Sissy thought that it must have something to do with the primacy of form over function, thus approximating her own approach to hitchhiking, wherein an emotional and physical structure created by variations and intensifications of the act of hitching was of far more importance than the utilitarian goals commonly supposed to be the sole purpose of the act. She was still thinking it over when Jelly said, “Say, there's a sexual reconditioning class in five minutes. Some of us are gonna crash it. To pass on some helpful information and correct some misconceptions. You like to come along?”
The S. R. building was of rustic exterior. It could have been a blacksmith shop. Inside, there were thick rubber mats and harem cushions all over the floor of a single, dimly lit room. At the rear of the room, partly concealed by a brocade curtain, was a flush toilet, gleaming in porcelain ostentation like one of the Countess's incisors. At the front there stood a long, low table, upon which was displayed a harvest of vials, bottles, boxlets, spray cans and ointment tubes, as well as a pair of dainty pink rubber apparatuses that looked like the twin nieces of an enema bag. Approximately a dozen women sat upon the floor, facing the table. Half of them were noticeably overweight, several were as skinny as light verse and appeared to be as burned-out as old sparkplugs although a few of the women seemed to Sissy to be quite attractive and in no need of the Rubber Rose Ranch's ministrations. Sissy wondered what lemons her destiny would have to suck before she might find herself a client of a place such as this.
Led by Debbie, the cowgirls set right to work. “There's only one excuse for ever douching,” Debbie informed her captive audience, “and that's to cure an irritation or infection. In which case, you want to be real careful about what you slosh on the inflamed tissues. There are eleven herbs or natural substances suitable for douching the vagina. These are: fennel, fit root, slippery elm, gum arabic, white pond lily, marsh mallow . . .”
“Marshmallow?” asked one of the more obese ladies, incredulously.
Debbie was earnest. “Marsh mallow or Althaea officinalis is a pink-flowering plant that grows in marshy places. It's an excellent medicinal herb, a fact that's often obscured by the sweet white confectionery paste that can be made by boiling down its mucilaginous roots. Now, where were we. Marsh mallow, wild alum root, uva ursi, fenugreek, bayberry bark . . .” Debbie clicked off the herb names, but the fat woman was no longer listening. Her eyes had glazed over as she pondered the pleasures of a marshmallow douche, losing her conscious mind in toffee whipped-cream molasses visions of vaginal delight.
Somewhat later in the lecture, Delores grabbed a can of Dew spray mist from the table and slung it in the air. Jelly drew her six-gun and tried to blast it before it hit the floor. She missed, but the class got the point. The shot brought Miss Adrian running from the main house, where she'd been delayed while attempting once again to phone the Countess in Washington, D.C. She arrived in time to hear:
“There isn't a man alive, unless he's some masochistic chemical fetishist, who'd dip his genitals in benzethonium chloride, and any woman who sprays hers with it is a dupe.”
Thinking of the ranch's image, thinking, too, perhaps, of Delores's whip and Jelly's pistol, Miss Adrian struggled to restrain herself. “Girls,” she said. “Girls.”
“Just a minute, ma'am,” urged Jellybean. “We're almost through. We got one more little piece of pertinent info to pass along. A vivacious lady like yourself might find it interesting.” She bade Miss Adrian stand aside, then turned to the audience.
“Now as Debbie has already mentioned, not only is a woman's natural essence nothing to be ashamed of, the truth of the matter is it's a positive thing that works in our favor. Here's a little self-celebration I bet you ladies never thought of. What you do is reach down with your fingers and get them wet with your juices. Then you rub it in behind your ears . . .”
“Behind your ears???”
This brought the class to full attention. It even brought the fat lady back from marshmallow land. It brought Miss Adrian to the edge of a dead faint.
“Yeah, behind your ears. And a dab on your throat, if you want. When it dries, there's no whiff of low tide about it at all. It's a wonderful perfume. Very subtle and very mischievous. Men are attracted, I guarantee you. Why, in Europe women have been using it for centuries. That's why Neapolitan girls are so seductive. You don't believe me, do you? Here, I'll prove how nice it is.”
Jelly slipped her hand up inside her skirt and began priming the essence. Before she could complete the demonstration, however, Miss Adrian, pale and shaking, began to blubber. She was raving about something, but nobody could understand her. She made a sudden lunge for Jelly's gun, but Jelly, who was getting pretty good at the fast draw, whisked her hand out of her crotch in time to ward off the older woman's gambit. The cowgirls figured it was time to retreat.
Tittering and jabbering, they went to the stables and saddled up. Jelly and Big Red helped Sissy mount a calm mare. They rode eastward for two or three miles, to where the hills began leveling off into prairie. The breeze in the grasses made a sound like a silk-lined opera coat falling to the floor of a carriage. Continuously. Except that the breeze in the grasses was actually the breeze in the asters, for wherever the party trotted or looked, the ground was wiggling with asters, yellow-eyed and purple-petaled, like daisies wine-stained after an orgy of the gods.
More than one cowgirl thought of old high school English Wordsworth, him wandering lonely as a cloud that floats o'er vales and hills, when all at once he saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils. But these asters were no crowd, and no host, either: they were a planet, a universe, a goddamned infinity of flowers. Who'd have thought that Gary Cooper's prairie; Crazy Horse's prairie; the westward ho the wagons! prairie; the hard, flat belly of America prairie became in September such a garden of gentle blooms? Everywhere, asters waved as if practicing the art of waving. The purity of the movement gave Sissy's thumbs the Big Itch, but the cowpokes were stilled by the solitary sweep of the spectacle, and they, all of them, rode back toward the ranch with a papery noise of peace in their minds, asters of the heart forcing their way to the light.
Upon arrival, they discovered the goat, which they'd tied to the corral fence with a long rope, busily eating the top off the cinematographers' convertible. It had already eaten the front-seat upholstery and part of the steering wheel of Miss Adrian's Cadillac limousine. And, as hors d'oeuvres, perhaps, it had cruised the bunkhouse clothesline, devouring no fewer than fourteen pairs of panties, including Delores's bayou snakeskins, Heather's lace bikinis and Kym's lone pair of Frederick's of Hollywood peekaboos with their valentine-shaped cutout.
That evening, around the fireplace, there were some second thoughts about goats.
45.
"THE COW MILK MOLECULE is one hundred times larger than the molecule of mother's milk. But the goat milk molecule and the human milk molecule are practically the same size. That's why goat milk is easy for us to digest and cow milk is like sand in the gas tank of the gut."
“Did you ever taste 'gator's milk?” asked Delores. Debbie didn't know how to take that question.
“Debbie's right,” said Bonanza Jellybean. “More and more people are discovering that cow's milk isn't fit for human consumption. Billy West says if we can produce enough goat's milk on the ranch to make it worth his while, he'll run it into Fargo regularly. He won controlling interest in a cheese factory there in a crap game. They'd make goat cheese from our milk and supply health food stores throughout the plains states. If we can deal in enough volume—and keep the goats from eating the fucking boots right off our feet—the ranch could be self-supporting.”
“And we'd be performing a service,” added Debbie, ever-mindful of karma. “Goat's milk is so good for babies whose mamas can't nurse.”
“Speaking of babies,” said Delores, “I hope you itchy-clits who are sneaking down to the lake every night are taking precautions.”
Nobody responded vocally, although there was some nervous—and angry—sq
uirming. Delores continued. “I'm aware that Tad Lucas rode broncs until her ninth month, but I don't think pregnant cowgirls are going to be any asset on this ranch. It's bad enough we've got cranes coming; we don't need storks. I feel that those filmmakers should be removed from the Rubber Rose as soon as possible. Men can cause nothing but trouble here. I also feel that our guest"—she nodded her dark curls toward Sissy—"should be excused while we discuss this matter further.”
Jelly started to speak in Sissy's behalf, but, assuring everyone that she understood, Sissy arose and left the bunkhouse.
A moon hung over the ranch like the muzzle of a melancholy mule. Preferring moonlight to the electric shine in the main house, where the guests were playing bridge and reading novels by John Updike, Sissy strolled around the grounds. She considered the fact that that same moon that was pouring its mule milk (data on the molecular relation to human milk unavailable at this time) upon hilltops and willow trees and cowgirl intrigues was the same moon that was beaming on the roof of Julian's remodeled tenement. It was a trite consideration, the kind of thought that escapes from the noodles of amateur songwriters and lovesick fraternity boys. But it placed her in touch with toothier sentiments. She and Julian Gitche, united emotionally and legally (whatever that meant), were also connected by moonlight. And by forces even more tentative and obscure. Perhaps everything was connected to everything, in a discernible if nebulous way, and if one might only trace the fibers and filaments of those connections, one might . . . One might what? Observe the Grand Design? Untangle all the puppet strings and discover whose hands (or claws) are pulling them? End the ancient search for order and meaning in the universe? “Criminey,” sighed Sissy, kicking a horse biscuit (or was it a nylon-flavored cookie from the goat's oven?). “If my brain were only as outsized as my thumbs, I might be able to put the whole picture in focus.”
Don't bet on it, Sissy, honey.
Were your brain appreciably larger, large enough to put the strain on your Princess Grace neck that your loppy preaxial digits put upon your wrists, you conceivably would possess a superior intellect. It is also conceivable, however, that, with the nervous system required to fire a brain of that size, you would be so sensitive to the follies of civilization that you would feel compelled to take to the sea the way the big-brained dolphin did. Your death certificate would speak of “suicide” and “drowning,” as if your death certificate were jacket notes for the Golden Gate Bridge. No, big brains are for dolphins, who are great swimmers, and for Martians, who, judging by their infrequent visits, don't seem to get much of a bang out of Earth. Our brains are probably too large as they are.
Recent neurological research indicates that the brain is governed by principles it cannot understand. And if the brain is so weak or timid that it is incapable of comprehending its own governing principles, the physical laws it appears bound to obey, then it is not going to be much use to anyone confronting the Ultimate Questions, not even if it were as big as a breadbox (Ugh, what a sickening thought!). This author's advice to his readers is to make the best you can of your brain—it's pretty good storage space and the price is right—and then turn to something else.
The way that Sissy, for example, having tired of pondering invisible connections, turned to her thumbs and began hitchhiking cricket chirps as she walked back to her room.
46.
IT WAS THE SIXTH DAY, the day upon which, in the Judaeo-Christian version of Creation, God said, “Let there be strict potty training and free enterprise.” Sissy stepped out of the main house. Immediately, her eyes turned, as they invariably did, toward Siwash Ridge.
Sometimes she could distinguish a human figure up there, silhouetted against the multicolored limestone, or emerging, closer to the base, from a clump of juniper bushes, trailing its beard behind it. On this morning she was rewarded by the blurred sight and muffled noise of a commotion.
A group of cowgirls was watching the butte, also. They were leaning against the vehicle known as the “peyote wagon,” a Dodge pickup with a handmade wooden camper on its bed. The eaves of the camper were carved to resemble the open jaws of alligators, and caimans, green-skinned and fearsome of teeth, protruded in bas-relief along both sides of the luridly painted compartment. Images of iguanas and tongue-flickering saurians adorned the rear doors; the hospital white mouths of moccasins yawned from every space that was not already undulating with the killing coils, squamous wiggles and hypnotic eyes of swamp crawlers and other manifestations of the original Totem. There was no mistaking the owner of that vehicle, dressed as she was in darkest black from her Spanish-style riding hat to her mambaskin boots: Delores (with an “e") del Ruby.
It was that same Delores who stomped away upon Sissy's approach, calling back coldly over her shoulder, “The feminine hygiene business takes women for fifty million dollars a year.”
Sissy was stunned by the hostile reference to her Yoni Yum/Dew Girl activities. As if it were a baby adder from the peyote wagon's façade, her lower lip was seized by tiny spasms. She was accustomed to having her thumbs, and the use to which she put them, ridiculed, but her modest modeling career had been the single thing about her life that people had deemed worthy.
“Don't pay any attention to Delores,” said Kym. “She's got a sharp stick up her ass.”
“Yes,” agreed Debbie. “I'll sure be glad when she has her Third Vision.” Debbie's brow made viperine movements of its own. “On second thought, maybe I won't be glad at all.”
The cowgirls half-laughed, half-grumbled. They seemed embarrassed by Delores's rudeness, yet there was plenty of reason, considering the previous day's behavior in the sexual reconditioning class, for Sissy to believe they shared their forewoman's scorn for the industry she represented. Perhaps some re-evaluation was in order. For the moment, however, there was commotion on that ridge that to one sixteenth of her was supposed to be sacred.
“Uh, what's happening up there?” asked Sissy, hoping that her voice did not tremble.
Kym answered. “Oh, it's another bunch of salvation-seekers trying to see the Chink. He's chasing them away, as usual. What a farce.”
“Shit,” swore Big Red. “It's Debbie's fault. Debbie wrote all her friends and told 'em there was this big boohoo livin' up yonder, and the word just spread like hot butter. So's now they come from as far away as Frisco expectin' that old fart to tell 'em what's what. Only he don't ever tell nobody nothin'.”
“He tells Jellybean a lot,” corrected Debbie.
“Maybe he does and maybe he don't,” countered Big Red. “I 'spect Jelly's just humoring him to keep him from causing us any trouble—and he's doing the same with her. Well, there they go! Look at your pilgrims hightailin' it, Deb. Be gettin' too cold for salvation pretty soon; maybe the old geek will get a few months' peace. Not that he deserves it.”
Sissy wondered why Debbie thought the Chink to be some kind of grand boohoo to begin with. She asked about it.
“That's a good question,” said Debbie, who was approximately as darling as Bonanza Jellybean, although, as were her companions, more conventionally attired. “That's a good question. You know, Sissy, every sage or holy man or spiritual leader or whatever you choose to call them does not go around preaching, writing books, gathering disciples or holding rallies in the Houston Astrodome. Some remain almost invisible among us. Swami Vivekananda once said that Buddha and Christ were second-rate heroes. He said the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. They put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools or systems in their name. They never create any stir but just melt down into love . . .”
“Love!” interrupted Big Red. “Grease is more like it.”
Debbie smiled patiently. “Vivekananda warned that the statesmen and generals and tycoons who seem so big to us are really low-level figures. He said, 'The highest men are calm, silent and unknown.' Isn't that beautiful? The true masters seldom reveal themselves, except in the vibrations they leave behind, and upon which the lesser gurus build their doctrines.
But there are ways to recognize them. The Chink, as he is called, seems a difficult person—he refuses to even snigger in my direction—but in his silence and mysterious manners he gives signs of . . .”
“Yeah, if you can call shakin' his dick a sign,” interjected Big Red.
“. . . signs of high wisdom,” Debbie continued. “It was wrong of me to write my former sisters and brothers in the League of the Acid Atom Avatar about him, even though many of them are desperate for illumination, I see that now. But I'm not wrong in my estimation of him, of that I'm sure.” She paused, rubbing her ringed fingers along the curves of a carved coral snake. “I've been meaning to ask you, Sissy: I understand that you've done more traveling than just about anybody. In your constant moving among the peoples, didn't you ever come across a person whose wisdom stood out from the others, who seemed to have knowledge about the living of life that the rest of us lack?”
The question was put seriously, so Sissy gave it thought. Oddly enough, she hadn't really interacted with a great many people, nor even observed many carefully. She had collected rides, not drivers. And as for pedestrians . . . shadows in the memory of a streak. However, there was that time in Mexico, not far south of the border. Sissy had been hitchhiking down a road so dusty it could have strangled a camel. At one point the road passed the home workshop of a cabinetmaker. Fifteen or twenty pieces of newly carpentered furniture were lined up in the heat alongside the road. A man of indeterminate age was varnishing them. From a two-gallon can, the Mexican was carefully applying varnish with a brush. Whenever a car or truck went by, which was fairly frequently, thick clouds of dust roiled up, settling like Lawrence of Arabia's memories upon the sticky furniture. But the Mexican went on with his work, smiling, singing to himself and paying no more attention to the dust than if it were a radio broadcast in a foreign language. So impressed had been Sissy that she nearly stopped to talk to the man; he let loose elaborate bright balloons in her heart. In the end, though, she had kept on hitching—subsequently thinking of the varnisher only in times of stress, frustration and self-doubt.