by Tom Robbins
“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 t
he 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.