A Confederate General From Big Sur by Richard Brautigan

Author:Richard Brautigan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Literary, United States, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780395547038
Publisher: Rebel Inc
Published: 1968-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Extremity of $6.72

WHEN WE ARRIVED BACK at our place and Lee Mellon got out and I got off the truck, I could see that thirst had built itself a kind of shack in Lee Mellon’s throat. Thoughts of strong drink crossed his eyes like birds in flight.

“I wish she had been home,” Lee Mellon said, picking up a rock and throwing it at the Pacific Ocean. The rock did not quite reach the Pacific. It landed on a pile of about seven billion other rocks.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Who knows what might have happened?” Lee Mellon said.

I was quite certain that nothing would have happened, but I said, “Yeah, if she had been home…”

The birds kept crossing his eyes, flocks of little drinky-winkies, their wings attached by glass to their bodies. A fog was building up on the ocean. It was not building up like a shack, but more like a grand hotel. The Grand Hotel of Big Sur. Soon it would start inward and curve up the slope of the canyon and everything would be lost in flocks of vaporous bellboys.

Lee Mellon was getting pretty nervous. “Let’s hitchhike to Monterey and get drunk,” he said.

“Only if I can fill my pockets with rice when we get there, and put a pound of hamburger in my wallet before we start drinking,” I said. I used the word wallet like one uses the word mausoleum.

“OK,” he said.

Eight hours later I was sitting in a small bar in Monterey with a young girl. She had a glass of red wine in front of her and I had a martini in front of me. Sometimes it just happens that way. There’s no telling the future and little understanding of what’s gone on before. Lee Mellon was passed out underneath the saloon. I had hosed the vomit off him and covered him with a large piece of cardboard so the police wouldn’t find him.

There were a lot of other people in the bar. At first I could barely contain my amusement at human and public surroundings. I was pretending very hard that I was a human being and by doing so, I allowed myself to come on with the girl.

I had met her about an hour earlier when Lee Mellon had passed out on top of her. In subtracting him from her, a thing not taught in grade school arithmetic, we had struck up a casual conversation and it had flowered into us sitting opposite each other and having a drink together.

I held a sip of the cold martini in my mouth until the temperature of the drink was the same temperature as my body. The good old 98.6 fahrenheit—our only link with reality. That is if you want to consider a mouth full of martini as having anything to do with reality.

Elaine was the girl’s name and the more I watched her the prettier she flowered out, which is a nice thing if one can pull it off. It’s hard. She could. That certain acceleration that comes from within has always pleased me.

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