Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

  5.

  SISSY'S EARLIEST MEMORY was of a day when she was four or three. It was Sunday afternoon and she had been napping under sheets of funnies on a horsehair sofa in the living room. Believing that she was still asleep, for they were not intentionally unkind, her daddy and a visiting uncle were standing over her, looking down at her young thumbs.

  “Well,” her uncle said after a while, “you're lucky that she don't suck 'em.”

  “She couldn't suck 'em,” said Sissy's daddy, exaggerating. “She'd need a mouth like a fish tank.”

  The uncle agreed. “The poor little tyke might have a hard time finding herself a hubby. But as far as getting along in the world, it's a real blessing that she's a girl-child. Lord, I reckon this youngun would never make a mechanic.”

  “Nope, and not a brain surgeon, neither,” said Sissy's daddy. “'Course she'd do pretty good as a butcher. She could retire in two years on the overcharges alone.”

  Laughing, the men went out to the kitchen to fill their glasses.

  “One thing,” Sissy heard her uncle jest from a distance. “That youngun would make one hell of a hitchhiker . . .”

  Hitchhiker? The word startled Sissy. The word tinkled in her head with a supernatural echo, frozen in mystery, causing her to stir and rustle the funny papers so that she failed to hear the conclusion of her uncle's sentence:

  “. . . if she was a boy, I mean.”

  6.

  THE SURPRISE of Sissy Hankshaw is that she did not grow up a neurotic disaster. If you are a small girl in a low-income suburb of Richmond, Virginia, as Sissy was, and the other kids jeer at your hands, and your own brothers call you by your neighborhood nickname—"Thumbelina"—and your own daddy sometimes makes jokes about your being “all thumbs,” then you toughen up or shatter. You do not merely stretch rhino leather over your own fair skin, for that would deflect pleasure as well as pain, and you do not permit your being to turn stinking inside a shell, but what you do is swirl yourself in the toughness of dreams.

  It is all you care about. When the other kids are playing hopscotch or kick-the-can you go off alone to a woods near your home. There are no cars in the woods, of course, but that does not matter. There are cars in your dream.

  You hitchhike. Timidly at first, barely flashing your fist, leaning almost imperceptibly in the direction of your imaginary destination. A squirrel runs along a tree limb. You hitchhike the squirrel. A blue jay flies by. You flag it down. You are not the notorious Sissy then; just a shy Southern child at the edge of a small forest, observing the forward motion of your thumbs, studying the way they behave at different velocities and angles of arc. You hitchhike bees, snakes, clouds, dandelion puffs.

  In school you learn that it is the thumb that separates human beings from the lower primates. The thumb is an evolutionary triumph. Because of his thumbs, man can use tools; because he can use tools he can extend his senses, control his environment and increase in sophistication and power. The thumb is the cornerstone of civilization! You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

  Because of his thumbs, man can use tools etc., etc. But you cannot use tools. Not well. Your thumbs are too immense. Thumbs separate humans from the other primates. Your thumbs separate you from other humans. You begin to sense a presence about your thumbs. You wonder if there is not magic there.

  The first time . . . You'll never forget it. It's a frigid morning and a thin snow is filling the chinks in the wind. You don't feel like walking the five blocks to school. Over your shoulder you see—Oh you can barely speak of it now!—a Pontiac stationwagon approaching at a moderate speed. How you suffer through those false starts before your hand takes the plunge. Your bladder threatens to overflow. The sweep of your skinny arm seems to last for minutes. And even then you are passed by. But no—brake lights! The Pontiac skids ever so slightly on the snowflakes. You run, actually sweating, to its side. Peer in. Your face, beneath your stocking cap, is a St. Vitus tomato. But the driver motions for you to get in . . .

  After that you never walk to school. Not even in fine weather. You catch rides to the movies on Saturday afternoons (your first exposure to cowgirls); catch rides into downtown Richmond just for practice. You are amazed at the inherent, almost instinctive, precision with which your thumbs move through air. You marvel at the grace of those floppy appendages. That there were ever such instruments as thumbscrews bring tears to your eyes. You invent rolls and flourishes. During your thirteenth summer you hitchhike nearly a hundred miles—to Virginia Beach to see the ocean.

  For one reason or another, you look up “thumb” in a dictionary. It says “the short, thick first or most preaxial digit of the human hand, differing from the other fingers by having two phalanges and greater freedom of movement.”

  You like that. Greater freedom of movement.

  7.

  THEY CONTINUED TO GROW, the first or most preaxial digits of Sissy's hands. They grew while she ate her grits and baloney; they grew while she slurped her Wheaties and milk. They grew while she studied history ("As the settlers pushed ever westward, they were threatened constantly by hordes of savage Indians"); they grew while she studied arithmetic ("If a hen and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick the seeds out of a dill pickle?"). They grew in the sour-smelling room where she slept with two brothers; they grew in the small forest where she played all alone. They grew in the summer when other things grew; they grew in the winter when most growing had stopped. They grew when she laughed; they grew when she cried. As she inhaled and exhaled, they grew.

  (Yes, they grew even as millions of young Americans under social pressure and upon the instruction of their elders, struggled to cease growing; which is to say, struggled to “grow up,” an excruciatingly difficult goal since it runs contrary to the most central laws of nature—the laws of change and renewal—yet a goal miraculously attained by everyone in our culture except for a few misfits.)

  They continued to grow, the first or most preaxial digits of Sissy's hands, and not quite in direct ratio with the rest of her growing-girl self.

  If Sissy was fearful that they might grow on forever, that eventually they might reach a size that would put them beyond her control, that they might cause her to end up in a roadside zoo, third geek from the left, just across the pit from the Gila monster, she did not let on.

  With no mental effort, she was expanding her breasts from bottle-stoppers to mounds that required material restraint. Without any help from her brain, she was beginning to sprout velvety hairs over that area between her legs that heretofore had been as bare and ugly as a baby bird. Lacking reason or logic to guide her, she nevertheless maneuvered her bodily rhythms into perfect synchronization with those of the moon, at first merely spotting her panties and then, after only a few months' practice, issuing a regular lunar flow. With the same calm and expert innocence, she pumped up her thumbs, ever lengthening the shadows they dropped on schoolwork and dinner plates.

  As if intimidated by this rank and easy spectacle of growth—which, because they shared her room, they must witness in intimate detail—her brothers all but halted their own physiological progression. They remained their whole lives short and peanutlike, with baby faces and genitals of a size that women don't really mind but that other men often feel compelled to mock. Believing that old wives' tale about the correlation in scale of the thumb and the penis, locker-room anatomists sometimes suggested to the brothers that it was a pity they hadn't shared in their sister's digital largess.

  Jerry and Junior Hankshaw would have been horrified had their thumbs assumed sisterly proportions; would have been horrified, for that matter, if their peckers had so enlarged. But a slight increase, a reasonable enlargement, would have been welcome, and indeed, after numerous clandestine consultations in the same scrubby forest where Sissy had learned her business, the brothers decided actively to seek it.

  Junior, whose mechanical skills were to
lead him in his daddy's gritty footsteps (in the tobacco warehouses of South Richmond there is always a dryer, a humidifier or an exhaust fan that needs repair), began work on a secret apparatus. After no less than three used innertubes had been ripped and stripped in vain, and following the theft of both rawhide laces from Mr. Hankshaw's boots, Junior finally produced a gadget that resembled a mix between a vise, a slingshot and the center tube from a toilet tissue roll. For reasons of discretion, the thumb-stretcher could be used only late at night, and the brothers spent many a sleepy hour in the dark taking turns at the agony dispensed by the device they had fastened to their imitation maple Sears and Roebuck bedstead.

  Their endeavor was not without historical precedent. Around 1830, when he was twenty years old, the composer Robert Schumann subjected the fingers of his right hand to a stretching machine. Schumann's purpose was to escalate his progress toward piano virtuosity, his pianist-sweetheart Clara having expressed dismay over the length of his reach. In the sugar-frosted elegance of a nineteenth-century Leipzig drawing room, Schumann would sit stiffly, sipping kaffee, while his stubby fingers suffered growing pains in the grips of a contraption that resembled a nightingale harness, a rack for heretic elves. The result was that he crippled his hand, terminating his performing career.

  All that happened to Jerry and Junior Hankshaw was that, with thumbs too red and raw to disguise, they soon were questioned by their parents and ridiculed by their peers. Thanking Jesus that he and Jerry had gone through digital intermediaries and not subjected their peckers directly to his invention, Junior threw the device into the James River. Poor Schumann threw himself into the Rhine.

  Only one set of thumbs was destined to grow—and glow—in the rickety house of the Hankshaws. One set of thumbs destined to soar and bow, as if that set of thumbs was the prematurely shortened performing career of Robert Schumann, continuing now in a Rhine-soaked frock coat upon the cement stages of America's freeways, O Fantasia, O Noveletten, O Humoreskes, Gas Food Lodging Exit 46.

  8.

  SOUTH RICHMOND was a neighborhood of mouse holes, lace curtains, Sears catalogs, measles epidemics, baloney sandwiches—and men who knew more about the carburetor than they knew about the clitoris.

  The song “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” was not composed in South Richmond.

  There have been cans of dog food more splendiferous than South Richmond. Land mines more tender.

  South Richmond was settled by a race of thin, bony-faced psychopaths. They would sell you anything they had, which was nothing, and kill you over anything they didn't understand, which was everything.

  They had come, mostly by Ford from North Carolina, to work in the tobacco warehouses and cigarette factories. In South Richmond, the mouse holes, lace curtains and Sears catalogs, even the baloney sandwiches and measles epidemics, always wore a faint odor of cured tobacco. The word tobacco was acquired by our culture (with neither the knowledge nor consent of South Richmonders) from a tribe of Caribbean Indians, the same tribe that gave us the words hammock, canoe and barbecue. It was a peaceful tribe whose members spent their days lying in hammocks puffing tobacco or canoeing back and forth between barbecues, thus offering little resistance when the land developers arrived from Europe in the sixteenth century. The tribe was disposed of swiftly and without a trace, except for its hammocks, barbecues and canoes, and, of course, its tobacco, whose golden crumbs still perfume the summer clouds and winter ices of South Richmond.

  In South Richmond, smelling as it did of tobacco, honky-tonk vice and rusted-out mufflers, social niceties sometimes failed to make the six o'clock news, but one thing the citizens of South Richmond agreed upon was that it was not fit, proper or safe for a little girl to go around hitchhiking.

  Sissy Hankshaw hitched short distances but she hitched persistently. Hitching proved good for her thumbs, good for her morale, good, theoretically, for her soul—although it was the mid-fifties, Ike was President, gray flannel was fashionable, canasta was popular and it might have seemed presumptuous then to speak of “soul.”

  Parents, teachers, neighbors, the family minister, older children, the cop on the beat tried to reason with her. The tall, frail, solitary child listened politely to their pleas and warnings, but her mind had a logic of its own: if rubber tires were meant to roll and seats to carry passengers, then far be it from Sissy Hankshaw to divert those noble things from their true channel.

  “There's sick men who drive around in cars,” they told her. “Sooner or later you're bound to be picked up by some man who wants to do nasty things to you.”

  Truth was, Sissy was picked up by such men once or twice a week, and had been since she began hitching at age eight or nine. There are a lot more men like that than people think. Assuming that many of them would be unattracted to a girl with . . . with an affliction, there are a lot of men like that, indeed. And the further truth was, Sissy allowed it.

  She had one rule: keep driving. As long as they maintained the forward progress of their vehicles, drivers could do anything they wished to her. Some complained that it was the old rolling doughnut trick, which even Houdini had failed to master, but they would take a flyer. She caused a few accidents, taxed the very foundations of masculine ingenuity and preserved her virginity until her wedding night (when she was well past the age of twenty). One motorist, a tanned athletic type, managed an occasional French lick while keeping his Triumph TR3 on a true course in moderate traffic. Normally, however, the limitations imposed by her steadfast devotion to vehicular motion were met with less dexterity.

  Sissy neither solicited nor discouraged, but accepted the attentions of random drivers with calm satisfaction—and insisted they keep driving. She would eat the cheeseburgers and Dairy Queen sundaes they bought for her while they fished in her panties for whatever it is men fish for in that primitive space. Personally, she preferred gentle, rhythmic trollings. And automatic transmissions. (No girl likes to be molested by a party who is always having to shift gears.) Being molested was, in a sense, a fringe benefit of her craft, a secondary pleasure pulled like a trailer behind the supreme joy of the hitchhike. In honesty, though, she had to admit that it was also an avocational hazard.

  Since the brain has such a high susceptibility to inflammation, there were occasional hotheads who would not or could not abide by her rule. In time she learned to recognize them by subtle symptoms—tight lips, shifty eyes, and a pallor that comes from sitting around in stuffy rooms reading Playboy magazine and the Bible—and refused their rides.

  Earlier, however, Sissy dealt with would-be rapists in another way. When pressured, she placed her thumbs between her legs. Usually, the man simply gave up rather than try to remove them. The very sight of them there, guarding the citadel, was enough to cool passions or at least to confuse them long enough for her to leap out of the car.

  Sissy dear. Your thumbs. HOLLYWOOD SPECTACULAR. LAS VEGAS. THE ROSE BOWL. Larger than any one man's desires.

  (Incidentally, Sissy's mama never noticed any olfactory traces of her daughter's adventures. Perhaps that is because in South Richmond even a young girl's damp excitement quickly assumed the fragrance of tobacco.)

  9.

  SHE WAS TAKEN TO A SPECIALIST ONCE. Once was all that her family could afford.

  Dr. Dreyfus was a French Jew who had settled in Richmond following the unpleasantries of the forties. On his office door it was proclaimed that he was a plastic surgeon and a specialist in injuries of the hands. Sissy owned some toy automobiles made of plastic—she used them to set up theoretical problems in hitchhiking. Unlike some children, she took excellent care of her playthings. The notion of a plastic surgeon seemed silly to her. The suggestion of injury puzzled her further.

  “Do they ever hurt?” asked Dr. Dreyfus.

  “No,” replied Sissy. “They feel goo-ood.” How could she explain the tiny tingle of power she had begun to perceive in them?

  “Then why do you flinch when I press?” inquired the specialist.

  �
�Just because,” said Sissy. Again the schoolgirl could not elucidate the true emotion, but throughout her life she would refuse to shake hands for fear of damaging those digits that were to be to hitchhiking what Toscanini's baton was to a more traditional field of motion.

  Dr. Dreyfus measured the thumbs. Circumference. Length. He gave them eyeshine treatment although their skin was not lacking in shine. He tapped them with tiny hammers, registered (without hint of aesthetic preference) the various tints and shades of their coloration, milked them with syringes, pricked them with pins. He placed them one at a time upon the scales, cautiously, as if he were the Spanish treasurer and they musical hot dogs brought from America by Christopher Columbus to amuse the queen. In a hushed voice he announced that they comprised four percent of the girl's total body weight—or about twice as much as the brain.

  The x-rays had a go at them.

  “Bone structure, apparent origin and insertion of musculature, and articulation are properly proportioned and normal in every aspect but size,” the doctor noted with a nod. The ghost-thumb in the negative nodded back.

  Mr. and Mrs. Hankshaw were summoned from the waiting room where Saturday Evening Post fantasies had clouded their instinctive parental concern the way that Norman Rockwell's sentimental ideas cloud the purity of a blank canvas.