Jubilee Hitchhiker (18 page)

Linda Webster discovered Dick Brautigan's true feelings for her one afternoon when they were out on the back porch together fooling around with the typewriter, making up short stories and poetry like any other afternoon. Linda wore a scooped-neck white blouse, and she happened to bend over, retrieving something she'd dropped. Looking up, she caught Dick staring down inside her blouse. “And his face, his neck, everything turned just bright red.” Linda didn't remember ever seeing anyone blush so vividly before. Inexperienced as she was, the burgeoning woman within knew instantly what Dick had on his mind.

Dick Brautigan felt so embarrassed he couldn't talk, stammering and inarticulate as his face reddened and he groped for words to make things right again. He lacked the sophistication to turn it all into a joke. In matters of the heart, Dick was a bumbling novice. A surge of anger burned through Linda. Outwardly, she suppressed her feelings. Deep inside, fury raged, as she realized Dick was interested in a lot more than just being her big brother buddy. All those days of poetry and wordplay seemed like nothing but a ruse. He was no different from the horny boys in junior high.

Dick Brautigan didn't stick around the Webster place much longer on that particular afternoon. He expressed his feelings in the only way he knew how, by writing a poem for Linda. The next day, he brought it by on his bicycle, but Linda was mad and not interested in continuing their back porch poetry games. After that, Dick rode over several times a day to leave his conciliatory poetry offerings. Linda avoided him. She climbed a cherry tree in the Websters' softball-field-sized backyard. The leafy hiding place provided an excellent vantage point to spot Dick's bike approaching. “I didn't want to see him,” she remembered.

On the ninth of September, Dick dropped off a one-line note asking Linda if she wanted “to go to the show on May 3, 1959,” his offhand joking way of telling her that he was willing to wait for her to come of age. The poems Dick Brautigan wrote during this period were all about Linda Webster. Most were love poems, but many were pieces he knew would make her laugh. “I think he was obsessed with me,” she recalled. This was not altogether unpleasant. Even though she didn't want to see him, Linda enjoyed receiving his daily poetic offerings. She'd tell her ninth-grade friends about them, and they'd all giggle. Secretly, she was proud of Dick's devotion.

All the while, Brautigan stewed in utter despair. He called his sister Barbara every night and read her what he'd written that day. “I spent hours writing this poem,” he'd said. “What do you think?”

Her standard answer was “I think it's great. That's the best you've written so far.”

“Well, she didn't understand it,” he complained. “She didn't like it.”

“I'm not surprised,” Barbara told her brother. “She's just real young. You have to give her time. I'm sure it's not that she doesn't care for you. She's just probably not into poetry.”

Barbara thought Dick was satisfied with these answers, but he'd always call again the next evening to read her another new poem. “You're a girl,” he insisted, “and you know how girls think.”

In truth, B.J. had no idea what Linda Webster was thinking. Dick grew more and more desperate as she continued avoiding him. “He didn't know why,” Barbara remembered. “And it really bothered him.” She noticed that his writing seemed different, too. “Kind of on the dark side. You could definitely tell he was depressed.”

Gary Stewart also detected the change in his friend. Gary owned a car, and “every once in a while,” Dick asked him drive them by the house on Madison Street, hoping for a glimpse of the elusive Linda. In spite of such obsessive behavior, Gary believed Dick's condition was caused more by “intense poverty” than the pangs of love. The Folstons paid the rent for Dick's room, but he had to take care of his food and subsisted mainly on canned beans. He spent only $3 a week on food. His weight dropped to 145 pounds. “He was just skin and bones,” Gary remembered. “Looked like something that came out of a Nazi war camp.” Gary worked full-time during the days that summer. In the evenings, he frequently invited Dick over to his family home for a decent meal, “to fatten him up.”

Brautigan had written several new stories. Gary Stewart remembered one in particular. Dick pointed out the short, crisp Hemingway-inspired sentences. The story started with a man in a serious automobile accident. The ER team arrived and loaded the victim into an ambulance. When he got to the hospital, the doctors noticed their patient's eyes were open and had a glimmer of hope. Then, a fly landed on the blank gleaming cornea. Dead men don't blink.

As a devout Mormon, Gary Stewart was required to embark upon a two-and-a-half-year mission once he turned twenty. In September 1955, the Stewart family gathered to bid their departing son farewell. Before leaving, he asked them to continue having Dick Brautigan over for home-cooked meals. “Look after him when I'm gone.” There were no planes out of Eugene in those days, nor did the trains go in the direction Gary was headed. Later in the evening, the young missionary, not wanting his mom standing around weeping, said goodbye to the folks and found himself waiting in the art deco Greyhound/Trailways bus depot on Olive Street in the company of Dick and another buddy.

Because the narrow roads did not permit full-sized buses to travel west from Eugene, Gary Stewart took an old three-seat Chrysler limo over the mountains to Bend, where he caught the Greyhound bound for Salt Lake City. Whatever transpired that night so impressed Dick Brautigan that he went home to his furnished room and wrote what he called “the funniest and saddest story that has ever crawled out of my brain.”

In a letter to Gary a few days later, he asked his friend's permission to include him by name in his fiction (“i don't believe a writer should write about peoples he knows without tellin em foist”) and, knowing the young Mormon would soon be heading to Europe on his long mission, cautioned him, “when you get to holland [
sic
] and wonder [
sic
] around speechless for a while, remember the language of love.” (Brautigan was wrong about Stewart's destination. He was bound for Belgium.) Dick closed with “this here letter dieth like what dies tomorrow?” The mood of the letter was playful and ebullient. The young writer signed himself “richard broodigan.”

On October 2, 1955, Brautigan published a new poem, “Butterfly's Breath,” in the Sunday
Oregonian Northwest Roto Magazine
. Wistful and evanescent, with just a tinge of melancholy (“The shadow is as silent / As the birth of a rose”), the poem captured Dick's fragile mood at the time, a young man helplessly lost in the bathos of unrequited love. It was his final work to appear in the
Oregonian
. Feeling he had “goofed completely” with Linda Webster, Dick focused his talents over the next couple weeks on writing a sequence of letters, some long, others very brief, he hoped would catch the attention of his fourteen-year-old dream girl.

Brautigan wrote a short jocular note to Linda on October 3, announcing, “Gee, I'm a schemer,” and asking if she'd “ever been kidnaped to a show?” He signed himself “Hitchard
Black Jack” and appended a postscript telling Linda he was going to buy “a roll of adhesive tape and four hundred feet of rope and then, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha . . .” A few days later, on the seventh and the eighth, Dick continued in this vein, penning two more brief missives, both unsigned. The first asked Linda not to open the letter until she went to bed and concluded “Good Night.” The second requested that she not open it until she was “halfway through eating dinner,” ending with “Please pass the salt.”

On October 8, Brautigan wrote a more serious and lyrical letter, a prose poem describing Linda's beauty. It began “I think you are more beautiful than white pigeons cooing in a soft spring rain and the laughter of little children [. . .]” Dick told Linda she was “more beautiful than the dawn gently kissing and hugging the hills of eastern Oregon [. . .] more beautiful than old men lovingly telling about people and days gone forever.” Then, mocking his own sensitivity, he signed the letter “Yours, Itchard Brat Again.” His PS acknowledged Linda's wish that he not write or bother her, explaining, “I've already made a damn fool out of myself, I might as well try to break the world's record.”

True to his word, Dick Brautigan spent the next week or so writing two long letters created for an audience of one, a girl barely in her teens who was not the least interested. “I hope that you understand some of this. by the time i was 14, i understood things no one should ever understand. what things does a genius remember about a girl? what things burn in the forest of his mind?”

Dick remembered the first time he saw Linda wearing a gray sweatshirt and red pedal-pushers and mentioned the song “That Old Black Magic.” (“‘It really kills me,' I said. ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch.'”) Linda laughed and asked Dick to repeat his remark, but he was too shy. His heart beat rapidly when she made a second request. “I said something shy and did not do it,” Brautigan wrote. Another time Edna nursed her baby in the kitchen, and Dick felt embarrassed, staring at the stove while Linda kept her eyes fixed on him. “Every time i looked up her eyes were on me. i shall never forget that look as long as i live. linda staring at me.” Recalling their afternoon poetry-writing sessions on the back porch: “I wanted very much to take linda in my arms and show her love so gentle that it would turn her into a piece of softness. love so gentle that it would turn her into the first light of dawn. but i didn't do that. i wrote a god damn poem instead.”

Sharing a bag of potato chips on their way home from fishing one evening, Bill Brown suggested to Dick that Linda thought of him only as a “big brother.” Dick choked on his chip. “Do you think I goofed completely?” he asked.

“Man,” Brown replied, “the ways you didn't goof with her haven't been invented yet. I'd give it up if I were you. It's hopeless, man.”

Dick typed a final letter to Linda soon afterward. He admitted he wrote “because I wanted very much to show you something about me. I wanted to show you that I'm awfully clever and amusing and nice, but I guess you are too young to appreciate the things which are me.” He promised he wouldn't write or try to call her anymore. “It's like trying to catch a bird with my hands.” His postscript said, “Life is a very short visit. When you're dead, you're dead for a long time [. . .] I believe in quality over quantity. I believe an inch of truth is more than a mile of lies.”

Dick Brautigan never mailed these letters. He typed “For Linda” on the envelopes and brought them over to 41 Madison Street, leaving them with Edna Webster to give to her daughter. For reasons of her own, Edna never did. She hid the letters away, and they remained out of sight for forty years. Eventually, they were sold to the Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley,
where curious scholars probed them long before Linda Webster, now a woman in her seventies, read the words a lovesick young poet had written to her so many years ago.

In late October (1955), not long after his desperate letter-writing campaign, Dick asked Edna Webster's permission to take Linda fishing. “I trusted him,” Edna said and consented to the angling expedition. Linda recollected that things had more or less been prearranged without consulting her: “I think my mother told me that I was going fishing with Richard.” Dick asked Bill Brown, providing the transportation, if it would be okay if Linda went along. “Sure,” Brown said. “No problem.”

Early on a spectacular fall day, the three headed up the McKenzie under a crystalline blue sky, fall colors tinting the cottonwoods along the river and air crisp as biting into an apple. They drove to Vida, a little town named for Vida Pepiot, a pioneer woman, not much more than a grade school and a post office/general store on the side of the road. Pronounced “V-(eye)-da” (a distinction Brautigan retained a decade later in
The Abortion
when he called his heroine Vida), the town stood close to Gate Creek.

Bill Brown rigged his rod and waded upstream. Dick had no intention of going fishing. He and Linda walked downriver to the Goodpasture Bridge, one of about 140 covered bridges still in daily use in Oregon in 1955. Built by Lane County in 1938, its 165-foot span remained the longest of any surviving covered bridge in the state. A graceful white structure with a peaked shingled roof and ten slatted, Gothic-arched windows along either side, the Goodpasture Bridge seemed to float above the reflected autumnal dazzle of the McKenzie like some improbable airborne sailing ship.

Dick Brautigan led Linda Webster under the curved portal into the dim interior of the bridge. The cathedral windows provided illumination for big logging trucks, and the crepuscular light inside felt cool and inviting, a magical moment of midday twilight. This was a special place for Dick, and he wanted to share it with Linda. Her own feelings were confused, a jumble of apprehension, anger, and a strange joy occasioned by such an unbelievable fall day.

Goodpasture Bridge was hushed and quiet, like being in church. The thick foot-wide wooden planks muffled Dick and Linda's footsteps. The bridge struck Brautigan as a holy temple. He explained to Linda how their presence constituted a form of worship. “The way he told me was very beautiful,” she remembered. Dick pointed into the rafters, telling Linda that angels lived up there, spreading their golden wings among the shadows masking the king posts and triangular trusses. He gathered his courage and attempted a kiss, fighting an inherent shyness.

Linda wasn't interested. Slipping away, she ran to one of the Gothic windows, staring through the slanted horizontal slats dividing her view of the river. Linda recalled, “I'd go and look out one window, and he'd come over and stand real close to me, and I'd run clear over to the other side and look out that one. I probably wasn't very nice.”