Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Read Online Free PDF Page A

of competing smells (This was outside the tobacco zone), Madame Zoe, in kimono and wig, asked them in. “I am the enlightened Madame Zoe,” she began, stubbing a cigarette in one of those enlightened little ceramic ashtrays that are shaped like bedpans and inscribed BUTTS . The trailer was cluttered, but not one knickknack, chintz curtain or chenille-covered armchair seemed to have come from the Beyond. The floor lamp was powered by electricity, not prana ; the telephone directory was for Richmond, not Atlantis. Even more disappointing to the girl was the absence of any physical reference to Persia, Tibet or Egypt, those centers of arcane knowledge that Sissy was certain she would hitch to someday, although it should be made clear, here and now, that Sissy never really dreamed of hitching to anywhere; it was the act of hitching that formed the substance of her vision. It turned out that there was nothing the least bit exotic in that house trailer except for the smoldering incense, and although in the dead air of the Eisenhower Years in Richmond, Virginia, incense seemed exotic enough, that particular stick of jasmine was in the process of being kicked deaf, blind and dumb by a pot of cauliflower.
    “I am the enlightened Madame Zoe,” she began, her voice an uninterested monotonous drone. “There is nothing about your past, present or future that your hands do not know, and there is nothing about your hands that Madame Zoe does not know. There is no hocus-pocus involved. I am a scientist, not a magician. The hand is the most wonderful instrument ever created, but it cannot act of its own accord; it is the servant of the brain. (Author's note: Well, that's the brain's story, anyhow.) It reflects the kind of brain behind it by the manner and intelligence with which it performs its duties. The hand is the external reservoir of our most acute sensations. Sensations, when repeated frequently, have the capacity to mold and mark. I, Madame Zoe, chiromancer, lifelong student of the moldings and markings of the human hand; I, Madame Zoe, to whom no facet of your character or destiny is not readily revealed, I am prepared to . . .” Then she noticed the thumbs.
    “Jesus fucking Christ!” she gasped (and this in an era when the expressive verb/noun fuck did not, like a barnyard orchid, like a meat bubble, like a saline lollipop, did not bloom, as it does today, upon the lips of every maiden in the land).
    Mrs. Hankshaw was as shocked by the fortuneteller's epithet as the fortuneteller was startled by the girl's digits. The two women turned pale and uncertain, while Sissy recognized with a faint smile that she was in command. She extended her thumbs to the good madame. She extended them as an ailing aborigine might extend his swollen parts to a medical missionary; madame showed no sign of charity. She extended them as a gentleman spider might extend a gift fly to a black widow of fatal charm; madame exhibited no appetite. She extended them as a brash young hero might extend a crucifix to a vampire; madame recoiled rather nicely. At last, Sissy's mama drew a neatly folded five-dollar bill from her change purse and extended it alongside her smiling daughter's extremities. The palmist returned immediately to her senses. She took Sissy by the elbow and led her to sit at a Formica-topped table of undistinguished design.
    Apprehensively, Madame Zoe held Sissy's hands while with closed eyes she appeared to go into trance. Actually, she was trying desperately to remember all that her teachers and books had taught her about thumbs. At one time, as a young woman in Brooklyn, she had been a serious student of chiromancy, but over the years, like those literary critics who are forced to read so many books that they begin to read hurriedly, superficially and with buried resentment, she had become disengaged. And like those same dulled book reviewers, she was most resentful of a subject that did not take her values seriously, that was slow to