I Am a Japanese Writer

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN'S COWBOY BOOTS

ONE EVENING THERE was a knock at the door. I opened it. He refused to come in. I understood I was to follow. Some animals communicate that way. He wanted to show me his lair.

“No one’s ever been in here,” he said.

I didn’t answer. He grabbed me by the neck.

“I told you no one’s ever been in here.”

“It certainly is an honor!”

He smiled. He was doing his absolute best to put on a show for me. He offered me everything he owned. He brought me an object, and depending on how I looked at it, he would pull it out of my hands.

“You probably won’t care…”

We had drunk a few beers, and I was heading for the door when his face lit up. He scrambled through the apartment and found me an old pair of cowboy boots. He was sure he’d got it right this time. I couldn’t refuse, even if they were old boots curled up at the toes.

“They belonged to a friend of my father’s. I knew I’d find someone to give these to one day.”

I thanked him and went upstairs with the boots. I was in the middle of a Lee van Cleef Western when I heard a knock on the door. He was wearing a smile like a kid about to play a trick on someone. He handed me a book covered in lime dust. I could hardly read the title. The author’s name had disappeared under the dust. He waited for my reaction. I opened the book. The pages cracked like dry bread. I found myself gazing at Richard Brautigan’s droopy mustache and worldweary eyes.

“He was a friend of my father’s. They used to go troutfishing together, right behind the house. I spent hours watching them out the window. They were like two posts nailed into the river… My mother didn’t want me to bother them.”

I stood there a moment, trying to picture Brautigan in these boots. They were the cowboy boots he wore all the time. He has them on in the few photos I’ve seen of him. He gave them to his Gaspé friend, who passed them on to his son, who was now giving them to me. If I had to choose between the writer’s typewriter and his boots, which would I choose? The typewriter, no doubt. Practically lying on top of the machine, he typed with his heavy fingers. His spirit lived in his fingertips. Which is false. Actually, he beat out the rhythm of his books with his feet. His feet in these boots. A real cowboy. He walked into the river in these boots. I thought of all those things as I tapped the boots one against the other. White dust fell. Réjean was waiting for me to say something, even though he’d never read a book in his life. These boots were his last connection to his father, the man who did only what he wanted to.

“He was a very delicate but delirious writer. He wrote the way he fished. He hunkered down in the middle of a book and wouldn’t budge. Once in a while you’d feel a slight pull. A fish had just taken the bait. The problem was that we never saw the fish. He always managed to let it slip away.”

Fishing, writing. Réjean looked at me, incredulous. He’d never understood my metaphors, but he did get the emotion. He understood I was moved.

“I knew you would know him. My father told me he was a pretty strange guy. They died the same year.”

I read the inscription. To my friend Réjean.

“That’s for my father. We have the same name.”

Réjean turned and left. He was too moved to hang around. On the table, I placed the old cowboy boots that had belonged to the author of The Tokyo-Montana Express.