在路上 英文版-14

gas-fare to Frisco and zoomed over the land.Two fellows were driving this car; they said they were pimps. Two other fellows were passengerswith me. We sat tight and bent our minds to the goal. We went over Berthoud Pass, down to thegreat plateau, Tabernash, Troublesome, Kremmling; down Rabbit Ears Pass to Steamboat Springs,and j out; fifty miles of dusty detour; then Craig and the Great) American Desert. As we crossed theColorado-Utah border 11 saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above thedesert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, .Pass here and go on, you’re on the road toheaven.. 1 Ah well, alackaday, I was more interested in some old rotted! covered wagons and pooltables sitting in the Nevada desert] near a Coca-Cola stand and where there were huts with the!weatherbeaten signs still napping in the haunted shrouded 1 desert wind, saying, .Rattlesnake Billlived here. or .Broken-j mouth Annie holed up here for years.. Yes, zoom! In Salt! Lake City thepimps checked on their girls and we drove on. I Before I knew it, once again I was seeing the fabledcity of San Francisco stretched on the bay in the middle of the night. I ran immediately to Dean. Hehad a little house now. I was! burning to know what was on his mind and what would happen now,for there was nothing behind me any more, all my I bridges were gone and I didn’t give a damnabout anything at ] all. I knocked on his door at two o’clock in the morning.1072He came to the door stark naked and it might have been the President knocking for all he cared.He received the world in the raw. .Sal!. he said with genuine awe. .I didn’t think you’d actually doit. You’ve finally come to me...Yep,. I said. .Everything fell apart in me. How are things with you?..Not so good, not so good. But we’ve got a million things to talk about. Sal, the time has fi-nallycome for us to talk and get with it.. We agreed it was about time and went in. My arrival wassomewhat like the coming of the strange most evil angel in the home of the snow-white fleece, asDean and I began talking excitedly in the kitchen downstairs, which brought forth sobs from upstairs.Everything I said to Dean was answered with a wild, whispering, shuddering .Yes!. Camille knewwhat was going to happen. Apparently Dean had been quiet for a few months; now the angel hadarrived and he was going mad again. .What’s the matter with her?. I whispered.He said, .She’s getting worse and worse, man, she cries and makes tantrums, won’t let me out tosee Slim Gaillard, gets mad every time I’m late, then when I stay home she won’t talk to me and saysI’m an utter beast.. He ran upstairs to soothe her. I heard Camille yell, .You’re a liar, you’re a liar,you’re a liar!. I took the opportunity to examine the very wonderful house they had. It was a two-story crooked, rickety wooden cottage in the middle of tenements, right on top of Russian Hill with aview of the bay; it had four rooms, three upstairs and one immense sort of basement kitchendownstairs. The kitchen door opened onto a grassy court where washlines were. In back of thekitchen was a storage room where Dean’s old shoes still were caked an inch thick with Texas mudfrom the night the Hudson got stuck on the Brazos River. Of course the Hudson was gone; Deanhadn’t been able to make further payments on it. He had no car at all now. Their second baby wasaccidentally coming. It was horrible to hear Camille sobbing so. We couldn’t stand it and went out tobuy beer and brought it back to the kitchen. Camille finally went to sleep or spent the night staringblankly at the dark. I had no idea-what was really wrong, except perhaps Dean had driven her madafter all.After my last leaving of Frisco he had gone crazy over Marylou again and spent months hauntingher apartment on Divisadero, where every night she had a different sailor in and he peeked downthrough her mail-slot and could see her bed. There he saw Marylou sprawled in the mornings with a-boy. He trailed her around town. He wanted absolute proof that she was a whore. He loved her, hesweated over her. Finally he got hold of some bad green, as it’s called in the trade - green, uncuredmarijuana - quite by mistake, and smoked too much of it..The first day,. he said, .I lay rigid as a board in bed and couldn’t move or say a word; I justlooked straight up with my eyes open wide. I could hear buzzing in my head and saw all kinds ofwonderful technicolor visions and felt wonderful. The second day everything came to me,EVERYTHING I’d ever done or known or read or heard of or conjectured came to me andrearranged itself in my mind in a brand-new logical way and because I could think of nothing else inthe interior concerns of holding and catering to the amazement and gratitude I felt, I kept saying,’Yes, yes, yes, yes.’ Not loud. Yes,’ real quiet, and these green tea visions lasted until the third day.I had understood everything by then, my life was decided, I knew I loved Marylou, I knew I had tofir my father wherever he is and save him, I knew you were buddy et cetera, I knew how great Carlois. I knew a thousand things about everybody everywhere. Then the third day began having a terribleseries of waking nightmares, and the were so absolutely horrible and grisly and green that I lay theredoubled up with my hands around my knees, saying, ’Oh, oh, oh, ah, oh . . .’ The neighbors heard108me and sent for a doctor. Camille was away with the baby, visiting hot folks. The wholeneighborhood was concerned. They came in and found me lying on the bed with my arms stretchedout forever. Sal, I ran to Marylou with some of that tea. And do you know that the same thinghappened to that dumb little box? - the same visions, the same logic, the same final decision abouteverything, the view of all truths in one painful In leading to nightmares and pain - ack! Then I knew Iloved her so much I wanted to kill her. I ran home and beat my head on the wall. I ran to Ed Dunkel;he’s back in Frisco with Galatea; I asked him about a guy we know has a gun, I went the guy, I gotthe gun, I ran to Marylou, I looked down mail-slot, she was sleeping with a guy, had to retreat andhe hesitate, came back in an hour, I barged in, she was alone - and gave her the gun and told her tokill me. She held the gun in her hand the longest time. I asked her for a sweet dead pact. She didn’twant. I said one of us had to die. She said no. I beat my head on the wall. Man, I was out of mymind. She’ll tell you, she talked me out of it...Then what happened?..That was months ago - after you left. She finally married a used-car dealer, dumb bastit haspromised to kill me if he finds me, if necessary I shall have to defend myself and kill him and I’ll go toSan Quentin, ‘cause, Sal, one more rap of any kind and I go to San Quentin for life - that’s the endof me. Bad hand and all.. He showed me his hand. I hadn’t noticed in the excitement that he hadsuffered a terrible accident to his hand. .I Ht Marylou on the brow on February twenty-sixth at sixo’clock in the evening - in fact six-ten, because I remember I had to make my hotshot freight in anhour and twenty minutes - the last time we met and the last time we decided everything, and nowlisten to this: my thumb only deflected off her brow and she didn’t even have a bruise and in factlaughed, but my thumb broke above the wrist and a horrible doctor made a setting of the bones thatwas difficult and took three separate castings, twenty-three combined hours of sitting on hardbenches waiting, et cetera, and the final cast had a traction pin stuck through the tip of my thumb, soin April when they took off the cast the pin infected my bone and I developed osteomyelitis whichhas become chronic, and after an operation which failed and a month in a cast the result was theamputation of a wee bare piece off the tip-ass end..He unwrapped the bandages and showed me. The flesh, about half an inch, was missing under thenail..It got from worse to worse. I had to support Camille and Amy and had to work as fast as Icould at Firestone as mold man, curing recapped tires and later hauling big hunnerd-fifty-pound tiresfrom the floor to the top of the cars - could only use my good hand and kept banging the bad brokeit again, had it reset again, and it’s getting all infected and swoled again. So now I take care ofbaby while Camille works. You see? Heeby-jeebies, I’m classification three-A, jazz-houndedMoriarty has a sore butt, his wife gives him daily injections of penicillin for his thumb, which produceshives, for he’s allergic. He must take sixty thousand units of Fleming’s juice within a month. He musttake one tablet every four hours for this month to combat allergy produced from his juice. He musttake codeine aspirin to relieve the pain in his thumb. He must have surgery on his leg for an inflamedcyst. He must rise next Monday at six A.M. to get his teeth cleaned. He must see a foot doctor twicea week for treatment. He must take cough syrup each night. He must blow and snort constantly toclear his nose, which has collapsed just under the bridge where an operation some years agoweakened it. He lost his thumb on his throwing arm. Greatest seventy-yard passer in the history ofNew Mexico State Reformatory. And yet - and yet, I’ve never felt better and finer and happier withthe world and to see little lovely children playing in the sun and I am so glad to see you, my fine gonewonderful Sal, and I know, I know everything will be all right. You’ll see her tomorrow, my terrificdarling beautiful daughter can now stand alone for thirty seconds at a time, she weighs twenty-two109pounds, is twenty-nine inches long. I’ve just figured out she is thirty-one-and-a-quarter-per-centEnglish, twenty-seven-and-a-half-per-cent Irish, twenty-five-per-cent German, eight-and-threequarters-per-cent Dutch, seven-and-a-half-per-cent Scotch, one-hun-dred-per-cent wonderful.. Hefondly congratulated me for the book I had finished, which was now accepted by the publishers..We know life, Sal, we’re growing older, each of us, little by little, and are coming to know things.What you tell me about your life I understand well, I’ve always dug your feelings, and now in factyou’re ready to hook up with a real great girl if you can only find her and cultivate her and make hermind your soul as I have tried so hard with these damned women of mine. Shit! shit! shit!. he yelled.And in the morning Camille threw both of us out, baggage and all. It began when we called RoyJohnson, old Denver Roy, and had him come over for beer, while Dean minded the baby and did thedishes and the wash in the backyard but did a sloppy job of it in his excitement. Johnson agreed todrive us to Mill City to look for Remi Boncoeur. Camille came in from work at the doctor’s officeand gave us all the sad look of a harassed woman’s life. I tried to show this haunted woman that Ihad no mean intentions concerning her home life by saying hello to her and talking as warmly as Icould, but she knew it was a con and maybe one I’d learned from Dean, and only gave a brief smile.In the morning there was a terrible scene: she lay on the bed sobbing, and in the midst of this Isuddenly had the need to go to the bathroom, and the only way I could get there was through herroom. .Dean, Dean,. I cried, .where’s the nearest bar?..Bar?. he said, surprised; he was washing his hands in the kitchen sink downstairs. He thought Iwanted to get drunk. I told him my dilemma and he said, .Go right ahead, she does that all the time..No, I couldn’t do that. I rushed out to look for a bar; I walked uphill and downhill in a vicinity of fourblocks on Russian Hill and found nothing but laundromats, cleaners, soda fountains, beauty parlors. Icame back to the crooked little house. They were yelling at each other as I slipped through with afeeble smile and locked myself in the bathroom. A few moments later Camille was throwing Dean’sthings on the living-room floor and telling him to pack. To my amazement I saw a full-length oilpainting of Galatea Dunkel over the sofa. I suddenly realized that all these women were spendingmonths of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of the men. I heardDean’s maniacal giggle across the house, together with the wails of his baby. The next thing I knewhe was gliding around the house like Groucho Marx, with his broken thumb wrapped in a huge whitebandage sticking up like a beacon that stands motionless above the frenzy of the waves. Once againI saw his pitiful huge battered trunk with socks and dirty underwear sticking out; he bent over it,throwing in everything he could find. Then he got his suitcase, the beatest suitcase in the USA. It wasmade of paper with designs on it to make it look like leather, and hinges of some kind pasted on. Agreat rip ran down the top; Dean lashed on a rope. Then he grabbed his seabag and threw things intothat. I got my bag, stuffed it, and as Camille lay in bed saying, .Liar! Liar! Liar!. we leaped out ofthe house and struggled down the street to the nearest cable car - a mass of men and suitcases withthat enormous bandaged thumb sticking up in the air.That thumb became the symbol of Dean’s final development. He no longer cared about anything(as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the sameto him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it. He stopped me inthe middle of the street..Now, man, I know you’re probably real bugged; you just got to town and we get thrown out thefirst day and you’re wondering what I’ve done to deserve this and so on - together with all horribleappurtenances - hee-hee-hee! - but look at me. Please, Sal, look at me..I looked at him. He was wearing a T-shirt, torn pants hanging down his belly, tattered shoes; hehad not shaved, his hair was wild and bushy, his eyes bloodshot, and that tremendous bandaged110thumb stood supported in midair at heart-level (he had to hold it up that way), and on his face wasthe goofiest grin I ever saw. He stumbled around in a circle and looked everywhere..What do my eyeballs see? Ah - the blue sky. Long-fellow!. He swayed and blinked. He rubbedhis eyes. .Together with windows - have you ever dug windows? Now let’s talk about windows. Ihave seen some really crazy windows that made faces at me, and some of them had shades drawnand so they winked.. Out of his seabag he fished a copy of Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris and,adjusting the front of his T-shirt, began reading on the street corner with a pedantic air. .Now really,Sal, let’s dig everything as we go along . . .. He forgot about that in an instant and looked aroundblankly. I was glad I had come, he needed me now..Why did Camille throw you out? What are you going to do?..Eh?. he said. .Eh? Eh?. We racked our brains for where to go and what to do. I realized it wasup to me. Poor, poor Dean - the devil himself had never fallen farther; in idiocy, with infected thumb,surrounded by the battered suitcases of his motherless feverish life across America and backnumberless times, an undone bird. .Let’s walk to New York,. he said, .and as we do so let’s takestock of everything along the way - yass.. I took out my money and counted it; I showed it to him..I have here,. I said, .the sum of eighty-three dollars and change, and if you come with me let’sgo to New York - and after that let’s go to Italy...Italy?. he said. His eyes lit up. .Italy, yass - how shall we get there, dear Sal?.I pondered this. .I’ll make some money, I’ll get a thousand dollars from the publishers. We’ll godig all the crazy women in Rome, Paris, all those places; we’ll sit at sidewalk cafes; we’ll live inwhorehouses. Why not go to Italy?..Why yass,. said Dean, and then realized I was serious and looked at me out of the corner of hiseye for the first time, for I’d never committed myself before with regard to his burdensome existence,and that look was the look of a man weighing his chances at the last moment before the bet. Therewere triumph and insolence in his eyes, a devilish look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a longtime. I looked back at him and blushed.I said, .What’s the matter?. I felt wretched when I asked it. He made no answer but continuedlooking at me with the same wary insolent side-eye.I tried to remember everything he’d done in his life and if there wasn’t something back there tomake him suspicious of something now. Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said-.Come to New York with me; I’ve got the money.. I looked at him; my eyes were wateringwith embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking throughme. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent somehours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendouslyinvolved and tormented mental categories. Something clicked in both of us. In me it was suddenlyconcern for a man who was years younger than I, five years, and whose fate was wound with mineacross the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matter that I can ascertain only from what hedid afterward. He became extremely joyful and said everything was settled. .What was that look?. Iasked. He was pained to hear me say that. He frowned. It was rarely that Dean frowned. We bothfelt perplexed and uncertain of something. We were standing on top of a hill on a beautiful sunny dayin San Francisco; our shadows fell across the sidewalk. Out of the tenement next to Camille’s housefiled eleven Greek men and women who instantly lined themselves up on the sunny pavement whileanother backed up across the narrow street and smiled at them over a camera. We gaped at theseancient people who were having a wedding party for one of their daughters, probably the thousandthin an unbroken dark generation of smiling in the sun. They were well dressed, and they were strange.Dean and I might have been in Cyprus for all of that. Gulls flew overhead in the sparkling air.111.Well,. said Dean in a very shy and sweet voice, .shall we go?..Yes,. I said, .let’s go to Italy.. And so we picked up our bags, he the trunk with his one goodarm and I the rest, and staggered to the cable-car stop; in a moment rolled down the hill with ourlegs dangling to the sidewalk from the jiggling shelf, two broken-down heroes of the Western night.1123First thing, we went to a bar down on Market Street and decided everything - that we wouldstick together and be buddies till we died. Dean was very quiet and preoccupied, looking at the oldbums in the saloon that reminded him of his father. .I think he’s in Denver - this time we mustabsolutely find him, he may be in County Jail, he may be around Larimer Street again, but he’s to befound. Agreed?.Yes, it was agreed; we were going to do everything we’d never done and had been too silly to doin the past. Then we promised ourselves two days of kicks in San Francisco before starting off, andof course the agreement was to go by travel bureau in share-the-gas cars and save as much moneyas possible. Dean claimed he no longer needed Marylou though he still loved her. We both agreedhe would make out in New York.Dean put on his pin-stripe suit with a sports shirt, we stashed our gear in a Greyhound bus lockerfor ten cents, and we took off to meet Roy Johnson who was going to be our chauffeur for two-dayFrisco kicks. Roy agreed over the phone to do so. He arrived at the corner of Market and Thirdshortly thereafter and picked us up. Roy was now living in Frisco, working as a clerk and married toa pretty little blonde called Dorothy. Dean confided that her nose was too long - this was his bigpoint of contention about her, for some strange reason - but her nose wasn’t too long at all. RoyJohnson is a thin, dark, handsome kid with a pin-sharp face and combed hair that he keeps shovingback from the sides of his head. He had an extremely earnest approach and a big smile. Evidently hiswife, Dorothy, had wrangled with him over the chauffeuring idea - and, determined to make a standas the man of the house (they lived in a little room), he nevertheless stuck by his promise to us, butwith consequences; his mental dilemma resolved itself in a bitter silence. He drove Dean and me allover Frisco at all hours of day and night and never said a word; all he did was go through red lightsand make sharp turns on two wheels, and this was telling us the shifts to which we’d put him. He wasmidway between the challenge of his new wife and the challenge of his old Denver poolhall gangleader. Dean was pleased, and of course unperturbed by the driving. We paid absolutely no attentionto Roy and sat in the back and yakked.The next thing was to go to Mill City to see if we could find Remi Boncoeur. I noticed with somewonder that the old ship Admiral Freebee was no longer in the bay; and then of course Remi wasno longer in the second-to-last compartment of the shack in the canyon. A beautiful colored girlopened the door instead; Dean and I talked to her a great deal. Roy Johnson waited in the car,reading Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. I took one last look at Mill City and knew there was nosense trying to dig up the involved past; instead we decided to go see Galatea Dunkel about sleepingaccommodations. Ed had left her again, was in Denver, and damned if she still didn’t plot to get himback. We found her sitting crosslegged on the Oriental-type rug of her four-room tenement flat onupper Mission with a deck of fortune cards. Good girl. I saw sad signs that Ed Dunkel had lived hereawhile and then left out of stupors and disinclinations only..He’ll come back,. said Galatea. .That guy can’t take care of himself without me.. She gave afurious look at Dean and Roy Johnson. .It was Tommy Snark who did it this time. All the timebefore he came Ed was perfectly happy and worked and we went out and had wonderful times.Dean, you know that. Then they’d sit in the bathroom for hours, Ed in the bathtub and Snarky on theseat, and talk and talk and talk -such silly things..Dean laughed. For years he had been chief prophet of that gang and now they were learning histechnique. Tommy Snark had grown a beard and his big sorrowful blue eyes had come looking for113Ed Dunkel in Frisco; what happened (actually and no lie), Tommy had his small ringer amputated in aDenver mishap and collected a good sum of money. For no reason under the sun they decided togive Galatea the slip and go to Portland, Maine, where apparently Snark had an aunt. So they werenow either in Denver, going through, or already in Portland..When Tom’s money runs out Ed’ll be back,. said Galatea, looking at her cards. .Damn fool hedoesn’t know anything and never did. All he has to do is know that I love him..Galatea looked like the daughter of the Greeks with the sunny camera as she sat there on the rug,her long hair streaming to the floor, plying the fortune-telling cards. I got to like her. We evendecided to go out that night and hear jazz, and Dean would take a six-foot blonde who lived downthe street, Marie.That night Galatea, Dean, and I went to get Marie. This girl had a basement apartment, a littledaughter, and an old car that barely ran and which Dean and I had to push down the street as thegirls jammed at the starter. We went to Galatea’s, and there everybody sat around - Marie, herdaughter, Galatea, Roy Johnson, Dorothy his wife - all sullen in the overstaffed furniture as I stood ina corner, neutral in Frisco problems, and Dean stood in the middle of the room with his balloon-thumb in the air breast-high, giggling. .Gawd damn,. he said, .we’re all losing our fingers - hawrhawr-hawr...Dean, why do you act so foolish?. said Galatea. .Camille called and said you left her. Don’t yourealize you have a daughter?..He didn’t leave her, she kicked him out!. I said, breaking my neutrality. They all gave me dirtylooks; Dean grinned. .And with that thumb, what do you expect the poor guy to do?. I added. Theyall looked at me; particularly Dorothy Johnson lowered a mean gaze on me. It wasn’t anything but asewing circle, and the center of it was the culprit, Dean -responsible, perhaps, for everything thatwas wrong. I looked out the window at the buzzing night-street of Mission; I wanted to get goingand hear the great jazz of Frisco - and remember, this was only my second night in town..I think Marylou was very, very wise leaving you, Dean,. said Galatea. .For years now youhaven’t had any sense of responsibility for anyone. You’ve done so many awful things I don’t knowwhat to say to you..And in fact that was the point, and they all sat around looking at Dean with lowered and hatingeyes, and he stood on the carpet in the middle of them and giggled - he just giggled. He made a littledance. His bandage was getting dirtier all the time; it began to flop and unroll. I suddenly realized thatDean, by virtue of his enormous series of sins, was becoming the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of thelot..You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you thinkabout is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of peopleand then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you thatlife is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing allthe time..That’s what Dean was, the HOLY GOOF..Camille is crying her heart out tonight, but don’t think for a minute she wants you back, she saidshe never wanted to see you again and she said it was to be final this time. Yet you stand here andmake silly faces, and I don’t think there’s a care in your heart..This was not true; I knew better and I could have told them all. I didn’t see any sense in trying it. Ilonged to go and put my arm around Dean and say, Now look here, all of you, remember just onething: this guy has his troubles too, and another thing, he never complains and he’s given all of you adamned good time just being himself, and if that isn’t enough for you then send him to the firing114squad, that’s apparently what you’re itching to do anyway . . .Nevertheless Galatea Dunkel was the only one in the gang who wasn’t afraid of Dean and couldsit there calmly, with her face hanging out, telling him off in front of everybody. There were earlierdays in Denver when Dean had everybody sit in the dark with the girls and just talked, and talked,and talked, with a voice that was once hypnotic and strange and was said to make the girls comeacross by sheer force of persuasion and the content of what he said. This was when he was fifteen,sixteen. Now his disciples were married and the wives of his disciples had him on the carpet for thesexuality and the life he had helped bring into being. I listened further..Now you’re going East with Sal,. Galatea said, .and what do you think you’re going toaccomplish by that? Camille has to stay home and mind the baby now you’re gone - how can shekeep her job? - and she never wants to see you again and I don’t blame her. If you see Ed along theroad you tell him to come back to me or I’ll kill him .Just as flat as that. It was the saddest night. I felt as if I was with strange brothers and sisters in apitiful dream. Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked hisway out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic,right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying, .Yes,yes, yes,. as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I amconvinced they were, and the others suspected as much and were frightened. He was BEAT - theroot, the soul of Beatific. What was he knowing? He tried all in his power to tell me what he wasknowing, and they envied that about me, my position at his side, defending him and drinking him in asthey once tried to do. Then they looked at me. What was I, a stranger, doing on the West Coast thisfair night? I recoiled from the thought..We’re going to Italy,. I said, I washed my hands of the whole matter. Then, too, there was a