by Jack Kerouac
The old lady was upset and some deep rancor against her grandson, Kenny’s father, was coming out.
“He never was a father. He was never even a son. I’ve always wondered why a line of men starts strong and ends up like that.… Now little Kenny’s got a lot of Wood in him, but he never got a chance. I was too old to make much difference anyhow. And the men who came before can’t do much from the grave to spur their kin. There’s no spurring in this house, never was—and the mother got herself married to an Austrian count, now that’s something! We used to laugh at that, in the old house in Richmond. In those days in the Nineties we were as rich as you like, and Kenny’s aunts were almost swept off their feet by two or three European counts that I can remember, but they ended up marrying some no-account Kentuckians and Missourians just the same. Ah, but I’ve seen this family change—from the big houses full of brothers and sisters down to this. This!” She waved a limp hand scornfully. “But I’ve got no say now—I just sit here and think about it.”
She put on her glasses slowly and peered at Peter. “You come to see me again some time. Be a good son and you’ll be a good father and that will keep going all the time.” She frowned at him. “My gosh, a woman loves a good man—and you can keep that going all the time.”
It was moving to hear these things after all that had happened that day, after everything that Peter had known in New York in the past years. This old lady sitting by a window in towering Manhattan, remembering Missouri in 1860 and the men and things of that time, remembering the first sawmills of Virginia, and cattle trail days, the early American time of great forests and wild plains. These places and raw simplicities had now gone into the night, far beyond the incomprehensible sprawl, the cancerous smoky suburbs, the street-demented scab and wreckage of New York City and its outflung Chicagos, Cincinnatis, Milwaukees, Detroits, and Clevelands—so easily forgotten in the turmoils of city-time and city-talk and city-life and city-sarcasm and city-weariness, in all the Brooklyns and Babylons, Baltimores and Gomorrhas, Gazas and Philadelphias, and the pitted and blasted black Pittsburghs with all their Toledos and Bridgeports, ruined Newarks and Jersey Cities and the satellites thereof, the smoke-smothered Hobokens and Akrons and Garys of the land.
In her voice he heard the voices of all old people, voices without sarcasm and weariness and disgust, strong voices telling in a long way the chronicle of labor and belief and human joy. In her voice he heard his own mother’s voice, the voices of his grandfathers and grandmothers, the voices he wanted to hear again, the voices that soothed in a harsh world, in a world of real struggle and true hope.
Peter kissed the old lady on the cheek and said good-bye. He never saw her again; she died a month later, just a few weeks short of one hundred years of age.
It began to rain in torrents. Peter and Kenny and the two detectives drove down to Bellevue Hospital to identify the body in the morgue.
They ran up the steps and ducked inside, almost boisterously, but at once they smelled the burnt odor of decay and death. An attendant behind a desk dozed over a magazine, an old clock ticked on the wall, the rain poured outside. Peter and Kenny looked at each other with terrified sadness. After checking some papers at the desk, one of the detectives beckoned the boys and started down a ramp of broad steps into the basement. As they descended the stairs, the sound of the rain lessened, the silence of death took over, and the boys’ hearts pounded with horror and greedy curiosity.
In the cold damp cement atmosphere of the basement, in the catacombs of the city, there was the presence of something horrible and secret and guarded—the innumerable kept dead of the brutal streets above.
When Peter and Kenny saw what the morgue was actually like, they trembled in their bones. They expected to see rows of marble slabs and corpses covered by white sheets. They pitiably got this idea from movies and crime magazines. Instead—and with a feeling that it could not have been otherwise—they saw rows upon rows of big filing cases on all sides with numbers and handles on the doors. The detective glanced impatiently at the slip of paper in his hand, speculated with a finger pointing, selected a door, gripped the handle, called out jubilantly, “Here it is! Sixty-nine!”—and yanked back. Slowly, on rollers, the corpse of Waldo Meister swung into view.
If it was Waldo Meister. The corpse that lay there on its back was a mangled thing, in no way human. Slumped, broken, with one elbow turned up the wrong way, one knee twisted around, brown clotty gobs where the face should have been, and hair like a mop used on the floor of an abattoir. A fly buzzed out as the filing cabinet opened, a lone fly that had remained inside the niche since afternoon, and now momentarily flew away.
Peter could feel his knees buckle. Kenny paled like a sheet. The silence all around was ghastly with the sudden presence of this apparition.
“That’s him!” cried the detective, smiling at the youngsters and standing back to gaze with official impartiality at the thing on the roller-board. “Just identify him and we’re all done for the night. My old lady’s keeping my supper warm.” As he spoke a huge attendant, a beefy red-haired man in an undershirt and white duck trousers, came shambling out of the shadows at the end of the aisle, munching on a sandwich and staring at them curiously. He was eating at a little table by the back door of the basement, where a truck backed up at that moment. Two men struggled in with a long box containing, presumably, still another corpse picked up in the streets above. They were swearing and shouting because the rain was dripping on them from a faulty drainpipe.
“Well, can you identify him?” demanded the detective.
“How the hell can we do that!” muttered Peter. “That doesn’t look like anybody I ever saw. Why don’t you just close it up and let’s go!” He backed up instinctively, almost touching another row of filing cases. He jumped forward again in a stumble of nightmarish futility. He had the sudden urge to run like the wind right out of there.
“He won’t hurt you, kiddo,” growled the undershirted attendant with the sandwich, “not now he won’t.” And to the utter amazement of the two boys this man walked up to the corpse and plucked at the dry bloody hair with one hand, lolling the skull back and forth grotesquely, as he munched on the sandwich. “He had brown hair, didn’t he? See the brown hair here underneath the blood? Come up close and look. You can’t see nawthin’ from there.” He turned the head over, the pitiful head.…
“Come on, come on!” commanded the detective impatiently. “I can’t stay here all night. Ain’t you guys ever seen a weenie before?”
Kenny was trying to mumble something, stuttering and clutching his hands and looking desperately away. “I don’t—know—who that is … honest to Christ I don’t.” His face was a contortion of grief and revulsion.
“Well, do you recognize the clothes? See the shoes there! How about the wallet!”
“Wallet?”
“Right under that broken arm, the wallet there. Did you ever see that wallet before?” shouted the detective.
The attendant reached over and plucked up the wallet and showed it to Kenneth, who glanced at it fearfully, and nodded, saying: “Yes, that’s Waldo’s wallet—I … I remember it all right.”
“And the brown hair?” said the attendant, grinning with a leer at Kenny, and suddenly tearing up a fingerful of hair from the skull which cracked dryly, and holding the tuft underneath the boy’s nose.
Kenneth dodged away with an agonized cry. “You crazy sonofabitch you!!”
“Hyah! hyah! hyah!” roared the attendant flinging the piece of hair away and twirling triumphantly on one foot. Without another word he walked back down the grisly aisle, munching on the sandwich.
“Please let’s get the hell out of here,” pleaded Peter. “What’s the sense? Just push him back in and let’s go.” He turned and walked back to the stairs with the vision of the corpse burning as though it would never be erased from his mind. He saw it even when he closed his eyes, and he knew he would never forget it. It was not the corpse alone but the place where it was
filed and registered, nameless and dead, in the dank underworld basement of the city.
As they waited in the office upstairs, a call came through from headquarters ordering Kenny Wood’s release. The investigation was closed. The boys shambled out together in the rain and walked away from the morgue.
“Did I do that to the guy?” mourned Kenneth, looking at Peter in the downpour. His face was all wet from raindrops and tears, pale from terror, all twisted and stunned.
“You didn’t do that to him, Ken.”
“Oh, yes, I did—in my fashion. Just like Cynara and all that.”
“There’s life and death, man, and he’s dead. Everybody dies—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” scoffed Kenneth darkly.
They were walking along in the rain mechanically with no thought of sheltering themselves and no idea where they were and where they were going.
“Well, good-bye, Pete.…”
“Where are you going?” shouted Peter.
“How the hell should I know—where are you going?”
“Let’s walk together anyway.” Peter frowned and took him by the arm, and wondered what he could say. He could think of nothing. Perhaps they would go on walking all night in the rain. The neon lights of a bar were shining in the rain across the street.
“Let’s go in there for a drink,” said Kenneth. “I’ve still got some money Dennison gave me to go to Mexico.”
“Okay. Don’t worry, Ken, you’ll be okay.…”
“You speak more nonsense—”
“Well, go to hell then.”
“I’ve just been there. Let’s have a drink and a toast to something, a toast to my grandmother maybe.”
“Did you hear me talking to her tonight?” laughed Peter with a rattled little croak.
“I certainly did!” Kenny sighed, and suddenly, without any warning, he dug in his pockets, came up with a handful of bills, flung them away in the rain, and started running up the street. Peter stood stock still wondering what was going on. He started after Kenny, came back, searched feverishly for the bills soaking in the gutter, picked them up, and ran full speed after the boy, catching up with him at the corner.
‘Where are you going?!!” he shouted, gripping him by the arm and pulling him around impulsively.
Kenny turned and looked at him wonderingly, wearily, almost meekly, and sat down, without a word, on the curbstone—with his feet in a puddle—putting his head in his hands, drooping, shuddering suddenly with a spastic intwisted violence.
“It wasn’t your fault, Ken.… For krissakes, forget it and pull yourself together. Let’s go have that drink. Don’t sit there in the gutter, you’ll catch your death.”
“I’ve always sat in gutters. I used to sit in gutters all the time. I once saw a dead guy in the street all mashed up by a car when I was on my way to see a girl I was loving-up at the time in Yonkers, and I thought, Ever moreso gentle am I than death.” He looked away up the street. “What the hell’s a Kenny Wood to do in this world? Not on account of that, but on general watered-down principles. It’s really fine to sit in gutters, by the by, it’s a marvelous game that people always play at times like this. Don’t you know anything, Martin? Maybe I should sleep in the river tonight.”
Peter sat down beside him, but got up instantly because it was too cold and wet. He retreated to a doorway. “All I know’s it’s dumb to sit there in the gutter.”
“Beautiful, beautiful.”
“What’s beautiful?”
“Everybody in the world’s dumb and beautiful …” Kenny laughed sharply. “So the old man’s disposed of at last. And ah! but he was beautifully chopped up. Mother Meister was always so thorough.…”
“Let’s go to a bar,” said Peter, shivering.
“Even as a weenie. Well, Pete, so long.” Kenny came over and shook hands in the doorway, with drooped head.
Peter heard himself say “So long” faintly, but when Kenny walked away he followed him a few steps, and then, again, Kenny stuck out his hand, pitifully now. He had some change in his hand and when they shook hands the coins jingled and a few of them dropped on the sidewalk.
“I’ll pick them up!” grinned Peter, nervously.
“Go ahead. So long, Pete.”
“So long, Ken.”
Kenny walked determinedly away in the rain, vanishing around a corner. Peter picked up the coins from the sidewalk and went back to stand in the doorway. He stood there staring in the rain, wondering where to go next. He looked up and down the deserted street and wondered who he was, and why it was raining so soft, and what it all was.
Suddenly he saw Kenny running towards him down the avenue.
He ran out shouting, “What’s the matter?”
Kenny stopped running and strolled casually in a little circle. “My white gloves are beginning to chafe. I can’t go home just now—you see, it’s the white gloves.”
“What white gloves?”
“They wear them, you know … the French dukes … when they face the firing squad. What’ll I do with them? You want them?”
“What?”
“The white gloves! the white gloves!”
Peter looked around and down at the gutter, lugubriously. “That’s easy, just drop them in the gutter, see.”
And Kenneth plucked at the air over the gutter, magically, and opened his hand with stiff, dramatic fingers, and stared down.
“I’ll walk you home,” said Peter.
“All right. But on the other hand let’s stay here awhile in this fine doorway. No, I think I’ll go home. You go in that bar and have a drink on me, that toast to great-grandmama. So long, Pete.”
“Okay,” said Peter, turning away with sick confusion. “So long, man, so long.”
Kenny walked away again, way up the avenue this time, in a straight line, disappearing in the rainy darkness as Peter leaned out of the doorway watching, watching. When he lost sight of the weaving form, he brooded in the downpour of rain, somewhere on Second Avenue, in the halo of a streetlamp, as the April rain slanted down and twinkled in the street, as the long dreariness lay spread, glistening and empty.
A solitary truck came rumbling down the avenue and vanished upstreet with a blink of tail-lights. The traffic lights blinked and clicked, blinked and clicked to the empty streets. Peter remembered Washington that dawn with his little brother Charley. And the tenement fronts were dark and asleep all around in the deathly rain of that night.
Around midnight he went home to Judie’s apartment. It was empty. Just a few hours ago his father and his mother were there and Judie. Now they were all gone and he was alone with the haunted wreckage of their unhappiness, and his own, thinking of the irredeemable death and completion of Waldo Meister, the mad futility of Kenny Wood, and the foggy rain of the streets outside.
He wandered to his room and lay down in the dark, and lit a cigarette. In a moment he knew he would begin to imagine Waldo stalking blindly and bloodily into his room, arms outstretched, leering in death, with the great crab of suicide clutched over his mangled face.… He shuddered and sat up.
There was some mail on the desk beside the bed, two letters from Alexander Panos in Italy and another letter from his sister Ruth in Los Angeles. Peter reached for these letters like a man paralyzed. He put on the bedlamp, with the strange feeling that he was the only person left alive in New York, and began eagerly reading his sister’s letter first. She was on leave in the California valleys with some friends, near Fresno, near the Fresno that Alexander loved so from reading William Saroyan’s stories of Armenian children.
He began absentmindedly opening one of Alexander’s letters, when he realized strangely that it was addressed in his own handwriting, addressed to A. S. Panagiatopoulos—alas! this was the boy’s legal name—in Peter Martin’s own thoughtless overbearing hand, looking so stupid there on the envelope. He looked meditatively at his own handwriting, with a blank sense of not comprehending something. Just below the address the words we
re stamped in red ink: “ADDRESSEE REPORTED DECEASED.”
Peter snickered with a crazy little shudder of his lips. Quickly, with trembling fingers he opened the other letter and wonderingly read his comrade’s last written words. He was sure someone had made a mistake. The little letter read:
Dear Pete,
Riding in a truck past fields scattered with the red leaves of last Fall, the bare little Italian trees and the dead, the English soldier boys who can’t go home again now and are lying there among the red leaves together. I send you this leaf from a lonely Italian field.
All of Alexander’s letters from overseas had been like this, brief, poetic, sorrowful. This scarcely differed from the others, yet somehow there was an air of weariness and finality in the words, something incurled, sad, complete. He mused over the red leaf Alexander had enclosed in the envelope, looking at it almost indifferently yet with a deep ungraspable stab of pain.
The letter was signed:
“I have kept faith, I have remembered—ALEXANDER.”
It was as though something had broken inside him, all fallen and ruined. What had happened to his dear friend? Now his dark face was lost, Alex’s face, in the strange unthinking world, all awful and raw and grieved.
5
[1]
The fall of 1945 the great troopships began to arrive in New York Harbor crowded from stem to stern with returning veterans. On fabulous October days when the sun and wind made the harbor waters sparkle with all the allure of the sunny sea-world itself, when gulls swooped above ships’ stacks and ships’ masts, and circled the smoking tugs, and sat pecking on mouldy imperial dockpiles, and when flags cracked and whipped in the jubilant wind everywhere, and ships’ whistles and horns brayed in the huge demented medley of war’s end, and crowds waved on the docks—something furiously sad, angry, mute, and piteous was in the air, something pathetically happy too. Great ships lumbered slowly in the waters before the looming tumult and smoke-surrounded bulk of New York. And soldiers gazed with a sense of weary finality, some with a kind of sarcastic joy, others without a comment in their hearts, and others with sad-sack wonder and amazement that they were really back.