Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings

by Jack Kerouac

  “Wait here,” said Wesley, shuffling toward the partitioned office across the broad plank floor. “I’ll be right back.” Everhart sat on the suitcase, peering.

  “Hey, Martin!” howled a greeting voice from the folding chairs. “Martin you old crum!” A seaman was running across the hall toward Wesley, whooping with delight in his discovery. The echoing cries failed to disturb the peace of the other seamen, though, indeed, they glanced briefly and curiously toward the noisy reunion.

  Wesley was astounded.

  “Jesus!” he cried. “Nick Meade!”

  Meade fairly collapsed into Wesley, almost knocking him over in his zeal to come to grips in a playful, bearish embrace; they pounded each other enthusiastically, and at one point Meade went so far as to push Wesley’s chin gently with his fist, calling him as he did so every conceivable name he could think of; Wesley, for his part, manifested his delight by punching his comrade squarely in the stomach and howling a vile epithet as he did so. They whooped it up raucously for at least a half a minute while Everhart grinned appreciatively from his suitcase.

  Then Meade asked a question in a low tone, hand on Wesley’s shoulder; the latter answered confidentially, to which Meade roared once more and began anew to pummel Wesley, who turned away, his thin frame shaking with soundless laughter. Presently, they made their way toward the office, exchanging news with the breathless rapidity of good friends who meet after a separation of years.

  “Shipping out?” raced Meade.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s see Harry about a double berth.”

  “Make it three, I’ve got a mate with me.”

  “Come on! The Westminster’s in port; she’s taking on ’most a full crew.

  “I know.”

  “You old son of a bitch!” cried Meade, unable to control his joy at the chance meeting. “I haven’t seen you since forty,” kicking Wesley in the pants, “when we got canned in Trinidad!”

  “For startin’ that riot!” remembered Wesley, kicking back playfully while Meade dodged aside. “You friggin’ communist, don’t start kickin’ me again ... I remember the time you got drunk aboard ship and went around kickin’ everybody till that big Bosun pinned your ears back!”

  They howled their way into the inner office where a sour faced Union man looked up blandly from his papers.

  “Act like seamen, will you?” he growled.

  “Hangover Harry,” informed Meade. “He uses up all the dues money to get drunk. Look at that face will you?”

  “All right Meade,” admonished Harry. “What are you looking for, I’m busy ...”

  They made arrangements to be on hand and near the office door that afternoon when the official ship calls from the S.S. Westminster would be posted, although Harry warned them those first come would be first served. “Two-thirty sharp,” he grunted. “If you’re not here, you don’t get the jobs.” [...]

  But a half hour later, Wesley rose and told Meade to meet him in the Union Hall at two-thirty; and with this, he and Everhart left the bar and turned their steps toward Atlantic Avenue.

  “Now for your seaman’s papers,” he said to Bill.

  Atlantic Avenue was almost impossible to cross, so heavy with the rush of traffic, but once they had regained the other side and stood near a pier, Billy’s breast pounded as he saw, docked not a hundred feet away, a great gray freighter, its slanting hull striped with rust, a thin stream of water arching from the scuppers, and the mighty bow standing high above the roof of the wharf shed.

  “Is that it?” he cried.

  “No, she’s at Pier Six.”

  They walked toward the Maritime Commission, the air heavy with the rotting stench of stockpiles, oily waters, fish, and hemp. Dreary marine equipment stores faced the street, show windows cluttered with blue peacoats, dungarees, naval officers uniforms, small compasses, knives, oilers’ caps, seamen’s wallets, and all manner of paraphernalia for the men of the sea.

  The Maritime Commission occupied one floor of a large building that faced the harbor. While a pipe-smoking old man was busy preparing his papers, Everhart could see, beyond the nearby wharves and railroad yards, a bilious stretch of sea spanning toward the narrows, where two lighthouses stood like gate posts to a dim Atlantic. A seagull swerved past the window.

  An energetic little man fingerprinted him in the next room, cigarette in mouth almost suffocating him as he pressed Bill’s inky fingers on the papers and on a duplicate.

  “Now go down to the Post Office building,” panted the little man when he finished, “and get your passport certificate. Then you’ll be all set.”

  Wesley was leaning against the wall smoking when Bill left the fingerprinting room with papers all intact.

  “Passport certificate next I guess,” Bill told Wesley, nodding toward the room.

  “Right!”

  They went to the Post Office Building on Milk Street where Bill filled out an application for his passport and was handed a certificate for his first foreign voyage; Wesley, who had borrowed five dollars from Nick Meade, paid Bill’s fee.

  “Now I’m finished I hope?” laughed Bill when they were back in the street.

  “That’s all.”

  “Next thing is to get our berths on the Westminster. Am I correct?”

  “Right.”

  “Well,” smiled Bill, slapping his papers, “I’m in the merchant marine.”

  At two-thirty that afternoon, Wesley, Bill, Nick Meade and seven other seamen landed jobs on the S.S. Westminster. They walked down from the Union hall down to Pier Six in high spirits, passing through the torturous weave of Boston’s waterfront streets, crossing Atlantic Avenue and the Mystic river drawbridge, and finally coming to a halt along the Great Northern Avenue docks. Silently they gazed at the S.S. Westminster, looming on their left, her monstrous gray mass squatting broadly in the slip, very much, to Everhart’s eyes, like an old bath tub.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  [...]

  He lay back on the pillow and realized these were his first moments of solitary deliberation since making his rash decision to get away from the thoughtless futility of his past life. It has been a good life, he ruminated, a life possessing at least a minimum of service and security. But he wasn’t sorry he had made this decision; it would be a change, as he’d so often repeated to Wesley, a change regardless of everything. And the money was good in the merchant marine, the companies were not reluctant to reward the seamen for their labor and courage; money of that amount would certainly be welcomed at home, especially now with the old man’s need for medical care. It would be a relief to pay for his operation and perhaps soften his rancor against a household that had certainly done him little justice. In his absorption for his work and the insistent demands of a highly paced social life, Bill admitted to himself, as he had often done, he had not proved an attentive son; there were such distances between a father and his son, a whole generation of differences in temperament, tastes, views, habits; yet the old man, sitting in that old chair with his pipe, listening to an ancestral radio while the new one boomed its sleek, modern power from the living room, was he not fundamentally the very meaning and core of Bill Everhart, the creator of all that Bill Everhart had been given to work with? And what right, Bill now demanded angrily, had his sister and brother-in-law to neglect him so spiritually? What if he were a lamenting old man?

  Slowly, now, Everhart began to realize why life had seemed so senseless, so fraught with folly and lack of real purpose in New York, in the haste and oration of his teaching days—he had never paused to take hold of anything, let alone the lonely heart of an old father, not even the idealisms with which he had begun life as a seventeen-year-old spokesman for the working class movement on Columbus Circle Saturday afternoons. All these he had lost, by virtue of a sensitivity too fragile for everyday disillusionment ... his father’s complaints, the jeers of the Red baiters and the living, breathing social apathy that supported their jeers in phlegmatic silence. A few shocks from t
he erratic fuse box of life, and Everhart had thrown up his hands and turned to a life of academic isolation. Yet, in the realms of this academic isolation, wasn’t there sufficient indication that all things pass and turn to dust? What was that sonnet where Shakespeare spoke sonorously of time “rooting out the work of masonry?” Is a man to be timeless and patient, or is he to be a pawn of time? What did it avail a man to plant roots deep into a society by all means foolish and Protean?

  Yet, Bill now admitted with reluctance, even Wesley Martin had set himself a purpose, and this purpose was the idea of life—life at sea—a Thoreau before the mast. Conviction had led Wesley to the sea; confusion had led Everhart to the sea.

  A confused intellectual, Everhart, the oldest weed in society; beyond that, an intelligent modern minus the social conscience of that class. Further, a son without a conscience—a lover without a wife! A prophet without confidence, a teacher of men without wisdom, a sorry mess of a man thereat!

  Well, things would be different from now on ... a change of life might give him the proper perspective. Surely, it had not been folly to take a vacation from his bookish, beerish life, as another side of his nature might deny! What wrong was there in treating his own life, within the bounds of moral conscience, as he chose and as he freely wished? Youth was still his, the world might yet open its portals as it had done that night at Carnegie Hall in 1927 when he first heard the opening bars of Brahms’ first symphony! Yes! As it opened its doors for him so many times in his ’teens and closed them firmly, as though a stern and hostile master were its doorman, during his enraged twenties.

  Now he was thirty-two years old and it suddenly occurred to him that he had been a fool, yes, even though a lovable fool, the notorious “shortypants” with the erudite theories and the pasty pallor of a teacher of life ... and not a liver of life. Wasn’t it Thomas Wolfe who had struck a brief spark in him at twenty-six and filled him with new love for life until it slowly dawned on him that Tom Wolfe—as his colleagues agreed in delighted unison—was a hopeless romanticist? What of it? What if triumph were Wolfe’s only purpose? .... if life was essentially a struggle, then why not struggle toward triumph, why not, in that case, achieve triumph! Wolfe had failed to add to whom triumph was liege ... and that, problem though it was, could surely be solved, solved in the very spirit of his cry for triumph. Wolfe had sounded the old cry of a new world. Wars come, wars go! elated Bill to himself, this cry is an insurgence against the forces of evil, which creeps in the shape of submission to evil, this cry is a denial of the not-Good and a plea for the Good. Would he, then, William Everhart, plunge his whole being into a new world? Would he love? Would he labor? Would he, by God, fight? [...]

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  That afternoon, while Everhart sat sunning near the poop deck, reading Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” he was startled by the harsh ringing of a bell behind him. He looked up from the book and glanced around the horizon with fear. What was it?

  A droning, nasal voice spoke over the ship’s address system: “All hands to the boat deck. All hands to the boat deck.” The system whistled deafeningly.

  Bill grinned and looked around, fear surging in his breast. The other seamen, who had been lounging on the deck with him, now dashed off. The warm wind blew Bill’s pages shut; he rose to his feet with a frown and laid down the book on his folding chair.

  This calm, sunny afternoon at sea, flashing greens and golds, whipping bracing breezes across lazy decks, was this an afternoon for death? Was there a submarine prowling in these beautiful waters?

  Bill shrugged and ran down to his focastle for the lifebelt; running down the alleyway, he hastily strapped it on, and clambered up the first ladder. An ominous silence had fallen over the ship.

  “What the hell’s going on!” he muttered as he climbed topsides. “This is no time for subs! We’ve just got started!” His legs wobbled on the ladder rungs.

  On the top deck, groups of quiet seamen stood beside their lifeboats, a grotesque assemblage in lifebelts, dungarees, cook’s caps, aprons, oiler’s caps, bowcaps, khaki pants, and dozens of other motley combinations of dress. Bill hastened toward his own lifeboat and halted beside a group. No one spoke. The wind howled in the smoking funnel, flapped along the deck waving the clothing of the seamen, and rushed out over the stern along the bright green wake of the ship. The ocean sighed a soothing, sleepy hush, a sound that pervaded everywhere in suffusing enormity as the ship slithered on through, rocking gently forward.

  Bill adjusted his spectacles and waited.

  “Just a drill, I think,” offered a seaman.

  One of the Puerto Rican seamen in Bill’s group, who wore a flaring cook’s cap and a white apron beneath his lifebelt, began to conga across the deck while a comrade beat a conga rhythm on his thighs. They laughed.

  The bell rang again, the voice returned: “Drill dismissed. Drill dismissed.”

  The seamen broke from groups into a confused swarm waiting to file down the ladders. Bill took off his lifebelt and dragged it behind him as he sauntered forward. Now he had seen everything ... the ship, the sea ... mornings, noons, and nights of sea ... the crew, the destroyer ahead, a boat drill, everything.

  He felt suddenly bored. What would he do for the next three months?

  Bill went down to the engine room that night to talk with Nick Meade. He descended a steep night of iron steps and stopped in his tracks at the sight of the monster source of the Westminster’s power ... great pistons charged violently, pistons so huge one could hardly expect them to move with such frightening rapidity. The Westminster’s shaft turned enormously, leading its revolving body toward the stern through what seemed to Bill a giant cave for a giant rolling serpent.

  Bill stood transfixed before this monstrous power; he began to feel annoyed. What were ideas in the face of these brutal pistons, pounding up and down with a force compounded of nature and intriguing with nature against the gentle form of man?

  Bill descended further, feeling as though he were going down to the bottom of the sea itself. What chance could a man have down here if a torpedo should ram at the waterline, when the engine room deck was at a level thirty or forty feet below! Torpedo ... another brutal concoction of man, by George! He tried to imagine a torpedo slamming into the engine room against the hysterical blind power of the pistons, the deafening shock of the explosion, the hiss of escaping steam, the billows of water pouring in from a sea of endless water, himself lost in this holocaust and being pitched about like a leaf in a whirlpool! Death! ... he half expected it to happen that precise moment.

  A water tender stood checking a gauge.

  “Where’s the oiler Meade?” shouted Bill above the roar of the great engine. The water tender pointed forward. Bill walked until he came to a table where Nick sat brooding over a book in the light of a green-shaded lamp.

  Nick waved his hand; he had apparently long given up conversation in an engine room, for he pushed a book toward Bill. Bill propped himself up on the table and ran through the leaves.

  “Words, words, words,” he droned, but the din of the engine drowned out his words and Nick went on reading.

  The next day—another sundrowned day—the Westminster steamed North off the coast of Nova Scotia, about forty miles offshore, so that the crew could see the dim purple coastline just before dusk.

  A fantastic sunset began to develop ... long sashes of lavender drew themselves above the sun and reached thin shapes above distant Nova Scotia. Wesley strolled aft, digesting his supper, and was surprised to see a large congregation of seamen on the poop deck. He advanced curiously.

  A man stood before the winch facing them all and speaking with gestures; on the top of the winch, he had placed a Bible, and he now referred to it in a pause. Wesley recognized him as the ship’s baker.

  “And they were helped against them, and the Hagarites were delivered into their hand, and all that were with them,” the baker shouted. “For they cried to God in the battle and he was entreated of them
because they put their trust in him ...”

  Wesley glanced around at the assemblage. The seamen seemed reluctant to listen, but none of them made any motion to leave. Some watched the sunset, others the water, others gazed down—but all were listening. Everhart stood at the back listening curiously.

  “And so, brothers,” resumed the baker, who had obviously appointed himself the Westminster’s spiritual guide for the trip, “we must draw a lesson from the faith of the Reubenites in their war with the Hagarites and in our turn call to God’s aid in our danger. The Lord watched over them and he will watch over us if we pray to him and entreat his mercy in this dangerous ocean where the enemy waits to sink our ship ...”

  Wesley buttoned up his peacoat; it was decidedly chilly. Behind the baker’s form, the sunset pitched alternately over and below the deck rail, a florid spectacle in pink. The sea was deep blue.

  “Let us kneel and pray,” shouted the baker, picking up his Bible, his words drowned in a sudden gust of sea wind so that only those nearby heard him. They knelt with him. Slowly, the other seamen dropped to,their knees. Wesley stood in the midst of the bowed shapes.

  “Oh God,” prayed the baker in a tremulous wail, “Watch over and keep us in our journey, Oh Lord, see that we arrive safely and ...”

  Wesley shuffled off and heard no more. He went to the bow and faced the strong headwind blowing in from the North, its cold tang biting into his face and fluttering back his scarf like a pennant.

  North, in the wake of the destroyer, the sea stretched a seething field which grew darker as it merged with the lowering sky. The destroyer prowled.