Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

  If the killings upset him, the Chink accepted with ease other contradictions in the Clock People's philosophy. When faced with a contradiction, as he was—as we all are—daily if not hourly, it seemed only fair to him to take both sides.

  Yet he grew increasingly impatient with the Clock People's notions, and toward the end of his Sierra stay his hickory dickory mouse of mockery ran frequently up their clock.

  Now, a number of the young men of the Great Burrow had lost patience, too. Through the Chink's news broadcasts they had learned of mushrooming militancy among American Indians. They learned of Red Power and of reservations whose proud residents were freshly painted—and armed to the teeth. In early spring of 1969 a quartet of bucks slipped away from the Great Burrow, venturing into the strange world beyond the still snowy mountains, to see for themselves. A couple of months later they returned, excited, feathered, beaded, buzzing of revolution. Two comrades threw in with them and they deserted the Clock People to go face the white man on his own terms—and in his own time. The bucks called at the Chink's shack on their way down the mountains. “You're as tired as we are of sitting around waiting for a motherfucking earthquake,” they said in the idiom they had recently adopted. “You're strong and smart and have taught us much. Come with us and join the movement.”

  “This movement of yours, does it have slogans?” inquired the Chink.

  “Right on!” they cried. And they quoted him some.

  “Your movement, does it have a flag?” asked the Chink.

  “You bet!” And they described their emblem.

  “And does your movement have leaders?”

  “Great leaders.”

  “Then shove it up your butts,” said the Chink. “I have taught you nothing.” He skipped down to the creek to gather watercress.

  A few weeks later he accepted the invitation of an aged Siwash chief who was the principal outside confederate of the Clock People, a degenerated warlock who could turn urine into beer, to be initiated as a shaman, an honor that gave him rights of occupancy in the sacred cave on far-away Siwash Ridge. At once he left for the Dakota hills to construct a clockworks whose ticks might more accurately echo the ticks of the universe, which, as he listened, sounded more and more like “ha ha ho and hee hee.”

  64.

  WHEN YOU'RE IN THE SADDLE ALL DAY, you need something to do with your mouth besides sing “Yippee eye oh ki yea.” Usually it's too hot and dry for singing, anyhow. You just end up with a throat full of dust.

  However, when you're stuck in the saddle from dawn to dusk, you need something of an oral nature to keep you occupied and calm. That's why so many cowboys chew tobacco or puff roll-yer-owns. That's why it really is Marlboro Country.

  But cowgirls of the New Age, they aren't much into the tobacco habit. Gloria was mighty attached to the Pall Malls that dit-ditted to her in an endless dotted line from South Richmond, Virginia, and Big Red was prone to accept a chaw. On the whole, though, the gals had a nonpreference for tobacco that was close to contempt, even if they did not agree with Debbie, who predicted, “When things really get too bad on the planet Earth and it starts to fall apart from wars and pollution and earthquakes and so forth, then Higher Beings are going to come in flying saucers and rescue the more evolved souls among us; but they can't take smokers aboard their spaceships because people with nicotine in their systems explode when they enter the seventh dimension.”

  At any rate, cowgirls need something to do with their mouths while riding herd, and this is what they do: they stick a butterscotch Life Saver in one cheek and a clove in the other. They seldom suck and never chew, but just concentrate on the mixture of juices that drips onto their tonsils from the Life Saver and the clove, in a steady drip like rainwater running off the candied rooftops of Fairyland.

  Now, aside from being calming and occupying, requiring no spitting and no assistance from the hands, a butterscotch Life Saver and a clove give a person the most interesting breath in the world.

  It's no wonder the Rubber Rose ladies were always kissing on each other, although what a cowgirl does with her mouth once she's back at the bunkhouse shouldn't really concern us students of Western lore.

  When there were thirty or more cowgirls riding for the Rubber Rose, sometimes the wheatgrass and the hills and the whole wide sky itself would start to smell like butterscotch and clove.

  Sometimes the Chink would smell it way up on his ridge. Not when he first came to Dakota, of course. Then he could smell only pollen and sagebrush and woodsmoke and his own hairy self. Who was it once said, “A hermit is mysterious to everyone but the hermit.”

  65.

  WHEN HE FIRST LIT ON SIWASH RIDGE, the Chink couldn't catch a whiff of butterscotch/clove cowgirl breath or of Countess-gagging cowgirl snatch. Which is just as well, for had there been cowgirls then on the Rubber Rose range, they might have drawn his nose out of his own business. And he had business aplenty. The cave proved to be as wondrous as advertised, but enormous amounts of labor and ingenuity were required to adapt it to his lifestyle and make it comfortable for year-round residency. Moreover, he had a clockworks to assemble and that is not a simple task. In the process of readying the cave and planning his clockworks, he had also to extricate himself from Clock People consciousness, because twenty-six years among the Indians of the Great Burrow had molded him more than he had realized when he set out again on his own.

  The mass of humanity has minds like soft wax. Once an impression is made upon them, it won't change until you change it for them. They are malleable but not self-malleable (a condition politicians and PR men use to sinister advantage). The Chink, however, was perfectly capable of reshaping his ball of tallow: it just took longer than he had anticipated.

  When, four years later, he spoke of the Clock People to Sissy, it was with admiration, appreciation and amusement.

  In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings—artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers—to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relieve the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption. The Chink snickered his hell-crazed snicker when he imagined the doubt and confusion that would follow society's eventual discovery of the Clock People. He snickered even though he suspected that the encounter would destroy the Clock People, and even though he scorned the sickening democratic more-is-better fallacy inherent in the notion that the part must be sacrificed for the whole.

  “I loved those loony redskins,” the Chink said to Sissy. “But I couldn't be a party to their utopian dreaming. After a while it occurred to me that the Clock People waiting for the Eternity of Joy was virtually identical to the Christians waiting for the Second Coming. Or the Communists waiting for the worldwide revolution. Or the Debbies waiting for the flying saucers. All the same. Just more suckers betting their share of the present on the future, banking every misery on a happy ending to history. Well, history isn't ever going to end, happily or unhappily. And history is ending every second—happily for some of us, unhappily for others, happily one second, unhappily the next. History is always ending and always not ending, and both ways there is nothing to wait for. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”

  The shaggy old fart slid his arms around Sissy and . . . no, wait, she wasn't telling Dr. Robbins that part. Yet.

  Sometime in the course of things, the Chink had made it clear to Sissy that, while he might not buy the Clock People's dreaming, he did respect the quality of their dream. The vision of an era, however lasting, during which all ritual would be personal and idiosyncratic, made the Chink's heart want to stand up and dance. Furthermore, while a return engagement by Jesus appears as impossible as worldwide Marxist revolution is improbable, a general disruption of the planet by natural forces is inevitable. The Clock People had narrowed the apocalyptic credi
bility gap.

  “In the end, though,” observed the Chink, “for all their insight, the Clock People were a collection of human animals banded together to prepare for better days. In short, just more victims of the disease of time.”

  Ah, time! Back to time. Dr. Robbins struggled to sit upright. The wine had said its good-bys. He was a trifle drunk. His mustache could not deny it. Every so often, Dr. Goldman would appear at the French doors. This didn't bother Dr. Robbins. Dr. Goldman would never have the courage to interrupt, not so long as Sissy continued her exercises. Great digits wallowed in the garden air.

  (Dr. Goldman's face, as red and swollen as a smallpox vaccination, pressed to the pane. He saw the thumbs promenade stiffly in their suits of blushes. Then they began to quiver. They made wild and ultrarapid swoops, like water spiders on the surface of a pond. As he watched, a kind of radiant ectoplasm formed all around them. Sissy was smiling absently. Dr. Robbins lay, as if in adoration, at her feet. Dr. Goldman whirled abruptly and strode away.)

  In truth, Dr. Robbins was a bit more anxious than he might have appeared. His patient's testimony had gradually become secondary to her hitch practice, her running of the scales. What had begun as casual muscle flex had escalated, as she lost self-consciousness, into a thorough inventory of the extravagant moves and motions stored in her gross appendages. Now she had fallen silent, absorbed in the piloting of her blimps. Dr. Robbins was agog at the display, but he wished, like old-fashioned novelists, to stay to the point, to keep the story flowing. You see, Dr. Robbins had a theory that was apropos the clockworks and the Chink. It had long been Dr. Robbin's belief that the central problem facing the human race was time.

  As for defining time, or speculating upon its nature, forget it. Neither tipsy nor sober was he about to dance with the angels on the head of that pin. Since embarking upon a career in behavioral science, however, Dr. Robbins had searched to find at least one fundamental truth about the psyche, and the closest he had come to a fundamental was the discovery that most psychological—and, therefore, social, political and spiritual—problems can be linked to pressures exerted by time. Or, more precisely, civilized man's idea of time.

  Of course, he wasn't absolutely sure that there were any problems. It was entirely possible that everything in the universe was perfect; that all that happened, from global warfare to a single case of athlete's foot, happened because it ought to happen; and while from our perspective it would seem that something horrendous had gone wrong in the development of the human species, vis-à-vis its happy potentialities on the blue green sphere, that that was an illusion attributable to myopia, and that, in fact, development was proceeding beautifully, running right as a Tokyo train, and needing only a more cosmic overview in order for its grand perfection to obscure its momentary fits and faults.

  That was a possibility, all right, one that Dr. Robbins had by no means ruled out. On the other hand, if such an approach was, like religion, merely a camouflage system created to modify experience in order to make life more tolerable—another exercise in escapism festooned with mystic crêpe—then one had no choice but to conclude that mankind was a royal fuck-up. Despite our awesome potential; despite the presence among us of the most extraordinary enlightened individuals, operating with intelligence, gentleness and style; despite a plethora of achievements that no other living creatures have come within a billion light-years of equaling, we were on the verge of destroying ourselves, internally and externally, and of taking the entire planet with us, crumpled in our tight little fists, as we shoot down the shit-chute to oblivion.

  Now, if that be the case, one is compelled to ask what went wrong; how and when did it go wrong. The answer to that question of questions breathes on so many buds that the wimpy brain gets hay fever, its eyes puff shut, it sneezes away whole bouquets of hidden and half-guessed truths, and it probably doesn't want to know anyway. From his psychiatrist's stance, however, a stance only slightly less allergic than any other, Dr. Robbins was able to venture this far:

  Most of the harm inflicted by man upon his environment, his fellows and himself is due to greed.

  Most of the greed (whether it be for power, property, attention or affection) is due to insecurity.

  Most of the insecurity is due to fear.

  And most of the fear is, at bottom, a fear of death.

  Given time, all things are possible. But time may have a stop.

  Why do people fear death so? Because they realize, unconsciously at least, that their lives are mere parodies of what living should be. They ache to quit playing at living and to really live, but, alas, it takes time and trouble to piece the loose ends of their lives together and they are dogged by the notion that time is running out.

  Was that it, or was the pebble in the dancing slipper the phobia that time does not have a stop? If we could live our average 70.4 years and know for certain that that was that, we could readily manage. We might complain that it was far too short, but what there was of life we could live freely, doing exactly what we pleased insofar as our conscience and capabilities allowed, accepting that when it was over it was over: easy come, easy go. Ah, but we aren't allowed the luxury of finality. We dilute and hobble our most genuinely felt impulses with the idea, whether fervently held or naggingly suspected, that after death there is something else, and that that something may be endless, and that the correctness of our behavior in “this” life may determine how we fare in the “next” one (and for those poor souls who believe in reincarnation, the ones after that).

  Thus, whether it is in danger of stopping and catching us with our pants down, or whether it runs on forever and demands that we busy ourselves preparing for the next station on the long ride, either way, time prevents us from living authentically.

  Perhaps the fault is that we are Dr. Frankensteins who have created time as a monster with three heads: past, present and future. In which case, back to the drawing board! The present is okay, the present is sharp and clean; leave it where it is, on top of and directing the body. But relegate the past to some other anatomical function. The past, for example, would make a perfect asshole. As for the future, let's see, the future could be time's . . .

  Thumbs.

  Like papier-mâché spaceships in an old Buck Rogers movie, they wooshed in a wobbly fashion toward imaginary worlds. She fueled them with rocket powder mined in her heart. She juggled them without ever letting go, tossing and catching them simultaneously, so that the shower of thumbs—that aerial ballet of warm pineapples—struck over and over again the same rods in the observer's eye. The hammered eye blinked beneath this banging of bubbles. Thumbs tumbled end over end in the field of vision. Thumbs wheeled and thumbs floated. Thumbs squirmed like the tickled bellies of babies. Thumbs spanked the bottom of the sky.

  It was all Dr. Robbins could do not to surrender to the spectacle, to let thumbs carry him to wherever thumbs desired he go. After all, this was not a sight many had seen but he was a stubborn man with time on his hands. So, at last, he exclaimed, loudly enough to pierce his patient's reverie, “Sissy, don't keep me in suspense! What were the Chink's thoughts about time? And how did he apply them to building his own clockworks?”

  “Oh,” said Sissy, a trifle startled. “Oh yes.” She let her thumbs fall into her lap and bounce gently there. “Oh yes. Well, you see, you must understand that the Chink doesn't do a whole lot of talking. He says what he has to say very quickly and seldom repeats or explains himself. He's more apt to be laughing and scratching than expounding ideas. But if I humored him—and let him do what he wanted with me” (Sissy lowered her lashes)—"he would share a few of his thoughts. Now, I'm not sure what this has to do with time itself, but the Chink sees life as a dynamic network of interchanges and exchanges, spreading in all directions at once. And it's all held together by the tension between opposites. He says there is order in Nature, but there is also disorder. And it is the balance of tensions between the order and the disorder, the natural laws and the natural randomness, that k
eeps it from completely collapsing. It's a beautiful paradox, as he describes it. Personally, I don't know. When I mentioned the concept to Julian, he just scoffed. Julian says that everything in Nature is ordered and there is no randomness. The more we learn about the way Nature works, the more laws we discover. Julian says there isn't any paradox, that the only reason certain aspects of Nature seem disorderly to us is because we haven't understood them yet. Julian says . . .”

  “Julian doesn't know his scrotum from Kentucky fried chicken,” grumbled Dr. Robbins. “I recognize that paradox the Chink was speaking of; it's inside us as well as all around us. I went into psychiatry with the desire to help set people free. But I soon learned that man is stuck with a lot of conflicting behavioral and emotional traits that have a genetic basis. We have built-in contradictions; they're standard equipment on all models. No matter how much people long to be free—even to the point of valuing freedom over happiness—an aversion to liberty is right there in their DNA. For eons of evolutionary time, our DNA has been whispering into the ears of our cells that we are, each one of us, the most precious things in the universe and that any action that entails the slightest risk to us may have consequences of universal importance. 'Be careful, get comfortable, don't make any waves,' whispers the DNA. Conversely, the yearning for freedom, the risky belief that there is nothing to lose and nothing to gain, is also in our DNA. But it's of much more recent evolutionary origin, according to me. It has arisen during the past couple of million years, during the rapid increase in brain size and intellectual capacity associated with our becoming human. But the desire for security, the will to survive, is of much greater antiquity. For the present, the conflicting yearnings in the DNA generate a basic paradox that in turn generates the character—nothing if not contradictory—of man. To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox? But, since the genetic bent for freedom is comparatively recent, it may represent an evolutionary trend. We may yet outgrow our overriding obsession to survive. That's why I encourage everyone to take chances, to court danger, to welcome anxiety, to flaunt insecurity, to rock every boat and always cut against the grain. By pushing it, goosing it along whenever possible, we may speed up the process, the process by which the need for playfulness and liberty becomes stronger than the need for comfort and security. Then that paradox that the, er, Chink sees holding the show together may lose its equilibrium. What then, Mr. Chink, what then?” Dr. Robbins scratched his mustache with the stem of his Bulova, thereby simultaneously satisfying itch and winding watch. With time the central problem facing mankind, such efficiency had to be admired.