Trout Fishing in America

by Richard Brautigan

  He was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seaman who had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen and a home in Marin County. He liked the works of George Orwell, Richard Aldington and Edmund Wilson.

  He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

  The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again. They wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads.

  I went to the bookstore in the afternoons after I got off work, during that terrible year of 1959.

  He had a kitchen in the back of the store and he brewed cups of thick Turkish coffee in a copper pan. I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end. He had a small room above the kitchen.

  It looked down on the bookstore and had Chinese screens in front of it. The room contained a couch, a glass cabinet with Chinese things in it and a table and three chairs. There was a tiny bathroom fastened like a watch fob to the room.

  I was sitting on a stool in the bookstore one afternoon reading a book that was in the shape of a chalice. The book had clear pages like gin, and the first page in the book read:

  Billy

  the Kid

  born

  November 23,

  1859

  in

  New York

  City

  The owner of the bookstore came up to me, and put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Would you like to get laid?” His voice was very kind.

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re wrong,” he said, and then without saying anything else, he went out in front of the bookstore, and stopped a pair of total strangers, a man and a woman. He talked to them for a few moments. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He pointed at me in the bookstore. The woman nodded her head and then the man nodded his head.

  They came into the bookstore.

  I was embarrassed. I could not leave the bookstore because they were entering by the only door, so I decided to go upstairs and go to the toilet. I got up abruptly and walked to the back of the bookstore and went upstairs to the bathroom, and they followed after me.

  I could hear them on the stairs.

  I waited for a long time in the bathroom and they waited an equally long time in the other room. They never spoke. When I came out of the bathroom, the woman was lying naked on the couch, and the man was sitting in a chair with his hat on his lap.

  “Don’t worry about him,” the girl said. “These things make no difference to him. He’s rich. He has 3,859 Rolls Royces.” The girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves.

  “Come to me,” she said. “And come inside me for we are Aquarius and I love you.”

  I looked at the man sitting in the chair. He was not smiling and he did not look sad.

  I took off my shoes and all my clothes. The man did not say a word.

  The girl’s body moved ever so slightly from side to side.

  There was nothing else I could do for my body was like birds sitting on a telephone wire strung out down the world, clouds tossing the wires carefully.

  I laid the girl.

  It was like the eternal 59th second when it becomes a minute and then looks kind of sheepish.

  “Good,” the girl said, and kissed me on the face.

  The man sat there without speaking or moving or sending out any emotion into the room. I guess he was rich and owned 3,859 Rolls Royces.

  Afterwards the girl got dressed and she and the man left. They walked down the stairs and on their way out, I heard him say his first words.

  “Would you like to go to Ernie’s for dinner?”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “It’s a little early to think about dinner.”

  Then I heard the door close and they were gone. I got dressed and went downstairs. The flesh about my body felt soft and relaxed like an experiment in functional background music.

  The owner of the bookstore was sitting at his desk behind the counter. “I’ll tell you what happened up there,” he said, in a beautiful anti-three-legged-crow voice, in an anti-dandelion side of the mountain voice.

  “What?” I said.

  “You fought in the Spanish Civil War. You were a young Communist from Cleveland, Ohio. She was a painter. A New York Jew who was sightseeing in the Spanish Civil War as if it were the Mardi Gras in New Orleans being acted out by Greek statues.

  “She was drawing a picture of a dead anarchist when you met her. She asked you to stand beside the anarchist and act as if you had killed him. You slapped her across the face and said something that would be embarrassing for me to repeat.

  “You both fell very much in love.

  “Once while you were at the front she read Anatomy of Melancholy and did 349 drawings of a lemon.

  “Your love for each other was mostly spiritual. Neither one of you performed like millionaires in bed.

  “When Barcelona fell, you and she flew to England, and then took a ship back to New York. Your love for each other remained in Spain. It was only a war love. You loved only yourselves, loving each other in Spain during the war. On the Atlantic you were different toward each other and became every day more and more like people lost from each other.

  “Every wave on the Atlantic was like a dead seagull dragging its driftwood artillery from horizon to horizon.

  “When the ship bumped up against America, you departed without saying anything and never saw each other again. The last I heard of you, you were still living in Philadelphia.”

  “That’s what you think happened up there?” I said.

  “Partly,” he said. “Yes, that’s part of it.”

  He took out his pipe and filled it with tobacco and lit it.

  “Do you want me to tell you what else happened up there?” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “You crossed the border into Mexico,” he said. “You rode your horse into a small town. The people knew who you were and they were afraid of you. They knew you had killed many men with that gun you wore at your side. The town itself was so small that it didn’t have a priest.

  “When the rurales saw you, they left the town. Tough as they were, they did not want to have anything to do with you. The rurales left.

  “You became the most powerful man in town.

  “You were seduced by a thirteen-year-old girl, and you and she lived together in an adobe hut, and practically all you did was make love.

  “She was slender and had long dark hair. You made love standing, sitting, lying on the dirt floor with pigs and chickens around you. The walls, the floor and even the roof of the hut were coated with your sperm and her come.

  “You slept on the floor at night and used your sperm for a pillow and her come for a blanket.

  “The people in the town were so afraid of you that they could do nothing.

  “After a while she started going around town without any clothes on, and the people of the town said that it was not a good thing, and when you started going around without any clothes, and when both of you begin making love on the back of your horse in the middle of the zocalo, the people of the town became so afraid that theyabandonedthe town. It’s been abandoned ever since.

  “People won’t live there.

  “Neither of you lived to be twenty-one. It was not necessary.

  “See, I do know what happened upstairs,” he said. He smiled at me kindly. His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord.

  I thought about what happened upstairs.

  “You know what I say is the truth,” he said. “For you saw it with your own eyes and traveled it with your own body. Fin
ish the book you were reading before you were interrupted. I’m glad you got laid.”

  Once resumed, the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea.

  The Last Year the Trout Came up Hayman Creek

  Gone now the old fart. Hayman Creek was named for Charles Hayman, a sort of half-assed pioneer in a country that not many wanted to live in because it was poor and ugly and horrible. He built a shack, this was in 1876, on a little creek that drained a worthless hill. After a while the creek was called Hayman Creek.

  Mr. Hayman did not know how to read or write and considered himself better for it. Mr. Hayman did odd jobs for years and years and years and years.

  Your mule’s broke?

  Get Mr. Hayman to fix it.

  Your fences are on fire?

  Get Mr. Hayman to put them out.

  Mr. Hayman lived on a diet of stone-ground wheat and kale. He bought the wheat by the hundred-pound sack and ground it himself with a mortar and pestle. He grew the kale in front of his shack and tended the kale as if it were prize-winning orchids.

  During all the time that was his life, Mr. Hayman never had a cup of coffee, a smoke, a drink or a woman and thought he’d be a fool if he did.

  In the winter a few trout would go up Hayman Creek, but by early summer the creek was almost dry and there were no fish in it.

  Mr. Hayman used to catch a trout or two and eat raw trout with his stone-ground wheat and his kale, and then one day he was so old that he did not feel like working any more, and he looked so old that the children thought he must be evil to live by himself, and they were afraid to go up the creek near his shack.

  It didn’t bother Mr. Hayman. The last thing in the world he had any use for were children. Reading and writing and children were all the same, Mr. Hayman thought, and ground his wheat and tended his kale and caught a trout or two when they were in the creek.

  He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he got the notion that he would die, and did so. The year he died the trout didn’t come up Hayman Creek, and never went up the creek again. With the old man dead, the trout figured it was better to stay where they were.

  The mortar and pestle fell off the shelf and broke.

  The shack rotted away.

  And the weeds grew into the kale.

  Twenty years after Mr. Hayman’s death, some fish and game people were planting trout in the streams around there.

  “Might as well put some here,” one of the men said.

  “Sure,” the other one said.

  They dumped a can full of trout in the creek and no sooner had the trout touched the water, than they turned their white bellies up and floated dead down the creek.

  Trout Death by Port Wine

  It was not an outhouse resting upon the imagination.

  It was reality.

  An eleven-inch rainbow trout was killed. Its life taken forever from the waters of the earth, by giving it a drink of port wine.

  It is against the natural order of death for a trout to die by having a drink of port wine.

  It is all right for a trout to have its neck broken by a fisherman and then to be tossed into the creel or for a trout to die from a fungus that crawls like sugar-colored ants over its body until the trout is in death’s sugarbowl.

  It is all right for a trout to be trapped in a pool that driesupin the late summer or to be caught in the talons of a bird or the claws of an animal.

  Yes, it is even all right for a trout to be killed by pollution, to die in a river of suffocating human excrement.

  There are trout that die of old age and their white beards flow to the sea.

  All these things are in the natural order of death, but for a trout to die from a drink of port wine, that is another thing.

  No mention of it in “The treatyse of fysshynge wyth an angle,” in the Boke of St. Albans, published 1496. No mention of it in Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream, by H. C. Cutcliffe, published in 1910. No mention of it in Truth Is Stranger than Fishin’, by Beatrice Cook, published in 1955. No mention of it in Northern Memoirs, by Richard Franck, published in 1694. No mention of it in I Go A-Fishing, by W.C. Prime, published in 1873. No mention of it in Trout Fishing and Trout Flies, by Jim Quick, published in 1957. No mention of it in Certaine Experiments Concerning Fish and Fruite, by John Taverner, published in 1600. No mention of it in A River Never Sleeps, by Roderick L. Haig Brown, published in 1946. No mention of it in Till Fish Us Do Part, by Beatrice Cook, published in 1949. No mention of it in The Flyfisher & the Trout’sPoint of View, by Col. E. W. Harding, published in 1931. No mention of it in Chalk Stream Studies, by Charles Kingsley, published in 1859. No mention of it in Trout Madness, by Robert Traver, published in 1960.

  No mention of it in Sunshineand the Dry Fly, by J. W. Dunne, published in 1924. No mention of it in Just Fishing, by Ray Bergman, published in 1932. No mention of it in Matching the Hatch, by Ernest G. Schwiebert, Jr., published in 1955. No mention of it in The Art of Trout Fishing on Rapid Streams, by H. C. Cutcliffe, published in 1863. No mention of it in Old Flies in New Dresses, by C.E. Walker, published in 1898. No mention of it in Fisherman Spring, by Roderick L. Haig-Brown, published in 1951. No mention of it in The Determined Angler and the Brook Trout, by Charles Bradford, published in 1916. No mention of it in Women Can Fish, by Chisie Farrington, published in 1951. No mention of it in Tales of the Angler’s El Dorado New Zealand, by Zane Grey, published in 1926. No mention of it in The Flyfisher’s Guide, by G. C. Bainbridge, published in 1816.

  There’s no mention of a trout dying by having a drink of port wine anywhere.

  To describe the Supreme Executioner: We woke up in the morning and it was dark outside. He came kind of smiling into the kitchen and we ate breakfast.

  Fried potatoes and eggs and coffee.

  “Well, you old bastard,” he said. “Pass the salt.”

  The tackle was already in the car, so we just got in and drove away. Beginning at the first light of dawn, we hit the road at the bottom of the mountains, and drove up into the dawn.

  The light behind the trees was like going into a gradual and strange department store.

  “That was a good-looking girl last night,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You did all right.”

  “If the shoe fits . . .” he said.

  Owl Snuff Creek was just a small creek, only a few miles long, but there were some nice trout in it. We got out of the car and walked a quarter of a mile down the mountainside to the creek. I put my tackle together. He pulled a pint of port wine out of his jacket pocket and said, “Wouldn’t you know.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  He took a good snort and then shook his head, side to side, and said, “Do you know what this creek reminds me of?”

  “No,” I said, tying a gray and yellow fly onto my leader.

  “It reminds me of Evangeline’s vagina, a constant dream of my childhood and promoter of my youth.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “Longfellow was the Henry Miller of my childhood,” he said.

  “Good,” I said.

  I cast into a little pool that had a swirl of fir needles going around the edge of it. The fir needles went around and around. It made no sense that they should come from trees. They looked perfectly contented and natural in the pool as if the pool had grown them on watery branches.

  I had a good hit on my third cast, but missed it.

  “Oh, boy,” he said. “I think I’ll watch you fish. The stolen painting is in the house next door.”

  I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department. He didn’t even put his tackle together. He just followed after me, drinking port wine and poking a stick at the world.

  “This is a beautiful creek,” he said. “It reminds me of Evangeline’s hearing aid.”
>
  We ended up at a large pool that was formed by the creek crashing through the children’s toy section. At the beginning of the pool the water was like cream, then it mirrored out and reflected the shadow of a large tree. By this time the sun was up. You could see it coming down the mountain.

  I cast into the cream and let my fly drift down onto along branch of the tree, next to a bird.

  Go-wham!

  I set the hook and the trout started jumping.

  “Giraffe races at Kilimanjaro!” he shouted, and every time the trout jumped, he jumped.

  “Bee races at Mount Everest!” he shouted.

  I didn’t have a net with me so I fought the trout over to the edge of the creek and swung it up onto the shore.

  The trout had a big red stripe down its side.

  It was a good rainbow.

  “What a beauty,” he said.

  He picked it up and it was squirming in his hands.

  “Break its neck,” I said.

  “I have a better idea,” he said. “Before I kill it, let me at least soothe its approach into death. This trout needs a drink.” He took the bottle of port out of his pocket, unscrewed the cap and poured a good slug into the trout’s mouth.

  The trout went into a spasm.

  Its body shook very rapidly like a telescope during an earthquake. The mouth was wide open and chattering almost as if it had human teeth.

  He laid the trout on a white rock, head down, and some of the wine trickled out of its mouth and made a stain on the rock.

  The trout was lying very still now.

  “It died happy,” he said.

  “This is my ode to Alcoholics Anonymous.

  “Look here!”

  The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America

  This is the autopsy of Trout Fishing in America as if Trout Fishing in America had been Lord Byron and had died in Missolonghi, Greece, and afterward never saw the shores of Idaho again, never saw Carrie Creek, Worsewick Hot Springs, Paradise Creek, Salt Creek and Duck Lake again.

  The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America:

  “The body was in excellent state and appeared as one that had died suddenly of asphyxiation. The bony cranial vault was opened and the bones of the cranium were found very hard without any traces of the sutures like the bones of a person 80 years, so much so that one would have said that the cranium was formed by one solitary bone. . . . The meninges were attached to the internal walls of the cranium so firmly that while sawing the bone around the interior to detach the bone from the dura the strength of two robust men was not sufficient. . . . The cerebrum with cerebellum weighed about six medical pounds. The kidneys were very large but healthy and the urinary bladder was relatively small.”