Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg

Avenue. It made sense to get a couple of photos there. I drove to the little house set back from the road. Everything looked the same, the metal sign on the gate still warning of dangerous dogs. Not a soul in sight. With the aplomb of a spy, I pulled out the camera.
    Perhaps never to be in Tacoma again, I decided to give the interview another try. “What can he do, shoot me?” I thought, retracing two-year-old footsteps. I rang the doorbell. A cosmic eraser swept clean the blackboard of the past. Ben Brautigan’s mood (Mary Lou Folston said he was called Ben) seemed as sunny as the bright late-summer day. My first question got him talking and he stepped out into the afternoon’s warmth, followed by Buff, his surprisingly docile little dog.
    I asked if I could turn on my tape recorder. Ben Brautigan agreed. He’d been married to Lula Mary Kehoe for about seven years when they broke up. There was another man. “She was running around,” the old man insisted. “Yeah, yeah. Sure, she knew it was Ron Bluett. He lived not very far from us out there on 64th and McKinley. But, we were split up for a long time before we got a divorce. And I got sewered [ sic ] for divorce and got the divorce.”
    â€œAnd you think this fellow, Bluett, was the actual paternal father?” I asked, as Buff sniffed around our feet.
    â€œOh, yes, yes, yes, I know. I’d swear to it. Absolutely. She would, too, if she wanted to, you know, make herself clear.” Frowning with assumed sagacity, he tried to sum up his thoughts about Richard. “For her to say a thing like that, that’s what hurt him. He knew that in his mind all this stuff was going on that he has no way to prove it.”

    Ben tossed a worn tennis ball across the yard. Buff barked in frantic pursuit. I said Richard’s mother obviously never told him anything about this man, Bluett.
    â€œNo, no, no. And if she ever told him anything about me being the father, it would seem like he’d come up here.”
    Somewhat hesitantly, I brought up Richard’s claim of seeking him out decades before in a barber shop.
    â€œIt’s just a story, that’s all it is,” Ben Brautigan said.
    I asked him if he thought Richard had made the story up.
    â€œYeah. Because if I had a feeling that he was—I’d invite him over so we could talk. For coffee or a glass of beer or something. But, I have no idea, no idea.”
    I looked carefully at Ben Brautigan. Although he was a short man and eighty-six years old there was something about the sharpness of his long nose and the emphatic candor of his distant blue eyes clearly reminiscent of Richard. “So,” I asked, “your marriage with Lula Mary Kehoe had broken up considerably long before the child was born?”
    â€œOh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. I was probably single, away from her, for three, four years.”
    When I mentioned that Mary Lou had listed him as the father on the birth certificate, Ben replied, “Yeah, yeah. But, she comes out now and she says that she got that child alongside the road. Why did she use that figure?”
    I said I didn’t know. We talked some about Mary Lou’s other three children, each by a different father. I mentioned it must have been a terrible shock to learn about Richard only after his suicide.
    â€œYes, it was.” Ben’s anger resurfaced. “I said, my god o’mighty! You know, to be a father and don’t know nothing about it . . .”
    â€œThat’s why I really wanted to hear your side of it,” I said. “You never met Richard or even saw him and—”
    â€œI don’t know none of the family!” Ben Brautigan interjected.
    â€œAnd when he was born, she never notified you then?”
    â€œNo, no, no, no.”
    I said it seemed highly unlikely that had he been the father she wouldn’t have gotten in touch with him.
    â€œRight in the neighborhood