The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [31]
“You’re crazy, Morley.”
“I dunno, maybe I am, but if I am I’ll leave a lovely will anyway.” Then out of nowhere he would say “Well I’m very pleased to go climbing with two poets, I’m going to write a book myself, it’ll be about Ragusa, a late medieval maritime city state republic which solved the class problem, offered the secretaryship to Machiavelli and for a generation had its language used as the diplomatic one for the Levant. This was because of pull with the Turks, of course.”
“Of course,” we’d say.
So he’d ask himself the question out loud: “Can you secure Christmas with an approximation only eighteen million seconds left of the original old red chimney?”
“Sure,” says Japhy laughing.
“Sure,” says Morley wheeling the car around increasing curves, “they’re boarding reindeer Greyhound specials for a pre-season heart-to-heart Happiness Conference deep in Sierra wilderness ten thousand five hundred and sixty yards from a primitive motel. It’s newer than analysis and deceptively simple. If you lost the roundtrip ticket you can become a gnome, the outfits are cute and there’s a rumor that Actors Equity conventions sop up the overflow bounced from the Legion. Either way, of course, Smith” (turning to me in the back) “and in finding your way back to the emotional wilderness you’re bound to get a present from…someone. Will some maple syrup help you feel better?”
“Sure, Henry.”
And that was Morley. Meanwhile the car began climbing into the foothills somewhere and we came to sundry sullen towns where we stopped for gas and nothing but bluejeaned Elvis Presleys in the road, waiting to beat somebody up, but down beyond them the roar of fresh creeks and the feel of the high mountains not far away. A pure sweet night, and finally we got out on a real narrow tar country road and headed up toward the mountains for sure. Tall pine trees began to appear at the side of the road and occasional rock cliffs. The air felt nippy and grand. This also happened to be the opening eve of the hunting season and in a bar where we stopped for a drink there were many hunters in red caps and wool shirts looking silly getting loaded, with all their guns and shells in their cars and eagerly asking us if we’d seen any deer or not. We had, certainly, seen a deer, just before we came to the bar. Morley had been driving and talking, saying, “Well Ryder maybe you’ll be Alfred Lord Tennyson of our little tennis party here on the Coast, they’ll call you the New Bohemian and compare you to the Knights of the Round Table minus Amadis the Great and the extraordinary splendors of the little Moorish kingdom that was sold round to Ethiopia for seventeen thousand camels and sixteen hundred foot soldiers when Caesar was sucking on his mammy’s teat,” and suddenly the deer was in the road, looking at our headlamps, petrified, before leaping into the shrubbery by the side of the road and disappearing into the sudden vast diamond silence of the forest (which we heard as Morley cut the motor) and just the scuffle of its hoofs running off to the haven of the raw fish Indian up there in the mists. It was real country we were in, Morley said about three thousand feet now. We could hear creeks rushing coldly below on cold starlit rocks without seeing them. “Hey little deer,” I’d yelled to the animal, “don’t worry, we won’t shoot you.” Now in the bar, where we’d stopped at my insistence (“In this kinda cold northern upmountain country ain’t nothin better for a man’s soul at midnight but a good warm glass of warmin red port heavy as the syrups of Sir Arthur”)—
“Okay Smith,” said Japhy, “but seems to me we shouldn’t drink on a hiking trip.”
“Ah who gives a damn?”
“Okay, but look at all the money we saved by buying cheap dried foods for this weekend and all you’re gonna