Jubilee Hitchhiker Read Free

in darkness. The Zenos next door thought nothing of it. Richard was always coming and going mysteriously. He had his own peculiar reasons for the way he did things. He had mentioned that he might leave for a hunting trip to Montana in early October. Maybe he decided not to leave the light-timer on. When the phone in Brautigan’s office/bedroom rang, the answering machine, running now on internal batteries, continued to pick up and deliver the same noncommittal message. It was a perfect vanishing act. The dead poet had managed to completely disappear.
    The long, hot California fall days merged into weeks. Heat accelerated the process of decomposition and the eager swarming flies, finding easy access through the massive cranial damage, deposited thousands of their eggs inside Brautigan’s body. When they hatched, the cadaver teemed with maggots, the rice-sized larvae writhing in his decaying flesh. At the same time, the batteries in the answering machine began wearing down and the recorded message grew distorted, the words slurred, like a man underwater. Even this final echo of the poet’s voice began to die.
    If no one in Bolinas seemed to care that Richard Brautigan had disappeared (either they were no longer talking to him and just didn’t give a damn or else he had told them he was leaving on an extended journey), others among his closest friends began to grow concerned. At one point, Klyde Young, a housepainter and friend of Brautigan’s who had done odd jobs for the writer off and on for the past dozen years, ran into Jim Zeno in Stinson Beach. Young was alarmed to hear that no one had been to Richard’s house in more than two weeks.
    Soon after, Young talked with Tony Dingman, saying if he got authorization from Ianthe he would get into the house, break a small window, and check things out. Dingman had also been worried. The last time he spoke with Richard on the phone, the day before he died, Brautigan said he’d swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills the previous night but that they’d had no effect. Knowing his buddy once made a similar halfhearted suicide attempt after the breakup of his second marriage, Dingman didn’t take this latest pill episode too seriously. But weeks without any word caused concern, and Dingman had several conversations with Richard Breen, another Brautigan crony. They both hoped Richard had gone back to Amsterdam with a Dutch critic who had visited California earlier that summer.
    This didn’t seem right to Klyde Young. He drove to Bolinas and wandered outside the gloomy house on Terrace Avenue. Nothing looked amiss. No mail had accumulated. Klyde figured if a
body was inside he would smell it. There was no odor. The front porch steps were gone, yet, for inexplicable reasons, he couldn’t bring himself to attempt the interior entryway stairs. Young looked through the windows. The blinds were drawn all the way around. He couldn’t see a thing. No one remembered Brautigan being in town lately. Klyde Young assumed that he had taken off for the start of bird season in Montana, and headed back to Tiburon. Doubts remained, but he didn’t want to take any drastic action on his own. How would he explain it to Richard when he returned?
    On October 4, Jonathan Dolger sent a Mailgram to Brautigan’s address in Bolinas reading: “Have been unable to reach you these past three weeks. Stop. Please call to discuss two new book and movie offers.” This was exactly the sort of good news Richard had been waiting for. Receiving the message might not have saved his life but almost certainly would have prolonged it.
    Up in Montana, things felt very bad. Where was Richard? He had missed the opening of the upland bird season and wasn’t answering his calls. Becky Fonda felt particularly troubled by the garbled message on Brautigan’s machine at the Bolinas number. Even when drunk, Richard didn’t sound like that. She made several calls and