Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Read online

  The dissatisfied diners scoffed, and because little Debbie looked so near to tears, Bonanza Jellybean spoke in her behalf. “It's a well-known fact,” said Jelly, “that the reason India is overpopulated is because curry powder is an aphrodisiac.”

  Delores del Ruby flicked an ember out of the reunion with a sharp crack of her whip. “Bullshit,” said Delores. “There isn't but one aphrodisiac in the world.

  “And that's strange stuff.”

  15.

  "HITCHHIKING IS NOT A SPORT. It is not an art. It certainly isn't work, for it requires no particular ability nor does it produce anything of value. It's an adventure, I suppose, but a shallow, ignoble adventure. Hitchhiking is parasitic, no more than a reckless panhandling, as far as I can see."

  Those were the words of Julian Gitche, spoken in exasperation to Sissy Hankshaw. Sissy did not bother to answer Julian's charges, and the author, who is ambivalent about the whole matter of hitchhiking, certainly is not going to answer them for her.

  From Whitman to Steinbeck to Kerouac, and beyond to the restless broods of the seventies, the American road has represented choice, escape, opportunity, a way to somewhere else. However illusionary, the road was freedom, and the freest way to ride the road was hitchhiking. By the seventies, so many young Americans were on the road that hitchhiking did take on, Julian to the contrary, characteristics of sport. In the letters column of pop culture magazines such as Rolling Stone, hitchhikers boasted of records set for speed and distance, and whole manuals were published to advise those new to the “game.”

  Oddly enough, Sissy was almost indifferent to this cultural phenomenon. To approach her for practical advice on the subject of hitchhiking would have been virtually futile. For example, she could not have told you, as did Ben Lobo and Sara Links in their booklet Side of the Road: A Hitchhikers Guide to the United States, that Montana laws strictly forbid hitchhiking in the vicinity of mental institutions. And it is difficult to say how she might have reacted to this piece of advice in Hitchhikers Handbook by Tom Grimm: “Don't use your thumb to hitchhike. Use a sign instead.”

  And at this Grimm observation, “I doubt whether most girls could safely hitchhike long distances alone,” Sissy would have had to laugh.

  Because by that day in the New York clinic when Dr. Goldman administered to her the “talk serum,” many years after the black musician's Lincoln had transported her away from home and family, Sissy could say:

  “Please don't think me immodest, but I'm really the best. When my hands are in shape and my timing is right, I'm the best there is, ever was or ever will be.

  “When I was younger, before this layoff that has nearly finished me, I hitchhiked one hundred and twenty-seven hours without stopping, without food or sleep, crossed the continent twice in six days, cooled my thumbs in both oceans and caught rides after midnight on unlighted highways, such was my skill, persuasion, rhythm. I set records and immediately cracked them; went farther, faster than any hitchhiker before or since. As I developed, however, I grew more concerned with subtleties and nuances of style. Time in terms of m.p.h. no longer interested me. I began to hitchhike in something akin to geological time: slow, ancient, vast. Daylight, I would sleep in ditches and under bushes, crawling out in the afternoon like the first fish crawling from the sea, stopping car after car and often as not refusing their lift, or riding only a mile and starting over again. I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, clover-leafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified. Then I began to juxtapose slow, extended runs with short, furiously fast ones—until I could compose melodies, concerti, entire symphonies of hitch. When poor Jack Kerouac heard about this, he got drunk for a week. I added dimensions to hitchhiking that others could not even understand. In the Age of the Automobile—and nothing has shaped our culture like the motor car—there have been many great drivers but only one great passenger. I have hitched and hiked over every state and half the nations, through blizzards and under rainbows, in deserts and in cities, backward and sideways, upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber. There is no road that did not expect me. Fields of daisies bowed and gas pumps gurgled when I passed by. Every moo cow dipped toward me her full udder. With me, something different and deep, in bright focus and pointing the way, arrived in the practice of hitchhiking. I am the spirit and the heart of hitchhiking, I am its cortex and its medulla, I am its foundation and its culmination, I am the jewel in its lotus. And when I am really moving, stopping car after car after car, moving so freely, so clearly, so delicately that even the sex maniacs and the cops can only blink and let me pass, then I embody the rhythms of the universe, I feel what it is like to be the universe, I am in a state of grace.

  “You may claim that I've an unfair advantage, but no more so than Nijinsky, whose reputation as history's most incomparable dancer is untainted by the fact that his feet were abnormal, having the bone structure of bird feet. Nature built Nijinsky to dance, me to direct traffic. And speaking of birds, they say birds are stupid, but I once taught a parakeet to hitchhike. Couldn't speak a word, but he was a hitchhiking fool. I let him get rides for us all across the West, and then he indicated that he wanted to set out on his own. I let him go and the very first car he stopped was carrying two Siamese cats. Tsk tsk. Maybe birds are stupid at that.”

  16.

  THE SO-CALLED TALK SERUM is essentially racemic methedrine with a pinch of Sodium Pentothal. It is not to be confused with the controversial “truth serum,” which is wholly Sodium Pentothal. Indeed, according to Dr. Goldman, the talk serum may cause a subject to exaggerate. Clearly, he believed Sissy Hankshaw guilty of overstatement while under the influence of the injection.

  The author frankly doesn't know. The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to utilize such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction.

  We employ drugs, yogic techniques and poetics—and a thousand more clumsy methods—in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.

  So much for that. And so much for Sissy Hankshaw's testimony on hitchhiking, whether distorted or exact. There is something else to get at here. Listen.

  Suppose you awoke one morning with the uneasy feeling that the world had, while you slept, somehow slipped a-tilt and rose to find that your dresser drawers were mysteriously open a fraction of an inch and that prescription bottles had tipped over in the medicine cabinet (although neither you nor anyone else in your household had ventured since bedtime to get an aspirin, a condom or a Tums) and that pictures on the wall, shades on the lamps and books in the case were askew. Outdoors, the taller buildings were posing à la Pisa, or, should you live in the country, streams were running slightly outside their grooves as fruits dropped like gargoyle ganglia from the uniformly leaning trees. What would be your reaction to such a phenomenon? Honestly, now, and seriously, too. How would you feel? Would you be scared? Confused? Puzzled and anxious? Would you telephone the police? Would you pray? Or would you numbly await an explanation, refusing to attempt to analyze the event or even to experience it with your full emotions until you had read the papers, tuned in the news, heard how experts from the universities were explaining the tilt, learned how the Pentagon planned to deal with it, were reassured by the President, who might insist, as Presidents will, that nothing really nothing had gone wrong? Or instead of fear, bewilderment and anxiety, or in addition to fear, bewilderment and anxiety, or instead of a hard impulse to dismiss the happening and get back to business-as-usual, or in addition to a hard impulse to dismiss the happening and get back to business-as-usual, do you imagine that a bright trace of delight, unnamable and indefensible, might tickle your spine; could you feel in an odd way elated—elated, perhaps, because, in a rational world where even disasters are
familiar and damn near routine, something of almost fairytale flavor had occurred?

  Another try. Suppose that upon a late evening with thirsty guests in your home your supply of beer runs dry. You slip out and aim your car in the direction of the only store in the area open after midnight, a half-case of Budweiser your goal. Well, a couple of blocks from your house, the store not yet in view, you are subjected suddenly to an intense sensation of being spied upon. You scan for patrol cars but spot none. And then you see it, in the sky (its altitude and size indeterminable due to lack of reference points), a whirling disc outlined by concentric circles of white and green light with a scattering of rapidly blinking purple lightpoints in its center. It hovers—you are positive it is interested in you—beyond and above the hood of your car, whirling all the while, occasionally darting to the left or right with incredible speed. Before you gain the presence of mind to decide whether to brake or accelerate, the outer rings of white and green are extinguished and the small purple lights arrange themselves in a recognizable pattern—a pattern of a duck's foot—against the starless sky. Seconds later, the whole craft disappears. You drive on to the store, of course, because there's nothing else (for the moment) you can do. A while later, stunned and excited, you arrive home with the beer (you forgot Rick's cigarettes), where you are faced with the problem of what, if anything, to tell your friends. Maybe they won't believe you; they'll insist you're drunk or lying or worse. Maybe they'll blab too much; word will get to the press; you'll be hounded by skeptics and nuts. Should you call the radio station to ascertain if anyone else saw what you saw? Do you have a moral obligation to notify the nearest military installation? The way you handle these questions, as well as how much thought you eventually devote to the meaning of the UFO's visual message—why, you might wonder, a duck's foot?—would be determined by your basic personality, and with all tender respect, that is of small concern to the author. The significant query here is this: would you not, sooner or later, no matter who or what you are, feel a rise in spirit, a kind of wild-card joy as a result of your encounter? And if this elevation, this joyousness, can be attributed in part to your contact with . . . Mystery . . . cannot it equally be attributed to your abrupt realization that there are superior forces “out there,” forces that for all their potential menace, nevertheless might, should they elect to intervene, represent salvation for a planet that seems stubbornly determined to perish?

  Take now the clockworks. Both the clockworks, the original and the Chink's. The clockworks, being genuine and not much to look at, don't generate the drama of an Earth-tilt or a flying saucer, nor do they seem to offer any immediate panacea for humanity's fifty-seven varieties of heartburn. But suppose that you're one of those persons who feels trapped, to some degree, trapped matrimonially, occupationally, educationally or geographically, or trapped in something larger than all those; trapped in a system, or what you might describe as an “increasingly deadening technocracy” or a “theater of paranoia and desperation” or something like that. Now, if you are one of those persons (and the author doesn't mean to imply that you are), wouldn't the very knowledge that there are clockworks ticking away behind the wallpaper of civilization, unbeknownst to leaders, organizers and managers (the President included), wouldn't that knowledge, suggesting as it does the possibility of unimaginable alternatives, wouldn't that knowledge be a bubble bath for your heart?

  Or is the author trying to ease you into something here, trying to manipulate you a little bit when he ought to be just telling his story the way a good author should? Maybe that's the case. Let's drop it for now.

  But look here a minute. Over here. Here's a girl. She's a nice girl. And she's a pretty girl. She looks a bit like the young Princess Grace, had the young Princess Grace been left out in the rain for a year.

  What's that you say? Her thumbs? Yes, aren't they magnificent? The word for her thumbs has got to be rococo—rocococototo tutti! by God.

  Ladies. Gentlemen. Shhh. This is the way truth is. You've got to let those strange hands touch you.

  Part

  II

  . . . the Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love

  —Margaret Atwood

  17.

  NEWSPAPERS KEEP PHOTOGRAPHS of famous persons in their files. When one of the famous dies, a staff artist (the same guy who draws the circles around fumbled footballs) borrows the dead celebrity's photo folder and with an air brush obliterates the highlights in his eyes.

  It is standard procedure on most American newspapers. By thus visually distinguishing those with us from those gone, the press shows its respect for, or its fear of, death. Whenever you see a picture of a deceased notable in the papers, chances are his eyes will be dull and flat—as if the sparkle of his living had been divided among his next of kin.

  In the official Postal Service photograph of the President of the United States, the process seemed almost to have been reversed. Eyes that originally had been inert and shallow had been made with the retoucher's brush to twinkle warmly and project volleys of paternalism and health.

  Sissy Hankshaw was standing beneath that very portrait of the President, in the lobby of the LaConner, Washington, post office. She looked at the President's portrait as if it were the benign fantasy of some Jehovah's Witness cartoonist—while she waited at the counter for her mail.

  LaConner, Washington, was one of a half-dozen places around the country where Sissy received letters. The other places were Taos, New Mexico, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Cherokee, North Carolina, Pleasant Point, Maine, and one other town. What these post offices had in common was that they all were on or adjacent to Indian reservations.

  The President in the picture on the LaConner, Washington, post office wall that morning was not Ike. Oh no, Ike had led the people during Sissy's childhood and, except as to how they might best grip a golf club, had never thought of thumbs at all. Sissy had fled Richmond just as the Eisenhower Years were dying. (Dying of boredom, we might say—although the Eisenhower Years and the fifties were perfectly suited for one another; they went together like Hi and Lois. It was when the Eisenhower Years returned, in 1968 and, worse, in 1972—times too psychically complex, technologically advanced and socially volatile to endure simple-mindedness on such a grand scale—that a civilization already green around the gills began to flip-flop in earnest.)

  More than ten years had passed since Sissy made her move; a decade during which she hitchhiked obsessively, constantly, solitarily, marvelously. Among people who pay attention to such things, she had become a legend.

  Being a legend is not always financially gainful. There is no United Federation of Legends union to ensure that members be compensated for their legendary labors at a minimum wage of $5.60 an hour. Legends have no lobby in Washington, D.C. There isn't even a Take a Legend to Lunch Week. Consequently, Sissy had to rely on something other than her legendary hitchhiking for eats (for Tampax and toothpaste and repairs to her shoes). That is why she occasionally worked for the Countess. And it was because the Countess had to have a means of contacting her that Sissy checked post office general delivery whenever she was near LaConner, Taos, Pine Ridge, Cherokee, Pleasant Point or that other place. Certainly, nobody but the Countess ever wrote to her. Sissy had neither heard from nor contacted her family since she had hitched off into the sunset. (Actually, of course, it was night when Sissy made her getaway, but in remembering South Richmond it is easy to confuse the memory of old brick with the memory of sunsets, as it is easy to inadvertently mingle in one's recollections the odor of toasting tobacco with the odor of blood: another of the brain's little practical jokes.)

  Sissy wished quite hard for a message from the Countess that day, because there was less than a dollar in her pockets. Wishing made it so. As the President beamed upon her, the postmaster returned to the counter with a slinky mauve envelope, addressed in puce-colored ink and smelling (even as it snuggled against the postmaster's hand) of the boud
oir. “Thank you,” Sissy said, and she carried the missive out onto the sidewalk.

  Hitchhiking into LaConner, Washington, had been like hitchhiking down a mossy old well. Dark, damp and very green. There were puddles in the street and the smell of mushrooms everywhere. The sky was a crock of curdled cloud. Mallards swam within quacking distance of the village post office and, as if in welcome, ten thousand hitchhiking cattails pointed their fat thumbs in the air.

  She could hear foundations decaying as she stood there, and every horizon she tried to focus upon was mysteriously blurred, as if licked by the tip of the tongue of the Totem. Snails advanced upon the woodpiles. Fir trees stood their ground.

  Directly across the slough from the village was the Swinomish reservation. Indeed, several Indians walked past Sissy at the post office, distracting her, for the moment, from the Countess's letter.

  At last, however, she ripped it open and was surprised to read just this:

  Sissy, Precious Being,

  How are you, my extraordinary one? I worry so. Next time you are near Manhattan, do ring me up. There is a man to whom I simply must introduce you. Thrill!!

  The Countess

  Refolding the sheet of expensive notepaper, Sissy warmed it for a while between her palms, as if, like the dirty old man who sat on a Girl Scout cookie hoping to hatch a Brownie, it might metamorphose into a work order. When she read it again, alas, it was the same pointless message.

  “You'd think the Countess would know me better than that,” she mused. “I haven't had a paycheck in half a year and all the Countess can come up with is an introduction to a man. Criminey!”

  Just then, on the slough, some Indians tore by in a long canoe (an antique shovel-nose war canoe), chanting furiously in the Skagit language. They were Swinomish bucks, mostly high school ballplayers or young unemployed veterans, practicing for the annual Fourth of July longboat race against the Lummi, Muckleshoot and other Puget Sound tribes. Sissy flung the scented letter into a waste can.