Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Read online

  On television once, she had seen a cheapo Western called Reprisal. Guy Madison played a half-breed who passed. In the end, however, he soured on the System and went back to the wild old ways. “I deny that part of me that is white!” he cried

  Sometimes Sissy had considered following Guy Madison's example. Ah, to wahoo in the fir-shadowed streets of LaConner and deny that part of her that was civilized and pale!

  But that would be denying fifteen-sixteenths of her.

  What would it be like, living life as a one-sixteenth?

  (a) Like that part of the moth the candle burns last.

  (b) Like a “slow dance on the killing ground.”

  (c) Maybe not so bad at that: in the land of rotting grapes a raisin could be queen.

  (d) Like a pair of thumbs to which there is no brain, no heart, no cunt attached.

  18.

  THAT HER PLEASURE IN INDIANHOOD and her passion for car travel might be incongruous if not mutually exclusive never occurred to Sissy (as it was to occur to Julian and Dr. Goldman). After all, the first car that ever stopped for her had been named in honor of the great chief of the Ottawa: Pontiac.

  Perhaps Sissy was one of those who believed that nature and industry could sleep between the same flowered sheets. Perhaps she entertained visions of a future wilderness where bison and Buicks would mingle in harmony and mutual respect, a neoprimitive prairie where both pinto and Pinto would run free.

  Perhaps. The visions of a woman in motion are difficult to gauge.

  Visionary beliefs were neither expressed nor implied as Sissy, provisioned with Three Musketeers bars, thrilled LaConner's municipal cattails by the manner in which she hitched out of town. As previously suggested, Sissy made it a general practice never to plan an itinerary nor fix a destination—but could she help it if the only road out of LaConner, Washington, ran directly to New York City?

  Just as Chief Pontiac's beseeching question, “Why do you suffer the white man to dwell among you?” arrowed straight to the soul of his people, so the only road out of LaConner shot straight to Park Avenue and the Countess.

  “I honestly don't know how I got here so fast,” Sissy told the Countess. “When I walked into the LaConner Food Center to buy candy, some Indians at the beer cooler snickered at my hands. I freaked out and the next thing I knew I was approaching the Holland Tunnel. I woke up in the front seat of a convertible. The top was down and my first impression was that we'd been scalped.”

  19.

  THE COUNTESS HAD A SMILE like the first scratch on a new car. It was immanently regrettable. It was a spoiler. It was a stinging little reminder of the inevitability of deterioration.

  As if further vandalizing a marred surface, an ivory cigarette holder periodically pried apart the Countess's prickly jowls. Ashes from French cigarettes sifted onto the white linen suit that he wore daily without respect to season; ashes sifted upon the month-old bloom in his lapel. His monocle was fly-specked, his ascot was steaksauced, his dentures thought that they were castanets and the world was a fandango.

  The Countess didn't give a damn. He was rich, and not a penny less. You would be rich, too, if you had invented and manufactured the world's most popular feminine hygiene products.

  The Countess had built a fortune on those odors peculiar to the female anatomy. He was the General Motors of body cosmetics, the U.S. Steel of intimate fresheners. As any genius might, he obsessively directed every phase of his company's activities, from research to marketing, including advertising campaigns. That was where Sissy came in. She was his favorite model.

  He had discovered her years before in Times Square, where a crowd had gathered to watch her cross Forty-second Street against the lights. In a rare concession, he had wiped off his monocle. She had an ideal figure for modeling, she was blond and creamy, her demeanor was regal—except for her mouth: “She has the eyes of a poetess, the nose of an aristocrat, the chin of a noblewoman and the mouth of a suck artist in a Tijuana pony show,” announced the Countess. “She's perfect.”

  “But my God in holy Heaven,” protested the vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, with whom he had just lunched. “What about her hands?”

  Bookkeepers should know better than to argue with genius.

  The Countess had a fine photographer in his employ. Background was essential to the dreamy, romantic yet slightly suggestive tableaux with which he appealed to potential consumers of Dew spray mist and Yoni Yum spray powder, so he frequently sent his cameraman on location, as far away as Venice or the Taj Mahal. He spared no expense to get the image he wanted, and he learned to wait patiently for Sissy to hitchhike to her assignments.

  He never photographed her hands.

  Now, in the days when Lucky Strike cigarettes sponsored “Your Hit Parade” on television, the program featured a singer named Dorothy Collins. Miss Collins invariably appeared in blouses or dresses with high collars. Eventually, the high collars led to the rumor that Miss Collins was hiding something. She was said to have a scar or a goiter or one hell of a mole. Perhaps a vampire had given Dorothy Collins a permanent hickey. There were all sorts of stories. After several years, however, the vocalist abruptly appeared on “Your Hit Parade” (singing “Shrimp Boats Are A-Coming” or something like that) in a low-cut gown—and her throat was as normal as yours or mine. Of course, someone in Dr. Dreyfus's profession could have worked a little plastic magic. We'll probably never know.

  At any rate, what with Sissy Hankshaw posing for so many picturesque Yoni Yum and Dew ads, it didn't take more than about a year for sharp eyes to ascertain that her hands were never in the picture. They would be behind her back, or cropped out, or some tropical foliage or gondola prow would be obscuring them. And rumors à la Dorothy Collins spread along Madison Avenue. The usual stories—she had warts or birthmarks or tattoos or six fingers where five would do—came and went; but one version, that when she had once accepted an engagement ring from another, a jealous lover had lopped off her hands with a fish knife, persisted. The Countess, of course, wouldn't say. He kept Sissy's identity a secret and paid his photographer extra to develop lockjaw. It was the kind of game the Countess loved. Listening to the rumors about his mystery model, he would probe his nasty smile with his cigarette holder and his dentures would clack like a goose eating dominoes.

  Years afterward, when he was no longer using Sissy exclusively, the Countess posed a female impersonator in a Dew ad. He was not above that sort of trick. But he truly was taken with Sissy Hankshaw. Among other things, he believed her responsible for the jumpsuit interest that seized Western womanhood in the late sixties, and he placed her in the avant-garde of fashion. Well, it is true; Sissy wore jumpsuits long before any editor at Vogue, but it is also true that she continued to wear them after they passed out of style. Zippered jumpsuits were, in fact, the only garb Sissy could wear—because she hadn't the facility to button her clothes.

  Sissy never complained about the censorship of her hands, although as a matter of pride she would have preferred them in plain view. To the Countess's credit, he often expressed a desire to get Sissy's thumbs into the photo, simply for their phallic counterpoint, but he feared the American public wasn't ready for that.

  Maybe he'd test a thumb shot in Japan, he said, for among the Japs his firm already had grossed millions with an ad that paraphrased a haiku by the eighteenth-century poet Buson:

  The short night is through:

  on the hairy caterpillar

  little beads of Dew.

  COWGIRL INTERLUDE (MOON OVER DAKOTA)

  The moon looked like a clown's head dipped in honey.

  It bobbed ballishly in the sky, dripping a mixture of clown white and bee jelly onto the Dakota hills.

  Coyote howls (or were they crane whoops?) zigzagged through the celestial make-up like auditory wrinkles.

  Moonlight fell on Bonanza Jellybean as she bent over the horse trough, still scrubbing out her panties. (A warm day in a bouncing saddle can really stain a girl's underwear
.)

  Moonlight spilled in the bunkhouse windows, competing with the lampshine that illuminated the pages of Mary's Holy Bible, Big Red's Ranch Romances and Debbie's The Way of Zen.

  Moonlight ghosted the cheeks of girls sleeping and girls pretending to sleep.

  A single moonbeam quivered timidly on the stock of Delores del Ruby's blacksnake whip, where the stock protruded from beneath the sack of peyote buttons that nightly served as her pillow.

  Moonlight lured Kym and Linda outdoors in their nightgowns to lean against the corral fence in silent rapture.

  Our moon, obviously, has surrendered none of its soft charm to technology. The pitter-patter of little spaceboots has in no way diminished its mystery.

  In fact, the explorations of the Apollo mechanics revealed almost nothing of any real importance that was not already intimated in the Luna card of the tarot deck.

  Almost nothing. There was one interesting discovery. Some of the rocks on the moon transmit waves of energy. At first it was feared that they might be radioactive. Instruments quickly proved that the emissions were clean, but NASA was still puzzled about the source and character of the vibrations. Rock samples were brought back to Earth by astronauts for extensive laboratory testing.

  As the precise electromagnetic properties of the moon rocks continued to baffle investigators, one scientist decided just for drill to convert the waves into sound. It's a simple process.

  When the moon vibrations were channeled into an amplifier, the noises that pulsed out of the speaker sounded exactly like “cheese, cheese, cheese.”

  20.

  "SIT DOWN, DEAR, do sit down. Take a load off those lovely tootsies. Yes, sit right there. Would you fancy some sherry?” The decanter the Countess lifted was dusty on the outside, sticky empty inside; a stiff fly lay feet-up on its lip. “Shit O goodness, I'm all out of sherry; how about a red Ripple?” He reached into the midget refrigerator beside his desk and removed a bottle of pop wine. After a shameful amount of effort he tore loose its cap and filled two sherry glasses.

  “You know what Ripple is, don't you? It's Kool-Aid with a hard-on. Tee hee.”

  Sissy managed a polite smile. Shyly, she gazed at her glass. It was impastoed with so many fingerprints it should have been buried with J. Edgar Hoover. (At FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., there is an agent who can go through the fingerprint files and pick out all the trumpet players. Perhaps he is the same agent who kept returning Sissy's file card to the Richmond regional office demanding to know why there were no thumb marks. He was in good shape and didn't know it. There once was a family in Philadelphia that went through four generations without fingerprints at all: they were born without prints, the only known case in history. “This could present quite a problem for law enforcement,” said one public official. “No way,” replied another. “If the police ever find a murder weapon in Philly with no prints on it, we'll know immediately that one of them did it.”

  The Countess lifted his glass in salute. “To my own special Sissy,” he toasted. “Cheers! And welcome. So my letter brought you flying, eh? Well, I may have a little surprise for you. But first, tell me about yourself. It's been six months, hasn't it? In some circles that's half a year. How are you?”

  “Tired,” said Sissy.

  He stared at her sympathetically. “That's the very first time in the eons that I've known you that I've ever heard you complain. You must be tired. You've endured the greatest hardships without a whimper. I've always said, 'Sissy Hankshaw never has any bad luck because nothing seems bad luck to her. She's never been disgraced because there is nothing which she'd acknowledge as disgrace.' And now you're tired, poor darling.”

  “Some folks might say I had my hard luck at birth, and after dealing with that everything else was easy. A born freak can only go uphill.”

  “Freak, schmeek. Most of us are freaks in one way or another. Try being born a male Russian countess into a white middle-class Baptist family in Mississippi and you'll see what I mean.”

  “I understand that. I was being facetious. You know that I've always been proud of the way nature singled me out. It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live with nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters—or mice. Anyway, I'm fine. But I've been steady moving for eleven years and some months, you realize, and I guess I'm a tad fatigued. Maybe I should rest up for a spell. Not as young as I used to be.”

  “Shit O goodness, you won't be thirty for another year. And you're more beautiful than ever.”

  Her jumpsuit was patterned with robins and apple blossoms. It bore sweet testimony to recent laundering, but there were creases where it had been folded in her rucksack. Her lengthy blond hair fell straight; it would have been more convenient to travel with it in braids, but, alas, how could her fingers braid it? A mask of grime and road filth that no rinsing in service station ladies' rooms could adequately remove clung to her face. In the pores of her crisp nose and high forehead was the residue of various fossil fuels as well as flea's-eye particles of Idaho, Minnesota and western New Jersey: clay, sand, loam, mud, pollen, cement, ore and humus. The dirty veil with which hitchhiking draped her features was one reason why her identity as a model had been fairly simple to conceal. If the Countess wanted her to pose, he'd have to steam her for a day or two in his private bath. Still, the sunshine that was projected in the office windows, having first passed through the green filter of Central Park, showed the Countess to be no snaky flatterer: Sissy was beautiful, indeed.

  “Does that mean you might have an assignment for me?”

  There was a long pause, during which the Countess tapped his monocle with his cigarette holder, during which a squirrel successfully crossed Park Avenue, during which the twentieth century flicked its pea under another shell, catching a few million more suckers with their bets in the wrong places.

  “You were the Yoni Yum/Dew Girl from, let's see, from nineteen sixty-two through nineteen sixty-eight. That's a long time in this business. It was a brilliant campaign, if I do say so, and it was a good association. But it can't be repeated. One can't repeat oneself. Not and dredge any flavor out of life. Now, I've been using you two, three times a year, in trade magazine ads only, ever since. And I may use you again. I probably shall. You're my eternal favorite. Princess Grace herself couldn't be better, not even if she had your personality, which she doesn't; I am by proclamation official feminine hygienist to the Court of Monaco and I know, but that's telling tales out of school. Anyway, dear, I'm out of photography now and into watercolors. Whole new campaign about to start, built around incredibly lyrical watercolor paintings. Ah, how circuitous conversation is! We're back at the beginning. The exact man I've wanted you to meet is my artist, the watercolorist.”

  Sissy dared a sip of Ripple. “If I'm not going to pose for him, why do you want me to meet him?”

  “Purely personal. I believe you might enjoy one another.”

  “But, Countess . . .”

  “Now now. Don't get exasperated. I realize that you've always avoided all but the most rudimentary involvements with men, and, I might add, you've been wise. Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much—then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal. Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a hea
lthy seventy-year-old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood. Shit O goodness, how I do go on.”

  The Countess refilled his glass. The squirrel started across Park Avenue again but didn't make it. A uniformed chauffeur got out of a limousine and held the crushed animal up where it could be seen by the elderly woman passenger, who next week would make a twenty-five-dollar donation to the SPCA.

  “But here you are, still a virgin—you are virginal yet, aren't you?”

  “Why, yes, technically. Jack Kerouac and I came awfully close, but he was afraid of me, I think . . .”

  “Yes, well, what I'm getting at is that there comes a time when it is psychologically impossible for a woman to lose her virginity. She can't wait too long, you know. Now, there's no reason why you must lose yours. You're so much better off than most women. You've remained on the battleground, center stage, experiencing life and, what's more important, experiencing yourself experiencing it. You haven't been reduced to a logistical strategy for somebody else's lifewar. I'm not suggesting that you capitulate. But maybe you should pause—now in your weariness is a perfect opportunity—and consider if perhaps you aren't missing something of magnitude; consider if perhaps you wouldn't want to experience a romantic relationship before, well, frankly, before it may be too late. I mean, just ponder it a bit, that's all.”

  “What makes you think this watercolorist and I would develop a romantic relationship?” Sissy's brow was spaghettied.

  “I can't be certain that you would. Furthermore, I can't imagine why I would want you to. I mean, you've always smelled so nice. Like a little sister. The irony has just killed me.” The Countess's teeth began a faster clack. “You, the Dew Girl, one of the few girls who doesn't need Dew. I loath the stink of females!” The clatter grew louder. “They are so sweet the way God made them; then they start fooling around with men and soon they're stinking. Like rotten mushrooms, like an excessively chlorinated swimming pool, like a tuna fish's retirement party. They all stink. From the Queen of England to Bonanza Jellybean, they stink.” The dental flamenco hit a delirious tempo, a bulería, a Gypsy flurry of too many notes too soon.