Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg Page A

even,” he snorted. “She’s over there and I was here and he was over in the hospital.”
    I was astonished. “You were living in this house in ’35?” I asked. “Right here on Sixty-fifth Street?”
    â€œYeah. It’s in the phone book.”
    â€œRight. And she never said a word to you?”
    â€œNo, uh-uh, not a word. Why should I hide it?”
    â€œShe put your name on the birth certificate but didn’t bother to tell you?”
    â€œYeah, yeah.” Old Ben Brautigan stared thoughtfully out over the fruit trees shading his lawn. “I wish I had the opportunity to see him, not even talk to him, but see him. And, too, his mother to lie like that, to hurt everybody. Not only the poor kid had to suffer about it, but that it’ll go on for years and years and years, till they find out what in the hell the real truth is. You know, if Lula knew that was mine,” he mused, “why didn’t she have nerve enough to step over a couple of doors and tell me?”

    I asked if his ex-wife had ever requested any child support from him.
    â€œNo. It’s funny, the hospital didn’t come after me to pay for the bill.”
    â€œThey never did? They never approached you?”
    â€œNo, no. It’s funny. It isn’t a lot of things, you know, that we try to figure out ourself [ sic ] in our own mind, but that’s as far as we get, is to try to figure ’em out.” Ben Brautigan struggled to express the great eternal conundrum of never knowing the answers to anything. Wrestling with the ineffable seemed to tire him. Something inside sagged a little. His watery eyes lost their focus for a moment as he stared at the endless sky.
    A more relentless and diligent investigator might have probed on, but I didn’t have the heart for it. Ben and I talked about the trolleys that once ran the length of McKinley Avenue in the thirties and how he had worked as a laborer in a local plywood factory for most of his life. I remarked what a pretty spot he had, saying I understood why he’d happily lived here for nearly sixty years.
    â€œYeah,” the old man murmured, “I lost two wives living here. I was married to one, I was married to her for thirty, about thirty-two years.”
    â€œYour second wife?” I asked, patting Buff as he nosed around me.
    â€œYeah. And my third wife, I was married to her. She died not too long ago, about five years. She died of cancer. She didn’t have cancer when I married her, but she got it and picked it up fast.”
    Not knowing quite how to reply, I told Ben Brautigan that he looked to be in very good health. I said I hoped he continued to have it.
    â€œI do, too. I do, too. There’s a lot out here yet to enjoy.”
    We talked a bit longer but I couldn’t think of much more to say. “Any time I can help you, stop in,” he called as I headed back to my car. I figured on phoning him once I sorted out my notes. I might as well have been a paving contractor on the highway to hell. When I tried to get in touch with Ben Brautigan again, he was dead.

three: american dust
    I N HIS WONDERFUL short story “Revenge of the Lawn,” Richard Brautigan combines details from the lives of his grandmother and great-grandmother to create a character who, “in her own way, shines like a beacon down the stormy American past.” Brautigan’s great-grandmother had a poem for her name. Madora Lenora Ashlock was born on April 20, 1856, in Collin County, Texas, just across the line from the Indian Territory. There had been Ashlocks in North America since 1720.
    At sixteen, on January 9, 1873, Madora wed her first cousin, William Ashlock, a tall, charming man six years her senior. The Ashlocks returned to Greene County, Illinois, where William’s branch of the family had settled on land made available to veterans of the war of 1812. Altogether, they had nine children. The youngest