Trout Fishing in America (12 page)

“To this day I don't know why I saw that movie seven times. It was just as deadly as
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.
I wonder if the Missouri River is still there?” I said.

“It is,” Trout Fishing in America said smiling. “But it doesn't look like Deanna Durbin.”

The baby by this time had put a dozen or so of the colored rocks in Trout Fishing in America's shirt pocket. He looked at me and smiled and waited for me to go on about Great Falls, but just then I had a fair strike on my Super-Duper. I jerked the rod back and missed the fish.

Trout Fishing in America said, “I know that fish who just struck. You'll never catch him.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Forgive me,” Trout Fishing in America said. “Go on ahead and try for him. He'll hit a couple of times more, but you won't catch him. He's not a particularly smart fish! Just lucky. Sometimes that's all you need.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You're right there.”

I cast out again and continued talking about Great Falls.

Then in correct order I recited the twelve least important things ever said about Great Falls, Montana. For the twelfth and least important thing of all, I said, “Yeah, the telephone would ring in the morning. I'd get out of bed. I didn't have to answer the telephone. That had all been taken care of, years in advance.

“It would still be dark outside and the yellow wallpaper in the hotel room would be running back off the light bulb. I'd put my clothes on and go down to the restaurant where my stepfather cooked all night.

“I'd have breakfast, hot cakes, eggs and whatnot. Then he'd make my lunch for me and it would always be the same thing: a piece of pie and a stone-cold pork sandwich. Afterwards I'd walk to school. I mean the three of us, the Holy Trinity: me, a piece of pie, and a stone-cold pork sandwich. This went on for months.

“Fortunately it stopped one day without my having to do anything serious like grow up. We packed our stuff and left town on a bus. That was Great Falls, Montana. You say the Missouri River is still there?”

“Yes, but it doesn't look like Deanna Durbin,” Trout Fishing in America said. “I remember the day Lewis discovered the falls. They left their camp at sunrise and a few hours later they came upon a beautiful plain and on the plain were more buffalo than they had ever seen before in one place.

“They kept on going until they heard the faraway sound of a waterfall and saw a distant column of spray rising and disappearing. They followed the sound as it got louder and louder. After a while the sound was tremendous and they were at the great falls of the Missouri River. It was about noon when they got there.

“A nice thing happened that afternoon, they went fishing below the falls and caught half a dozen trout, good ones, too, from sixteen to twenty-three inches long.

“That was June 13, 1805.

“No, I don't think Lewis would have understood it if the Missouri River had suddenly begun to look like a Deanna Durbin movie, like a chorus girl who wanted to go to college,” Trout Fishing in America said.

I've come home from Trout Fishing in America, the highway bent its long smooth anchor about my neck and then stopped. Now I live in this place. It took my whole life to get here, to get to this strange cabin above Mill Valley.

We're staying with Pard and his girlfriend. They have rented a cabin for three months, June 15th to September 15th, for a hundred dollars. We are a funny bunch, all living here together.

Pard was born of Okie parents in British Nigeria and came to America when he was two years old and was raised as a ranch kid in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

He was a machine-gunner in the Second World War, against the Germans. He fought in France and Germany. Sergeant Pard. Then he came back from the war and went to some hick college in Idaho.

After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk cafe. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it.

When Pard came back to America from Paris, he worked as a tugboat man on San Francisco Bay and as a railroad man in the roundhouse at Filer, Idaho.

Of course, during this time he got married and had a kid. The wife and kid are gone now, blown away like apples by the fickle wind of the Twentieth Century. I guess the fickle wind of all time. The family that fell in the autumn.

After he split up with his wife, he went to Arizona and was a reporter and editor of newspapers. He honky-tonked in Naco, a Mexican border town, drank Mescal Triunfo, played cards and shot the roof of his house full of bullet holes.

Fard tells a story about waking one morning in Naco, all hungover, with the whips and jingles. A friend of his was sitting at the table with a bottle of whisky beside him.

Pard reached over and picked up a gun off a chair and took aim at the whisky bottle and fired. His friend was then sitting there, covered with flecks of glass, blood and whisky. “What the fuck you do that for?” he said.

Now in his late thirties Pard works at a print shop for $1.35 an hour. It is an avant-garde print shop. They print poetry and experimental prose. They pay him $1.35 an hour for operating a linotype machine. A $1.35 linotype operator is hard to find, outside of Hong Kong or Albania.

Sometimes when he goes down there, they don't even have enough lead for him. They buy their lead like soap, a bar or two at a time.

Pard's girlfriend is a Jew. Twenty-four years old, getting over a bad case of hepatitis, she kids Pard about a nude photograph of her that has the possibility of appearing in
Playboy
magazine.

“There's nothing to worry about,” she says. “If they use that photograph, it only means that 12,000,000 men will look at my boobs.”

This is all very funny to her. Her parents have money. As she sits in the other room in the California bush, she's on her father's payroll in New York.

What we eat is funny and what we drink is even more hilarious: turkeys, Gallo port, hot dogs, watermelons, Popeyes, salmon croquettes, frappes, Christian Brothers port, orange rye bread, cantaloupes Popeyes, salads, cheese—booze, grub and Popeyes.

Popeyes?

We read books like
The Thief's Journal
,
Set This House on Fire
,
The Naked Lunch
, Krafft-Ebing. We read Krafft-Ebing aloud all the time as if he were Kraft dinner.

“The mayor of a small town in Eastern Portugal was seen one morning pushing a wheelbarrow full of sex organs into the city hall. He was of tainted family. He had a woman's shoe in his back pocket. It had been there all night.” Things like this make us laugh.

The woman who owns this cabin will come back in the autumn. She's spending the summer in Europe. When she comes back, she will spend only one day a week out here: Saturday.
She will never spend the night because she's afraid to. There is something here that makes her afraid.

Pard and his girlfriend sleep in the cabin and the baby sleeps in the basement, and we sleep outside, under the apple tree, waking at dawn to stare out across San Francisco Bay and then we go back to sleep again and wake once more, this time for a very strange thing to happen, and then we go back to sleep again after it has happened, and wake at sunrise to stare out across the bay.

Afterwards we go back to sleep again and the sun rises steadily hour after hour, staying in the branches of a eucalyptus tree just a ways down the hill, keeping us cool and asleep and in the shade. At last the sun pours over the top of the tree and then we have to get up, the hot sun upon us.

We go into the house and begin that two-hour yak-yak activity we call breakfast. We sit around and bring ourselves slowly back to consciousness, treating ourselves like fine pieces of china, and after we finish the last cup of the last cup of the last cup of coffee, it's time to think about lunch or go to the Goodwill in Fairfax.

So here we are, living in the California bush above Mill Valley. We could look right down on the main street of Mill Valley if it were not for the eucalyptus tree. We have to park the car a hundred yards away and come here along a tunnel-like path.

If all the Germans Pard killed during the war with his machine-gun were to come and stand in their uniforms around this place, it would make us pretty nervous.

There's the warm sweet smell of blackberry bushes along the path and in the late afternoon, quail gather around a dead unrequited tree that has fallen bridelike across the path. Sometimes I go down there and jump the quail. I just go down there to get them up off their butts. They're such beautiful birds. They set their wings and sail on down the hill.

O he was the one who was born to be king! That one, turning down through the Scotch broom and going over an upside-down car abandoned in the yellow grass. That one, his gray wings.

One morning last week, part way through the dawn, I awoke under the apple tree, to hear a dog barking and the rapid sound of hoofs coming toward me The millennium? An invasion of Russians all wearing deer feet?

I opened my eyes and saw a deer running straight at me. It was a buck with large horns. There was a police dog chasing after it.

Arfwowfuck! Noisepoundpoundpoundpoundpoundpound! POUND! POUND!

The deer didn't swerve away. He just kept running straight at me, long after he had seen me, a second or two had passed.

Arfwowfuck! Noisepoundpoundpoundpoundpoundpound! POUND! POUND!

I could have reached out and touched him when he went by.

He ran around the house, circling the John, with the dog hot after him. They vanished over the hillside, leaving streamers of toilet paper behind them, flowing out and entangled through the bushes and vines.

Then along came the doe. She started up the same way, but not moving as fast. Maybe she had strawberries in her head.

“Whoa!” I shouted. “Enough is enough! I'm not selling newspapers!”

The doe stopped in her tracks, twenty-five feet away and turned and went down around the eucalyptus tree.

Well, that's how it's gone now for days and days. I wake up just before they come. I wake up for them in the same manner as I do for the dawn and the sunrise. Suddenly knowing they're on their way.

Saturday was the first day of autumn and there was a festival being held at the church of Saint Francis. It was a hot day and the Ferris wheel was turning in the air like a thermometer bent in a circle and given the grace of music.

But all this goes back to another time, to when my daughter was conceived. We'd just moved into a new apartment and the lights hadn't been turned on yet. We were surrounded by unpacked boxes of stuff and there was a candle burning like milk on a saucer. So we got one in and we're sure it was the right one.

A friend was sleeping in another room. In retrospect I hope we didn't wake him up, though he has been awakened and gone to sleep hundreds of times since then.

During the pregnancy I stared innocently at that growing human center and had no idea the child therein contained would ever meet Trout Fishing in America Shorty.

Saturday afternoon we went down to Washington Square. We put the baby down on the grass and she took off running toward Trout Fishing in America Shorty who was sitting under the trees by the Benjamin Franklin statue.

He was on the ground leaning up against the right-hand tree. There were some garlic sausages and some bread sitting in his wheelchair as if it were a display counter in a strange grocery store.

The baby ran down there and tried to make off with one of his sausages.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty was instantly alerted, then he saw it was a baby and relaxed. He tried to coax her to come over and sit on his legless lap. She hid behind his wheelchair, staring past the metal at him, one of her hands holding onto a wheel.

“Come here, kid,” he said. “Come over and see old Trout Fishing in America Shorty.”

Just then the Benjamin Franklin statue turned green like a traffic light, and the baby noticed the sandbox at the other end of the park.

The sandbox suddenly looked better to her than Trout Fishing in America Shorty. She didn't care about his sausages any more either.

She decided to take advantage of the green light, and she crossed over to the sandbox.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty stared after her as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger.

In San Francisco around Easter time last year,
they
had a trout fishing in America peace parade.
They
had thousands of red stickers printed and
they
pasted them on their small foreign cars, and on means of national communication like telephone poles.

The stickers had WITNESS FOR TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA PEACE printed on them.

Then this group of college- and high-school-trained Communists, along with some Communist clergymen and their Marxist-taught children, marched to San Francisco from Sunnyvale, a Communist nerve center about forty miles away.

It took them four days to walk to San Francisco. They stopped overnight at various towns along the way, and slept on the lawns of fellow travelers.

They carried with them Communist trout fishing in America peace propaganda posters:

 

“DON'T DROP AN H-BOMB ON THE OLD FISHING HOLE!”
“ISAAC WALTON WOULD'VE HATED THE BOMB!”
“ROYAL COACHMAN, SI! ICBM, NO!”

 

They carried with them many other trout fishing in America peace inducements, all following the Communist world conquest line: the Gandhian nonviolence Trojan horse.

When these young, hard-core brainwashed members of the Communist conspiracy reached the “Panhandle,” the emigre Oklahoma Communist sector of San Francisco, thousands of other Communists were waiting for them. These were Communists who couldn't walk very far. They barely had enough strength to make it downtown.