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TFA: The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
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The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

Once water bugs were my field. I remember that childhood spring when I studied the winter-long mud puddles of the Pacific Northwest. I had a fellowship.

My books were a pair of Sears Roebuck boots, ones with green rubber pages. Most of my classrooms were close to the shore. That's where the important things were happening and that's where the good things were happening.

Sometimes as experiments I laid boards out into the mud puddles, so I could look into the deeper water but it was not nearly as good as the water in close to the shore.

The water bugs were so small I practically had to lay my vision like a drowned orange on the mud puddle. There is a romance about fruit floating outside on the water, about apples and pears in rivers and lakes. For the first minute or so, I saw nothing, and then slowly the water bugs came into being.

I saw a black one with big teeth chasing a white one with a bag of newspapers slung over its shoulder, two white ones playing cards near the window, a fourth white one staring back with a harmonica in its mouth.

I was a scholar until the mud puddles went dry and then I picked cherries for two-and-a-half cents a pound in an old orchard that was beside a long, hot dusty road.

The cherry boss was a middle-aged woman who was a real Okie. Wearing a pair of goofy overalls, her name was Rebel Smith, and she'd been a friend of "Pretty Boy" Floyd's down in Oklahoma. "I remember one afternoon 'Pretty Boy' came driving up in his car. I ran out onto the front porch."

Rebel Smith was always smoking cigarettes and showing people how to pick cherries and assigning them to trees and writing down everything in a little book she carried in her shirt pocket. She smoked just half a cigarette and then threw the other half on the ground.

For the first few days of the picking, I was always seeing her half-smoked cigarettes lying all over the orchard, near the john and around the trees and down the rows.

Then she hired half-a-dozen bums to pick cherries because the picking was going too slowly. Rebel picked the bums up on skidrow every morning and drove them out to the orchard in a rusty old truck. There were always half-a-dozen bums, but sometimes they had different faces.

After they came to pick cherries I never saw any more of her half-smoked cigarettes lying around. They were gone before they hit the ground. Looking back on it, you might say that Rebel Smith was anti-mud puddle, but then you might not say that at all.


Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America