“Miss Hankshaw, I am proud of the Rubber Rose. Basically, we offer the same program as Elizabeth Arden's: mat exercises, swimming exercises, sauna, steam bath, paraffin-wax bath, massage, facials, whirlpool bath, scalp treatment, diet training, manicure, pedicure, hair-styling, make-up classes. But it's more fun here. Arden's Maine Chance is elegant and posh. We offer a rustic, informal dude ranch atmosphere with riding and campouts and so forth. What really sets us apart, however, from the Maine Chance and all other spas is our program of intimate conditioning. Miss Hankshaw, we are adult women, you and I; we can speak frankly about such things. When a woman comes to a beauty spa, she does so to make herself sexually attractive to men. That's it in a nutshell. There often are other considerations, of course, but essentially our client is a mateless bird in need of preening.” (The ornithological allusion set Sissy to thinking of past parakeets and future whooping cranes.) “Other spas recognize this, but they don't go far enough. What use is it to lure a man to bed, pardon me if I am blunt, if he is to be offended or disappointed there? That is why we at the Rubber Rose stress feminine hygiene, vagina-tightening exercises and so forth. Well, this week the cowgirls invaded the sexual reconditioning room, and the uncouth practices they advocated there my tongue refuses to describe. Shocking beyond belief. The little barbarians are destroying all that I've built, mocking all that the company stands for. When the Countess gets here . . . I've been afraid to complain in the past. Oh, Jellybean is more bark than bite, and most of the girls, for all their bad manners, wouldn't harm a fly. But there's a new one, one they call del Ruby. She has the good will of a scorpion; oh, if you could see the way she looks at me! Anyway, I've considered it prudent to avoid a confrontation that might further upset the guests. But now that the season is practically over—we operate April through September—and the Countess is finally coming . . .”
They were in the hills now. The sun was sinking. Taking its tambourine with it, the wind went home to supper. Grass lost the beat and fell still. An American loneliness, which is like no other loneliness in the world, was spreading on all sides of the Cadillac, creeping out of the cooling soil, out of the air itself; smelling sweet, colored like the pinched feet of tired salesmen, tasting of sweat and beer and fried potatoes, haunted by childhood dreams and the ghosts of Indians—a lonering gloaming coiling like a smoky snake out of the busted suitcase of the continent. The limousine moved through the hush like a dentist's drill.
Inside the vehicle, Miss Adrian continued to talk. Obviously she was distraught. Sissy said nothing. Maybe Sissy was not even listening. Who could tell? Sissy sat as she usually sat, supporting her thumbs affectionately upon crossed legs—and smiling. She grinned the invincible soft grin that some people associate with madness, that others attribute to spiritual depth, but that in reality is simply the grin that comes from the secret heart of very private experience.
40.
BANG! Bang bang bang! Bang squared and bang cubed. Bang conjugated and Bang koked.
They arrived at the ranch to the sound of gunfire.
“O merciful Jesus!” cried Miss Adrian. “They're murdering the guests!”
The main house, the bunkhouse, the stables and outbuildings were deserted. There was no one around the spread at all except for a couple of men in Hollywood sweaters, loitering by the corral. More gunfire.
Miss Adrian was hysterical. She ran up to one of the men and seized him by the shoulders. “Where are the guests?” she shrieked.
The man seemed indignant. “Take it easy, lady,” he said. “They went on a short ride with the cowgirls. Rode over the hill yonder. You're Miss Adrian, aren't you? We need to talk to you about the filming.”
“Not now, you fool, not now. Those crazed bitches have led innocent women out and are slaughtering them at this moment. We'll all be killed. Oh! Ohhhh!”
The other cameraman spat out a wad of chewing gum, launching it on a trajectory that carried it over the corral fence. “There's a slaughter going on all right, but it's not the fat ladies that are getting it. Your hired hands are killing the cattle.” He looked guiltily at the pink cud of gum, lying now among horse droppings and clods. “It'll be okay if a nag steps in that, I guess. Chewing gum is made out of horses' hooves to begin with. Everything has got a homing instinct, even Dentyne.”
In the twilight, Miss Adrian's complexion looked like a silver spoon that had been left overnight in a dish of mayonnaise. “The cattle? They're killing the cows? All of them?”
“That's what they said, Miss Adrian. They invited your guests to go along so's to see what ranch life was really like. They invited the staff, too. It's getting dark. They should be back pretty . . . Here they come now.”
As the party rode into sight, Miss Adrian counted the guests. All present. She counted her staff. The manicurist and masseuse were having the time of their lives. They had never been allowed on a Rubber Rose outing before. Had Miss Adrian gone on to count the cowgirls, she would have discovered four missing: the three left behind to guard the slain cattle—and Debbie, who, as a vegetarian, would have no part in the slaughter and was even now over at Siwash Lake in the bird blind with a cinematographer, making love not beef.
41.
THE hearty stew recipe:
Peel onions. Pare potatoes and carrots. Cut meat into bite-size chunks. Drop into boiling water. Add sprinkle of parsley, sage, rosemary, simon and garfunkle. Caution: Under no circumstances use beef from the Rubber Rose Ranch.
To a veterinarian, the Rubber Rose herd was one of the greatest spectacles on Earth.
Threadworms? The Rubber Rose cows had so many threadworms in their bronchial tubes that they coughed from dusk to dawn like an opium den full of Julian Gitches. Hair balls? These cows had hair balls to rival the tumbling tumbleweeds. They had fevers and fissures and gas and gnats. They had hernias of the rumen and hernias of the rennet. The entire herd suffered from variola, displaying its symptomatic pustular eruptions upon their teats and udders. Actinomycosis, known to farmers as “big jaw” or “wooden tongue,” rattled the teeth of these bovines. A peek down their throats would disclose evidence of parotitis, not to mention pharyngeal polypi as large as boysenberries. There were random cases of foul foot, inverted eyelid and scurfy ear, and one of the bulls was so afflicted with orchitis that he walked with a straddling gait, lest his geranium red testicles sound a painful gong against his thighs.
According to Bonanza Jellybean, the Rubber Rose herd was indicative of the Countess's values. He had purchased a cheap, weak strain to begin with, to hear Jelly tell it, whereupon improper care by a succession of uninterested ranch hands had taken its toll. After futile attempts at restoring the herd to health, Jelly decided to put it out of its misery. Actually, it had been Delores's idea. Debbie, who would swat no living thing, and who believed that nature must run its course, opposed euthanasia. Miss Adrian, naturally, opposed it also. She was furious at the deed. “How dare you slaughter the Countess's cattle! Just wait until he gets his hands on you! What is a ranch without cows?” And so on.
Jelly's response—"We're going to replace them with goats"—only made her more angry. She was for telephoning the Countess that very evening, except that the cinematographers managed to squeeze a word in and inform her that they'd already tried, unsuccessfully, to phone the Countess—he was a guest of the President at the White House and couldn't be reached.
The cinematographers were a bit upset themselves. They had received a letter of instructions from the Countess that day, and only then did they realize that the douche bag tycoon expected them to film a mating dance. A mating dance? Oh dear. Like most geniuses, the Countess was a very limited person. Sigmund Freud was so ignorant of art that the Surrealist painters had to explain their use of Freudian symbols over and over again, and still he didn't get it. Einstein never could remember to take the biscuits out of the oven. Those same forces that drive a genius to create the things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has n
one left for the social graces (Should you invite Van Gogh to your home he might stand on your sofa in his muddy boots and pee where he pleased), and the very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance, and certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as “common sense” has never produced anything worth celebrating. But back to the point. The Countess, in the demands of his genius, had overlooked one small fact of nature—birds mate in the spring.
Birds mate in the spring. No amount of coaxing, libidinous stimulation or aphrodisiac birdseed will cause them to punch in early. Even horned owls will couple only in springtime.
The Countess had retained an expert wildlife camera crew to shoot whooping crane footage. He was a trifle tardy in advising it that he expected film of the mating rite. The cinematographers were vexed, but they offered a possible alternative to moving the operation to the Gulf Coast and waiting for spring. It seems, they told Miss Adrian, that a whooping crane will sometimes dance outside the breeding cycle. They have been known to perform their ballet simply as a physical or emotional outlet. Occasionally a crane may execute a short but dazzling dance just for the hell of it. Perhaps one or more cranes might be inspired to perform during the Siwash Lake stop-over. If the cameramen were alert, they might get enough dance footage to suit the Countess's purposes. But as for this model who was supposed to be in the film, she would have to be shot separately and superimposed.
Miss Adrian didn't know what to tell them. “You'll just have to discuss it with the Countess,” she said. She had a poison headache.
“Come along, Miss Hankshaw,” she uttered through the pain. “I'll show you to your room, and see that you get something to eat—if there is anything to eat besides brown rice and bean sprouts.”
The camermen stared at the pair of thumbs that came swinging around from the opposite side of the Cadillac: pillows of sugar, clouds of meat, filling the lenses of their camera eyes.
One of the men wiped his brow. “Come back, Walt, all is forgiven,” he moaned.
The Rubber Rose. Disney's was never like this.
42.
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, the ranch stood on one leg (more in imitation of flamingo anxiety than of what the poet García Lorca called “the ecstasy of cranes"). The ranch wasn't going to set its other foot down until the Countess came.
Meanwhile, the cowgirls dug a lime pit in which to bury the snuffed cattle. After it was dug, they had to fill it up again. That's the way it is with holes; they're insatiable. The hands worked from early morning until sundown. They took their meals from the chuck wagon, and when supper was done, rode to the bunkhouse and bombed directly into bed. From her window, Sissy watched them come and go, heard their weary laughter and observed the dimples in their skintight Levis opening and closing like the mouths of tropical fish.
Taking advantage of the hands' absence, Miss Adrian sought to reestablish her control over the health-and-beauty program. No longer did ladies grunt in carbohydrate confusion, trying to squeeze a “fiery serpent” up their spines.
Sissy was given a tour of the facilities, most of which were in a wing of the main house: the sauna and the buildings that housed steam baths and the mysteries of “sexual reconditioning” were separate, a few yards away. Miss Adrian invited Sissy to use the pool and the sauna whenever she wished, but the manager was busy putting things straight and had little time for the thumby model from New York.
The cinematographers spoke with her the first morning, as they picked up additional provisions for the blinds, which, due to the presumed approach of Crane Hour, they dared not leave again. They offered to show her the pond and the blinds, but repeated what they'd said earlier about having to film her separately. “No whooping crane is gonna let you get that close to it,” they said. “Hell, whoopers don't even like other birds around.” The cameramen weren't entirely sure there was going to be any filming. Nobody would know anything until the Countess arrived.
So the ranch stood on one leg and waited.
And all the while, this clumsy balancing act was being nonchalantly scrutinized—leisurely leered upon, some might say—by a short man with a long white beard, a sure-footed man whose periodic appearances along the eroded poop decks and wind-carved turrets of Siwash Ridge had such an air of the occult, the supernatural, that he may excite the imaginations of many an eager mind, while others may find him merely disconcerting and shake their heads suspiciously.
But now, as we observe events at the ranch, and observe, further, the old gentleman who observed them, now is not the time for either reckless excitement or cynical scoffing. We must regard this business coolly, objectively, with a philosophy of operative wholeness. We must suspend, temporarily, a critical or analytical approach. Let us, rather, gather facts, all the facts, regardless of aesthetic appeal or theoretical social worth, and spread those facts before us not as the soothsayer spreads the innards of a turkey but as a newspaper spreads its columns. Let us be as journalists, then. And like all good journalists, we shall present our facts in an order that will satisfy the famous five W's: wow, whoopee, wahoo, why-not and whew.
43.
ON THE FIFTH MORNING, as the Indian summer sun popped up from behind the hills like a hyperthyroid Boy Scout, burning to do good deeds, Sissy was awakened by the tinkle of breakfast trays. She yawned and stretched and held her thumbs up in the sunlight to make sure there had been no overnight change. Then she propped herself up on pillows—she felt rested but uneasy—and awaited the knock at her door.
Breakfast in bed was a tradition Miss Adrian had installed at the Rubber Rose. It seemed like a nice idea to Sissy until she lifted the cloth cover from her first tray and encountered decaffeinated coffee with saccharine, fresh grapefruit without sugar and a piece of Melba toast: the guests were on a strict 900-calories-a-day regime. At least they were when Debbie was not running the kitchen. Sissy had had more luxurious breakfasts in jail.
The morning maid, who doubled as a bath therapist, delivered her tray this fifth day and stood by, as if to take sadistic amusement in watching Sissy unveil a meal that would piss off the taste buds of a saint. But when our Sis removed the cover, she discovered (in addition to a vase of prairie asters) a double-meat cheeseburger, a package of Hostess Twinkies, a cold can of Dr. Pepper and a Three Musketeers bar; in short, just the sort of repast she might have procured for herself had she been on the road.
A dragon who'd been served Princess Anne on a platter could not have grinned with more gastronomical satisfaction.
“Compliments of Bonanza Jellybean,” said the maid. “She'll be up to see you directly.”
Sure enough, about the time Sissy clinked the last droplet of the Doctor's peppy nectar out of the can and dabbed a final trace of chocolate from her lips, there was a fist against her door and in sailed the tresses, teeth and titties of a cowgirl so cute she made Sissy blush just to look at her. She wore a tan Stetson with as aster pinned to it, a green satin shirt embroidered with rearing stallions snorting orange fire from their nostrils, a neckerchief, a leather vest as white as a corpse, of the same cadaverous leather a skirt so short that if her thighs had been a clock the skirt would have been five minutes to midnight, and a pair of handtooled Tony Lama boots, the toes of which you could pick your teeth with. There were silver spurs fastened to her boots, and encircling her trim waist, just above the slightly bulging baby fat of her belly, a wide, turquoise-studded belt, from which dangled a holster and the holster's inhabitant, a genuine six-shooter with a long nose like bad news from the clinic. She flashed honey thighs when she walked, her breasts bounced like dinner rolls that had gotten loaded on helium and, between red-tinged cheeks, where more baby fat was taking its time maturing, she had a little smile that could cause minerals and plastics to remember their ancient animate connections.
She grasped Sissy's elbow (not dar
ing to get too close to the thumb) and sat on the side of the bed. “Welcome, podner,” she said. “By God, it's great to have you here. It's an honor. Sorry I took so long getting to you, but we've had a mess of hard work these past few days—and a heap of planning to do.” When she pronounced the word “planning,” her voice assumed a conspiratorial, almost ominous, tone.
“Er, you seem to know who I am,” said Sissy, “and maybe even what I am. Thanks for the breakfast.”
“Oh, I know about Sissy Hankshaw, all right,” said Jelly. “I've done a little hitchhiking myself. Ah shucks, that's like telling Annie Oakley you're a sharpshooter because you once knocked a tomato can off a stump with a fieldstone. I haven't done a lick of serious hitching. But starting when I was about eleven, I used to run away from home every couple of months and try to find a place where I could be a cowgirl. Somebody always sent me back to Kansas City, though. No ranch ever let me stay and some of 'em had me locked up. Lot of times the law picked me up before I could get outta Kansas. But I got around enough to hear about you. First time was in Wyoming. Some deputy says to me, 'Who do you think you are—Sissy Hankshaw?' I says, 'No, you dumb fuck, I'm Margaret Meade,' and he whipped me good, but not before he'd aroused my curiosity about this Sissy Hankshaw person. Later, I'd hear tales about you from people I'd meet in jail cells and truckstops. I heard about your, uh, your, ah, your wonderful thumbs, and I heard how you were Jack Kerouac's girl friend . . .”