On the Road - Jack Kerouac [12]
Finally there were Mississippi Gene and his charge. Mississippi Gene was a little dark guy who rode freight trains around the country, a thirty-year-old hobo but with a youthful look so you couldn’t tell exactly what age he was. And he sat on the boards crosslegged, looking out over the fields without saying anything for hundreds of miles and finally at one point he turned to me and said, “Where you headed?”
I said Denver.
“I got a sister there but I ain’t seed her for several couple years.” His language was melodious and slow. He was patient. His charge was a sixteen-year-old tall blond kid, also in hobo rags; that is to say, they wore old clothes that had been turned black by the soot of railroads and the dirt of boxcars and sleeping on the ground. The blond kid was also quiet and he seemed to be running away from something, and it figured to be the law the way he looked straight ahead and wet his lips in worried thought. Montana Slim spoke to them occasionally with a sardonic and insinuating smile. They paid no attention to him. Slim was all insinuation. I was afraid of his long goofy grin that he opened up straight in your face and held there half-moronically.
“You got any money?” he said to me.
“Hell no, maybe enough for a pint of whisky till I get to Denver. What about you?”
“I know where I can get some.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. You can always folly a man down an alley, can’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess you can.”
“I ain’t beyond doing it when I really need some dough. Headed up to Montana to see my father. I’ll have to get off this rig at Cheyenne and move up some other way. These crazy boys are going to Los Angeles.”
“Straight?”
“All the way—if you want to go to LA you got a ride.”
I mulled this over; the thought of zooming all night across Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Utah desert in the morning, and then most likely the Nevada desert in the afternoon, and actually arriving in Los Angeles within a foreseeable space of time almost made me change my plans. But I had to go to Denver. I’d have to get off at Cheyenne too, and hitch south ninety miles to Denver.
I was glad when the two Minnesota farmboys who owned the truck decided to stop in North Platte and eat; I wanted to. have a look at them. They came out of the cab and smiled at all of us. “Pisscall!” said one. “Time to eat!” said the other. But they were the only ones in the party who had money to buy food. We all shambled after them to a restaurant run by a bunch of women, and sat around over hamburgers and coffee while they wrapped away enormous meals just as if they were back in their mother’s kitchen. They were brothers; they were transporting farm machinery from Los Angeles to Minnesota and making good money at it. So on their trip to the Coast empty they picked up everybody on the road. They’d done this about five times now; they were having a hell of a time. They liked everything. They never stopped smiling. I tried to talk to them—a kind of dumb attempt on my part to befriend the captains of our ship—and the only responses I got were two sunny smiles and large white cornfed teeth.
Everybody had joined them in the restaurant except the two hobo kids, Gene and his boy. When we all got back they were still sitting in the truck, forlorn and disconsolate. Now the darkness was falling. The drivers had a smoke; I jumped at the chance to go buy a bottle of whisky to keep warm in the rushing cold air of night. They smiled when I told them. “Go ahead, hurry up.”
“You can have a couple shots!” I reassured them.
“Oh no, we never drink, go ahead.”
Montana Slim and the two high-school boys wandered the streets of North Platte with me till I found a whisky store. They chipped in some, and Slim some, and I bought a fifth. Tall, sullen men watched us go by from false-front buildings; the main street was lined with square box-houses. There were immense vistas of the plains beyond every sad street. I felt something different in the air in North Platte, I didn’t know what it was. In five minutes I did. We got back on the truck and roared off. It got dark quickly. We all had a shot, and suddenly I looked, and the verdant farm-fields of the Platte began to disappear and in their stead, so far you couldn