The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

  There were cats buried there: Blackout, Cutie, Regina, and Patches who was born in Dachau.

  There was a hamster: Willie.

  And a pigeon: Deed.

  And two parakeets: Jingle and Peppi.

  There were two goldfish: Peter and Lela “God bless them both.”

  And there was Tweeter whose epitaph read:

  HERE LIES TWEETER

  WRAPPED IN SILK

  THE LITTLE BIRD

  DROWNED IN A

  GLASS OF MILK

  There were many line graves and many minor graves and as I read the epitaphs of dogs, I could hear dogs barking in the Presidio, pets that were still on duty.

  One grave had a pile of carefully selected rocks on it and a plastic Madonna lying on her side with her face turned toward the gravemarker of a silenced pet.

  Another grave was just a plain stake stuck in the ground and stapled to the stake was an old nameless piece of paper, looking almost like the sky in a Japanese painting. There were three rusty bottle caps lying beneath it, and the rust had taken their identities away. They were nameless as the pet buried there.

  Around one grave there was a white fence uprooted and crooked with a heart or an apple drawn on one of the pickets and the word LOVE was written in the center of the heart or the apple.

  Beside another grave I found a pacified mole, looking like a dead seal with a Pinocchio nose, and at the other end of the cemetery I found an empty package of Force’s Gopher Killer. It had been a case of mistaken identity, but nevertheless very effective. It seemed strange to me that death should be practiced as an active force in a sanctuary of death, but perhaps it was only the day and the way the Rudi Gernreich coat fit. I’ll have to admit the graves were a little tight across the shoulders.

  I found the inevitable potter’s field where dead pets lay almost anonymously in the ground and the weeds and the flowers hardly dared to grow.

  And I saw grand graves covered with fine white rocks and there were marble tombstones and wax flowers and some of them even had flowers and plants and cactuses growing on the graves in white boxes.

  Somebody driving by in their car upon the freeway had thrown their empty April to May 1965 Golden Cate Bridge commuter ticket book out of the car window and it had landed on the grave of Penny, a ten-year-dead pet.

  One gravemarker had a yellow sun painted child-like on it with the rays of the sun shining down the marker toward the ground.

  There was a white marker for a pet named Checkers that said very starkly: “It was done.”

  At another place in the cemetery I saw the all too familiar signature of the good old American necrophilic beer-drinker. There was an empty Olympia beer can lying beside some markers that had been knocked down.

  I have never been able to understand why people want to go to the store and buy some beer and then immediately head for the nearest cemetery to drink the beer and knock down gravemarkers.

  I wonder if it has anything to do with the American mother abandoning breast-feeding her young. Perhaps as a culture we are not quite ready for the bottle yet.

  I don’t know how long I had been in the cemetery when I looked up beyond the grave of a dog to see two soldiers coming down the hill.

  They had rifles slung over their shoulders and they were carrying mess kits in their hands. I knew the pet cemetery was not a restricted area, so I gave their approach only a passing glance and went back to looking at the dog’s grave.

  I looked up again to see that the soldiers were very close and that one of them had handed his mess kit to the other soldier and then had taken the rifle off his shoulder and was advancing toward me with the rifle in his hands.

  Suddenly he jumped forward and landed on both feet in front of me, balanced on the balls of his feet. He held the rifle across his chest with both of his hands.

  He was standing outside the cemetery and I was standing inside the cemetery.

  “Halt! Who goes there?” he yelled, looking sternly at me with his finger on the trigger of the rifle. I was surrounded by hundreds of dead dogs and cats and goldfish and hamsters and pigeons and parakeets and Tweeter who had the misfortune of drowning in a glass of milk.

  “It’s all right for me to be here,” I said gently, appreciating fully “the outrageous gesture,” and told him that I had gotten permission from the provost marshal.

  “What are you doing?” he said, still holding the gun in position across his chest.

  “I’m writing a little story about this cemetery,” I said.

  He smiled and relaxed his rifle. “Well, put me in your story,” he said.

  I looked at his mess kit and said, “Are you going to lunch?”

  “No,” he said. “We’ve already had lunch. We’re going to South Vietnam.”

  He and the other soldier were smiling and laughing to each other as they walked away. I think they thought up this “Halt! Who goes there?” pet cemetery business as a kind of joke to attack the boredom of a Sunday afternoon. They looked awfully young to be soldiers. They no doubt would be older when they came back from South Vietnam.

  As for me, I soon departed: leaving behind the Rudi Gernreich coat draped over that short white fence beneath the freeway. It seemed to belong there.

  Turkey and Dry

  Breakfast Cereal Sonata

  The turkeys got into a knockdown drag out battle with no holds barred. They were really going at it and the two ponies just got bored with it all and galloped out of the woods into an open field, leaving the turkeys to sort out their own domestic problems.

  I had walked a quarter of a mile down to the lodge which was closed and I knew it was closed before I started out. I just wanted to check the blue sign in the front door window again.

  I of course already knew what it said, but I just wanted to check it out again because I had nothing else to justify walking down there for, and I wanted to take a morning walk, so I used reading the sign again as an excuse and walked through the very quiet and still little community of Pine Creek.

  It was a good walk, my footsteps crunching fresh snow that sounded like expensive breakfast cereal as I stepped on it, almost like music from General Mills.

  The blue sign was still there on the door and its message had not changed. It still said thank you for patronage and friendship from the old owners and that the store would stay closed until February 20th when the new owners would take over, and that they looked forward to meeting everybody.

  I wondered how much and what kind of change the lodge would make under new ownership. I thought about the new owners and what kind of people they were to run a small lodge which included one gas pump, a little cafe-store combination and a few log cabins in barely a spot on the map: Pine Creek, Montana, so far from Paris, New York or Tokyo.

  I would find out about the new directions, if any, in the lodge and meet the new owners in a few days. So far, nothing had changed with the lodge and nobody was there.

  The new ownership of the lodge was a small mystery that would keep me interested for a few days, something to think about here in the Montana winter.

  Then the turkeys started fighting in the woods across the road from the lodge and the ponies ran out of the woods into a field and I turned around and walked back home, listening to the sound of breakfast cereal under my feet.

  Old Man Working the Rain

  Every day I see people in Tokyo handing out handbills to other people. This is the way they make their living, by standing on the street handing out handbills to total strangers, wanting them to spend their money on something they may or may not need.

  Most of the time the strangers don’t make use of the handbills. They just throw them away and forget about them.

  I also see men holding signs that want other men to spend their money in nearby massage parlors and cabarets where there are women for the purposes that men use women and that women get money for.

  Often the men are old and wear poor sloppy clothes, standing there holding erotically promisin
g signs. I wish the old men were not doing that. I wish they were doing something else and their clothes looked better.

  But I can’t change the world.

  It was already changed before I got here.

  Sometimes when I finish writing something, perhaps even this, I feel as if I am handing out useless handbills or I am an old man standing in the rain, wearing shitty clothes and holding a sign for a cabaret that is filled with the beautiful and enticing skeletons of young women that sound like dominoes when they walk toward you coming in the door.

  The Remarkable Dining Cars

  of the Northern Pacific Railroad

  “The remarkable dining ears of the Northern Pacific Railroad used to feature two great products of the Northwest in the days when railroads catered to the public.”

  That is the first sentence of a recipe for baked apples in a cookbook called American Cookery by James Beard. It is a very good recipe and reading it started my mind to dreaming like a small airplane taking off from a rural airfield on a cold December morning.

  The plane, my dreams, slowly circles the airfield gaining altitude and then the course is set. It is lined up perfectly on my compass:

  a baked apple is my destination.

  That’s where I’m going at a comfortable speed of 150 miles an hour over fields and orchards of late autumn with smoke curling up like apple peelings from the chimneys of farm houses.

  It’s easy to see that I love baked apples hot and fresh from the oven with rich cream poured like the wings of an angel over them. The first bite makes my taste buds seem like the Grand Canyon filled to the rim with pleasure.

  The flight is over.

  My airplane just made a perfect landing on a baked apple.

  Railroading in Tokyo

  As a child I listened to “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” when it was a brand-new song, an infant song. Now it is middle-aged and the song’s hair is starting to turn gray. I never listened to all the words. I listened to just snatches of them and probably sang those snatches or maybe just sang the words:

  “track 29”

  and let it go at that. Now so many years later with it just starting to rain at a little sidewalk cafe in Tokyo, “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” was played over the sound system and I listened to all the words, the entire song for the first time as it the words were lumber and a house was being built out of them. When the song was finished, the house was built and there it was in my mind on a little side street near the river.

  I marvelled at the fact that it had taken me so many years to listen to all the words of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” Then I heard my own voice singing softly in the Tokyo afternoon just beginning to rain:

  “track 29.”

  Two Montana Humidifiers

  There’s very little humidity up here in the wintery mountains of Montana. I remember somebody once told me that this place is geologically classified as a high alpine desert, though I don’t think in those terms because we have rivers filled with trout and there are beautiful forests here.

  I’m living in the mountains is the way I look at it.

  Anyway, we have a foot of snow on the ground and the air is very dry. We’ve been getting our humidity in the house by leaving a pan of water on the stove under a low heat. A few days ago I decided that we needed a humidifier.

  Why not?

  Let’s breathe some air with a little moisture in it. I’d never bought a humidifier before. It would be an interesting experience. Yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Let him buy a humidifier and find out what it’s about. I had no idea how they even worked.

  I was a little excited by the prospect as my wife and I drove into town through seemingly endless snow.

  We parked the car and made our way carefully across the icy sidewalk and into a hardware variety-type store, which certainly had to be the dwelling place of a humidifier.

  A young woman was holding a child in her arms and there was a young man standing beside her who was also holding a child in his arms.

  One of the children was a year old and the other one was a baby, just a few months old. Their parents were trying to make up their minds to buy something that required very serious expressions on their faces.

  They were standing beside the cash register where a clerk was patiently waiting for them to make up their minds. The clerk was trying to help them out, so she also had a very serious expression on her face.

  Fortunately, my mind was already made up, so I said to the clerk, “Excuse me, I’d like to buy a humidifier.”

  “They’re over there,” she said, pointing at something which had to be a humidifier, though I couldn’t be certain because I’d never seen one before.

  I walked over to where she had pointed and looked down at a humidifier. I don’t know what I had expected but it wasn’t really that exciting. It was a brown metal cabinet with a ventilated plastic grill on top.

  Encountering a humidifier for the first time certainly did not rank as one of the great experiences of my life. I had no idea how it worked.

  “How does this thing work?” I asked the clerk. She was standing about thirty feet away with the very serious young couple who were still trying to make up their minds.

  “What do you think?” the young mother said.

  “I don’t know,” the young father said.

  “It’s on sale,” the clerk said.

  “Excuse me,” I said, walking back to the clerk. “If you’re not too busy, could you show me how the humidifier works?”

  I could see that the young couple still had some more thinking to do. They weren’t going anyplace. They were rooted in their tracks. The children were being very good, so they could think about what they wanted to buy without being interrupted. The babies were aimlessly looking around. They had no idea where they were at.

  “You’re interested in buying a humidifier?” the clerk said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, let’s go look at it,” she said and started around the counter.

  Just then the young mother turned to the young father—they were both about twenty years old, just kids themselves—and said, “That’s one thing we don’t have to get. A humidifier. We’ve got two of them right here,” gesturing toward the babies and their diapers.

  We all laughed.

  And then the young people went back to serious thinking about buying something that will always remain a mystery to me because when I left the store with my humidifier, they were still standing at the counter trying to make up their minds.

  Contents for Good Luck

  I read a beautiful and very sad poem today by the Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa about the unfaithfulness of women and how hard it is to sleep with them that first night after you know they have been with another man that day. They always fall asleep and you lie there beside them wide awake, feeling a tremendous loneliness created by the touch of their sleeping body. They are warm with the sperm of another man inside of them like a stove but you are very cold, so cold that you feel as if you had been hatched from a penguin egg in Antarctica and died shortly afterwards becoming a thumbful of frozen feathers on a continent where there is not a single post office and the only mail delivery is the wind.

  She turns over in her sleep, puts her arm around you and her touch is the cold wind of Antarctica bringing you your mail and blowing your heart into mirror-like shadows of darkness.

  You of course will go on loving her, but it will be a different kind of love. It will never be as it was before and you will start tomorrow. As you lie there waiting for the dawn, you are sharing the company of men since the beginning of time.

  In the dark shadows of the bedroom, you see another bed with a Roman soldier lying in it beside his wife who is sleeping soundly. He is staring at the ceiling waiting for the dawn which will stretch slowly across the sky like a defeated sword, bringing no comfort.

  It is an old story.

  In the dark shadows of his bed is an Egyptian bed three thousand years before Christ wh
ere the woman is sleeping happily and the man stares at the ceiling, and in the dark just beyond the Egyptian’s bed are caves and animal skin beds.

  The awake man or creature resembling man stares at the ceiling of the cave. His woman or creature that resembles woman snores happily unaware what he is thinking in whatever mental symbols mean something to him.

  I could kill her or just forget about it. Try and live with it. Why did she do it? Now I will have to start loving her in a completely different way. The old way is gone.

  Tod

  For the first time in eight days the temperature is over thirty degrees, so it’s a good time to examine games and what they’ve had to do with my life and why I don’t play them any more.

  I don’t read the funnies in the newspaper any more either but that’s a different story and will be gone into at a later time.

  …much later.

  Let’s get back to games:

  When I was a child I liked games. They were a good way to pass a rainy day. I played Parcheesi, Monopoly, Authors and Old Maid. Monopoly was my favorite game and also checkers had their share of rainy days.

  As childhood slowly went away, so did the games. They are forgotten or stored in an attic someplace. Perhaps in a house that no one lives in any more on a street that’s hard to find where the house numbers don’t quite make sense. The 2’s look like 7’s and the 5’s look like 1’s.

  In my early twenties I played lots of chess and in my early thirties I played a lot of dominoes. I stopped playing chess when I was twenty-five and dominoes went when I was thirty-three. Why? I just got tired of them and stopped. It’s that simple.

  From time to time every few years, I’ve played a little poker but not much because I don’t have any luck. I always lose, so it’s really not any fun. Who likes to lose all the time and that’s what I do when I play poker.

  So this gets us up to last night and a game of Scrabble in a house surrounded by snow in the deep Montana winter. The game was not my idea.