Atop an Underwood

by Jack Kerouac

  The trickling water was not trickling water. It was a faucet of blood coming from Annabel’s face. Richard reeled to one knee, and began to curse and weep all at once.

  “Who was driving?” asked a voice.

  “Oh, leave the poor kid alone,” muttered Richard. “He’s hurt.”

  A beam of light fell upon Pete’s upthrust face.

  “This one’s dead,”said a woman in calm amazement.

  Richard felt his own leg, and knew that it was all blood.

  “What a Goddamned thing!” he cursed aloud. “Christ! Why’d you go and do that! Jesus!”

  “Take it easy, boy. We’ve called the ambulance. That’s a pretty mean wreck. It sounded like a truck wreck from my bedroom. How fast were you going?” There were a lot of people around, and cars parked across the road.

  “I dunno,” muttered Richard. “Get this poor girl to the hospital, will you?”

  He was sick, repulsively sick with doom and tragedy and death. He could have vomited, but he wouldn’t. The whole thing was too disgusting to think about. From somewhere came the dim howl of an engine whistle. Richard felt tears come to his eyes, then his hands began to shake convulsively. Screeching with the horror and agony of man, the ambulance approached through the night, siren paving the terrorized way.

  The ambulance was long and sleek. It was low and racy, and could negotiate any curve without going off the road.

  [The Very Thing I Live For]

  How can I deceive the very thing I live for? (writing)

  (truth)

  I love life more dearly, yes, more dearly [than] my

  strange, dark

  self, which I yet do not understand. Who am I? I can’t

  say ... I

  am a stranger to myself: I emerged in birth into a

  strange, gray

  world, and my child self was full of wonder...

  You may wander west across the plains, across the

  mountains into

  the dry Nevadas, you may journey south to the sultry

  Gulf, or

  north to the dark pines...wherever you go, seek the

  deepest, darkest

  forest and steal into its most secluded and innermost

  glade, and

  there you’ll find a heavy rock mouldy and dark and green

  in the

  green, green shade, and when you turn it over, and the

  crow caws

  from his secret branch, and the forest echoes and echoes,

  and

  the elfin deer peeps over from a hidden brook, and the

  owl ruffles

  his feathers in the cool shade by a virgin well, and the

  tall pines

  sway pointing at the passing high clouds, and from far off

  you

  hear once more the caw of the crow, yes, when you turn

  over this

  rock, there you’ll find my heart...

  When I see you and your beauty, yes, your youthful,

  laughing beauty,

  my heart stirs the heavy green rock and once more I see

  a field

  of violets in the May breeze and want to go out with the

  sheep

  and sing by the waterfalls...

  The Mystery

  One night, returning from work in the casual, squalid atmosphere of railroad yards, warehouses, switch towers, idle boxcars, and one lonely little lunchcart across the tracks, as I was approaching the rail crossing near the old depot that we have in my home town, I had to lean against a sagging fence (black with soot-years) for fully ten minutes while a mighty locomotive went by freighting ninety-six cars: coal cars, oil tanks, wooden boxcars, all types of commercial rolling stock. While I loafed there with a cigarette, watching each car rumble past and checking the cargoes, a thought came to me with swift and lucid impact, with the same jolt of common sense and disbelief in the scantiness of my own intelligence that I had felt when first I understood the workings of a mathematical equation. “Why,” I asked myself, “does not this rich cargo, these cars, that terrific locomotive belong to me? ... and to my fellow men? Why are they not, like my trousers, my property; and why are they not, like the trousers of my fellow men, their property? Who covets these great things so that myself and my fellow men are not heir to their full use?” Then I asked myself, “Are we not all men living alone together on a single earth?”

  Then I gazed at the old depot, its aged brownstone turrets lost in clouds of steam—(steam, I thought, strangely rational puffs of steam, marks of industrial necessity each with a reason and justice behind their inception, fashioned by the common Genius of just and reasonable working men, all for sure and strong and everlastingly sound purposes)—and I wondered why the depot did not belong to my fellow men and I as well.

  When the caboose finally went by, bringing up the rear of the freight train with a little glow of red light, I watched the railroad employee as he leaned on the rail of the caboose with pipe in mouth and wondered why he wasn’t working for himself and for his fellow men rather than for the Boston & Maine Railroad Corporation (its wealth as a corporation, I pondered, is measured in shares: the bulk of these scraps of paper are in the hands of a few great men of wealth, “railroad magnates” with cigars protruding from their mouths, men who are so busy others make way for them when they approach to pass .... and yet, I wondered, if they were the men who “ran the railroads,” then where were they tonight? Where?)

  I allowed my mind to imagine—I knew I was not idly speculating: I saw one of these great “railroad kings”; he was seated in the rear of a long black car, holding onto a leather window strap while his chauffeur shot the purring car like a sleek, silent cat through the streets. The car was rolling (almost floating) through the streets of West End New York, uptown along Ninth Avenue. From his plush seat, the “railroad king” saw fruit stands in the hot summer evening, peddlers pushing carts and chanting their wares, shawled women shuffling along the dirty sidewalks, unwashed children scattering suddenly from dark alleys across the street cobbles, old men seated wearily on stoops, shabby young lovers strolling, and here and there, a drunkard vomiting in his dark corner. The “railroad king” saw all this, surely, and yet he did not: he was not detached .... No! He was only abstracted, other things were on his mind, he was on his way to a dinner party. Who would be there, that was the question, who would be there at the dinner party? And what year champagne? Would the dinner be as exquisite as that one last night in Pittsburgh? The “railroad king‘s” subconscious mind was a stream of shimmering, smooth things .... gowns of silk, long cool drinks, natty white dinner jackets, hearty laughter beneath cigar smoke, music stealing in from concealed sources, the great head of a moose exposed dumbly and mutely above a marble wainscoting, the eyes of a woman that know; and the voices, the voices: as smooth as oil the voices will soothe confidentially, behind a cigar, the sly voices, the secret, confidential mirth, the smooth power of the clan. Yes! the smell of new things, deep-grained, walnut things, new leather, new silk, the fragrance of rich, new things. This Ninth Avenue—all in passing, something “on the way” to the dinner party, not permanent, not solid! Yes, to the “railroad king’s” mind this Ninth Avenue meant only something old and corrosive and—well, to be frank—a bit on the loathsome side.

  Yes! all this while the old man who controlled the wooden guards across the street from where I stood that night pulled the lever that lofted the zebra-striped guards and then went back to his little shack to resume his reading of a Hearst tabloid by the light of a sooty oil lamp. All this ... and Ninth Avenue, New York City. Was it evident, then, that this “railroad magnate” had no conscience, despite all that was before him to see? Could he ride through the filthy streets where the masses abounded in their rank legions and pass it off as “something on the way?” Are beasts and plants the only forms of living without a moral conscience?

  It was then that I realized conclusively that this must not go on, that this must surel
y and would surely end, that it could not be otherwise, that the system of the world since the conquest of the last savage races by barbarians was a tumor which had somehow set in. I compared the system to a tubercle which had become inflamed by a horde of bacilli more rotten than any to be found in nature at its lush worst, and that the nature of these bacilli was powermad greed: then I knew that the inflammation would develop until the prodigy cell of society would collapse. How should this horrid tumor be eliminated? I did not know for certain. But I knew what society would be like once the corruption would be dug out. It was at once and always the most beautiful and casual revelation I have ever felt.

  I saw the same freight train, the same ancestral depot with its homely turrets, the same switch towers, the same expanse of steel rail, the same old man in the shack. I, with my cigarette and shabby trousers, walked across the track and thought: “How is our railroad running tonight?” “Fine,” was the answer in my thought, “the brothers are running it right, because it is our railroad. Why should it be otherwise? See, two of the brothers have stopped to chat by a switch; see the glow of their pipes in the summer darkness, see the hands that hold the lantern (look! the veinous power of their lanky hands!) Ask them how things are coming along, and they will certainly tell you. ‘Brother,’ they will tell you in the quiet darkness, ‘our railroad is coming along fine ... just now, a large trainload went by on its way to Boston.’ ‘Is that so!’ I will say to them in quiet amaze, not quite able to remain calm about such a large and beautiful fact. ‘Certainly,’ they will answer, ‘The cargo will be unloaded by our brothers in Boston to be distributed among the people ... food from our farms, clothing and necessities and gadgets and things from our factories, oil from our wells, toys and books and little things ... Oh! all manner of things, there is no end to it!’ ‘Sure,’ I will say to them, smiling, ‘it has always been like this.’ ‘And why not!’ they will answer in unison. Then we all laugh, and I walk away, and there is nothing to say.”

  What a plain and simple fact this dream was, and is! I walked home and looked at the rich, nodding stars in the sky and it was as plain as that. When I stopped to contemplate the tree in my backyard it was as simple as that. I could not understand what had gone wrong, and where, and at what time ..... it was a mystery that needed explanation. Sternly, but with a puzzled frown, I wanted an explanation.

  Thinking of Thomas Wolfe on a Winter’s Night

  Bereaved pines standing like Justice,

  The cold stare of stars between;

  I walk down the road, holding

  my ears,

  My palms the shelters

  From dry sweeps of brittle cold.

  “Who has known fury?” Wolfe

  had asked,

  And the critic’s winter eyes,

  Like these stars (between

  the pines)

  Had stared, amusedly.

  Come, it is warm in my house;

  We shall go there;

  Soon the flashing sun will

  rise up

  To overwhelm the petulant

  stars.

  from The Sea Is My Brother (Merchant Mariner)

  Kerouac saw a rough equivalency in his World War II—era service with the Merchant Marine and the combat in Europe and the Pacific faced by his friends and contemporaries. According to the U.S. Coast Guard, Merchant Marine casualties on U.S. ships included 845 dead, 4,780 missing, and 37 dead as prisoners of war. More than 600 U.S.-flagged ships were lost. Another 500 Americans died on foreign ships under U.S. supervision.

  The Sea Is My Brother is the most ambitious early work by Kerouac. The following is an excerpt from the third version of the novel, which is published here for the first time under the dual titles The Sea Is My Brother and Merchant Mariner. Both titles appear on the 158-page hand-printed manuscript, which Kerouac identified as follows: “Original of 1943 novel The Sea Is My Brother (which was examined by psychiatrists at Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md. 1943).” Waiting in Lowell to report to the U.S. Navy, Kerouac told Sebastian Sampas in a mid-March 1943 letter that he was writing almost around the clock and that their friends had praised his thirty-five-thousand-word manuscript.

  Kerouac wrote to his friend George J. Apostolos in April 1943: “And, all my youth I stood holding two ends of rope, trying to bring both ends together in order to tie them. Sebastian was at one end, you on the other, and beyond both of you lay the divergent worlds of my dual mind [...]—had a hell of a time trying to bring these two worlds together—never succeeded actually; but I did in my novel ‘The Sea Is My Brother,’ where I created two new symbols of these two worlds, and welded them irrevocably together. ”

  Kerouac worked his Merchant Marine experience into various writing projects, including a story called “An Introvert at Sea, ” a novel titled Two Worlds for a New One, and a one-act play, The Seaman. In one of the many sea project documents from the period, Kerouac described the story as “A man’s simple revolt from society as it is, with its inequalities, frustrations, and self-inflicted agonies. Wesley. Martin loves the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentencer. He goes down. The story also of another man [Bill Everhart], in contrast, who esc apes society for the sea, but finds the sea a place of terrible loneliness. ”

  In notes for another version of The Sea Is My Brother, in which the worldly Wesley Martin dies at sea, Kerouac describes how Martin’s friend and rookie seaman Everhart presses on alone, dealing with various characters aboard ship. He is interested in one who seems very much an individual: “[...] Slim is to Everhart the ‘vanishing American,’ the big free boy, the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes. For, in a planned economy, in the emergence of the state over capitalism, crown, and church, Slim’s type is not allowed to exist without dire consequence. [...] Yet, Everhart is enraged by this, because he finds such humility and wisdom in the hobo, and beauty, too. ”

  CHAPTER THREE

  WE ARE BROTHERS, LAUGHING

  [...]

  Wesley went to the window and glanced down the street; way off in the distance, the clustered pile of New York’s Medical Center stood, a grave healer surrounded at its hem by smaller buildings where the healed returned. From Broadway, a steady din of horns, trolley bells, grinding gears, and screeching trolley wheels surmounted the deeper, vaster hum from the high noon thoroughfare. It was very warm by now; a crazy haze danced toward the sun while a few of the more ambitious birds chittered in sleepy protest from the green. Wesley took off his coat and slouched into an easy chair by the window. When he was almost asleep, Everhart was talking to him: “... Well, the old man leaves me my choice. All I have to do now is speak to my brother-in-law and to the Dean. You wait here, Wes, I’ll call the jerk up ... he’s in his radio repair shop ...”

  Everhart was gone again. Wesley dozed off; once he heard a boy’s voice speaking from the door: “Geez! Wha’s dat!” Later, Everhart was back, bustling through the confusion of papers and books on his desk.

  “Where the hell? ...”

  Wesley preferred to keep his eyes closed; for the first time in two weeks, since he had signed off the last freighter, he felt content and at peace with himself. A fly lit on his nose, but he was too lazy to shoo it off; it left a moist little feeling when he twitched it away.

  “Here it is!” muttered Everhart triumphantly, and he was off again.

  Wesley felt a thrill of anticipation as he sat there dozing: in a few days, back on a ship, the sleepy thrum of the propeller churning in the water below, the soothing rise and fall of the ship, the sea stretching around the horizon, the rich, clean sound of the bow splitting water .... And the long hours lounging on deck in the sun, watching the play of the clouds, ravished by the full, moist breeze. A simple life! A serious life! To make the sea your own, to watch over it, to brood your very soul into it, to accept it and love it as though only it mattered and existed! “A.B. Martin!” they called him. “He’s a quiet good enough seaman, good worker,” they
would say of him. Hah! Did they know he stood on the bow every morning, noon, and night for an hour; did they suspect this profound duty of his, this prayer of thanks to a God more a God than any to be found in book-bound altar-bound religion?

  Sea! Sea! Wesley opened his eyes, but closed them rapidly. He wanted to see the ocean as he had often seen it from his foc’sle porthole, a heaving world pitching high above the port, then dropping below to give a glimpse of the seasky—as wild and beautiful as the sea—and then the sea surging up again. Yes, he used to lay there in his bunk with a cigarette and a magazine, and for hours he would gaze at the porthole, and there was the surging sea, the receding sky. But now he could not see it; the image of Everhart’s bedroom was etched there, clouding the clean, green sea.

  But Wesley had felt the thrill, and it would not leave him: soon now, a spray-lashed day in the graygreen North Atlantic, that most rugged and moody of oceans ....

  Wesley reached for a cigarette and opened his eyes; a cloud had come across the face of the sun, the birds had suddenly stopped, the street was gray and humid. An old man was coughing in the next room.

  Everhart was back.

  “Well!” he said. “Done, I guess ...”

  Wesley passed his hand through the thin black mat of his hair: “What’s done?”

  Everhart opened a dresser drawer: “You’ve been sleeping, my beauty. I saw the Dean, and it’s all right with him; he thinks I’m going to the country for a vacation.”

  Everhart slapped a laundered shirt in his hand meditatively: “The noble brother-in-law whined until I made it clear I’d be back with enough money to pay up all the half-rents and half-boards in this country for a year. At the end, he was fairly enthusiastic ...”

  “What time is it?” yawned Wesley.

  “One-thirty.”