The door was tall, silent and human like a middle-aged woman. I felt as if I were touching her hand when I opened the door delicately like the inside of a watch.
The first room in the house was her kitchen and she wasn't in it, but there were twenty or thirty vases and jars and bottles filled with flowers. They were on the kitchen table and on all the shelves and ledges. Some of the flowers were stale and some of the flowers were fresh.
I went inside the next room and it was the living room and she wasn't there either, but again there were twenty or thirty vases and jars and bottles filled with flowers.
The flowers made my heart beat faster.
Her garbage had lied to me.
I went inside the last room and it was her bedroom and she wasn't there either, but again the twenty or thirty vases and jars and bottles filled with flowers.
There was a window right next to the bed and it was the window that looked down on the street. The bed was made of brass with a patchwork quilt on it. I walked over to the window and stood there staring down at my friend who was sitting in the gutter looking up at the window.
He couldn't believe that I was standing there in the witch's window and I waved very slowly at him and he waved very slowly at me. Our waving seemed to be very distant travelling from our arms like two people waving at each other in different cities, perhaps between Tacoma and Salem, and our waving was merely an echo of their waving across thousands of miles.
Now the dare had been completed and I turned around in that house which was like a shallow garden and all my fears collapsed upon me like a landslide of flowers and I ran screaming at the top of my lungs outside and down the stairs. I sounded as if I had stepped in a wheelbarrow-sized pile of steaming dragon shit.
When I came screaming around the side of the house, my friend jumped up from the gutter and started screaming, too. I guess he thought that the witch was chasing me. We ran screaming through the streets of Tacoma, pursued by our own voices like a 1692 Cotton Mather newsreel.
This was a month or two before the German Army marched into Poland.
1/3, 1/3, 1/3
IT was all to be done in thirds. I was to get 1/3 for doing the typing, and she was to get 1/3 for doing the editing, and he was to get 1/3 for writing the novel.
We were going to divide the royalties three ways. We all shook hands on the deal, each knowing what we were supposed to do, the path before us, the gate at the end.
I was made a 1/3 partner because I had the typewriter.
I lived in a cardboard-lined shack of my own building across the street from the run-down old house the Welfare rented for her and her nine-year-old son Freddy.
The novelist lived in a trailer a mile away beside a sawmill pond where he was the watchman for the mill.
I was about seventeen and made lonely and strange by that Pacific Northwest of so many years ago, that dark, rainy land of 1952. I'm thirty-one now and I still can't figure out what I meant by living the way I did in those days.
She was one of those eternally fragile women in their late thirties and once very pretty and the object of much attention in the roadhouses and beer parlors, who are now on Welfare and their entire lives rotate around that one day a month when they get their Welfare checks.
The word "check" is the one religious word in their lives, so they always manage to use it at least three or four times in every conversation. It doesn't matter what you are talking about.
The novelist was in his late forties, tall, reddish, and looked as if life had given him an endless stream of two-timing girlfriends, five-day drunks and cars with bad transmissions.
He was writing the novel because he wanted to tell a story that had happened to him years before when he was working in the woods.
He also wanted to make some money: 1/3.
My entrance into the thing came about this way: One day I was standing in front of my shack, eating an apple and staring at a black ragged toothache sky that was about to rain.
What I was doing was like an occupation for me. I was that involved in looking at the sky and eating the apple. You would have thought that I had been hired to do it with a good salary and a pension if I stared at the sky long enough.
"HEY, YOU!" I heard somebody yell.
I looked across the mud puddle and it was the woman. She was wearing a kind of green Mackinaw that she wore all the time, except when she had to visit the Welfare people downtown. Then she put on a shapeless duck-gray coat.
We lived in a poor part of town where the streets weren't paved. The street was nothing more than a big mud puddle that you had to walk around. The street was of no use to cars any more. They travelled on a different frequency where asphalt and gravel were more sympathetic.
She was wearing a pair of white rubber boots that she always had on in the winter, a pair of boots that gave her a kind of child-like appearance. She was so fragile and firmly indebted to the Welfare Department that she often looked like a child twelve years old.
"What do you want?" I said.
"You have a typewriter, don't you?" she said. "I've walked by your shack and heard you typing. You type a lot at night."
"Yeah, I have a typewriter," I said.
"You a good typist?" she said.
"I'm all right."
"We don't have a typewriter. How would you like to go in with us?" she yelled across the mud puddle. She looked a perfect twelve years old, standing there in her white boots, the sweetheart and darling of all mud puddles.
"What's 'go in' mean?"
"Well, he's writing a novel," she said. "He's good. I'm editing it. I've read a lot of pocketbooks and the Reader's Digest. We need somebody who has a typewriter to type it up. You'll get 1/3. How does that sound?"
"I'd like to see the novel," I said. I didn't know what was happening. I knew she had three or four boyfriends that were always visiting her.
"Sure!" she yelled. "You have to see it to type it. Come on around. Let's go out to his place right now and you can meet him and have a look at the novel. He's a good guy. It's a wonderful book."
"OK," I said, and walked around the mud puddle to where she was standing in front of her evil dentist house, twelve years old, and approximately two miles from the Welfare office.
"Let's go," she said.
***
We walked over to the highway and down the highway past mud puddles and sawmill ponds and fields flooded with rain until we came to a road that went across the railroad tracks and turned down past half a dozen small sawmill ponds that were filled with black winter logs.
We talked very little and that was only about her check that was two days late and she had called the Welfare and they said they mailed the check and it should be there tomorrow, but call again tomorrow if it's not there and we'll prepare an emergency money order for you.
"Well, I hope it's there tomorrow," I said.
"So do I or I'll have to go downtown," she said.
Next to the last sawmill pond was a yellow old trailer up on blocks of wood. One look at that trailer showed that it was never going anywhere again, that the highway was in distant heaven, only to be prayed to. It was really sad with a cemetery-like chimney swirling jagged dead smoke in the air above it.
A kind of half-dog, half-cat creature was sitting on a rough plank porch that was in front of the door. The creature half-barked and half-meowed at us "Arfeow!" and darted under the trailer, looking out at us from behind a block.
"This is it," the woman said.
The door to the trailer opened and a man stepped out onto the porch. There was a pile of firewood stacked on the porch and it was covered with a black tarp.
The man held his hand above his eyes, shielding his eyes from a bright imaginary sun, though everything had turned dark in anticipation of the rain.
"Hello, there," he said.
"Hi," I said.
"Hello, honey," she said.
He shook my hand and welcomed me to his trailer, then he gave her a little kiss on th
e mouth before we all went inside.
The place was small and muddy and smelled like stale rain and had a large unmade bed that looked as if it had been a partner to some of the saddest love-making this side of The Cross.
There was a green bushy half-table with a couple of insect-like chairs and a little sink and a small stove that was used for cooking and heating.
There were some dirty dishes in the little sink. The dishes looked as if they had always been dirty: born dirty to last forever.
I could hear a radio playing Western music someplace in the trailer, but I couldn't find it. I looked all over but it was nowhere in sight. It was probably under a shirt or something.
"He's the kid with the typewriter," she said. "He'll get 1/3 for typing it."
"That sounds fair," he said. "We need somebody to type it. I've never done anything like this before."
"Why don't you show it to him?" she said. "He'd like to take a look at it."
"OK. But it isn't too carefully written," he said to me. "I only went to the fourth grade, so she's going to edit it, straighten out the grammar and commas and stuff."
There was a notebook lying on the table, next to an ashtray that probably had 600 cigarette butts in it. The notebook had a color photograph of Hopalong Cassidy on the cover.
Hopalong looked tired as if he had spent the previous night chasing starlets all over Hollywood and barely had enough strength to get back in the saddle.
There were about twenty-five or thirty pages of writing in the notebook. It was written in a large grammar school sprawl: an unhappy marriage between printing and longhand.
"It's not finished yet," he said.
"You'll type it. I'll edit it. He'll write it," she said.
It was a story about a young logger falling in love with a waitress. The novel began in 1935 in a cafe in North Bend, Oregon.
The young logger was sitting at a table and the waitress was taking his order. She was very pretty with blond hair and rosy cheeks. The young logger was ordering veal cutlets with mashed potatoes and country gravy.
"Yeah, I'll do the editing. You can type it, can't you? It's not too bad, is it?" she said in a twelve-year-old voice with the Welfare peeking over her shoulder.
"No," I said. "It will be easy."
Suddenly the rain started to come down hard outside, without any warning, just suddenly great drops of rain that almost shook the trailer.
You sur lik veel cutlets dont you Maybell said she was holding her pensil up her mowth that was preti and red like an apl!
Onli wen you tak my oder Carl said he was a kind of bassful loger but big and strong lik his dead who ownd the starmill!
Ill mak sur you get plenti of gravi!
Just ten the caf door opend and in cam Rins Adams he was hansom and meen, everi bodi in thos parts was afrad of him but not Carl and his dad they wasnt afrad of him no sur!
Maybell shifard wen she saw him standing ther in his blac macinaw he smild at her and Carl felt his blod run hot lik scallding cofee and fiting mad!
Howdi ther Rins said Maybell blushed like a flouar while we were all sitting there ir that rainy trailer, pounding at the gates of American literature.
The Gathering of a Californian
LIKE most Californians, I come from someplace else and was gathered to the purpose of California like a metal-eating flower gathers the sunshine, the rain, and then to the freeway beckons its petals and lets the cars drive in, millions of cars into but a single flower, the scent choked with congestion and room for millions more.
California needs us, so it gathers us from other places. I'll take you, you, you, and I from the Pacific Northwest: a haunted land where nature dances the minuet with people and danced with me in those old bygone days.
I brought everything I knew from there to California: years and years of a different life to which I can never return nor want to and seems at times almost to have occurred to another body somehow vaguely in my shape and recognition.
It's strange that California likes to get her people from every place else and leave what we knew behind and here to California we are gathered as if energy itself, the shadow of that metal-eating flower, had summoned us away from other lives and now to do the California until the very end like the Taj Mahal in the shape of a parking meter.
A Short Story about Contemporary Life in California
THERE are thousands of stories with original beginnings. This is not one of them. I think the only way to start a story about contemporary life in California is to do it the way Jack London started The Sea-Wolf. I have confidence in that beginning.
It worked in 1904 and it can work in 1969. I believe that beginning can reach across the decades and serve the purpose of this story because this is California—we can do anything we want to do—and a rich young literary critic is taking a ferryboat from Sausalito to San Francisco. He has just finished spending a few days at a friend's cabin in Mill Valley. The friend uses the cabin to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche during the winter. They all have great times together.
While travelling across the bay in the fog he thinks about writing an essay called "The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist."
Of course Wolf Larsen torpedoes the ferryboat and captures the rich young literary critic who is changed instantly into a cabin boy and has to wear funny clothes and take a lot of shit off everybody, has great intellectual conversations with old Wolf, gets kicked in the ass, grabbed by the throat, promoted to mate, grows up, meets his true love Maud, escapes from Wolf, bounces around the damn Pacific Ocean in little better than a half-assed rowboat, finds an island, builds a stone hut, clubs seals, fixes a broken sailing ship, buries Wolf at sea, gets kissed, etc.: all to end this story about contemporary life in California sixty-five years later.
Thank God.
Pacific Radio Fire
THE largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking. My friend's wife had just left him. She walked right out the door and didn't even say good-bye. We went and got two fifths of port and headed for the Pacific.
It's an old song that's been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it's been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.
We sat down on a small corner-like beach surrounded by big granite rocks and the hugeness of the Pacific Ocean with all its vocabularies.
We were listening to rock and roll on his transistor radio and somberly drinking port. We were both in despair. I didn't know what he was going to do with the rest of his life either.
I took another sip of port. The Beach Boys were singing a song about California girls on the radio. They liked them.
His eyes were wet wounded rugs.
Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all.
It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love.
Finally he set fire to the radio. He piled some paper around it. He struck a match to the paper. We sat there watching it. I had never seen anybody set fire to a radio before.
As the radio gently burned away, the flames began to affect the songs that we were listening to. A record that was #1 on the Top-40 suddenly dropped to #13 inside of itself. A song that was #9 became #27 in the middle of a chorus about loving somebody. They tumbled in popularity like broken birds. Then it was too late for all of them.
Elmira
I return as if in the dream of a young American duck hunting prince to Elmira and I am standing again on the bridge across the Long Tom River. It is always late December and the river is high and m
uddy and stirs dark leafless branches from its cold depths.
Sometimes it is raining on the bridge and I'm looking downstream to where the river flows into the lake. There is always a marshy field in my dream surrounded by an old black wooden fence and an ancient shed showing light through the walls and the roof.
I'm warm and dry under sweet layers of royal underwear and rain clothes.
Sometimes it is cold and clear and I can see my breath and there's frost on the bridge and I'm looking upstream into a tangle of trees that lead to the mountains many miles away where the Long Tom River starts its beginning.
Sometimes I write my name on the bridge in frost. I spell my name out very carefully, and sometimes I write "Elmira" in frost, too, and just as carefully.
I'm always carrying a double-barrel sixteen-gauge shotgun with lots of shells in my pockets ... perhaps too many shells because I am a teen-ager and it's easy to worry about running out of shells, so I'm weighed down with too many shells.
I'm almost like a deep-sea diver because my pockets are filled with such an abundance of lead. Sometimes I even walk funny because I've got so many shells in my pockets.
I'm always alone on the bridge and there's always a small flock of mallards that fly very high over the bridge and down toward the lake.
Sometimes I look both ways on the road to see if a car is coming and if a car isn't coming, I shoot at them, but they are too high for my shot to do anything but annoy them a little.
Sometimes a car is coming and I just watch the ducks fly down the river and keep the shooting to myself. It might be a game warden or a deputy sheriff. I have an idea somewhere in my head that it is against the law to shoot at ducks from a bridge.
I wonder if I am right.
Sometimes I don't look to see if there is a car on the road. The ducks are too high to shoot at. I know I'll just waste my ammunition, so I let them pass.
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 2