Read Online Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan - Free Book Online

Government pension and is looking forward to a long and cheerful retirement.
    We see a cafe resting in the snow's leisure. I get out of the Jeep and leave the girl sitting there while I go into the cafe to find out about the road.
    The waitress is middle-aged. She looks at me as if I am a foreign movie that has just come in out of the snow starring
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve. The cafe smells like a fifty-foot-long breakfast. Two Indians are sitting at it, eating ham and eggs.
    They are quiet and curious about me. They look at me sideways. I ask the waitress about the road and she tells me that it's closed. She says it in one quick final sentence. Well, that takes care of that.
    I start out the door but one of the Indians turns and says sideways to me, "The road's open. I went over it this morning."
    "Is it open all the way to Highway 44: the road over to Cuba?" I ask him.
    "Yes."
    The waitress suddenly turns her attention to the coffee. The coffee needs taking care of right now and that is what she is doing for the benefit of all the generations of coffee drinkers to come. Without her dedication, coffee might become extinct in Thoreau, New Mexico.

44:40
    W HEN I knew Cameron he was a very old man and wore carpet slippers all the time and didn't talk any more. He smoked cigars and occasionally listened to Burl Ives' records. He lived with one of his sons who was now a middle-aged man himself and starting to complain about growing old.
    "God-damn it, there's no getting around the fact that I'm not as young as I used to be."
    Cameron had his own easy chair in the front room. It was covered with a wool blanket. Nobody else ever sat in that chair, but it was always as if he were sitting there, anyway. His spirit had taken command of that chair. Old people have a way of doing that with the furniture they end their lives sitting in.
    He didn't go outside any more during the winter, but he would sit out on the front porch sometimes in the summer and stare past the rose bushes in the front yard to the street beyond where life calendared its days without him as if he had never existed out there at all.
    That wasn't true, though. He used to be a great dancer and would dance all night long in the 1890s. He was famous for his dancing. He sent many a fiddler to an early grave and when the girls danced with him, they always danced better and they loved him for it and just the mention of his name in that county made the girls feel good and would get them blushing and giggling. Even the "serious" girls would get excited by his name or the sight of him.
    There were a lot of broken hearts when he married the youngest of the Singleton girls in 1900.
    "She's not that pretty," refrained the sore losers and they all cried at the wedding.
    He was also a hell-of-a good poker player in a county where people played very serious poker for high stakes. Once a man sitting next to him was caught cheating during a game.
    There was a lot of money on the table and a piece of paper that represented twelve head of cattle, two horses and a wagon. That was part of a bet.
    The man's cheating was made public by one of the other men at the table reaching swiftly across without saying a word and cutting the man's throat.
    Cameron automatically reached over and put his thumb on the man's jugular vein to keep the blood from getting all over the table and held him upright, though he was dying until the hand was finished and the ownership of the twelve head of cattle, two horses and a wagon was settled.
    Though Cameron didn't talk any more, you could see events like that in his eyes. His hands lad been made vegetable-like by rheumatism but there was an enormous dignity to their repose. The way he lit a cigar was like an act of history.
    Once he had spent a winter as a sheepherder in 1889. He was a young man, not yet out of his teens. It was a long lonely winter job in God-forsaken country, but he needed the money
to pay off a debt that he owed his father.