TROUT FISHING ON THE BEVEL
The two graveyards were next to each other on small hills and between them flowed Graveyard Creek, a slow-moving, funeral-procession-on-a-hot-day creek with a lot of fine trout in it.
And the dead didn’t mind me fishing there at all.
One graveyard had tall fir trees growing in it, and the grass was kept Peter Pan green all year round by pumping water up from the creek, and the graveyard had fine marble headstones and statues and tombs.
The other graveyard was for the poor and it had no trees and the grass turned a flat-tire brown in the summer and stayed that way until the rain, like a mechanic, began in the late autumn.
There were no fancy headstones for the poor dead. Their markers were small boards that looked like heels of stale bread:
Devoted Slob Father Of
Beloved Worked-to-Death Mother Of
On some of the graves were fruit jars and tin cans with wilted flowers in them:
Sacred
To the Memory
of
John Talbot
Who at the Age of Eighteen
Had His Ass Shot Off
In a Honky-Tonk
November 1, 1936
This Mayonnaise Jar
With Wilted Flowers In It
Was Left Here Six Months Ago
By His Sister
Who Is In
The Crazy Place Now.
Eventually the seasons would take care of their wooden names like a sleepy short-order cook cracking eggs over a grill next to a railroad station. Whereas the well-to-do would have their names for a long time written on marble hors d’oeuvres like horses trotting up the fancy paths to the sky.
I fished Graveyard Creek in the dusk when the hatch was on and worked some good trout out of there. Only the poverty of the dead bothered me.
Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star.
SEA, SEA RIDER
The man who owned the bookstore was not magic. He was not a three-legged crow on the dandelion side of the mountain.
He was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seaman who had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen and a home in Marin County. He liked the works of George Orwell, Richard Aldington and Edmund Wilson.
He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.
The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars.
Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again. They wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads.
I went to the bookstore in the afternoons after I got off work, during that terrible year of 1959.
He had a kitchen in the back of the store and he brewed cups of thick Turkish coffee in a copper pan. I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end. He had a small room above the kitchen.
It looked down on the bookstore and had Chinese screens in front of it. The room contained a couch, a glass cabinet with Chinese things in it and a table and three chairs. There was a tiny bathroom fastened like a watch fob to the room.
I was sitting on a stool in the bookstore one afternoon reading a book that was in the shape of a chalice. The book had clear pages like gin, and the first page in the book read:
Billy
the Kid
born
November 23,
1859
in
New York
City
The owner of the bookstore came up to me, and put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Would you like to get laid?” His voice was very kind.
“No,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” he said, and then without saying anything else, he went out in front of the bookstore, and stopped a pair of total strangers, a man and a woman. He talked to them for a few moments. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He pointed at me in the bookstore. The woman nodded her head and then the man nodded his head.
They came into the bookstore.
I was embarrassed. I could not leave the bookstore because they were entering by the only door, so I decided to go upstairs and go to the toilet. I got up abruptly and walked to the back of the bookstore and went upstairs to the bathroom, and they followed after me.
I could hear them on the stairs.
I waited for a long time in the bathroom and they waited an equally long time in the other room. They never spoke. When I came out of the bathroom, the woman was lying naked on the couch, and the man was sitting in a chair with his hat on his lap.
“Don’t worry about him,” the girl said. “These things make no difference to him. He’s rich. He has 3,859 Rolls Royces.” The girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves.
“Come to me,” she said. “And come inside me for we are Aquarius and I love you.”
I looked at the man sitting in the chair. He was not smiling and he did not look sad.
I took off my shoes and all my clothes. The man did not say a word.
The girl’s body moved ever so slightly from side to side.
There was nothing else I could do for my body was like birds sitting on a telephone wire strung out down the world, clouds tossing the wires carefully.
I laid the girl.
It was like the eternal 59th second when it becomes a minute and then looks kind of sheepish.
“Good,” the girl said, and kissed me on the face.
The man sat there without speaking or moving or sending out any emotion into the room. I guess he was rich and owned 3, 859 Rolls Royces.
Afterwards the girl got dressed and she and the man left. They walked down the stairs and on their way out, I heard him say his first words.
“Would you like to go to Ernie’s for dinner?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “It’s a little early to think about dinner.”
Then I heard the door close and they were gone. I got dressed and went downstairs. The flesh about my body felt soft and relaxed like an experiment in functional background music.
The owner of the bookstore was sitting at his desk behind the counter. “I’ll tell you what happened up there,” he said, in a beautiful anti-three-legged-crow voice, in an anti-dandelion side of the mountain voice.
“What?” I said.
“You fought in the Spanish Civil War.