That set him off into another “Phwaw” exclamation. Shaking his head as if it was a question he had never been up against before, he speculated, “Only in the cosmic sense, bride of the slave to lust, you might say.” He reached around and tickled her approximately in the ribs. “Aren’t you, Sweet Adeline.”
“Mmm.” In a sleepy pout she leaned his way and gave him a kiss right in the ear. “Aren’t you done scribbling yet?” the woman teased, still going at the ear. “You need to rest up for better things, Jean-Louis de K.” She snuzzled—if that was a word, because it sure looked like it fit what she was up to—herself into his side until she was practically joined on to him, before drowsing off again with another pouty “Mmm.”
Gazing broodily across to me, he spoke perfectly man-to-man. “The ladies. You know how it is. Can’t do without ’em, can’t do with ’em.”
He said a mouthful there. Out of nowhere, which was just like her, Aunt Kate abruptly clouded out Letty, and I hurried to change the topic. “How far are you and the, uh, lady going?”
“Califrisco, Sanifornia,” he quacked it, which if I wasn’t mistaken was the address of Scrooge McDuck in the funnies, or at least I laughed like it was. He quit clowning right away, though, soberly thinking out loud in that tobacco-smoked voice. “Babylon by the Bay, yowser. We’ll crash with some of the Frisco cats awhile, then drop down to Big Sur. The little lady here”—if I wasn’t mistaken, he was tickling the inside of her thigh now—“has never seen the blue Pacific, west of the West.” Although the tickle, tickle, didn’t stop, his voice deepened, I’d almost say darkened. “Been a while for me, too, to see where it all begins and ends, kerplosh.”
To the best of my geography book knowledge, I worked out where they were headed. “Isn’t this sort of out of the way?”
“A standard deviation,” he replied, which I didn’t get at all. As if reminded of the extent of highway ahead, he leaned into the aisle to peer toward the windshield and the stretch of blacktop lit by the bus’s headlights. Restlessly passing a hand through his hair, which started at a widow’s peak but turned so thick and dark it made up for it, he asked, as if I’d been keeping better track than he had: “Where are we, anyway? Shouldn’t civilization be showing up?”
The way the bus was keeping to eternal bus speed, we still had a lot of South Dakota to go yet, so I gave that the French salute. “He’d say,” I pointed over my shoulder to Herman, “we’re somewhere south of the moon and north of Hell.”
“That’s solid, man,” my partner in conversation let out, as if he wished he’d thought of it first. His exclamation roused the sleeping woman, who wriggled against him in a way that couldn’t help but get his attention. “Excusez-moi, buddy,” he apologized in a whisper, closing his notebook and putting a hand to her somewhere I could not quite see. “Need to tend the home fire.”
“Uh, first, since you’re writing so much anyway, could you put something in my autograph book just real quick?” I asked before the chance slipped away. He gazed at me across the aisle again, question replacing mood in his deep-set eyes. “It has Senator Ridpath in it and everything,” I hurried to say. “He’s called the cowboy senator because he’s from Montana.”
“Well, bust my britches,” he faked a cowboy drawl. “Hand that there thang over, pardner.”
Curiosity getting the best of him, he focused his little flashlight on the album pages and read a couple at random. With a hand on his drowsing ladyfriend’s thigh marking his place there, he split his attention to keep paging through the inscriptions and signatures, smiling here and there at the purple penmanship. Totaling up the contents, he whistled softly. “You laying this on people wherever you go?”
“Betsa bootsies I am,” I answered boldly, as one inspired traveler to another, the darkness helping my courage. “I want to collect so much of what they write it’ll make Believe It or Not!”
“Man, that’s so far out it’s in,” he said wisely, or at least I interpreted it that way.
Next thing I knew, he was rapidly filling the album page with slanted handwriting. At the speed he was giving it, I grew alarmed that he might fill a whole bunch of pages.
But finally he signed off near the bottom with a last burst and handed the album back to me. “Toot sweet and adoo, buddy,” he excused himself to tend to business at his side. “See you down the road.” The penlight snapped off, leaving me in the dark.
You think about what actually happened, you tell friends long stories about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure, then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the typewriter, or at the writing notebook, and get it over with as fast as you can.
Advice free for the taking if you want to live life as she be in this mad bad buggered old contraption of a country called Uhmerica. Hang in there, buddy, and take it as it comes.
It evens out in the end.
Jack Kerouac
On the road somewhere south of the moon and north of Hell
17.