Free The Tokyo-Montana Express by Richard Brautigan

miles from
here. This is the worst.”
    That made us feel better.
    The road was a white tire track vagueness
that disappeared into a premature horizon. There were fat beaconesque mesas
towering up from the desert floor. The road vanished somewhere in between their
shipless vigilance.
    I had a strong feeling that the mesas didn’t
give a damn about that road. To them the road was just a passing cartoon. After
all, they had been witnesses to the beginning of time.
    “My sister’s out there,” the Indian said,
casually pointing down the road that very shortly vanished off the face of the
earth.
    “What?” I said, not quite hearing or maybe
just not believing what he had just said.
    “She’s looking for the chain. I lost a tire
chain out there. She’s looking for it.”
    I looked down the road.
    I didn’t see anybody.
    “About a mile or so,” he said, still
pointing.
    He had one foot on the running board of the
pickup.
    “There’s somebody out there,” I said, still
playing straight man.
    “My sister,” he said. “I hope she finds
that chain. It cost me three dollars. Used.”
    “Yeah,” I said, blindly. What else could I
say because I certainly couldn’t see an Indian woman down that road looking for
a three-dollar tire chain?
    “When you see her,” he said, “tell her I’m
still here waiting.”
    “OK,” I said, my voice like a white cane
tapping along.
    We said our good—byes and continued down
the road for a mile or so, and like the Indian said, we saw her walking along
the side of the road looking in the snow for the tire chain.
    She was looking very carefully for it in
the late-cold, Snowy-clear New Mexico morning. We stopped beside her and she
looked up from her tire chain searching. Her face was weathered with patience,
her eyes echoed timelessness.
    I think the Queen of England would be
impatient by now if she had been looking for a three-dollar tire chain in the
snow.
    “Your brother’s waiting for you,” I said,
like a blind-man, motioning with my head down the road.
    “I know,” she said. “He’s good at that.”
    “Any luck?” I said, like a bat.
    I could see that she wasn’t carrying the
tire chain, so obviously she hadn’t found it, but I had to say something.
    “It’s here someplace,” she said, glancing
with her eyes at the nearby 121,000 square miles, which is the area of New
Mexico.
    “Good luck,” I said, ten years ago in the
Sixties that have become legend now like the days of King Arthur sitting at the
Round Table with the Beatles, and John singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
    We drove down the road toward the
Seventies, leaving her slowly behind, looking for a tire chain in the snow with
her brother waiting patiently beside a blue pickup truck with its Age-of-Aquarius
paint job starting to flake.

White
    Whenever I seriously think about the
color white, I think about her, for she is the ultimate definition of white.
    She was at a combination exhibition of
paintings and autograph party for a famous Japanese painter-writer. She was
very interested in him as he sat at a table autographing copies of his latest
book. There was a long line of people waiting for his autograph. She did not
get in line but wandered around and around and around the gallery, looking but
not looking at his paintings.
    She was very beautiful with an incredible
pair of legs that she showed off like an event, which they were. She crowned
them with a pair of black, almost shark-like high heel shoes.
    The woman knew how to provoke attention.
    From time to time she walked near the table
where the writer was autographing away like some king of machine. He
autographed books as if Sony had invented him. He never noticed her.
    She had a way of walking very slowly seven
or eight premeditated steps and then turning swiftly on her heel like a shark
turning to attack.
    As the hours passed, the line of people
gradually evaporated down to just a handful and then she walked dramatically as
if a