The Tokyo-Montana Express (12 page)

Every time I look at the chickens
these days here in Montana, north of Yellowstone National Park, I think about
something and finally it’s reached the point where I have to share it with
another person, so tor better or for worse, here it is.

Oh, yes, a word of warning:

If you are expecting something dramatic to
be revealed about chickens and their place in the firmament, forget about it.
What I am about to reveal here could not be used as the plot for a disaster
movie starring Burt Reynolds as a chicken rancher who takes the law in his own
hands with brilliant cameo appearances by Reggie Jackson, Lillian Carter, Red Buttons,
Bill Walton, Elizabeth Taylor, the graves of Abbott and Costello, and also
starring Charlton Heston as “Oak.”

Last week I was taking some leftover ears
of corn out to the chickens. I like to liven up their lives with scraps, so
they will be stimulated to lay inspired eggs, eggs that are just like going to
church.

When the chickens saw me leave the house
carrying something toward them, they all ran over to the fence and waited for
me. My appearances at the chicken house with leftover goodies from the kitchen
constitute a large part of their day.

Sometimes I feel like chorale director
because the chickens are always making a big racket clucking away as I start
toward them. I wonder how
The Messiah
would sound sung by eighteen
chickens.

I was carrying six very large ears of corn
in a small plastic bag, but if you really want the truth: The ears of corn were
actually huge, gigantic, larger than life!

I planned on just dumping them over the
fence and going on with the rest of my life. When I got to the chicken yard and
saw the chickens all gathered closely together, I realized that I had better be
careful because I didn’t want to dump the ears of corn on the chickens heads. I
had a vision of three or four chickens being knocked cold by huge ears of corn
falling from the sky. I didn’t like that idea at all.

I could see them lying unconscious with the
other chickens gathered solemnly around their fallen comrades and looking up at
me with expressions of anti-imperialistic hatred in their eyes:

“YANKEE DOG, GO HOME!”

No, no, I didn’t want nor need that
responsibility piled on a life that already had enough problems, so I took a
few steps down the fence away from the chickens and shook the corn out of the
bag.

As the ears of corn fell en masse out of
the plastic bag, one chicken rushed out of the flock toward me and all six ears
landed right on his head. They of course did not knock him unconscious. They
caused him to be knocked sideways and then jump a foot in the air. Then down he
came, gave his head a good shake to make sure that it was still there and
joined in eating with the other chickens who did not give a damn about six ears
of corn landing on this dumbbell’s head.

I went away a little confused myself and
thinking about the possibilities of six ears of corn and eighteen possible chicken
head targets and how that one chicken got all the corn on his head. There
should have been other combinations. For instance: One ear of corn on six
different chicken heads or two ears of corn on one chicken head and three ears
of corn on single chicken heads and the remaining ear of corn missing
altogether a possible chicken head and just falling harmlessly on the ground.

I think you get the picture of what was
going on in my mind except that I have not told you the reason for this story.
Sometimes I feel just like the chicken who got all six ears of corn on his
head.

He sits alone in a sea of beds. They
break around him like silent, motionless waves. It is a rainy winter day in San
Francisco and nobody wants to buy a bed. He is a middle-aged man and very
bored. He sits there surrounded by beds of every flavor and variety. There are
maybe fifty or sixty double beds in the huge showroom and he is sitting on one
of them.

He realizes that the situation is hopeless
because he has taken his suit coat off and is just sitting there. He is wearing
a dress shirt with a tie but he should have his coat on to create a responsible
appearance, somebody who sincerely wants to sell beds, but he just doesn’t give
a damn right now.

“Nobody is going to buy a bed today,” he
thinks. “I might as well be comfortable.”

He also knows that his boss would not
approve of him taking his coat off, but his boss is at the dentist having a wisdom
tooth extracted, so… that takes care of the boss. Rain continues to fall.

It will come down all day long.

He stares out at the rain through the huge
panoramic windows of the bed store but he doesn’t see it. For a few seconds he
thinks about how he got into selling beds for a living. He took pre-med in college
with the dream of being a doctor but he doesn’t complete the thought. It’s too depressing
to finish, so his mind just blanks out.

Meanwhile, the beds wait for owners.

They wait for the stillness of sleepers and
the spring-disturbing antics of passion makers. They wait for the thousands of
clean sheets that will become dirty sheets. It will all begin very simply with
two virginal sheets.

People will be created and people will die
in these beds.

The beds wait to be in museums centuries
from now, providing wonder and amusement for people wearing strange clothes and
perhaps speaking languages that have not been invented yet.

The salesman, almost lost in an immensity
of beds, does not know that he is a shepherd of the future and these beds are
his flock.

The 1960s:

A lot of people remember hating President
Lyndon Baines Johnson and loving Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, depending on
the point of view. God rest their souls.

I remember an Indian woman looking for a
tire chain in the snow. She was about fifty or so and we didn’t see her at first.
It was New Mexico 1969. We saw her brother standing patiently beside a blue
Age-of-Aquarius pickup truck parked on the side of the road. He was about her
age, but as I said just a few words ago, she wasn’t there. We wouldn’t see her
until later.

Because he was basically parked in the
middle of nowhere we stopped and asked him if he needed any help. “No,” he
said. “Everything’s just fine.”

That being settled we asked if we could get
through on the road to the obscure place where we were headed; some old Indian
ruins. I might add all this is taking place in a snowy landscape and the other
person that it took to make a we or an us was a long since gone girlfriend. The
last I heard she was in South America.

Jeeping it in New Mexico, we were just
driving around in the late winter, early spring, taking in the sights with not
many people to distract us.

“The road’s good,” the Indian said. “There’s
more snow here than there is ahead. It’s pretty good three or four miles from
here. This is the worst.”

That made us feel better.

The road was a white tire track vagueness
that disappeared into a premature horizon. There were fat beaconesque mesas
towering up from the desert floor. The road vanished somewhere in between their
shipless vigilance.

I had a strong feeling that the mesas didn’t
give a damn about that road. To them the road was just a passing cartoon. After
all, they had been witnesses to the beginning of time.

“My sister’s out there,” the Indian said,
casually pointing down the road that very shortly vanished off the face of the
earth.

“What?” I said, not quite hearing or maybe
just not believing what he had just said.

“She’s looking for the chain. I lost a tire
chain out there. She’s looking for it.”

I looked down the road.

I didn’t see anybody.

“About a mile or so,” he said, still
pointing.

He had one foot on the running board of the
pickup.

“There’s somebody out there,” I said, still
playing straight man.

“My sister,” he said. “I hope she finds
that chain. It cost me three dollars. Used.”

“Yeah,” I said, blindly. What else could I
say because I certainly couldn’t see an Indian woman down that road looking for
a three-dollar tire chain?

“When you see her,” he said, “tell her I’m
still here waiting.”

“OK,” I said, my voice like a white cane
tapping along.

We said our good—byes and continued down
the road for a mile or so, and like the Indian said, we saw her walking along
the side of the road looking in the snow for the tire chain.

She was looking very carefully for it in
the late-cold, Snowy-clear New Mexico morning. We stopped beside her and she
looked up from her tire chain searching. Her face was weathered with patience,
her eyes echoed timelessness.

I think the Queen of England would be
impatient by now if she had been looking for a three-dollar tire chain in the
snow.

“Your brother’s waiting for you,” I said,
like a blind-man, motioning with my head down the road.

“I know,” she said. “He’s good at that.”

“Any luck?” I said, like a bat.

I could see that she wasn’t carrying the
tire chain, so obviously she hadn’t found it, but I had to say something.

“It’s here someplace,” she said, glancing
with her eyes at the nearby 121,000 square miles, which is the area of New
Mexico.

“Good luck,” I said, ten years ago in the
Sixties that have become legend now like the days of King Arthur sitting at the
Round Table with the Beatles, and John singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

We drove down the road toward the
Seventies, leaving her slowly behind, looking for a tire chain in the snow with
her brother waiting patiently beside a blue pickup truck with its Age-of-Aquarius
paint job starting to flake.

Whenever I seriously think about the
color white, I think about her, for she is the ultimate definition of white.

She was at a combination exhibition of
paintings and autograph party for a famous Japanese painter-writer. She was
very interested in him as he sat at a table autographing copies of his latest
book. There was a long line of people waiting for his autograph. She did not
get in line but wandered around and around and around the gallery, looking but
not looking at his paintings.