping cranes on the violent, lawless actions of the cowgirls. The fair-minded majority would believe the girls had gotten their just deserts.

“Besides,” said the man whom the new President had nominated to be the new Vice President, “it doesn't make any difference politically. The bleeding-hearts raked me over the coals for permitting the rioters at Attica Prison to be, ah, severely dealt with, but it hasn't hurt my career one iota. Mr. President, maybe you underestimate the moral sense of the American people.”

It was a convincing argument, though the way it was phrased did nothing to cream the texture of the presidential bile. The new President rolled his eyes from Pentagon to Petroleum. He was trapped and knew it. Narrowing the beam on his monkey lamps, to suggest that he was both thoughtful and independent, he said, “I'll have to give it some consideration.” He stood with an amateur actor's interpretation of dignity, banging his thigh painfully against the conference table. Expensive handtooled shoes, which he remembered now as having been a gift from the oil lobby, bore him from the room.

As soon as possible, he exchanged those shoes for golf shoes. Before he left for Burning Tree Country Club, the new President called in his most trusted aide. “In two hours — no, better make it three — I want you to tell FBI that I have decided to approve Operation Whooper Pooper.”

The new President went out on the green Earth and knocked a little ball around.

114.

SISSY HANKSHAW GITCHE never made it back to Siwash Lake. No thumb was large enough, no mastery of movement so perfect, no will over landscape and its travelers of such strength as to get her there.

She was turned back by U.S. marshals and FBI agents, who had parked armored vehicles on the hilltop and now squared off against the cowgirls from close range. The federal forces had held her for questioning, and when she was released, it was in the sour custody of a marshal who escorted her to the Rubber Rose gates and pointed her toward Mottburg.

It took more than that to stop her, of course. She doubled back along the base of Siwash Ridge and into the southern hills, intending to approach the lake from the eastern or prairie side, the only side that was not now guarded by the government. With every step she took, however, the wind increased by some large fraction of a knot. By the time she began to angle onto the prairie, Dakota had its dust up. Like a fog of knife tips, like a hurricane of harsh ants, the dust enveloped her, bit her, choked her, blinded her. She fought the storm, but it would not stand still. She hitchhiked it, but it would not take her with it.

The storm had no sense of humor. There is little in Nature that does. Maybe the human animal has contributed really nothing to the universe but kissing and comedy — but by God that's plenty.

The storm reminded Sissy of that creature that is simultaneously the most dangerous and most pitiful thing on Earth: a scared old man with a title. It was more frustration than fear that drove her back to Siwash Ridge, a refuge whose frenzied heights occasionally showed themselves through the dust. It took her hours to get there, and when she finally crawled, exhausted, into the cave, she felt as if she'd been sandpapered in the hobby shop of Hell.

The Chink sought to apply some varnish — yam oil, to be exact — but Sissy pushed him away. “Not now,” she said. “I'm sending all my energy to Jellybean. I want her to feel that I'm standing with her in this crazy thing that she does.”

Love grew thumbs. And hitchhiked unmolested through storm and stormtroopers to the lake. It arrived at about the same instant as Delores's Third Vision. About the same time as a very battered, very skinny, very pooped-out snake with a card — the jack of hearts — under its tongue.

115.

WE HAVE A REPTILE in our totem. It has been there since Eden. It lives at the base of the brain and has a special relationship to women. It is associated with the dark world, dark consciousness, the necessary opposite of light. However, it does not function as a symbol because it is too unpredictable. In a male, its venom can cause violence or art. In a female, it produces a peculiar madness that men do not understand. In children, it is the little red wagon painted blue.

Delores ate seven peyote buttons, after cutting away their poisonous tufts. She gave three apiece to Donna, LuAnn, Big Red and Jody. That left only four buttons in the sack. Not enough for the cranes, who already were showing signs of coming down — restlessness, wariness, noise — and none of the other cowgirls wished to get high. So Delores ate the last four plants herself. Peyote is ugly to look upon (the “buttons” resemble grungey green Naugahyde hassocks for the splayed feet of malevolent gnomes) and horrid to taste. Its seven alkaloids produce seven varieties of abdominal cramps (Within an hour, five cowgirls were puking) and dirty burps of bitterness.

Nauseated, Donna, Big Red, LuAnn and Jody wandered around the lakeshore, batting their eyes at everything that moved, which was everything. Their faces were hot, their legs rubbery, their thoughts soaring. The armored cars on the hill seemed ridiculous, childish. The way the wind kept accelerating, never content with this speed or that, struck them as funny, too. But the wind has no sense of humor, and when billows of dust began to rise, the stoned-out cowgirls took refuge in the barricades, huddled together in an anxious stupor, perhaps reliving the dusty moments of Creation.

But Delores. . Delores lay in the reeds at the water's edge. Asleep yet awake, she had sunk so deeply into the hole in her mind that gale and dust could not follow her. Jellybean gave up on trying to rouse her and lead her to shelter, leaving her there, spattered with green vomit, to communicate with her totem. Delores moaned. Her hand opened and closed on the handle of her whip. She seemed about to crawl on her belly, to slither into the wind-whipped waters of the pond.

It was there in that state that they found her. “They?” Niwetúkame the Divine Mother and the snake from the message service. Had they come together? Were they in cahoots, the serpent and the goddess? What was said? How was the playing card dealt? Was Delores shown jewels or hummingbirds or strikes of lightning? Did she meet her double? What business was transacted? Was it stunning and frightful, or was there an air of show biz about it? Delores has never said.

Long after the vision of St. Anthony and Paul's epileptic flashes on the Damascus road, long after the voices spoke to Joan of Arc and Blake had his eyeballs seared with heavenly wonderments, long after Edgar Cayce's prophetic trances and Ginsberg's glimpse of the hip angel, there came the three visions of Delores del Ruby, the third of which sent her stumbling into the barricades, in the dark of night, at the end of a Dakota dust storm, to snatch the rifles from the hands of her cowgirl sisters.

Her black eyes were shining like the wet crowns of drakes; her face had softened into a sweet mask of electric blood. In the moonlight, she stood out like a city surrounded by flames. She walked as if in sleep. With a slow underwater strangeness, she threw guns into the dust-covered grass.

No one dared question her actions; no one so much as thought to question her actions. She obviously was operating under divine authority. She had abandoned her whip.

When she spoke, it was as if someone had filed the burrs off her consonants and fluffed out her vowels. She spoke simply, but with intensity.

“The natural enemy of the daughters is not the fathers and the sons,” she announced.

“I was mistaken.

“The enemy of women is not men.

“No, and the enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men.

“We all have the same enemy.

“The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.

“There are authoritative blacks with dull minds, and they are the enemy. The leaders of capitalism and the leaders of communism are the same people, and they are the enemy. There are dull-minded women who try to repress the human spirit, and they are the enemy just as much as the dull-minded men.

“The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized.”

The cowgirls gathered around Delores in a tight circle. None was missing. Many were transfixed. Their eyes had begun to glow in pale approximation of their forewoman's orbs.

“It is woman's mission to destroy as well as to give birth,” Delores told them. “We will destroy the tyranny of the dull. But we can't destroy it with guns. Or whips. Violence is the dullard's Breakfast of Champions, and the logical end product of his or her misplaced pride. Violence fertilizes that which we would starve. But Debbie, we can't love the dull away, either. We only pollute our own waters when we try to extend our true affection to those who don't know how to accept love or to give it. Love is very powerful, but it has limits and it's a costly mistake to spread it too thin.

“No, we will destroy the enemy in other ways. The Peyote Mother has promised a Fourth Vision. But it won't come to me alone. It will come to each of you, to every cowgirl in the land, when you have overcome that in your own self which is dull.

“The Fourth Vision will come to some men, too. You will recognize them when you meet them, and be their steady sidekicks in equal and ecstatic escapades of poetic behavior and romance.” Delores held up a card. The prairie moon illuminated its tattered edges. It was the jack of hearts.

The forewoman seemed to be tiring. Fumes of weariness streamed from her black hair. Her voice was leaning against the wall of her larynx when she said, “First thing in the morning, you must end this business with the government and the cranes. It's been positive and fruitful, but it's gone far enough. Playfulness ceases to serve a serious purpose when it takes itself too seriously. Sorry I won't be with you at the conclusion. As you know, I've been sick and stupid for a long time. I have a lot to make up for, a lot to accomplish, and there's someone important that I've got to see. Now.”

As graceful as a ballet for cobras, Delores turned and walked away into the dry Dakota night.

116.

THE COWGIRLS DIDN'T SLEEP a wink. They felt intoxicated. The ideological tensions that had divided them had called in well. Purposes had been redefined. Right around the next corner, mysterious Fourth Vision destinies were singing. Whole new aspects of existence beckoned, like stupendous. . thumbs. The pardners were ready for more of everything, and even that might not be enough.

When life demands more of people than they demand of life — as is ordinarily the case — what results is a resentment of life that is almost as deep-seated as the fear of death. Indeed, the resentment of life and the fear of death are virtually synonymous. Does it follow, then, that the more people ask of living, the less their fear of dying?

Or was Dr. Robbins merely being cute when, explaining how such a cowardly concept as “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die” could gain popular favor, he said, “Some people would rather die than think about death"?

Well, we can observe only that so elated were the cowgirls, so expectant, so immersed in magic, that it was difficult for them to concentrate on the menace facing them from the hill. They knew merely that they no longer wished to battle with the authorities — on the authorities' terms — and they had faith that no battle would ensue.

Behind the shield of the armored cars, however, the U.S. marshals and agents of the FBI shared no such notions. The men hadn't slept a wink, either. The storm had left them dirty, pink-eyed and irritable, but as dawn neared they trembled with the ancient power of the hunter. When they thought of the soft young game they would bring down, they trembled the more. They chewed gum furiously. Many of them had erections.

Neither camp was prepared for dawn when it did appear. Like the hands of a cat burglar, those famous rosy fingers suddenly slid over the window ledge of the hemisphere and with silent efficiency began to jimmy the lock of the day. Before their excited minds could fully cope with the idea, the cowgirls and the G-men were staring at the faint outlines of one another's barricades.

“Well,” said Jellybean, “what we got to do is one of us has got to go up that hill and tell them boys that America can have its whooping cranes back. Since I'm the boss here, and since I'm responsible for a lot of you choosing to be cowgirls in the first place, it's gonna be me that goes.”

“But. .”

“No buts about it. It's getting lighter by the second. You podners keep your heads down. Ta ta.”

“Jelly! Please!”

The cutest cowgirl in the world stood up and stretched. For a moment, her rigid arms resembled wings. The goose flesh on her bare thighs drew taut. Her breasts vibrated in her gaudy Western shirt. Had Francis Scott Key observed such breasts in the dawn's early light, he might have gone below deck and written quite a different anthem. (Or maybe Francis Scott Key would have ignored the erogenous mammaries — mere sexual trappings where men are concerned — and commented instead on the more universal example of a lone human being bravely accepting a dread responsibility. Let us not judge the composer unfairly nor confuse his sensibilities with those of that awful roller derby performer, Francis Skate Key.)

Jellybean vaulted over the carcass of a reducing machine and planted her Tony Lama boots in the dewless grass. “Nothing to be scared of,” she told herself. “I'll just get this message delivered as fast as I can and head for the butte to see Sissy.” Jelly had no idea what was going to happen to the Rubber Rose now, but she had never felt more like a cowgirl.

About halfway up the hill, her dimpled knees knocking dust puffs off aster heads, she remembered that she was still wearing her six-gun. Delores had overlooked that one in her disarmament spree. “Better get rid of this,” Jelly thought. “Might give those greenhorn dudes a fright.”

Rubber-doll fingers reached into the holster and drew the gun. She had been pulling pistols out of holsters since she was three years old. Play. Just play. She started to fling the toy away, but before her pinkies could release the pearl handle, a shot rang out from the top of the hill.

Jelly felt a blow to her tummy. Something was stinging her baby fat. The six-gun slipped from her fingers as she lifted her satin shirt tail and pulled down the waistband of her skirt. Bright red blood was running out of her scar; she could see it in the dawnlight, could see the warm brightness pouring from that exact spot where she'd fallen on a wooden horse when she was twelve.

“I wasn't really shot with a silver bullet,” she confessed to no one in particular.

“Or was I?”

She smiled the deliciously secretive smile of one who instinctively recognizes the reality of myth.

Twenty or thirty more sweaty triggers were squeezed on the hilltop, and Bonanza Jellybean was blown into a bloody mush.

Down by the lake, the cowgirls screamed and cried. They hugged one another in horror. A couple of them, LuAnn and Jody, leaped from the barricades to retrieve their weapons, and were immediately riddled.

A voice bellowed over a bullhorn, “You've got two minutes to come out with your hands over your heads.” But it was obvious there would be no opportunity for surrender. Random G-men already were starting to snipe, and at any second there would erupt an orgy of gunfire intended to seduce with death every cowgirl in the Dakota hills.

Funny no one paid any attention to the helicopter. Those G-men who heard it at all must have assumed it was one of theirs. Its red and black markings would not have been conspicuous in the dim morning. At any rate, nobody took a shot at the chopper, even though it was flying extremely low. It was so weighted down with explosives it couldn't have climbed another inch.

By the time it floundered to a landing, dissolving the semicircle of federal cops, nothing could be done about it. There wasn't enough “time.” The fat boy in the cockpit — it was impossible to tell whether he was laughing or crying — pushed the detonator and a mighty blast took the top off the hill — wheatgrass, asters, little bluestem, dust, mice, armored cars, G-men and all.

In the hush that followed the echoes of the explosion, the whooping crane flock rose in one grand assault of beating feathers — a lily white storm of life, a gush of albino Gabriels — swarmed into the waiting sky, and after circling the pond one time — either a limbering exercise or some primordial ornithological farewell — flapped south toward Texas.

Leaving human friends and human foe to clean up their respective human messes.

117.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So you're the great boohoo, eh?”

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

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

“No big deal.”

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

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

“Aren't all big boohoos misquoted?”

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

“You're not much like Jesus.”

“How do you know?”

“Talking about my ass.”

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

“Not the Jesus I've read about.”

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

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

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

“I don't play with whips anymore.”

“Oh yeah? What do do you play with?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No big deal.”

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

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

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

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

118.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get thee back to the aroma of birth,” Dr. Robbins had told the Countess, “for the smells of the female body, the smells you have sought to kill with your totalitarian chemicals, are the very smells of birth, the strong odors of the essence of existence. The nose that is offended by the hot perfume of the cunt is a nose unsuited for this world, and should be sniffing gold on the scrubbed streets of Heaven. The vagina reeks of life and love and the infinite et cetera. O vagina! Your salty incense, your mushroom moon musk, your deep waves of clam honey breaking against the cold steel of civilization; vagina, draw our noses to the grindstone of ecstasy, and let us die smelling as we did when we were born!”

And so it came to pass that, as soon as possible, Sissy and Delores brought the Chink to the ranch to convalesce. They fixed up the master bedroom for him, the room that had slept Jellybean, and Miss Adrian before her. The ranch house held a minimum of charm for the old fart, but he was well aware that the two women couldn't carry him up Siwash Ridge. Delores put the stereo in his room, so he could pass the autumn days listening to rock 'n roll while meditating, chanting, eating deep-fried yams and leafing through Oui magazine.

Sissy served him faithfully, and most of the time cheerfully, but she was subject to fits of depression. Once, in a particularly grim despondency, she had turned to him and assigned him partial fault in Jelly's death. “You should have done more!” she charged.

“I did all I could.”

“What was that? I never noticed you do anything — until it was too late.”

“I set an example. That's all anyone can do. I'm sorry the cowgirls didn't pay better attention, but I couldn't force them to notice me. I've lived most of my entire adult life outside the law, and never have I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked fights with authority. That's stupid. They're waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful. Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. And it's fairly easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, act lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid — but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the System. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself. You know that, Sissy,”

Of course Sissy knew it. Hadn't the world's greatest hitchhiker always operated on that premise? It's just that she had a brain and our brains are forever having fun with us by making us learn over and over what we've known from the beginning. The brain may have been unjustly criticized in this book, but you've got to admit, the brain has a weird sense of humor.

And so it came to pass that Delores and Sissy became lovers.

They shared the room adjacent to the Chink's, keeping close in case he needed anything during the night.

In time, they found themselves needing something during the night.

Delores slept on the left, Sissy on the right. Before long, there wasn't any middle.

The bed never grumbled beneath them. Even the springs, tattletales by nature, resisted all temptations to squeak. The walls and ceiling auditioned each new position, apparently approving, for nothing cracked or fell. The little squeals that Delores's serpentine tongue pushed and pulled from Sissy's pipes, that Sissy's hitchhiker fingers beckoned from deep in Delores's throat, attracted no more attention from the hills beyond the fluttering curtains than the squeals of rabbits and mice. Sometimes four sets of lips would be smacking at once, but the edition of Amy Vanderbilt that Miss Adrian had left on the mantlepiece never once corrected them or turned up its nose. It was as if the world was absorbing their love, offering no resistance, but was lightly, softly breathing it in. Sighing “ah!”

Or “ha!”

But certainly not “ma!” Girl-love may have its place in the world, but as the bedsprings, walls, ceiling, hills and even Amy Vanderbilt must know, spit doesn't make babies.

And so it came to pass that when Sissy discovered she was pregnant, her thumb pointed at the Chink. Figuratively speaking, to be sure, for she told him nothing of it, nor did she mention her condition to Delores or write of it to Julian (whose drinking problem had become so acute that the “beautiful people” now shunned him, leaving him to wheeze out the effects of civilization in the posthippie hangouts of the East Village).

She concealed her morning sickness by pretending it was emotional, a physical manifestation of worry and grief, and no one was the wiser — except for a certain middle-aged woman who read palms and suffered trances in the drive-in movie outskirts of Richmond, Virginia.

And so it came to pass that the Rubber Rose cowgirls were acquitted on all counts. They rode out of Mottburg in a horseback processional, triumphantly waving their hats at the townsfolk, among whom was Granny Schreiber, cheering.

Back at the ranch, a meeting was called. In the bunkhouse, just like the old days.

Big Red read the hands some literature from the Girls' Rodeo Association. “All-girl rodeoing is enjoying the greatest period of growth in its history. Only five all-girl rodeos were held in 1973—this year there were eleven.” The GRA poop sheet went on to tell how Gail Petska, twenty-five, of Tecumseh, Oklahoma, had earned $19,448 in 1973, bull-riding, calf-roping, barrel-racing and goat-tying.

“I aim to cut into that pie,” announced Big Red. “And I wish the rest of y'all would consider coming with me. We'll work outta Texas, just like the whooping cranes.”

“Goat-tying as a sport is a new one on me,” said Donna, “but with our experience us Rubber Rose podners ought to be damn good at it. You can count me in, but only if you'll help me agitate to end all-girl rodeos and get us back to competing with men again, equal, like it ought to be.”

“Exactly what I had in mind,” said Big Red. “But we'll do it gently, like the Peyote Mother told us to.”

Seven cowgirls in all agreed to move to Texas and hit the rodeo circuit. Kym and Linda had already decided to winter in Florida, working as waitresses, saving money for some new adventure. Six cowgirls had made up their minds to give college a try, including Mary, who was going to study archeology to put her Christian faith to the test of historical fact. Some of the hands thought they'd just knock around for a while, trying different lifestyles on for size — preparing themselves for the Fourth Vision.

Outside the bunkhouse, two men were sitting on the corral fence. One was Elaine's sidekick, a thirty-five-year-old poet from San Francisco, who had been paying Elaine clandestine visits off and on since she'd been in Dakota. The other was an old friend of Debbie's from her Acid Atom Avatar days, a reformed LSD dealer who'd started reading the complete works of Albert Einstein and was learning to think (not reason, but think). Elaine and her sidekick, and Debbie and hers, wanted to run the ranch together. They planned to cultivate sunflowers and market the seeds.

It was agreed. Elaine and Debbie would be granted trusteeship of the spread, but the place was also to be permanently maintained as a haven for the twenty-six cowgirls, should any of them ever need a safe place to retreat from the slings and arrows of outrageous whatever.

Finally, the women voted to change the name of the Rubber Rose to El Rancho Jellybean. And that is how it is known to this day.

There was one more item of business. Heather wanted to know who stole the picture of Dale Evans out of the shitter.

119.

ONE MORNING the prairie dogs looked out of their cellars and saw that Indian summer had skipped town. It hadn't even left a good-by note. The prairie dogs shrugged, shivered and ducked inside, hoping to get to sleep before winter began stomping around upstairs in its hob-nailed boots. That very same day, the Chink left, too.

Sissy and Delores returned windblown from a walk to find him hobbling on a cherry stick, his belongings tied in a skin. Out in the chill, Sissy had confessed her pregnancy to Delores, and the two of them had agreed that the Chink ought to be informed. Now, here he was, his second day on his feet, preparing to flee the ranch. And not for Siwash Ridge, either.

“I'm going to go back with the Clock People,” he said. “I kind of miss those fool redskins and wonder what they're up to. Besides, they need somebody like me to needle 'em and keep 'em honest. Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government.”

“I just can't believe you're going to leave the butte,” said Sissy. But she could believe it. His bone had healed much more quickly than the physicians forecast, yet seeing him leaning on a cane, so drawn and pale, it was difficult to imagine him ever scurrying over the unpredictable architecture of Siwash Ridge again. What Sissy really meant was that she couldn't believe he was leaving her.

“Easy come, easy go,” said the Chink.

“Wow, you sure have a way with words,” said Delores.

The Chink actually blushed. “I can't help it if I grew up in an antipoetic culture,” he said. “Language will be different when I'm with the Clock People, though. They're from an oral tradition. And I'm not talking about what you horny hop toads do in bed every night.”

It was Delores's turn to blush. Sissy's turn, too. The walls had betrayed them after all.

“Well,” sighed Sissy, trying to make her teardrops stay in their seats, “if the Clock People give you any inside information on the end of the world, drop us a postcard.”

“The world isn't going to end, you dummy; I hope you know that much.” He grew uncharacteristically serious. “But it is going to change. It's going to change drastically, and probably in your lifetime. The Clock People see calamitous earthquakes as the agent of change, and they may be right, since there are a hundred thousand earthquakes a year and major ones are long overdue. But there are far worse catastrophes coming. .”

“Inevitable?” asked Delores.

“Unless the human race can bring itself to abandon the goals and values of civilization, in other words, unless it can break the consumption habit — and we are so conditioned to consuming as a way of life that for most of us life would have no meaning without the yearnings and rewards of progressive consumption. So I'd say yes, inevitable. It isn't merely that our bad habits will cause global catastrophes, but that our operative political-economic philosophies have us in such a blind crab grip that they prevent us from preparing for the natural disasters that are not our fault. So the apocalyptic shit is going to hit the fan, all right, but there'll be some of us it'll miss. Little pockets of humanity. Like the Clock People. Like you two honeys, if you decide to accept my offer of a lease on Siwash Cave. There's almost no worldwide calamity — famine, nuclear accident, plague, weather warfare or reduction of the ozone shield — that you couldn't survive in that cave.”

“Okay for us,” said Sissy, “and okay for the Clock People, but what about the rest of the world, the millions who aren't even aware of the dangers, let alone the alternatives? We should probably be working full-time educating the masses and trying to mobilize them for survival.”

“No, no,” said the Chink. He was leaning heavily on his cane. “Survival isn't important. What matters is how you survive. Every long-term survival plan conceived by our think tanks and scientists and social strategists involves variations on totalitarianism — anthill- or beehive-type societies. Well, insects are good at survival; better than any other creatures, for sure. That's because in the insect world there's no individualism whatsoever. Insect life is rigid and predictable; the bug psyche is concerned with absolutely nothing but survival: survival of the colony, the hive, the swarm. I think it's better that mankind dies out than resorts to a totalitarian survival lifestyle. We should take as our model the whooping crane rather than the termite. Let's go extinct if we must, but let's go with some dignity and humor and grace. Antmen and beewomen aren't worthy of survival.”

The Chink reached out and caressed Sissy's thumb. The left thumb. The transcontinental whopper. So slow was his movement that she didn't even flinch. “Survival itself is of no concern to me, but here's something I do find interesting. Suppose that in the next twenty to fifty years a series of overlapping natural and manmade disasters wrecks our social structure and eliminates most of the human race. The probability of this is high. Only small, isolated groups would survive. Now, suppose that you, Sissy, were among the survivors — and if you exercise your option to reside in Siwash Cave, you would be among them. And suppose that you bear children. .”

With that, he removed his wrinkled yellow hand from Sissy's perpetually pregnant appendage and began to caress her temporarily knocked-up belly. His eyes were smiling. My God? Did he know about that, too?

“Suppose that Madame Zoe's prophecy comes true and you bear five or six children with your characteristics. All in Siwash Cave. In a postcatastrophe world, your offspring would of necessity intermarry, forming in time a tribe. A tribe every member of which had giant thumbs. A tribe of Big Thumbs would relate to the environment in very special ways. It could not use weapons or produce sophisticated tools. It would have to rely on its wits and its senses. It would have to live with animals — and plants! — as virtual equals. It's extremely pleasant to me to think about a tribe of physical eccentrics living peacefully with animals and plants, learning their languages, perhaps, and paying them the respect they deserve. It's just fun to consider, that's all.”

Sissy squeezed his hand. It felt like a wedge of stale cheese. “Fun is fun,” she said, “but how am I going to be the progenitor of a tribe when I'm living on an isolated ridgetop with Delores?”

“That's your problem” said the Chink. “Actually, I'm not much more concerned with tribal situations than I am with mass populations. Most groups are herds and all herds are a mess. Debbie and those other misguided kids try to pigeonhole me as another Oriental boohoo. They couldn't be more wrong. The various Oriental philosophers have at least one thing in common: they take the personal and try to make it universal. I hate that. I'm the opposite. I take the universal and make it personal. The only truly magical and poetic exchanges that occur in this life occur between two people. Sometimes it doesn't get that far. Often, the true glory of existence is confined to individual consciousness. That's okay. Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.”

Abruptly, the Chink pulled his hand from Sissy's stomach. He cleared his throat. “Kaff.” And rolled his eyes until they looked like a couple of beans that had just got the word they were being transferred to Boston. “Listen to the way I'm babbling. That dynamite must have loosened one of my transistors. Don't pay any attention to me. You've got to work it out for yourself. The westbound choo-choo leaves Mottburg at one-forty. I want to be on it. Will you drive me to the station?”

When the authorities dropped charges against Delores — apparently seeking to wash their hands of cowgirls forever — they had returned the peyote wagon. The women decided to take it to town; after all, the new jeep (a gift from the Countess Foundation) belonged to the ranch and the ranch was now in the control of Elaine and Debbie. Delores drove, Sissy and the Chink beside her holding hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old goat.

120.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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