by Jack Kerouac
“Yeh but that’s not important.”
“What’s not important, mo-ney?” he shows his teeth yelling at me, mad at his brother for bein so Innisfree—
“All right, you’ll be a millionaire. Get me no yacht with blondes and champagne, all I want is a shack in the woods. A shack on Desolation Peak.”
“And a chance” tapping me, leaping forward “to play the system with the money I’ll send you by Western Union soon’s we’re ready to expand our business across the country—You cover the New York tracks, I’ll stick to the rail here and cover these tracks and we’ll set Old Sleepyhead Raphael there a-sailin for them Tropical Park Isles—he can cover Florida—and Irwin New Orleans—”
“And Marlon Brando Santa Anita,” I say—
“And Marl that’s right and the whole gang—”
“Simon at Setabustaposk Park in Sardine Russia”
“Semopalae Russia for Lazarus so dear m’boy it’s in the bag a dead sure fire headbang cinch” whacking his fist, “except I gotta brush the back a my suit, here’s the brush, get those specks off the back of me willya?”
And I proudly like an old New Orleans movie porter in old trains, brush his back clean of specks—
“That’s fine, me boy,” says Cody, placing the Racing Form neatly in the side of his uniform, and now we march on to Sunnyvale—“there’s old Sunnyvale out there” says Cody looking out as we clank into a station, and he goes out calling “Sunny-Vale” to the passengers, twice, and some of em yawn and get up—Sunnyvale where Cody and I’d worked together, and the conductor said he talked too much tho Cody did show me how not to get on a diesel footboard—(If you get on the wrong way you’re ground under, sometimes it isnt noticed in the dark) (You stand there in the dark on a track and wont see nothing because a low flatcar’s sneakin up to ya like a snake)—So Cody is the Conductor of the Heavenly Train, and we’ll all get our tickets pinched by him because we were all good lambs believed in roses and lamps and eyes of the moon—
Water from the moon
Comes all too soon
100
But he’s mad at me for bringing Raphael to his house for the weekend, tho he doesnt care, he figures Evelyn wont like him, or it—We get off the train at San Jose, wake up Raphael, and get into his new family car, a Rambler Stationwagon, and off we go, he’s mad, he slams the car around with vicious twists and yet doesnt make a sound with his tires, he’s learned that old trick before—“All right,” he seems to say, “we’ll go to the pad and sleep. And,” he says out loud, “you two guys enjoy yourselves tomorrow watching the big Pro Football game Packers and Lions, I’ll be back bout six, and drive you in Monday dawn to the first train back—that I’m working in, you see, so you dont have to worry about getting on—Now chillun, here’s the pad,” turning into a narrow country road, and another, and into a driveway and a garage—“There’s the Spanish Mansion Pad and first thing is sleep.”
“Where do I sleep?” says Raphael.
“You sleep on the sofa in the parlor,” I say, “and I’ll sleep in the grass in my sleepingbag. I’ve got my spot out there in the backyard.”
Okay, we get out and I go in the back of the huge yard among bushes, and spread out my sack, from the rucksack, on dewy grass, and the stars are cold—But that star air hits me and as I slip into my bag it’s like a prayer—To sleep is like a prayer, but under the stars, if you wake up at night, at 3 A.M., you’ll see what a big beautiful Heavenly Milky Way room you’re sleeping in, cloudy-milk with a hundred thousand myriads of universes, and more, the number is unbelievably milky, no Univac Machine with the brainwash mind can measure that extent of our reward that we can see up there—
And the sleep is delicious under stars, even if the ground is humpy you adjust your limbs to it, and you feel the earth-damp but it only lulls you to sleep, it’s the Palaeolithic Indian in all of us—The Cro-Magnon or Grimaldi Man, who slept on the ground, naturally, and often in the open, and looked at the stars on his back and tried to calculate the dipankara number of them, or the hoodoo oolagoo mystery of them blearing there—No doubt he asked “Why?” “Why, name?”—Lonely lips of Palaeolithic men under the stars, the nomad night—the crackle of his campfire—
Aye, and the zing of his bow—
Cupid Bow me, I just sleep there, tight—When I wake up it’s dawn, and gray, and frosty, and I just burrow under and sleep on—In the house Raphael is having another sleeping experience, Cody another, Evelyn another, the three children another, even the doggy another—It will all dawn on tender paradise, though.
101
I wake up to the delicious little voices of two little girls and a little boy, “Wake up Jack, breakfast is ready.” They sorta chant “breakfast is ready” because they’ve been told to but then they explore around my bushes a minute then leave and I get up and leave my pack right there in the straw grass of Autumn and go into the house to wash up—Raphael is up brooding at the corner chair—Evelyn is all radiant blonde in the morning. We grin at each other and talk—She’ll say “Why didn’t you sleep in the kitchen couch?” and I’ll say “O I love to sleep out in that yard, I always get such good dreams”—She says “Well it’s nice to have people who have good dreams nowadays.” She brings me my coffee.
“Raphael what are you brooding about?”
“I’m brooding about your good dreams,” he says absently gnawing his fingernail.
Cody is all a-bustle in the bedroom jumping around changing the Television set and lighting cigarettes and running to the toilet to do his morning toilet between programs and scenes—“Oh isnt she darling?” he’ll say as a woman comes on to advertise soap, and from the kitchen Evelyn will hear him and say something, “She must be an old hag.”
“Hag, shmag,” ’ll say Cody, “I’ll let her climb into my bed any tam.”—“Oh poo,” she’ll say, and let it go at that.
All day long nobody likes Raphael, he gets hungry and asks me for food, I ask Evelyn for some jelly sandwiches, which I make—The children and I go off on a magic walk through the little Kingdom of The Cats—it’s all prune trees, that I eat out of, and we go through roads and fields to a magic tree with a magic little hut under it built by a boy—
“What does he do in there I say?”
“Oh,” says Emily, 9, “he just sits and sings.”
“What does he sing?”
“Anything he likes.”
“And,” says Gaby, 7, “he is a very nice boy. You should see him. He’s very funny.”
“Yes, tee hee, he’s very funny,” says Emily.
“He is very funny!” says Timmy, 5, and so low to the ground down there holding my hand I’d forgot all about him—All of a sudden I’m wandering around in desolation with little angels—
“We’ll take the secret trail.”
“The short trail.”
“Tell us a story.”
“Nah.”
“Where does this path lead?”
“It leads to the Kings,” I say.
“Kings? Humph.”
“Trapdoors and ooboons,” I say.
“O Emily,” announces Gaby, “isnt Jack funny?”
“He sure is,” almost sighs Emily, dead serious.
Timmy says: “I have fun with my hands,” and he shows us mystic mudra birds—
“And there’s a bird singing in the tree,” I advise them.
“Oh I hear him,” says Emily—“I’m going to explore further.”
“Well dont get lost.”
“I am the giant in the tree,” says Timmy climbing the tree.
“Hang on tight,” I say.
I sit down and meditate and relax—All’s well—the sun is warm through the branches—
“I am real high,” says Timmy, higher.
“You sure are.”
We walk back and on the road a dog comes up and rubs Emily’s leg and she says “O, he is just like a person.”
“He is a person,” I say (“more or less”).
We come back
to the house, eating prunes, all glad.
“Evelyn,” I say, “it’s wonderful when you have three children I cant tell the difference between one or the other—they’re all uniformly sweet.”
Cody and Raphael are yelling bets in the bedroom to the TV game—Evelyn and I sit in the parlor and have one of our long quiet talks about religion—“It’s all different words and phrases to express the same thing,” says Evelyn balancing sutras and readings in her hands—We always talk about God. She has resigned herself to Cody’s wildness because it’s as it should be—One day she even rejoiced in the opportunity to thank God when nasty children threw eggs in her window: “I was thanking Him for the opportunity to forgive.” She’s a very pretty little woman and a topnotch mother—She’s not concerned one way or the other, though, about anything in principle—She really has achieved that cold void truth we’re all yakking about, and in practice she displays warmth—what more you need? On the wall is the strange gold-lamé Christ she did at age 14, showing a squirt of blood coming out of His pierced side, very Medieval—and over the mantelpiece two good portraits of her daughters, simply painted—In the afternoon she comes out in her bathingsuit, blonde and like it’s lucky when you live in California, and takes sunbath, while I demonstrate swan dives and jack knifes to her and to the kids—Raphael watches the ball game, wont swim—Cody goes off to work—Comes back—It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon in the country. What’s to get excited?
“Very very quiet, children,” says Cody removing his brakeman clothes and getting in his bathrobe. “Supper, Maw.”… “Dont we ever get anything to eat around here?” he adds.
“Yeah,” says Raphael.
And Evelyn comes up with a beautiful tasty supper that we all eat in candlelight preceded by Cody and the children reciting a Little Lord’s Prayer about supper—“Bless the food we are about to eat”—It’s no longer than that, but they’ve got to recite it all together, while Evelyn watches, I close my eyes, and Raphael wonders—
“This is crazy, Pomeray,” he says finally—“And you really really truly believe in all this stuff?—Awright that’s a one way to do it—” Cody puts on Okie Revival Healers on Television and Raphael says “It’s bullshit!”
Cody refuses to agree—finally Cody prays a little with the Television audience where the healer asks for attention to pray, Raphael is out of his mind—And in the evening here comes a woman being interviewed for the $64,000 Question, and announces she’s a butcher in the Bronx and you see her simple serious face, maybe mincing a little, maybe not, and Evelyn and Cody agree and hold hands (at their end of the bed, on pillows, as Raphael sits Buddha at their feet and then me on the door with a beer). “Dont you see it’s just a simple sincere woman Christian,” says Evelyn, “just good oldfashioned folks—well-behaved Christians”—and Cody agrees “That’s it precisely, darling” and Raphael yells: “WHO WANTS TO HEAR HER, SHE KILLS PIGS!” And Cody and Evelyn are shocked out of their faces, both stare at Raphael wide-eyed, besides he’s said it so suddenly, and what he’s saying, they cant help seeing that it’s true but it’s got to be true, she kills pigs—
Now Raphael starts razzing Cody and feels much better—It turns into a funny night, we all get high on the moving programs we see, Rosemary Clooney singing so prettily, and Million Dollar Movies that we cant see because Cody’ll jump and click on the piece of a photographed sports game, then jump to a voice, a question, jump on, cowboys shooting toy guns in little dusty hills, then bang he hits a big worried face in a panel show or You Ask The Questions—
“How can we see the show?” yells Raphael and Evelyn all the same time—
“But it’s all one show, Cody knows what he’s doing, he knows everything—Looka there Raphael, you’ll see.”
Then I go in the hall to investigate a sound (King Cody: “Go see what that is”) and it’s a big bearded Patriarch of Constantinople with a black suede jacket and glasses and Irwin Garden, emerging from the gloom of Russia beyond—It frights me to see it!—I jump back into the room, half out of scared and half telling Cody “Irwin is here”—Behind Irwin are Simon and Gia—Simon takes his clothes off and jumps in the moonlight swimmingpool, just like an ambulance driver of a Lost Generation cocktail party in 1923—I bring them out to the deck chairs by the moonlight shining pool to let Evelyn and Cody sleep—Gia is standing beside me, laughs, and walks off with her hands in her pockets, she’s wearing pants—for a minute I think she’s a boy—she slouches and smokes like a boy—one of the gang—Simon pushes her at me: “She loves ya, Jack, she loves ya.”
I put on Raphael’s dark glasses as we sit in the booth in a restaurant ten blocks down the highway—We order a whole pot of coffee, in the Silex—Simon piles dishes and toasts and cigarette butts in a tall dirty tier of Babel—The management is concerned, I tell Simon to stop “It’s high enough”—Irwin sings a little tune:
“Silent night
holy night”—
Smiling at Gia.
Raphael broods.
We go back to the house, where I’ll sleep in the grass, and they say goodbye to me at the driveway, Irwin saying “We’ll sit in the yard and have a farewell.”
“No,” I say, “if you’re gonna go go.”
Simon kisses me on the cheek like a brother—Raphael gives me his dark glasses as a gift, after I give him back the cross, which he still insisted I keep—It’s sad—I hope they dont see my weary goodbye face—the blear of time in our eyes—Irwin nods, that little simple friendly sad persuasive and encouraging nod, “Okay, we’ll see you in Mexico.”
“Goodbye Gia”—and I go to my yard and sit awhile smoking in a beach chair as they drive away—I stare into the swimmingpool like a college director, a movie director—like a Madonna in the bright water—surrealistic swimmingpool—then I look towards the kitchen door, the darkness there, and I see materialize fast a vision of a gang of dark men wearing silver rosaries and silver trinkets and crosses around their dark chests—it comes very fast then it goes.
How glittering are those shining things in the dark!
102
The next night after I’ve done kissing maw and the babies goodbye, Cody drives me to the San Jose railyards.
“Cody, I had a vision last night of a gang of dark men like Raphael and David D’Angeli and Irwin and me all standing in the gloom with glittering silver crucifixes and neck chains over our dark dingy breasts!—Cody, Christ will come again.”
“Why shuah,” he nods suavely, handling the brake apparatus, “S’why I say—”
We park by the yards and watch the smoky engine scene and the new thrumming diesels and the yard office with bright lights, where we’d worked together in our ragged brakeman days—I am very nervous and keep wanting to get out of the car and out to that track to catch the Ghost as she pulls out but he says “O man they’re only switchin now—wait till the engine’s tied on—you’ll see it, a great big four-unit sonumbitch’ll get you flyin down that Los Angeles no time but Jack be careful keep a good handhold and remember what I always told you boy we been buddies a long time in this lonesome world I love you more than ever and I dont want to lose you son—”
I have a half pint of whisky for my whistling trip on the flat, offer him a shot—“That’s a man’s business you’re going into now,” he says, seeing I drink whisky now instead of wine, and shakes his head—When he does swing the car out back of a string of deadhead passenger cars and sees me hoist on my old freight train jacket with the sleeves bulging over my hands and the doleful POW stain left on the armband from some Korean War pre-history (jacket bought in strange torn Indian stores in El Paso) he stares to see me out of my city uniform and in my night-hopping uniform—I wonder what he thinks of me—He’s all instructions and care. He wants me to hop on from the fireman’s side but I dont like the six or seven rails I have to cross to get to the main (where Ghost Zipper’ll be flipping)—“I might trip in that dark—let’s get on the engineer’s side.” We have oldtime arguments about railroad method
s, his are long involved razorsharp Okie logics based on imaginary fears, mine are silly innocent green mistakes based on actual Canuck safety-measures—
“But on the engineer side man they’ll see you, that big spot’ll fall right on ya!”
“I’ll hide between the deadheads.”
“No—come inside.”
And like oldtime carstealing days there he is, a renowned employee of the company, sneaking into the empty cars, looking around whitefaced like a thief not to be seen, in absolute darkness—I refuse to haul my pack inside for nothing and stand between the cars and wait—He whispers from a dark window:
“KEEP OUT OF SIGHT WHATEVER YOU DO!”
Suddenly the herder’s across from us with his green lamp, giving the come-on sign, the engine’s blasted her BAW BAW hiball, and suddenly the big yellow glare is right on me and I back up against the bucklers shivering, Cody’s scared me—And instead of joining him in a shot of my whisky I’d abstained, boasting “Never drink on duty,” seriously meaning the duty of grabbing moving grabirons and heaving onto a difficult flatcar with heavy pack, if I’d have drank a shot I wouldnt now be shivering, shaking—The herder sees me, again Cody’s terrified whisper:
“KEEP OUT OF SIGHT!”
and the herder yells:
“Having trouble?” which then instantly I take either to mean, “money trouble so have to hop freights?” or “cop trouble so have to hide out of sight?” but I just liltingly yell but without thinking “Yeah—O kay?” and the herder instantly replies:
“T’s awright”
Then as the big train slowly turns into the main with ever blindinger glare I add and yell “I’ll catch her right here” to indicate to the herder I’m just a good old talkative simple boy not out to wreck open box doors and bash panels—Cody is a dead silent lump huddled in the dark coach window, for all I know down on the floor—