Trout Fishing in America. Richard Brautigan
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the Spanish Civil War as if it were the Mardi Gras in New Orleans being acted out by Greek statues.
“She was drawing a picture of a dead anarchist when you met her. She asked you to stand beside the anarchist and act as if you had killed him. You slapped her across the face and said something that would be embarrassing for me to repeat.
“You both fell very much in love.
“Once while you were at the front she read Anatomy of Melancholy and did 349 drawings of a lemon.
“Your love for each other was mostly spiritual. Neither one of you performed like millionaires in bed.
“When Barcelona fell, you and she flew to England, and then took a ship back to New York. Your love for each other remained in Spain. It was only a war love. You loved only yourselves, loving each other in Spain during the war. On the Atlantic you were different toward each other and became every day more and more like people lost from each other.
“Every wave on the Atlantic was like a dead seagull dragging its driftwood artillery from horizon to horizon.
“When the ship bumped up against America, you departed without saying anything and never saw each other again. The last I heard of you, you were still living in Philadelphia.”
“That’s what you think happened up there?” I said.
“Partly,” he said. “Yes, that’s part of it.”
He took out his pipe and filled it with tobacco and lit it.
“Do you want me to tell you what else happened up there?” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“You crossed the border into Mexico,” he said. “You rode your horse into a small town. The people knew who you were and they were afraid of you. They knew you had killed many men with that gun you wore at your side. The town itself was so small that it didn’t have a priest.
“When the rurales saw you, they left the town. Tough as they were, they did not want to have anything to do with you. The rurales left.
“You became the most powerful man in town.
“You were seduced by a thirteen-year-old girl, and you and she lived together in an adobe hut, and practically all you did was make love.
“She was slender and had long dark hair. You made love standing, sitting, lying on the dirt floor with pigs and chickens around you. The walls, the floor and even the roof of the hut were coated with your sperm and her come.
“You slept on the floor at night and used your sperm for a pillow and her come for a blanket.
“The people in the town were so afraid of you that they could do nothing.
“After a while she started going around town without any clothes on, and the people of the town said that it was not a good thing, and when you started going around without any clothes, and when both of you began making love on the back of your horse in the middle of the zocalo, the people of the town became so afraid that they abandoned the town. It’s been abandoned ever since.
“People won’t live there.
“Neither of you lived to be twenty-one. It was not necessary.
“See, I do know what happened upstairs,” he said. He smiled at me kindly. His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord.
I thought about what happened upstairs.
“You know what I say is the truth,” he said. “For you saw it with your own eyes and traveled it with your own body. Finish the book you were reading before you were interrupted. I’m glad you got laid.”
Once resumed, the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea.
THE LAST YEAR THE TROUTCAME UP HAYMAN CREEK
Gone now the old fart. Hayman Creek was named for Charles Hayman, a sort of half-assed pioneer in a country that not many wanted to live in because it was poor and ugly and horrible. He built a shack, this was in 1876, on a little creek that drained a worthless hill. After a while the creek was called Hayman Creek.
Mr. Hayman did not know how to read or write and considered himself better for it. Mr. Hayman did odd jobs for years and years and years and years.
Your mule’s broke?
Get Mr. Hayman to fix it.
Your fences are on fire?
Get Mr. Hayman to put them out.
Mr. Hayman lived on a diet of stone-ground wheat and kale. He bought the wheat by the hundred-pound sack and ground it himself with a mortar and pestle. He grew the kale in front of his shack and tended the kale as if it were prize-winning orchids.
During all the time that was his life, Mr. Hayman never had a cup of coffee, a smoke, a drink or a woman and thought he’d be a fool if he did.
In the winter a few trout would go up Hayman Creek, but by early summer the creek was almost dry and there were no fish in it.
Mr. Hayman used to catch a trout or two and eat raw trout with his stone-ground wheat and his kale, and then one day he was so old that he did not feel like working any more, and he looked so old that the children thought he must be evil to live by himself, and they were afraid to go up the creek near his shack.
It didn’t bother Mr. Hayman. The last thing in the world he had any use for were children. Reading and writing and children were all the same, Mr. Hayman thought, and ground his wheat and tended his kale and caught a trout or two when they were in the creek.
He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he got the notion that he would die, and did so. The year he died the trout didn’t come up Hayman Creek, and never went up the creek again. With the old man dead, the trout figured it was better to stay where they were.
The mortar and pestle fell off the shelf and broke.
The shack rotted away.
And the weeds grew into the kale.
Twenty years after Mr. Hayman’s death, some fish and game people were planting trout in the streams around there.
“Might as well put some here,” one of the men said.
“Sure,” the other one said.
They dumped a can full of trout in the creek and no sooner had the trout touched the water, than they turned their white bellies up and floated dead down the creek.
TROUT DEATH BY PORT WINE
It was not an outhouse resting upon the imagination.
It was reality.
An eleven-inch rainbow trout was killed. Its life taken forever from the waters of the earth, by giving it a drink of port wine.
It is against the natural order of death for a trout to die by having a drink of port wine.
It is all right for a trout to have its neck broken by a fisherman and then to be tossed into the creel or for a trout to die from a fungus that crawls like sugar-colored ants over its body until the trout is in death’s sugarbowl.
It is all right for a trout to be trapped in a pool that dries up in the late summer or to be caught in the talons of a bird or the claws of an animal.
Yes, it is even all right for a trout to be killed by pollution, to die in a river of suffocating human excrement.
There are trout that die of old age and their white beards flow to the sea.
All these things are in the natural order of death, but for a trout to die from a drink of port wine, that is another thing.