The Tokyo-Montana Express (25 page)

Around one grave there was a white fence
uprooted and crooked with a heart or an apple drawn on one of the pickets and
the word LOVE was written in the center of the heart or the apple.

Beside another grave I found a pacified
mole, looking like a dead seal with a Pinocchio nose, and at the other end of
the cemetery I found an empty package of Force’s Gopher Killer. It had been a case
of mistaken identity, but nevertheless very effective. It seemed strange to me
that death should be practiced as an active force in a sanctuary of death, but
perhaps it was only the day and the way the Rudi Gernreich coat fit. I’ll have
to admit the graves were a little tight across the shoulders.

I found the inevitable potter’s field where
dead pets lay almost anonymously in the ground and the weeds and the flowers
hardly dared to grow.

And I saw grand graves covered with fine
white rocks and there were marble tombstones and wax flowers and some of them
even had flowers and plants and cactuses growing on the graves in white boxes.

Somebody driving by in their car upon the
freeway had thrown their empty April to May 1965 Golden Cate Bridge commuter
ticket book out of the car window and it had landed on the grave of Penny, a
ten-year-dead pet.

One gravemarker had a yellow sun painted
child-like on it with the rays of the sun shining down the marker toward the
ground.

There was a white marker for a pet named
Checkers that said very starkly: “It was done.”

At another place in the cemetery I saw the
all too familiar signature of the good old American necrophilic beer-drinker.
There was an empty Olympia beer can lying beside some markers that had been
knocked down.

I have never been able to understand why
people want to go to the store and buy some beer and then immediately head for
the nearest cemetery to drink the beer and knock down gravemarkers.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the
American mother abandoning breast-feeding her young. Perhaps as a culture we
are not quite ready for the bottle yet.

I don’t know how long I had been in the
cemetery when I looked up beyond the grave of a dog to see two soldiers coming
down the hill.

They had rifles slung over their shoulders
and they were carrying mess kits in their hands. I knew the pet cemetery was
not a restricted area, so I gave their approach only a passing glance and went
back to looking at the dog’s grave.

I looked up again to see that the soldiers
were very close and that one of them had handed his mess kit to the other soldier
and then had taken the rifle off his shoulder and was advancing toward me with
the rifle in his hands.

Suddenly he jumped forward and landed on
both feet in front of me, balanced on the balls of his feet. He held the rifle
across his chest with both of his hands.

He was standing outside the cemetery and I
was standing inside the cemetery.

“Halt! Who goes there?” he yelled, looking
sternly at me with his finger on the trigger of the rifle. I was surrounded by
hundreds of dead dogs and cats and goldfish and hamsters and pigeons and parakeets
and Tweeter who had the misfortune of drowning in a glass of milk.

“It’s all right for me to be here,” I said
gently, appreciating fully “the outrageous gesture,” and told him that I had
gotten permission from the provost marshal.

“What are you doing?” he said, still
holding the gun in position across his chest.

“I’m writing a little story about this
cemetery,” I said.

He smiled and relaxed his rifle. “Well, put
me in your story,” he said.

I looked at his mess kit and said, “Are you
going to lunch?”

“No,” he said. “We’ve already had lunch.
We’re going to South Vietnam.”

He and the other soldier were smiling and
laughing to each other as they walked away. I think they thought up this “Halt!
Who goes there?” pet cemetery business as a kind of joke to attack the boredom
of a Sunday afternoon. They looked awfully young to be soldiers. They no doubt would
be older when they came back from South Vietnam.

As for me, I soon departed: leaving behind
the Rudi Gernreich coat draped over that short white fence beneath the freeway.
It seemed to belong there.

The turkeys got into a knockdown drag
out battle with no holds barred. They were really going at it and the two ponies
just got bored with it all and galloped out of the woods into an open field,
leaving the turkeys to sort out their own domestic problems.

I had walked a quarter of a mile down to
the lodge which was closed and I knew it was closed before I started out. I
just wanted to check the blue sign in the front door window again.

I of course already knew what it said, but
I just wanted to check it out again because I had nothing else to justify walking
down there for, and I wanted to take a morning walk, so I used reading the sign
again as an excuse and walked through the very quiet and still little community
of Pine Creek.

It was a good walk, my footsteps crunching
fresh snow that sounded like expensive breakfast cereal as I stepped on it,
almost like music from General Mills.

The blue sign was still there on the door
and its message had not changed. It still said thank you for patronage and friendship
from the old owners and that the store would stay closed until February 20th
when the new owners would take over, and that they looked forward to meeting everybody.

I wondered how much and what kind of change
the lodge would make under new ownership. I thought about the new owners and
what kind of people they were to run a small lodge which included one gas pump,
a little cafe-store combination and a few log cabins in barely a spot on the
map: Pine Creek, Montana, so far from Paris, New York or Tokyo.

I would find out about the new directions,
if any, in the lodge and meet the new owners in a few days. So far, nothing had
changed with the lodge and nobody was there.

The new ownership of the lodge was a small
mystery that would keep me interested for a few days, something to think about
here in the Montana winter.

Then the turkeys started fighting in the
woods across the road from the lodge and the ponies ran out of the woods into a
field and I turned around and walked back home, listening to the sound of
breakfast cereal under my feet.

Every day I see people in Tokyo
handing out handbills to other people. This is the way they make their living,
by standing on the street handing out handbills to total strangers, wanting them
to spend their money on something they may or may not need.

Most of the time the strangers don’t make
use of the handbills. They just throw them away and forget about them.

I also see men holding signs that want
other men to spend their money in nearby massage parlors and cabarets where
there are women for the purposes that men use women and that women get money
for.

Often the men are old and wear poor sloppy
clothes, standing there holding erotically promising signs. I wish the old men
were not doing that. I wish they were doing something else and their clothes
looked better.

But I can’t change the world.

It was already changed before I got here.

Sometimes when I finish writing something,
perhaps even this, I feel as if I am handing out useless handbills or I am an
old man standing in the rain, wearing shitty clothes and holding a sign for a
cabaret that is filled with the beautiful and enticing skeletons of young women
that sound like dominoes when they walk toward you coming in the door.

“
The remarkable dining ears
of the Northern Pacific Railroad used to feature two great products of the
Northwest in the days when railroads catered to the public.
”

That is the first sentence of a recipe for
baked apples in a cookbook called
American Cookery
by James Beard. It is
a very good recipe and reading it started my mind to dreaming like a small
airplane taking off from a rural airfield on a cold December morning.

The plane, my dreams, slowly circles the
airfield gaining altitude and then the course is set. It is lined up perfectly
on my compass:

a baked apple is my destination.

That’s where I’m going at a comfortable
speed of 150 miles an hour over fields and orchards of late autumn with smoke
curling up like apple peelings from the chimneys of farm houses.

It’s easy to see that I love baked apples
hot and fresh from the oven with rich cream poured like the wings of an angel
over them. The first bite makes my taste buds seem like the Grand Canyon filled
to the rim with pleasure.

The flight is over.

My airplane just made a perfect landing on
a baked apple.

As a child I listened to “Chattanooga
Choo-Choo” when it was a brand-new song, an infant song. Now it is middle-aged
and the song’s hair is starting to turn gray. I never listened to all the
words. I listened to just snatches of them and probably sang those snatches or
maybe just sang the words:

“track 29”

and let it go at that. Now so many years
later with it just starting to rain at a little sidewalk cafe in Tokyo, “Chattanooga
Choo-Choo” was played over the sound system and I listened to all the words,
the entire song for the first time as it the words were lumber and a house was
being built out of them. When the song was finished, the house was built and
there it was in my mind on a little side street near the river.