| O 1939 Tacoma Washington witch, where are you now that I am growing toward you? Once my body occupied a child's space and door had a large meaning to them and were almost human. Opening a door meant something in 1939 and the children used to make fun of you because you were crazy and lived by yourself in an attic across the street from where we sat in the gutter like two slum sparrows. We were four years old. I think you were about as old as I am now with the children always teasing and calling after you, "The crazy woman! Run! Run! The witch! The witch! Don't let her look at you in the eye. She looked at me! Run! Help! Run! Now I am beginning to look like you with my long hippie hair and my strange clothes. I look about as crazy in 1967 as you did in 1939. Little children yell, "Hey, hippie!" at me in the San Francisco mornings like we yelled, �Hey, crazy woman!� at you plodding through the Tacoma twilights. I guess you got used to it as I�ve always gotten used to it. As a child I would always hang my hat on a dare. Dare me to do anything and I�d do it. Ugh! Some of the things that I did following, like a midget Don Quixote, trails and visions of dares. We were sitting in the gutter doing nothing. Perhaps we were waiting for the witch or anything to happen that would free us from the gutter. We had been sitting there for almost an hour: child�s time. �I dare you to go up to the witch�s house and wave at me out the window,� my friend said, finally to get things going. I looked up at the witch�s house across the street. There was one window in her attic facing down upon us like a still photograph from a horror movie. �OK,� I said. �You�ve got guts,� my friend said. I can�t remember his name now. The decades have flied it off my memory, leaving a small empty place where his name should be. I got up from the gutter and walked across the street and around to the back of the house where the stairs were that led to the attic. They were gray wooden stairs like and old mother cat and went up three flights to her door. There were some garbage cans at the bottom of the stairs. I wondered what garbage can was the witch�s. I lifted up one garbage can lid and looked inside to se if there was any witches� garbage in the can. There wasn�t. The can was filled with just ordinary garbage. I lifted up the lid to the next garbage can but there wasn�t any witches� garbage in that can either. I tried the third can but it was the same as the other two cans: no witches� garbage. There were three garbage cans and there were three apartments in the house, including the attic where she lived. One on the cans had to be her garbage but there wasn�t any difference between her garbage and the other people�s garbage. �so� I walked up the stairs to the attic. I walked very carefully as if I were petting an old gray mother cat nursing her kittens. I finally arrived at the witch�s door. I didn�t know whether she was inside or not. She could have been home. I felt like knocking but that didn�t make any sense. Is she were there, she�d just slam the door in my face or ask me what I wanted and I�d run screaming down the stairs, �Help! Help! She looked at me!� The door was tall, silent and human like a middle-aged woman. I felt as if I were touching her hand when I opened the door delicately like the inside of a watch. The first room in the house was her kitchen and she wasn�t in it, but there were twenty or thirty vases and jars and bottle filled with flowers. They were on the kitchen table and on all the shelves and ledges. Some of the flowers were stale and some of the flowers were fresh. I went inside the next room and it was the living room and she wasn�t there either, but again there were twenty or thirty vases and jars and bottles filled with flowers. The flowers made my heart beat faster. Her garbage had lied to me. I went inside the last room and it was her bedroom and she wasn�t there either, but again the twenty or thirty vases and jars and bottles filled with flowers. There was a window right next to her bed and it was the window that looked down on the street. The bed was made of brass with a patchwork quilt on it. I walked over to the window and stood there staring down at my friend who was sitting in the gutter looking up at the window. He couldn�t believe that I was standing there in the witch�s window and I waved very slowly at him and he waved very slowly at me. Our waving seemed to be very distant traveling from our arms like two people waving at each other in different cities, perhaps between Tacoma and Salem, and our waving was merely an echo of their waving across thousands of miles. Now the dare had been completed and I turned around in that house which was like a shallow garden and all my fears collapsed upon me like a landslide of flowers and I ran screaming at the top of my lungs outside and down the stairs. I sounded as if I had stepped in a wheelbarrow-sized pile of steaming dragon shit. When I came screaming around the side of the house, my friend jumped up from the gutter and started screaming, too. I guess he thought that the witch was chasing me. We ran screaming through the streets of Tacoma, pursued by our own voices like a 1692 Cotton Mather newsreel. This was a month or two before the German Army marched into Poland. |
| 1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel |
| by Richard Brautigan |
| --from Revenge of the Lawn |
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| Richard Brautigan and Revenge Of The Lawn cover girl |
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| Also by Richard Brautigan: |
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