The Tokyo-Montana Express Read Free Page A

waiting for him to remember.
    Then he remembered.
    “This young man,” he said. “Played
football.”

Ice Age Cab Company
    These mountains of Montana are
endlessly changing, minute to minute, nothing remains the same. It is the work
of sun and wind and snow. It is the play of clouds and shadows.
    I am staring at the mountains again.
    It is the time of another sunset. This one
is muted. I expected to watch a different sunset when I left the house and came
out here to this room sitting in the top of a red barn with a large window
facing the mountains.
    I expected a clear sharp sunset, analytical
in its perception of this the first snowy day of the autumn down here in the
valley:
    …October 10, 1977.
    We went to sleep last night with it
snowing, hut now the sunset is changing again, minute to minute, taking on a different
character. The mute quality is giving way to a vague sharpness like a knife
that can cut some things but can’t cut other things. It can cut a peach but it
can’t cut an apple.
    There was a great old woman who used to run
the taxicab company in town which was only a little more than one cab. You
might say that the whole cab company was one cab+ and not be far from the
truth.
    Anyway, last year she was driving me out
here and high white clouds had gone into partnership with a sharp June sun and
their business was rapid, dramatic light changes going on in the mountains.
    We were of course talking about ice ages.
    She liked to talk about ice ages. It was
her favorite topic. She finished saying something about ice ages by changing the
subject to the light patterns going on in the mountains.
    “…ice ages!” she said, dramatically
bringing to an end the conversation about ice ages. Then her voice softened. “These
mountains,” she said. “I’ve lived here for over fifty years and maybe looked at
the mountains a million times and they’ve never looked the same way twice.
They’re always different, changing.”
    When she started talking about the
mountains, they looked one way and when she finished talking about them, they
looked another way.
    I guess that’s what I’m trying to say about
this sunset.
    “Different, changing.”

Shrine of Carp
    The bars are closing in Shibuya on a
Friday night and thousands of people are pouring out into the streets like happy
drunken toothpaste, laughing and speaking Japanese.
    The traffic is very heavy with full taxis.
It is well known that Shibuya can be a very difficult place to get a taxicab on
a Friday or Saturday night. Sometimes it can be almost impossible, only fate
and the direct intervention of the gods will secure you a taxicab.
    I stand there in Shibuya in the middle of
this gigantic party of Japanese. I feel no anxiety to go home because I am
alone. When I get home an empty bed in a hotel room waits for me like a bridge
to lonely and solitary sleep.
    So I just stand there as peaceful as a
banana because that’s what I look like in this all-Japanese crowd. Every taxi that
comes by me is full in the traffic that’s barely moving. Ahead of me I can see
empty cabs, but they are seized instantly as soon as they appear.
    I don’t care.
    I am not really going anyplace that counts,
not like the many young lovers that I see around me who are on their way to
happy drunken fucking.
    Let them have the cabs.
    They are a blessing from me to them.
    I was once young myself.
    Then I see an empty cab headed toward me
and for some strange reason all the lovers look away and I automatically raise
my hand beckoning toward the cab. It is not that I want the cab. It’s just done
out of unconscious habit. I have no interest in stealing their cab.
    When a person feels like that, of course,
the taxi stops and I get into it. Kindness can only go so far. It is a
privately-owned cab because its interior reflects the personality of the cab
driver and shows the professional pride he takes in owning his own cab.
    I tell the driver in Japanese where I am
going and we start on our