Jubilee Hitchhiker (13 page)

Bill got up and went out the front door without a word. He signed on at Wyatt's, recapping tires, the very same day. Even so, tension remained electric between Dick and Bill. Having a new man around Mom after more than five years undoubtedly added unfamiliar emotional energy to the teenager's awakening sexuality. Even big-hearted Bill didn't want to see that hostile stare every time he came into his pop-stand kitchen. He set immediately to work on further home reconstruction. A built-on garage with a dirt floor sagged against the outside kitchen wall. It was not a big space, the floor area no more than eight feet by ten feet. The Folstons stored stove wood there, as well as in the shed on the other side of the kitchen door. They decided the old garage would make a perfect bedroom for Dick Porterfield.

Bill fixed the place up in a rudimentary way. “It was just tar paper,” Barbara remembered. “Tar paper on the outside, tar paper on the inside of the house part, and he kind of finished it up a little bit.”

“It was more like a hut than anything else,” Chuck Wical recollected. For Dick Porterfield, it promised pure Huck Finn freedom. Having a separate entrance from the main house allowed him to come and go as he pleased. B.J. fretted because he didn't have direct access to a bathroom. When the hour grew late, Dick avoided disturbing the others by not using the inside facilities. “I think that was why he did a lot of walking,” Barbara surmised. “He'd walk to a service station or something to go to the bathroom if he had to.”

B.J., a vivacious and gregarious girl, didn't comprehend the solitary compulsions of a natural-born loner like her brother. Dick never explained his need to wander the dark streets of Eugene for hours late at night. The seeds of poetry often require nocturnal cultivation. Walking along alone in the shadows also felt kind of cool. His primitive tar paper room became both Dick's refuge and a portal to independence.

“It was very, very messy.” Art Wical spent many hours in Dick's hideout room, yet couldn't remember ever meeting any of his family. “I just knew that he had a sister.” Young Porterfield began a lifelong habit of compartmentalizing his friendships. He assumed a secret life. By the last year of high school, Dick had a typewriter, a telephone, and a radio out in his room. Certain physical improvements had also been made. A window went in after Bill Folston spotted an advertisement for salvage in the paper. “Grandpa” Charlie Hines, a neighbor, performed the needed carpentry. He also hung the door Dick found somewhere to replace what his mother called “an old shackle-door.”

Once he started high school, Dick retreated to the sanctity of his room, spending less time with Barbara. Babysitting continued as a regular chore, but Sandi was now the little girl he hauled along to the logging ponds. More than ever before, fishing consumed Dick Porterfield's life. Adventurous trips meant heading up the McKenzie. Peter Webster said his friend “knew every fishing hole on the river.” Dick's favorite stretch ran from Leaburg Dam to the South Fork of the McKenzie. “We fished Gate Creek, Indian Creek, Vida, Leaburg Reservoir, Blue River, Good Pasture Islands, South Fork, Clear Lake, Olala, Paradise.”

Dick walked or hitchhiked to his favorite spots on the McKenzie. One afternoon when he was twelve, Dick caught a ride with an affable stranger. After a few minutes, the guy put his hand
on Dick's leg. The kid didn't panic. Keeping a straight face, he told the pederast that his father was chief of police of the next little town down the road. The offending hand was immediately withdrawn. The pervert dropped Dick off safely. Years later, when Richard told this story to his daughter, she took the moral to be “it's okay to lie in order to save your ass.”

B.J. remained enough of a tomboy at twelve to still want to go fishing. She remembered “getting up early in the morning” and walking twenty miles with her brother if they didn't thumb down a ride. “We'd get home late at night during the summer.” Lorna Smith, two years younger than Dick Porterfield, glimpsed him once during this period from a bus window and retained an image all the rest of her life: “He was tall and had overalls on and looked raggedy, and that's how he stuck in my mind. He had a fishing pole, and it reminded me of Tom Sawyer.”

The soup bowl haircuts Mary Lou gave her white-blond oldest son only enhanced this archetype, a Mark Twain character hitchhiking up the McKenzie in the rain with a fly rod under his arm and a peanut butter sandwich in his pocket. A number of cherished Folston family tales involved Dick's fishing obsession. In the retelling, they sound like ghost chapters from
Trout Fishing in America
.

A year or so before she died, Bessie Dixon paid her last visit to Eugene, bringing her grandson a brand-new woolen suit. Mary Lou organized a picnic. The family went out to Skinner Butte, a popular city park where bears were kept caged in pits. The Willamette River provided the park's northern boundary. After lunch, Dick went fishing. He'd long admired a snapshot of Moonshine Bess and a twenty-five-pound salmon she'd caught from the cupola-covered sundeck of her riverbank home in St. Helens. Richard returned at dusk, having slipped and fallen in the river. His new wool trousers had shrunk comically high above his ankles, as if he'd swapped clothes with a midget.

Mary Lou thought her son “was kind of afraid” of Bessie. “I don't remember any loving affection between him or her. My mother was businesslike. She'd kiss you hello and goodbye and that was that.” Barbara recalled things differently. “Richard and I both liked her. Jovial, easygoing, seemed to me she laughed all the time. Was very warm and loving, I can remember, but we didn't get to see her that much. I have maybe about three or four recollections of visiting with her. My mother wasn't that close to her.”

Another time, Dick Porterfield hooked a huge salmon spawning in shallow water far up the McKenzie. After a monumental thrashing fight, he maneuvered the big fish up onto a gravel bank. Barbara remembered that “he called home and asked my stepdad if he could come up there, probably because it was illegal. It must have weighed twenty-five pounds.” Mary Lou related how her son failed once to come home from fishing. Having a laissez-faire attitude about Dick's late-night angling, she didn't get worried until the next day and was on the phone with the sheriff when he finally walked in the door just before noon. He'd gotten lost after dark far up the McKenzie, fishing some remote feeder creek, and had taken refuge in a strange mountain cabin.

“Mama, they were really crazy,” he said of the people he met there. “They scared me to death.” Mary Lou recalled that he spent the night in the cabin but didn't sleep. “He was eyeing them and they were eyeing him. They were really weird.” Perhaps this was the “large shack [. . .] with a lot of old cars surrounding it” described in the short story “A Short History of Oregon.” There was something spooky about the old place with a “crude makeshift porch,” where four shoeless children with hair “unruly like dwarf witches',” watched the narrator pass by in the rain.

For Christmas in 1951, Bill Folston gave his stepson a side-by-side double-barreled sixteen-gauge shotgun, the first firearm Dick ever owned. Later in life, Richard Brautigan told his
daughter that his stepfather “taught me how to hunt and bought me a .22 rifle for my thirteenth birthday.” According to Mary Lou, Dick Porterfield did not have a .22 rifle when he was a kid. She remembered her husband once giving Dick a fine pearl-handled pocket knife. “He said, ‘Put this away for me, Mama.' And I still got that thing. I figured he didn't want it because Papa gave it to him.”

Dick Porterfield owned a little dog, a ten-pound brown and white rat terrier named Pluto. Bill Folston brought home a pair of pups given to him by a neighbor. Pluto was the runt of the litter, his sister, “fat and sassy.” They kept the little dogs in a cardboard box in the kitchen and fed them milk from a bottle. The bitch was given away. Dick named Pluto after the Disney character. The feisty little dog loved chasing car tires. Potholes cratered the gravel street outside, and traffic passed slowly. Pluto ran out from ambush and bit hold of the tires, whirling round and round, “two or three times,” before being hurled free from the jouncing automobiles. Pluto bit automobile tires every day for years until he was killed by a car one night, following Dick to a neighborhood grocery store.

Though he was famed as a watch dog and slayer of rats, Pluto's finest canine attribute was his ability to find birds. “He'd take off running, in wheat fields and tall grass, and he would point.” Dick and Barbara hunted pheasants together out West Sixth Street and up among the old orchards on Bailey Hill, where the Husband boy had been killed. “He had no license or nothing,” his mother remembered, “but he could bag pheasants.” Dick was right-handed but shot left-handed. He was a decent wing-shot.

Hunting together with Pluto became Dick and B.J.'s final shared adventure. The next year she contracted polio. At twelve, she still walked by his side, watching him bring down the birds Pluto flushed out of weed-choked irrigation ditches. Barbara thought her brother might soon need glasses. He couldn't tell the roosters from the hens. “When he killed the hens, I carried them under my coat,” B.J. said. “And if it was a rooster, he carried it across his shoulder.”

They hunted for food. Mary Lou served fried pheasant whenever Dick brought birds home. Dick went out with Pluto alone after B.J. was ill. Sometimes he was accompanied by Gary Stewart. The two boys hunted together before Bill gave Dick the shotgun. “We used to get my dad's guns,” Gary remembered, “sneak those out, and we'd go hunt pheasants out West Eleventh as far as Fern Ridge.” They also hunted the sloughs south of Eugene. “Every Sunday morning we'd make a run down through that gully, and there would always be a few ducks that came up.”

The Folston family owned a ranch in Halsey, in eastern Oregon. Every fall the brothers hunted deer and elk together up Bridge Creek or Gable Creek in the nearby mountains of the Ochoco National Forest. At fourteen, Dick Porterfield accompanied Bill Folston, not yet married to Mary Lou, and stepuncles (Matt, Andy, Seldon, Jim, and Larry) on his first and only deer-hunting expedition.

Dick never talked about an incident in camp on this trip. Uncle Larry rubbed venison blood all over his face while he lay sleeping and woke the boy by pouring ice-cold creek water into his ear. “Uncle Larry was mean,” Mary Lou declared. “And so was his wife.” The blood baptism occurred the same year Donald Husband died. “I don't know what happened,” Barbara said. “He went once, and he would never go again. He just hated that whole thing.”

Dick and B.J. didn't do much together once he was in high school. She was sick a lot. Starting with polio at thirteen, Barbara was hit with life-threatening illnesses on a yearly basis. Mary Lou
summed things up: “She had polio and she had spinal meningitis the following year and the year after that she had virus of the spine.” Healthy again at sixteen, B.J. gladly took a live-in job away from home, caring for the children of the wealthy Guistina family, who owned a local lumber yard.

Dick Porterfield attended Eugene High School, a three-story factorylike brick building at the corner of Seventeenth and Lincoln. With its many windows, it must have seemed quite progressive when the block-long structure was built in 1915. Termed “commodious” at the time, the school could no longer accommodate its student population. The Class of 1953 (Dick's class), was the last to graduate before a new campus opened across town as South Eugene High.

American high schools in the early 1950s resembled Archie Andrews much more than
Blackboard Jungle.
Everybody sported “I Like Ike” and “I Go Pogo” pins. Rock and roll had not emerged from the black rhythm-and-blues stations at the far ends of the AM band to knock Joni James, Eddie Fisher, Johnnie Ray, and Patti Page off the pop charts forever. Eugene High held noontime hops, and the kids slow-danced to the strains of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window,” “Love Letters in the Sand,” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

The big clothing fad among the boys demanded garish plaid or checked trousers. Most guys trimmed their hair short in crew cuts, popular since the GIs came home victorious from World War II. The gals looked even worse, sporting short, perky “Which Twin Has the Toni” perms, Peter Pan blouses, bobby socks, saddle shoes, and straight skirts hemmed at midcalf, the most unflattering length of the century.

Dick Porterfield remained impervious to fads and the sartorial demands of the clique fashion police. “He was a loner, you know,” his mother explained. Solitary by nature, Dick withdrew more and more into a private realm several dimensions away from high school high jinks. He and Gary Stewart “sort of drifted apart. We were friends, but I had a different group of people that I went around with.” Dick still played intramural ball with the Heibert and Wical twins, but he mainly hung out with Stan Oswald and Rex Sorenson, helping them with their homework. Rexford's mother was a schoolteacher, and he needed all the help he could get to live up to her lofty expectations. Rex also aspired to become a writer. He planned on going to college and learning how to write but ended up with a PhD in education instead.

No one expected anything much of Dick Porterfield, who had no plans for college. He continued to be an indifferent scholar at best. Don Hiebert remembered his friend writing “genius level” papers in high school. He felt Dick capable of the honor roll had he cared about grades. The school officials listed Dick's IQ as 105. He probably also goofed off during his intelligence tests. Hiebert thought Porterfield did lesser work to “flaunt it” to his teachers. Barbara recalled her brother being “very good in school—in the subjects that he liked.”

Dick Porterfield remained an invisible presence at Eugene High. Roland Medel (editor of the
EHS News
, varsity football player, and National Honor Society member), a BMOC with a wide range of friends and acquaintances, can't recall him at all. Medel became a fan of Brautigan's work twenty years later and was stunned to discover they had once been classmates. He asked many of those from his varied circles if they remembered Richard in school. The best answer he got was, “‘Kind of a tall lanky kid—maybe light-colored hair.'”