The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [33]
“What…well now what?”
They discussed it awhile fiddling with flashlights in the frost and then Japhy came over and said “You’ll have to crawl outa there Smith, all we have is two sleeping bags now and gotta zip ’em open and spread ’em out to form a blanket for three, goddammit that’ll be cold.”
“What? And the cold’ll slip in around the bottoms!”
“Well Henry can’t sleep in that car, he’ll freeze to death, no heater.”
“But goddammit I was all ready to enjoy this so much,” I whined getting out and putting on my shoes and pretty soon Japhy had fixed the two sleeping bags on top of ponchos and was already settled down to sleep and on toss it was me had to sleep in the middle, and it was way below freezing by now, and the stars were icicles of mockery. I got in and lay down and Morley, I could hear the maniac blowing up his ridiculous air mattress so he could lay beside me, but the moment he’d done so, he started at once to turn over and heave and sigh, and around the other side, and back toward me, and around the other side, all under the ice-cold stars and loveliness, while Japhy snored, Japhy who wasn’t subjected to all the mad wiggling. Finally Morley couldn’t sleep at all and got up and went to the car probably to talk to himself in that mad way of his and I got a wink of sleep, but in a few minutes he was back, freezing, and got under the sleeping-bag blanket but started to turn and turn again, even curse once in a while, or sigh, and this went on for what seemed to be eternities and the first thing I knew Aurora was paling the eastern hems of Amida and pretty soon we’d be getting up anyway. That mad Morley! And this was only the beginning of the misadventures of that most remarkable man (as you’ll see now), that remarkable man who was probably the only mountainclimber in the history of the world who forgot to bring his sleeping bag. “Jesus,” I thought, “why didn’t he just forget his dreary air mattress instead.”
7
From the very first moment we’d met Morley he’d kept emitting sudden yodels in keeping with our venture. This was a simple “Yodelayhee” but it came at the oddest moments and in oddest circumstances, like several times when his Chinese and German friends were still around, then later in the car, sitting with us enclosed, “Yodelayhee!” and then as we got out of the car to go in the bar, “Yodelayhee!” Now as Japhy woke up and saw it was dawn and jumped out of the bags and ran to gather firewood and shudder over a little preliminary fire, Morley woke up from his nervous small sleep of dawn, yawned, and yelled “Yodelayhee!” which echoed toward vales in the distance. I got up too; it was all we could do to hold together; the only thing to do was hop around and flap your arms, like me and my sad bum on the gon on the south coast. But soon Japhy got more logs on the fire and it was a roaring bonfire that we turned our backs to after a while and yelled and talked. A beautiful morning—red pristine shafts of sunlight coming in over the hill and slanting down into the cold trees like cathedral light, and the mists rising to meet the sun,