The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [30]
“You can carry that ax, Morley, but I don’t think we’ll need it, but canned goods is just a lot of water you have to lug on your back, don’t you realize we got all the water we want waitin for us up there?”
“Well I just thought a can of this Chinese chop suey would be kinda tasty.”
“I’ve got enough food for all of us. Let’s go.”
Morley spent a long time talking and fishing around and getting together his unwieldy packboard and finally we said goodbye to his friends and got into Morley’s little English car and started off, about ten o’clock, toward Tracy and up to Bridgeport from where we would drive another eight miles to the foot of the trail at the lake.
I sat in the back seat and they talked up front. Morley was an actual madman who would come and get me (later) carrying a quart of eggnog expecting me to drink that, but I’d make him drive me to a liquor store, and the whole idea was to go out and see some girl and he’d have me come along to act as pacifier of some kind: we came to her door, she opened it, when she saw who it was she slammed the door and we drove back to the cottage. “Well what was this?” “Well it’s a long story,” Morley would say vaguely, I never quite understood what he was up to. Also, seeing Alvah had no spring bed in the cottage, one day he appeared like a ghost in a doorway as we were innocently getting up and brewing coffee and presented us with a huge double-bed spring that, after he left, we struggled to hide in the barn. And he’d bring odd assorted boards and whatnot, and impossible bookshelves, all kinds of things, and years later I had further Three Stooges adventures with him going out to his house in Contra Costa (which he owned and rented) and spending impossible-to-believe afternoons when he paid me two dollars an hour for hauling out bucket after bucket of mudslime which he himself was doling out of a flooded cellar by hand, black and mudcovered as Tartarilouak the King of the Mudslimes of Paratioalaouakak Span, with a secret grin of elfish delight on his face; and later, returning through some little town and wanting ice-cream cones, we walked down Main Street (had hiked on the highway with buckets and rakes) with ice-cream cones in our hands knocking into people on the little sidewalks like a couple of oldtime Hollywood silent film comedians, whitewash and all. An extremely strange person anyway, in any case, any old way you looked at, and drove the car now out toward Tracy on the busy fourlaner highway and did most of the talking, at everything Japhy said he had twelve to say, and it went like this: Japhy would say something like “By God I feel real studious lately, I think I’ll read some ornithology next week.” Morley would say, “Who doesn’t feel studious when he doesn’t have a girl with a Riviera suntan?”
Every time he said something he would turn and look at Japhy and deliver these rather brilliant inanities with a complete deadpan; I couldn’t understand what kind of strange secret scholarly linguistic clown he really was under these California skies. Or Japhy would mention sleeping bags, and Morley would ramble in with “I’m going to be the possessor of a pale blue French sleeping bag, light weight, goose down, good buy I think, find ’em in Vancouver—good for Daisy Mae. Completely wrong type for Canada. Everyone wants to know if her grandfather was an explorer who met an Eskimo. I’m from the North Pole myself.”
“What’s he talking about?” I’d ask from the back seat, and Japhy: “He’s just an interesting tape recorder.”
I’d told the boys I had a touch of thrombophlebitis, blood clots in the