Hear the Wind Sing

39

This is where my story ends, but of course there’s an epilogue.

I’m twenty-nine, the Rat is thirty. Kind of an uninteresting age. At the time of the highway expansion, J’s Bar was remodeled and became a nice little place. Going in there, you can see J every day, same as ever, facing his bucket of potatoes, and you can hear the regulars complaining about how much better things used to be as they keep on drinking their beers.

I got married, and I’m now living in Tokyo. Whenever a new Sam Peckinpah movie comes out, my wife and I go to the movie theatre, stop at Hibiya Park on the way back and drink two beers each, scattering our popcorn for the pigeons. Out of Peckinpah’s movies, my favorite is Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and she says she likes Convoy the best. Of non-Peckinpah movies, I like Ashes and Diamonds, and she likes Mother Joan of the Angels. Live together long enough, and I guess your interests start to coincide.

Am I happy? If you asked me this, I’d have to say,

‘Yeah, I guess.’ Because dreams are, after all, just that: dreams.

The Rat is still writing his novels. He sends me copies of them every year for Christmas. Last year’s was about a cook in a psychiatric hospital’s cafeteria, the one from the year before that was about a comedy band based on The Brothers Karamazov. Same as ever, his novels have no sex scenes, and none of the characters die.

The first page is always a piece of Japanese writing paper bearing this message:

“Happy birthday,

and a

White Christmas.”

Because my birthday is December 24th. The girl with only four fingers on her left hand, I never saw her again. When I went back to the town that winter, she’d quit the record store and vacated her apartment. Then, in a flood of people and in the flow of time, she vanished without a trace. When I go back to the town in the summer, I always walk down the street we walked together, sit on the stone stairs in front of the warehouse and gaze out at the sea. When I think I want to cry, the tears won’t come. That’s just how it is.

That California Girls record, it’s still on my record shelf. When summer comes around I pull it out and listen to it over and over. Then I think of California and drink beer.

Next to the record shelf is my desk, and above my desk hangs the dried-out, nearly mummified remains of the clump of grass. The grass I pulled out of that cow’s stomach.

The picture of the dead girl from the French lit department, it got lost when I moved.

The Beach Boys put out their first new record in a long time.

I wish they all could be California I wish they all could be California girls…