Read The Tokyo-Montana Express for Free Online Page A

exhausted and abstract.
    She touches his hair gently with her hand.
Her hand is delicate and he isn’t afraid of it. Then she caresses his face gently
with her hand. It isn’t warm but it isn’t cold either. Her hand possesses an
existence between life and death.
    She smiles at him. He’s so tired that he
almost smiles back. She leaves the room and he falls asleep. His dreams are not
unpleasant. They are a floating bridge to his mother who wakes him up in the
morning by loudly opening the door to his bedroom and yelling, “Time to get up!
Breakfast is on the table!”
    He is silent at the kitchen table. His
brothers and sisters are chattering away and his father hasn’t said a word
while carefully drinking a cup of stoic coffee. His father never talks at the
kitchen table, even when its dinner and there’s company. People have gotten
used to it.
    The boy thinks about the ghost as he eats
thick slices of bacon and eggs scrambled in the fat and nibbles on a jalapeno
pepper. He really likes jalapenos, the hotter the better.
    He does not mention the ghost to anyone at
the table. He doesn’t want them to think that he is crazy and the years pass
and he grows up in that house with his two sisters and two brothers and his
mother and his father and the ghost.
    She visits him five or six times a year.
There is no pattern to the visits. She doesn’t come every May or September or
the third of July. She just comes when she wants to, but it averages five or
six times a year. She never frightens him and almost seems to love him but they
never have anything to say to each other.
    It’s hard to make a living in that part of
Texas in those days, so eventually the family grows up and scatters away from
that house and it becomes just another abandoned old house in West Texas.
    One sister goes to live in Houston and a
brother to Oklahoma City and another sister marries a mechanic and he has a filling
station in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
    His father dies of a heart attack one rainy
afternoon in San Angelo, Texas, and his mother goes to live in an old-folks
home in Abilene, Texas, because her sister lives nearby, and one of his brothers
gets a job in Canada, and his other brother is killed in an automobile accident
in 1943 while in the Air Force stationed at Amarillo, Texas.
    Then there is himself: He marries his high
school sweetheart and lives in Brownwood, Texas, for three years, working at a
feed store.
    He is drafted into the infantry and fights
in Italy and later on is a part of the Normandy Landing on D-Day 1944 and is
wounded once, not seriously, shrapnel in the leg and rises to the rank of
sergeant because so many men in his company are killed in a fire tight with
some Waffen SS troops on the border of Germany.
    He comes back from the war and goes to
college on the GI Bill for two years at the University of Texas in Austin, majoring
in business administration, then drops out of college and works as a cigarette
salesman for a few years until by a fluke he gets involved in selling
television sets and eventually has a little TV store of his own in Austin. They
have two children: a girl named Joan and a boy Robert.
    The old house just continues to stand out
there in West Texas: abandoned, a monument to the growing years of an American
family. Its dark outline stands against the sunset and the wind bangs something
that is loose on the house.
    And on… and on… and on ( years passing,
life being lived, problems, good times, bills, etc., the children growing up
and getting married… on, etc., on ) until he is fifty-three years old at a
family reunion picnic with his brother and his two sisters sitting alone
together at a wooden table outside in the Texas afternoon, but their mother
couldn’t come because she’s just too old and doesn’t recognize them any more.
Her sister stopped visiting her last year because it broke her heart to see her
that way.
    It is at a picnic table covered with plates
of barbecue and salad, roast young