The Tokyo-Montana Express (14 page)

Now: He has published a book about the Acid
Shadow of Fame that eats at the heart and soul until ambiguity and disarray are
as predictable as the time the sun rises and the sun goes down.

Today the sun came up at 6:13 a.m. and went
down at 6:22 p.m.

It was only five years ago.

My, how time flies.

Her last known boyfriend was a
Canadian airman who was shot down over Germany in November 1944. Their romance
only lasted a week and they never went to bed together. They were going to get
married after the war.

He was twenty-two and she was nineteen.

They met by accident at a bus stop in San
Francisco. He had never talked to a Chinese woman before. She was the only
other person waiting for a bus. He was a very cheerful and outward going young
man. People instantly liked him.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m from Canada.”

They wrote every day after he was gone,
promising each other the future. They were going to have three children: two
boys and a girl.

The last letter she got was written by an
air force chaplain:

He often spoke of you, etc.

He asked me to write to you if, etc.

I know that he would want you to, etc.

When she finished reading the letter, her
life was over and she had joined him in death. She quit college where she was a
straight-A student and got a job washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant on Jackson
Street. People working at the restaurant thought it very strange and disturbing
that a beautiful young woman should be washing dishes for a living.

There were so many other things that she
could have done.

She was like a ghost in the kitchen.

Over the years they would try to talk to
her about it but she didn’t say anything and they always gave up. Finally, no
one cared any more because she was no longer beautiful.

The only thing that was known about her was
that she had once been in love with a Canadian airman.

She never looks up from the dishes.

Thirty-four years…

She scrapes the remains of uneaten food off
the plates of people that she never sees. Their eating is the cemetery where
she is buried.

You can’t cut meat when you’re wearing
gloves and nobody wants to buy meat from somebody wearing them either. Gloves
and meat do not go hand in hand. That’s why the butcher has cold hands. I know
because he told me so.

I was in a San Francisco meat market,
thinking about having some meat for dinner. I didn’t know what kind. I paced up
and down the meat counter. I walked past pork chops, hamburger, lamb shanks,
dead chickens, and fresh but dusty-eyed fish.

The butcher watched me without saying
anything and he didn’t move either. There was a kind of forlorn expression on
his middle-aged face that had gone as far in life as it was going to go. Now it
would become the face of an old man.

I stopped and stared at a piece of round
steak. It did not catch my fancy and I walked back toward a lamb chop that was
a little more interesting. I stood there staring at one chop in the middle of
twenty-five other chops. It was on top of the other chops and looked as if it
had climbed up there. I admired its spunk.

The other twenty-four chops did nothing for
me. They might as well have been nameless sand. I thought about applying heat
to that chop and eating it for dinner. I was living by myself, so that chop
would grace a solitary meal.

It was a dreary day in San Francisco,
overcast and futureless like it gets sometimes in the summer and can stay that
way for days. You begin to wonder if there is any summer at all going on in
America.

“I have cold hands,” the butcher said.

I looked up from the chop.

I didn’t know who he was talking to.

He was talking to me.

I looked at his hands.

He was holding them despairingly out in
front of him. They were a used-up sort of gray and red. Those hands had been
cold for years leading into decades of dead meat. I tried to think of a proper
response. My hands were suddenly very warm, actually hot. I felt very guilty. My
tongue was deserty and I was lost without water in that desert.

The butcher broke the chains of my
predicament by saying, “I could have been a truck driver. I drove a truck in the
Army. I guess that’s what I should have done. At least, 1ny hands wouldn’t be
cold all the time.”

By this time, the blood in my hands was
boiling.

I forced a kind of half-smile that people
try to pretend means that they understand and sympathize with when somebody
says something that there is no good way to respond to.

The butcher rubbed his hands together and
tried to break the tension by telling a little joke, but not a single word came
out of him. His mouth started to move but then it stopped and we both smiled as
if he had actually told the joke.

As he walked toward me and my lamb chop, he
was still rubbing his hands together.

By any standard she would be
considered a good-looking woman and maybe in her early thirties. She has fine
features, a perfect little mouth that looks as if it had been built by roses
working overtime in a rare factory. The only flaw in her face is her eyes. They
are beautiful eyes but lack a certain character that’s not important because
most men aren’t particularly interested in a woman’s character, anyway.

Her body is nice to look at, compact and
well-proportioned. She has trim ankles and a bust that stops just short of being
generous.

As we hurtle along on the subway underneath
Tokyo, she sits across from me, absentmindedly playing with the skin under her
chin. She pulls gently on it, checking out its firmness again and again as we
stop at a station and then hurtle forward to the next station.

Above us twelve million people are trying
to be happy and make the best of their lives while she continues to think about
the firmness of her chin and the years to come, which will certainly come. They
will come just like the station in front of us that we are hurtling toward.

Welcome to the Yotsuya Station
.

It’s just another stop on the way
.

Above all these

things

put on charity
…

—Col. 3:14

Last night there was a knock at the kitchen door of this ranch
house in Southern Montana, near the banks of the Yellowstone River on its way
to join up with the Missouri River, then onto the Mississippi River travelling
down to the Gulf of Mexico, its eventual home, so far away from these
mountains, this kitchen door and the knocking of last night.

I was busy cooking something. I couldn’t
quite believe that somebody was knocking at the kitchen door. A friend talking
to me in the kitchen answered it before I could move. I had been paying close
attention to a frying pan full of chicken and mushrooms.

I waited for the people to come into the
kitchen and see who they were and what they wanted. I also wondered why they
hadn’t come to the front door. It’s easier to get to, at the front of the
house, so to speak. It’s right on the way. I don’t remember anybody ever coming
around to the kitchen door at night. Maybe somebody did once, a long time ago,
but I wasn’t living here, then.

The people didn’t come into the kitchen.
They just stood outside on the back porch talking to my friend for the briefest
of times and then my friend closed the door and the people were gone without my
having seen them.

The few words they said sounded like
children talking: “Welcome to Paradise Valley.”

That’s all I could make out.

My friend stood there with a small yellow
pamphlet in his hands.

“Who was that?” I said.

“Two girls inviting us to church.”

The handmade yellow pamphlet was about the
churches here in the valley:

Paradise Valley Community Church

Pine Creek Methodist Church

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Emigrant, Mont.

It was a simple and cheerfully mimeographed
pamphlet listing the names of the ministers, their telephone numbers and the
various types and times of worship offered at the churches.

There was a decal of flowers pasted on the
yellow cover and a nice quote from Colossians to keep it company.

My friend told me the girls were ten or
eleven years old. I never saw them but it was nice of them to come by one autumn
evening and invite us to church. They have good hearts. I wish the best in life
for them and a safe journey like the Yellowstone River flowing to the Gulf of Mexico,
its faraway home and future.

These children will also flow away.