On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [133]
thing Neal couldn’t take his eyes off her. “Wow. Wait till she grows up! Can you see her cuttin’ down Canal street with a hincty eye. Ah! Oh!” He hissed through his teeth. We spent a mad day in downtown New Orleans walking around with the Hinkles. Neal was out of his mind that day. When he saw the T&NO freight trains in the yard he wanted to show me everything at once. “You’ll be a brakeman ’fore I’m thru with you!” He and I and Al Hinkle ran across the tracks and hopped a freight; Louanne and Helen were waiting in the car. We rode the freight a halfmile into the piers waving at brakemen and firemen. They showed me the proper way to jump off a moving boxcar: the backfoot first to leave the other foot for jumping off the ground when you hit. They showed me the refrigerator boxes, “reefers,” good for a ride on any winter night. “Remember what I told you about New Mexico to LA?” cried Neal. “This was the way I hung on.” We got back to the girls later and of course they were mad. Al and Helen had decided to get a room in New Orleans and stay there and work. This was okay with Bill who was getting sick and tired of the whole mob. The invitation, originally, was for me to come alone. In the front room where Neal and Louanne slept there was jam and coffee stains and empty benny tubes all over the floor; what’s more it was Bill’s workroom and he couldn’t get on with his shelves. Poor Joan was driven to distraction by the continual jumping and runningaround on the part of Neal. We were waiting for my next GI check to come through, my mother was forwarding it. Then we were off, the three of us, Neal, Louanne, me. When the check came I realized I hated to leave Bull’s wonderful house so suddenly but Neal was all energies and ready to go. In a sad red dusk we were finally seated in the car and Joan, Julie, Willie, Bill, Al and Helen stood around in the high grass smiling. It was goodbye. At the last moment Neal and Bill had a misunderstanding over money: Neal had wanted to borrow: Bill said it was out of the question. The feeling reached back to Texas days. Con-man Neal was antagonizing people away from him by degrees. He giggled maniacally and didn’t care; he rubbed his balls, stuck his finger in Louanne’s dress, slurped up her knee, frothed at the mouth and said “Darling you know and I know that everything is straight between us at last beyond the furthest abstract definition in metaphysical terms or any terms you want to specify or sweetly impose or harken back”---and so on, and zoom went the car and we were off again for California. What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?---it’s the too-huge world vaulting us in, and it’s goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. We had all kinds of trouble getting to Frisco, and once there I got stuck and had to “stagger back East” as Allen predicted, but who cares and I didn’t. We wheeled through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back towards the muddy-splashed crabb’d old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two-lane hiway to Baton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, cross’t the Mississippi at a place called Port Allen and tore across the state of Louisiana in a matter of three hours. Port Allen---Poor Allen---where the river’s all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we swung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a bridge and crossed eternity again. What is the Mississippi River?---a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, down along, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans and Point of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice and the Night’s Great Gulf, and out. So the stars shine warm in the Gulf of Mexico at night. From the soft and thunderous Carib