The Tokyo-Montana Express (27 page)

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.”

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 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.

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.

…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.