Looking for Jack Kerouac

by Barbara Shoup

  She fell quiet—maybe she’d surprised herself saying so much.

  “I wish I could have sent my mom that postcard,” I said. “You could have autographed it. She’d have gotten a big kick out that.”

  “I would have, too,” Lorelei said. “The one with my own picture on it. They just made it. In fact, I brought some to give to Daddy, but he made me so darn mad I thought, I’ll keep these for someone who’s going to appreciate them.” She opened the console between the seats, took them out and handed them to me. “Here. You boys take them.”

  “Mermaid Lorelei,” the card said. “Mermaid Springs, Florida.” The photographer had caught her swimming toward the camera, her hair floating in a dark cloud around her face, her iridescent tail so real that I couldn’t help glancing at her legs to make sure they were actually there.

  “Whoa,” Duke said when I handed one back to him. “This is fine.”

  Lorelei smiled. “Y’all can send them to your girlfriends.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” Duke said.

  “I just ditched mine.”

  “Smart boys,” she said. “Y’all just keep the postcards then. A little souvenir. Maybe show them to—what’s his name? Your writer?”

  “Jack Kerouac,” Duke said. “Yeah, we’ll definitely show them to Jack. Maybe we’ll even bring him up to see your show.”

  “You do that,” she said. “Elvis came a while back, and he just loved it. I had my picture made with him. We all did. He said I looked exactly like Ann-Margret.”

  “Yeah, I can totally see that,” Duke said.

  He settled himself in the corner of the backseat so Lorelei couldn’t see him from the rear-view mirror, but I didn’t have to turn around and look at him to know that he had his notebook out, writing away.

  When we stopped for gas, the first thing he said to me once Lorelei was out of earshot was, “Jesus, Paulie. Even Kerouac didn’t get picked up by a goddamn mermaid.”

  “See. I told you. Take the rides as they come. If we hadn’t gone with Darnell this morning, we wouldn’t have been where we were when Lorelei passed by.”

  It ticked him off. Duke hated to be wrong.

  Then, after the three of us had eaten at the diner across the highway, Lorelei tossed me her car keys. “Honey, you drive for a while,” she said. “I’m tired.” And there we were, me at the wheel of the T-Bird, Lorelei in the passenger seat like she was my girlfriend. Duke in the backseat, steaming.

  Lorelei asked me about my mom, and I told her the basics of what happened, but mainly what Mom was like. Maybe, being in the T-Bird, I had cars on my mind because I told her about how Mom finally learned to drive just a year or so before she died and Dad and my Uncle Rich had rebuilt a turquoise Buick for her.

  “She kept a little statue of St. Christopher perched on the dashboard for safe travels,” I said. “Which, believe me, she needed for the four-way stops. She was always waving other drivers through to be polite, which drove my brother and me crazy—and more than once nearly caused an accident when all the drivers she was being polite to started into the intersection at the same time.”

  Lorelei laughed.

  “Not to mention the fact that she drove so slow that people were always risking their lives to swerve around her. We never teased her, though,” I said. “She’d have been crushed. It took her so long to get up the nerve to drive and she got such a kick out of tooling around in her Buick that we just gritted our teeth and prayed.”

  “That’s so sweet,” Lorelei said. “I just love how boys are with their mamas. If I ever had kids, which, believe me, I do not intend, I’d want boys myself. Girls? I swear, they’re just like street cats sometimes the way they act toward each other. My own sister, Jean-Ann, was just awful to me from the day I was born. Mama would try to make her be nice, but she wouldn’t. Well. She was jealous because I was prettier than her. She still is jealous. She gangs up on me with Daddy and Dee. They all think I should be like her, with her boring, needle-neck husband and her two bratty kids and her fancy house over by the golf course.

  “It is overdone,” Lorelei said. “That house. You should see it. T-a-c-k-y. Anyway. Boys aren’t like that. Y’all get pure mad and have a fistfight and it’s over. I don’t even like most of the other mermaids, if you want to know the truth. The way they’re always backbiting and playing up to Les. He’s the owner. Honey, let me tell you, they’d walk right over you in their spike heels if they thought it would get them a lead part. Me? I stay out of all that.”

  She closed her eyes, sighed. “Makes me tired just to think of it.”

  Two seconds later, she was fast asleep. In the rearview mirror I could see Duke was sacked out, too. Over the radio, I could hear the low rumble of the V-8. The car had some serious horsepower just waiting to let loose. I gave it a little more gas, turned up the radio, and headed on down the highway, Jerry Lee Lewis screaming, “Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!”

  This wild joy—like nothing I’d ever felt before—rushed into me. I felt different, but utterly myself. Like some new self, one I didn’t yet know.

  TEN

  About twenty miles outside of Weeki Wachee, she told me to pull over so she could take the wheel. “The car belongs to Les,” she said. “Honey, he would kill me if he found out I picked up hitchhikers. Not to mention let you drive.”

  She stopped again and let us out at a road sign that said:

  Weeki Wachee

  1 mile

  “Y’all walk on in. You’ll see Mermaid Springs; you can’t miss it. There’s not a thing on either side of it for fifteen miles—and it’s pink. Wait in the little grove across the way while I take the car back to Les. I’ve got in mind a place where y’all can stay the night.”

  She gave a little wave and took off, the red taillights with their little horizontal bars disappearing into the darkness.

  Duke looked at me, grinned, and we set out after her.

  There was a nice breeze that rustled through the pine forests on either side of the road, cooling the humid air and bringing with it the scent of evergreen and water.

  The occasional car or truck whooshed by. We probably could have made it to St. Petersburg that night, but neither Duke nor I turned and stuck out our thumb when we heard them approaching. Soon a billboard advertising Mermaid Springs appeared: a gargantuan version of Lorelei swimming toward us in the Florida night.

  Duke stopped before it. “‘Visit Beautiful Mermaid Springs,’” he read aloud. “‘See Real Mermaids Perform Amazing Acts Underwater in Eight Shows a Day.’”

  “‘Amazing acts,’” he repeated. “Holy shit. Hit me, Paulie. So I know it’s real.”

  I gave him an easy shot in the bicep.

  “‘Yes, yes, yes,’” he murmured, and we walked on until the sprawling pink building came into sight.

  It sat close to the road, “Mermaid Springs” spelled out in neon script above it and big posters advertising the shows framed all along the front. The ticket office was dark; the pink concession stand was shuttered. There was a fountain, its spray of water lit by colored lights at the base of a blue concrete pool, and it would have been nice to take off our shoes and cool our feet, but Lorelei had told us to wait in the grove across the street, so Duke and I walked over there, dropped our gear a little way in and sat down, each of us leaning against an orange tree, to wait for her.

  We didn’t talk, just breathed in the faint scent of the growing oranges mingled with some unfamiliar mix of earth and water. I looked up at the sky—the same sky, the same moon and stars in it that I’d seen all my life, but the sky seemed larger and darker, the moon and stars brighter somehow. I picked up an orange that had fallen from its branch and held it in my hand like a baseball. It was smaller than a baseball, though, and a little shriveled, not shiny, like oranges in the supermarket—not even orange, but washed-out yellow. I was shocked by the sudden intense scent of orange that emerged from it when I broke the skin with my thumbnail. A voice in my head—Sal Paradise’
s voice—said, clear as anything, “‘Adventuring in the crazy American night.’”

  If I had repeated the words out loud, Duke would have assumed I was talking about the craziness of Lorelei picking us up, the two of us in the grove, now, waiting to see what would happen next, when, in fact, the burst of orange made me feel cut loose, like anything could happen. I didn’t want to try to explain it, so I kept it to myself.

  Lorelei had told us that she lived in one of the cottages behind Mermaid Springs and, and after we’d watched for the T-Bird to pull into Mermaid Springs and drop her off for nearly a half hour, Duke said, what if she got dropped off before we got to the grove? Maybe we should sneak around the side of the theater building and see if we could find her.

  “Remember Clayton?” I asked. “The night watchman? The guy she told us about at the diner? The bodybuilder? Anyway. If she already got dropped off and she’s not here by now, there’s a good chance that letting us off the way she did was her way of dumping us nicely.”

  “She’s not dumping us,” Duke said. Then. “Shit. You think she’d do that?”

  “Beats me,” I said.

  Duke sighed. “Well, let’s give it another ten minutes. Then split. If we’re lucky, we can still hitch a ride into St. Petersburg tonight.”

  But not long afterward we heard a rustling behind us, in the grove, and Lorelei appeared, trailed by a girl about our age—blond, wearing a flowered sundress that showed off her curves, pretty in a Kewpie-doll way.

  “This is Mermaid Anastasia,” Lorelei said.

  The girl grinned, rolled her eyes. “I’m Bev,” she said. “Call me Bev.”

  “Bev.” Duke stuck out his hand; they shook. “Duke. Pleasure to meet you.”

  “This here is Paul,” Lorelei said.

  Bev smiled at me, but stayed right there at Duke’s side.

  “I was talking to Clayton,” Lorelei said. “That’s what took so long. Honestly, he is a man who will talk you half to death. First he had to tell me all about his cheating girlfriend, then I had to tell him about Daddy and Dee, and Jean-Ann being so smug and bossy, and work my way up to how I gave you boys a ride. Then he had to give me a little lecture about picking up hitchhikers and I said, ‘Clayton, I know. But I looked these boys over real good before I let them in the car, and I could tell they’d act like gentlemen.’”

  Duke gave a little bow, and Bev giggled.

  “He’s always talking to us girls about how we shouldn’t have anything to do with anybody who’s not a gentleman,” Lorelei went on. “I listened politely, like I always do. I said, “Clayton, you are so right. We all really do need to be careful—and I promise, I am. Then I said to him—” She exaggerated her accent, batted her eyelashes. “‘Clayton? Honey? I’d really love to give these nice boys a tour of the theater.’

  “Of course, he didn’t come right out and say I could. He said, ‘I’m about to go out on my rounds, and I’ll check on the door.’ Meaning he’d leave it open for us.”

  “He’s a peach,” Bev said.

  “He is. Les would kill him if he knew.”

  “Les would kill us if he knew,” Bev said.

  They laughed.

  Lorelei had put on fresh lipstick and some perfume—an earthy scent that was unfamiliar to me, nothing like the flowery perfume Kathy wore. She took my hand and we headed back into the grove. As soon as the picnic area was out of sight, we turned and walked a diagonal path through the woods, toward the highway, which was completely empty, the moonlit road stretching one way, south, to St. Petersburg, and the other, north, toward home.

  “Quick, y’all,” Lorelei said. “Run.”

  We did, disappearing ourselves into the pine forest on the other side of the road, Lorelei still in those high heels. We slanted through the trees and eventually came out at the side of the theater, which was built right into the natural spring for which it was named. The spring was about the size of a football field, lined with stone. So deep, Lorelei told us, that the bottom had never been found.

  “And clear,” Bev added. “The water comes up from the caves under the ground. So do turtles—and all kinds of fish. Catfish, big ones—ugh. Sometimes a dozen of them at a time will gather around us—they love our sparkly tails—and we have to bonk them with our air hoses to get them away. Once, I kid you not, an alligator swam up from a hole under the theater while one of the girls was in the tank cleaning the glass.”

  “‘I quit!’” were the first words out of her mouth when she got out of the water,” Lorelei said. “Well, once she got done screaming. She was cleared out of her cottage in an hour.”

  We stood, looking at the dark water.

  “So you just jump in?” I asked. “In those…tails?”

  I felt like an idiot as soon as I said it, but Lorelei just put a finger to her lips and gestured for us to follow her alongside the theater to a door with “NO ADMITTANCE” on it, which opened at her touch. We slipped in and she closed it behind us. There was nothing but metal stairs, lit by a single bare bulb in the ceiling, and we dropped our gear on the landing and walked down to what would have been the basement if there’d been anything above it. It was chilly and dark; it smelled like water. The control room, to our left, with its turntable and microphone, its panel of toggle buttons, looked like a radio studio—except for the window of water that took up one whole end of it.

  We walked past, through the dressing room door, into a big room with long counters that had mirrors above them and short stools pulled in beneath, each station marked with a Mermaid’s name and cluttered with girl stuff. There were two hairdryers, the kind they had in beauty shops. Costumes and glittery mermaid tails hung on clothes racks. But there were lockers and showers, too—and on the far end, a round, tiled opening in the floor that looked like a sewer.

  “That’s how we go in.” Lorelei kicked off her shoes and sat down, locking her legs together at the ankles and dangling them over the opening; then she put her arms behind her and lifted herself to show how it worked. “You just let go and whoosh down the tunnel,” she said. “I’m used to it now, but the first few times—”

  Bev shuddered. “I’m used to it, too, but I never will like it,” she said.

  We went from there into the darkened amphitheater, where rows of benches, like church pews, faced a huge window that framed the underwater stage. Lorelei sat on one of them, then took my hand, pulling me down beside her. She kept hold of it as we sat looking at the ghostly scene—the fairytale castle, fish threading through the plants surrounding it, an occasional turtle swimming by. Everything lit by the moonlight that shone from above.

  “It’s like being an astronaut,” Lorelei said. “Being underwater, you know? How you see them on the TV and it looks like they’re swimming in air?”

  “No gravity,” I said.

  “No gravity,” she repeated. “Like the rules of the world do not apply to you. Sometimes I think if I could just stay down there, if I never, ever had to come up, I’d be so happy.”

  She looked at me a long time, then ran a finger the length of my face—and kissed me.

  Duke and Bev had disappeared by this time, so it was only the two of us when we set out walking hand-in-hand toward the row of mermaid cottages at the edge of the woods behind the theater. Neither of us spoke. There was just the sound of the breeze rustling the trees, the buzzing and whirring of insects. The sound of my heart pounding in my ears. Could Lorelei hear it?

  Everything in her tiny cottage was pink. Pink walls, pink linoleum, pink-and-white checked curtains. Pink dishes and coffee cups; pink knick-knacks. Even the cabinets in the tiny kitchenette were painted pink. There was a pink flowered couch and a little TV on a pink table.

  Lorelei didn’t say a word. She folded back the pink bedspread from her bed in her pink bedroom; she undressed me, kissing every part of my body she revealed. Then pulled me down with her into the bed.

  ELEVEN

  One of the last times I had sex with Kathy, we went to the drive-in to see B
ikini Beach. Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello dithering, as usual, over their relationship and ending up living happily ever after—until next summer, when they’d do it all over again. Kathy talked through the whole movie, which she had chosen, so I was watching Frankie and Annette, but hearing her soundtrack: Our Perfect Wedding and Beyond. There was a brand new apartment complex over on Cline Avenue and she had gone to look at it with Judy because Judy and Doug were getting married in October and wanted to rent an apartment before that and have it ready so they could move right in after the honeymoon. It was small, but cozy, Kathy said. Fine until they were ready to have kids.

  She got quiet and I thought she was watching the big climactic drag race scene in the movie. But, no. She sighed, happily. “I can’t wait till we have kids,” she said. “Two boys, two girls. A boy first, I think. Troy Dean. I just love that name.”

  “Troy Dean? Are you nuts? He’d be eaten alive on the playground,” I said, realizing too late that by making him a “he,” I’d made him real.

  “Well, what name do you want then?” Kathy asked.

  “I don’t want any name. I don’t want any kids. Not for a long time, anyway. I’m not ready for that.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Paul, I’m not talking about tomorrow. I’m talking about—” She waved her arm out, toward our future. “Why do you have to be so crabby every time I talk about—”

  “I’m tired, okay? For Christ’s sake, I got maybe three hours of sleep this morning.”

  She sighed, not happily this time. “I hate that stupid third shift,” she said. “I really do. How long do you think it will be before you can go to days?”

  Like she assumed I was going to be working at the mill forever. She moved right up next to me, did this thing she always did with her tongue in my ear that made me weak, then kissed me—and I kissed her back. “This is a stupid movie,” she said. “Let’s go, Paul. Let’s—” She ran her finger lightly along my thigh.