Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (6 page)

“Well, I couldn't keep my big mouth shut. I told the kids at school about it and they teased her pretty hard.

“That wasn't the worst time, though. The worst time was when I gave a costume party and I invited Sissy, partly because I felt sorry for her but also because she was, I don't know how to put it into words, she fascinated me, in a sense. At any rate, Bill—he's my husband now, he's a chemist at the Philip Morris plant, you oughta talk with him—Bill made himself a huge pair of thumbs outta paper and chicken wire and that was his costume. He didn't really mean to be cruel, but you know how young folks are. Thoughtless.”

She sighed. She milked another half-pint from her hair. Then, as had the coffee before her, she perked.

“Goodness, it's nearly two. I've gotta start getting my face on. Can you excuse me? Young Willie has to be at the doctor's at three. He's gotta have a wart burned off today.”

Whereupon the ten-year-old boy who had been loitering on the edges of the interview glomming crackers by the dozen presented his unshod foot—washed, thank God, in recent times—and sure enough, there was a wart atop it the size of a burr. The interviewer wondered why Mrs. Seward simply didn't spray the wart until it tasted like a chocolate chip cookie and let Willie eat it off.

The interviewer didn't tell Mrs. Seward that.

There was something else the interviewer didn't tell Mrs. Seward.

He didn't tell her that the next time persons adorned themselves with fraudulent thumbs in imitation of Sissy Hankshaw, it would be an act of homage.

Mrs. Seward would have thought it ridiculous, an homage of tree-bark thumbs waving impertinently in the face of the twentieth century like a forest of prehistoric diplomas that expect no handshake in return. As a matter of fact, it
was
a bit ridiculous. But because it was ridiculous, we know it must be true.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (VENUSIAN)

On Venus, the atmosphere is so thick that light rays bend as if made of foam rubber. The bending of light is so extraordinary that it causes the horizon to tilt upward. Thus, if one were standing on Venus one could see the opposite side of the planet by looking directly overhead.

Perhaps it is best that we on Earth resist the temptation to thicken our atmosphere. Maybe we should give second considerations to those leaders who insist we learn to think of smog as our friend.

Imagine that you are a cowgirl, trotting your pony in the grassy hills of the Dakotas. Suddenly you hear a wild trumpeting cry. You rear back in the saddle and look aloft—expecting to see a flight of whooping cranes, dancing in midair to their own loud music. Instead, you gaze upon a bugler blowing reveille on the other side of the world. The Chinese army is bivouacked all over the sky.

13.

ONE JUNE,
Richmond, Virginia, woke up with its brakes on and kept them on all summer. That was okay; it was the Eisenhower Years and nobody was going anywhere. Not even Sissy. That is to say, she wasn't going far. Up and down Monument Avenue, perhaps; hitching up and down that broad boulevard so dotted with enshrined cannons and heroic statuary that it is known throughout the geography of the dead as a banana belt for snuffed generals.

The old Capital of the Confederacy marked time in the heat. Its boots kicked up a little tobacco dust, a little wisteria pollen, and that was it. Each morning, including Sundays, the sun rose with a golf tee in its mouth. Its rays were reflected, separately but equally, by West End bird baths, South Side beer cans, ghetto razors. (In those days Richmond was convoluted like the folds of the brain, as if, like the brain, it was attempting to prevent itself from knowing itself.)

In the evenings, light from an ever-increasing number of television sets inflicted a misleading frostiness on the air. It has been said that true albinos produce light of a similar luminescence when they move their bowels.

Middays, the city felt like the inside of a napalmed watermelon.

Whenever possible, men, women, children and pets kept to the shade, talked little, stirred less, watched the blades of fans go 'round as is the nature of fan business. Only Sissy Hankshaw voluntarily frequented those places where tar was sticky, where fried gravel sparkled, where weeds wilted, where asphalt crumbled (the Devil's leftover birthday cake), where worn concrete translated into Braille long bitter arguments between the organic and inorganic levels of life. (If you have ever licked nickel or kissed steel, you know the arguments.)

Some say excessive sunshine softens the brain (repulsively soft already) and maybe that's what made her do it. Maybe it was the yellow gloves of hydrogen boxing her ears; maybe solar radiation caused her atoms to whirl a trifle coocoo. On the other hand, her action may have been merely an indication of the scope of her ambition, and while remarkable, should hardly be considered any more strange than little Mozart's impulse, at age nine, to compose a symphony.

In any case, and whichever the ever, upon a sweaty but otherwise nondescript afternoon in early August 1960, an afternoon squeezed out of Mickey's mousy snout, an afternoon carved from mashed potatoes and lye, an afternoon scraped out of the dog dish of meteorology, an afternoon that could lull a monster to sleep, an afternoon that normally might have produced nothing more significant than diaper rash, Sissy Hankshaw stepped from a busted-jaw curbstone on Hull Street in South Richmond and attempted to hitchhike an ambulance. As a matter of fact, she tried to flag it down twice—coming and going.

Squalling, its red lamps flashing as if in frenetic, amateurish imitation of that summer's quietly professional sun, the ambulance was on an errand of mercy. Naturally, it did not stop. Had she expected it to? Would she have boarded it, joined its bleeding or gasping cargo if it had? Had she successfully hitchhiked an ambulance, would she next have tried a hearse?

Conjecture. The meat wagon rolled on, and Sissy, unlike young Mozart, was rewarded by not so much as a lump of sugar for her experiment. However, the ambulance crew had not failed to notice her hailings. Before Sissy had gotten many blocks away, she was, for the first time in her career, arrested.

Her appearance at the station house created a minor stir. On the one hand, the girl seemed pathetic; on the other, she was Buddha belly serene, and to the cop mentality, serenity smacks of disrespect. She was underage, her crime difficult to classify, the procedure uncertain. A police reporter from the
News Leader
became the first journalist to be intrigued by her; he telephoned his city editor to send over a photographer. File clerks were sneaking around corners to get a glimpse of her; other prisoners were making remarks. Finally, the desk sergeant lectured her against interfering with emergency vehicles and had a policewoman hustle her home.

The photographer arrived too late to get a picture and the reporter was peeved, but for the others involved, a hasty release was ideal: the police got her out of their crew cuts; Sissy got back to work. Early that humid evening, as a roaring warehouse blaze sent the makings of a billion Pall Malls up in premature smoke, she was arrested again—for trying to flag down a fire engine.

This time she was booked and held for twenty-four hours at the juvenile detention center, although the authorities once more found it expedient to set her free. Not the least of the reasons for her release was the frustration she caused the fingerprinter.

14.

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA,
has been called a “depression-proof” city. That is because its economy has one leg in life insurance and the other in tobacco.

During times of economic bellyache, tobacco sales climb even as other sales tumble. Perhaps the uncertainty of finances makes people nervous; the nervousness causes them to smoke more. Perhaps a cigarette gives an unemployed man something to do with his hands. Maybe a pipe in his mouth helps a man forget that he hasn't lately chewed steak.

In times of depression, policy-holders somehow manage to keep up their life insurance premiums. Life insurance could be the only investment they can afford to maintain. Perhaps they insist on dignity in death since they never had it in life. Or is it that the demise of one of its insured members is the only chance a family has of getting flush?

Each autumn for many years Richmond has celebrated its depression-proof economy. The celebration is called the Tobacco Festival. (Somehow “Life Insurance Festival” didn't set any leather to tapping.)

Sissy Hankshaw liked to watch the Tobacco Festival parades. From a Broad Street curb, where she would secure an early position, it was her habit, once her courage climbed, to try to hitch the open convertibles in which the various Tobacco Princesses rode. The drivers, Jaycees one and all, never noticed her; they kept their gaze straight ahead for the safety that was in it—tobacco gods would cough lightning should a Jaycee drive up the hindquarters of a Marlboro Filters float—but the waving Princesses, projecting eyebeam and toothlight into the multitudes, ever on the alert for kinfolk, boy friends, photographers and talent scouts, the Princesses sometimes would catch sight of a pleading pod, and for a crowd-puzzling second—Oh the perils of innocence in the service of nicotine!—lose their carefully coached composure. We may wonder what thumbtales—thumbfacts evolving into thumbmyths—those beauties carried home to Danville, Petersburg, South Hill or Winston-Salem when that year's Tobacco Festival had burned down to a butt.

In 1960, the Tobacco Festival parade took place on the night of September 23. The
Times-Dispatch
reported that there were fewer floats than the previous year ("but they were fancier, and wider by six feet"); even so, it took ninety minutes for the procession to pass a given point. There were twenty-seven Princesses, from whose company Lynne Marie Fuss—Miss Pennsylvania—was the next day named Queen of Tobaccoland. The parade grand marshal was Nick Adams, star of a TV series called “The Rebel.” Adams was a perfect choice since “The Rebel” had a Civil War theme and was sponsored by a leading brand of cigarettes. The actor became piqued at one point in the parade when he discovered, rather abruptly, that his horse's flank was the target of a gang of boys armed with peashooters. There were marching bands, clowns, military formations, drum majorettes, dignitaries, animals, “Indians,” a few temporary cowgirls, even, their reptile-shiny shirts loaded down with embroidery and udders; there were hawkers of souvenirs and the aforementioned gang of evil peashooters. City Manager Edwards estimated attendance at the “noisily lavish extravaganza” at close to two hundred thousand, by far the largest crowd in festival history. Sissy Hankshaw was not among the throng.

Miles across town from the thousands (who, according to the newspaper, “yelled, giggled and clapped"); across the James in South Richmond, where, economic theories to the contrary, it was always depression time; in a dim, dinky house, frescoed with soot and some termites' low relief; before a full-length mirror merciless in its reflection of thumbs—Sissy stood naked. (Never say “stark naked.” “Naked” is a sweet word, but nobody in his right mind likes “stark.")

Sissy was making a decision. It was a point in life that could not hold still for ninety minutes' worth of bright-leaf boosterism to pass it by.

In the seven weeks since her arrest a lot had happened to the girl. First, an assistant commonwealth attorney, encouraged by the police-woman who had driven Sissy home, was pulling strings to have her shipped to reform school. The public defender was using those terms “incorrigible,” “wayward,” “curfew breaker” and “beyond parental control,” that, when applied to a young girl, mean simply “She fucks.” As late as 1960, the large majority of juvenile females behind bars were there because they had acquired an early taste for sexual intercourse (early in the eyes of civilized society, that is, for by nature's calendar the twelfth or thirteenth year is precisely correct).

That our Sissy remained free on that September evening when animated cigarettes pranced in glittery goosesteps down Broad Street was owing in part to the efforts of a social worker who had been assigned to her case. However, if Miss Leonard had helped keep Sissy out of reformatory, insisting that the girl's hitchhiking was a chaste idiosyncrasy that offered no threat to society, she herself had been an upsetting factor. A few weeks back she had nagged Sissy to go to a dance with her, a “special” dance where the girl would “feel comfortable.” At last the limbic telephone had jingled again—
"Ready on your call to Romance. Please deposit sixty-five micrograms of estrogen for the first three minutes"
—and Sissy found herself throbbing into a formal gown that a cousin had worn to a distant prom and with which some moths had recently been dancing cheek to cheek. Repairs to the gown had caused Sissy and Miss Leonard to arrive late at the community hall where the soirée was in progress. When Sissy read the poster that said
GOODWILL INDUSTRIES BALL
, she began to suspect that they should not have arrived at all. Once inside, she was sure of it. The dance floor glistened with drool as over it there limped, staggered, slid and dragged the crab toes and chicken heels of a score or more splayed, spindly and rickety organisms; while in the red glow of homemade Chinese lanterns cleft palates, harelips, slack jaws, tics, twitches, frothings, popped eyes, dripping nostrils and skull points bobbed at various tempos, inspired by a Guy Lombardo record and the kinetic examples of their partners in the dance. When Sissy froze in alarm, Miss Leonard lectured her. “Listen, honey, I realize how it is with you people.” She smiled knowingly at the remarkable creatures who were either shuffling vacantly or flying apart at every joint to the “sweetest music this side of heaven.” “I'm aware of how it is in here. The polios can't stand the cerebral palsies, the cerebral palsies snub the birth defects and all three hate the retardeds. I'm aware of that, but you've got to overcome it; the handicapped have got to stick together.” She was gently pushing Sissy toward the stag line, where the chair-pilots were spinning their wheels, when the girl, for the first time in her life, heard her own voice rise above a wispy phosphorescence. Sissy screamed. “I'M NOT HANDICAPPED, GODDAMN IT!!” The cry turned Guy Lombardo's sugar to lumps. The dancers stopped, some taking longer to wind down than others. They stared at her. A few of them giggled and cackled. Then, one by one, they began to applaud her (some of them clapping with one hand, in flailing and unintentional illustration of Zen Buddhism's most famous proverb). Growing uneasy, almost afraid, the chaperones called for quiet, and Miss Leonard, in an effort to cast a more reasonable light on the scene, began tearing the red paper away from bald bulbs, but the applause flopped to an unsteady end when Sissy ran from the hall. Sissy wore that strange applause like a corsage of swampflowers as she hitchhiked home in her first formal gown, waltzing the waltz of the cars.