Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [69]
Gliding together in the dark shadows of the night Doctor Sax and I knew this and everything about Lowell.
6
WE CROSS THE BACKYARD IN THE DARK SHADE of Mrs. Duffy’s cherry tree–in two months, when they run the Kentucky Derby, the cherry blossoms will be in bloom– She wanted to have it cut down, she said, because she didn’t want nobody to hide behind it in the dark. Lounging, hand in pocket, in the day time, as everybody laughed at her, I nodded and agreed she was silly to want that tree cut down. The Doctor flattened into its Shadow like a passing thing; I brought up the rear, shh.
We crossed on tiptoe to the fence and leapt cleanly into the yard of my old Phebe Avenue house– Another family lives there, man and eight kids, I look swiftly as I pass under green porch at haunteds in the brown gloom of rakes, old balls, old papers. Up, I look at my ancient bedroom window where once, within, in light, I had begun my gray and hoary Turf (1934) (Westrope the first Jockey) —the rattling doom glooms of other deaths we’ve died. Triumphant laughter snickered from the immense nasalities of Doctor Sax as he led striding low thru the grass and weeds of the yard–and we vaulted Marquand’s, tiptoed in gardens, came to the gloomy brown side of the Plouffe house and looked in at Gene Plouffe’s window. I saw the Shadow of Sax far ahead, I hurried to follow–he was looking for the wrong room, it turned out, he hurried swiftly to rectify mistakes.
“Ah!” I heard him say (as I fumbled and turned around in circles and he bumped into me coming around the other way and the force of his bump carried us in one shroud to the window). There we were, chins on the windowsill, looking in under a foot of no-shade at Gene Plouffe reading Shadow Magazine in bed.
Poor Gene Plouffe-looking at the dark window to make a speech to an enemy cowboy but realizes void, nobody there–Sax and I were well concealed by his Shroudy Cape. It hung in great black velvet folds in the cubular shadows of the high wall yard. Mr. Plouffe’s house had brown shingle-planks and strange tar alleys he made himself you’d think. He was asleep in his own part of the house that night– It was probably the one or two nights out of the week Gene slept there– A lot of Lowell families had several houses, several bedrooms, and wandered sullenly from one to another under great swishing trees of Eternity’s summer. Gene had the quilt up to his chin, only his wrists stuck out to hold the Star Western in his hand–on the cover you can see reddish brown riders shooting bluegray Colt .45’s in a milky snow background sky, with the words Street & Smith that always took your mind away from red-brown buttes of stark West and made you realize a redbrick building, somehow sooty, with big sign STREET & SMITH on it, in white, dirty white, near Street & Smith Street in the downtown section of Pittsburgh New York. Sax chuckled, poked me in the ribs. Gene was engrossedly eyeing a beautiful sentence about “Pete Vaquero Kid riding up a dry arroyo in the mesquite desolations of a flat table near Needle, the road to Needle angling off like a wriggly snake thru the brush humps of the desert below, suddenly ‘Crack-Ow’ a bullet pinged in the rock and Pete leveled with the dust in a flap of brushbeaten chaps and spurjingles, lay still as a lizard in the sun.”
“How eagerly the youth doth pursue his legends, with a hungry eye,” whispered Doctor Sax much amused. “Would now the Koranns of the grown up gulpitude make keen misery of that hitch. A hitch will disgust your mind in time. A hitch is called time in jail. You’ll come to rages you never dreamed.”
“Me?