On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [87]
the window. Henri had to unpack everything and put it back. But he was racking his brain. Later in the night, when he went off duty and I was all alone on the base, a strange thing happened. I was taking a walk along the old canyon trail just to chance meeting a deer---Henri had seen deers around, the Marin country being wild even in 1947---when I heard a frightening noise in the dark. It was a huffing and a puffing. I thought it was a rhinoceros coming for me in the dark. I grabbed my gun, I grabbed my balls. A tall figure appeared in the canyon gloom; it had an enormous head. Suddenly I realized it was Henri with a huge box of groceries on his shoulder. He was moaning and groaning from the enormous weight of it. He’d found the key to the cafeteria somewhere and just got his groceries out the front door. I said “Henri I thought you were home. What the hell are you doing?” And he said “You know what President Truman said, we must cut down on the cost of living.” And I heard him huff and puff into the darkness. I’ve already described that awful trail back to our shack up hill and dale; he hid the groceries in the tall grass and came back to me. “Jack I just can’t make it alone. I’m going to divide it into two boxes and you’re going to help me.” “But I’m on duty.” “I’ll watch the place while you’re gone. Things are getting rough all around. We’ve just got to make it the best way we can and that’s all there is to it.” He wiped himself. “Whoo! I’ve told you time and time again Jack that we’re buddies, and we’re in this thing together. There’s just no two ways about it. The Dostioffskis, the Chief Davies, the Texes, the Dianes, all the evil skulls of this world are out for our skin. It’s up to us to see that nobody pulls any schemes on us. They’ve got a lot more up their sleeves besides a dirty arm. Remember that. You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune.” “Whatever are we going to do about shipping out?” I finally asked. We’d been doing these things for ten weeks. I was making fifty-five dollars a week and sending my mother an average of forty. I’d spent only one evening in San Francisco in all that time. My life was wrapped in the shack, in Henri’s battles with Diane, and in the middle of the night at the barracks. Henri was gone off in the dark to get another box. I struggled with him on that old Zorro road. We piled up the groceries a mile high on Diane’s kitchen table. She woke up and rubbed her eyes. “You know what President Truman said? He said for us to cut down on the cost of living.” She was delighted. I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural born thief. I was getting the bug myself. I even began to try to see if doors were locked. The other cops were getting suspicious of us; they saw it in our eyes; they understood with unfailing instinct what was on our minds. Years of experience had taught them the likes of Henri and Me. In the daytime Henri and I went out with the gun and tried to shoot quail in the hills. Henri sneaked up to within three feet of the clucking birds and let go a blast of the .32. He missed. His tremendous laugh roared over the California woods and over America. “The time has come for you and me to go and see the Banana King.” It was Saturday; we got all spruced up and went down to the bus station at the crossroads. Here we spent an hour playing the pinball machine. We knew how to tip on it and left a hundred games there for anybody who wanted some fun. Henri’s huge laugh resounded everywhere we went. He took me to see the Banana King. “You must write a story about the Banana King” he warned me. “Don’t pull any tricks on the old maestro and write about something else. The Banana King is your meat. There stands the Banana King.” The Banana King was an old man selling bananas on the corner. I was completely bored. But Henri kept punching me in the ribs and even dragging me along by the collar. “When you write about the Banana King you write about the human interest things of life.” We strolled through the streets of San Francisco. Henri had no use for Chinatown. He took