Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [73]
“Well,” says G.J. turning to Scotty, as Lousy ghostly comes up-flailing in the leafwild shade of Riverside with his funny sounds and little pebbles he is throwing, approaching us out of eternity, a riddlic being, headed the other side–elf—G.J. is saying “I wonder where Jacky is tonight.”
SCOTTY: Dunno, Gus. He may be over to Dicky Hampshire’s. Or down in the alley spottin.
GUS: Here comes Old Lousy–whenever I see old Lousy coming, I know I’ll go to heaven, he’s an angel Goddam Lousy-
Doctor Sax and I suddenly fly into the upper air like we were dodging some tremendous black force that would have knocked us far–instead we veer up, and over a great deal, so I don’t know where we are, and can’t see how far down, or up, or over, and what precipice and shelf it is. But it’s familiar: it’s not a baptismal font, but it’s in the shrouds and holy hands V-clasped,— Doctor Sax, elongated like a long scorpion, is flying across the moon like a demented cloud. Fiendish, teeth shining, I fly after him in a minor flare of ink– We come to the red-works of his shack, we’re standing in the middle of his house looking down at an open trap door.
“Into that innocent land go as you are now, naked, when you go into the destruction of world snakes. Leery-head may moan, go ahead and do your groan, Leda and the Swan may moan, go a lone groan, listen to your own self–it ain’t got nothin to do with what’s around you, it’s what you do inside at the controls of that locomotive crashing through life—”
“Doctor Sax!” I cried “I don’t understand what you’re saying! You’re mad! You’re mad and I’m mad!”
“Hee hee hee ha ya,” he gaggled gispled, “this is the Moan victory.”
“How mad can you get?” I thought. “This old hero of the shroud is a crazy old fool. What’d I let myself in for?”
We’re standing there staring at the red glow in the trap door; there’s a wooden ladder.
“Go down!” he says impatiently. I jump down that ladder fast, the rungs are hot; I land on a hard dirt floor like clay upon which there are several great straw rugs and scrapes all stretched and torn but keeping your feet from the cold clay–all bright with designs skimmed in and wove, but dancing in the red fire light. Doctor Sax had a forge, it was well nigh impossible to hear the clang of your own heart for the hearty meaty clang of that harp-fire, it was a sodden bum-down red bed of coals, and a blower, a batwing blower, fue, powders were made to undergo hardening and boiling down tests in these works. Doctor Sax was making the herb powder that was going to destroy the Snake.
“Anoint thee, son—” he hallooed in the mud cellar— “we’re going into Homeric battles of the morn–over the dew tops of every one of your favorite pines of Dracut Tigers slants the far red sun that’s just now rising from a bed of night-blue to a day of bluebells in the crime–and the shores of oceans will crash, in Southern Latitude climes, and the bark will plow thou hoary antique sea with a vast funebreal consonant splowsh of bow-foams —you’re in on no mean squabble the butcher’s devil.”
8
SUDDENLY I REALIZED his great black cat was there. It stood four feet tall from ground to spine, with big green eyes and vast slow swishing tail like eternity on a fly–the strangest cat. “Got him in the Andes,” was all the Sax ever told me, “got him in the Andes, on a chestnut tree.” Parakeets he also had, they said exceedingly strange things, “Zangfed, dezeede leeing, fling, flang”—and one that cried in proud Spanish learnt from old bushy brow pirate who farted in his rum, “Hoik kally-ang-goo–Quarent-ay-cinco, señor, quarent-ay-cinco, quarent-ay-cinco.” A vast perwigillar balloon exploded over my head, it was a blue balloon that had risen out of the blue powders in the Forge, and so suddenly everything was blue.
“The Blue