The Tokyo-Montana Express (16 page)

She has let herself go and she is
thirty-five pounds overweight. Her long dark hair is a tangled rebel against combs
and brushes. Her wardrobe could be described as sloppy and desolate.

And all she wants to do is talk.

There are a bunch of us in a cabin; twelve
or fourteen. The occasion is a very loose dinner party in the foothills of New
Mexico, just outside of a small town.

The food is delicious.

We sit around on the floor eating it.

We all look like hippies.

On my way to the house, riding on the back of
a truck, some spring snow tell. It was a slight flurry that didn’t stick, and a
short while later I watched a beautiful sunset from outside the house and I
played with two kittens and a tomcat and marvelled at how big New Mexico is.

Everything is very casual inside the house,
low-geared, mellow, except for the girl. She interrupts whatever we are talking
about, which isn’t very important stuff, but still after a while it gets on our
nerves a little.

We are all very patient with her. She talks
very slowly in a shy bumbling way. She is like having a difficult child about
the house.

These are the things that she talks about:

1. We should all make our clothes out of a
special seaweed that grows along the California coast. She has a notebook full
of designs for seaweed clothes out in the Volkswagen bus. She will go and get
the book after she has finished eating. Her three children are asleep in the
bus. She never eats meat, so she is making an exception with this meal. They’re
very tired.

(It turns out later that nobody in the
house had ever seen her before. She just came by and joined in. Maybe she
smelled dinner when it was cooking and figured that this was a good place to
park her bus for a while and get something to eat.)

2. We’ll take the massive profits that will
be earned from the seaweed clothes, everybody will want them, Dennis Hopper, he
lives at Taos, and just everybody, maybe Frank Zappa too, and Carole King, and
buy a mountain where people can live in peace and harmony with a great golden
telescope. She knows right where the mountain is. It’s a cheap mountain, too.
It could be purchased for just a few hundred thousand dollars from the seaweed
clothes profits.

(Nobody is really very interested in what
she is talking about because it is such a familiar conversation that everybody
has heard again and again coming from people who have been wiped out by taking
too many drugs or living a life style that’s just too estranged from reality
but somebody has to ask her about the telescope and they do, but…)

3. By this time she has gone onto something
else and the future of the great golden telescope is in serious doubt.

(I take another bite of food.)

4. “Do you know what?” she says suddenly,
having just told us a long story about the possibility of building boats that
look like old-timey train engines like the ones you see in Western movies and
shipping them by real four-wheeled trains to the California coast, where they
would look beautiful anchored beside our seaweed boutiques, “I think I’ve been
in a Volkswagen bus too long.”

When I was a child I knew who killed
Jesse James, shot him in the back when he was putting a picture up on the wall.

That man’s name was as familiar to me as my
own because Jesse James was a hero of my youth. My friends and I used to talk
about him being shot all the time. It was one of our favorite topics and always
good for something to feel sad about or get angry at. Jesse James’s death was
as real and important to us as a death in the family.

But now at the age of forty-three I can’t
remember the name of the man who shot Jesse James. I’ve been trying to think of
it all day but that name has remained out of sight in my mind, hiding somewhere
in the canyons and crevasses of other memories.

I can remember that Pat Garrett shot Billy
the Kid and the Dalton gang should never have gone to Coffeyville, Kansas, for
a little banking where they were turned into bullet-riddled corpses stretched
out on doors being photographed for posterity.

No one wants to have a photograph of
themselves taken lying dead on a door in a Kansas street and be remembered that
way.

…ugh.

You don’t need it.

But that still leaves me not able to
remember the name of the man who shot my boyhood hero Jesse James. I try desperately
to think of his name.

Did it start with Matthew or Will or Sam or
Richard… or I just don’t know.

What I once knew and was so important to me,
I can’t remember now. It has been claimed and taken away by the forces of time,
a Western myth gone like the buffalo with nothing to assume its place.

He is a businessman who comes to Tokyo
three times a year. He is very interested in shoes. No, that’s not his line of
business. He is in some very strange way involved with computers, but still
shoes are what he’s really interested in. Actually, it’s not shoes but feet:
the feet of Japanese women. He is madly in love with their feet.

He comes to Japan three times a year to
look at the feet that are in the shoes. When he is in Japan, which averages two
weeks a visit, he hangs around shoe stores a lot, watching Japanese women
trying on shoes. He also carefully studies the sidewalks of Tokyo as if they
were art galleries because they exhibit shoes like moving sculpture and where
there are shoes! Sometimes he wishes that he was a Japanese sidewalk. That
would be paradise for him but could his heart stand the excitement of being a
sidewalk?

In conventional storytelling this would be
a good time to say some things about the life of the businessman: Maybe his
age, country, background, family, does he masturbate? is he impotent? etc., but
I won’t because it’s not important.

All that’s important is that three times a
year, he comes to Japan, spending two weeks looking at Japanese shoes and the
feet inside of them. Of course, summertime is a must visit for him… sandals!

When the airplane flies him to Japan, he
always gets a window seat and thousands of dancing feet pass by the window in
shoes that bring out all their beauty.

When I was twelve years old in 1947,
I had seventeen cats. There were tomcats, and mother cats, and kittens. I used
to catch fish for them from a pond that was a mile away. The kittens liked to
play with string under the blue sky.

Oregon 1947—California 1978

I saw a light on at the Tastee-Freez a
few weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The Tastee-Freez has
been closed since late October.

This is early March.

It will stay closed until the summer, June
or sometime.

I’ve only been here once when it reopened
for the summer and that was a number of years ago and I was very busy at the
time and I can’t remember exactly when it opened.

Perhaps it opens as early as May or even
earlier.

I don’t know.

But one thing is for certain: until last
year in October, they would always close just after Labor Day and it would be a
signalling symbol to me that the summer was rapidly coming to a close here in Montana
where spring, summer and autumn are so short and winter so very, very long.

They serve a good hamburger, the Big Tee
burger and tasty onion rings and fifty flavors of milk shakes. You could have a
different milk shake every day and almost two months would pass, like a Montana
summer, before you would have to start over again with maybe Red Rose. That’s
one of the flavors they have or if you didn’t want to start off with Red Rose,
you could try a Grasshopper shake.

I’m not kidding.

Anyway, the Tastee-Freez used to close in
early September and for some strange reason it would make me sad. I am growing
older. There is one less summer in life with a closed sign on the door.

…no more Big Tees or the possibility of 700
different flavors of milk shakes…

After a while when they got to know what an
enthusiastic fan of milk shakes you are, they might mix flavors together for
you, opening up almost unlimited milk shake horizons stretching out to your
first Red Rose-Grasshopper shake.

For these long winter months every time I
drive by, the Tastee-Freez is closed and dark at night. That is, until a few
weeks ago when I saw a light on as I drove by.

There was somebody inside the Tastee-Freez.
Oh, I thought, maybe they’re going to open up early this year and not wait
until June or so, but open up in February. It was a good thought. It would
almost be like an early summer coming to this snowy land of Montana.

The next day when I drove by, the closed
sign was still on the door and that night the Tastee-Freez was dark inside
again, and has remained that way ever since. It is definitely closed and
probably will not open until May or June or I don’t know when but it is obvious
they are not going to open up this winter.

Maybe the person who was in there that
night was just checking the supplies, the milk shake flavors, for next summer
or… who knows why somebody would turn the lights on at night in a Tastee-Freez
that’s been closed since late October?

But I continue thinking about it, not so
much about what the person was doing in there but just that the light was on
months before the Tastee-Freez would open.