Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Read online

  Contents

  Title page

  Dedication

  Quote by William Blake

  Quote by Roy Rogers

  Single Cell Preface

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part II

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part III

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Part IV

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Part V

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Part VI

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 111a

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Part VII

  Chapter 121

  Special Bonus Parable

  About the Author

  Books By Tom Robbins

  Copyright Page

  To Fleetwood Star Robbins, the apple,

  the pineapple, the mango, the orchard of my eye.

  And, of course, to all cowgirls, everywhere.

  The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.

  The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

  Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  I told Dale, “When I go, just skin me and put me on top of Trigger.” And Dale said, “Now don't get any ideas about me.”

  —ROY ROGERS

  SINGLE CELL PREFACE

  AMOEBAE LEAVE NO FOSSILS. They haven't any bones. (No teeth, no belt buckles, no wedding rings.) It is impossible, therefore, to determine how long amoebae have been on Earth.

  Quite possibly they have been here since the curtain opened. Amoebae may even have dominated the stage, early in the first act. On the other hand, they may have come into existence only three years—or three days or three minutes—before they were discovered by Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1674. It can't be proven either way.

  One thing is certain, however: because amoebae reproduce by division, endlessly, passing everything on yet giving up nothing, the first amoebae that ever lived is still alive. Whether four billion years old or merely three hundred, he/she is with us today.

  Where?

  Well, the first amoeba may be floating on his/her back in a luxurious pool in Hollywood, California. The first amoeba may be hiding among the cattail roots and peepers in the muddy shallows of Siwash Lake. The first amoeba may recently have dripped down your leg. It is pointless to speculate.

  The first amoeba, like the last and the one after that, is here, there and everywhere, for its vehicle, its medium, its essence is water.

  Water—the ace of elements. Water dives from the clouds without parachute, wings or safety net. Water runs over the steepest precipice and blinks not a lash. Water is buried and rises again; water walks on fire and fire gets the blisters. Stylishly composed in any situation—solid, gas or liquid—speaking in penetrating dialects understood by all things—animal, vegetable or mineral—water travels intrepidly through four dimensions, sustaining (Kick a lettuce in the field and it will yell “Water!"), destroying (The Dutch boy's finger remembered the view from Ararat) and creating (It has even been said that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another, but that's another story). Always in motion, ever-flowing (whether at steam rate or glacier speed), rhythmic, dynamic, ubiquitous, changing and working its changes, a mathematics turned wrong side out, a philosophy in reverse, the ongoing odyssey of water is virtually irresistible. And wherever water goes, amoebae go along for the ride.

  Sissy Hankshaw once taught a parakeet to hitchhike. There is not much in that line she could teach an amoeba.

  For its expertise as a passenger, as well as for its near-perfect resolution of sexual tensions, the amoeba (and not the whooping crane) is hereby proclaimed the official mascot of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

  And to the first amoeba, wherever it may be, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues would like to say happy birthday. Happy birthday to you.

  WELCOME TO THE RUBBER ROSE RANCH

  IT IS THE FINEST OUTHOUSE IN THE DAKOTAS. It has to be.

  Spiders, mice, cold drafts, splinters, corncobs, habitual stenches don't make it in this company. The hands have renovated and decorated the privy themselves. Foam rubber, hanging flower pots, a couple of prints by Georgia O'Keeffe (her cow skull period), fluffy carpeting, Sheetrock insulation, ashtrays, an incense burner, a fly strip, a photograph of Dale Evans about which there is some controversy. There is even a radio in the outhouse, although the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas.

  Of course, the ranch has indoor facilities, flush toilets in regular bathrooms, but they'd been stopped up during the revolution and nobody had ever unstopped them. Plumbing was one thing the girls were poor at. Nearest Roto-Rooter man was thirty miles. Weren't any
Roto-Rooter women anywhere, as far as they knew.

  Jelly is sitting in the outhouse. She has been sitting there longer then necessary. The door is wide open and lets in the sky. Or, rather, a piece of the sky, for on a summer's day in Dakota the sky is mighty big. Mighty big and mighty blue, and today there is hardly a cloud. What looks to be a wisp of cloud is actually the moon, narrow and pale like a paring snipped from a snowman's toenail. The radio is broadcasting “The Silver Dollar Polka.”

  What is young Jelly thinking, in such a pensive pose? Hard to say. Probably she is thinking about the birds. No, not those crows that just haiku-ed by, but the birds she and her hands are bamboozling down at the lake. Those birds give a body something to think about, all right. But maybe she is thinking about the Chink, wondering what the crazy old coot is up to now, way up yonder on his ridge. Maybe she is thinking about ranchly finances, puzzling how she's going to make ends meet. It is even possible that she is pondering something metaphysical, for the Chink has more than once subjected her to philosophical notions: the hit and miss of the cosmic pumpkin. If that is unlikely, it is still less likely that she is mulling over the international situation—desperate, as usual. And apparently her mind is not on romance or a particular romantic entity, for though her panties and jeans are at her feet, her fingers drum dryly upon the domes of her knees. Perhaps Jelly is thinking about what's for supper.

  On the other hand, Bonanza Jellybean, ranch boss, may just be looking things over. Surveying the spread from the comfort of the privy. Checking out the corrals, the stables, the bunkhouse, the pump, what's left of the sauna, the ruins of the reducing salon, the willow grove and cottonwoods, the garden where Delores teased a rattlesnake on Monday, the pile of hair dryers still rusting among the sunflowers, the chicken coop, the tumbleweed, the peyote wagon, the distant buttes and canyons, the sky full of blue. Weather's hot but there's a breeze today and it feels sweet, swimming up her bare thighs. There is sage smell and rose waft. There is fly buzz and polka yip. Way off, horse lips flutter; she hears the goats at pasture and the far, faint sounds of the girls tending the herd. The bird herd.

  A rooster clears his sinuses. He's loud but absolutely nothing compared to what those birds can do if the hands don't keep them quiet. They'd better!

  Still sitting, Jelly focuses her dreamy gaze on the rooster. “Someday,” she says to the empty seat next to her, “if that Sissy Hankshaw ever shows up here again, I'm gonna teach her how to hypnotize a chicken. Chickens are the easiest critters on Earth to hypnotize. If you can look a chicken in the eyes for ten seconds, it's yours forever.”

  She pulls up her pants, shoulders her rifle and ambles off to relieve the guard at the gate.

  Welcome to the Rubber Rose. The largest all-girl ranch in the West.

  Part

  I

  Nature's got a hankering after experiments.

  —Trader Horn

  1.

  IT IS NOT A HEART: light, heavy, kind or broken; dear, hard, bleeding or transplanted; it is not a heart.

  It is not a brain. The brain, that pound and a half of chicken-colored goo so highly regarded (by the brain itself), that slimy organ to which is attributed such intricate and mysterious powers (it is the self-same brain that does the attributing), the brain is so weak that, without its protective casing to support it, it simply collapses of its own weight. So it could not be a brain.

  It is neither a kneecap nor a torso. It is neither a whisker nor an eyeball. It is not a tongue.

  It is not a belly button. (The umbilicus serves, then withdraws, leaving but a single footprint where it stood: the navel, wrinkled and cupped, whorled and domed, blind and winking, bald and tufted, sweaty and powdered, kissed and bitten, waxed and fuzzy, bejeweled and ignored; reflecting as graphically as breasts, seeds or fetishes the omnipotent fertility in which Nature dangles her muddy feet, the navel looks in like a plugged keyhole on the center of our being, it is true, but O navel, though we salute your motionless maternity and the dreams that have got tangled in your lint, you are only a scar, after all; you are not it.)

  It is not a ribcage. It is not a back. It is not one of those bodily orifices favored for stuffing, nor is it that headstrong member with which every conceivable stuffable orifice somewhere sometime has been stuffed. There is no hair around it. For shame!

  It is not an ankle, for her ankles, while bony, were ordinary, to say the least.

  It is not a nose, chin or forehead. It is not a biceps, a triceps or a loop-of-Henle.

  It is something else.

  2.

  IT IS A THUMB. The thumb. The thumbs, both of them. It is her thumbs that we remember; it is her thumbs that have set her apart.

  It was thumbs that brought her to the clockworks, took her away, brought her back. Of course, it may be a disservice to her, as well as to the Rubber Rose, to emphasize the clockworks—but the clockworks is fresh and large in the author's mind right now. The image of the clockworks has followed the author through these early sentences, tugging at him, refusing to be snubbed. The image of the clockworks tugs gently at the author's cuff, much as the ghost of Duncan Hines tugs at the linen tablecloths of certain restaurants, little that he can eat now: long time no cheese omelet.

  Still, as is well known, our subject's thumbs brought her to myriad other places besides the clockworks and to myriad other people besides the Chink. For example, they brought her to New York City and, there, before the gentleman Julian. And Julian, who looked at her often, looked at her well, looked at her from every angle, exterior and interior, from which man might look at woman—even Julian was most impressed by her thumbs.

  Who was it who watched her undress for bed and bath? It was Julian. Whose eyes traced every contour of her delicate face and willowy body, invariably coming to rest on her thumbs? Julian's. It was Julian, sophisticated, sympathetic, closed to any notion of deformity, who, nevertheless, in the final analysis, in the sanctuary of his own mind's eye, had to regard her thumbs as an obtrusion on the exquisite lines of an otherwise graceful figure—as though Leonardo had left a strand of spaghetti dangling from the corner of Mona Lisa's mouth.

  3.

  THE NORMAL rectal temperature of a hummingbird is 104.6.

  The normal rectal temperature of a bumblebee is calculated to be 110.8, although so far no one has succeeded in taking the rectal temperature of a bumblebee. That doesn't mean that it can't or won't be done. Scientific research marches on: perhaps at this moment, bee proctologists at Du Pont . . .

  As for the oyster, its rectal temperature has never even been estimated, although we must suspect that the tissue heat of the sedentary bivalve is as far below good old 98.6 as that of the busy bee is above. Nonetheless, the oyster, could it fancy, should fancy its excremental equipment a hot item, for what other among Creation's crapping creatures can convert its bodily wastes into treasure?

  There is a metaphor here, however strained. The author is attempting to draw a shaky parallel between the manner in which the oyster, when beset by impurities or disease, coats the offending matter with its secretions, thereby producing a pearl, a parallel between the eliminatory ingenuity of the oyster and the manner in which Sissy Hankshaw, adorned with thumbs that many might consider morbid, coated the offending digits with glory, thereby perpetuating a vision that the author finds smooth and lustrous.

  The author did not choose Sissy Hankshaw for her thumbs per se, but rather for the use that she made of them. Sissy has provided this book with its pearly perspectives, just as the clockworks—where there is tick and tock enough for everyone—has supplied its cosmic connections; just as the Rubber Rose has generated its rather warm rectal temperature.

  4.

  SISSY HANKSHAW arrived at the Rubber Rose—and, subsequently, the clockworks—as she had always arrived everywhere: via roadside solicitation. She hitchhiked into the Rubber Rose because hitchhiking was her customary mode of travel; hitchhiking was, in fact, her way of life, a calling to which she was born. Regardless of
what luck her other eight digits grabbed onto, her thumbs carried her to many wonderful times and places and finally they carried her to the clockworks as well.

  Even had she been common of thumb, however, she might have bummed a ride into the Rubber Rose, for she was without private transportation, and no train, bus or plane goes near the ranch, let alone the clockworks.

  A woman came hitchhiking into a remote region of the Dakotas. She rolled in like a peach basket that had swallowed a hoop snake. It was nothing. She made it look easy. She had the disposition for it, not to mention the thumbs.

  That woman did not come to stay. She meant to leave no more tracks in the hills of Dakota than a water bug might leave on a double martini. She rolled in effortlessly, her thumbs wiggling like the hula hips of Heaven. She planned to leave the same way.

  But plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.

  At any rate . . . Just as there were ranch hands, politically oriented, who objected to the 8 – 10 glossy of Dale Evans in the Rubber Rose outhouse on the grounds that Miss Evans was a revisionist, a saddlesore (as they put it) on the long ride of cowgirl progress, there were interested parties who objected to Sissy Hankshaw's being identified with the Rubber Rose on the grounds that Sissy is not a true cowgirl and that, despite her friendship with Bonanza Jellybean et al., despite her presence during the revolt, she was only temporarily and peripherally involved with the events that took place on that hundred and sixty acres of lipstick criminal moonlight. Their contention is not without merit. How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of another's personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships. That the axis around which Sissy's daily involvements revolved was a result of her physical condition is obvious, and it is equally true that whatever memorable or epiphanic impact this singular woman has had on us occurred in a context quite removed from the Rubber Rose—or, at least, as the cowgirls themselves saw the Rubber Rose. It cannot be denied, however, that Sissy Hankshaw came not once, but twice, to the ranch, as well as to that place that, because therein occurs both a measuring and a transvaluation of time, we are obliged to call the “clockworks.” She came in different seasons and under different circumstances. But on both occasions she hitchhiked.