Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [58]
where the flood just lapped up and fendered away in a sunkjunk beach of 90 degrees– We stood on this edge of this watery precipice watching with eagle eye of Indians in the plateau morning for a chickencoop roof to bump into our hands. It came pirouetting in bumps along the fendered shore–we hooked it at our mooring with a small piece of rope on one end (tied to a car bumper stuck in the ground for ten years) and the other end more or less held by a board bridge with rocks on it, temporarily–chicken feathers we found as we romped up and down the tin roof. It was a solid raft, wood on the bottom, tin on deck–it measured fifty feet by thirty, immense– It had slipped over the swollen Falls without damage. But we never bargained for any long trip on the Merrimac Sea–we thought we had it securely tied, enough anyway, and at some point the rope broke, Dicky saw it and jumped on the dump–but I was strolling along the outer, or flood, edge of the chickenroof and didn’t hear (from eternity roar of river) what Dicky wanted to say—”Hey Jack–the rope broke–come on back.” In fact I was dreamily standing surveying that tremendous and unforgettable monstrous rush of humpbacked central waters Flooding at 60 miles an hour out of the rock masses beneath the Moody Bridge where the white horses were now drowned in brown and seemed to gather at the mouth of the rocks in a surging vibration of water to form this Middle lunge that seemed to tear the flood towards Lawrence as you watched–to Lawrence and the sea–and the Roar of that hump, it had the scaly ululating back of a sea monster, of a Snake, it was an unforgettable flow of evil and of wrath and of Satan barging thru my home town and rounding the curve of the Rosemont Basin and Centralville Snake Hill by that blue puff figure castle on the meadow landlump in the rawmous clouds beyond– Also I was watching to see if the people in the Little Canada rock-cliff tenements that jutted over the river were evacuating their solidly founded homes at the hungry lip of the River’s brown torrential roar– Back of Laurier park the dump and the dumpshacks of Little Canada Aiken Street and old pest heur with his poolhall shack and come-alleys of dirtybook hookey toss-a-coin days that came later to make men of me and Dicky and Vinny and G.J. and Scotty and Lousy and Billy Artaud and Iddiboy and Skunk– In fact I might have been dreaming of Skunk, as Dicky yelled to me, the time Skunk was supposed to fight Dicky in the park-trail and somebody intervened in the long red dusk of ancient heroic events and now Skunk was a baseball star on our team but also his house in Rosemont was probably floating away– all of it was drowned … the dump, half the Laurier ballpark, tragic gangs of American Low-ellians were gathered on the opposite shore watching–in the wild sun-excited day I watched it all from my foaming deck–higher than my head the deluge roared 200 feet away– The sun was one vast white mass of radiance suspended in the aurobus of heaven like an auriola, an arcade shaft penetrated it all, there were slants of heaven and bedazzling impossible brilliances illuminating all furyfied the tremendous spectacles of flood– High up there in the white of the blue I saw it, the silly dove, a pippione, an Italian love bird, returning from the Himalayas the other side of the world-roof with an herb wrap’t round its leg, in a tiny leaf, the Monks of the Rooftop Monastery have sent Tibetan secrets to the King of Anti Evil, Doctor Sax, Enemy of the Snake, Shade of Dark, Phantom Listener at My Window, Watcher With Green Face of Little Jewish Boys in Paterson Night Time when phobus claggett me gonigle bedoigne breaks his arse shroud on a giant pitrock black Passaic weyic manic madness in the smoony snow night of dull balls– A young and silly dove is yakking in the blue, circling the brown and slushy river with yaks of pipsqueak joy, demoniac manic bird of little paradise, come snowing from Ebon hills to bring our message herb–a pip-pione, weary with travel–now all eyes comes circling upon the flood, then veers in blinding day to