Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (42 page)

When the bandages were removed from Bernie Schwartz's proboscis, however, the boy's horrified parents were gaping at what has been called "the most scandalous incident of deliberate malpractice in the recent history of medicine."

Succumbing, maniacally, to his suppressed artistic drives, Dr. Felix Dreyfus, disdaining marble, clay and plaster to work in living flesh, had sculptured upon the face of little Bernie Schwartz the world's first Cubistic nose!

Bernie's new nose had six nostrils, two in front, two on each side, and three bridges, so that in either profile it looked as if you were seeing it frontally. According to the exuberant Dr. Dreyfus, Bernie's nose is "simultaneously viewed from several aspects, all the aspects overlapping, so that what we have is a nose in
totality
, and that totality manages to suggest motion, even when static; it shatters the classical idea of the face in which the nose is fixed and unchanging; it is a nose in a perpetual state of ultimate noseness, yet it is on the very verge of the abstract."

Dr. Dreyfus's enthusiasm may be short-lived. The Virginia Medical Board has suspended his license, and it is reported that the surgeon may be permitted to retire as an alternative to being barred permanently from practice. Bernie's parents, unconvinced by the creator's glowing aesthetic evaluation of his work, are suing Dr. Dreyfus for three million dollars. Moreover, the "masterpiece" is doomed. As soon as medically feasible, a team of plastic surgeons in Washington, D.C., will restore the world's first Cubistic nose to a realistic style that promises to please even devotees of Norman Rockwell. Meanwhile, Bernie Schwartz spends a lot of time indoors.

When Dr. Dreyfus returned, rather sheepishly, to the living room, Sissy rushed to embrace him. She was smiling for the first time in more than twenty-four hours. “Oh, Doctor!” she cried. “You've got to do it. You and nobody else should be allowed to take away my gift.”

91.

"AH THE THUMB,"
mused Dr. Dreyfus, yawning his small eyes so that they might take in the full length and breadth of Sissy's prodigious pucky-wucks. “The thumb, yes. The thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb. One of evolution's most ingenious inventions; a built-in tool sensitive to texture, contour and temperature: an alchemical lever; the secret key to technology; the link between the mind and art; a humanizing device. The marmoset and the lemur are thumbless; none of the New World monkeys has opposable thumbs; the spider monkey's thumbs are absent or reduced to a tiny tubercle; the thumbs of the potto are set at an angle of one hundred eighty degrees to the other digits, making them nonfunctional except as pinchers; the orangutan, which is humanlike to the extent that it is called the 'man of the woods,' has a thumb so tiny in relation to its extremely long curved fingers that its manipulation is only nominal; the thumb of the chimpanzee opposes the bent fingers in a clumsy action, and the gorilla lacks a grip precise enough to hold small objects; the baboon comes close—its thumbs are fully opposable and it has a good precision grip—but have you ever observed the thumb of the baboon, how flat and splay-headed and crudely shaped it is; no, there is but one true thumb on this planet and
homo sapiens
has got it."

Pause.

“And so you are demanding at last the privileges of thumb that nature has perversely denied you?”

“I just want to be normal,” said Sissy. “Give me that old-fashioned normality. It was good enough for Crazy Horse and it's good enough for me.”

“Ah yes,” said Dr. Dreyfus, smiling weakly, like a duck in dishwater, too embarrassed to quack. “Very well, my dear. Here is what we can do.

“Full normality, whatever that may exactly be, is out of the question. But out of the question comes the answer, so to speak. If your thumb bone—actually, two phalanx metacarpal bones—if your thumb bones were of normal size, then we could merely cut away the excess tissue and sew your thumb inside of your chest for a while, for a skin graft, you see. Then you'd have thumbs that were normal in appearance as well as in function. However, as I recall, your thumb bones are enlarged in proportion to the whole. That makes it more complicated. That calls for pollicerization. One thing a surgeon cannot do is reduce volume of bone. Bone can be shortened but not reduced in size. So. In pollicerization, we make a thumb out of your index finger. We shorten the bone of the index finger, alter its angle and move it over. After a time, it becomes a completely acceptable thumb. But your hands, you realize, would still not be quite normal, because they'd have only four digits a piece. Your present thumbs—there certainly is a peculiar glow about them—would, of course, have to be amputated.”

What??? Feel faint. Ooooo, dizzy. Sick to the tummy. A startle of fishes in the seas of the abdomen. A thick black toxin spews from the heart to numb the teeth. Sissy suffers shortness of breath. The author's own fingers tremble on the keys. Amputation. A leaden word. A word with a built-in echo and a built-in ache. A word off Dr. Guillotine's workbench. A lump in God's gravy. Can thumbs understand the word “amputate” the way whooping cranes understand the word “extinct"?

Felix Dreyfus offered the shaken Sissy a glass of sherry. She declined. Probably not a dram of Ripple in the whole West End. In lieu of alcoholic stimulant, then, the good doctor administered the tonic of conspiracy.

“This will be a risky escapade,” he confided, “but I'm old now and can afford to take risks. I'll not run from Nazis ever again. My brother-in-law is a surgeon. Ha! Some surgeon. He couldn't cut the pimento out of a stuffed olive. He ought to have a red and white striped pole outside of his office. He's employed by the Veterans' Administration. Only the government would hire such a boob. Well, as our luck would have it, he's in residence at O'Dwyre VA Hospital over in South Richmond. I'll have him schedule you for surgery. He owes me thousands; he'll do what I say. Then I'll show up to 'assist' with the operations. I'll use an assumed name. Nobody at O'Dwyre will be the wiser. They're understaffed, outmoded, incompetent and corrupt. The follow-up work I can do here at home. Faintly ingenious, yes? Against all rules, but as the painter Delacroix said, 'There are no rules for great souls: rules are only for people who have merely the talent that can be acquired.' But I don't suppose that means much to you.”

92.

ONCE,
a young woman was admitted to a hospital, and no birds sang.

Once, blood was analyzed in a laboratory, and no birds sang.

Once, powerful lamps were turned on in an operating room, and no birds sang.

Once, IV tubes were inserted in veins, and no birds sang.

Once, a young woman was wheeled into surgery, and no birds sang.

Once, an anesthesiologist stuck a needle into a curved and creamy ass, and no birds sang.

Once, an anesthesiologist stuck needles into a long, graceful neck, and no birds sang.

Once, a nurse scrubbed an arm for ten full minutes, and no birds sang.

Once, a body and a table were draped with sheets to create a sterile field, and no birds sang.

Once, a tourniquet was placed on a slender right arm, and no birds sang.

Once, an elastic rubber bandage was applied so tightly it squeezed most of the blood out of an arm, and no birds sang.

Once, a tourniquet was inflated, and not a single ornithological peep was heard.

Once, a surgeon outlined in iodine an incision around the base of a thumb, and still no birds were singing.

Once, pale smooth skin was incised along a premarked line and dissected down to the bone, while silence prevailed in treetop and nest.

Once, arteries and veins were divided and tied, and a nerve was separated and allowed to detract into a wound, without an accompanying warble or whistle or tweet.

Once, a joint was opened, and it wasn't a new roadhouse nor were any of our fine feathered friends chirping there.

Once, a tendons were cut, snapped and allowed to retract like rubber bands, a sound that could not have been mistaken for a meadowlark or a thrush.

Once, a metacarpal bone was fractured with a saw, a task that, due to the unusual size of the particular bone, required such exertion on the part of the surgeon that he could not have heard any birds if they were singing, which they weren't.

Once, a drain was placed in a wound, and not so much as a sparrow opened its mouth.

Once, a woman flesh was sewn shut with four-ought nylon suture, and the beaks of the birds must have been sewn shut, too.

Once, a pressure dressing was applied to a hand, but no amount of pressure could induce the birds to sing.

Once, a tourniquet was deflated, a bloody arm bathed, and a numb young woman rolled to a recovery room, four fingers showing from a bandage and not one of them pointing to the silent skies.

Once, a nurse and two surgeons, their attention directed by an intensifying pinkish glow, turned to stare into a metal pan, where a huge human thumb, disarticulated from the hand it had served (in its fashion), was now flopping about like a trout—no! not flopping aimlessly in breathless panic but, rather, arching and thrusting itself in a calculated and endlessly repeated gesture, the international gesture of the hitchhike, as if, to avoid troubling the world with its great white grief, it was trying to flag a ride On Out of Here.

And no birds sang.

93.

THE SKY
was as tattered as a Gypsy's pajamas. Through knife holes in the flannel overcast, July sunlight spilled, causing Sissy's eyes to blink when she stepped outside the long, dark corridors of O'Dwyre VA Hospital. The air was so humid, she felt orchids growing in her armpits.

Masquerading as the pensioned widow of a Vietnam hero, Sissy had been in the hospital for three full days. On this, the fourth morning, the drain had been removed from her wound, a fresh dressing applied and a discharge granted.

On this morning, also, Dr. Dreyfus had learned that Sissy had spent the fortnight prior to her surgery sleeping on the warped linoleum of a condemned house, the rat-slobbered old Hankshaw residence in South Richmond. Now he was driving her to his own house, where his wife (who turned out to be the short gray woman from the office) was preparing a room for her. She was invited to stay with the Dreyfus family until the work on her hands was completed. Because of the magnitude of the wound left by amputating such large digits, Dr. Dreyfus had decided that four operations would be necessary. The first, just done, would remove her right thumb. The second would remove the left. The object of the third would be the pollicerization of the right index finger; the fourth, the left. They would allow six weeks between each operation. One doesn't get to be normal overnight.

Mrs. Dreyfus didn't approve of her husband's illegal ministrations to Sissy, but, like many native Richmonders, she was gracious to the point of agony. Margaret Dreyfus did her bust-a-gut best to make the convalescent feel at home. Meals were regular, cheerful and good. With air conditioning, showers and pitchers of limeade, Sissy's armpits were defoliated, fruit bats discouraged from hanging from her sex hairs. In the evenings, a portable TV was rolled onto the screened-in veranda, the programming left to Sissy's wishes. During late-night thunderstorms, discreet inquiries were made as to whether the guest was nervous. The latest magazines appeared on her bedside table.

If Sissy didn't feel completely at home, it was because Sissy wasn't completely at home; she wasn't completely anywhere, she wasn't complete. Part of her—oh such a part!—was literally missing. Even though it
felt
as if it were still there, it was gone, gone, gone; gone to her questioning eyes, gone to her fumbling touch, gone from all dimensions except the inexplicable dimension of bioenergy, where its heavy aura pulsated and practiced phantom poses just in case some psychic researcher should start taking Kirlian photographs with a wide-angle lens. Sissy was determined to feel no remorse, but shock showed on her eyeballs like a marmalade glaze.

“Lord!” exclaimed Margaret Dreyfus. “She acts like that big ol' thumb had been her child.”

“No,” corrected her husband. “She acts as if she had been the thumb's child.”

Two weeks after the operation, on the day the stitches were removed, Sissy phoned Marie Barth in Manhattan. She learned that the Countess had survived, although some spots seemed to be missing from his dice. There was a warrant for Sissy's arrest outstanding, but as long as she kept away from New York State, she was safe: The crime was not serious enough for extradition; in fact, in the High Renaissance of crime that New York was now enjoying, Sissy's little assault was considered no more important than, say, the after-hours doodles of one of Botticelli's apprentices. By Marie, Sissy sent word to Julian that she was well and that she would be coming back to him some day, but first she had some changes to go through.

After the call, Sissy felt a bit more perky. Several times she accompanied Margaret Dreyfus on shopping expeditions—to Richmond Kosher Meat Market on West Cary Street and to Weiman's Bakery on North Seventeenth. With Dr. and Mrs. Dreyfus and their son, Max, a law student at Washington and Lee University, she attended movies at the Colonial Theater and the Byrd. There had been few visitors to the Dreyfus home since the Bernie Schwartz scandal, and Sissy found the patio private enough for nude sunbathing. Once, she walked as far as Byrd Park, the weight of orchids and bats dragging her down, and fed the ducks. She returned home saturated, panting, her ears resonant with blessed duck music, and beat Dr. Dreyfus at chess. That night she seemed vaguely joyous.

For the most part, however, Sissy had joined the ranks of the Unhappy Waiters and Killers of Time. Oh God, there are so many of them in our land! Students who can't be happy until they've graduated, servicemen who can't be happy until they're discharged, single folks who can't be happy until they're married, workers who can't be happy until they're retired, adolescents who can't be happy until they're grown, ill people who can't be happy until they're well, failures who can't be happy until they succeed, restless who can't be happy until they get out of town; and, in most cases, vice versa, people waiting, waiting for the world to begin. Sissy knew better than to fall into that dumb trap—certainly the Chink had taught her enough about time so that she needn't ever mark it—but there she was, playing the zombie game, running in place, postponing life until normality was achieved—while simultaneously she mourned the decrease in personal magic that had occurred with the loss of that famous Airstream Trailer of digits, the thumb that had launched a thousand trips.