Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

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

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

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

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

  36.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Sissy waved as she walked away. “There's nothing I want done for my thumbs, Mrs. Schreiber. Thanks a lot for your help. I'll see if there's a part in the movie for you.”
>
  “Do that. Do that,” said the old woman. She cackled. Then she reached out lazily, as if to scratch Indian summer behind its ears.

  37.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  38.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  39.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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