Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

by Richard Brautigan

  "Relatives can be tiring. The excitement of it all. Renewing family ties," the desk clerk said.

  "Yes," I said.

  He gave us the key to his mother's room.

  "I can take you up to the room if you don't remember the way," he said.

  "No, that's not necessary," I said. "I remember the way." I headed him off by saying, "It's such a beautiful room."

  "Isn't it?" he said.

  "Very lovely room," Vida said.

  "My mother was so happy there," he said.

  We took the old elevator upstairs and I opened the door with the key. "Get off the bed," I said as we went into the room. "Off," I repeated.

  "What?" Vida said.

  "The Mother Ghost," I said.

  "Oh."

  Vida lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. I took her shoes off, so she could be more comfortable.

  "How do you feel?" I said.

  "A little tired."

  "Let's take a nap," I said, putting her under the covers and joining her.

  We slept for an hour or so and then I woke up. The Mother Ghost was brushing her teeth and I told her to get into the closet until we were gone. She got into the closet and closed the door after her.

  "Hey, baby," I said. Vida stirred in her sleep and then opened her eyes.

  "What time is it?" she said.

  "About the middle of the afternoon," I said.

  "What time does our plane leave?" she said.

  "6:25," I said. "Do you feel you can make it? If you don't, we'll spend the night here."

  "No, I'm all right," she said. "Let's go back to San Francisco. I don't like San Diego. I want to get out of here and leave all this behind."

  We got up and Vida washed her face and straightened herself up and felt a lot better, though she was still a little weak.

  I told the hotel ghost mother good-bye in the closet and Vida joined me. "Good-bye, ghost," she said.

  We went down the elevator to the waiting desk clerk whom I suspected of drinking on the job.

  He was startled to see me standing there holding the KLM bag in my hand and returning the room key to him.

  "You're not spending the night?" he said.

  "No," I said. "We've decided to stay with her sister."

  "What about your snoring?" he said.

  "I'm going to see a doctor about it," I said. "I can't hide from this all my life. I can't go on living like this forever. I've decided to face it like a man."

  Vida gave me a little nudge with her eyes to tell me that I was carrying it a little too far, so I retreated by saying, "You have a lovely hotel here and I'll recommend it to all my friends when they visit San Diego. What do I owe you?"

  "Thank you," he said. "Nothing. You're Foster's friend. But you didn't even spend the night."

  "That's all right," I said. "You've been very friendly. Thank you and good-bye."

  "Good-bye," the desk clerk said. "Come again when you can spend the night."

  "We will," I said.

  "Good-bye," Vida said.

  Suddenly he got a little desperate and paranoid. "There was nothing wrong with the room, was there?" he said. "It was my mother's room."

  "Nothing," I said. "It was perfect."

  "A wonderful hotel," Vida said. "A beautiful room. A truly beautiful room."

  Vida seemed to have calmed him down because he said to us as we were going out the door, "Say hello to your sister for me."

  That gave us something to think about as we drove out to the San Diego airport sitting very close together in the back seat of a cab where the driver, American this time, did not take his eyes off Vida in the mirror.

  When we first got into the cab, the driver said, "Whereto?"

  I thought it would be fairly simple just to say, "The International Airport, please."

  It wasn't.

  "That's the San Diego International Airport, isn't it? That's where you want to go, huh?"

  "Yes," I said, knowing that something was wrong.

  "I just wanted to be sure," he said. "Because I had a fare yesterday that wanted to go to the International Airport, but it was the Los Angeles International Airport he wanted to go to. That's why I was checking."

  Oh, yeah.

  "Did you take him?" I said. I didn't have anything else to do and my relationship with the cab driver was obviously out of control.

  "Yes," he said.

  "He was probably afraid of flying," I said.

  The cab driver didn't get the joke because he was watching Vida in the rear-view mirror and Vida was watching mc after that one.

  The driver continued staring at Vida. He paid very little attention to his driving. It was obviously dangerous to ride in a cab with Vida.

  I made a mental note of it for the future, not to have Vida's beauty risk our lives.

  The San Diego (Not Los Angeles) International Tipping Abyss

  UNFORTUNATELY, the cab driver was very unhappy with the tip I gave him. The fare was again one dollar and ten cents and remindful of the experience we'd had earlier in the day with that first cab driver, I raised the tip-ante to thirty cents.

  He was startled by the thirty-cent tip and didn't want to have anything else to do with us. Even Vida didn't make any difference when he saw that thirty cents.

  What is the tip to the San Diego airport?

  Our plane didn't leave for an hour. Vida was quite hungry, so we had something to eat in the cafe. It was about 5:30.

  We had hamburgers. It was the first time I'd had a hamburger in years, but it turned out not to be very good. It was flat.

  Vida said her hamburger was good, though.

  "You've forgotten how a hamburger is supposed to taste," Vida said. "Too many years in the monastery have destroyed your better judgment."

  There were two women sitting nearby. One of them had platinum hair and a mink coat. She was middle-aged and talking to a young, blandly pretty girl who was talking in turn about her wedding and the little caps that were being designed for the bridesmaids.

  The girl was nice in the leg department but a little short in the titty line or was I spoiled? They departed their table without leaving a tip.

  This made the waitress mad.

  She was probably a close relative to the two cab drivers I'd met that day in San Diego.

  She stared at the tipless table as if it were a sex criminal. Perhaps she was their mother.

  Farewell, San Diego

  I TOOK a closer look at the San Diego airport. It was petite, uncomplicated with no Playboy stuff at all. The people were there to work, not to look pretty.

  There was a sign that said something like: Animals arriving as baggage may be claimed in the airline air freight areas in the rear of bldg.

  You can bet your life that you don't see signs like that in the San Francisco International Airport.

  A young man with crutches, accompanied by three old men, came along as we were going out to wait for our airplane. They all stared at Vida and the young man stared the hardest.

  It was a long way from the beautiful PSA pre-flight lounge in San Francisco to just standing outside, beside a wire fence in San Diego, waiting to get on our airplane that was shark-like and making a high whistling steam sound, wanting very much to fly.

  The evening was cold and gray coming down upon us with some palm trees, nearby, by the highway. The palm trees somehow made it seem colder than it actually was. They seemed out of place in the cold.

  There was a military band playing beside one of the airplanes parked on the field, but it was too far away to see why they were playing. Maybe some big wig was coming or going. They sounded like my hamburger.

  My Secret Talisman Forever

  WE got our old seats back over the wing and I was sitting again next to the window. Suddenly it was dark in twelve seconds. Vida was quiet, tired. There was a little light on the end of the wing. I became quite fond of it out there in the dark like a lighthouse burning twenty-three miles away and I made it my secret talisma
n forever.

  A young priest was sitting across the aisle from us. He was quite smitten by Vida for the short distance to Los Angeles.

  At first he tried not to be obvious about it, but after a while he surrendered himself to it and one time he leaned across the aisle and was going to say something to Vida. He was actually going to say something to her, but then he changed his mind.

  I will probably go on for a long time wondering what he would have said to my poor aborted darling who, though weak and tired from the ways of Tijuana, was the prettiest thing going in the sky above California, the rapidly moving sky to Los Angeles.

  I went from the priest's interest in Vida to wondering about Foster at the library, how he was handling the books that were coming in that day.

  I hoped he was welcoming them the right way and making the authors feel comfortable and wanted as I made them feel.

  "Well, we'll be home soon," Vida said to me after a long silence that was noisy with thought. The priest's composure vibrated with tension when Vida spoke.

  "Yes," I said. "I was just thinking about that."

  "I know," she said. "I could hear the noise in your mind. I think everything's all right at the library. Foster's doing a good job."

  "You're doing a good job yourself," I said.

  "Thank you," she said. "It will be good to get home. Back to the library and some sleep."

  I was very pleased that she considered the library her home. I looked out the window at my talisman. I loved it as much as the coffee stain flying down.

  Perhaps and Eleven

  THINGS are different at night. The houses and towns far below demand their beauty and get it in distant lights twinkling with incredible passion. Landing at Los Angeles was like landing inside a diamond ring.

  The priest didn't want to get off the plane at Los Angeles, but he had to because that's where he was going. Perhaps Vida reminded him of somebody. Perhaps his mother was very beautiful and he didn't know how to handle it and that's what drove him to the Cloth and now to see that beauty again in Vida was like swirling back through the mirrors of time.

  Perhaps he was thinking about something completely different from what I have ever thought about in my life and his thoughts were of the highest nature and should have been made into a statue ... perhaps. To quote Foster, "Too many perhapses in the world and not enough people."

  I was suddenly wondering about my library again and missed the actual departure of the priest to become part of Los Angeles, to add his share to its size and to take memories of Vida into whatever.

  "Did you see that?" Vida said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "This has been happening ever since I was eleven," she said.

  Fresno, Then 3½ Minutes to Salinas

  THE stewardesses on this flight were fantastically shallow and had been born from half a woman into a world that possessed absolutely no character except chrome smiles. All of them were of course beautiful.

  One of them was pushing a little cart down the aisle, trying to sell us cocktails. She had a singsong inhuman voice that I'm positive was prerecorded by a computer.

  "Purchase a cocktail.

  "Purchase a cocktail.

  "Purchase a cocktail."

  While pushing her little cart down the sky.

  "Purchase a cocktail.

  "Purchase a cocktail.

  "Purchase a cocktail."

  There were no lights below.

  Shine on, O talisman!

  I pushed my face against the window and looked very hard and saw a star and I made a wish but I won't tell. Why should I? Purchase a cocktail from pretty Miss Zero and find your own star. There's one for everyone in the evening sky.

  There were two women behind us talking about nail polish for the thirty-nine minute way to San Francisco. One of them thought that fingernails without polish should be put under rocks.

  Vida had no polish on her fingernails but she didn't care and gave the women's conversation no attention.

  From time to time the airplane was bucked by an invisible horse in the sky but it didn't bother me because I was falling in love with the 727 jet, my sky home, my air love.

  The pilot or some male voice told us that if we looked out the window, we could see the lights of Fresno and were 3½ minutes away from the lights of Salinas.

  I was already looking for Salinas, but something happened on the plane. One of the women spilt her fingernail polish on a cat ten years ago and I looked away for a moment to wonder about that and missed Salinas, so I pretended my talisman was Salinas.

  The Saint of Abortion

  WE were about to land at San Francisco when the women behind us finished their conversation about fingernail polish.

  "I wouldn't be caught dead without fingernail polish," one of them said.

  "You're right," the other one said.

  We were only three miles away from landing and I couldn't see the wing that led like a black highway to my talisman. It seemed as if we were going to land without a wing, only a talisman.

  Ah, the wing appeared magically just as we touched the ground.

  There were soldiers everywhere in the terminal. It was as if an army were encamped there. They flipped when they saw Vida. She was increasing the United States Army sperm count by about three tons as we walked through the place, heading toward the van in the parking lot.

  Vida also affected the civilian population by causing a man who looked like a banker to walk directly into an Oriental woman, knocking the woman down. She was rather surprised because she had just flown in from Saigon and didn't expect this to happen on her first visit to America.

  Alas, another victim of Vida's thing.

  "Do you think you can take it?" Vida said.

  "We ought to bottle what you've got," I said.

  "Vida Pop," Vida said.

  "How do you feel?" I said with my arm around her.

  "Glad to be home," she said.

  Even though the San Francisco International Airport acted like a Playboy cybernetic palace wanting to do things for us that we were not quite ready to have done, at that moment I felt that the International Airport was our first home back from Tijuana.

  I was also anxious to get back to the library and see Foster.

  The Bufano statue waited for us with a peace that we couldn't understand with its strange people fastened projectile-like upon a huge bullet.

  As we got into the van, I thought there should be a statue for the Saint of Abortion, whoever that was, somewhere in the parking lot for the thousands of women who had made the same trip Vida and I had just finished, flying into the Kingdom of Fire and Water, the waiting and counting hands of Dr. Garcia and his associates in Mexico.

  Thank God, the van had an intimate, relaxed human feeling to it. The van reflected Foster in its smells and ways of life. It felt very good to be in the van after having travelled the story of California.

  I put my hand on Vida's lap and that's where it stayed following the red lights of cars in front of us shining back like roses into San Francisco.

  A New Life

  WHEN we arrived back at the library the first thing we saw was Foster sitting out on the steps in his traditional T-shirt, even though it was now dark and cold.

  The lights were on in the library and I wondered what Foster was doing sitting outside on the steps. That didn't seem to be the correct way to run a library.

  Foster stood up and waved that big friendly wave of his.

  "Hello, there, strangers," he said. "How did it go?"

  "Fine," I said, getting out of the van. "What are you doing out here?"

  "How's my baby?" Foster said to Vida.

  "Great," she said.

  "Why aren't you inside?" I said.

  "Tired, honey?" Foster said to Vida. He put his arm gently around her.

  "A little," she said.

  "Well, that's the way it should be, but it won't last long."

  "The library?" I said.

  "Good girl," Foster
said to Vida. "Am I glad to see you! You look like a million dollars in small change. What a sight!" giving her a kiss on the cheek.

  "The library?" I said.

  Foster turned toward me. "I'm sorry about that," he said, then turning to Vida, "Oh, what a girl!"

  "You're sorry about what?" I said.

  "Don't worry," Foster said. "It's for the best. You need a rest, a change of scene. You'll be a lot happier now.

  "Happier, what? What's going on?"

  "Well," Foster said. He had his arm around Vida and she was looking up at him as he tried to explain what was going on.

  There was a slight smile on her face that grew large and larger as Foster continued, "Well, it happened this way. I was sitting there minding your asylum when this lady came in with a book and she—"

  I looked away from Foster toward the library where its friendly light was shining out and I looked inside the glass door and I could see a woman sitting behind the desk.

  I couldn't see her face but I could see that it was a woman and her form looked quite at home. My heart and my stomach started doing funny things in my body.

  "You mean?" I said, unable to find the words.

  "That's right," Foster said. "She said the way that I was handling the library was a disgrace and I was a slob and she would take it over now: thank you.

  "I told her that you'd been here for years and that you were great with the library and I was just watching it during an emergency. She said that didn't make any difference, that if you had turned the library over to me, even for a day, you didn't deserve to be in charge of the library any more.

  "I told her that I worked at the caves and she said that I didn't work there any more, that her brother would take care of it from now on, that I should think of doing something else like getting a job.

  "Then she asked me where the living quarters were and I pointed out the way and she went in and packed all your stuff. When she found Vida's things there, she said, 'I got here just in time!' Then she had me take it all out here and I've been sitting here ever since."