The Tokyo-Montana Express Read Online Free PDF Page A

around
to everybody and there were very long pauses between sentences.
    One sentence was an incoherent comment
about the State of the Union. I substituted an obscure California weather
pattern in place of a traditional Montana weather pattern to use as a metaphor
about inflation.
    What I said made absolutely no sense
whatsoever and when I finished nobody asked me to elaborate. A few people said
that they needed some more wine and excused themselves to go get some, though I
could see that they still had plenty of wine left in their glasses.
    I also told everybody that I had seen a
moose in my back yard, right outside the kitchen window. Then I did not give
any more details. I just stood there staring at them while they waited
patiently for me to continue talking about the moose, but that was it.
    A little old lady told me that she had to
go to the toilet. Later on during the party every time I was in her vicinity, she
immediately started talking desperately to the closest person.
    A man I told my moose story to said, “Was
that the same moose you told me about yesterday?” I looked a little shocked and
then said, “Yes.” The shocked expression slowly changed into one of serene
bewilderment.
    I think my mind is going. It is changing
into a cranial junkyard. I have a huge pile of rusty tin cans the size of Mount
Everest and about a million old cars that are going nowhere except between my
ears.
    I stayed at the party for three hours,
though it seemed closer to a light-year of one-sentence moose stories.
    Then I went home and watched Fantasy Island
on television. As a sort of laststand nervous spiritual pickup, I called a
friend in California on the telephone during a commercial. We had a very
low-keyed conversation during the commercial. He was not really that interested
in talking to me.
    He was more interested in doing something else.
    As we struggled through the conversation,
like quicksand, I wondered what the first thing he would do after I hung up. Maybe
he would pour himself a stiff drink or he would call somebody interesting on
the telephone and tell them how boring I had become.
    At one point toward the end of our
thousand-mile little chat, I said, “Well, I’ve just been fishing and writing. I’ve
written seven little short stories this week.”
    “Nobody eares,” my friend said. And he was
right.
    I started to tell him that I had seen a
moose in my back yard but I changed my mind. I would save it for another time.
I did not want to use up my best material right away. You’ve got to think of
the future.

OPEN
    Once she owned a Chinese restaurant
and she worked very hard to get it. I think she spent her whole life earning the
money. The location had not been a restaurant before, so she had to start from
the very beginning and create a restaurant from a place that had been an
Italian men’s clothing store for years with a clientele that was exclusively old
men. The store finally closed when all its customers died.
    Then the woman came along and made it into
a Chinese restaurant. She replaced somber dark suits with fried rice and chow
mein.
    She was a small middle-aged Chinese woman
who had once been very good looking, probably beautiful. She decorated the restaurant
herself. It was a comfortable little world that reflected the values of the
Chinese lower middle-class. There were bright and cheerful Chinese lanterns and
inexpensive scrolls that had birds painted on them and little glass knickknacks
from Hong Kong.
    She had to build the restaurant from the
very beginning, including lowering the ceiling and panelling the walls and carpeting
the floor. There was also, and this is a big also, putting in the kitchen and
creating two bathrooms. None of that is cheap.
    She put her life’s savings into the
restaurant and hoped for the best, probably prayed for the best. Unfortunately,
it was not to come her way. Who knows why a restaurant fails? She had good food
at reasonable prices and a good location with lots of