The Tokyo-Montana Express Read Online Free PDF

foot traffic, but people
just didn’t want to eat there.
    I went there a couple of times a week and became
friends with her. She was a very nice woman. I slowly watched her restaurant
fade away. Often when I ate there, there were only two or three other people in
the restaurant. Sometimes there were none.
    After a while she took to looking at the
door a lot. She sat at an empty table, surrounded by empty tables and watched
the door, waiting for customers that never came. She would talk to me about it.
“I can’t understand it,” she would say. “This is a good restaurant. There are a
lot of people walking by. I don’t understand.”
    I didn’t understand either and when I ate
there, I gradually became a shadow of her, watching the door, hoping for
customers.
    She put up a huge sign in the front window
that said OPEN. By then it was too late, nothing could help. I went away to Japan
for a few months. When I came back the restaurant was closed. She had run out
of time, staring at the front door while it grew cobwebs.
    I didn’t see her again for about two years
and then I bumped into her one day on the street. We said our hellos and she
asked me how I was and I said, “Fine,” and she told me that she was fine. “You
know I lost the restaurant,” she said.
    Then she turned and pointed her hand down
the street toward a neon sign two blocks away that jutted out, breaking the
anonymity of the block. The sign told us that the Adams and White Mortuary was
located there.
    “I’ve been working for Adams and White
since the restaurant failed,” she said, her voice was almost desperate and
suddenly she seemed very small like a frightened child, just waking up from a
nightmare and trying to talk about it while it was still so vivid that the
child couldn’t tell the difference between it and reality.

Spiders Are in the House
    It is autumn. Spiders are in the
house. They have come in from the cold. They want to spend the winter in here.
I don’t blame them. It’s cold out there. I like spiders and welcome them. They’re
OK in my book. I’ve always liked spiders, even when I was a child. I was afraid
of other things, like my playmates, but I wasn’t afraid of spiders.
    Why?
    I don’t know: just because. Maybe I was a
spider in another life. Maybe I wasn’t. Who cares? There are spiders living
comfortably in my house while the wind howls outside. They aren’t bothering
anybody. It I were a fly, I’d have second thoughts but I’m not, so I don’t.
    …nice spiders protected from the wind.

Very Good Dead Friends
    One day in his life he realized that
he had more very good dead friends than he had living ones. When he first realized
this, he spent an afternoon turning thousands of people in his mind like pages
in the telephone book to see if he was right.
    He was, and he didn’t know how to feel
about it. At first he felt sad. Then the sadness slowly turned into feeling
nothing at all and that felt better, like not being aware of the wind blowing
on a very windy day.
    Your mind someplace else,
    No wind there.

What Are You Going to Do
with 390 Photographs
of Christmas Trees?
    I don’t know. But it seemed like the
thing to do in that first week in January 1967, and I got two other people to
join me. One of them wants to remain anonymous, and that’s all right.
    I think we were still in shock over
President Kennedy’s assassination. Perhaps that had something to do with all
those photographs of Christmas trees.
    The Christmas of 1963 looked terrible, illuminated
by all the flags in America hanging at halt-mast week after week in December
like a tunnel of mourning.
    I was living by myself in a very strange
apartment where I was taking care of an aviary for some people who were in
Mexico. I fed the birds every day and changed their water and had a little
vacuum cleaner to tidy up the aviary when it was needed.
    I ate dinner by myself 0n Christmas day. I
had some hot dogs and beans and drank a bottle of rum with