Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [75]
“Will everything stay blue till we get to that Snake White?” I asked swiftly.
“No–even from inside the vacuum glass my potent powder will change the atmosphere several times this night as we jostle to our work.”
“Is the cat coming with us sir?”
“Yes–Pondu Pokie they called him in the Chilean mines —you’d never guess what his Indian name meant– It my boy meant ‘Great Cat Full of Waiting’– A beast like that is born to be great.”
He took the glass ball with its terrible innocent looking morphine-powder-like spoonful, and thrust it in his holy heart’s pocket.
He raised his face to the dark ceiling.
“—” His mouth was wide open for a great cry and he only awped with his neck muscles upstrained to the ceiling —in blueish glows of fire.
He ducked slightly, the cat stiffened, the room shook, a great cranging noise rang across the sky towards the Castle-
“That’s the Eagle’s Lord and Master coming to the fray.”
“What? Who?”—terrified, an air raid of horror everywhere.
“They say there’s a mighty force no one of us knows about and so the eagles and birds make a great to-do and noise and especially tonight when the Invisible Power of the Universe is supposed to be nigh–we don’t know any more than the Sun what the Snake will do–and can’t know what the Golden Being of Immortality can do, or will do, or what, or where– Huge batallions of loud snake-decorated birds it was you just heard above, rattling their sabers above the Lowell night, heading for the duel with the Crooges of the Castle—”
“Crooges?”
“No time to wait son I–figs and Caesar don’t mix–run to the fore with me–come and see the moo mouth maw of death–come get your ass through the western gate of Wrath, come ride the rocky road to orgone mystery. The eyes of those who have died are watching in the night-”
We’re flying in a sad slant whirl right over Centerfield Dracut Tigers, came up-chawing from the cannon of his mad activity and balled across the air talking.
“What eyes?” I cried, leaning my head on a pillow of air; it was dew, & cool.
“The eyes of eternity, son– Look!”
I looked and suddenly in the night it was all filled with floating eyes none of them as bright as stars but like gray plicks in the texture cloak of fields and nightskies–unmistakable, they drooped and dreared to see Doctor Sax and I pass in the wake of the clanging nightbirds ahead. The eyes without seeming to move followed us like flying saucer armies as we fanned out all in great raw wild flight over the fields, sandbank and still-brown foamed river to the Castle.
9
AND THEN IT BEGAN TO RAIN, Doctor Sax deposited himself sadly on a rock right down by the river at the part where Snake Hill lawns stretched down bushy and wild to the Rocky eternal Merrimac shore. “No, son,” said Sax, as the first drops pittered and I look all around at the suddenly dark night with its rainshrouds and listen for spooks from the Castle, “no, me boy, the rain comes to peter me out. Years of my life have piled a great woe-weariness in a one-time worry-house soul that stood on vibrating but solid pillars; no, now it’s doubt returns to flagle me in my old age, where once I’d conquered in youth–sun-lizard days– No this woe and rain makes me want to sit down on a rock and cry. O waves of the river, cry.” He sits down, be-shrouded– I see a little corner of his rubberboat sticking out of his cardinal black hat above its frightening cargo blackbody in drape. The river laps and ululates on rocks. Night creeps across its misty surface to a meet with dumpshores and factory pipes. All Lowell is bathed in blue light.
The usually blue windows of Boott Mills in the night are now piercing, heartbreaking with a blue that’s never been seen before–terrible how that blue shines like a lost star in the blue city lights of Lowell–yet even as I look, slowly the night turns red, at first a horrible red suede red with evil shitty river and then a regular deep profound night red that bathed everything in dim soft restful