Free Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins Page B

so. As the President beamed upon her, the postmaster returned to the counter with a slinky mauve envelope, addressed in puce-colored ink and smelling (even as it snuggled against the postmaster's hand) of the boudoir. “Thank you,” Sissy said, and she carried the missive out onto the sidewalk.
    Hitchhiking into LaConner, Washington, had been like hitchhiking down a mossy old well. Dark, damp and very green. There were puddles in the street and the smell of mushrooms everywhere. The sky was a crock of curdled cloud. Mallards swam within quacking distance of the village post office and, as if in welcome, ten thousand hitchhiking cattails pointed their fat thumbs in the air.
    She could hear foundations decaying as she stood there, and every horizon she tried to focus upon was mysteriously blurred, as if licked by the tip of the tongue of the Totem. Snails advanced upon the woodpiles. Fir trees stood their ground.
    Directly across the slough from the village was the Swinomish reservation. Indeed, several Indians walked past Sissy at the post office, distracting her, for the moment, from the Countess's letter.
    At last, however, she ripped it open and was surprised to read just this:
     
Sissy, Precious Being,
How are you, my extraordinary one? I worry so. Next time you are near Manhattan, do ring me up. There is a man to whom I simply must introduce you. Thrill!!
The Countess
    Refolding the sheet of expensive notepaper, Sissy warmed it for a while between her palms, as if, like the dirty old man who sat on a Girl Scout cookie hoping to hatch a Brownie, it might metamorphose into a work order. When she read it again, alas, it was the same pointless message.
    “You'd think the Countess would know me better than that,” she mused. “I haven't had a paycheck in half a year and all the Countess can come up with is an introduction to a man. Criminey!”
    Just then, on the slough, some Indians tore by in a long canoe (an antique shovel-nose war canoe), chanting furiously in the Skagit language. They were Swinomish bucks, mostly high school ballplayers or young unemployed veterans, practicing for the annual Fourth of July longboat race against the Lummi, Muckleshoot and other Puget Sound tribes. Sissy flung the scented letter into a waste can.
    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