The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

  “I know,” she said. “He’s good at that.”

  “Any luck?” I said, like a bat.

  I could see that she wasn’t carrying the tire chain, so obviously she hadn’t found it, but I had to say something.

  “It’s here someplace,” she said, glancing with her eyes at the nearby 121,000 square miles, which is the area of New Mexico.

  “Good luck,” I said, ten years ago in the Sixties that have become legend now like the days of King Arthur sitting at the Round Table with the Beatles, and John singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  We drove down the road toward the Seventies, leaving her slowly behind, looking for a tire chain in the snow with her brother waiting patiently beside a blue pickup truck with its Age-of-Aquarius paint job starting to flake.

  White

  Whenever I seriously think about the color white, I think about her, for she is the ultimate definition of white.

  She was at a combination exhibition of paintings and autograph party for a famous Japanese painter-writer. She was very interested in him as he sat at a table autographing copies of his latest book. There was a long line of people waiting for his autograph. She did not get in line but wandered around and around and around the gallery, looking but not looking at his paintings.

  She was very beautiful with an incredible pair of legs that she showed off like an event, which they were. She crowned them with a pair of black, almost shark-like high heel shoes.

  The woman knew how to provoke attention.

  From time to time she walked near the table where the writer was autographing away like some king of machine. He autographed books as if Sony had invented him. He never noticed her.

  She had a way of walking very slowly seven or eight premeditated steps and then turning swiftly on her heel like a shark turning to attack.

  As the hours passed, the line of people gradually evaporated down to just a handful and then she walked dramatically as if a spotlight were on her to the table. She took a copy of his book out of her purse and waited for the people that were in front of her to disappear off the earth. Then it was her turn.

  I can imagine the sound of her heart as she stood there waiting. The writer took the book and signed it without looking up. That was all. She turned very slowly and walked away. She never looked back, going out the door.

  She was wearing a white dress.

  Montana Traffic Spell

  We all have moments in life when we don’t know what to do next. Here is one of them; A friend and I were driving down the Mainstreet of a small town in Montana. It was a cloudy autumn late-afternoon and we came to a green light. It was the only traffic light in town: the shepherd of a sleepy intersection.

  My friend wanted to turn right on the light but he hesitated for no apparent reason except that suddenly he didn’t know what to do next.

  My friend is an experienced driver, so it had nothing to do with his driving ability. He just didn’t know what to do next and I sat there watching him with a great deal of interest, wondering how it was all going to turn out.

  We weren’t moving on the green light and suddenly there was a line of cars building up behind us. I don’t know where they had come from in such a small town but they were now behind us. For some strange reason nobody was making a fuss, not even honking a horn, over us completely stopping the traffic.

  We were just a long line of cars stopping for no reason at a green light. Perhaps, they didn’t know what to do next either.

  We were all in a cloudy Montana approaching-twilight spell, just sitting there in our cars, some of us patiently listening to the radio, others anxious to get home to family and loved ones or just to go someplace by yourself and do something that was your own business, but nothing was happening. We were at a complete standstill.

  I don’t know how long this went on.

  It could have been thirty seconds or a year might have passed taking us in a full circle right back to where we had started from.

  There was no way of knowing.

  We were all helpless.

  We didn’t know what to do next.

  Then a man in the ear right behind us solved the problem. lt was so easy that I don’t know why it wasn’t done before. It changed everything and we made the right turn and all the other cars drove on past us committed now to finish their destinations.

  Nobody knew what to do next until the man behind us rolled his car window down and yelled at the top of his lungs; “MOVE, YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!”

  That took care of it.

  Hangover as Folk Art

  For Jim Harrison

  Yesterday I had a hangover here in Tokyo that was so painful and exhausting that I could only think of it as grotesque folk art. It was being sold by vendors that you don’t want to know about.

  Normally, a real bad hangover bites the dust when the sun goes down. It dies like a snake. This hangover didn’t die at all. It changed into folk art made from my central nervous system, my stomach and the little stretches of imagination I call my brain.

  The folk art took the shapes of badly carved, smelly little dolls, undesirable tainted trinkets constructed from rusty beer cans and coal, paintings of alligator shit on swamp bark, and of course, last but not least, colorful native shirts woven out of the underwear removed from corpses by albino grave robbers who can only rob graves on full moon nights. They work at the most twelve nights a year and the rest of the time it’s unemployment for them. They stay around the house and watch a lot of television. During the commercials they beat their wives.

  In other words: I simply don’t want a day like yesterday again in my life. When the hangover finally ended, the folk art vendors had vanished, taking their strange and dubious wares with them. They also took every feeling in my body with them except for an abstract chalky awareness that I was still breathing.

  Right, Jim?

  Marching in the

  Opposite Direction of a Pizza

  They are like a strange army returning from the front for a brief rest before going back into battle again here in Tokyo. Four of them just came by in uniform which consists of blue pants and red and white striped shirts. They were not wearing their helmets that look like plastic straw hats. Their military discipline is relaxed because they are on what the army calls furlough. They are on furlough from making pizzas. Just a short distance away is a Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. These crack troops are young Japanese men who make pizzas there. They are on break or furlough from a battlefield whose lines, yards won and lost, are measured in pizzas eaten.

  As they walk by, I know one thing for certain in this world and it may be the only thing I do know, they are not going to get a pizza.

  Dogs on the Roof

  I could see the dogs standing on the root from a long distance away. There were two of them; collies (quite small), but as I bicycled toward them they grew larger and larger until eventually they would start barking when I was close enough.

  There was a small polluted creek beside the house and a small tangled woods behind the house. It was a very dense and unfriendly woods, the kind that scratches you and tears your clothes.

  The house itself wasn’t much to look at. It was two stories high and wooden: hard to describe and easy to forget except for the dogs on the roof.

  Often I had to bicycle past that house.

  I don’t know how the dogs got onto the roof but they were there.

  Once they didn’t bark at me and that made me nervous.

  Hard as it is to believe, their barking was easier to take than their silence.

  They just stood there on the roof staring at me as I bicycled past.

  I never once saw the people that lived in the house.

  I hope the dogs didn’t live there alone.

  California Mailman

  Until recently, I’ve never been a very intuitive person and my ESP temperature has always hovered in the low zeroes like 27 below. But all that changed a few months ago when I had a dream that came true. It is t
he first time this ever happened to me. I dreamt that my mail would be very boring and uninteresting in the months to come and that’s the way it’s been since the dream.

  All I get are bills and junkmail and trivia.

  When I see the mailman coming up the walk, my eyelids slowly lower. Sometimes I fall asleep while I am opening an envelope.

  California is ready for anything.

  I wonder if I should start a cult.

  The Cobweb Toy

  I remember five years ago when he first became famous. It was a beautiful toy and he had a lot of fun with it. I enjoyed watching his pleasure. He is a very good writer and deserved the fame.

  Now: He has published a book about the Acid Shadow of Fame that eats at the heart and soul until ambiguity and disarray are as predictable as the time the sun rises and the sun goes down.

  Today the sun came up at 6:13 a.m. and went down at 6:22 p.m.

  It was only five years ago.

  My, how time flies.

  Her Last Known Boyfriend

  a Canadian Airman

  Her last known boyfriend was a Canadian airman who was shot down over Germany in November 1944. Their romance only lasted a week and they never went to bed together. They were going to get married after the war.

  He was twenty-two and she was nineteen.

  They met by accident at a bus stop in San Francisco. He had never talked to a Chinese woman before. She was the only other person waiting for a bus. He was a very cheerful and outward going young man. People instantly liked him.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m from Canada.”

  They wrote every day after he was gone, promising each other the future. They were going to have three children: two boys and a girl.

  The last letter she got was written by an air force chaplain:

  He often spoke of you, etc.

  He asked me to write to you if, etc.

  I know that he would want you to, etc.

  When she finished reading the letter, her life was over and she had joined him in death. She quit college where she was a straight-A student and got a job washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant on Jackson Street. People working at the restaurant thought it very strange and disturbing that a beautiful young woman should be washing dishes for a living.

  There were so many other things that she could have done.

  She was like a ghost in the kitchen.

  Over the years they would try to talk to her about it but she didn’t say anything and they always gave up. Finally, no one cared any more because she was no longer beautiful.

  The only thing that was known about her was that she had once been in love with a Canadian airman.

  She never looks up from the dishes.

  Thirty-four years…

  She scrapes the remains of uneaten food off the plates of people that she never sees. Their eating is the cemetery where she is buried.

  The Butcher

  You can’t cut meat when you’re wearing gloves and nobody wants to buy meat from somebody wearing them either. Gloves and meat do not go hand in hand. That’s why the butcher has cold hands. I know because he told me so.

  I was in a San Francisco meat market, thinking about having some meat for dinner. I didn’t know what kind. I paced up and down the meat counter. I walked past pork chops, hamburger, lamb shanks, dead chickens, and fresh but dusty-eyed fish.

  The butcher watched me without saying anything and he didn’t move either. There was a kind of forlorn expression on his middle-aged face that had gone as far in life as it was going to go. Now it would become the face of an old man.

  I stopped and stared at a piece of round steak. It did not catch my fancy and I walked back toward a lamb chop that was a little more interesting. I stood there staring at one chop in the middle of twenty-five other chops. It was on top of the other chops and looked as if it had climbed up there. I admired its spunk.

  The other twenty-four chops did nothing for me. They might as well have been nameless sand. I thought about applying heat to that chop and eating it for dinner. I was living by myself, so that chop would grace a solitary meal.

  It was a dreary day in San Francisco, overcast and futureless like it gets sometimes in the summer and can stay that way for days. You begin to wonder if there is any summer at all going on in America.

  “I have cold hands,” the butcher said.

  I looked up from the chop.

  I didn’t know who he was talking to.

  He was talking to me.

  I looked at his hands.

  He was holding them despairingly out in front of him. They were a used-up sort of gray and red. Those hands had been cold for years leading into decades of dead meat. I tried to think of a proper response. My hands were suddenly very warm, actually hot. I felt very guilty. My tongue was deserty and I was lost without water in that desert.

  The butcher broke the chains of my predicament by saying, “I could have been a truck driver. I drove a truck in the Army. I guess that’s what I should have done. At least, 1ny hands wouldn’t be cold all the time.”

  By this time, the blood in my hands was boiling.

  I forced a kind of half-smile that people try to pretend means that they understand and sympathize with when somebody says something that there is no good way to respond to.

  The butcher rubbed his hands together and tried to break the tension by telling a little joke, but not a single word came out of him. His mouth started to move but then it stopped and we both smiled as if he had actually told the joke.

  As he walked toward me and my lamb chop, he was still rubbing his hands together.

  To the Yotsuya Station

  By any standard she would be considered a good-looking woman and maybe in her early thirties. She has fine features, a perfect little mouth that looks as if it had been built by roses working overtime in a rare factory. The only flaw in her face is her eyes. They are beautiful eyes but lack a certain character that’s not important because most men aren’t particularly interested in a woman’s character, anyway.

  Her body is nice to look at, compact and well-proportioned. She has trim ankles and a bust that stops just short of being generous.

  As we hurtle along on the subway underneath Tokyo, she sits across from me, absentmindedly playing with the skin under her chin. She pulls gently on it, checking out its firmness again and again as we stop at a station and then hurtle forward to the next station.

  Above us twelve million people are trying to be happy and make the best of their lives while she continues to think about the firmness of her chin and the years to come, which will certainly come. They will come just like the station in front of us that we are hurtling toward.

  Welcome to the Yotsuya Station.

  It’s just another stop on the way.

  A Safe journey Like This River

  Above all these

  things

  put on charity…

  —Col. 3:14

  Last night there was a knock at the kitchen door of this ranch house in Southern Montana, near the banks of the Yellowstone River on its way to join up with the Missouri River, then onto the Mississippi River travelling down to the Gulf of Mexico, its eventual home, so far away from these mountains, this kitchen door and the knocking of last night.

  I was busy cooking something. I couldn’t quite believe that somebody was knocking at the kitchen door. A friend talking to me in the kitchen answered it before I could move. I had been paying close attention to a frying pan full of chicken and mushrooms.

  I waited for the people to come into the kitchen and see who they were and what they wanted. I also wondered why they hadn’t come to the front door. It’s easier to get to, at the front of the house, so to speak. It’s right on the way. I don’t remember anybody ever coming around to the kitchen door at night. Maybe somebody did once, a long time ago, but I wasn’t living here, then.

  The people didn’t come into the kitchen. They just stood outside on the back porch talking to my friend f
or the briefest of times and then my friend closed the door and the people were gone without my having seen them.

  The few words they said sounded like children talking: “Welcome to Paradise Valley.”

  That’s all I could make out.

  My friend stood there with a small yellow pamphlet in his hands.

  “Who was that?” I said.

  “Two girls inviting us to church.”

  The handmade yellow pamphlet was about the churches here in the valley:

  Paradise Valley Community Church

  Pine Creek Methodist Church

  St. John’s Episcopal Church

  Emigrant, Mont.

  It was a simple and cheerfully mimeographed pamphlet listing the names of the ministers, their telephone numbers and the various types and times of worship offered at the churches.

  There was a decal of flowers pasted on the yellow cover and a nice quote from Colossians to keep it company.

  My friend told me the girls were ten or eleven years old. I never saw them but it was nice of them to come by one autumn evening and invite us to church. They have good hearts. I wish the best in life for them and a safe journey like the Yellowstone River flowing to the Gulf of Mexico, its faraway home and future.

  These children will also flow away.

  Parking Place Lost

  It’s a hot day and a young priest steps out of a church door, almost bumping into me. He is wearing a black, short-sleeve shirt. Maybe some kind of priest summerwear? I don’t know but it is a warm day.

  “It’s gone!” the priest says, glancing angrily at some cars parked in front of the church. The cars occupy all the parking places. He stamps his foot on the sidewalk like a gravely-dressed little kid.

  He shakes his head in disgust.

  “It was here just a minute ago!” he says. “Now we’ll have to find another place to park.” He is talking to an older priest who walked out just after him and says nothing.