The Tokyo-Montana Express (15 page)

It’s a hot day and a young priest
steps out of a church door, almost bumping into me. He is wearing a black,
short-sleeve shirt. Maybe some kind of priest summerwear? I don’t know but it
is a warm day.

“It’s gone!” the priest says, glancing
angrily at some cars parked in front of the church. The cars occupy all the parking
places. He stamps his foot on the sidewalk like a gravely-dressed little kid.

He shakes his head in disgust.

“It was here just a minute ago!” he says. “Now
we’ll have to find another place to park.” He is talking to an older priest who
walked out just after him and says nothing.

I hope there is plenty of parking in
Paradise.

Ever time; and I am talking about a
period of seven years, I call a certain friend on the telephone, he is always
home. I’ve called him maybe sixty or seventy times during these seven years and
he always answers.

There is no intentional pattern to my
calling. It is strictly random dialing. I just call him when I feel like it. My
linger pokes seven holes in the telephone and his voice automatically returns, “Hello.”

Most of the time our conversations are not
important, but what is important is that he is always there. Sometimes it is in
the morning and sometimes it is at night.

He says he has a job, but what proof do I
have? He says he got married a few years ago, but I have never met his wife and
she never answers the phone.

I called him today at 1:15 in the afternoon
and of course he was there. The phone rang only once. Lately, I’ve been thinking
that since 1972 he has just been sitting around, waiting for me to call.

We left Pine Creek, Montana, and
headed down the road toward Bozeman to pick up a friend at the airport. He was
flying in from Los Angeles, California.

The snow was very deep, locking up the
ground like a white jail, and the temperature was a permanent 13 below zero
with a meat ax wind showing who was boss of the North Country.

My friend was going to have quite a
surprise when he landed. The expression on his face would be interesting to observe.
The palm trees that he drove by on his way to Los Angeles International Airport
only a few hours ago would instantly become a distant part of the past when he
got out of that airplane. Those trees could have been in his childhood. Maybe
he saw them when he was six years old.

I was right and we drove back to Pine
Creek.

The road was an icy sword cutting starkly
through country that wore winter like a suit of albino armor. We went around a
bend in the road and there were six huge crows black as a blindman’s dreams.
The crows were eating a truck tire in the center of the road. They didn’t move
as we approached them. They didn’t show any fear or a desire to let us pass.
They just kept eating the truck tire. We drove around them.

“You’ve got some winter here,” my friend
said, LA gone, now only a ghost town in his mind. “Those crows are hungry.”

I’ve been thinking about this for
years. It’s been like a soup simmering on the back burner of my mind. I’ve stirred
the soup thousands of time… often out of nervousness as the years have slipped
away, leaving me older and older, and not quite the man I once was.

…of course it has to be a woman… that’s taken
so much time… cooking

slowly down

until finally I have arrived at these
words; I don’t know her name or what she looked like other than she was a short
blond woman, and comely. I think she had blue eyes but I’ll never be certain.

I do remember that she had a very healthy
outlook on things and glowed with cheerfulness, though I can remember only one
thing we talked about.

I was very drunk. Whiskey had obscured my
intelligence like a tropical rainstorm. Soaking wet monkeys were at play in my
mind.

But she was interested in me, though what I
was saying could hardly have made any sense. I remember her looking up at me.
She was amused. We talked for a few moments or was it hours? We were in a bar
someplace. There were a lot of people. They were a shimmering have of clothing.

She kept listening to me.

The one thing I remember talking to her
about was her body.

I wanted it.

“Yes!” she said, very enthusiastically—“But
come back when you’re sober.”

That’s the only thing I remember her saying
the next morning, which was years ago, when I woke up alone in bed with a
classic hangover like feeding time in an anteater grotto and you’re it, buster.
I still had my clothes on or perhaps more accurately yet, my clothes had me on…

oh, God! I couldn’t remember where I had
been or how I got home.

So I lay there hurting and thinking about
her.

I took her words, like fresh ingredients,
and carefully sliced them into a huge mental pot, along with everything else
about her that I had said here, and put a slow fire under the pot because it
would have to cook for years.

“
Yes!
”
she said
,
very
enthusiastically
—“
But come back when you’re sober
.”

Too bad I didn’t know where back was.

Once upon a time there was a dwarf knight
who only had fifty word to live in and they were so fleeting that he only had
time to put on a suit of armor and ride swiftly on a black horse into a very
well-lit woods where he vanished forever.

Osaka is a Southern Japanese heavy industrial
area of 8,333,845 people. It is not known for oranges.

This evening I was thinking about eating
beautiful oranges from Osaka. They were so sweet, so delicious, so orangy. I
could see them growing in thousands of orchards all around Osaka which was
known as the Orange Capital of the Orient.

I could see the city almost possessed by
oranges. Everybody eating oranges, talking about oranges and oranges on every
tongue. Oranges and more oranges, and the babies of Osaka smelled like orange blossoms.
I am also the only person who ever thought about this.

Somebody has to take his tennis shoes
off. As an afterthought: nobody wants to, but it’s ridiculous for him to go on
wearing them because he doesn’t need them any more.

Nobody wants to take them off.

They’re wet and very cold and have a
strange whiteness to them that is absolutely silent.

He lies on the riverbank with his tennis
shoes a few inches from the water, the last thing that he ever knew, filling
him up with death.

Tokyo

July 14, 1978