When they had retreated about thirty yards, the cowgirls stopped. With astonishing rapidity, they unbuckled, unbuttoned and unzipped—and stepped out of their jeans and underpants. Then, nude from the waist down, thatched pubises thrust forward, up front and leading the way, they began to advance. The Countess's grin went down his throat like bathwater down a drain.
“Better reach for your spray cans!” taunted Gloria.
“Not one of these pussies has been washed in a week!” yelled Jellybean.
Rather pale now, his nose twitching, the Countess dropped the caviar canapé he'd been holding. A prairie ant helped itself to the spoils, the first ant in the history of the Dakotas to make off with a gobule of Iranian caviar. He or she'll go down in the Ant Hall of Fame.
On came the cowpokes, while behind them, in rows, fifteen separate little piles of jeans and panties bowed low to the ground, like a pilgrimage of rag Muslims prostrating themselves to the Mecca of duds. On came the cowpokes, pelvises pumping, laying down what the trembling Countess believed to be a devastating barrage of musk.
Lost in her own hysteria, Miss Adrian charged. A barbecue fork she hurled drew blood from Heather's eyebrow. Quick as a frog's tongue, Delores's whip cracked. Its lash curled around the ranch manager's ankles, pulling her feet from under her. She hit the sod in a jangle of jewelry and an explusion of breath. Then the rampage began.
A Molotov cocktail said good-by to Big Red, hello to the sexual reconditioning building. Within minutes, the structure was blazing. Other cowgirls, bare asses flashing, stormed the wing of the main house where the beauty parlor and exercise rooms were located. Sounds of glass breaking and wood splintering echoed through the house. The air was singed with cries of “Wahoo,” “Yippee,” “Let 'er buck” and “The vagina is a self-cleaning organ.”
Sissy hadn't a clue what to do. Her darling Jellybean had obviously forgotten her. The Countess would be furious with her for failing to warn him of the impending revolt. Julian would not be pleased, either. And for all she knew, she might be in physical peril. Delores and her pals did identify her with the Countess's business. The sauna was burning now and the ranch was swirled in smoke.
Acting on orders from that very large portion of the brain that is completely uninterested in anything but survival, Sissy fled the house by the way she had entered. Crossing the croquet court, passing the pool, she ran to the base of Siwash Ridge and then southward along the mountain's foot. Eventually she came to a place where the juniper bushes were broken to reveal a crude path beginning a steep ascent. Because the butte promised both protection and a view of the proceedings, Sissy elected to climb.
She shouldered her way through low, silvery boughs. The trail was acting funny. It would switch back where there was no reason for it to switch or it would head straight for the edge of the cliff, only to turn aside at the last possible inch and bob up and down as if it were laughing. It seemed to have a mind of its own. A deranged mind, at that.
Sissy walked lightly but firmly, as if she were trying to calm the trail down, as if she were giving it therapy. It did not respond.
Sweating, panting, startled by rabbits and magpies, she accepted the first opportunity—approximately halfway up the ridge and twenty minutes' climb—to rest on a flat rock, from which she might look down upon the Rubber Rose. The ranch was farther away than even the deceptions of the trail had led her to imagine.
The whoopjamboreehoo was still raging. Noise and smoke. The main house had been spared the torch, but several of the outbuildings were in ashes. She thought she could detect cowgirls attempting to quiet horses that had panicked in the corrals. She did see Miss Adrian's Cadillac roar out of the drive, but she had no way of telling what passengers it bore. Somewhat later, the cinematographers' rented convertible and their equipment van also drove away. Had the filmmakers been evicted or had others commandeered their vehicles? Sissy sat and wondered. She also wondered if and when she should return to the ranch. The sun was already kneeling on the doorsill of the West, and as night approached she could feel cold scratchings on her flesh.
After a while she felt something else. Eyes, she felt. Eyes watching her. Not little pink rabbit eyes or jumpy bright bird eyes. Big carnivorous eyes. A wildcat or wolf, for sure. Again, that vast battery of efficient brainpower, insensitive to beauty, romance, fun or freedom; suspicious and careful, as conventional as eggs-for-breakfast, as cheerless as a banker's socks; that stiff-collared DNA fogy who happens to be the major stockholder in human consciousness, issued orders. Obeying, for no commands are as difficult as these to disobey, Sissy picked up a stone and turned around slowly.
“Ha ha ho ho and hee hee,” snickered the thing that was watching her. It stood ten yards away. It was, of course, the Chink.
The Chink's problem was that he looked like the Little Man who had the Big Answers. Flowing white hair and a dirty bathrobe, weathered face and handmade sandals, teeth that would make an accordion jealous, eyes that twinkled like bicycle lights in a mist. He was short but muscular, aged but handsome and O the smoky aroma of his immortal beard! He looked as if he had stolen down from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, by way of a Yokohama opium parlor. He looked as if he could talk with animals, discussing with them subjects Dr. Dolittle wouldn't comprehend. He looked as if he had rolled out of a Zen scroll, as if he said “presto” a lot, knew the meaning of lightning and the origin of dreams. He looked as if he drank dew and fucked snakes. He looked like the cape that rustles on the backstairs of Paradise.
They scrutinized one another with mutual fascination. Sissy held her breath and the Chink said, “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”
At last she thought of something to say, but, as if he sensed that she was about to speak and did not want her words in his strangely pointed ears, he whirled, and scampered up the mountainside whence he had come.
“Wait!” she cried.
Warily, he stopped and turned, poised to flee again.
Sissy smiled.
She raised her ripe right thumb.
And jerking it and swooshing it and wringing every flicker from it, as though this were its farewell performance and it must please the gods, she hitchhiked the hermit and his mountain.
And got a ride to the clockworks.
Part
IV
I am not of your race. I belong to the Mongol clan which brought to the world a monstrous truth: the authenticity of life and the knowledge of rhythm . . . You do well to hem me in with the hundred thousand bayonets of Western enlightenment, for woe unto you if I leave the dark of my cave and set about in earnest to chase off your clamorings.
—Blaise Cendrars
52.
FOR CHRISTMAS THAT YEAR, Julian gave Sissy a miniature Tyrolean village. The craftsmanship was remarkable.
There was a tiny cathedral whose stained-glass windows made fruit salad of sunlight. There was a plaza and ein Biergarten. The Biergarten got quite noisy on Saturday nights. There was a bakery that smelled always of hot bread and strudel. There was a town hall and a police station, with cutaway sections that revealed standard amounts of red tape and corruption. There were little Tyroleans in leather britches, intricately stitched, and, beneath the britches, genitalia of equally fine workmanship. There were ski shops and many other interesting things, including an orphanage. The orphanage was designed to catch fire and burn down every Christmas Eve. Orphans would dash into the snow with their nightgowns blazing. Terrible. Around the second week of January, a fire inspector would come and poke through the ruins, muttering, “If they had only listened to me, those children would be alive today.”
It was a fascinating gift and not inexpensive, but Sissy might have known there was a catch to it.
Julian couldn't keep to himself very long the information that the village had been made by a young man who had had both arms amputated after a tricycle accident at age three. He had made the village with his toes. Moreover, the fellow was in trade school, studying to be a pastry cook. In another year, he
would be decorating cakes.
Naturally, this was supposed to be inspirational to Sissy.
Julian even arranged for Sissy to meet the student chef, whose name was Norman. He left the disabled pair alone in a coffee shop, where they might speak heart to heart for half an hour. When Julian returned, he found that Sissy had talked Norman into carving a Tyrolean with enlarged thumbs to hitchhike up and down the streets of her village.
53.
THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS were mellow and cozy for the Gitches, after a rather tempestuous autumn.
Sissy had returned to New York on October 8, to face an angry, anxious husband and an incredulous Countess. Where had she been; why hadn't she telephoned; had she aided and abetted the Rubber Rose coup d'état and so forth. She was Perry Masoned from pillar to post, and Franz Krafkaed, too. Only when she threatened to leave again did the interviews finally cease.
For the Countess's part, his attitude toward the revolt on his ranch was ambivalent. One day he would curse the cowgirls as the most disgusting cat pack of female filth to ever gag a decent nostril, and the next day he would reiterate how much he admired women who could make their way without men and would wish them luck. He'd lost interest in the ranch, he said. Now that he had friends in the White House, the taxes the Rubber Rose saved him were a drop in the bucket; he could save more with a single phone call.
“That ranch is anal excruciation,” the Countess complained, his dentures working over his ivory cigarette holder like a chiropractor realigning the spine of a Chihuahua. “When the market improves, I'm going to sell it. Then we'll watch how the new owners handle those little primitives. Say, are you certain the old fleabag who lives on the butte had nothing to do with all this?”
The Countess was never quite satisfied with Sissy's explanations, but he grew quickly bored with making an issue of it. He scrapped his plans for a whooping crane TV commercial and threw himself into new projects.
Julian, on the other hand, had to be forced to muzzle his interrogations and even then his soft brown eyes narrowed harshly at the most innocent and irrelevant references to Sissy's Rubber Rose assignment. He turned off the radio once when the deejay announced a song by Dakota Staton.
Actually, Sissy would have appreciated someone with whom to talk about Jellybean and the Chink—but there was no one she felt she could turn to. Julian, certainly, would not have been a good listener. As it was, he spent a great deal of time, even at his easel, wondering about the changes that had come over his wife, wondering about their origin, whether they were for better or worse. Before her trip West, Sissy had been an ardent lover but a reluctant student. Upon her return, however, she exhibited wolfish intellectual appetites for Julian's discourses upon history, philosophy, politics and the arts, but her responses between the sheets seemed no more than perfunctory. Had the Yale man gained a brain and lost a vagina? And was the Indian happy about it?
As mentioned, the cheer of Christmas brought an end to their discord. One day, while shopping in East Village boutiques, Sissy snapped out of the stupor she'd been in for weeks. Between second and third fingers, she held a sprig of mistletoe over Julian's head and kissed him right on the street. She hummed a carol on the way home. Through the holidays, she was gay and bright, with only an occasional far-away look in her eyes.
Then, on December 31, a few hours before the Gitches were to join the Barths for New Year's Eve at Kenny's Castaways, the news broke that several hospitals in both America and Denmark had been privately following a policy of letting deformed babies die. On the CBS Evening News, one doctor was heard to say, “If a baby is too deformed to be loved, then its life is going to be hell. Death is mercy for the unlovable.” The disclosure slammed Sissy into a dungeon of depression, from which she did not begin to emerge until sometime in February, when she came across by chance an item in the Times.
MANILA, Philippines (AP)—A Manila newspaper reported yesterday the birth of a boy with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.
"This will bring good luck to the family," said the infant's elated mother.
54.
ALTERNATELY SKIPPING AND STAGGERING, an overwhelmed Sissy had come down the Siwash Trail after three days at the clockworks. She found a work party of cowgirls, headed by Delores, removing hair dryers and Exercycles from the damaged wing of the main house while a second party, led by Big Red, was busily renovating the old ranch privy. Bonanza Jellybean was nowhere to be seen. Kym disclosed that Jelly and Debbie had hauled a couple of sacks of brown rice out to Siwash Lake in the chuck wagon. They were going to feed the whoopers, who were there now in full strength, and see if the birds couldn't be enticed to extend their usual stay on the ranch.
The cinematographers were no longer at the pond. They had gone off to the Pacific Northwest to shoot a new Walt Disney family feature, The Living Mud Puddle. They would be spending a lot of time poking their wide-angle lenses under wet rocks.
Sissy debated waiting for the boss cowgirl's return. She packed slowly, but when the rucksack had been snapped shut there was still no Jellybean. Kym suggested that maybe Jelly and Debbie had stopped to “roll around.” That settled it. Sissy shouldered her rucksack and trudged away. She had walked no more than three miles when the goat-chawed Cadillac limousine—which, as it turned out, was registered to the Rubber Rose—pulled up alongside her. Kym leaned out the driver's window. “Well,” she called. “Aren't you gonna hitchhike me?”
Kym, who had defied Delores in order to give Sissy a ride, dropped her off at the main highway. She hugged her. “You're always welcome,” she said. Over the cowgirl's shoulder miles of wheatgrass shimmered like the brushed hairs of a gopi. Violet hills and burnt umber buttes rested in their still American places like novels on Zane Grey's bookshelf. The sun, which in those parts appears as a half-breed—its father a prairie fire and its mother a wolf bite—shampooed Siwash Ridge in blood, so that it resembled the freshly scalped head of a trapper. This was the West. Dakota.
Back in Manhattan . . . Sissy gazing over the primordial rim . . . of mixing bowls . . . dishpans . . . brandy snifters. Sissy listening to the lope of Tenth Street traffic. Sissy staring down the poodle. Sissy, the next time Marie made a pass at her, surprising them both by taking the offensive, and afterward, while getting dressed, feeling that it had been a mistake and swearing off women forever. Sissy pumping Julian for ideas, facts, opinions—then sometimes interrupting his lectures to snigger “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Sissy painting her nails so that they were a blizzard of cherry coughdrops when she hitched from room to room. Sissy introspective, Sissy brooding, Sissy calm as ever except that now her lifelong serenity seemed thin and brittle and she gave people the disquieting impression that at any moment she might lunge away in an unexpected direction.
Julian refused to give up on her. “She is immature and self-indulgent,” he explained. “Those traits can be overcome.” It was the Mohawk's belief that his wife had been born into an ordinary family in the ordinary way, and had not some gene broken down under pressure, some chromosome slipped and fallen on its ass, she might have become a woman like any other. “She's lovely and intelligent. She needs only to be taught to overcome her affliction instead of reveling in it.”
“Quite probably you are correct,” agreed Dr. Goldman. “As you know, some social and behavioral deviants develop subcultures that, like the ethnic and racial ghettos, constitute havens where the individuals can live openly and with mutual support and insist that they are just as good as anyone else. Social deviates such as homosexuals and drug addicts may congregate in enclaves or live in small communities and take the line that they are not only as good as, but actually better than, 'straights,' and that the lives they lead are superior to those led by the majority. The socially stigmatized individual, by entering a subculture, accepts his alienation from the larger society, and by identifying himself with like souls claims that he is a full-fledged 'normal' or even a superior human being and that it is the others who are lacking. This type
of adjustment is much more available to ethnic minorities, such as Jews, Amish or Black Panthers, and to stigmatized social deviants, such as hippies, drug addicts and homosexuals, than it is to the blind, the deaf and the orthopedically handicapped. So your wife may have chosen to become a subculture of one, so to speak.
“You say that she frequently makes a sincere effort to function as a normal woman in a normal household; well, every nonconformist secretly believes that he or she could live a straight life if only they so chose, and no doubt your wife yearns to prove that, within her dextrous limitations, she can adapt at will. Yet, as you say, so long as she indulges her handicap and the fantasy life she has constructed around it, she is not likely to succeed.
“At this juncture, however, I see no need in forcing her to visit the clinic against her will.”
“No, no, I wouldn't wish that,” said Julian.
But that evening when he returned home and saw what Sissy had done, he telephoned Dr. Goldman:
“I'm bringing her in,” he wheezed.
55.
"THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF CRAZY PEOPLE," Dr. Goldman said. He said this privately, to close friends, and with no intention of being quoted. “There are those whose primitive instincts, sexual and aggressive, have been misdirected, blunted, confused or shattered at an early age by environmental and/or biological factors beyond their control. Not many of these people can completely and permanently regain that balance we call 'sanity,' but they can be made to confront the source of their damage, to compensate for it, to reduce their disadvantageous substitutions and to adjust to the degree that they can meet most social requirements without painful difficulty. My satisfaction in life is in assisting these people in their adjustments.
“But there are other people, people who choose to be crazy in order to cope with what they regard as a crazy world. They have adopted craziness as a lifestyle. I've found that there is nothing I can do for these people because the only way you can get them to give up their craziness is to convince them that the world is actually sane. I must confess that I have found such a conviction almost impossible to support.”