Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Read online

  It was at this point—Julian cooing, Sissy purring—that the magic that had attended her thumbs from the moment in her youth when she first made her commitment to a life less shallow, safe and small than our society demands of us, excused itself, tiptoed out of the apartment like Howard and Marie and strolled down to Stanley's Bar on Avenue B for a beer.

  Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.

  COWGIRL INTERLUDE (DELORES DEL RUBY)

  Some folks said she had scaled a convent wall in San Antonio and run away with a Mexican circus. Others claimed she had been the favored daughter of a prominent Creole family in New Orleans, until she got mixed up with an alligator cult that practiced peyoteism. Still others said she was Gypsy, through and through, while one source insisted that—like so many “Spanish” dancers—she was actually Italian or Jewish, and had picked up her routines watching Zorro on television in the Bronx.

  One thing all the cowgirls agreed on, however, was that their forewoman flicked an educated lash, so none disputed the story that she had acquired her first whip when she was five years old, a gift from an uncle who had said, upon presentation, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

  The day Delores del Ruby arrived at the Rubber Rose, a snake crawled across the dusty road that led to the ranch, carrying a card under its forked tongue. The card was the queen of spades.

  26.

  EACH TIME HE GOT UP, whether it was to go to the bathroom or feed his pets, Julian had removed an article of clothing, so that now, on the third day of their sofaing, he was nearly as naked as she.

  The smack of kisses sounded with increasing frequency in the room; discussions and naps were of shorter duration. After she had broken down and surrendered to his protective ministrations, the last faint traces of his asthma evaporated like moth pee off a sixty-watt bulb and he found himself host to an erection.

  Sissy knew just how to entertain it. She had been recently educated. She stroked it. She pushed its hood back. She ringed its rosy. She let it throb alongside her thigh, and better yet, alongside her thumb. She maneuvered herself beneath it and guided its crabapple noggin through the seam in her being. Like a bullet of thick fish meat, it went to target.

  Alas, Julian's chimes rang before the appointed hour. He was subjected to a sudden attack of the old premature. And Sissy was left with her virginity intact, throttling a sticky wicket. Gitche Goomee!

  The watercolorist apologized with downcast eyes. It was Sissy's turn to comfort. She reassured him so convincingly that he soon cheered up and began to chatter again about such wonders as Shakespeare and Edward Albee, Michelangelo and Marc Chagall. “It is the measure of Western civilization,” said he, “that it can encompass in harmony, balance off, as it were, such divergent masterworks as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The American Dream, as the dome of the Sistine Chapel and the ceiling of the Paris Opera.”

  Sissy sat up. Her eyes moped about the apartment, looking at but not seeing the macramé wallhangings, the volumes of Robert Frost.

  “What's the matter?” asked Julian.

  After a while Sissy answered. “I'm cold,” she said.

  “Here. I'll turn down the air conditioner.”

  “It's not the air conditioner that's making me cold.”

  “Oh . . . Well, what is it? Is it . . . me?” Eyes downcast again.

  “It's the piano.”

  “The piano? You don't like my white piano? Well, if you'd prefer, I mean, if you'll be coming here often—and I hope you shall—I suppose I can have it removed. Might as well. I play badly. I've studied for years but I'm rotten. The Countess says I'm the first Indian in history to be scalped by Beethoven. Ha ha.”

  “It's not the piano.”

  “Oh . . . What is it then? Me?”

  “It's the books.”

  “The books?”

  “No. It's the paintings.”

  “The paintings? My watercolors? Well, I do use lots of blues and greens.”

  “No, it's not your paintings.”

  “Not my paintings?”

  “It's the stillness.”

  “My home is too quiet for you?” asked Julian incredulously, for he could plainly hear Puerto Ricans beating garbage cans in the next block.

  “Not quiet. Still. Nothing moves in here. Not even your birds.”

  Sissy stood. The Countess had sent a flunky by with her rucksack, and now she walked to it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting dressed. I've got to go.”

  “But I don't want you to leave. Please stay. We can go to dinner. I owe you a dinner. And tonight . . . we can . . . really make love.”

  “I have to go, Julian.”

  “Why? Why do you have to go?”

  “My thumbs hurt.”

  “Oh, I'm sorry. Is it something usual? What can we do for them?”

  “I've made a mistake. I've been negligent. I haven't exercised. I have to hitchhike a little bit every day, no matter what. It's like a musician practicing his scales. When I don't practice, my timing gets off, my thumbs get stiff and sore.”

  To that, Julian could not respond. Sissy Hankshaw was one of those mysteries that drop onto Earth unasked, and perhaps undeserved, like grace—like clockworks. His ancestors might have known what to do with her, but Julian Gitche did not. All of a sudden her presence seemed completely outside his frame of reference. His apartment was no longer static when she moved about it; tall, jump-suited, globs of air orbiting her like planets of musical roses. She caused sculptures to sway on their pedestals. The bedroom birdies came alive and flitted in their cage. It was incomprehensible to Julian that he had presumed to be her consoling daddy a few short hours before.

  Julian had a poodle named Butterfinger, named for the candy bar that F. Scott Fitzgerald was eating when he fell dead of a coronary surprise. Julian called him Butty for short.

  Butty had every fault known to dog. He was a face-licker and crotch-sniffer, a hair-shedder and corner-crapper, a shoe-chewer and guest-nipper, a garden-digger and cat-intimidator, a nylon-snagger and chair-muddyer, a scrap-begger and lap-crawler, a car-chaser and shrub-defiler, a bath-hater and air-polluter, a garbage-raider and leg-humper and, moreover, a yapper in that shrill, spoiled, obnoxious yap-style to which poodles alone may lay claim.

  (Sissy, unlike most humans who travel on foot—subject to the bites and barks of canine fancy—was not a dog-hater per se; the wild dingo of Australia had her sincerest respect.)

  Butty was yapping as Sissy left Julian's apartment. For once, it may have been a tolerable sound. Because of the yapping, Julian could not hear her hurrying, almost sprinting, down the stairs; Sissy could not hear the wheeze that struggled out of Julian's lungs like a wimpy wind that blew between their worlds.

  The magic caught up with her on Fourteenth Street as she headed for the George Washington Bridge.

  27.

  THE COUNTESS WAS PRACTICING DENTAL KARATE. Chop chop chop. His Princess telephone was in imminent danger of being incapacitated by a blow from the teeth.

  “So she left town,” he said—chop chop. “Well, that shouldn't surprise you. Leaving town is what Sissy is all about. But tell me, how did she strike you?”

  “Extraordinary!”

  “She's obviously that. Jesus! Which would you rather have, a million dollars or one of Sissy's thumbs full of pennies?”

  “Oh you! I'm not talking about her hands. They're difficult to ignore, I confess, but I'm speaking of her whole being. Her whole being is extraordinary. The way she talks, for example. She's so articulate.”

  “It's high time you realized, honey babe, that a woman doesn't have to give the best years of her life to Radcliffe or Smith in order to speak the English language. What's more, those intellectual college girls have got the odor as bad as any others. Worse, I suspect. One healthy waitress probably uses more Yoni Yum each week than the entire
dean's list at Wellesley.” Chop!

  Julian sighed. “I wouldn't know about that,” he said. “But she is extraordinary. I don't understand her in the least, yet I'm helplessly attracted. Countess, I'm really in a dither. She's turned my head.”

  “Ninety degrees to the left, I hope.” Chop clack click. “How does she feel about you?”

  Another wheezy sigh. “I think she's disappointed that I'm not more, ah, sort of atavistic. She's got some naíve, sentimental notions about Indians. I'm sure she liked me, though; she gave me many indications that she liked me. But . . . then she left town.”

  “She always leaves town, you dummy. That doesn't mean anything. What about in bed? Does she like it in bed?”

  Evel Knievel's motorcycle could not have jumped over the pause that followed. Finally, Julian asked, “How did she like what in bed?”

  “Like what?” Chop!! Clack!! “What do you think?”

  “Well . . . er . . .”

  “Shit O dear, Julian. Do you mean to tell me you spent three days together and you didn't get it on?”

  “Oh, we got it on. But you might say we didn't get it all the way on.”

  “Whose fault was that?”

  “I suppose it was mine. Yes, it definitely was my fault.”

  “In a way I'm relieved it wasn't hers. I've been worried about her psychological virginity. Only now I'm concerned about you. What do they do to you boys in those Ivy League schools, anyway? Strap you down and pump the Nature out of you? That's what they do, all right. They can even press the last drop of Nature out of a Mohawk buck. Why, send a shaman or a cannibal to Yale for four years and all he'd be fit for would be a desk in the military-industrial complex and a seat in the third row at a Neil Simon comedy. Jesus H. M. S. Christ! If Harvard or Princeton could get hold of the Chink for a couple of semesters they'd turn him into a candidate for the Bow Tie Wing of the Hall of Wimps. Oogie boogie.”

  “You needn't stoop to reverse snobbism just because Ol' Miss was the only university in the nation that would take you in. If we Ivy Leaguers aren't earthy enough to suit you hillbillies, at least we don't go around indulging in racist terms such as 'Chink.' Next thing I know, you'll be calling me 'chief.'”

  “'Chink' is the guy's name, for Christ's sake.”

  “What guy?”

  “Aw, he's some old fart who lives in the hills out West. Gives my ranch the creeps, and the willies, too. But though he be old and dirty, he's alive, I'll bet, clear down to his toes. They don't have his juice in a jar in New Haven. That prissy alma mater of yours could pluck the hair off a werewolf. Better Sissy keep her virginity than lose it to the strains of 'The Whiffenpoof Song.'”

  “Sex isn't everything, just because it keeps you in business. And speaking of your business, you'd better be concerned. Because that mysterious model of yours has got me too upset to paint.”

  “You'll paint, all right, sweetie-poo. You'll paint because you're under contract to paint. Moreover, you'll paint better than you've ever painted before. Nothing like a little suffering to put some backbone into art. Has she got you smoking and drinking? Good! Creativity feeds on poisons. All great artists have been depraved. Look at me! As sure as Raoul Dufy is peeing over the side of Eternity's sailboat, this little affaire is going to inspire the finest watercolors of your career. Now, tell that goddamned poodle of yours to quit whimpering and you get in there and paint!”

  “That's not the poodle.”

  “Oh,” said the Countess. “Well shit O dear. Just hold on, you hear. Don't go getting asthmatic. We can write her a letter, if you'd like. Send copies to Taos, LaConner, Pine Ridge, Pleasant Point, Cherokee and that other place. I'll pick up some Ripple and come right over.”

  The eyes of the sky's potato have seldom looked down on such a frantic epistolary collaboration as occurred that night.

  28.

  THE CHINCK IS RIGHT: life is essentially playful.

  Of course, it plays a bit rough at times.

  Maybe life is like a baby gorilla. It doesn't know its own strength.

  Life was mashing the big fat drops out of Julian Gitche and Sissy Hankshaw. They had chipmunk festivals inside their stomachs and the fillings in their teeth were picking up signals from sentimental radio. Life is forever pulling this number on men and women, and then acting surprised and innocent, as it it didn't realize it was hurting anybody.

  On the surface, to the untrained eye, Sissy was hitchhiking as well as she ever had. She had even developed some new wrinkles. Such as using both thumbs at once, addressing one appendage to the far lanes of traffic while causing the other to beckon wittily to the cars passing closest to roadside. She had also perfected a high bouncing roll to the left, comparable to the “American twist” service in tennis. It was flashy but there was no real joy in it, no substance or spontaneity. It was what is known as a virtuoso performance. It lacked soul. You know. Show biz is teeming with performers like that, all of them with more tiles in their swimming pools than you or I have.

  A sense of urgency had crept into her style. Whereas in the past Sissy had kept up her astonishing pace out of sheer exhilaration at being unique and being free, she now kept going because she was afraid to stop. For when biological necessities did force her to stop, time and space, which she had heretofore held in abeyance (as if she were some clockworks personified), fell in on her in a gravitational rush. Time and space fell in on her like a set of encyclopedias falling off a missionary's shelf onto a pygmy. And time brought along its secretary, memory, and space brought its brat, loneliness.

  In the past, she had been subjected to ridicule, pity, awe and lust. Now, she was being subjected to tenderness and need. It was better and worse. As do many strong people, she had fallen victim to the tyranny of the weak.

  As for Julian, he took to swilling Scotch. In the mornings. Before he had even had his Mother of God Wheat Flakes (or was it his Joyce Carol Oats?) One night he went to Max's Kansas City and created a minor ruckus by yelling, in a wheezy voice, “Jackson Pollock was a fraud!” A sculptor, hardly making an effort, bloodied his nose; and a perverted biology student followed him home because he thought Julian had said Pollock was a frog. (In New York, my dears, there are all kinds.) He listened to Tchaikovsky and stopped combing his hair.

  Sometimes one gets the idea that life thinks it's still living in Paris in the thirties.

  29.

  JULIAN GITCHE'S letter caught up with Sissy Hankshaw in Cherokee, North Carolina, on Christmas Eve. She picked it up at 11:00 A.M., just before the post office closed for the holiday. After reading it twice, she escorted it into a honky-tonk (where aghast drunks reacted to her thumbs as if they were the hellish little reindeer of some kind of anti-Santa Claus) and read it again. The Countess had advanced her four hundred dollars when she got to New York back in the summer and she had enough left to buy a bottle of wine. She chose red Ripple, for old times' sake, and promptly spilled some on the letter. While a jukeboxed Bing Crosby crooned “I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas,” a postage-stamp Ike grinned his I-made-it-all-the-way-to-the-top-but-I-still-don't-understand grin through a puddle of wine. Under the plastic mistletoe, pool balls kissed. Blue lights winked from a metallic silver tree. Vulgarity called, and was answered.

  Halfway through the Ripple, Sissy got up to go to the toilet and went to the phone booth instead.

  Julian, holding back wheezes with a herculean effort, told her that he loved her. She protested that he didn't even know her. Abandoning all that he'd been taught at Yale, he replied that feeling was superior to knowledge.

  “I love you,” Julian said.

  “You're a fool,” said Sissy.

  “I'm offering love and you're rejecting it. Maybe you are the fool.”

  Well!

  A week after New Year's, she hitched into Manhattan. With the Countess, who despised the way men behaved and women smelled, as their sarcastic witness, Sissy and Julian went to the Little Church of the Positive Thought and were married by a protégé of Dr.
Norman Vincent Peale's.

  Thus ended for all practical purposes what the author knows to be one of the most remarkable and least understood careers in human history.

  But a career, however unusual, is not a story. And Sissy's story, dovetailing as it does with the stories of the Rubber Rose cowgirls and the clockworks Chink, and disclosing as it does the possible pancake beneath the sluggish syrup and slippery butter of life, is far from ended.

  COWGIRL INTERLUDE (BING)

  Under an orchard tree, drooping with cherries, cowgirls lay in the shade. They fed each other fruit. Dark juice dribbled into dimples. Cherry meat stained smiles and nostrils.

  Kathy was embroidering a rainbow on the back of Heather's workshirt. Inspired, Linda rendered an all-red rainbow on Debbie's bare waist, and Kym, dipping slightly below the belt, added the pot of gold. Cherry paint.

  Fruit goo began to attract flies, so the cowgirls imitated their hobbled horses and brushed them away by flinging their hair. A cloud chugged by. If it was not gone by sunset, it would be painted, too.

  The forewoman, Delores del Ruby, was away from the ranch on a peyote run. Big Red was acting forewoman, and she was permitting the hands a very extended break. The goats in their charge were straying far and wide, and as for the birds, they could not be seen from the cherry tree.

  Placing her New Testament back in her saddlebag, Mary asked, “Pardners, do you think this is honest, goofing off like this?”