Free Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan Page A

were all talking about the missing bears and were kind of looking for the bears all over the place.
    "They're dead," somebody said, trying to be reassuring, and pretty soon we were looking inside the house, and a woman went through the closets, looking for bears.
    After a while the mayor came over and said, "I'm hungry. Where are my bears?"
    Somebody told the mayor that they had disappeared into thin air and the mayor said, "That's impossible," and got down and looked under the porch. There were no bears there.
    An hour or so passed and everybody gave up looking for the bears, and the sun went down. We sat outside on the front porch where once upon a time, there had been bears.
    The men talked about playing high school football during the Depression, and made jokes about how old and fat they had grown. Somebody asked Uncle Jarv about the four hotel rooms and the four bottles of whiskey. Everybody laughed except Uncle Jarv. He smiled instead. Night had just started when somebody found the bears.
    They were on a side street sitting in the front seat of a car. One of the bears had on a pair of pants and a checkered shirt. He was wearing a red hunting hat and had a pipe in the
mouth and two paws on the steering wheel like Barney Old-field.
    The other bear had on a whits silk negligee, one of the kind you see advertised in the back pages of men's magazines, and a pair of felt slippers stuck on the feet. There was a pink bonnet tied on the head and a purse in the lap.
    Somebody opened up the purse, but there wasn't anything inside. I don't know what they expected to find, but they were disappointed. What would a dead bear carry in its purse, anyway?
    ***
    Strange is the thing that makes me recall all this again: the bears. It's a photograph in the newspaper of Marilyn Monroe, dead from a sleeping pill suicide, young and beautiful, as they say, with everything to live for.
    The newspapers are filled with it: articles and photographs and the like—her body being taken away on a cart, the body wrapped in a dull blanket. I wonder what post office wall in Eastern Oregon will wear this photograph of Marilyn Monroe.
    An attendant is pushing the cart out a door, and the sun is shining under the cart. Venetian blinds are in the photograph and the branches of a tree.

Pale Marble Movie
    T HE room had a high Victorian ceiling and there was a marble fireplace and an avocado tree growing in the window, and she lay beside me sleeping in a very well-built blond way.
    And I was asleep, too, and it was just starting to be dawn in September.
    1964.
    Then suddenly, without any warning, she sat up in bed, waking me instantly, and she started to get out of bed. She was very serious about it.
    "What are you doing?" I said.
    Her eyes were wide open.
    "I'm getting up," she said.
    They were a somnambulist blue.
    "Get back in bed," I said.
    "Why?" she said, now halfway out of bed with one blond foot touching the floor.
    "Because you're still asleep," I said.
    "Ohhh ... OK," she said. That made sense to her and
she got back into bed and pulled the covers around herself and cuddled up close to me. She didn't say another word and she didn't move.
    She lay there sound asleep with her wanderings over and mine just beginning. I have been thinking about this simple event for years now. It stays with me and repeats itself over and over again like a pale marble movie.

Partners
    I like to sit in the cheap theaters of America where people live and die with Elizabethan manners while watching the movies. There is a theater down on Market Street where I can see four movies for a dollar. I really don't care how good they are either. I'm not a critic. I just like to watch movies. Their presence on the screen is enough for me.
    The theater is filled with black people, hippies, senior citizens, soldiers, sailors and the innocent people who talk to the movies because the movies are just as real as anything else that has ever happened to them.
    "No! No! Get back in the