Sissy Hankshawe was born with thumbs the size of sausages, and while her mother fretted about her ability to be normal she decided to be extraordinary. Sissy became the greatest hitchiker to ever live, crisscrossing north america, not to get anywhere in particular, but just to move, constantly, led by her thumbs.
Bonanza Jellybean dreamt of being a cowgirl, but around the time she turned ten, she faced the kind of revelation many young girls are forced to swallow: only little boys get to grow up to be what they dream. Cowgirls aren't real, they only exist in dreams. Jelly sees the fundamental injustice of this fact, and vows to make a place where cowgirls are real, and little girls can grow up to join their ranks if they so wish. She is joined by a band of other misfits and malcontents:
Debbie, who venerates the feminine and sees toxic unchecked male energy as the root of modern problems, but who wishes to reform the world through feminine nurturing actions, rather than masculine aggression.
Delores del Ruby, the reptilian-clad, whip-cracking, peyote-popping forewoman, who thinks the patriarchy must be ousted through whatever force is necessary, and who is working at the ranch awaiting the Third of three peyote induced visions she is receiving from Nature, personified as a serpent.
And eventually Sissy Hankshawe, who hitchhikes her way up to the ranch where Jelly is plotting a mutiny against its owner.
The Rubber Rose Ranch is a weight loss spa owned by a homosexual man who goes by the moniker of the Countess, and who became extravagently wealthy inventing and selling feminine hygiene sprays to cover the "horrifying" and "repulsive" scent of cunts. Sissy has made some money modeling for his products, Yoni Yum and Dew, and it is a modeling job that brings her to the ranch, where ahe meets Jelly and eventually the Chink.
Bear with me, there are a lot of characters. They all matter.
Before she rolls up to the ranch, Sissy meets Julian Glitche, a watercolor artist who has painted some advertisements for the Countess. Julian and Sissy get married very quickly, though Julian doesn't understand or accept Sissy's hitchhiking habit. In fact, it is her restlessness at being trapped in Manhattan, that has her accepting the modeling job at the Rubber Rose, to stretch her legs (and thumbs).
So, Sissy arrives at the ranch by means of her magnificent thumbs, meets Jellybean and the rest of the cowgirls, and before the commercial she's there for gets filmed, the cowgirls launch a mutiny against the general manager of the weight loss program, Miss Adrian, and take over the ranch. Not wanting to get caught in the crossfire, Sissy flees up Siwash Ridge. And there she meets the Chink.
And now I have to try and explain who the Chink is and why the only name the author gives him is a slur. Born on a yam farm on the side of a volcano in Ryukyu, he moves to San Francisco as a child, where his uncle is a landscaper of some skill. He develops an early disdain for authority that gets him labeled as a subversive during world war 2, and sent to a high security concentration camp for Japanese Americans. He manages to escape through a tunnel below the camp, but ends up stranded on the side of the Rockies in winter. He is rescued by the Clock People.
The Clock People are an indigenous group never identified by the government, hidden deep in their tunnels in the wild Dakota hills. They are named after the Clockworks, which exist at the heart of their tunnel and cave territory. The clock people are the ones who name him (inaccurately) as the Chink.
Are you still following? Me neither.
Sissy meets the Chink on Siwash Ridge, where he moved after leaving the Clock People. He talks to her about his philosophy: a world that resists the human urge to label and categorize, name and contain, understand in absolutes. In his view the world is a mess of self contradictions; Human logic and Nature's randomness, which produced humans to have logic. "I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee."
After returning to Julian in New York, Sissy feels increasingly confused by life there. Julian insists on her going to a psychiatric hospital for treatment for her "abnormal" behavior. Dr. Robbins is a promising intern at the hospital who takes her case. I dont know if i have the energy to explain his plotline. I haven't even mentioned the whooping cranes yet. Lets focus on Sissy.
Ok but i do need to explain about the cranes real quick for the ending to make sense. The reason the Countess (remember him?) wanted Sissy to go the the Rubber Rose to make the ad is because the lake at the ranch, Siwash Lake, was a stopover point for the last flock of whooping cranes in North America. He wants them in the background of the ad. The cranes are charismatic and beautiful and rare, a species that defies the demand to adapt or die. Jelly later writes to Sissy in Manhattan that they tried feeding the cranes brown rice, and they stayed a little longer at the lake. she's hoping they can get the flock to stay even longer next year.
Time passes. The girls repair the ranch (which was damaged in the revolution) and start raising goats.
Out in the world, the Secretary of the Interior is informed that the flock of whooping cranes has gone missing between their winter nesting grounds in south texas and their summer home in the remote Canadian wilderness.
The Countess shows up at Julian and Sissy's apartment in a towering snit over the cowgirls still running the ranch without him. He yells at sissy for some reason that is unclear to me, and threatens to expose that the cowgirls are probably responsible for the missing cranes. Sissy slaps him, her thumb striking like a hammer. And keeps slapping him until he is insensible on the floor of their apartment. The Countess is shipped off to the hospital, and the nurse tells Sissy that she should report ot the police station to explain what happened. Julian wants her to go home first and get dressed up: party dress, makeup, fix her hair. To make the police more likely to be on her side. Quietly, Sissy strikes off on her own. Distraught and distracted as she is, for the first time ever, she hitches a ride with the wrong driver. He attempts to assault her, and once again her thumbs leave a man unconscious on the ground.
Feeling betrayed by the thing that has always been her conduit to the world, she flees (by bus, for the first time in her life) back to her birthplace of South Richmond, Virginia, where she seeks out the plastic surgeon her mother consulted all those years ago to see if there was any way to make her thumbs normal. The surgery will be complex, Dr. Dreyfus says. They will have to amputate her thumb, and replace it with her index finger, in order to achieve more normal visual proportions. She agrees. Her right thumb is removed. She tells them to finish the right hand, and not bother with the left.
As she recovers, she hears on the news that the missing flock of cranes has been discovered at a ranch, guarded by a group of heavily armed young women on horseback. Sissy knows what she has to do. She hitches (left thumbed) from south Richmond to the rubber rose, where she is united with Jelly just as a standoff begins between the cowgirls and the Feds. Days of tension finally culminate when Jelly, removing her six-gun from its holster to discard it before meeting with the Assistant Undersecretary of the Interior, gets gunned down on the ridge. A firefight breaks out, and the outlaw who was supplying the cowgirls with guns, Billy West, flies his helicopter loaded with explosives right into the center of the federal agents, sheriff's deputies, etc. gathered to bring the cowgirls to heel.
At the sound of the explosion, the flock of cranes lifts away and sets off on their migration south. But they dont stop in Texas. They continue on, through mexico and panama and Argentina and over to thailand and china, roaming all over the world.
Sissy and Delores fall in love and move into the cave system on Siwash Ridge that once hosted the Chink. and the Chink, injured in the exchange of bullets over Siwash Lake, goes back to the Clock People to live out his days. The Countess deeds the ranch to the cowgirls under the adviement of his new psychiatrist, Dr. Robbins, and becomes an obstetrics nurse. Julian becomes a sad old alcoholic, alone in Manhattan (fuck him, honestly.)
And Dr. Robbins? He sets out for the Dakotas, for Siwash Ridge and Sissy Hankshawe. He leaves us with this book.
What is magic? Visions and signs, connection, the end of the world, religion. Control and logic, knowledge and intuition. Humor and tragedy and ruthlessness and love. Maybe magic is just what we call the threads that draw people together around a specific moment and place. The forces our lives turn around like clockwork. Maybe its picking a car out of highway traffic like a grape off a platter. Maybe its tasting the vinegar of life and knowing its sweet.
