Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (29 page)

Moments prior to an earthquake, certain sensitive persons experience nausea. Animals, such as cattle, are even more sensitive to prequake vibrations, feeling them earlier and more strongly. By far the most quake-sensitive creatures in existence are catfish. Readers, this is scientific fact; the doubtful among you should not hesitate to check it out. Catfish.

Now, there is a species of catfish, hereditarily sightless, that dwells exclusively in subterranean streams. Its Latin name is
Satan eurystomus
, again for the skeptical, but spelunkers know these fish as blindcats. Relatively rare in California, blindcats are quite common in the caverns and caves of the Ozark states and Texas.

The clockworks pool is inhabited by such catfish. Their innate catfish earthquake sensitivity is compounded by the fact that they are tuned in, fin and whisker, to the vibrations of one of the globe's largest and most frenetic fault systems. When a tremor of any Richterian passion is building, the catfish go into a state of shock. They cease feeding, and when they move at all, it is erratically. By constantly monitoring changes in the Earth's magnetic field or the tilt of the Earth's surface or the rate of movement and intensity of stress where faults are slowly creeping, seismologists have correctly predicted a handful of minor tremors, though with no great exactitude. The clockworks catfish, on the other hand, have registered upcoming quakes as far away as Los Angeles (in 1971) and as early as four weeks in advance.

On the earthen walls of the Central Burrow, the Clock People have marked in sequence the dates and intensities of all tremors, mad or mild, that have occurred along the two thousand miles of West Coast faults since 1908. The whole pattern, transcribed from the catfish clock, reveals a rhythmic structure that indicates to the rhythmic minds of the Indians that something emphatic is going to be coming along any week now.

This peek on destruction is Pythagorean only in the sense that with the cataclysmic konking of the last vestige of cultural ritual will come the kind of complete social and psychic freedom that only natural timeless anarchy can offer, the birth of a new people into the Eternity of Joy.

The Clock People regard civilization as an insanely complex set of symbols that obscures natural processes and encumbers free movement. The Earth is alive. She burns inside with the heat of cosmic longing. She longs to be with her husband again. She moans. She turns softly in her sleep. When the symbologies of civilization are destroyed, there will be no more “earthquakes.” Earthquakes are a manifestation of man's consciousness. Without manmade follies, there could not be earthquakes. In the Eternity of Joy, pluralized, deurbanized man, at ease with his gentle technologies, will smile and sigh when the Earth begins to shake. “She is restless tonight,” they will say.

“She dreams of loving.”

“She has the blues.”

62.

IN THE FLIPPERS
of dolphins there are five skeletal fingers.

Once upon a time, dolphins had hands.

Observing the residual fingers that remain in their flippers, it is
possible
to conclude that dolphins had opposable thumbs.

Picture a dolphin holding an ace. Picture a dolphin plucking petals from a daisy: loves me, loves me not. Picture a dolphin, way back when, drawing an astrological chart and discovering that all of its planets were in Pisces. Can you see a dolphin fingering its blowhole? A dolphin at a typewriter writing this book?

Imagine the dolphin, a land animal then (although the Pisces Express stops only at the bottom of the sea), wagging a slick thumb in the lizard-filtered air of prehistory, hitchhiking to Atlantis or Gondwanaland. Would you pick up a hitchhiking dolphin? What if you were driving a Barracuda?

Look, look, look, the author wants to say (to the shortsighted and temporal-minded), the dolphin used to have thumbs! Ponder that when you have a moment. Right now, however, dolphin thumb is eclipsed by Sissy thumb. Flexing in a sooty city garden.

Dr. Robbins, bottoming out the wine, wished to know if the Chink swallowed the Clock People's ideas.

The answer was, and is, no, he never was in total agreement with the Clock People's viewpoints and suppositions, and as the years passed, he agreed with them less instead of more. However, he fell into the hands of the Clock People at a time when most of the world was banging heads together bloodily over vague, meaningless manias such as economic expansion and ethnocentric geopolitics, and his own peoples, the Japanese and the Americans, were among the most fanatical about victory as they prayed to the gods of bullets and taught their babies to walk on the edge of the knife. So, when he met the thirteen families of the Great Burrow and learned the rhymes and reasons of the clockworks, the Chink emitted a long overdue “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Said he, “It is reassuring to see on the planet signs of intelligent life.”

“My sentiments exactly,” mused Dr. Robbins, as he watched the shadows of Sissy's thumbs leaping like dolphins against the garden wall.

63.

AMONG THE CLOCK PEOPLE,
who never had tasted a yam nor seen a whooper, who were unfamiliar with the practice of hitchhiking, who would have been flabbergasted by a can of Yoni Yum and who knew better than to believe in such Fig Newtons of the American imagination as cowgirls, the Chink dwelt for twenty-six years.

For the first eight of those years, he lived virtually as a Clock Person himself, an honorary member of the Family of the Thirteenth Burrow, sharing its food, lodging and women. (Being an anarchistic, or, more precisely, a pluralistic society, some of the Clock People were monogamous, some, perhaps most, practitioners of free love. In a pluralistic society, love quickly shows all of its many smeared and smiling faces, and it should be noted that the term
family
was relevant only to the clockworks ritual, outside which there was uninhibited intermingling. For example, a man from the Family of the Fifth Burrow might impregnate an Eleventh Burrow lady, and the resulting child, once of age, might be assigned to the Family of the Ninth Burrow.)

In 1951, the war now only a glint in the American Legion's shell-popped eye, the Chink moved into a shack that he built some nine or ten miles west of the Great Burrow. The shack was strategically erected at the narrow entrance to the valley, which, with a creek as its racing stripe, totaled out against the base of the tunnel-filled knoll. In the other direction, a couple of miles beyond the shack, was a trail that led to a dirt road that led to a paved highway that led past, eventually, a combination gas station, café and general store. The Chink began to take fortnightly hikes to that store, where he picked up newspapers and magazines, along with other supplies. These he read to those Clock People (all spoke English but few could read it) who were interested; these were mainly the younger ones, the old Indians regarding that “news” that did not have to do with quakes, hurricanes, floods and other geophysical shenanigans as trivia. The belch of civilization, they called it. Maybe the older Indians were right. It was the Eisenhower Years, remember, and the news read as if it had been washed out of a Pentagon desk commander's golf socks.

The Chink also linked the older Indians with the rest of the world, but in a different manner. Throughout the decades, the Clock People had mysteriously maintained periodic contact with certain Indians on the outside. These outside contacts were medicine men or shamans, although exactly what was their relationship to the clockworks ritual and Eternity of Joy legend the Chink was never to ascertain. However, in the mid-fifties, one or more of these outsiders took to showing up at the Sierra store at the precise hours of the Chink's unannounced visits. They'd drink a beer with him and give him a piece or two of seemingly insignificant gossip, which he would feel compelled to pass along once he was back at the Great Burrow. Thus, he functioned as a medium, as the air is the medium for drumbeats, connecting Clock People, young and old, with distant drummers.

He also functioned as an agent of diversion. When hunters, hikers or prospectors entered the area, the Chink used his wiles to guide them away from the vicinity of the Great Burrow. Conversation studded with tips about game, scenic waterfalls or ore deposits was usually enough to divert the intruders, but occasionally a small rock slide or other mishap would have to be arranged. Even so, a few interlopers, especially rangers of the U.S. Forest Service, slipped through the Chink's net. Those who got too close were slain by the Clock People. From 1965 to 1969, seven outsiders took arrows through their breasts and were buried inside the Great Burrow.

These slayings were a source of contention between the Chink and the Clock People, the latter regarding them as the regrettable but necessary price of protection, the former declaring, “There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.”

The Chink tried to impress upon the Clock People that, with the increase in air traffic over the mountains, as well as in the number of outdoorsmen whom civilization was driving into the wilderness, it was only a matter of “time” before their culture was exposed. What would they do then? Obviously, the System would not be gracious enough to leave them alone. “We will hide in the tunnels,” answered some of the middle-aged. “We will defend ourselves to the death,” answered some of the youths. “The movements of the Earth will take care of all that,” answered the elders, smiling enigmatically.

If the killings upset him, the Chink accepted with ease other contradictions in the Clock People's philosophy. When faced with a contradiction, as he was—as we all are—daily if not hourly, it seemed only fair to him to take both sides.

Yet he grew increasingly impatient with the Clock People's notions, and toward the end of his Sierra stay his hickory dickory mouse of mockery ran frequently up their clock.

Now, a number of the young men of the Great Burrow had lost patience, too. Through the Chink's news broadcasts they had learned of mushrooming militancy among American Indians. They learned of Red Power and of reservations whose proud residents were freshly painted—and armed to the teeth. In early spring of 1969 a quartet of bucks slipped away from the Great Burrow, venturing into the strange world beyond the still snowy mountains, to see for themselves. A couple of months later they returned, excited, feathered, beaded, buzzing of revolution. Two comrades threw in with them and they deserted the Clock People to go face the white man on his own terms—and in his own time. The bucks called at the Chink's shack on their way down the mountains. “You're as tired as we are of sitting around waiting for a motherfucking earthquake,” they said in the idiom they had recently adopted. “You're strong and smart and have taught us much. Come with us and join the movement.”

“This movement of yours, does it have slogans?” inquired the Chink.

“Right on!” they cried. And they quoted him some.

“Your movement, does it have a flag?” asked the Chink.

“You bet!” And they described their emblem.

“And does your movement have leaders?”

“Great leaders.”

“Then shove it up your butts,” said the Chink. “I have taught you nothing.” He skipped down to the creek to gather watercress.

A few weeks later he accepted the invitation of an aged Siwash chief who was the principal outside confederate of the Clock People, a degenerated warlock who could turn urine into beer, to be initiated as a shaman, an honor that gave him rights of occupancy in the sacred cave on far-away Siwash Ridge. At once he left for the Dakota hills to construct a clockworks whose ticks might more accurately echo the ticks of the universe, which, as he listened, sounded more and more like “ha ha ho and hee hee.”

64.

WHEN YOU'RE IN THE SADDLE ALL DAY,
you need something to do with your mouth besides sing “Yippee eye oh ki yea.” Usually it's too hot and dry for singing, anyhow. You just end up with a throat full of dust.

However, when you're stuck in the saddle from dawn to dusk, you need something of an oral nature to keep you occupied and calm. That's why so many cowboys chew tobacco or puff roll-yer-owns. That's why it really
is
Marlboro Country.

But cowgirls of the New Age, they aren't much into the tobacco habit. Gloria was mighty attached to the Pall Malls that dit-ditted to her in an endless dotted line from South Richmond, Virginia, and Big Red was prone to accept a chaw. On the whole, though, the gals had a nonpreference for tobacco that was close to contempt, even if they did not agree with Debbie, who predicted, “When things really get too bad on the planet Earth and it starts to fall apart from wars and pollution and earthquakes and so forth, then Higher Beings are going to come in flying saucers and rescue the more evolved souls among us; but they can't take smokers aboard their spaceships because people with nicotine in their systems explode when they enter the seventh dimension.”

At any rate, cowgirls need something to do with their mouths while riding herd, and this is what they do: they stick a butterscotch Life Saver in one cheek and a clove in the other. They seldom suck and never chew, but just concentrate on the mixture of juices that drips onto their tonsils from the Life Saver and the clove, in a steady drip like rainwater running off the candied rooftops of Fairyland.

Now, aside from being calming and occupying, requiring no spitting and no assistance from the hands, a butterscotch Life Saver and a clove give a person the most interesting breath in the world.

It's no wonder the Rubber Rose ladies were always kissing on each other, although what a cowgirl does with her mouth once she's back at the bunkhouse shouldn't really concern us students of Western lore.

When there were thirty or more cowgirls riding for the Rubber Rose, sometimes the wheatgrass and the hills and the whole wide sky itself would start to smell like butterscotch and clove.

Sometimes the Chink would smell it way up on his ridge. Not when he first came to Dakota, of course. Then he could smell only pollen and sagebrush and woodsmoke and his own hairy self. Who was it once said, “A hermit is mysterious to everyone but the hermit.”