Jubilee Hitchhiker (181 page)

Kidd, the Dorns' son, wanted to go fishing. Brad rigged a fly rod with a streamer and walked the boy over to the river behind the mobile homes. Before long Kidd's younger sister, Maya, ran back to announce that he'd hooked a big one. Everybody hurried to the riverbank to watch him play his fish. Richard laughed as Kidd eased a beautiful two-pound trout out of the Gallatin. Georgia Donovan's snapshot captured the young angler holding his trophy. Everyone grinned with delight.

Over in Pine Creek that night, Dillof settled Ed and Jenny into the caboose, setting up a small tent for the kids. The next day the whole gang, including Brautigan, went to the Sunday rodeo in Livingston. Richard was “pissed at Dobro Dick.” Learning of the Dorns' impending arrival, Brautigan stormed over to the Hjortsberg place, raging, “I want
no
house guests.
NO
house guests!” Even though Ed and Jenny were his friends, Richard considered Dillof's invitation an unacceptable intrusion into what he considered his territory.

Bud Swearingen was up from Texas. After a day's fishing he stopped by Rancho Brautigan late in the evening with a “bunch of trout” as a gift offering. The Fourth of July had been overcast. By rodeo time it poured rain. Delighting at the discomfort of his friends camping down at Dillof's compound, Brautigan stood on his back porch “guffawing at them” through the stormy night. Before long he blasted away into the darkness with his powerful .44 Magnum. Swearingen beat a hasty retreat over to the Hjortsbergs'.

Marian “could see it coming, like a tornado building in the Midwest.” She turned off all the lights, hoping “to stay completely out of this situation.” When Bud knocked on her door, she went downstairs to face the music. “It's just crazy over there,” Bud said. “I thought I'd come over and say hi.” They decided the best course of action would be to head into town for a drink. Marian hurried to get dressed as distant gunshots boomed like thunder in the storm.

Paradise Valley and Livingston were famous for the howling wind funneling down off Yellowstone Park plateau. On the night of the fourth, it raged at gale force. As the shooting started, a violent gust demolished the tent where the terrified Dorn children huddled, unable to sleep. Ed, Jenny, and the kids took refuge in the creek bottom, weaving between the dark trees as bullets crashed through the storm-tossed branches overhead, heading for shelter at Marian's.

Brautigan got to the Hjortsberg house before them. Marian and Bud were about to clear out when Richard came through the kitchen door. “Damn that Dobro!” he fumed. “Damn that Dobro.”

“Come on in and sit down,” Marian said.

Looking bedraggled, the Dorns and their kids straggled in from the tempest, followed in short order by Dick Dillof and his girlfriend. Pandemonium ensued. The decibel level escalated. “Richard and Ed were having this fight,” Marian remembered, “and everyone was down on Dobro.” Tempers calmed. “They hashed it all out and made up.” Brautigan invited the Dorns to spend the night at his place. After a quick nightcap, they all trooped out into the night.

The next morning, chagrined by his nocturnal fusillade, Richard showed the Dorn children his guns, carefully explaining firearm etiquette and safety rules. After lunch, he took the kids down to the dump below his barn and “set them up for the afternoon,” plinking away at beer cans. Brautigan rejoined the adults on the back porch and resumed drinking, “laughing with that high-pitched sequence of hoots and howls.” Jenny thought “life was a very simple progression for Richard.” She and Ed returned to Colorado the following morning.

Fourth of July weekend was the last time Richard ever saw Bud Swearingen. The Texan left his mark on the grounds of Rancho Brautigan. A couple years before, Bud's two sons had abandoned a 1956 Ford Victoria by the fence off to the side of Richard's barn after a futile effort at getting it running again. The derelict car became a useful platform for viewing the night sky. The hood remained warm after sunset and was wide enough to accommodate two Brautigan-sized adults reclining along its length, their backs resting against the windshield. Richard stargazed with Masako from this vantage point. Greg Keeler spent many evenings perched on the junker Ford, staring at the heavens and bullshitting the night away with Brautigan.

A letter from Masako Kano arrived from Tokyo. Richard had written her from Bozeman during his teaching stint at MSU. Masako wrote to say her father was in the hospital, dying after surgery for intestinal cancer. She told Richard he'd known of the illness when he came to America in the fall of 1980. “I don't know the reason why, but there are only two adult men I can talk [to] like a true child of nature in this world,” she concluded. “I'll lose one of them within three months (at most). Dear Puma, How could I lose you, too?”

Brautigan wrote back the same day, thanking her for her sensitive letter. “I'm very sorry that your father is ill,” he scrawled. “Words often fail me, so I do not know what else to say.” He changed the painful subject by writing about the weather (“Storm follows storm”), signing off “Richard,” without any affectionate valediction.

Nikki Arai died on July 8. She was thirty-eight years old. Brautigan didn't get the news until a couple days later, when a mutual friend called from San Francisco. He felt “deeply shocked” and sat staring at the telephone in stunned silence. Not wanting to be alone, Richard dialed Marian Hjortsberg. He had a watermelon he'd bought when Rip Torn took him shopping a few days before. It hadn't been eaten at the party. Brautigan asked Marian if she'd like some watermelon. She said okay. “Bring it in half an hour and have dinner with me and my friend Todd.”

Richard said he'd be right over. He carried the watermelon down the road to the Hjortsbergs'. Gatz had moved with Sharon to the Big Island of Hawaii in January, and his kids were visiting him for the summer. Marian seemed strangely agitated when she greeted Brautigan in her kitchen. He'd interrupted a romantic moment with her new boyfriend. She'd been too embarrassed to say anything about it on the phone. He wanted to tell her about Nikki Arai's death but felt uncomfortable. The watermelon had been “just some kind of funny excuse to talk about my grief.” Brautigan apologized and went back to his place.

To avoid solitude, Richard started calling his friends. Nobody was home. He got lucky when John Barber picked up. “My friend just died,” Brautigan said. “Why don't you come over. Bring a bottle of whiskey.”

Barber knew about Richard's sick friend. He thought the woman was dying of cancer in Japan. He got to Pine Creek an hour later, Dickel in hand, and found Brautigan sitting alone in the coal shed he'd converted into his sleeping room. Richard proudly pointed out a metallic plastic roller blind he'd bought for the only window. Those inside could look out while remaining invisible to prying eyes. “You can lie here in bed with people all around in the backyard and make love,” he said. “No one can see in, no one knows what you are doing.”

Brautigan and Barber drank whiskey on the back porch. Richard sat in his favorite spot, legs stretched along the porch rail, facing south, his back supported by a pillar. John occupied “a spindly wooden lawn chair.” No one spoke. They watched the cottonwood fluff drift past like summertime snow as thunderheads massed over the Bridger Mountains to the west. Twilight enhanced their silence as “ghost deer” wandered at the edge of darkness.

“She's gone now,” Richard said, breaking their long meditation. “It's all done.”

“She's gone but not forgotten.” Barber felt stupid for mouthing an easy banality.

“I have no pictures of her, none of her letters, nothing. She's gone.”

“But you have memories,” John said, “and you can write them down and preserve them.”

“I don't write for therapy, or to eulogize,” Brautigan replied, getting up and going inside the house. When he returned he showed Barber a poem he'd written on a scrap of paper.

 

Rendezvous

 

Where you are now

I will join you.

 

Richard set his ephemeral poetry on the green wooden table. It fluttered among puffs of drifting cottonwood snow. “Come inside,” he said. “Hunger has visited us. Let's eat.”

They prepared noodles with smoked oysters, peas, and green onions gathered from the weed-choked garden. Eating with chopsticks, Brautigan taught Barber how to properly
slurp
his noodles in the Japanese manner. After their meal, they talked until the whiskey was gone and drove to Livingston for another bottle. They drank half of it on the way back to Rancho Brautigan.

“My friend was Japanese,” Richard said after they returned. “She was a Buddhist. The Buddhists believed that one can send things to the dead by burning them. I have two books of hers and the poem. I will burn them and you can help if you don't think it's too heavy.”

They gathered the items, along with lighter fluid and kitchen matches. “She loved white wine,” Brautigan said, pouring a “delicate tulip-shaped glass” full to the brim. “We will burn this also.”

They wove through waist-high backyard grass and placed the offerings on a pile of rocks. Richard gathered a handful of wildflowers, adding them to the impromptu bier. Barber soaked the offerings in lighter fluid and struck a match. “She always had great style,” Brautigan said as the little shrine burst into flames.

Richard and John stood, arms over each other's shoulders, watching everything burn. The stem of the wine glass snapped and the shattered glass fell into the ashes. “She's gone,” Brautigan whispered. “It's done.”

Greg Keeler remembered how Arai's death “devastated [Richard], and he became drawn and gaunt, staring off his back porch for hours.” Five days after she died, Brautigan wrote a letter to Nikki Arai (he called her N). He described getting the telephone call about her death and bringing a watermelon over to his “close neighbor M [. . .] when I interrupted her lovemaking.” Richard wanted to phone N and tell her what had occurred “because you have the perfect sense of humor to understand. It's just the kind of story you would have enjoyed.” Brautigan signed off, “Love, R.” He later used this fictional correspondence as the introduction to
An Unfortunate Woman.

The next day, after completing nearly thirty-five pages, Richard Brautigan stopped working on “American Hotels.” He concluded with a description of Sherry Vetter telling him years later how bored she had been during their many fishing trips to northern California. “‘Then why did you go along with it?' I said.

“‘Because I liked the fucking part of it,' she said.” At this point, Brautigan put down his pen. Memories of happier times nagged him like ghosts from the past.

Marian Hjortsberg's boyfriend, Todd, “a berserko alcoholic,” ran amok in Bozeman. Richard came over with the dire news. “This looks really bad,” he told her. “He's just gone berserk in Bozeman, and there's no telling if he's coming over here. I'm sleeping in the guestroom tonight.” Brautigan arrived in the evening with “his Magnum-type handgun.” He went to Marian's barn and brought in all the mallets, mauls, axes, and steel wedges, every conceivable weapon, hiding them under the guest room bed. After locking all the doors, Richard slept with his loaded pistol beneath the pillow.

Todd's rage ended in Brad Donovan's trailer. Word arrived in the morning. Brautigan had Marian drive them over to Forest Park. Richard liked Todd and his “zany sense of humor” but told Marian she had to break things off with him. “You have to meet with Todd,” he instructed on the trip over the Bozeman Pass. “You have to tell him you never want to see him again because that's the way it works.” She found it “very painful,” telling Todd she never wanted to speak to him or see him again, just as Brautigan had outlined it for her. “It was just awful,” Marian recalled. Richard waited in Brad's trailer until their private meeting was over.

Heading back over the hill, Brautigan observed that Marian had a “tendency to get involved with men who aren't altogether sound.” After their brief romance in 1980, they had “just sort of been having parallel lives ever since,” he explained, laying out some instructions regarding matters of the heart. “I don't necessarily follow them myself,” Richard said, “but I'm going to give you some rules about your future boyfriends. First of all, you have to check their apartments. If they have one!”

Marian expressed an interest. Brautigan asked, “Did you look at Todd's apartment when you first met him?

“Yes?”

“Was it neat?”

“No.”

“Was it a total pigsty?”

“Yes.”

Richard smiled. “Well, that should have told you right from the start that you didn't want to get involved with this person.”

At 9:48 am Tokyo time on July 16, Masako Kano wrote Richard Brautigan a one-line note: “Aujourd'hui Papa est mort.” Masamichi Kano was only fifty-six at the time of his death. Brautigan
wasn't home to receive her letter. Unable to tolerate being alone, he moved back over to Bozeman before it arrived. Richard did not take a room the Range. Georgia Donovan's sister, Mary, was away for the summer, and her trailer at Forest Park sat unoccupied. Brad invited Brautigan to use it whenever he needed a place to stay. He moved right in. A trailer park was familiar territory. Richard had grown up in sleazy motor courts. Forest Park seemed like the Ritz. Greg Keeler enjoyed visiting Brautigan there because the trailers sat right beside the Gallatin River. He could rig a baited rod on the bank and keep an eye on it while they drank and shot the shit inside. Richard was delighted. He considered this sort of angling “a typical tawdry example” of Keeler's Okie upbringing.