Looking for Jack Kerouac Page 14

  “Not at all,” I said. “I think you’re really lucky to know exactly what you want. Chuck does, too. I wish I did.”

  She gave me a long look, like she was reading me. “Well,” she said. “What do you love?”

  I thought about it. Baseball. But I wasn’t good enough to play professionally, and I didn’t want to be a sportswriter, like Chuck did. Or a coach. “I love reading,” I said. “But I don’t think I love it like you love the ocean. And I don’t want to be a teacher, so what good does that do?”

  “It would get you through college,” she said. “Which is a whole lot better idea than hanging around here, or anywhere, till you get drafted and sent to Vietnam. It’s happening already, you know. Two guys from Pass-a-Grille have been drafted in the last six months, for God’s sake. A guy I know at school, an ex-Marine, just got back. He says we don’t know the half of what’s going on over there. They don’t want us to know. I’m just saying, if you get a college deferment you’re not likely to have to go over and find out for sure. Unless you’re one of those idiots who think going off to any kind of war automatically makes you a hero.”

  “I’m not one of those idiots,” I said.

  I told her about my dad getting a Purple Heart in the war, but refusing to talk about it—and all the books I’d read trying to figure out what it might have been like for him. She’d read All Quiet on the Western Front in an English class, and we talked about what war did to people.

  Her dad joined the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor, she told me. He’d met her mom the summer before, when she was vacationing with some girlfriends in St. Petersburg.

  “My grandparents knew he’d been driving up to see a girl in Atlanta every chance he got,” she said. “But they’d never met her. They had no idea it was really serious until he and Mom eloped on his last leave before shipping out. He was the baby of the family. The best-looking of all of them, the best athlete. He was funny and smart—and wild. Everyone loved him.” She smiled. “So even though my mom was—as you can see, different from all the other aunts, not to mention my grandparents, they invited her to come live in Pass-a-Grille while Dad was overseas, and she did. He was on a P.T. boat in the Pacific, which, according to Uncle Jimmy, was the worst duty you could get in the Navy. It changed him. That’s all anybody has to say about it.”

  She scooped up some sugar sand and let it sift through her fingers. She did it again, watching it fall as if watching the sand fall in an hourglass. Then looked directly at me. “Sometimes I think he loved me so much because I was the only one who hadn’t known him before the war. He couldn’t disappoint me.

  “So. Don’t get drafted,” she concluded brusquely, before I had a chance to speak. “And I repeat: If you go to college, that’s not likely to happen.”

  “You’ve got a point,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. So take that job Jimmy offered you and start saving up for it.”

  TWENTY

  So there I was the next morning, washing dishes at the Crab Shack. Jimmy had given me explicit directions: Soak the dishes first, plunge them into scalding water, let them air dry. He handed me a pair of yellow rubber gloves so I wouldn’t burn my hands, a white apron to keep my clothes clean, and a bandana to tie, Indian-style, around my head to keep the sweat under control. Any time there was a lull in the action, he checked on me to make sure the dishes were as sparkling clean as he expected them to be—nodding his satisfaction.

  Meanwhile, Ginny zoomed up and down the counter, taking orders, pouring coffee, asking about wives and kids and grandkids, commiserating about the snowbirds who were already starting to clog traffic up and down the beach highway, delivering the heaping portions of eggs and bacon and oatmeal and pancakes, then bringing the dirty dishes back into the kitchen and setting them on the drain board to be washed. Now and then stopping long enough to ask if I was doing okay.

  I was. I liked being busy and, even though an earnest half-wit could have done the job the way Jimmy wanted it done, I still felt good about doing something right. The dishes kept coming; I kept washing them. Standing there in the cloud of steam, I saw Mom in my mind’s eye, ironing, steam puffing up from the iron, and I remembered how she always said she didn’t mind ironing because you could see the progress you were making—plus, you could listen to the radio and daydream, which made time pass quicker than you’d think. For once, it didn’t make me sad to think about her—maybe because washing dishes felt exactly the same way.

  It was a good day all around. Chuck and I met at Jack’s to watch the fifth game. He was in a great mood, convinced that Boyer’s grand slam had put the Cards on a roll. They’d win again today; Wednesday, back in St. Louis, it would be all over. Best of all, when the game actually started it was clear that, for the first time in the Series, the real Bob Gibson was back in the game. The guy was a strikeout machine, his face like a robot. The Yankees didn’t know what to do with him.

  Jack drank steadily throughout the game, and the win made him manic with happiness. He danced Mamère around the little house until she was beet red and breathless, begging him to let her go before she had—as she said—an attack of the heart. He wouldn’t let Chuck and me leave, but kept us pinned to our seats, telling us about his dad taking him to Boston Red Sox games when he was a kid; jumping from there to Yankee Stadium and New York itself—hanging out there with his friend, Neal, the real Dean Moriarity.

  He was still ramped up when Chuck and I came back for game six, still sure it would wind up the Series for the Cards, and already drinking toward the celebratory moment. It was weird, as if the liquor inside him knew when the Yankees pulled away in the seventh inning, because, suddenly, it turned him ugly. He was in a rage by the time Pepitone finished it off with a grand-slam homer in the ninth: rude to Mamère, argumentative if anybody said anything to disagree with him, and belligerent when Chuck tried to settle him down.

  “Okay, I’m done,” Chuck said, when we left. “I’ve seen him like this before. He’s so far gone it won’t matter who wins the last game. Even if he’s not passed out somewhere by then, he’ll be too hung-over to have any idea what’s going on. Once he gets going on these binges, nothing can stop him. Sometimes it’s weeks before he gets back to normal.” He laughed, but not like he thought anything was funny. “Like Jack’s ‘normal’ is a great way to be.”

  There was a TV at the Crab Shack. We’d watch it there, we decided. We gathered with Jimmy and a bunch of the regulars, a few tourists who just happened in and stayed. Ginny skipped class to stick around and help wait tables.

  It was a Cards crowd. Jimmy had put a sign on the door that said: “Yankee fans, enter at your own risk.” A joke—well, sort of—but it kept them away. Jimmy was wearing a Cards tee-shirt; most of the old guys were wearing St. Louis baseball caps set back on their heads, like old guys do.

  This was it: Either the Yankees or the Cards were going to win the Series today—and it was tense. Gibson was clearly tired, but the Cards stayed on top. It was 6-0 till the sixth, when Mantle smashed a three-run homer. The Cards scored again in the seventh, but in the bottom of the ninth the Yankees scored twice—pulling them to within two runs, with one out still to go.

  Should they leave Gibson in? Take him out?

  They left him in.

  The next batter popped to the Cards’ shortstop, who made the catch—and it was over.

  The whole Crab Shack went nuts. All of us yelling and throwing our arms around each other and pounding on whatever or whoever happened to be near. It must have been contagious because even Ginny was ecstatic, dancing in and out of everyone’s embrace.

  The place felt like home to me after that day. Every morning I got up at five and walked through the quiet streets to the pier, which was already lined with fishermen who stood, their lines out, drinking coffee they poured into the plastic lids of their Thermoses. I got there about 5:30, and Jimmy greeted me, already on his second or third cup of coffee. We set up for the day, talking about this and that.
>
  The mornings went quickly once Ginny arrived and tied on her apron. I was my own little assembly line, moving the dishes from one side of the sink to the other, all the while daydreaming, half-hearing the music on Jimmy’s little radio. Most days Ginny and I ate lunch together, sitting out on the pier, talking, watching the water. She refused to eat meat or, God forbid, any of her beloved sea creatures, and I teased her about that. She needed a good cheeseburger, I’d say, and she’d tell me it was none of my goddamn business what she ate. Nothing she did was any of my business, for that matter. She was serious.

  I didn’t mind. I liked how she treated me like she was my big sister: bossy, with a kind of eye-rolling affection. I liked how I could talk to her about anything. I told her the things about when Mom was sick that I most hated remembering. The way her head looked, shaved for surgery, and how scared she’d been. How, in the beginning, she kept saying, “But I’m a good person. I’m a good person,” as if the brain tumor were God’s punishment for something she’d done. How, when the headaches came back near the end, she didn’t know me. She thought I was her brother, who’d been killed in a car accident when he was twenty.

  One day I was telling her for about the tenth time how bad I felt about ditching Kathy after how great she’d been while Mom was sick and after she died. “She did everything for me,” I said. “My laundry, for Christ’s sake; all of our laundry. And came over most nights and made dinner for us. Then did the dishes.”

  Always before Ginny had listened, nodding her head as if in sympathy with me. Now, sounding half-mad, she said, “You didn’t need a personal maid, Paul. What you needed was someone who understood how you felt.”

  Instinctively, I defended Kathy. “She tried. She really did. She about drove me crazy, constantly asking me how I felt.”

  “How do you feel?” Ginny asked.

  It sounded different when she asked, like she was genuinely curious.

  “Well,” I said. “Remember that earthquake in Alaska in March? Part of Anchorage sliding into the ocean, part of Kodiak wiped out by a tidal wave, stuff blowing up and burning? That was how I felt,” I said.

  “And you told that to Kathy?”

  “I did. But she took it the wrong way, like nothing she’d done for me had mattered. I knew there was no point trying to explain. And I didn’t dare apologize because I knew if I apologized she’d forgive me and try harder to make me feel better, when what I really wanted was for her, for everybody, to just leave me alone.”

  “If she really knew you, she’d have known that’s what you wanted,” Ginny said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Still, it’s no excuse. The truth is, I was awful to her from the time I started working at the mill.”

  “Because she started pushing you to get married.”

  “Well, yeah. But I’m the one who let her act like my wife. Naturally, she’d assume—”

  “Paul,” Ginny said. “Almost all girls want to get married the first second they possibly can. They’re stupid that way. Haven’t you figured that out yet? And boys are stupid about sex. You’re lucky she didn’t get pregnant and trap you into it. Some girls do that, you know.”

  I opened my mouth to say that Kathy wouldn’t have done that to me, but shut it because, suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

  “My idiot cousins,” she went on, flushed with aggravation. “Trish and Janet. They couldn’t wait to get out of Pass-a-Grille and head for the big city—and what are they doing there? Looking for husbands. All they talk about when they come home to visit is getting married and settling down. The house in suburbia, a bunch of kids to take care of, watching TV, grilling out on the weekends…just not here. I mean, really, what’s the point?

  “You get one life,” she said. “One. Life. I want mine to be larger than that.”

  A silence fell between us, the kind that happens after bells ringing. I’d never heard anyone, male or female, say anything like that. I had no idea how to respond to it.

  “Sorry,” Ginny said, after a while. “I get a little crazy about things like that. Anyway. Kathy. She sounds like a good, well-meaning person—and you’re right, just leaving was a really shitty way to break up with her. On the other hand, you had to get the hell out of there to save your life. Right?

  “And okay—” She looked like she’d just swallowed a dose of awful-tasting medicine. “As much as I hate to admit this, if Duke was the one who talked you into leaving to come down here, I guess he can’t be all bad.”

  This cracked me up.

  But it was another thing I like about Ginny: she told the truth, no matter what.

  I felt good when I was with her: things fell into place. In fact, talking to her felt so good that it took me a while to realize that she hardly ever talked about herself—and when she did it was about the work she was doing on Shell Key and the future she planned.

  She’d get a Ph.D. in marine biology, teach at the university, do research, and write books about the ocean, books that would make people love it as much as she did. She’d buy a little house of her own on Pass-a-Grille and live in it her whole life—with nobody to answer to but herself.

  Personal things? Forget it.

  She’d always been like that, Chuck said. Private. She went on dates in high school, but never had a boyfriend. She never had a best girlfriend, either. She made it a point to like everybody just the same.

  He grinned. “I like to think that if all of us were drowning and there was only one life jacket, I’d be the one she’d throw it to. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  I didn’t pry. I admired her. She was so small and fierce, barreling toward her dreams. Why would I want to mess with that?

  TWENTY-ONE

  The days came and went. Afternoons, when Ginny left for class, I might borrow the rod and reel Jimmy kept at the restaurant and fish for a while with some of the old guys, or walk over to the library and read. Sometimes I took the bus to Haslam’s and bought a used book or two. It was still so much like summer that I might not have noticed time passing at all, except for the bats and vampires and kid-sized mannequins dressed in ghost and witch and skeleton costumes decorating the dimestore window. At home, the trees would start to change color; football nights would be cool enough to need a jacket. Pretty soon, kids would be jumping in piles of leaves, carving pumpkins.

  A year ago, I was helping build the senior class’s Beowulf-themed homecoming float in Kathy’s backyard. We worked all day one Saturday and Sunday, the number of volunteers growing so that by the middle of the next week, thirty or forty people were there every night to help.

  Kathy strung extension cords out of her bedroom window and put her record player on a card table under a big maple tree, setting stacks of 45s on the spindle to play while we worked. The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, the usual girl groups—and, of course, multiple plays of “My Boyfriend’s Back,” at which point all the girls would stop stuffing crepe paper and sing at the top of their lungs.

  Sometimes I’d just stand back and watch Kathy for a while. Dressed in a pair of wool Bermuda shorts and knee socks and a school sweatshirt or one of my old football jerseys, she was either laughing and stuffing green crepe paper in rhythm to whatever song was on the record player, or in her take-charge mode, checking her clipboard, assigning people to various tasks. If she caught me idle, she’d grab my arm and march me over to do whatever she wanted me to do, which was funny rather than annoying because I got a kick out of her being so obsessed. And she looked so pretty, her cheeks as pink as the last of Mom’s roses in the brisk fall air. When she got me where she wanted me to be, I stood stock-still and refused to work until she kissed me.

  “Paul,” she’d say.

  But every time she kissed me, for real, and I’d go back to stuffing crepe paper or use my pocket knife to cut out the big letters of the slogan, “Dragon Down the Archers” from the heavy cardboard where she had traced them—all the while thinking about being alone with her, later, when everyone had gone.

  Her birthday
had fallen the night before the homecoming game. After we’d made the finishing touches on the float, we sang “Happy Birthday” and ate the cake and ice cream her mom brought out. Later, at our place by the river, I gave her the gold circle pin with a pearl set into it that I’d seen her admire in a jewelry shop window. It made me happy, watching her face light up when she opened the box. We kissed a while, then scrambled into the backseat the way we always did then, unbuttoning, unzipping, still kissing as we went. It hurt sometimes, our arms and legs like tentacles, our bodies ramming into each other as if to break each other open and rush into each other’s very being. Then the explosion that left us weak, breathing as if we’d been running instead of making love.

  The next night, we won the game and Kathy reigned as homecoming queen at the dance afterward. A few weeks later, we were on our way to New York. Not long after we got back, I found out my mom was dying.

  After the world shifted, Kathy and I had never again made love the way we’d made love the night of her birthday. In the months my mom was sick and after she had died, what I wanted was the feel of Kathy’s body, warm against mine. I wanted to hold her. We’d lie in the backseat of the car, wrapped in each other’s arms, breathing as if we were one person. I’d drift off to that place you go right before sleep sometimes, half there with Kathy, half in the dreamlike succession of images playing in my head, and when she began to give me light kisses on my neck, pressing the whole length of her body against mine, it felt real and not real, something that took me away from the sorrow and confusion of my real life for a little while.

  What if the universe could reset and offer up a different future, one without Mom dying in it? Maybe that future would include finding On the Road on our trip to New York, maybe it wouldn’t. If it did, maybe I’d break up with Kathy on account of it. Maybe we’d argue, make up and, eventually, get married and live happily ever after. Who knew?