On the Road - Jack Kerouac [80]
“I dig you, man!” yelled Dean. They dashed off. For a moment I was worried; but Dean only wanted to dig the streets of El Paso with the kid and get his kicks. Marylou and I waited in the car. She put her arms around me.
I said, “Dammit, Lou, wait till we get to Frisco.”
“I don’t care. Dean’s going to leave me anyway.”
“When are you going back to Denver?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care what I’m doing. Can I go back east with you?”
“We’ll have to get some money in Frisco.”
“I know where you can get a job in a lunchcart behind the counter, and I’ll be a waitress. I know a hotel where we can stay on credit. We’ll stick together. Gee, I’m sad.”
“What are you sad about, kid?”
“I’m sad about everything. Oh damn, I wish Dean wasn’t so crazy now.” Dean came twinkling back, giggling, and jumped in the car.
“What a crazy cat that was, whoo! Did I dig him! I used to know thousands of guys like that, they’re all the same, their minds work in uniform clockwork, oh, the infinite ramifications, no time, no time ...” And he shot up the car, hunched over the wheel, and roared out of El Paso. “We’ll just have to pick up hitchhikers. I’m positive we’ll find some. Hup! hup! here we go. Look out!” he yelled at a motorist, and swung around him, and dodged a truck and bounced over the city limits. Across the river were the jewel lights of Juárez and the sad dry land and the jewel stars of Chihuahua. Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the county and back, out of the corner of her eye—with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad. Dean was convinced Marylou was a whore; he confided in me that she was a pathological liar. But when she watched him like this it was love too; and when Dean noticed he always turned with his big false flirtatious smile, with the eyelashes fluttering and the teeth pearly white, while a moment ago he was only dreaming in his eternity. Then Marylou and I both laughed—and Dean gave no sign of discomfiture, just a goofy glad grin that said to us, Ain’t we gettin’ our kicks anyway? And that was it.
Outside El Paso, in the darkness, we saw a small huddled figure with thumb stuck out. It was our promised hitchhiker. We pulled up and backed to his side. “How much money you got, kid?” The kid had no money; he was about seventeen, pale, strange, with one undeveloped crippled hand and no suitcase. “Ain’t he sweet?” said Dean, turning to me with a serious awe. “Come on in, fella, we’ll take you out—” The kid saw his advantage. He said he had an aunt in Tulare, California, who owned a grocery store and as soon as we got there he’d have some money for us. Dean rolled on the floor laughing, it was so much like the kid in North Carolina. “Yes! Yes!” he yelled. “We’ve all got aunts; well, let’s go, let’s see the aunts and the uncles and the grocery stores all the way ALONG that road!!” And we had a new passenger, and a fine little guy he turned out to be, too. He didn’t say a word, he listened to us. After a minute of Dean’s talk he was probably convinced he had joined a car of madmen. He said he was hitchhiking from Alabama to Oregon, where his home was. We asked him what he was doing in Alabama.
“I went to visit my uncle; he said