Free Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

another half-pint.
    â€œThat’s the way she handles it. She doesn’t talk very much,

and she doesn’t make any bad scenes. A good-looking woman.”
    My friend knocked on the door and we could hear somebody get up off the bed and come to the door.
    â€œWho’s there?” said a man on the other side.
    â€œMe,” my friend said, in a voice deep and recognizable as any name.
    â€œI’ll open the door.” A simple declarative sentence. He undid about a hundred locks, bolts and chains and anchors and steel spikes and canes filled with acid, and then the door opened like the classroom of a great university and everything was in its proper place: the gun beside the bed and a small bottle of brandy beside an attractive Negro woman.
    There were many flowers and plants growing in the room, some of them were on the dresser, surrounded by old photographs. All of the photographs were of white people, including Art when he was young and handsome and looked just like the 1930s.
    There were pictures of animals cut out of magazines and tacked to the wall, with crayola frames drawn around them and crayola picture wires drawn holding them to the wall. They were pictures of kittens and puppies. They looked just fine:
    There was a bowl of goldfish next to the bed, next to the gun. How religious and intimate the goldfish and the gun looked together.
    They had a cat named 208. They covered the bathroom floor with newspaper and the cat crapped on the newspaper. My friend said that 208 thought he was the only cat left in the world, not having seen another cat since he was a tiny kitten. They never let him out of the room. He was a red cat and very aggressive. When you played with that cat, he really bit you. Stroke 208’s fur and he’d try to disembowel your hand as if it were a belly stuffed full of extrasoft intestines.
    We sat there and drank and talked about books. Art had owned a lot of books in Los Angeles, but they were all gone now. He told us that he used to spend his spare time in secondhand bookstores buying old and unusual books when he was in show business, traveling from city to city across America. Some of them were very rare autographed books, he told us, but he had bought them for very little and was forced to sell them for very little.
    â€œThey’d be worth a lot of money now,” he said.
    The Negro woman sat there very quietly studying her brandy. A couple of times she said yes, in a sort of nice way. She used the word yes to its best advantage, when surrounded by no meaning and left alone from other words.
    They did their own cooking in the room and had a single hot plate sitting on the floor, next to half a dozen plants, including a peach tree growing in a coffee can. Their closet was stuffed with food. Along with shirts, suits and dresses, were canned goods, eggs and cooking oil.
    My friend told me that she was a very fine cook. That she could really cook up a good meal, fancy dishes, too, on that single hot plate, next to the peach tree.
    They had a good world going for them. He had such a soft voice and manner that he worked as a private nurse for rich mental patients. He made good money when he worked, but sometimes he was sick himself. He was kind of run down. She was still working for the telephone company, but she wasn’t doing that night work any more.
    They were still paying off the bills that pimp had run up. I mean, years had passed and they were still paying them off: a Cadillac and a hi-fi set and expensive clothes and all those things that Negro pimps do love to have.
    I went back there half a dozen times after that first meeting. An interesting thing happened. I pretended that the cat, 208, was named after their room number, though I knew that their number was in the three hundreds. The room was on the third floor. It was that simple.
    I always went to their room following the geography of Hotel Trout Fishing in America, rather than its numerical layout. I