On the Road - Jack Kerouac [33]
But Remi Boncœur and I were on duty alone many a night, and that’s when everything jumped. We made our first round of the evening in a leisurely way, Remi trying all the doors to see if they were locked and hoping to find one unlocked. He’d say, “For years I’ve an idea to develop a dog into a superthief who’d go into these guys’ rooms and take dollars out of their pockets. I’d train him to take nothing but green money; I’d make him smell it all day long. If there was any humanly possible way, I’d train him to take only twenties.” Remi was full of mad schemes; he talked about that dog for weeks. Only once he found an unlocked door. I didn’t like the idea, so I sauntered on down the hall. Remi stealthily opened it up. He came face to face with the barracks supervisor. Remi hated that man’s face. He asked me, “What’s the name of that Russian author you’re always talking about—the one who put the newspapers in his shoe and walked around in a stovepipe hat he found in a garbage pail?” This was an exaggeration of what I’d told Remi of Dostoevski. “Ah, that’s it—that’s it—Dostioffski. A man with a face like that supervisor can only have one name—it’s Dostioffski.” The only unlocked door he ever found belonged to Dostioffski. D. was asleep when he heard someone fiddling with his doorknob. He got up in his pajamas. He came to the door looking twice as ugly as usual. When Remi opened it he saw a haggard face suppurated with hatred and dull fury.
“What is the meaning of this?”
“I was only trying this door. I thought this was the—ah—mop room. I was looking for a mop.”
“What do you mean you were looking for a mop?”
“Well—ah.”
And I stepped up and said, “One of the men puked in the hall upstairs. We have to mop it up.”
“This is not the mop room. This is my room. Another incident like this and I’ll have you fellows investigated and thrown out! Do you understand me clearly?”
“A fellow puked upstairs,” I said again.
“The mop room is down the hall. Down there.” And he pointed, and waited for us to go and get a mop, which we did, and foolishly carried it upstairs.
I said, “Goddammit, Remi, you’re always getting us into trouble. Why don’t you lay off? Why do you have to steal all the time?”
“The world owes me a few things, that’s all. You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune. You go on talking like that and I’m going to start calling you Dostioffski.”
Remi was just like a little boy. Somewhere in his past, in his lonely schooldays in France, they’d taken everything from him; his stepparents just stuck him in schools and left him there; he was browbeaten and thrown out of one school after another; he walked the French roads at night devising curses out of his innocent stock of words. He was out to get back everything he’d lost; there was no end to his loss; this thing would drag on forever.
The barracks cafeteria was our meat. We looked around to make sure nobody was watchihg, and especially to see if any of our cop friends were lurking about to check on us; then I squatted down, and Remi put a foot on each shoulder and up he went. He opened the window, which was never locked since he saw to it in the evenings, scrambled through, and came down on the flour table. I was a little more agile and just jumped and crawled in. Then we went to the soda fountain. Here, realizing a dream of mine from infancy, I took the cover off the chocolate ice cream and stuck my hand in wrist-deep and hauled me up a skewer of ice cream and licked at it. Then we got ice-cream boxes and stuffed them, poured chocolate syrup over and sometimes strawberries too, then walked around