Trout Fishing in America Read Free

pistol against the rat’s head. The rat did not move and continued eating away. When the hammer clicked back, the rat paused between bites and looked out of the corner of its eye. First at the pistol and then at the man. It was a kind of friendly look as if to say, “When my mother was young she sang like Deanna Durbin.”
    The man pulled the trigger.
    He had no sense of humor.
    There’s always a single feature, a double feature and an eternal feature playing at the Great Theater in Mooresville, Indiana: the John Dillinger capital of America.

Grider Creek
    I had heard there was some good fishing in there and it was running clear while all the other large creeks were running muddy from the snow melting off the Marble Mountains.
    I also heard there were some Eastern brook trout in there, high up in the mountains, living in the wakes of beaver dams.
    The guy who drove the school bus drew a map of Grider Creek, showing where the good fishing was. We were standing in front of Steelhead Lodge when he drew the map. It was a very hot day. I’d imagine it was a hundred degrees.
    You had to have a car to get to Grider Creek where the good fishing was, and I didn’t have a car. The map was nice, though. Drawn with a heavy dull pencil on a piece of paper bag. With a little square ߝ for a sawmill.

The Ballet for Trout Fishing in America
    How the Cobra Lily traps insects is a ballet for Trout Fishing in America, a ballet to be performed at the University of California at Los Angeles.
    The plant is beside me here on the back porch.
    It died a few days after I bought it at Woolworth’s. That was months ago, during the presidential election of nineteen hundred and sixty.
    I buried the plant in an empty Metrecal can.
    The side of the can says, “Metrecal Dietary for Weight Control,” and below that reads, “Ingredients: Non-fat milk solids, soya flour, whole milk solids, sucrose, starch, corn oil, coconut oil, yeast, imitation vanilla,” but the can’s only a graveyard now for a Cobra Lily that has turned dry and brown and has black freckles.
    As a kind of funeral wreath, there is a red, white and blue button sticking in the plant and the words on it say, “I’m for Nixon.”
    The main energy for the ballet comes from a description of the Cobra Lily. The description could be used as a welcome mat on the front porch of hell or to conduct an orchestra of mortuaries with ice-cold woodwinds or be an atomic mailman in the pines, in the pines where the sun never shines.
    â€œNature has endowed the Cobra Lily with the means of catching its own food. The forked tongue is covered with honey glands which attract the insects upon which it feeds. Once inside the hood, downward pointing hairs prevent the insect from crawling out. The digestive liquids are found in the base of the plant.
    â€œThe supposition that it is necessary to feed the Cobra Lily a piece of hamburger or an insect daily is erroneous.”
    I hope the dancers do a good job of it, they hold our

imagination in their feet, dancing in Los Angeles for Trout Fishing in America.

A Walden Pond for Winos
    The autumn carried along with it, like the roller coaster of a flesh-eating plant, port wine and the people who drank that dark sweet wine, people long since gone, except for me.
    Always wary of the police, we drank in the safest place we could find, the park across from the church.
    There were three poplar trees in the middle of the park and there was a statue of Benjamin Franklin in front of the trees. We sat there and drank port.
    At home my wife was pregnant.
    I would call on the telephone after I finished work and say, “I won’t be home for a little while. I’m going to have a drink with some friends.”
    The three of us huddled in the park, talking. They were both broken-down artists from New Orleans where they had drawn pictures of tourists in Pirate’s Alley.
    Now in San Francisco, with the cold