Free Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg Page A

have her.”
    Jack Fjetland meant business, and Eveline moved out. “She was married to Pisanni for ten years,” Mary Lou recalled, “and for ten years she kept her suitcase packed to leave him.”
    Eveline lived in the country with Mary Lou for a year until her divorce was final and she married Fjetland. In 1937, the year Eveline met Big Jack, he and Arthur Martin Titland, another Norwegian truck driver, became beer-drinking buddies at the New Country Grocery. One afternoon, before catching the bus outside back to the country, Mary Lou met Titland. He was ten years older, a “dark Norwegian” with black hair and a swarthy complexion. “He wasn’t any good. He was a drunk,” she said later. “He drank up the family house. He drank up everything.”
    Mary Lou started living with Arthur and on May 1, 1939, at the Tacoma General Hospital, she gave birth to a daughter, Barbara Jo Titland. By then, the couple had already separated. It’s doubtful they were ever legally married. No marriage certificate can be found, and Mary Lou’s divorce from Bernard Brautigan was not final until January 17, 1940.
    Richard Brautigan was four years old when his sister was born. His first memories eventually found their way into his fiction. His mother always said Richard had a “photostatic [ sic ] memory.” In “Revenge of the Lawn,” Brautigan wrote that his first memory “occurred in my grandmother’s front yard. The year was either 1936 or 1937.” He remembered “[Frank Campana] cutting down the pear tree and soaking it with kerosene” at The Boy’s Place in St. Helens. Like the character in the story, Campana had a morbid fear of bees.
    Brautigan wrote of his adventures with the little red wagon in an unpublished short story called “Cracker Jacks.” He was four years old and loaded up his wagon with two hundred boxes of Cracker Jack from a store display. He wanted the prizes, not to keep, but to bury in a small animal cemetery in the backyard where he interred dead birds and insects. Brautigan described his tiny graveyard in part 9 (“My Insect Funeral”) of his early pamphlet-length poem, The Galilee Hitch-hiker .
    Young Richard added the purloined prizes to his miniature necropolis, tamping damp earth onto the tiny toys. In the story, he gets caught red-handed with the ripped-open Cracker Jack boxes and spanked. His mother shelled out eight bucks (a substantial sum in the Depression) in recompense. The family ate Cracker Jacks for breakfast for weeks. Richard never told anyone what he had done with all the prizes.
    Brautigan often claimed to have twice flunked the first grade. “I couldn’t figure school out,” he said. “It didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t able to learn the system.” Richard transposed this
yarn of early failure directly into his fiction. In truth, Mary Lou enrolled him in the first grade at Tacoma’s Central Avenue grade school (September 1940) when he was five years old. Brautigan graduated from high school in June of 1953, a normal twelve-year course of study. Richard’s sister, Barbara, thought that he’d actually skipped a year. (“He either skipped the fourth or the fifth grade because he was really smart.”) Brautigan later concurred, writing: “I was smart and a year ahead in school.”
    Richard told many stories about learning to read. Along with the can label tale, two other conflicting versions survive. He once confided to his friend Keith Abbott that he kept a World War II Japanese machine gun in his Geary Street apartment because it “reminded him of how he learned to read at age six, when he understood a headline about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (“Japs Bomb Pearl Harbor”) and made the connection between letters and reality.” In 1980, Brautigan told a reporter from the Tacoma News Tribune that he realized he could read