Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [68]
The music is coming out of the Nadeau radio raspy and distant– Doctor Sax and I glide thru the backyard shadows silently– At the next jumping, he puts a shroudal hand on my shoulder and says “No need to worry–mix your mud with elephant flowers, adamantine boy–the hook and curl in the crook of eternity is a living thing.” All his statements knock me on the head Come In even though I don’t understand them. I know that Doctor Sax is speaking to the bottom of my boy problems and they could all be solved if I could fathom his speech.
“Grawfaced travelers have been this way, came waiting grayly and meekly at doors to the committee room and consulting booth at the Castle–they were all turned away.”
“When are you gonna go there?”
“Now–tonight,” said Doctor Sax—“you might as well be with me tonight as with anyone anywhere–for your own safety—” A fiery eye suddenly contemplated us in the dark, on the rail of the fence. Doctor Sax brushed it aside with his shady whip-cane-shroud. I couldn’t see when the Eye had vanished–for a moment I thought I saw it flying thru the sky, and the next thing I knew I saw a flashing speck in my eye and it closed-up again.
Far ahead of me, low along the fence, Doctor Sax glided and led the way.
We come to the Hampshire’s backyard, I can see the light in Dicky’s room where he’s drawing cartoons that he’ll be showing me Sunday at the house when my mother makes caramel pudding– I know Dicky will never see Sax or me with his weak eyes. “Punk,” I say, cursing up at his house–we’d had a fight after the raft episode–we’d make up in three days meeting gloomy and unwilling eyes on the irrevocable path in the park, and exchange Shadows.
The Hampshire barn was dark and huge–Sax was interested in it, glided to the door edge, we looked in at the groomus ceiling and suddenly a bat started from its revery and flapped away, dropping little red fire balls that Sax blew away with his breath, laughing like a young girl.
“Our good friend Condu,” he said in a burbling aristocratic voice, as though pleased with the recollection of his chi-chi castle friends and enemies.
In back of the Delorge house, where the old man had died and the night G.J. and I were wrestling along in the rain suddenly six men in black carrying a shrouded black box came out and deposited it, with Mr. Delorge in it who’d screamed at us one sunset of puddles over some ball, into the hearse, and with black feet stood in the rain–as Doctor Sax and I hurried under the vines, lattices and darkeries of the yards a car passed on Phebe casting brown thirties headlights towards my house and Sarah Avenue, crunching over the sand road with tufts of sandbank pines leaning within the up-lights dismal and strange in the Saturday Night– Sax coughs, spits, glides on; I see that he’s right in the world, things happen around him, he responds only to his own life in the world–just like an auto mechanic. I’m gliding behind him slanted and leering, at one point, tripping over a rock garden, slanted and leering like vaudeville comedians shooting drunk into the wings from a matinee performance for forty-seven bums half sleeping in seats— “Moo-hoo-hoo-ha-ha-ha” came the long, hollow, sepulchral sound of triumphant Doctor Sax’s profound and hidden laughter. I made my own cackle-laugh, with hands cupped, in the excruciatingly exciting dark shadows of Saturday Night–women were ironing the snow ghost wash in shroudy kitchens. The children screamed a race on the cobblestones of Gershom. A raucous woman who just heard a dirty joke lofts a shrieking big laugh in the humming neighborhood night, a door slams in a shed. Tall weepy Bert Desjardins’ brother is coming up Phebe from work, his footsteps are crunching in the pebbles, he spits, the starlight shines in his spit–they think he’s been to work but he’s been to skew his girl in a dirty barn in the Dracut Woods, they stood against the raw drippy wood of the wall, near some piles of kidshit, and kicked some rocks aside, and he lifted her dress over the goose pimples of her thighs, and they leered together