Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [59]
“Jack! Jack!” Dicky is calling. “Get off the raft-the rope’s cut off–you’re floating away!”
I turn around and survey the damage–I take a quick run to the edge and look over at brown bottomless waters of the 90 degree dump and its receding from the last shoe hold fender at Dicky’s feet, a four-foot jump in just a second. .. I knew I could barely make it and so I wasn’t scared but simply jumped and landed on my feet on the dump and the raft wait out behind me to join humps of the main midstream, where it was seen pitching and diving like a gigantic lid–it could have been my Ship.
2
NEWS CAME TO US from subsidiary kids in the booming amazing morning like in a Tolstoy battle that the White Bridge was pronounced dangerous and nobody was crossing it, there were road blocks, and on the boulevard the River had found an ancient creek bed suitable to its new forward floodrush and used it to flow in a mad torrent across half of Pawtucketville and join its horror to Pine Brook deluges and a rush out back through already back-flooded Rosemont–further, news came of disasters in downtown Lowell, soon we couldn’t even get there, the canals were overflowed into, the mills were swimming, water was creeping in the business streets, pools were forming of whole redbrick railroad switch alleys behind the mills–all of it was just mad great news to us– The afternoon of the gray tragic flood-warning with my mother, I later returned with the gang to see the sandbag operations at Riverside Street where it dipped down lowest. Right there lived one of our grammar school teachers, Mrs. Wakefield, in a little white cottage covered with rose vines. They were piling sandbags across the street from her white fence. We stood at the sandbags, at the ripple up flood swell, and poked our fingers at them–we wanted the Flood to pierce thru and drown the world, the horrible adult routine world. G.J. and I made jokes about it–scuffled with each other yakking in the tragic emergency flashlights and oilcup flares as the river rose–after supper we saw that the sandbag wall was higher. We wanted a real flood–we wished the workmen would go away. But next morning we came and saw the great snake hump roar of the river’s strong left arm slamming through the sandbag place 20 feet high and pouring through the blind gawp windows of Mrs. Wakefield’s brown vine weedy cottage with its last rooftop slipping over in the whirlpool–behind her a street-ful of rushing water– G.J. and I looked at each other in astonishment and impossible glee: IT HAD BEEN DONE!
Doctor Sax stood high above the parapets of Lowell, laughing. “I am ready,” he cried, “I am ready.” He pulled his little rubber boat from his slouch hat and blew it up again and paddled away with his rubber oar and Dove in pocket through the dismal forest flood waters of the night —towards the Castle–his hollow laugh echoed across the desolation. A giant spider crawled from the flood water and rushed on sixteen legs rapidly to the Castle on Snake Hill-
also nameless little ones did
rush there.
3
PAUL BOLDIEU’S HOME that we used to climb rickety outdoor steps to–at the edge of the Cow Field near St. Rita’s church,—his dismal house where his mother made beans for his breakfast in the morning–where poor dim religious St. Mary Calendars hung in brown door behind the stove —Pauls bedroom, where he kept his records in red ink of all our baseball batting averages–crazy Kid Faro (because of his gold tooth and green tweed suit on Sunday afternoon at the Crown Theater with rats in the balcony and the time we threw boxes of ice cream