by Jack Kerouac
“What are you doing Cody?” asked Watson when he noticed how pensive he was.
Oh ragged sailing heart!—it was far from time for Cody to be able to even want to explain his craziest secrets. “Actually and no lie, Tom, I was thinking to myself what a wonderful guy this Tom Watson fellow is really truly indeed.”
Slim Buckle, Earl Johnson and Jim Evans were the nucleus of Tom Watson’s gang at the time. They were grouped around a rear table in the usual ritual get-together game of rotation that they had every Saturday evening as a kind of preliminary tactical conference on the night’s action and for starting and a Coke. The program tonight featured two girls who were baby-sitting for the weekend in a house up near the Wyoming line. But this night without knowing it they were grouped around with that hotheaded dumbness the purpose of which is always to be ignorant of what’s about to happen, the only sure thing you can remember when you look back to see what people were doing during an important historical moment, sore, sullen, sighing from the drag of time, inattentive as always, impatient not only with life but always exactly the life unfolding in the immediate vicinity, the miserable here, the lousy now, as though all the blame was on that, and yet the poor souls actually sitting in that mysterious godlike stuff that later makes them say, “Listen, I was there the night Tom Watson came in with Cody the day he found him, 1942, Autumn, they had the Army-Columbia game that day I bet on it and heard it on the radio too, we were all playing pool me and Slim Buckle who just got haircuts and Earl Johnson and Jackoff and I dunno who the hell else, Christ we all drove to Wyoming that night, sure, it was a great mad night!”
Cody was introduced around. “Here comes Tom Watson; who’s that kid with him? What’s that, your cousin? What happened to you and Jackoff Friday night? Cody is it? Hiya boy.” And Cody with that strange little feeling of pleasedness that shivers deep in your chest and makes you want to hug yourself and explain everything to the man next to you, found himself standing at one table among all the others roaring with what he could now almost call his own gang as exciting shadows outdoors fell and they played eightball—Cody and Watson versus Buckle and Johnson with goodnatured Evans kibitizing. And everything they said—“That old Missouri twang Esmeralda swishin her butt around the Sandwich Shop I know her, if she had as many rods stickin out of her as she had in she’d look like a porcupine, yah, don’t laugh I stole it from Tony”—and everything they did—one reaching up to slap over the score and another reaching down to carefully place his Coke and another looking horizontally along his cue to see if it was too curved—was all part of one great three-dimensional moil that was all around him now instead of just flat in front of his face like a canvas prop, he was up on the stage with the show now. So he stood there with his weatherbeaten face growing more excited and redder by the hour, his big raw hands gripped around a cue, looking bashfully at his new friends and planning deep in his mind from everything they said and did the positively best, in fact only way to begin completely, helplessly impressing everyone and winning over their favor so conclusively and including their souls that eventually of course they would all turn to him for love and advice; mad Cody who eventually did run the gang, who was now just being merely coy quiet knowing instinctively the best way to start despite the fact that he never knew a gang before and the only thing he’d done was grab some poor kid by the arm in the junkyard or a newsboy in the street or some of the bicyclists on the paper route and make long strange speeches to them like the great speech he made to Watson that afternoon but they were too young to understand and frightened. So he stood stiffly at attention at the table side, sweaty in his suit, or made stupid hilarious shots laying out his big hand flat and flaccid for a cue-rest as if a baby was trying to shoot pool, and the boys laughed but only because Cody was so seriously absent-minded in his hilarious dumbness (trying to learn, they thought) and not because he was inconsequential. Right away the biggest fellow in the gang took a liking to Cody, six-foot-four Slim Buckle all shiny handsome in his Saturday night suit, who was always looming over everybody with a long grave calm that was half comical because it seemed to come from the loneliness of his great height which prevented him from being on a level with other faces so that he dreamed up there his own special juvenile dreams all the less realistic because they were so far from his feet where the ground was, the others had to stare dumbly at his vest most of the time, a fate that he accepted with immense and tender satisfaction. This goodnatured long tall drink of water took a liking to Cody that soon became hero worship and later led to their rambling around the country, buddies—a thing that Earl Johnson noticed and resented from the start. He was almost instantly jealous and immediately proclaimed next day in Watson’s ear (when it was too late) Cody wasn’t everything he seemed to be. So when the gang gave up the precious table and let their empty Cokes plop in a floorbox with a “So long fellers” and left the hall to jump in the car, a ’37 Ford belonging to Evans, for the ride north to Wyoming about eighty miles, the sun just then going down in vast unobserved event above the madding souls of people, and Cody above the objections of everyone else insisted on driving to show his skill, but then really fantastically wheeled the car right clear out of town with beautiful spot-shot neatness and speed, the guys who were prepared to criticize his driving and give pointers or stage false hysterical scenes forgot they were in a car and fell to gabbing happily about everything—Suddenly out on East Colfax Boulevard bound for Fort Collins Cody saw a football game going on among kids in a field, stopped the car, said “Watch” ran out leaping madly among kids (with noble seriousness there wearing those tragic lumps like the muscles of improvised strongmen in comedies), got the ball, told one blondhaired boy with helmet tucked underarm to run like hell, clear to the goalpost, which the kid did but Cody said “Further, further,” and the kid halfway doubting to get the ball that far edged on back and now he was seventy yards and Cody unleashed a tremendous soaring wobbling pass that dropped beyond the kid’s most radical estimate, the pass being so high and powerful the boy completely lost it in eyrieal spaces of heaven and dusk and circled foolishly but screaming with glee—when this happened everyone was amazed except Johnson, who rushed out of the car in his sharp blue suit, leaped around frantically in a mixup of kids, got the ball (at one point fell flat because of his new shiny-bottom shoes that had only a half hour’s poolroom dust on ‘em) and commanded the same uncomplaining noble boy to run across the field and enragedly unfurled a long pass but Cody appeared out of nowhere in the mad lowering dusk and intercepted it with sudden frantic action of a wildfaced maniac jumping into a roomful of old ladies; spun, heaving a prodigious sky pass back over Johnson’s head that Johnson sneered at as he raced back, he’d never been outdone by anybody (“Hey wheel” they yelled in the car); such a tremendous pass it was bound to be carried by the wind, fall in the road out on East Colfax, yet Johnson ran out there dodging traffic as mad red clouds fired the horizon of the mountains, to the west, and somewhere across the field littler tiny children were burning meaningless fires and screaming and playing football with socks, some just meaninglessly tackling one another all over in a great riot of October joy. Circling in the road, almost being murdered by a car driven eighty miles per by Denver’s hotshot (Biff Buferd, who tooted), Johnson made a sensational fingertip sprawling-on-knees catch instantly and breathtakingly overshadowed by the fact that dramatic fantastic Cody had actually gone chasing his own pass and was now in the road yurking with outstretched hands from the agony that he was barely going to miss, himself sprawling as terrorstricken motorists swerved and screeched on all sides. This insane scene was being beheld not only by Biff Buferd laughing like hell as it receded eighty miles an hour out of his rearview window, but across the wild field with its spastic fires and purple skies (actually an empty lot sitting between the zoom-swish of Colfax traffic and some old homes, the goalposts just sticks the kids “put up with believing crudeness of primitive Christians”) was propped all by itself there an old haunted house, dry garde
ns of Autumn planted round it by nineteenth-century lady ghouls long dead, from the weather-beaten green latticed steps of which now descended Mr. behatted beheaded Justin G. Mannerly the mad schoolteacher with the little Hitler mustache, within months fated to be teaching Cody how to wash his ears, how to be impressive with highschool principals—Mannerly now stopped, utterly amazed, halfway down, the sight of Cody and Earl Johnson furying in the road (almost getting killed too), saying out loud “My goodness gracious what is this?”; same who in fact that afternoon, at the exact moment Cody was approaching Watson, sat in a grave of his own in his overcoat in an empty unheated Saturday classroom of West Denver High not a mile across town, his brow in his hand as blackboard dust swam across October fires in the corner where the window-opening pole was leaned, where it was still written in chalk from yesterday’s class (in American Lit.) When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, sat there in a pretense of thinking for the benefit of any teachers and even kids passing in the hall with some of whom just before he’d in fact been joking (threw a feeble lopsided pass across the afternoon lawn as he hustled from Studebaker to business), sat now moveless in a pretense of remembering, with severe precision, the exact date of something that was bottlenecking his entire day, left wrist raised for a quick look at how much time was left, frown of accompaniment already formed, drawer pulled with letter headed memo paper ready to fly the instant he smacked the desk deciding, but actually choking over loss, choking over loss, thinking of the love, the love, the love he missed when his face was thin and fresh, hopes were pure. O growing old! O haggard ugly ghoul is life’s decay! Started life a sweet child believing everything beneath his father’s roof; went from that, immersed and fooled, to that mask of disgusted flesh called a face but not the face that love had hoped for and to that soul of a gruesome grieving ghost that now goes shuddering through nightmare life cluttering up the earth as it dies. Ah but well, Earl Johnson wanted to throw a pass to Cody and Cody challenged him and said “Run with the ball and let’s see if I tackle you before you reach that Studebaker where the man’s standing”; and Johnson laughed because he had been (absolutely) the outstanding runner everywhere (schools, camps, picnics), at fifteen could do the hundred in 10:9, track star speed; so took off not quite realizing what he’d done here giving Cody these psychological opportunities and looking back at him with taunts “Well come on, come on, what’s the matter?” And so that Cody furiously, as if running for his life, not only caught up with him but even when Johnson increased his speed in wholehearted realizing race caught up with him easily, in his sheer excitement, with his tremendous unprecedented raw athletic power he could run the hundred in almost ten flat (actually and no lie), and a sad, remote tackle took place in the field, for a moment everybody saw Cody flyingtackling horizontally in the dark air with his neck bulled on to prove, his head down almost the way a dead man bows his head self-satisfied and life-accomplished but also as if he was chuckling up his coat sleeve at Johnson about-to-be-smeared, both arms outstretched, in a tackling clamp that as he hung suspended in that instantaneous fix of the eye were outstretched with a particular kind of unspeakable viciousness that’s always so surprising when you see it leaping out of the decent suits of men in sudden sidewalk fights, the cosmopolitan horror of it, like movie magnates fighting, this savagery explosively leaping now out of Cody’s new suit with the same rage of shoulderpads and puffy arms, yet arms that also were outstretched with an unspeakable mute prophesied and profound humility like that of a head-down Christ shot out of a cannon on a cross for nothing, agonized. Crash, Johnson was tackled; Justin G. Mannerly called out “Why didn’t you try that in the road I have a shovel in the car” nobody noticing, even as he drove off; and Cody, like Johnson with his knees all bruised and pants torn, had established his first great position of leadership in Tom Watson’s famous gang.
Long ago in the red sun—that wow-mad Cody, whose story this is, lookout.
* * *
A WHOLE BUNCH OF SAD and curious people and half morose kicked around the weeds in the ordinary city debris of a field off East Colfax Avenue, Denver, October 1942, with semi-disgruntled expressions that said “There’s something here anyway.” Crap in weeds was an old map, Cashmere Soap paper, bottom glass of a broken bottle, old used-out flashlight battery, leaf, torn small pieces of newspaper (someone had saved a clipping and then torn it), nameless cardboards, nameless mats of hay, light bulb cardboards, old Spearmint Gum wrapper, ice cream box cover, old paper bag, weeds with little bunched lavender shoots and Rousseau-like but October rusted leaves—old cellophane-old bus transfer ticket, the strange corrugated cardboard from egg crates, a rock, pieces of brown beerbottle glass, old Phillip Morris flattened pack—the roots of weeds were purplish borscht color and left the matted filthy earth like tormented dog cocks leave the sac—sticks—coffee container—and an empty pint bottle of Five Star brand California Sherry drunk by an old wino of the road when things were less grim.
What actually had happened a miscarriage was discovered by some children in the field and reported to a cruising cop who’d now sent his partner back to call up a morgue wagon. There was something tremendously embarrassing about it because you wanted to see it and yet if you did you had to be conspicuous, had in fact to pick out the spot where it was supposed to be and even if you found that had to crane over others and give away the fact which is tremendously painful that you with your personal embarrassed also disgruntled face want to see the red horrible meat of a dead baby—have come snooping around to see it—probably knowing all the time what it was—Cody was embarrassed therefore till the other fellows (Tom Watson, Slim Buckle, Earl Johnson) joined him from the car and then it was easy to talk—But now: what a forlorn thing it is and frightening that the nameless soul (the thing created by the terribleness of a womb which when it does halfway work or even complete work takes the melted marble of man’s sperm which is a kind of acceptable substance, say in a bottle, and transforms it by means of the work of some heinous secret egg into a large bulky piece of decayable meat—) that this nameless little would-have-been lay, spilling out of that grocer’s bag, grocer’s wrapping, under a tree that by dry Autumn had been turned almost the same shade of red, turned thus instead of by wet and secret wombs—Girls are frightening when you see them under these circumstances because there seems to be a kind of insistence on their part to look you in the eye to find out that personal thing about you which is probably the thing that you expect and burn and kill to find in them when you think of penetrating their thighs—that secret wetness of the woman is as unknown to you as your eyes are to her when they’re confronted by a miscarried whatnot in a field under dark and mortal skies—Thus Cody ponders. Whatever he says (in the tragic dusk of this field, bareheaded), he says nothing now—
The roads that Cody Pomeray knew in the West and that I rode with him later were all those tremendously frightening two-lane bumpy roads with those ditches on both sides, that poor fence, that rangefence next, maybe a sad cut of earth, a hair head of grass on a lump of sand, then endless range leading to mountains that belong to other states sometimes—but that road always seems destined to bounce you in the ditch because it humps over each way and the feeling is of the car rolling on a side angle, inclined to a ditch, a bump in the road will bounce it in—as a consequence of this Western roads are lonelier to ride than any. Long hauls straight ahead and on a Saturday night you can see maybe five cars in the next five miles coming your way each headlight smaller and creating that illusion of water on the road when they’re so far the lights are absorbed probably by the night mist entire or whatever it really is—the mirage of night driving across great flat spaces—Cody like everybody else to drive this has that elbow over the window and he particularly with his thick muscular noble efficient (like necks of great busdrivers) neck looks calm and relaxed and perfect at the wheel as you look over his shoulder at that road which at night only shows part of itself, the most conspicuous being the five-mile headlights coming your way—co
ming into Denver for Saturday night—and the swath, the side-wash swath of the car lights catching the side ditches and a part of the range that jacks over, inlaps the fence like a sea past a breakwater towards the road showing forlorn tufts of bunchgrass on nobs of dry dead earth flashing by in the night in swift blurrily fanning succession and just beyond you know there is, or are, ends of the earth swinging out across the plain, thunderset, the desert, over gopher holes, over brush, sticks, rocks, tiniest pebbles reflecting largest stars (which are in reality galaxies) till the inevitable mesas that terminate Western horizons give some kind of indication that the world has contours and the flatness’s got to stop—this is flashing by, the stars are distant, if you put out the lights of the car you would see what you sense—Cody drove this that night eighty miles and drove it many other times too, north, south, east, west, and was perfectly still at the wheel for an entire hour and averaging an almost pure 80 m.p.h. in the trafficless wilds except for a town while the fellows gabbled and drank beer and sent cans banging after in the black abyss.
Now girls. The house was located on the Union Pacific railroad track under a watertank at the corner of a bunch of desolate looking buildings including one spare (the Anglo North and its fool Norwegians have captured Moby Dick! captured him a hundred years after!) vertical board church and a huge heavengoing creamy white silo with the name of the junction on it, a desolate place not even fit for a brakeman’s piss when the train’s stopped and watering, re-coaling, tanks, coal chutes. The house was somewhat sooty from railroad and therefore deliberately painted bright red window frames—brown sandpaper shingles over walls and on roof, those on roof pale green—weatherbeaten antique gray brick chimney protruding from peaked roof—wooden porch made into an extension out front, gray wood, full of bicycles, chairs, storm doors with lift hooks not knobs—and behind with adjunct wings getting smaller and beater in a graduating series, places to put overshoes, rubbers, umbrellas, addition-sheds, also gray wood but last little outhouse one has cheap English lamp hanging—In yard an old decrepit dresser facing house, shoved up against it with bucket and upside down apple basket on it—boards leaning on house—junk in yard, including an old water-heater tank in high grass, pieces of sodden dog biscuit—and one old sunken ancient car collapsed on timbers as if on display, decapitated, emptied of all except flaps of leather, twang of seat springs, the inner hay of seats, old red rust dials, a steering wheel cracked so you can cut yourself on it, blind headlamps, a back trunk where birds have nested and snow and spring combined to raise a small green crop—old potatoes dumped from a sack rotting next to the right front wheel hub—the kids’ playplace—the dog’s pissery—the trough of moony cows in the summer-rain.