she left, it was as if she had never been there at all. The second part of the ceremony began with him carrying the jar very carefully to an abandoned chicken house in the back. “The dishes can wait,” he said to me. Bertrand Russell could not have stated it better.
He opened the chicken house door and we went in. The place was littered with half-rotten comic books. They were like fruit under a tree. In the corner was an old mattress and beside the mattress were four quart jars. He took the gallon jar over to them, and filled them carefully not spilling a drop. He screwed their caps on tightly and was now ready for a day’s drinking.
You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it.
He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.
ANOTHER METHODOF MAKING WALNUT CATSUP
And this is a very small cookbook for Trout Fishing in America as if Trout Fishing in America were a rich gourmet and Trout Fishing in America had Maria Callas for a girlfriend and they ate together on a marble table with beautiful candles.
Compote of Apples
Take a dozen of golden pippins, pare them nicely and take the core out with a small penknife; put them into some water, and let them be well scalded; then take a little of the water with some sugar, and a few apples which may be sliced into it, and let the whole boil till it comes to a syrup; then pour it over your pippins, and garnish them with dried cherries and lemon-peel cut fine. You must take care that your pippins are not split.
And Maria Callas sang to Trout Fishing in America as they ate their apples together.
A Standing Crust for Great Pies
Take a peck of flour and six pounds of butter boiled in a gallon of water: skim it off into the flour, and as little of the liquor as you can. Work it up well into a paste, and then pull it into pieces till it is cold. Then make it up into what form you please.
A Spoonful Pudding
Take a spoonful of flour, a spoonful of cream or milk, an egg, a little nutmeg, ginger, and salt. Mix all together, and boil it in a little wooden dish half an hour. If you think proper you may add a few currants.
And Trout Fishing in America said, “The moon’s coming out.” And Maria Callas said, “Yes, it is.”
Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup
Take green walnuts before the shell is formed, and grind them in a crab-mill, or pound them in a marble mortar. Squeeze out the juice through a coarse cloth, and put to every gallon of juice a pound of anchovies, and the same quantity of bay-salt, four ounces of Jamaica pepper, two of long and two of black pepper; of mace, cloves, and ginger, each an ounce, and a stick of horseradish. Boil all together till reduced to half the quantity, and then put it into a pot. When it is cold, bottle it close, and in three months it will be fit for use.
And Trout Fishing in America and Maria Callas poured walnut catsup on their hamburgers.
PROLOGUE TO GRIDER CREEK
Mooresville, Indiana, is the town that John Dillinger came from, and the town has a John Dillinger Museum. You can go in and look around.
Some towns are known as the peach capital of America or the cherry capital or the oyster capital, and there’s always a festival and the photograph of a pretty girl in a bathing suit.
Mooresville, Indiana, is the John Dillinger capital of America.
Recently a man moved there with his wife, and he discovered hundreds of rats in his basement. They were huge, slow-moving child-eyed rats.
When his wife had to visit some of her relatives for a few days, the man went out and bought a .38 revolver and a lot of ammunition. Then he went down to the basement where the rats were, and he started shooting them. It didn’t bother the rats at all. They acted as if it were a movie and started eating their dead companions for popcorn.
The man walked over to a rat that was busy eating a friend and placed the pistol against the rat’s head. The rat did not move and continued eating away. When the hammer clicked back, the rat paused between bites and looked out of the corner of its eye. First at the pistol and then at the man. It was a kind of friendly look as if to say, “When my mother was young she sang like Deanna Durbin.”
The man pulled the trigger.
He had no sense of humor.
There’s always a single feature, a double feature and an eternal feature playing at the Great Theater in Mooresville, Indiana: the John Dillinger capital of America.
GRIDER CREEK
I had heard there was some good fishing in there and it was running clear while all the other large creeks were running muddy from the snow melting off the Marble Mountains.
I also heard there were some Eastern brook trout in there, high up in the mountains, living in the wakes of beaver dams.
The guy who drove the school bus drew a map of Grider Creek, showing where the good fishing was. We were standing in front of Steelhead Lodge when he drew the map. It was a very hot day. I’d imagine it was a hundred degrees.
You had to have a car to get to Grider Creek where the good fishing was, and I didn’t have a car. The map was nice, though. Drawn with a heavy dull pencil on a piece of paper bag. With a little square
THE BALLET FORTROUT FISHING IN AMERICA
How the Cobra Lily traps insects is a ballet for Trout Fishing in America, a ballet to be performed at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The plant is beside me here on the back porch.
It died a few days after I bought it at Wool worth’s. That was months ago, during the presidential election of nineteen hundred and sixty.
I buried the plant in an empty Metrecal can.
The side of the can says, “Metrecal Dietary for Weight Control,” and below that reads, “Ingredients: Non-fat milk solids, soya flour, whole milk solids, sucrose, starch, corn oil, coconut oil, yeast, imitation vanilla,” but the can’s only a graveyard now for a Cobra Lily that has turned dry and brown and has black freckles.
As a kind of funeral wreath, there is a red, white and blue button sticking in the plant and the words on it say, “I’m for Nixon.”
The main energy for the ballet comes from a description of the Cobra Lily. The description could be used as a welcome mat on the front porch of hell or to conduct an orchestra of mortuaries with ice-cold woodwinds or be an atomic mailman in the pines, in the pines where the sun never shines.
“Nature
