The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

  I have never never played Scrabble and did not have the slightest interest in it or knew what it was about except that it was some kind of word game. You made up words with letters on little wooden blocks.

  I cannot think of anything more boring because what are you going to do with the words after you’ve made them up? You might as well try breathing into a vacuum cleaner for fun.

  Anyway, a visiting friend bought the game at a store in town and I knew that sooner or later the game would be played and somehow I would be dragged into it. I hoped later but of course it turned out to be sooner, and I found myself at a table with a board in front of me demanding that words be made up and I had seven little wooden blocks with letters on them to oblige the board.

  I felt silly as the game started.

  First of all, I’m not a very good speller and it didn’t make much sense for me to play a game that depended on spelling for victory.

  The person who bought the game is of course a very good speller, a speller of almost championship ability. I can see why he liked and wanted to play the game, but I couldn’t see what there was ultimately in it for me, except the annoyance of wasting my time losing.

  There were four of us and the game started.

  Right from the very beginning when I selected my seven blocks of wood, I didn’t like the game and within a few moments dislike turned to true hatred. L’ve never hated anything so fast in my life.

  Among the first words played on the board was the word quieten as in quieten down, which I found to be an absurd word. Here in the West we use quiet down, not quieten down. I had never even heard the word quieten before, so I made a big mistake by compulsively looking it up in the dictionary, and there it was in all its glory: quieten, an English word, a word used in England. I don’t know English English. I know American English.

  That’s enough for me.

  It serves the purposes of my life.

  The next word played was ted. I’d never even heard of the word ted before. I’d of course heard of teddy bear and the name Ted, but not ted as a word. It was contributed by my friend who is a good speller. Again impetuously I went to the dictionary like a pig to bacon and God-damn it! there was the word ted.

  If you want to find out what the word means look it up yourself or if you already know what it means, that’s your problem, but I’d like to hear you use it in conversation sometime: “Please ted the cow shit or I have tedded the grass. What else do you want me to do?”

  Yeah, go right ahead and use that word.

  I dare you!

  That gets us around to the next word that was played after ted. Right after ted came tod. There it was: tod, looking up at me from the board, not a name or related to a hot toddy but something completely different: tod, as in, “Look, a tod!” Try that on your friends the next time you see a fox or try crafty as a tod and see how much response you get to that.

  Tod is a Scottish word for fox.

  I immediately escaped from the game.

  I was a prisoner of war who made a brilliant escape from a prison camp belonging to the silly forces of Scrabble.

  There was a big stirring at my departure and much coaxing was done trying to get me back into the game, but I was firm in my resolve. I got up laughing from the table and went and sat on the couch.

  As they tried to coax me back to the table and the game, I sat on the couch laughing.

  “Look,” I said. “There’s a tod in the chicken house. My, what a beautiful tod coat. Where did you get it? In the dictionary. Well, it certainly looks good on you.”

  Five Ice-Cream Cones

  Running in Tokyo

  For Rubin Clickman

  Normally, if you were to think about an ice-cream cone running, you’d think of it dripping and you have to keep licking fiercely away, like an anteater, to keep it from getting on you instead of in you.

  When you are dealing with the absolute reality of ice-cream cones, the word in is very positive, preferred, and the word on is negative. You don’t need it.

  I just saw a Japanese family: father, mother and their three little children running up the street, carrying in their hands ice-cream cones.

  Somehow I consider this a small miracle. I have never seen an entire family running up the street with ice-cream cones. They were all very happy. Maybe this is a new definition of running.

  The Good Work of Chickens

  The sweet turbines of revenge purred gently in his mind like the voice of a beautiful woman and relaxed him to the point that it didn’t feel strange or even out of the ordinary for him to be driving a dump truck full of chicken shit down a quiet street with his lights out in a prosperous middle-class residential neighborhood.

  He had bought the truckload of chicken shit earlier that day at a huge chicken ranch in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, and had driven it to the town of View, Montana, a distance of over two hundred miles.

  He had never done anything like this before and he enjoyed the whole procedure of borrowing a friend’s dump truck and driving it to White Sulphur Springs to buy the chicken shit and watching it being loaded onto the truck.

  “This sure is a lot of chicken shit,” one of the men said who was helping load the truck.

  “Yes,” said the proud new owner of the chicken shit. “It is a lot, isn’t it?”

  “What are you going to do with all this shit?” the man asked who liked to talk with people because he spent so much time with chickens.

  “I’m going to make sure that it gets to the right place.”

  “Well,” the chicken shit loader said, for lack of anything better to say. “I hope this chicken shit works out for the best.”

  “It will,” the man said, who we’ll call Mike, though his name was C. Edwin Jackson because his right name is not important. It’s what he did with that chicken shit that’s important.

  Mike drove slowly almost anonymously past house after house in the early evening of a cold February night, looking for the right house. He had muddied up the license plates of the truck, so that it would be hard to trace.

  That’s how he had gotten the address of his destination, a house on Butte Street, by tracing the owner’s license plate number when their car drove away leaving a bewildered little dog in its wake.

  The people in the car had abandoned the dog in the country near his place. When he saw what the people were doing, he ran out of the house but it was too late to stop them. He yelled at them but they drove away ignoring him and leaving the little dog standing there frightened in the road as its masters drove off, abandoning it to the cruel fates of the Montana countryside.

  Mike thought about getting his shotgun and pursuing them, but then he memorized their license plate number and went into the house and wrote it down right away because he had decided to put into operation a revenge fantasy that he had courted in his mind like a beautiful woman for years now.

  He had a small ranch out in the country about ten miles from the small town of View and people were always driving out and dumping their unwanted animals on his property. Poor dogs and cats doomed to the shock of abandonment, farewell, nice home, and to the agonies of starvation and survival in a world where they could not survive.

  One minute they were happy domestic pets and as soon as they were put outside the car or truck, they were just another wretched creature doomed to a slow and agonizing death.

  Domestic animals cannot survive by themselves in this country. They suffer minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day until kind Death touches their lives with the shadow of his life.

  Country people don’t want these animals. They already have their own animals. Why do people think that strangers will take care of their animals after they no longer want to take care of them themselves?

  There simply is not room for a hundred eats and fifty dogs at every house in the country. People at the most have a few dogs or cats and that’s about it.

  There truly is no room at the inn.

  It’s full.

&n
bsp; Anyway, Mike or C. Edwin Jackson had had it up to his ears with the cruelty of people abandoning their pets in the country to die a slow and painful death.

  He had seen puppies starved down so much that they looked like the shadows of string with no other response to life than hunger like bowling going on in their stomachs.

  He once saw a kitten eating an ear of corn in the garden and he had seen a cat standing in a creek, the water was a very cold six-inches deep, trying to catch a fish.

  Hunger had driven a house cat to become a fisherman.

  Yes, he had no love in his heart for people who would do things like that to animals and he had slowly evolved this fantasy of revenge upon those who abandoned the helpless without even the mercy to take their unwanted animals to the veterinarian and let him painlessly take care of the business, so that no suffering would occur. Sometimes he thought that people abandoned their animals just to save the few dollars that the vet would cost.

  Mike tried to think of what those people thought about when they took their animals away from their homes and drove them out to the horror of trying to stay alive in the country.

  But now there was going to be an element of fairness introduced into it and he was only a few blocks away from 14 Butte Street and the beauty of his revenge.

  It was a quiet house, large and spacious and occupied by a middle-aged man and his wife and their conveniently-absent dog.

  “Have you found your dog yet?” one of their neighbors asked the day after it had “disappeared.”

  “No, Little Scott is still missing.”

  “Well, we hope you End him. He’s such a cute dog.”

  “So do we. We love that dog.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll find him.”

  The man and woman were watching The Six Million Dollar Man on television when Mike backed the truck up over the curb and across their lawn to the front porch and dumped three tons of chicken shit on it.

  The man jumped up from the television set. He jumped up so fast that you’d think he was the Six Million Dollar Man.

  The woman screamed.

  She didn’t know it yet but she was going to have to cancel her appointment at the beauty parlor tomorrow. She would be doing something else.

  The weight of the chicken shit forced the front door open and it poured into their living room like an avalanche.

  Three tons of chicken shit is a lot of dedicated chickens and their work had not been in vain.

  Castle of the Snow Bride

  …what is missing here is much more important than what follows because what is absent is the ending of a Japanese erotic movie called Castle of the Snow Bride. lt was a fantastically sensual film. After watching just a few scenes I had an erection that was like that of a teenage boy. It was hot and unstable, shimmering; like heat in the desert.

  The actresses in the movie were the ultimate in beauty, grace and pleasure. They were doing things that became gradually more and more complicated and more and more imaginative.

  The pressure of my erection had reached the point of almost throwing me backwards, right out of my seal into the lap of the person sitting behind me.

  My body was dizzy with sex like a maelstrom in a tropical sea and my mind came and went like the continuous slamming of a hot door.

  The movie progressed deeper and deeper into more complicated and phantasmagorical sex, travelling toward the most sensual experience I had ever seen or imagined. It was going to make all my previous sexual experience seem as if I had spent my life working as a bookkeeper for a small brick and mousetrap company in a town so bleak and boring that it didn’t even have a name. The people who lived there had kept putting off naming the town for over a hundred years.

  “We’ll have to name this town next year,” was the way they kept handling it and that’s exactly how my sex life would compare to the way the movie was going to end.

  There were nine minutes left before the picture ended. I remembered that from the program in the box office window. The movie was going to end at 7:09 and the clock on the theater wall said 7:00. In less than ten minutes my sex life was going to be totally obsolete, a thing of the past.

  The female erotic goings on in front of me were now starting to turn the seats in the theater into steam. It was an interesting experience and pleasurable feeling my seat being vaporized by sensuality.

  Then something happened that caused me to get up and go out into the lobby. It was an errand of incredible importance. It had to be done. It could not be avoided. There things got kind of complicated because they are not clear.

  I may have gotten up to get a drink of cold pop because I thought I had enough time to buy one and get back into the theater before the final sexual scene or it may have been something different that drew me out of the theater.

  Perhaps I had to go to the toilet or maybe I had to give somebody a very important letter and we had agreed to meet in the lobby of the theater and I had no idea when the movie started that it was going to reveal the most fantastic sexual scene of all time.

  Anyway, I did what I was supposed to do in the lobby, whatever that was, and rushed back into the theater to see the curtain close on the end of the movie that was a long shot of a castle at sunset with crows circling it.

  The lights went on for the intermission and the theater was filled with unconscious men. Some of them were lying in the aisles. All the men had expressions of bliss on their faces as if the Angel of Pleasure had touched them while I was doing whatever I was doing.

  It was the last showing of the movie that night, but fortunately the film would be shown for one more day. I went home in a state of frustrated hell on earth. The night passed like ice-cold water dripping a drop at a time on a burning erection that lasted all through my sleep, trapping me in a state of considerable pain.

  The program said that the first showing of Castle of the Snow Bride was at 12:01 p.m. The morning passed like a monkey trying to dance in a block of ice.

  When I went to the theater at a quarter of twelve, it had disappeared. There was no trace of it. In its place was a small park with children playing and old people sitting on benches reading.

  I tried to ask people about the theater but nobody spoke English. When I finally found somebody who could speak English, he told me apologetically that he was just a tourist from Osaka, visiting Tokyo for the first time and he knew nothing about the theater, but the park was beautiful. He liked the way it looked because it had so many trees.

  Later I met some people who had a good knowledge of Japanese movies. I asked them about Castle of the Snow Bride. They had never heard of it and was I certain that was the right title?

  Yes, I was certain. There could only be one Castle of the Snow Bride. They were sorry that they could not help me. So there you have it: Everything is here except that which is missing.

  The Instant Ghost Town

  Here are just a few quick words from Montana before going into town because somebody has to go to town today. If everybody stayed home, the town would be empty. There would be no traffic and the streets would be abandoned and all the stores would be haunted by an absence of people on a holidayless Wednesday. It might be on the 6 o’clock national news. It would be presented as a joke for everyone to laugh at:

  “Today in Livingston, Montana, population 7000, all the folks decided to stay home, so the town became a ghost town for 24 hours. No official reason has yet been given for this unique event. The mayor had no comment when contacted by ABC News late this afternoon, so we can go on safely assuming that Montana is still the last frontier.”

  The anchorman would finish the joke with a big anchor smile on his face like the anchor of the Titanic settling to the bottom.

  Nobody out here wants that to happen, so I have to go to town and make myself highly visible. I hope that everyone will follow my example. I don’t want my absence to contribute to an instant ghost town.

  The Mouse

  Sitting down at a table at the same sidewalk cafe in To
kyo, I smelled something dead. I looked around but I couldn’t see anything dead and then the smell went away, so I ordered some coffee.

  Before the coffee arrived, the smell of something dead came back but vanished in just a few seconds. Then I was drinking coffee. The next time the smell of something dead came, I of course paid attention to it, but I didn’t let it bother me.

  The wind was blowing and I thought maybe it came on the wind, so I let it be, and very carefully watched people coming and going in the street. I love to watch people and Japan is a good place for it. I sat there for hours watching people and after I finished with the coffee, I drank a little wine.

  The smell came and went a hundred times and after a while it didn’t bother me because I knew that it would go away. It smelled like vinegar turning to sugar and sugar turning to vinegar. What I smelled was the middle point of their passage. In other words, the smell of death was on the wind or so I thought until I discovered that it was not the wind that brought the smell, but it was I who brought it. Every time I lowered my head toward my chest the smell came. Then I realized that it was coming from my own heart.

  There was something dead in my heart.

  I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse.

  I had a dead mouse in my heart.

  What was I to do?

  I was trying to figure that out when a beautiful Japanese woman sat down at the table next to me. Her table was very close and she was wearing a delicate but dominating perfume, like death in another direction, and the smell of her perfume made it possible for me not to smell the dead mouse in my heart any more.

  She is sitting next to me right now. I wish I could tell her what I just told you about the mouse and her perfume, but I don’t think she would understand.

  As long as she sits here, everything will be all right.

  I have to figure out what to do next.