We parked at McClures Beach. I remember very clearly the sound of the car being parked. It made a lot of noise. There were some other cars parked there. Even after our car was parked, totally silent, it was still making noise.
Warm fog swirled in the canyon as we gradually descended. A hundred feet in front of us everything was lost in the fog and a hundred feet behind us everything was lost in the fog. We were walking in a capsule between amnesias.
There were hushed flowers all around us. The flowers looked as if they had been painted by a Fourteenth Century anonymous French painter. My friend and I had not said anything to each other for a long time. Perhaps our tongues had joined the brushes of that painter.
I stared at the watercress in the creek. It looked wealthy. Whenever I see watercress, which isn't very often, I think of the rich. I think they are the only people who can afford it and they use watercress in exotic recipes that they keep hidden in vaults from the poor.
Suddenly we went around a turn in the canyon and there were five handsome teen-age boys in swimming suits burying five pretty teen-age girls in the sand. They were all carved from classical California physical marble.
The girls had arrived at various stages of being buried. One of them was completely buried with only her head above the sand. She was very beautiful with long black hair stretched out along the sand as if it were some kind of dark water, perhaps jade, flowing out of her head.
The girls were all very happy being buried in the sand and so were the boys who were burying them in the sand. It was a teen-age graveyard party because they had run out of everything else to do. They were surrounded by towels, beer cans, beach baskets, picnic leftovers, etc.
They gave us no particular attention as we walked by and down to the Pacific Ocean where I mentally pinched myself to make sure that I was still in this Christ-powered photograph.
Forgiven
THIS story is a close friend or perhaps even a lover to a story called "Elmira." They both deal in a way with the Long Tom River and the time when I was young, a teen-ager, and somehow the Long Tom River was a part of my spiritual DNA.
I really needed that river. It was the beginning answers to some very complicated questions in my life that I am still trying to work out.
I'm quite aware that Richard Brautigan has written a novel called Trout Fishing in America that deals thoroughly with trout fishing and its kaleidoscope of environments, so I'm a little embarrassed to try something in the same theme, but I'm going to go ahead because this is a story that I have to tell.
I used to go fishing on the Long Tom River way back in the mountains where the river in parts wasn't much wider than a coffee table with a best seller sitting on it.
The trout were little cutthroats between six and ten inches long and a lot of fun to catch. I really got good at fishing the Long Tom and could take my limit of ten fish in little over an hour if I had any kind of luck at all.
The Long Tom River was forty miles away. I usually hitch-hiked there late in the afternoon and would leave in the twilight to hitch-hike the forty miles back home.
A few times I hitch-hiked there in the rain and fished in the rain and hitch-hiked back in the rain. I travelled eighty miles in a wet circle.
I'd get out at a bridge across the Long Tom and fish down half a mile to another bridge across the river. It was a wooden bridge that looked like an angel. The river was sort of murky. It was gentle fishing between the bridges, down through a lazy dripping landscape.
Below the second bridge, which looked like a white wooden angel, the Long Tom River flowed into very strange ways. It was dark and haunting and went something like this: Every hundred yards or so there was a large open swamp-like pool and then the river flowed out of the pool into a fast shallow run covered over closely with trees like a shadowy knitted tunnel until it reached the next swampy pool and very seldom did I let the Long Tom River call me down into there.
But late one August afternoon I had fished down to the angel bridge and the fishing hadn't been very good. I only had four or five trout.
It was raining and very warm up there in the mountains and edging toward sundown and actually it may have been early twilight. I couldn't tell exactly what time it was because of the rain.
Anyway: I was taken by some goofy kid reason to try a little fishing down below the bridge into those knitted river tunnels and big swampy open pools.
It was really too late to go down into there and I should have just turned around and got out of there and hitch-hiked the forty miles back home through the rain.
I should have let well enough alone.
But, Oh no, I started fishing down into there. It was tropical in the tunnels and I was catching trout where the tunnels flowed into the big swampy pools. Then I'd have to wade around the pools through deep warm mud.
I lost a trout that went about thirteen inches long and that really got my excitement up, so I continued fishing down further and further until I was six swampy pools past the wooden angel bridge when suddenly, out of nowhere, the light just dropped away within a few moments, falling into total night and there I was halfway around the sixth swampy pool in the dark, and in front of me there was nothing but darkness and water, and behind me was nothing but darkness and water.
The strangest God-damn feeling of fear shook through me. It was just like a crystal chandelier made out of adrenaline swaying wildly in an earthquake, and I turned around and fled up the river, splashing like an alligator around the big swampy pools and running like a dog up the shallow tunnels.
Every horror in the world was at my back, at my sides and directly in front of me and they were all without names and had no shape but perception itself.
When at last I ran out of the final tunnel and saw the dim white outline of the bridge standing out against the night, my soul was born again through a vision of rescue and sanctuary.
As I got closer and closer, the bridge bloomed like a white wooden angel in my eyes until I was sitting on the bridge, resting and soaking wet but not at all cold in the constant rain of the mountain evening.
I hope that Richard Brautigan will forgive me for writing this story.
American Flag Decal
THIS story begins with an American flag decal on the rear window of a pickup truck, but you can barely see it because the truck is far away and then it turns off the highway onto a side road and it's gone, but somehow we have started again.
It's good to be back in California after a very unhappy month in the East: New York, etc.... with too much drunkenness, days and days of cold autumn rain and love affairs that were breathing mirrors of my unhappiness.
Now out here driving through the California countryside with a friend all we have to do is find somebody to repair his broken cesspool. It's a mess. We need somebody right now whose living is made from the knowing and handling of cesspools.
We drive down one road and then another, looking for a particular cesspool man. We stop at a place where we think he lives, but we are very wrong by about a million miles. It's a place that sells honey.
We don't know how we made the mistake. It's a long ways from a cesspool man to some women behind a screen door selling honey.
We think it's amusing and so do they. We laugh at ourselves and they laugh at us. We are funny and drive away talking about the inner and outer roads that a man travels down to arrive at owning a grocery store or being a doctor or knowing cesspools intimately or how somebody else decides te sell honey but then is mistaken for a cesspool man.
A short, humorously spiritual distance away we find a cesspool man who's at home surrounded by all the equipment that he needs to successfully exercise cesspools.
Three men are fixing a broken truck. They stop working and turn to look at us. They are very serious in a country-casual way.
"No, not today. We got to fix this truck, so we can go bear hunting."
And that's it and there you have it: They want to fix the truck, so they can go bear hunting. Our cesspool
is transparent, child-like. Bears are more important. I'm glad to be back in California.
The World War I Los Angeles Airplane
HE was found lying dead near the television set on the front room floor of a small rented house in Los Angeles. My wife had gone to the store to get some ice cream. It was an early-in-the-night-just-a-few-blocks-away store. We were in an ice-cream mood. The telephone rang. It was her brother to say that her father had died that afternoon. He was seventy. I waited for her to come home with the ice cream. I tried to think of the best way to tell her that her father was dead with the least amount of pain but you cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of the words somebody is dead.
She was very happy when she came back from the store.
"What's wrong?" she said.
"Your brother just called from Los Angeles," I said.
"What happened?" she said.
"Your father died this afternoon."
That was in 1960 and now it's just a few weeks away from 1970. He has been dead for almost ten years and I've done a lot of thinking about what his death means to all of us.
He was born from German blood and raised on a farm in South Dakota. His grandfather was a terrible tyrant who completely destroyed his three grown sons by treating them exactly the way he treated them when they were children. They never grew up in his eyes and they never grew up in their own eyes. He made sure of that. They never left the farm. They of course got married but he handled all of their domestic matters except for the siring of his grandchildren. He never allowed them to discipline their own children. He took care of that for them. Her father thought of his father as another brother who was always trying to escape the never-relenting wrath of their grandfather.
He was smart, so he became a schoolteacher when he was eighteen and he left the farm which was an act of revolution against his grandfather who from that day forth considered him dead. He didn't want to end up like his father, hiding behind the barn. He taught school for three years in the Midwest and then he worked as an automobile salesman in the pioneer days of car selling.
There was an early marriage followed by an early divorce with feelings afterward that left the marriage hanging like a skeleton in her family's closet because he tried to keep it a secret. He probably had been very much in love.
There was a horrible automobile accident just before the First World War in which everybody was killed except him. It was one of those automobile accidents that leave deep spiritual scars like historical landmarks on the family and friends of the dead.
When America went into the First World War in 1917, he decided that he wanted to be a pilot, though he was in his late twenties. He was told that it would be impossible because he was too old but he projected so much energy into his desire to fly that he was accepted for pilot training and went to Florida and became a pilot.
In 1918 he went to France and flew a De Havilland and bombed a railroad station in France and one day he was flying over the German lines when little clouds began appearing around him and he thought that they were beautiful and flew for a long time before he realized that they were German antiaircraft guns trying to shoot him down.
Another time he was flying over France and a rainbow appeared behind the tail of his plane and every turn that the plane made, the rainbow also made the same turn and it followed after him through the skies of France for part of an afternoon in 1918.
When the war was over he got out a captain and he was travelling on a train through Texas when the middle-aged man sitting next to him and with whom he had been talking for about three hundred miles said, "If I was a young man like you and had a little extra cash, I'd go up to Idaho and start a bank. There's a good future in Idaho banking."
That's what her father did.
He went to Idaho and started a bank which soon led to three more banks and a large ranch. It was by now 1926 and everything was going all right.
He married a schoolteacher who was sixteen years his junior and for their honeymoon they took a train to Philadelphia and spent a week there.
When the stock market crashed in 1929 he was hit hard by it and had to give up his banks and a grocery store that he had picked up along the way, but he still had the ranch, though he had to put a mortgage on it.
He decided to go into sheep raising in 1931 and got a big flock and was very good to his sheepherders. He was so good to them that it was a subject of gossip in his part of Idaho. The sheep got some kind of horrible sheep disease and all died.
He got another big flock of sheep in 1933 and added more fuel to the gossip by continuing to be so good to his men. The sheep got some kind of horrible sheep disease and all died in 1934.
He gave his men a big bonus and went out of the sheep business.
He had just enough money left over after selling the ranch to pay off all his debts and buy a brand-new Chevrolet which he put his family into and he drove off to California to start all over again.
He was forty-four, had a twenty-eight-year-old wife and an infant daughter.
He didn't know anyone in California and it was the Depression.
His wife worked for a while in a prune shed and he parked cars at a lot in Hollywood.
He got a job as a bookkeeper for a small construction company.
His wife gave birth to a son.
In 1940 he went briefly into California real estate, but then decided not to pursue it any further and went back to work for the construction company as a bookkeeper.
His wife got a job as a checker in a grocery store where she worked for eight years and then an assistant manager quit and opened his own store and she went to work for him and she still works there.
She has worked twenty-three years now as a grocery checker for the same store.
She was very pretty until she was forty.
The construction company laid him off. They said he was too old to take care of the books. "It's time for you to go out to pasture," they joked. He was fifty-nine.
They rented the same house they lived in for twenty-five years, though they could have bought it at one time with no down payment and monthly payments of fifty dollars.
When his daughter was going to high school he was working there as the school janitor. She saw him in the halls. His working as a janitor was a subject that was very seldom discussed at home.
Her mother would make lunches for both of them.
He retired when he was sixty-five and became a very careful sweet wine alcoholic. He liked to drink whiskey but they couldn't afford to keep him in it. He stayed in the house most of the time and started drinking about ten o'clock, a few hours after his wife had gone off to work at the grocery store.
He would get quietly drunk during the course of the day. He always kept his wine bottles hidden in a kitchen cabinet and would secretly drink from them, though he was alone.
He very seldom made any bad scenes and the house was always clean when his wife got home from work. He did though after a while take on that meticulous manner of walking that alcoholics have when they are trying very carefully to act as if they aren't drunk.
He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use.
He watched afternoon television.
Once he had been followed by a rainbow across the skies of France while flying a World War I airplane carrying bombs and machine guns.
"Your father died this afternoon."
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966
Richard Brautigan
DEDICATION
Frank:
come on in—
read novel—
it's on table
in front room.
I'll be back
in about
2 hours.
Richard
BOOK 1: Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?
The Library
THIS is a beautiful library, timed perfectly, lush and American. The hour is midnight and the library is deep and carried like a d
reaming child into the darkness of these pages. Though the library is "closed" I don't have to go home because this is my home and has been for years, and besides, I have to be here all the time. That's part of my position. I don't want to sound like a petty official, but I am afraid to think what would happen if somebody came and I wasn't here.
I have been sitting at this desk for hours, staring into the darkened shelves of books. I love their presence, the way they honor the wood they rest upon.
I know it's going to rain.
Clouds have been playing with the blue style of the sky all day long, moving their heavy black wardrobes in, but so far nothing rain has happened.
I "closed" the library at nine, but if somebody has a book to bring in, there is a bell they can ring by the door that calls me from whatever I am doing in this place: sleeping, cooking, eating or making love to Vida who will be here shortly.
She gets off work at 11:30.
The bell comes from Fort Worth, Texas. The man who brought us the bell is dead now and no one learned his name. He brought the bell in and put it down on a table. He seemed embarrassed and left, a stranger, many years ago. It is not a large bell, but it travels intimately along a small silver path that knows the map to our hearing.
Often books are brought in during the late evening and the early morning hours. I have to be here to receive them. That's my job.
I "open" the library at nine o'clock in the morning and "close" the library at nine in the evening, but I am here twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to receive the books.
An old woman brought in a book a couple of days ago at three o'clock in the morning. I heard the bell ringing inside my sleep like a small highway being poured from a great distance into my ear.
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 11
