On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [200]
no traffic laws. We parked the car in the hospital driveway and I went with Frank to see an interne while Neal stayed in the car and changed. The hall of the hospital was full of poor Mexican women, some of them pregnant, some of them sick or bringing their little sick kiddies. It was sad. I thought of poor Bea Franco and what she was doing now. Frank had to wait an entire hour till an interne came along and looked at his swollen arm. There was a name for the type infection he had but none of us bothered to pronounce it. They gave him a shot of penicillin. Meanwhile Neal and I went out to dig the streets of Mexican San Antonio. It was fragrant and soft---the softest air I’d ever known---and dark, and mysterious, and buzzing. Sudden figures of girls in white bandanas appeared in the dark. Neal crept along and said not a word. “Oh this is too wonderful to do anything!” he whispered. “Let’s just creep along and see everything. Look! look! a crazy San Antonio pool shack.” We rushed in. A dozen boys were shooting pool at three tables, all Mexicans. Neal and I bought cokes and shoved nickels in the jukebox and played Wynonie Blues Harris and Lionel Hampton and Lucky Millinder and jumped. Meanwhile Neal warned me to watch. “Dig now, out of the corner of your eye and as we listen and as we also smell the soft air as you saydig the kid, the crippled kid shooting pool at table No. 1, the butt of the joint’s jokes, y’see, he’s been the butt all his life. The other fellows are merciless but they love him.” The crippled kid was some kind of malformed midget with a great big beautiful face much too large in which enormous brown eyes moistly gleamed. “Don’t you see, Jack? A sanAntonio Mex Jim Holmes, the same story the world over. See they hit him on the ass with a cue? Ha! ha! ha! hear them laugh. You see, he wants to win the game, he’s bet four bits. Watch! Watch!” We watched as the angelic young midget aimed for a bankshot. He missed. The other fellows roared. “Ah man” said Neal “and now watch.” They had the little boy by the scruff of the neck and were mauling him around, playful. He squealed. He stalked out in the night but not without a backward bashful sweet glance. “Ah man, I’d love to know that gone little cat and what he thinks and what kind of girls he has---Oh man, I’m high on this air!” We wandered out and negotiated several dark mysterious blocks. Innumerable houses hid behind verdant almost jungle-like yards; we saw glimpses of girls in front rooms, girls on porches, girls in the bushes with boys. “I never knew this mad San Antonio! Think what Mexico’ll be like! Lessgo! lessgo!” We rushed back to the hospital. Frank was ready and said he felt much better. We put our arms around him and told him everything we’d done. And now we were ready for the last 150 miles to the magic border. We leaped into the car and off. I was so exhausted by now I slept all the way to Laredo and didn’t wake up till they were parking the car in front of a lunchroom at two o’clock in the morning. “Ah” sighed Neal “the end of Texas, the end of America, we don’t know no more.” It was tremendously hot: we were all sweating buckets. There was no night dew, not a breath of air, nothing, except billions of moths smashing at bulbs everywhere and the low rank smell of a hot river in the night nearby---the Rio Grande, that begins in cool Rocky Mountain dales and ends up fashioning world-valleys to mingle its heats with the Mississippi muds in the great Gulf. Laredo was a sinister town that morning. All kinds of cabdrivers and border rats wandered around looking for opportunities. There weren’t many, it was too late. It was the bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villains sink, where disoriented people have to go to be near a specific elsewhere they can slip in unnoticed. Contraband brooded in the heavy syrup air. Cops were redfaced and sullen and sweaty, no swagger. Waitresses were dirty and disgusted. Just beyond you could feel the enormous presence of the whole continent of Mexico and almost smell the billion tortillas frying and smoking in the