On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [196]
large almond eyes and a tense mad neck. “Frank” he simply said “don’t go. Don’t make your old father cry. Don’t leave me alone again.” Frank had explained to me that his father was going mad in recent years. It broke my heart to see all this. “Neal” said the old man addressing me “don’t take my Frank away from me. I used to take him to the park when he was a little boy and explain the swans to him. Then his little brother drowned in the same pond. I don’t want you to take my boy away.” “Father” said Frank “we’re leaving now, goodbye.” He struggled with his grips. His father took him by the arm. “Frank, Frank, Frank, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.” We fled with our heads bowed and the old man still stood in the doorway of his Denver side-street cottage with the beads hanging in the doors and the overstuffed furniture in the parlor. He was as white as a sheet. He was still calling Frank. There was something extremely paralyzed about all his movements and for this reason he did nothing about leaving the doorway but just stood in it muttering the name “Frank” and “don’t go” and looking after us anxiously as we rounded the corner. “God Jeff, I don’t know what to say.” “Never mind!” he moaned. “He’s always been like that. I wish you hadn’t seen him. My mother’s leaving him as soon as she gets straightened out.” “That poor old man’ll go mad if she leaves him.” “She’s too young for him anyway” said Frank. We met his mother at the bank where she was surreptitiously drawing money for him. She was a lovely white-haired woman still very young in appearance. She and her son stood on the marble floor of the bank whispering. Frank was wearing a levi outfit jacket and all and looked like a man going to Mexico sure enough. This was his tender existence in Denver and he was going off with the flaming tyro Neal. Neal came popping around the corner and met us just on time. Mrs. Jeffries insisted on buying us all a cup of coffee. “Take care of my Frank” she said “no telling what things might happen in that country.” “We’ll all watch over each other” I said. Frank and his mother strolled on ahead and I walked in back with crazy Neal: he was telling me about the inscriptions carved on shithouse walls in the east and in the west. “They’re entirely different, in the East they make cracks and corny jokes of all kinds; in the West they just write their names, Red O’Hara, Bluffton Montana, came by here, date, the reason being the enormous loneliness that differs just a shade and cunthair as you move across the Mississippi.” Well there was a lonely guy in front of us, for Jeffries’ mother was a lovely mother and she hated to see her son go but knew he had to go. I saw he was fleeing his father. Here were the three of us---Neal looking for his father, mine dead, Frank fleeing his and going off into the night together. He kissed his mother in the rushing crowds of 17th and she got in a cab and waved at us. Goodbye, goodbye. We got into our old Ford heap and went back to Bev’s. Here we spent a planned hour just sitting and talking on the porch with Beverly and Ed under the immense beezing trees of drowsy denver afternoon. And Brierly came to say goodbye. He rolled around the corner in his Olds and we heard his “Merry Christmas” across the heat. He came bustling to us on little businessman feet. “Well well well, ready to go and not a care. How do you feel about this Ed, do you want to go with the boys?” Ed White flipped his hand in the air and just smiled. Beverly was all game to go. She had been hinting it for days. “I wouldn’t be in the way” she said. Frank and she had been boyhood-girlhood pals: he used to pull her pigtails and roll hoops in Denver alleys with her brother Bob; later they roared in high schools, the golden high schools of Denver Neal had never made. “Well this is a strange trio indeed” said Brierly “I would never have foreseen it a few years back. Neal, what do you propose to do with these two fellows, do you think you’ll drive them to the So. Pole?” “Ah ha, ah ha, yes.” Neal looked away. Brierly looked away. All six of us just sat in