Lonesome Traveler Read Free Page B

hour to finish up and clean up and dress, I’ll be right with you—anybody around?”
    â€œI dont know.” I looked around. I had been looking around for a half hour, at parked cars, dark corners, holes of sheds, door holes, niches, crypts of Egypt, waterfront rat holes, crapule doorholes, and beercan clouts, midmast booms and fishing eagles—bah, nowhere, the heroes were nowhere to be seen.
    TWO OF THE SADDEST DOGS you ever saw (haw haw haw) walking off that pier, in the dark, past a few customs guards who gave Deni a customary little look and wouldnt have found the gun in his pocket anyway but he’d taken all those pains to mail it in that hollowedout tome and now as we peered around together he whispered “Well have you got it?”
    â€œYea yea in my pocket.”
    â€œHang on to it, give to me outside on the street.”
    â€œDont worry.”
    â€œI guess they’re not here, but you never can tell.”
    â€œI looked everywhere.”
    â€œWe’ll get outa here and make tracks—I’ve got it all planned Kerouac what we’re gonna do tonight tomorrow and the whole weekend; I’ve been talking to all the cooks, we’ve got it all planned, a letter for you down to Jim Jackson at the hall and you’re going to sleep in the cadets’ stateroom on board, think of it Kerouac a whole stateroom to yourself, and Mr. Smith has agreed to come with us and celebrate, hm a mahya.”—Mr. Smith was the fat pale potbellied wizard of the bottom skeels of the engine room, a wiper or oiler or general watertender, he was the funniest old guy you’d ever wish to see and already Deni was laughing and feeling good and forgetting the imaginary enemies—out on the pier street it was evident we were in the clear. Deni was wearing an expensive Hong Kong blue serge suit, with soldiers in his shoulder pads and a fine drape, a beautiful suit, in which, now, beside mine in my road rags, he stomped along like a French farmer throwing his biggest brogans over the rows de bledeine, like a Boston hoodlum scuffling along the Common on Saturday night to see the guys at the poolhall but in his own way, with cherubic Deni smile that was heightened tonight by the fog making his face jovial round and red, tho not old, but what with the sun shine of the trip thru the canal he looked like a Dickens character stepping to his post chaise and dusty roads, only what a dismal scene spread before us as we walked.— Always with Deni it’s walking, long long walks, he wouldntspend a dollar on a cab because he likes to walk but also there were those days when he went out with my first wife and used to shove her right through the subway turnstile before she could realize what happened, from the back naturally—a charming little trick—to save a nickel—a pastime at which old Den’s unbeatable, as could be shown—We came to the Pacific Red Car tracks after a fast hike of about 20 minutes along those dreary refineries and waterskeel slaphouse stop holes, under impossible skies laden I suppose with stars but you could just see their dirty blur in the Southern California Christmas—“Kerouac we are now at the Pacific Red Car tracks, do you have any faint idea as to what that thing is can you tell that you think you can, but Kerouac you have always struck me as being the funniest man I have ever known…”
    â€œNo, Deni YOU are the funniest man I ever known—”
    â€œDont interrupt, dont drool, dont—” the way he answered and always talked and he’s leading the way across the Red Car tracks, to a hotel, in downtown long Pedro where someone was supposed to meet us with blondes and so he bought enroute a couple of small hand cases of beer for us to portable around with, and when we got to the hotel, which had potted palms and potted barfronts and cars parked, and everything dead and windless with that dead California sad windless