On the Road - Jack Kerouac [119]
“Where is she?”
“Well, that’s just it, I don’t know—he’s going to try to find her, the old man, but you know what he’ll really do.”
“‘So he went to Seattle?”
“And straight to messy jail.”
“Where was he?”
“Texas, Texas—so you see, man, my soul, the state of things, my position—you notice I get quieter.”
“Yes, that’s true.” Dean had grown quiet in New York. He wanted to talk. We were freezing to death in the cold rain. We made a date to meet at my aunt’s house before I left.
He came the following Sunday afternoon. I had a television set. We played one ballgame on the TV, another on the radio, and kept switching to a third and kept track of all that was happening every moment. “Remember, Sal, Hodges is on second in Brooklyn so while the relief pitcher is coming in for. the Phillies we’ll switch to Giants-Boston and at the same time notice there DiMaggio has three balls count and the.pitcher is fiddling with the resin bag, so we quickly find out what happened to Bobby Thomson when we left him thirty seconds ago with a man on third. Yes!”
Later in the afternoon we went out and played baseball with the kids in the sooty field by the Long Island railyard. We also played basketball so frantically the younger boys said, “Take it easy, you don’t have to kill yourself.” They bounced smoothly all around us and beat us with ease. Dean and I were sweating. At one point Dean fell flat on his face on the concrete court. We huffed and puffed to get the ball away from the boys; they turned and flipped it away. Others darted in,and smoothly shot over our heads. We jumped at the basket like maniacs, and the younger boys just reached up and grabbed the ball from our sweating hands and dribbled away. We were like hotrock blackbelly tenorman Mad of American back-alley go-music trying to play basketball against Stan Getz and Cool Charlie. They thought we were crazy. Dean and I went back home playing catch from each sidewalk of the street. We tried extra-special catches, diving over bushes and barely missing posts. When a car came by I ran alongside and flipped the ball to Dean just barely behind the vanishing bumper. He darted and caught it and rolled in the grass, and flipped it back for me to catch on the other side of a parked bread truck. I just made it with my meat hand and threw it back so Dean had to whirl and back up and fall on his back across the hedges. Back in the house Dean took his wallet, harrumphed, and handed my aunt the fifteen dollars he owed her from the time we got a speeding ticket in Washington. She was completely surprised and pleased. We had a big supper. “Well, Dean,” said my aunt, “I hope you’ll be able to take care of your new baby that’s coming and stay married this time.”
“Yes, yass, yes.”
“You can’t go all over the country having babies like that. Those poor little things’ll grow up helpless. You’ve got to offer them a chance to live.” He looked at his feet and nodded. In the raw red dusk we said good-by, on a bridge over a superhighway.
“I hope you’ll be in New York when I get back,” I told him. “All I hope, Dean, is someday we’ll be able to live on the same street with our families and get to be a couple of oldtimers together.”
“That’s right, man—you know that I pray for it completely mindful of the troubles we both had and the troubles coming, as your aunt knows and reminds me. I didn’t want the new baby, Inez insisted, and we had a fight. Did you know Marylou got married to a used-car dealer in Frisco and she’s having a baby?”
“Yes. We’re all getting in there now.” Ripples in the upside-down lake of the void, is what I should have said. The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down. He took out a snapshot of Camille in Frisco with the new baby girl. The shadow of a man crossed the child on the sunny pavement, two long trouser legs in the sadness. “Who’s that?”
“That’s only Ed Dunkel. He came back to Galatea, they’re gone to Denver now. They spent a day taking pictures.”
Ed Dunkel, his compassion unnoticed like the compassion of saints. Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and begin ningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.