Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

  Sissy, soothing her thumbs, smiled. She liked that baby-faced junior shrink. In some ways, he even reminded her a little of the Chink. In other ways—dress and demeanor—he reminded her of Julian. She supposed that he would be pleased by the former comparison, vexed by the latter. So she said:

  “That's fascinating. Not the kind of talk I expected to run into at the Goldman Clinic, I'll tell you. You think a bit like the Chink yourself.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, you do. Although I wouldn't dare to presume to speak for the Chink, it sounds to me like you're talking about the same paradox. Or, at least, a similar one. Well, to try to get back to your question . . . The Chink sees in the natural world a paradoxical balance of supreme order and supreme disorder. But man has a pronounced bias for order. He not only refuses to respect or even accept the disorder in Nature, in life; he shuns it, rages against it, attacks it with orderly programs. And in so doing, he perpetuates instability.”

  “Hold on a minute,” called Dr. Robbins. He propped his Oxford cloth-shirted back against the stone bench upon which Sissy was sitting. “Let me make sure I'm with you. Wine made me fuzzy. You say—the Chink says—the bias for order leads to instability?”

  “Right,” said Sissy. “For several reasons. First, worshiping order and hating disorder automatically shoves great portions of Nature and life into a hateful category. Did you know that the center of the Earth is red-hot liquid covered with a hard crust, and that that crust is not a single unified layer but a whole jumbled series of shifting plates? These plates are about sixty miles thick and very plastic. They appear and disappear. They move around and buckle and bump into each other like epileptic dominoes. New mountains and new islands—once in a long while, new continents—are being created and old ones destroyed. New climates are being formed and old ones altered. The whole thing is in flux. Existing arrangements are temporary and constantly in threat of disruption. This whole big city of New York could be sucked into the Earth or quick-frozen or flattened or inundated—at any second. The Chink says the man who feels smug in an orderly world has never looked down a volcano.”

  Dr. Robbins appeared a tad disappointed. Maybe it was the sun heating the wine in his eyes. “Yeah, I had a geology course in college,” he mumbled. “Geophysical turmoil is a reality, all right, but hardly a defense of disorder. I mean, cancer—cellular turmoil—is a reality, too, but that doesn't make it lovable or even acceptable.”

  “True,” agreed Sissy. Her big digits had quieted down. They lolled upon her thighs like exhausted sea cows run ragged by some cowgirls of the deeps. “True. That wasn't the Chink's point. He was saying simply that the vagrancies and violence of nature must be brought back into the foreground of social and political consciousness, that they have got to be embraced in any meaningful psychic renewal.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay.”

  “But as for stability . . . In general, primitive man enjoyed great stability. It blew my mind to hear the Chink say that, but now I can see that it was true. Primitive culture was diverse, flexible and completely integrated with Nature at the level of the particular environment. Primitive man took from the land only what he needed, thus avoiding the hassles that result in modern economics from imbalances of scarcity and surplus. Hunting and gathering tribes worked only a few hours a week. To work more than that would have put a strain on the environment, with which they related symbiotically. It was only among mobile cultures—after the unfortunate domestication of animals—that surplus, a result of overachievement, led to potlatches and competitive feasts—orgies of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste—which attached to simple, healthy, effective economies the destructive elements of power and prestige. When that happened, stability was shattered. Civilization is a mutant beast that emerged from the shattered egg of primitive stability. Another thing about primitives; they deified forces of disorder as well as of order. In fact, the gods of wind and lava and lightning were often honored above the deities of more placid things—and not always out of fear.”

  Still not satisfied, Dr. Robbins dragged his nails through the label on the empty wine bottle. “Interesting,” he said. “Pretty interesting. But here you've got the Chink praising disorder on the one hand and stability on the other . . .”

  “Exactly,” answered Sissy. “Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn't understand stability. He's confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social leaders drool about stability constantly. It's their favorite word, next to 'power.' 'Gotta stabilize the political situation in Southeast Asia, gotta stabilize oil production and consumption, gotta stabilize student opposition to the government' and so forth. Stabilization to them means order, uniformity, control. And that's a half-witted and potentially genocidal misconception. No matter how thoroughly they control a system, disorder invariably leaks into it. Then the managers panic, rush to plug the leak and endeavor to tighten the controls. Therefore, totalitarianism grows in viciousness and scope. And the blind pity is, rigidity isn't the same as stability at all. True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. As a psychiatrist, wouldn't you say that a stable individual accepts the inevitability of his death? Likewise, a stable culture, government or institution has built into it its own demise. It is open to change, open even to being overthrown. It is open, period. Gracefully open. That's stability. That's alive.”

  “Makes sense, makes good sense,” agreed Dr. Robbins, upon whose girl-next-door face a wine-stained mustache made little sense at all. Dr. Robbins's mustache was the ruins of a lost city of hair discovered by archeologists in the Bald Mountains, or Dr. Robbins's mustache was a fur coat worn by an eccentric widow to a picnic in Phoenix, Arizona, on the Fourth of July, or Dr. Robbins's mustache was an obscene phone call to a deaf nun. “Yeah,” agreed Dr. Robbins, tugging at his mustache as if even he didn't believe it. “I can fit that into my jigsaw puzzle. But time, Sissy; where do time and clockworks connect to this?”

  “The Chink didn't exactly say how they connected, but I think I've got it figured out.” Sissy pulled a scrap of paper from a jumpsuit pocket. “A physicist named Edgar Lipworth wrote this,” she explained. “He writes, 'The time of physics is defined and measured by a pendulum whether it is the pendulum of a grandfather's clock, the pendulum of the Earth's rotation around the sun, or the pendulum of the precessing electron in the nuclear magnetic field of the hydrogen maser. Time, therefore, is defined by periodic motion—that is, by motion related to a point moving uniformly around a circle.' Got that?”

  “Sure,” said Dr. Robbins. “And there's the pendulum of the heart beating, the pendulum of the lungs breathing, the pendulum of music finding its beat . . .”

  “Those too. Right. Okay, then, civilized man is infatuated with the laws he finds in Nature, clings almost frantically to the order he sees in the universe. So he has based the symbologies, the psychological models with which he hopes to understand his life, upon his observations of natural law and order. Pendulum time is orderly time, the time of a lawfully uniform universe, the time of cyclic synthesis. That's okay as far as it goes. But pendulum time is not the whole time. Pendulum time doesn't relate to trillions of the moves and acts of existence. Life is both cyclic and arbitrary, but pendulum time relates only to the part that's cyclic.”

  “Although the manner in which we relate to pendulum time is often arbitrary, too,” threw in Dr. Robbins. He thought of the arbitrary dial of a clock and how certain arbitrary numbers on that dial, such as nine and five and noon and midnight have been left dog-eared by undue emphasis.

  “Yes, I reckon so,” said Sissy. “But the point is, although a lot of our experience occurs outside of, or relates only artificially and tenuously to, pendulum time, we still envision time only in pendulum terms, in terms of continuous compulsory rotation. Even the Clock People's hourglass; it wasn't designed for perfect accuracy
or anything, but it was modeled upon an orderly flow. It clung to the frayed edges of a time its builders wanted to transcend. The catfish pool came closer to measuring the 'other' time of life, but its limitations . . .”

  “Sissy.”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Robbins had spotted Dr. Goldman at the French doors again. “What is the Chink's clockworks like?” he asked.

  “Ha ha,” laughed Sissy. “Criminey. You wouldn't believe it. It's just a bunch of junk. Garbage can lids and old saucepans and lard tins and car fenders, all wired together way down in the middle of the Siwash cave. Every now and then, this contraption moves—a bat will fly into it, a rock will fall on it, an updraft will catch it, a wire will rust through, or it'll just move for no apparently logical reason—and one part of it will hit against another part. And it'll go bonk or poing and that bonk or that poing will echo throughout the caverns. It might go bonk or poing five times in a row. Then a pause; then one more time. After that, it might be silent for a day or two, maybe a month. Then the clock'll strike again, say twice. Following that there could be silence for an entire year—or just a minute or so. Then, POING! so loud you nearly jump out of your skin. And that's the way it goes. Striking freely, crazily, at odd intervals.”

  Sissy closed her eyes, as if listening for the distant bonk or poing, and Dr. Robbins, ignoring Dr. Goldman's gestures from the French doors, seemed to be listening, too.

  They listened. They heard.

  They were assured then, together, the psychiatric intern and his patient, that there was a rhythm, a strange unnoted rhythm, that might or might not be beating out their lives for them. For each of us.

  Because to measure time by the clockworks is to know that you are moving toward some end . . . but at a pace far different from the one you might think!

  66.

  DR. ROBBINS HAD HAD ALL THE FOOD for thought he could stomach at one sitting. He wished to be home alone with another bottle of wine. He dismissed his patient politely. Then, in order to avoid Dr. Goldman, left the clinic by scrambling over the garden wall, tearing, in the process, a knee out of his thirty-dollar slacks.

  Sissy Hankshaw Gitche, who never had talked so extensively before in her life, was weary and glad to be excused. Men of ideas, men such as Julian, the Chink and now Dr. Robbins, intrigued her. But she welcomed the chance to go to her room and dream of cowgirls, while, with a cube of unsalted kosher butter from the clinic dining room, she greased the creases in her thumbs.

  Julian Gitche failed to visit or phone his wife upon that day in May. Julian had just contracted to paint a series of watercolors for a West German pharmaceutical house, the firm that once manufactured thalidomide. He was entertaining a representative of the firm and he feared that any whisper of his spouse's physical peculiarities might evoke for the former thalidomide salesman embarrassing memories.

  The Chink hoofed into Mottburg that morning to purchase yams and a can of Chun King water chestnuts. His devotion to yams was unflagging, but he increasingly looked to the water chestnut as an example of endurance, of will and of fidelity to the particular. The water chestnut, after all, is the only vegetable whose texture doesn't change after freezing, changeth not after being cooked.

  The Countess spent the day in his laboratory, laboring feverishly to develop an antipheromone. A pheromone is an air-borne hormone given off by the female animal, bird or insect to attract a male of her species. The human pheromone had only recently been isolated. The Countess hoped to produce and market a pill that, ingested periodically, would counteract human pheromone activity, eliminating all prurient odors from that part of the female anatomy the writer Richard Condon has so beautifully described as “the vertical smile.” (To Richard Condon, a dozen purple asters and a pound of goat cheese from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.)

  Bonanza Jellybean rode Lucas out to Siwash Lake to see if the whoopers were still there. They were! She celebrated by sticking a feather in her hat, though she'd be damned if she'd call it macaroni.

  The author (who is also one of the above—which one doesn't matter) would like to take this opportunity, here at the conclusion of Sissy's remarkable account of Clock People and clockworks, to advance an earthquake theory of his own. As the author sees it, the Earth is God's pinball machine and each quake, tidal wave, flash flood and volcanic eruption is the result of a TILT that occurs when God, cheating, tries to win free games.

  67.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Dr. Robbins sent for Sissy early, before Dr. Goldman had a chance to get at her. Again he escorted her into the little walled garden, although this time without a bottle of wine. As a matter of fact, Dr. Robbins's blue eyes were being squashed by about a hundred pounds of hangover.

  “Okay,” he said softly, wishing not to agitate the punitive and vindictive deities of fermentation, “tell me how you met the Chink.”

  “I met him at the can-dee sto-ore,” sang Sissy. “No, seriously. I'm thankful to have an opportunity to talk to someone safe—trustworthy, you know—about the Chink, but aren't you supposed to be asking me about . . . about the reasons I'm in this institution?”

  “I haven't the slightest interest in your personal problems,” snapped Dr. Robbins, inwardly cursing the chemical Calvinism that causes alcohol to make us suffer for the good times it gives us.

  “Oh? Well, my husband is spending quite a sum of money to have my personal problems aired at this clinic.”

  “Your husband is a fool. As for you, if you let yourself be subjected to the indignities of psychoanalysis, you're a fool as well. And Goldman is certainly a fool for sending you to me. I, however, am no fool. You've told me some of the most fascinating stories I've heard in a long while. I'm sure as hell not going to waste these sunny hours among the flowers listening to your dreary personal problems when I could be hearing more about your adventures with the Chink. Now. Tell me how you met him. And don't hesitate to, uh, to perform the, er, the antics you do with your thumbs. If you'd like.”

  “But won't that attract attention?” Without the wine to encourage her, Sissy was hesitant to repeat the digital abandon of the day before.

  “Sometimes,” said Dr. Robbins, glancing with bloodshot peepers at the French doors, “sometimes those things that attract the most attention to us are the things that afford us the greatest privacy.” He flopped in the grass.

  “Doctor,” said Sissy with a smile, “forgive me but I get the impression that you're a bit of a mental case yourself.”

  “It takes one to know one,” replied Robbins. “That's probably why all the penguins ended up at the South Pole.”

  68.

  PART BADLANDS BUTTE, part grasslands hill, part high chaparral, Siwash Ridge is a geological mutant, a schizophrenic formation embodying in one relatively small mountain several of the most prominent features of the American West. A willy twisting and unpredictable trail zigs and zags up its eastern side, through thickets of scrub oak and juniper, upward over grassy bumps, finally clinging by its shoelaces to limestone walls. The top of Siwash, though disposed in a few places to jut and peak, is very nearly flat: a calcium carbonate aircraft carrier, a ship that water built from land.

  Toward the center of the butte top is a horse-deep, circular depression that in fair weather serves the Chink as a sunken living room. From the northern wall of the depression gapes the mouth of a cave.

  A person of Sissy's height has to crawl into the cave on her hands and knees, and almost nowhere in the entrance chamber—covered with Japanese straw matting—is there room for a leggy model to stand up straight. The entrance chamber, however, is merely the top level of three levels of caverns. The bottom level, deep inside the butte, consists of two freight car-sized rooms, heated by thermal updrafts and remarkably dry. On the middle level, there are five or six enormous chambers, connected by narrow passageways. In one of these chambers is the clockworks.

  From the walls of the middle-level room, fresh pure water drips constantly. It is as if the walls are weeping. It is as if
the soul of the continent is weeping.

  Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.

  It weeps

  for the black people who think like white people.

  It weeps

  for the Indians who think like settlers.

  It weeps

  for the children who think like adults.

  It weeps

  for the free who think like prisoners.

  Most of all, it weeps

  for the cowgirls who think like cowboys.

  69.