Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Read online

  Some say excessive sunshine softens the brain (repulsively soft already) and maybe that's what made her do it. Maybe it was the yellow gloves of hydrogen boxing her ears; maybe solar radiation caused her atoms to whirl a trifle coocoo. On the other hand, her action may have been merely an indication of the scope of her ambition, and while remarkable, should hardly be considered any more strange than little Mozart's impulse, at age nine, to compose a symphony.

  In any case, and whichever the ever, upon a sweaty but otherwise nondescript afternoon in early August 1960, an afternoon squeezed out of Mickey's mousy snout, an afternoon carved from mashed potatoes and lye, an afternoon scraped out of the dog dish of meteorology, an afternoon that could lull a monster to sleep, an afternoon that normally might have produced nothing more significant than diaper rash, Sissy Hankshaw stepped from a busted-jaw curbstone on Hull Street in South Richmond and attempted to hitchhike an ambulance. As a matter of fact, she tried to flag it down twice—coming and going.

  Squalling, its red lamps flashing as if in frenetic, amateurish imitation of that summer's quietly professional sun, the ambulance was on an errand of mercy. Naturally, it did not stop. Had she expected it to? Would she have boarded it, joined its bleeding or gasping cargo if it had? Had she successfully hitchhiked an ambulance, would she next have tried a hearse?

  Conjecture. The meat wagon rolled on, and Sissy, unlike young Mozart, was rewarded by not so much as a lump of sugar for her experiment. However, the ambulance crew had not failed to notice her hailings. Before Sissy had gotten many blocks away, she was, for the first time in her career, arrested.

  Her appearance at the station house created a minor stir. On the one hand, the girl seemed pathetic; on the other, she was Buddha belly serene, and to the cop mentality, serenity smacks of disrespect. She was underage, her crime difficult to classify, the procedure uncertain. A police reporter from the News Leader became the first journalist to be intrigued by her; he telephoned his city editor to send over a photographer. File clerks were sneaking around corners to get a glimpse of her; other prisoners were making remarks. Finally, the desk sergeant lectured her against interfering with emergency vehicles and had a policewoman hustle her home.

  The photographer arrived too late to get a picture and the reporter was peeved, but for the others involved, a hasty release was ideal: the police got her out of their crew cuts; Sissy got back to work. Early that humid evening, as a roaring warehouse blaze sent the makings of a billion Pall Malls up in premature smoke, she was arrested again—for trying to flag down a fire engine.

  This time she was booked and held for twenty-four hours at the juvenile detention center, although the authorities once more found it expedient to set her free. Not the least of the reasons for her release was the frustration she caused the fingerprinter.

  14.

  RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, has been called a “depression-proof” city. That is because its economy has one leg in life insurance and the other in tobacco.

  During times of economic bellyache, tobacco sales climb even as other sales tumble. Perhaps the uncertainty of finances makes people nervous; the nervousness causes them to smoke more. Perhaps a cigarette gives an unemployed man something to do with his hands. Maybe a pipe in his mouth helps a man forget that he hasn't lately chewed steak.

  In times of depression, policy-holders somehow manage to keep up their life insurance premiums. Life insurance could be the only investment they can afford to maintain. Perhaps they insist on dignity in death since they never had it in life. Or is it that the demise of one of its insured members is the only chance a family has of getting flush?

  Each autumn for many years Richmond has celebrated its depression-proof economy. The celebration is called the Tobacco Festival. (Somehow “Life Insurance Festival” didn't set any leather to tapping.)

  Sissy Hankshaw liked to watch the Tobacco Festival parades. From a Broad Street curb, where she would secure an early position, it was her habit, once her courage climbed, to try to hitch the open convertibles in which the various Tobacco Princesses rode. The drivers, Jaycees one and all, never noticed her; they kept their gaze straight ahead for the safety that was in it—tobacco gods would cough lightning should a Jaycee drive up the hindquarters of a Marlboro Filters float—but the waving Princesses, projecting eyebeam and toothlight into the multitudes, ever on the alert for kinfolk, boy friends, photographers and talent scouts, the Princesses sometimes would catch sight of a pleading pod, and for a crowd-puzzling second—Oh the perils of innocence in the service of nicotine!—lose their carefully coached composure. We may wonder what thumbtales—thumbfacts evolving into thumbmyths—those beauties carried home to Danville, Petersburg, South Hill or Winston-Salem when that year's Tobacco Festival had burned down to a butt.

  In 1960, the Tobacco Festival parade took place on the night of September 23. The Times-Dispatch reported that there were fewer floats than the previous year ("but they were fancier, and wider by six feet"); even so, it took ninety minutes for the procession to pass a given point. There were twenty-seven Princesses, from whose company Lynne Marie Fuss—Miss Pennsylvania—was the next day named Queen of Tobaccoland. The parade grand marshal was Nick Adams, star of a TV series called “The Rebel.” Adams was a perfect choice since “The Rebel” had a Civil War theme and was sponsored by a leading brand of cigarettes. The actor became piqued at one point in the parade when he discovered, rather abruptly, that his horse's flank was the target of a gang of boys armed with peashooters. There were marching bands, clowns, military formations, drum majorettes, dignitaries, animals, “Indians,” a few temporary cowgirls, even, their reptile-shiny shirts loaded down with embroidery and udders; there were hawkers of souvenirs and the aforementioned gang of evil peashooters. City Manager Edwards estimated attendance at the “noisily lavish extravaganza” at close to two hundred thousand, by far the largest crowd in festival history. Sissy Hankshaw was not among the throng.

  Miles across town from the thousands (who, according to the newspaper, “yelled, giggled and clapped"); across the James in South Richmond, where, economic theories to the contrary, it was always depression time; in a dim, dinky house, frescoed with soot and some termites' low relief; before a full-length mirror merciless in its reflection of thumbs—Sissy stood naked. (Never say “stark naked.” “Naked” is a sweet word, but nobody in his right mind likes “stark.")

  Sissy was making a decision. It was a point in life that could not hold still for ninety minutes' worth of bright-leaf boosterism to pass it by.

  In the seven weeks since her arrest a lot had happened to the girl. First, an assistant commonwealth attorney, encouraged by the police-woman who had driven Sissy home, was pulling strings to have her shipped to reform school. The public defender was using those terms “incorrigible,” “wayward,” “curfew breaker” and “beyond parental control,” that, when applied to a young girl, mean simply “She fucks.” As late as 1960, the large majority of juvenile females behind bars were there because they had acquired an early taste for sexual intercourse (early in the eyes of civilized society, that is, for by nature's calendar the twelfth or thirteenth year is precisely correct).

  That our Sissy remained free on that September evening when animated cigarettes pranced in glittery goosesteps down Broad Street was owing in part to the efforts of a social worker who had been assigned to her case. However, if Miss Leonard had helped keep Sissy out of reformatory, insisting that the girl's hitchhiking was a chaste idiosyncrasy that offered no threat to society, she herself had been an upsetting factor. A few weeks back she had nagged Sissy to go to a dance with her, a “special” dance where the girl would “feel comfortable.” At last the limbic telephone had jingled again—"Ready on your call to Romance. Please deposit sixty-five micrograms of estrogen for the first three minutes"—and Sissy found herself throbbing into a formal gown that a cousin had worn to a distant prom and with which some moths had recently been dancing cheek to cheek. Repairs to the gown had caused Sissy and
Miss Leonard to arrive late at the community hall where the soirée was in progress. When Sissy read the poster that said GOODWILL INDUSTRIES BALL, she began to suspect that they should not have arrived at all. Once inside, she was sure of it. The dance floor glistened with drool as over it there limped, staggered, slid and dragged the crab toes and chicken heels of a score or more splayed, spindly and rickety organisms; while in the red glow of homemade Chinese lanterns cleft palates, harelips, slack jaws, tics, twitches, frothings, popped eyes, dripping nostrils and skull points bobbed at various tempos, inspired by a Guy Lombardo record and the kinetic examples of their partners in the dance. When Sissy froze in alarm, Miss Leonard lectured her. “Listen, honey, I realize how it is with you people.” She smiled knowingly at the remarkable creatures who were either shuffling vacantly or flying apart at every joint to the “sweetest music this side of heaven.” “I'm aware of how it is in here. The polios can't stand the cerebral palsies, the cerebral palsies snub the birth defects and all three hate the retardeds. I'm aware of that, but you've got to overcome it; the handicapped have got to stick together.” She was gently pushing Sissy toward the stag line, where the chair-pilots were spinning their wheels, when the girl, for the first time in her life, heard her own voice rise above a wispy phosphorescence. Sissy screamed. “I'M NOT HANDICAPPED, GODDAMN IT!!” The cry turned Guy Lombardo's sugar to lumps. The dancers stopped, some taking longer to wind down than others. They stared at her. A few of them giggled and cackled. Then, one by one, they began to applaud her (some of them clapping with one hand, in flailing and unintentional illustration of Zen Buddhism's most famous proverb). Growing uneasy, almost afraid, the chaperones called for quiet, and Miss Leonard, in an effort to cast a more reasonable light on the scene, began tearing the red paper away from bald bulbs, but the applause flopped to an unsteady end when Sissy ran from the hall. Sissy wore that strange applause like a corsage of swampflowers as she hitchhiked home in her first formal gown, waltzing the waltz of the cars.

  Now she stood before the mirror. She couldn't hear the bands blaring “Dixie” as the talking cigarette package kicked up its silver slippers over town on Broad Street, but she could still hear the noise of the Goodwill Industries Ball, though weeks had passed. Perhaps sound carries farther across time than across space. No matter. There was a more pressing noise: the voice of her daddy in the adjoining room. Sissy's daddy was speaking in his Carolina voice, his booze voice, the voice that sounded as if it had been strained through Daniel Boone's underwear. He was speaking about the Colonel, the elderly man in the yellow sport coat who for years had petitioned to manage Sissy's show biz career. “We'll begin with my carnival, of course,” the Colonel would purr, and then he would chart a path up the golden staircase that led all the way to Ed Sullivan. The Hankshaws were embarrassed by the Colonel's overtures. They had discouraged his interest. Recently, however, Mr. Hankshaw had had a change of mind. For two reasons: Sissy was starting to cause him trouble, and the Colonel had doubled his offer. Mr. Hankshaw was a working man, after all, and in his breast, as in the breast of working men everywhere, there beat the fatty heart of a profiteer (Could Marxist stethoscopes be so universally faulty? Do all socialist heart specialists have gum in their ears?). Sissy's daddy and mama were arguing at that moment about the contract, already signed by the Colonel, that lay like a freshly ironed pillowcase atop the TV set.

  Her brothers were not home to defend her. Junior was watching the parade with the girl he was soon to marry. Jerry was in traction (no wonder the Hankshaws needed the Colonel's money) at the Medical College of Virginia. Refused enlistment into the paratroopers because of his size, Jerry had stood up in a ferris wheel seat at the Atlantic Rural Exposition—he had to do something—and gravity, that old scene-stealer, had once more gotten into the act.

  Other things were bothering Sissy. Things as minor as her inability to locate information pertaining to the Siwash Indians, about whom she wished to write a paper in school. Things as annoying as the fact that teen-aged boys in the neighborhood had begun to follow her whenever she set out to hitchhike, burning to halts beside her, trying to coax her, as much out of malice as lust, into their vulgar Fords.

  Many things had changed in Sissy Hankshaw's world, including her own physical image. Suddenly, in the seventeenth year of a life that had begun with a doctor's doubletake and a nurse's gasp, she had become lovely. A perfect compromise finally had been worked out between her predominantly angular features—high cheekbones, classically fine nose, fragile chin, peaceful blue eyes—and her decidedly round mouth—a full, pouty mouth that the Countess was later to compare to a mink's vagina at the height of the rut. Her figure had come to correspond to the average measurements of the high-fashion model: she stood five-nine in her socks, weighed 125 pounds and taped 33-24-34; one of those bony beauties of whom wags have said, “Falling downstairs, they sound like a cup of dice.”

  She had given herself completely to the hitchhike because heretofore she had nothing else nor any hope of else. Ah cha cha, but now there was a choice. Or the possibility of a choice. She was pretty. And a pretty girl can always make her way in a civilized society. Perhaps she should somehow find a job, work and work and save her money—even if it took years—so that she could return to Dr. Dreyfus for that complex operation; so that she could lead a normal human female life.

  Every time she said it to herself, however (there before the mirror), every time she thought “Dr. Dreyfus” or “normal life,” her thumbs talked back to her in thumbtalk: tingles, throbs and itches. Until at last she knew. Accepted what she had always sensed. She had been correct when she had howled at the dance. They were not a handicap. Rather, they were an invitation, a privilege audaciously and impolitely granted, perfumed with danger and surprise, offering her greater freedom of movement, inviting her to live life at some “other” level. If she dared.

  Well, about the time the steam calliope was wheezing like emphysema through the lungs of Tobaccoland, Sissy decided to dare. And about the instant she decided to dare, she commenced to laugh. She was laughing with such abandon, such secret delight, she could scarcely wiggle into her panties, even though her daddy stalked in from the living room and took a long, granite look.

  Her parents warned her not to go out, but their attentions were on the TV screen when she stood at the refrigerator and coaxed a package of Velveeta cheese into her coat pocket. Some olives jumped in also. An apple joined up. A half-loaf of Wonder Bread said, what the hell, it'd go along, what was there to lose. “Nothing,” said Sissy.

  She made it out the back door during a shootout on “Gunsmoke.” Silently, she thanked Marshal Dillon for the cover, but it didn't occur to her then to lament for Miss Kitty, ever a saloonkeeper, never a cowgirl.

  On a dead run, olives bouncing out of her jacket, she reached the corner where Hull Street was intersected by U.S. Route 1—in 1960 still the principal north-south interstate highway.

  By the time she got her arm in the air, the light had changed and the first car, a boatish, blue Lincoln with Jersey plates, was already passing. For a second, it appeared as if she were late, as if the driver had missed her gesture. But no, some aspect of it—a glint of neon on the nail, perhaps—snagged the hem of his vision. He glanced back in time to see the entire appendage, immense, scrubbed, lubricated, zeppelinlike, looking as fresh and newborn as an egg, invoking a strange interplay between the joyful and the ominous, as it swam at eye-level past his opposite rear window.

  He braked.

  What else could he do?

  “Going north?” asked Sissy for openers as the door swung toward her like a slab of candied sky. Were it any other direction she wouldn't have cared.

  “You bet your raggedy white ass I am,” said the driver, grinning sardonically. He was black-skinned and beret-topped, and it was difficult to ascertain which there were the more of, saxophones in his back seat or gold teeth in his mouth. Sissy hesitated. But what the hell? In imitation of the Wonder Bread, she said to hers
elf, “This is it; what is there to lose?” She boarded.

  Actually, there was a fine style about the driver, about the tingle of treasure when he grinned, about the billow of marijuana smoke in which he sat (how different from the celebrated smokes of Richmond!); about the gardenia in his lapel and the flask by his side, about the degree to which his cameoed fingers turned up the volume on the radio, about the speed at which he made that big Lincoln rocket out of the tobacco slums, forever and forever, bearing Sissy Hankshaw up to the heights.

  And Sissy Hankshaw, knees knocking with thrill and fear, and not knowing what else to do, reached into her scrawny coat and offered the black man a slice of cheese.

  COWGIRL INTERLUDE (CHUCK WAGON)

  Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy. To smoke a cigar is to end a long separation; to burn down a police station is to hold homecoming for billions of happy molecules.

  Beside a marshy lake in an obscure sector of the Dakotas, a campfire was smiling its head off. Around it, however, there arose from a group of cowgirls several flares of discontent. Some of the girls were complaining that their stew was tasteless and bland.

  “This stew is bland,” said one girl.

  “It's like milk from a sick cow,” said another.

  Debbie, on cook duty that day, was defensive. “But spices aren't good for you,” she said. “Spices burn the tummy and inflame the senses,” she went on, using two metaphors improperly inspired by the fire.