Looking for Jack Kerouac

by Barbara Shoup

  “Assholes,” Duke said. “Where’s their Christian kindness?”

  “Would you pick us up?” I asked.

  He snorted.

  Finally, we got picked up by another trucker, an older guy, maybe in his fifties—Darnell—and all the way to Chattanooga, through the green mountains, I listened to Duke tell him the story of our life on the road. Like two days made a life. Plus, the story he was telling was considerably more dramatic than the way things had actually been. In his version, we stood up to the racist guys at the gas station. There was no mention of them following us and scaring us to death.

  And, of course, last night’s girls. They were twin Elly May Clampetts now. Which got me to wondering, did he pick up those two girls last night, or were they prostitutes? Were there two girls? Was there even one?

  Darnell listened to Duke’s stories, now and then glancing toward me with an expression on his face that told me he knew Duke was full of shit and wondered if I was aware of it myself. Past Chattanooga it was getting to be dusk, and he offered to take us home with him to spend the night.

  “Y’all do not want to be hitchhiking down through Georgia at night,” he said. “Niggers around here have gone plumb crazy.”

  “I’m not afraid of Negroes,” Duke said, stressing the correct pronunciation. “I’ve got friends back home who are Negroes.”

  “This ain’t the North, son,” Darnell said. “I got nothing against them myself—and it ain’t so much them you got to worry about, anyway. You know what happened to them friendly white boys in Mississippi this summer, don’t you? You want to end up like that?”

  Duke shrugged.

  But I’d read about shootings and lynchings by the Klan and by the police, too, who were likely to assume that two guys obviously from the North, like Duke and me, had come down to cause trouble, as they saw it. Maybe Duke was just being a writer, blowing smoke about standing up for Gus and putting those guys in their place, but for all I knew he’d actually talked himself into believing it and had it in his mind to do it again.

  Darnell repeated his offer. “Ain’t got space in the trailer,” he said. “But I got a little pup tent I keep up in the yard for my grandsons and y’all can sleep there.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “We’ll take you up on that.”

  Duke glowered at me. He still wasn’t speaking to me when we settled into the tent an hour or so later.

  “Come on, man,” I finally said. “You know it would’ve been stupid to hitchhike through Georgia at night.”

  “That’s bullshit,” he said.

  But I knew I was right. Besides, it was nice stretched out in the tent, the door flap rolled open, letting in the cool air and the scent of the woods surrounding Darnell’s trailer. The whir of crickets, the chirping of frogs in some distant pond.

  I said, “‘Suddenly we were stoned with joy to realize that in the darkness all around us was fragrant green grass and the smell of fresh manure and warm waters. We’re in the South.’”

  Duke laughed, bitterly. “Yeah, in a frigging pup tent in some old geezer’s yard.”

  He turned away, pretended to be asleep—and pretty soon, he was. Darnell had brought us his grandsons’ army surplus sleeping bags and a couple of pillows before he went to bed. The boys were nine and eleven, he said, and showed us their school pictures, which he kept in his wallet. Two skinny, freckled kids with buzz cuts and toothy grins. The sleeping bags smelled a little musty, used; the pillows smelled like little kid sweat. When I stretched out the length of the sleeping bag, my foot touched something in the bottom—and I retrieved a cache of baseball cards rubber-banded together.

  It was pitch black, but I didn’t turn on the flashlight Darnell had left to see what the cards were. The last thing I wanted to do was wake up Duke and get another dose of his crappy attitude. So I just lay there, holding them in my hand, blindsided by the memory of Bobby and me sprawled out on the living room floor, playing our baseball card game when we were in grade school.

  I thought about the two of us playing on our high school team last season, too. How Coach Ropac had called me into his office a few weeks after Mom died. He was at his desk when I got there, a chewed-up cigar in his mouth, his head bent over a stat sheet.

  “Carpetti,” he said, when he looked up and saw me in the doorway. He waved toward the chair in front of his desk, and I sat down on it.

  He looked at me, puffed on his cigar a couple times, then said, “I’m real sorry about your mom, son. That’s a tough one. You doing okay?”

  I don’t know why, but his gruff voice saying that just killed me. All I could do was nod.

  He puffed some more.

  “We need you, Carpetti,” he said, finally. “Hart’s nowhere near the catcher you are. I got nobody to replace you. You got a good excuse for not showing up at practice,” he added, in the same gruff voice. “That’s not a problem. But I think it would be good for you to play—Bobby, too. You talk to him. The two of you show up this afternoon, we’re good to go.”

  He nodded toward the door, dismissing me.

  I wasn’t sure if I had the heart to play, or if I’d be any good if I tried, but I found Bobby and told him I was going home at lunchtime to get our gloves.

  “Okay,” he said, always the younger brother.

  It had been a beautiful, spring-like day—Mom’s crocuses just starting to come up in the yard. I walked through the quiet kitchen, to my bedroom. My glove was on the top shelf of my closet, where I’d left it at the end of the summer—saddle-soaped, softened with Vaseline, a ball in the pocket, crisscrossed with rubber bands to hold it in place. I took the rubber bands off, breathed in the smell of the leather. I took the ball out, threw it up and caught it a couple of times, then set it aside, put the glove on, and crouched in the catcher’s position. I punched the pocket, like I did waiting for a hit. It felt good. My thighs burned, I was in crap shape—but that felt good, too. Real.

  Later, running wind sprints until I felt like my chest was going to burst, throwing until my arm ached—even the punishment of floor burn when I made a bad slide practicing in gym shorts—all these things had felt the same way. Every day after practice, I ran ten circuits around the gym floor, up the stairs to the balcony and around, then down again. It was worth it for the hard plop of the ball landing in my glove, the feel of my mind telling my arm what to do—and my arm doing it. Throw, run, tag. Whatever.

  Coach Ropac never said another word about Mom, and he never gave Bobby or me a break because of it, either. He yelled at us when we screwed up, same as anybody. Playing made little pockets of time bearable—hashing over the games gave us something to talk about at the dinner table.

  When we weren’t playing or talking about playing, I felt like a zombie. Bobby was pretty much living in a state of rage. Everything set him off. Getting up late because he was used to Mom waking him, breaking a glass he was washing and slicing his finger so bad he had to get stitches, flunking a history test that he hadn’t been able to concentrate enough to study for. He hadn’t taken it out on people, which was good. But he put his fist through the garage wall one day over who knows what; sometimes I heard him slamming things around in his room. Once I saw him stomping around in the back yard after he took out the trash. Just stomping, from one side to another, mud spattering everywhere.

  I couldn’t talk to him. The few times I tried, he got pissed off at me.

  “Bug off,” he said. “What do you know?”

  So I just let him be.

  Dad hadn’t been able to help him, either; he wasn’t doing that well himself. As far as I knew, hadn’t shed a tear from the day Mom’s brain tumor was diagnosed until the day she finally died. But in the weeks afterwards, it seemed all he did was cry. Quietly, for the most part. We’d be watching TV and I’d look over at him and see tears streaming down his face. Sometimes I heard him late at night, though, sobbing, and I felt paralyzed. If I went to him, what would I do? So I just lay there and listened, hoping Bobby was sleeping thr
ough it in his room next door.

  Now, lying in Darnell’s tent, the whole story of Mom getting sick and dying unfolded again, like a movie in my mind—only it was like I was Bobby, watching it. Watching me. He’d watched me since he was a baby, still in his crib: watched me and tried to do whatever I was doing.

  Watching me after baseball season was over and all through the summer, he must have wondered what was happening to me, where his real brother had gone. I’d been so wrapped up in myself I hardly thought about him at all. Worse, I’d been crappy to him ever since football practice started in August. I felt sorry for myself every morning when I drove past school and saw the team practicing. Then, about the time I’d finished breakfast and was ready to go to bed, Bobby would come home, all fired up, and take a long shower, singing at the top of his lungs, and it made me furious that he was happy. That he had a life.

  Now I’d taken off without even telling him goodbye.

  Willfully, I erased all thoughts but this: Get to Florida. Figure it out from there. I breathed the thought in and then out, again and again, until I felt my body begin to loosen and, finally, drift toward sleep.

  The next morning, Darnell fixed us grits and eggs, and poured us black coffee so strong I swear a spoon could have stood right up in it. There was a picture of his wife over the stove that he said he kept there with the hope that she’d oversee his cooking and maybe even send down some tips from heaven.

  “Your cooking tastes great, I said.

  “You ain’t never had one of Mary Annie’s breakfasts,” he said. “That’s why. Her biscuits—? No doubt about it. The Lord himself took her right from the pearly gates into His kitchen! That’s where she’s at right now.”

  The tiny trailer kitchen was full of her: yellow as the sun, with ruffled white curtains and a yellow-and-white checked tablecloth on the dinette table. Embroidered Bible verses in dimestore frames on every available space on the wall.

  “Listen,” Darnell said, taking up our empty plates and setting them in the sink. “I got to head for Valdosta this morning, pick up a load there, and I’ll take you boys along. Ain’t too far from there to the state line. Y’all get your gear and we’ll be on our way.”

  There was no arguing with him. Even Duke could see that. But back in the tent, he said, “You know, we don’t have to do this, Paulie.”

  “You take the rides as they come,” I said. “That’s what Jack did.”

  I grabbed my duffel and headed for the rig, and Duke followed. He sat beside me, sullenly writing in his little notebook—probably about what a drag I’d turned out to be. When we stopped for a break, he headed for the restroom alone, then bought a Coke and a big bag of peanuts and got back to the rig before Darnell or I got there.

  Darnell ignored him; actually, he ignored both of us. When he started up the engine that morning and the radio came on, he turned the volume up, high, which I figured was his way of saying he’d had had his fill of us, he was doing his Christian duty getting us to a safe place, but didn’t want to chat.

  Fine with me. I didn’t want to chat, either.

  But I couldn’t doze because the awful country music was so loud. By the time he dropped us at an intersection near the factory where he was picking up his load, yesterday’s headache was back full-force and I was in as crappy a mood as Duke was in.

  “Y’all are about twenty miles from the Florida state line,” Darnell called out of the window. “You boys be careful now.”

  “You boys be careful now,” Duke mimicked under his breath, like a six-year-old. He hefted his duffel over his shoulder and set out walking.

  I followed, but stayed a body’s length behind him because I knew if I caught up, if I said one word to him, we’d drop our gear and get into a fistfight on the side of the road. The only thing up for grabs was who’d land the first punch.

  NINE

  Then a red, ’59 Thunderbird pulled over and stopped, but the door was locked when Duke tried to open it. The woman in the driver’s seat looked like a movie star. Dark hair tumbling loose and curly past her shoulders, caked-on red lipstick. She hit the button to roll down the window, turned down the radio; then she took off her big, glittery sunglasses.

  “Okay, y’all,” she said. “Let me look at you.”

  Duke glanced at me and we stepped back, suddenly in it together again, while she gave us the once-over. She had the longest, blackest eyelashes of anyone I’d ever seen.

  “Fake,” I heard Kathy’s voice say.

  “Well, all right,” she said, finally, batting those eyelashes at us. “Y’all don’t look like axe murderers. Plus, I’m bored half to death driving all by myself. So come on.” She reached over and pulled up the lock. “I’m Lorelei. I’m a mermaid at Weeki Wachee, that’s where I’m going. I can take you that far.”

  “Cool,” I said, like a moron.

  Duke still stood rooted to the highway. I gave him a little punch on the arm and pulled the seat back forward, and he climbed in before he got his wits about him. I slid into the front.

  “Y’all got names?” she asked.

  “Oh. Paul. That’s me.” I nodded toward the backseat. “And Duke.”

  “Duke.” She raised an eyebrow. “Well.”

  Then she put her sunglasses back on, shifted the Cruise-O-Matic into drive, and took off.

  I settled back into my white leather bucket seat, and took stock of this fortuitous turn of events. I couldn’t help smiling. Damn. There we were on the road in a T-Bird with a mermaid, for Christ’s sake, the radio playing Elvis and Chuck Berry and love songs from the ’50s, warm southern air rushing in through the open windows.

  Lorelei took a cigarette from the pack tucked into the visor, punched in the cigarette lighter and lit it. Her fingernails were long, painted the same red as her lipstick.

  “Y’all looked like you were on the Bataan Death March back there,” she said.

  “That’s because we were nearly whined to death by hillbilly music all the way from Chattanooga to Valdosta,” Duke said. “We were still getting over it.”

  Lorelei laughed. “Where y’all headed?”

  “You ever heard of Jack Kerouac?” Duke asked. “The writer?”

  Lorelei shook her head.

  “Well, he lives in St. Petersburg. That’s where we’re going. To find him.”

  “Mmmm.” Lorelei took a long, thoughtful drag from her cigarette, breathed out the smoke through pursed lips, like a kiss. “Jack—”

  “Kerouac. He wrote this book, On the Road.”

  “And now y’all are on it,” she said. “I think that’s nice. And I’m going to do my part to get you there as quick as I can.”

  Was she tweaking us? I couldn’t tell. All I know is she floored it and the T-Bird surged ahead, the needle on the speedometer rising. We crossed the state line going ninety. She gave a little wave as we passed the welcome center, with its sign offering free orange juice to travelers.

  “Boys,” she said. “Welcome to the Sunshine State.”

  There wasn’t much traffic, and we cruised along between eighty and ninety, Lorelei singing along with the radio, low. She was maybe twenty-five; stacked, but thin. She was wearing a tight sleeveless top, open at the neck, a delicate gold cross nestled between her breasts, tight black pedal-pushers that showed off her long legs. And black high heels.

  I made myself concentrate on the landscape to keep from staring at her—which was a little disappointing because, so far, Florida looked a lot like every place we’d seen hitchhiking. Crappy little towns, trailer parks, decrepit speedways, sketchy mom-and-pop motels. Old white farmhouses, with cows and horses grazing in the fields; ramshackle churches out in the middle of nowhere, with their messages of hell and damnation; tall water towers with their sloppily painted declarations of love.

  There were palm trees, though, mixed in with tall skinny pines. And trees hung with what looked kind of like the angel hair Dad put on our Christmas trees—only it was an ugly gray-brown that made them look spooky.
Spanish moss, Lorelei said. There were orange groves, too, and the billboards lining the highway promised the sun-and-surf Florida I imagined.

  After we’d been driving awhile, Duke cleared his throat, leaned between the seats. “So. You’re a mermaid,” he said.

  “I am,” Lorelei said. “Y’all heard of Mermaid Springs?”

  “My mom went there once,” I said. “Well, she and my dad went, on their honeymoon. But she’s the one who told me about it.”

  She beamed at me. “Well, then, when we get to Weeki Wachee, you can send her a postcard and tell her you met a real mermaid in Florida.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  Duke leaned between the seats. “She died,” he said. “Paul’s mom. Last spring.”

  “Oh, no,” Lorelei reached over and touched my shoulder. “It’s a terrible thing to lose your mama when you’re young. I know. I like to died myself when my own mama passed. It was ten years ago, and I still think about her all the time. And my daddy, well, he was no help to me whatsoever. Honestly. Six months hadn’t passed and he up and married this horrible, uppity churchwoman, Dee, who couldn’t see the backside of me soon enough. That’s where I was, visiting them up near Macon—though I don’t know why I bother. Believe me, Earl Watson is no longer the daddy I knew.

  “‘Brenda Marie’—that’s my real name, which he knows I cannot stand and which I changed when I got the job at Mermaid Springs. Legally changed. As far as I’m concerned, it’s against the law for him to call me that. Anyway. ‘Brenda-Marie,’ he’s always saying. ‘It’s time you got yourself a husband and made a Christian life.’

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. My mama was the best Christian I ever knew, and she loved me to pieces just the way I am. She knew I had a calling from the day they took me to see the mermaids when I was just five years old and I said, ‘Mama, I am going to be a mermaid when I grow up.’

  “And I am,” she said. “I said to Daddy when I left this afternoon, ‘I am telling you one last time, I do not need a husband. I do not want one. And I don’t need you or that damn Dee to tell me what a Christian life is. I have one, thank you very much—without a bunch of high-handed people in it judging me every time I turn around.’”