On the Road, The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac

On the Road, The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac  

There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon---they were coming home from hi school, but I had no time now for thoughts like that and promised myself a ball in Denver. Allen Ginsberg was already in Denver; Neal was there; Hal Chase and Ed White were there, it was their home­town; Louanne was there; and there was mention of a mighty gang including Bob Burford, his beautiful blonde sister Beverly; two nurses that Neal knew, the Gullion sisters; and even Allen Temko my old college writing buddy was there. I looked forward to all of them with joy and anticipation. So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines, Iowa. A crazy guy with a kind of toolshack on wheels, a truck full of tools, that he drove standing up like a modern milkman, gave me a ride up the long hill; where I immediately got a ride from a farmer and his son heading out for Adel in Iowa. In this town, under a big elm tree near a gas station, I made the acquaintance of another hitch-hiker who was going to be with me a considerable part of the rest of the way. He was of all things a typical New Yorker, an Irishman who'd been driving a truck for the Post Office most of his worklife and was now headed for a girl in Denver and a new life. I think he was running away from something in NY, the law most likely. He was a real rednose young drunk of 30 and would have bored me ordinarily except my senses were sharp for any kind of human friendship. He wore a beat sweater and baggy pants and had nothing with him in the way of a bag---just a toothbrush and hand­kerchiefs. He said we ought to hitch together. I should have said no, because he looked pretty awful on the road. But we stuck together and got a ride from a taciturn man to Stuart Iowa, a town in which I was destined to be really stranded. We stood in front of the railroad ticket-shack in Stuart waiting for the westbound traffic till the sun went down, a good five hours...dawdling away the time at first telling about ourselves, then he told dirty stories, then we just ended up kicking pebbles and making goofy noises of one kind and another. We got bored; I decided to spend a buck on beer; we went to a riotous old buck's saloon in Stuart and had a few. There he got as drunk as he ever did in his Ninth Avenue night back home and yelled joyously in my ear all the sordid dreams of his life. I sort of liked him; not that he was a good sort, as he later proved, but he was enthusiastic about things. We got back on the road in the darkness and of course nobody stopped and nobody came by much. This went on until three o'clock in the morning; we spent some time trying to sleep on the bench at the railroad ticket office, but the telegraph clicked all night and we couldn't sleep and big freights were slamming around outside. We didn't know how to hop a proper hiball, we'd never done it before, whether they were going east or west and how to find out and what boxcars to pick and so on.. So when the Omaha bus came through just before dawn we hopped on it and joined the sleeping passengers---for this I spent most of the last of my few bucks, his fare as well as mine. His name was Eddie. He reminded me of my cousin-in-law from Brooklyn. That was why I stuck with him. It was like having an old friend along...a dumb smiling good-natured sort to goof along with. We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked out; all winter I'd been reading of the great wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn dumb kind and another, all laid out in the dismal gray dawn. Then Omaha, and by God the first cowboy I saw, walking along the bleak walls of the wholesale meat ware­houses with a great big ten gallon hat on and Texas boots, looking like any beat character of the brickwall dawns of the east except for the getup. We got off the bus and walked clear up the hill, the long hill formed by the mighty Missouri over the millenniums, alongside of which Omaha is built, and got out to the country and stuck our thumbs out. We got a brief ride to a further crossroads from a wealthy rancher with a ten-gallon hat, who said the Valley of Nebraska (platte) was as great as the Nile Valley of Egypt, and as he said so I saw the great trees in the distance that snaked with the riverbed and the great verdant fields around it, and almost agreed with him. Then as we were standing there and it was starting to get cloudy another cowboy, this one six foot tall with a modest half-gallon hat, called us over and wanted to know if either one of us could drive. Of course Eddie could drive, and he had a licence and I didn't. He had two cars with him that he was driving back to Montana. His wife was sleeping at Grand Island in a motel and he wanted us to drive one of the cars there, where she'd take over. At that point he was going north and that was the limit of our ride with him. But it was a good 100 miles into Nebraska and of course we jumped for it. Eddie drove alone, the cowboy and myself following, and no sooner were we out of town that he started to ball that jack ninety miles an hour out of sheer exuberance. 'Damn me, what's that boy doing!' the cowboy shouted, and took off after him. It began to be like a race. For a minute I thought Eddie was trying to get away with the car---and for all I know that's what he meant to do. But Old Cowboy stuck to him and caught up with him and tooted the horn. Eddie slowed down. The cowboy tooted to stop. 'Damn, boy, you're liable to get a flat going that speed. Can't you drive a little slower.' 'Well I'll be damned, was I really going ninety?' said Eddie. 'I didn't realize it on this smooth road.' 'Just take it a little easy and we'll all get to Grand Island in one piece.' 'Sure thing.' And we resumed our journey. Eddie had calmed down and probably even got sleepy. So we drove 100 miles across Nebraska, following the winding So Platte with its verdant fields. 'During the depression,' said the cowboy to me, 'I used to hop freights at least once a month. In those days you'd see hundreds of men riding a flat car or in a box car, and they weren't just bums, they were all kinds of men out of work and going from one place to another and some of them just wandering. It was like that all over the west. Brakemen never bothered you in those days. I don't know about today. Nebraska I ain't got no use for. Why in the middle 1930's this place wasn't nothing but a big dustcloud as far as the eye could see. You couldn't breathe. The ground was black. I was here in those days. They can give Nebraska back to the Indians far as I'm concerned. I hate this damn place more than any place in the world. Montana's my home now, Missoula. You come up there sometime and see God's country.' Later in the afternoon I slept and got some rest when he got tired talking---he was an interesting talker. We stopped along the road for a rest and a bite to eat. The cowboy went off to have a spare tire patched and Eddie and I sat down in a kind of homemade diner. I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide oldtimer Nebraska farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner; you could hear his raspy cries clear across the plains, across the whole gray world of them that day. Everybody else laughed with him. He didn't have a care in the world and had the hugest regard for everybody nevertheless. I said to myself, 'Wham listen to that man laugh. That's the west, here I am in the West.' He came booming into the diner calling Maw's name from a distance, and she made the sweetest cherrypie in Nebraska and I had some with a mountainous scoop of ice cream on top. 'Maw, rustle me up some grub afore I have to start eatin myself raw or some damn silly idee like that' and he threw himself on a stool and went 'Hyaw hyaw hyaw hyaw! and thow some beans in it.' It was just the spirit of the west sitting right next to me. I wished I knew his whole raw life and what the hell he'd been doing all these years besides laughing and yelling like that. 'Whooee,' I told my soul, and the cowboy came back and off we went to Grand Island. We got there in no time flat. He went to fetch his sleeping wife and off to whatever fate awaited him in the intervening years since, and Eddie and I resumed on the road. We got a ride from a couple of young fellows, wranglers, teenagers, countryboys in a put-together jaloppy and were left off somewhere up the line in a thin drizzle of rain. Then an old man who said nothing and God knows why he picked us up took us to (Preston) Nebraska. Here Eddie stood forlornly in the road in front of a staring bunch of short squat Omaha Indians who had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Across the road was the railroad track and the watertank saying 'Preston.' 'Damn me,' said Eddie with amazement, 'I've been in this town before. It was years ago, during the fucking war, at night, late at night when everybody was sleeping, I went out on the platform to smoke, and there we was in the middle of nowhere and black as hell and I look up and see that name Preston written on the watertank..bound for the Pacific, every­body snoring, every damn dumb sucker, and we only stayed a few minutes stoking up or something and off we went. Damn me, this Preston! -- I hated this place ever since!' And we were stuck in Preston. As in Daven­port Iowa somehow all the cars were farmer-cars; and once in a while a tourist car, which is worse, with old men driving and their wives pointing out the sights or poring over maps, and sitting back like they do in their livingrooms all over America looking at everything with suspicious faces. The drizzle increased and Eddie got cold; he had very little clothes. I fished a wool plaid shirt from my canvas bag and he put it on. He felt a little better. I had a cold. I bought cough drops in a rickety Indian store of some kind. I went to the little two-by-four post office and wrote my mother a penny postcard. We went back to the gray road. There she was in front of us, Preston, written on the watertank. The Rock Island balled by. We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur. The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder. But I knew I'd get there. A tall, lanky fellow in a gallon hat stopped his car on the wrong side of the road and came over to us; he looked like a sheriff. We prepared our stories secretly. He took his time coming over. 'You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?' We didn't under­stand his question and it was a damned good question. 'Why?' we said. 'Well I own a little carnival that's pitched a few mile down the road and I'm looking for some old boys willing to work and make a buck for themselves. I've got a roulette concession and a wooden ring conces­sion, you know, the kind you throw around dolls and take your luck. You boys want to work for me you can get 30% of the take.' 'Room and board?' 'You can get a bed but no food. You'll have to eat in town for that. We travel some.' We thought it over. 'It's a good opportunity,' he said and waited patiently for us to make up our minds. We felt silly and didn't know what to say and I for one didn't want to get hung up with a carnival I was in such a bloody hurry to get to the gang in Denver. I said 'I don't know, I'm going as fast as I can and I don't think I have the time.' Eddie said the same thing, and the old man waved his hand and casually sauntered back to his car and drove off. And that was that. We laughed about it awhile and speculated what it would have been like. I for one had visions of a dark and dusty night on the plains, and the faces of Nebraska families wandering by, Okies mostly, with their rosy children looking at every­thing with awe, and I know I would have felt like the Devil himself rooking them with all those cheap carnival tricks that they make you do...and the ferris wheel revolving in the flatlands darkness, and Godalmighty the sad music of the merry-go-round and me wanting to get on to my goal...and sleeping in some gilt wagon on a bed of burlap. Eddie turned out to be a pretty absentminded pal of the road. A funny old contraption rolled by, driven by an old man, it was made of some kind of aluminum, square as a box, a trailer no doubt, but a weird crazy Nebraska homemade trailer, and he was going very slow and stopped. We rushed up; he said he could only take one; without a word, after a look from me, Eddie jumped in and slowly rattled from my sight, and wearing my wool plaid shirt, the very shirt I'd worn to write the first half of my book. Well, lackaday, I kissed the shirt goodbye, it only had sentimental value in any case, besides of which, though I didn't know it, I was destined to retrieve it some ways up the road. I waited in our personal godawful Preston for a long, long time, several hours; I kept thinking it was getting night but actually it was only early afternoon, but dark. Denver, Denver, how would I ever get to Denver. I was just about giving up and plan­ning to sit over coffee in a stew when a fairly new car stopped, driven by a young guy. I ran like mad. 'Where you going?' 'Denver.' 'Well I can take you a hundred miles up the line.' 'Grand, grand, you saved my life.' 'I used to hitch hike myself, that's why I always pickup a fellow.' 'I would too if I had a car.' And so we talked, and he told me about his life, which wasn't very inter­esting and I started to sleep some and woke up right outside the town of North Platte, where he left me off. And I wasn't thinking about much but the greatest ride in my life was about to come up, a truck, with a flatboard at the back, with about already five boys sprawled out on it and the drivers, two young blonde farmers from Minnesota were picking up every single soul they found on that road---the most smiling cheerful couple of hand­some bumkins you could ever wish to see, both wearing cotton shirts and overalls, nothing else, both thick-wristed and earnest, with broad howareyou smiles for anybody and anything that came across their path. I ran up, said 'Is there room?' They said 'Sure, hop on, 's'room for everybody.' So I did. I was amazed by the simplicity of the whole ride; I wasn't on the flatboard before the truck roared off, I lurched, a rider grabbed me, and I sat down some. Somebody passed a bottle of rotgut, the bottom of it. I took a big swig in the wild lyrical driz­zling air of Nebraska. 'Whooee, here we go!' yelled a kid with a baseball cap, and they gunned up the truck to seventy and passed everybody on the road. 'We been riding this sonofabitch since Omaha. These guys never stop. Every now and then you have to yell for pisscall otherwise you have to piss off the air and hang on, brother, hang on.' I looked at the company. There were two young farmer boys from North Dakota in red baseball caps, which is the standard NoDakota farmer boy hat, and they were headed for the harvests: their old men had given them leave to hit the road for a summer. Then there were two young city boys, from Columbus Ohio, high school footballplayers, chewing gum, winking, singing in the breeze, and they said they were hitch hiking around the US for the summer. 'We're going to LA!' they yelled. 'What you going to do there?' 'Hell, we don't know. Who cares?' Then there was a tall slim fellow whose name was Slim and he came from Montana, he said, and he had a sneaky look. 'Where you from?' I asked; I was lying next to him on the platform, you couldn't sit without bouncing off; it had no rails. And he turned slowly to me, opened his mouth and said, 'Mon-ta-na.' And finally there was Mississippi Gene and his charge. Mississippi Gene was a little dark guy who rode freight trains around the country, a 30 year old hobo but with a youthful look so you couldn't tell exactly what age he was. And he sat on the boards crosslegged, looking out over the fields without saying anything for hundreds of miles, and finally at one point turned to me and said 'Where you headed?' I said Denver. 'I got a sister there but I ain't seed her for several couple years.' His language was melodious and slow. His charge was a sixteen year old tall blond kid, also in hobo rags, and that is to say they wore old clothes that had been turned black by the soot of railroads and the dirt of boxcars and sleeping on the ground. The blond kid was also quiet and he seemed to be running away from something, and it figured to be the law the way he looked straight ahead and wet his lips in worried thought. They sat side by side, silent buddies, and said nothing to anyone else. The farmboys and the high school boys bored them; Montana Slim however spoke to them occasionally with a sardonic and insinu­ating smile. They paid no attention to him. Slim was all insinuation. I was afraid of his long goofy grin that he opened up straight in your face and held there half-moronically. 'You got any money?' he said to me. 'Hell no, maybe enough for a pint of whisky till I get to Denver. What about you?' 'I know where I can get some.' 'Where?' 'Anywhere. You can always folly a man down an alley can't you?' 'Yeah, I guess you can.' 'I ain't beyond doing it when I really need some dough. Headed up to Montana to see my father. I'll have to get off this rig at Cheyenne and move up some other way, these crazy boys are going to Los Angeles.' 'Straight?' 'All the way – if you want to go to L.A. you got a ride.' I mulled this over, the thought of zoomingallnight across Nebraska, Wyoming and the Utah desert in the morning and then the Nevada desert most likely in the afternoon, and actually arriving in Los Angeles California within a foreseeable space of time almost made me change my plans. But I had to go to Denver. I'd have to get off at Cheyenne too, and hitch south 90 miles to Denver. I was glad when the two Minne­sota farmboys in the cab decided to stop in No. Platte and eat; I wanted to have a look at them. They came out of the cab and smiled at all of us. 'Pisscall!' said one. 'Time to eat!' said the other. But they were the only ones in the party who had money to buy food. We all shambled after them to a restaurant run by a whole bunch of women and sat around over hamburgers while they wrapped away enormous meals just like they were back in their mother's kitchen. They were brothers: they were trans­porting farm machinery from Los Angeles to Minnesota and making good money at it. So on their trip to the Coast empty they picked up everybody on the road. They'd done this about five times now; they were having a hell of a time. They liked everything. They never stopped smiling. I tried to talk to them---actually it was a kind of dumb attempt on my part to befriend the captains of our ship and there was no reason to, because they treated the crew with equal respect---and the only response I got were two sunny smiles and large white corn-fed teeth. Everybody had joined them in the restau­rant except the two hobo kids, Gene and his boy. When we all got back they were still sitting in the truck forlorn and disconsolate. Now the darkness was falling. The drivers had a smoke; I jumped at the chance to go buy a bottle of whisky to keep warm in the rushing cold air of night. They smiled when I told them. 'Go ahead, hurry up.' 'You can have a couple shots!' I reassured them. 'Oh no, we never drink, go ahead.' Montana Slim and the two high school boys wandered the streets of North Platte with me till I found a whisky store. They chipped in some, and Slim some, and I bought a fifth. Tall sullen men watched us go by from false-front build­ings; the main street was lined with square box-houses. There were immense vistas of the plains beyond every sad street. I felt something different in the air in North Platte, I didn't know what it was. In five minutes I did. We got back on the truck and roared off, same speed. It got dark quickly. We all had a shot, and suddenly I looked, and the verdant farmfields of the So. Platte began to disappear and in their stead, so far you couldn't see to the end of it, appeared long flat wastelands of sand and sagebrush. I was astounded. 'What in the hell is this?' I cried out to Slim. 'This is the beginning of the range­lands, boy. Hand me another drink.' 'Whoopee!' yelled the high school boys. 'Columbus so long! What would Sparkie and the boys say if they was here. Yow!' The drivers had switched up front; the fresh brother was gunning the truck to the limit. The road changed too; humpy in the middle, with soft shoulders and a ditch on both sides about four feet deep, so that the truck bounced and teetered from one side of the road to the other, miraculously only when there no cars coming the oppos ite way, and I thought we'd all take a somersault. But they were tremendous drivers. They swapped at the wheel all the way from Minnesota to palmy L.A. without stopping more than 10 minutes to eat. How that truck disposed of the Nebraska nub!---the nub that sticks out over Colo­rado. And soon I realized I was actually at last over Colorado, though not officially in it, but actually looking southwest towards Denver itself a few hundred miles away. I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way. And suddenly Mississippi Gene turned to me from his crosslegged patient reverie, and opened his mouth, and leaned close, and said 'These plains put me in the mind of Texas.' 'Are you from Texas?' 'No sir, I'm from Green-vell Muzz-sippy' and that was the way he said it. 'Where's that kid from?' 'He got into some kind of trouble back in Mississippi so I offered to help him out. Boy's never been out on his own so I offered to help some. I take care of him best as I can, he's only a child.' Although Gene was white there was something of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like Hunkey the NY dope addict in him, but a railroad Hunkey, a traveling epic Hunkey, crossing and re-crossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer and only because he has no place he can stay in without getting tired of it and because there's nowhere to go but everywhere, and keep rolling under the stars, generally the western stars. 'I been to Og-den a couple times. If you want to ride on to Og-den I got some friends there we could hole up with.' 'I'm going to Denver from Cheyenne.' 'Hell, go right straight thu, you don't get a ride like this everyday.' This too was a tempting offer. What was in Ogden. 'What's Ogden?' I said. 'It's the place where most of the boys pass thu and always meet there, you're liable to see anybody there.' In my earlier days I'd been to sea with a tall rawboned fellow from Ruston La. called Big Slim Hubbard, William Holmes Hubbard, who was hobo by choice; as a little boy he'd seen a hobo come up to ask his mother for a piece of pie, and she had given it to him, and when the hobo went off down the road the little boy had said, 'Ma what is that fellow?' 'Why that's a ho-bo.' 'Ma, I want to be a ho-bo someday.' 'Shet your mouth, that's not for the like of the Hubbards.' But he never forgot that day, and grew up, after a short spell playing football at LSU, and did become a hobo. Slim and I spent many nights telling stories and spitting tobacco juice in paper containers. There was something so indubitably remin­iscent of Big Slim Hubbard in Mississippi Gene's demeanor that I came out and said 'Do you happen to have met a fellow called Big Slim Hubbard somewhere?' And he said 'You mean the tall fellow with the big laugh?' 'Well, that sounds like him. He came from Ruston Lou isiana.' 'That's right, Louisiana Slim he's sometimes called. Yessir, I shore have met Big Slim.' 'And he used to work in the East Texas oil fields?' 'East Texas is right. And now he's punching cows.' And that was exactly right; and still I couldn't believe Gene could have really known Slim, whom I'd been looking for more or less for years. 'And he used to work in tugboats in NY?' 'Well now, I don't know about that.' 'I guess you only know him in the West.' 'I reckon, I ain't never been to NY.' 'Well, damn me, I'm amazed you know him. This is a big country. Yet I knew you must have known him.' 'Yessir, I know Big Slim pretty well. Always generous with his money when he's got some. Mean tough fellow, too; I seen him flatten a police-man in the yards at Chey­enne, one punch.' That sounded like Big Slim; he was always practising that one punch in the air; he looked like Jack Dempsey, but a young Jack Dempsey who drank. 'Damn!' I yelled into the wind, and I had another shot, and by now I was feeling pretty good. Every shot was wiped away by the rushing wind of the open truck, wiped away of its bad effects and the good effect sank in my stomach. 'Cheyenne, here I come!' I sang. 'Denver, look out for your boy.' Montana Slim turned to me, pointed at my shoes, and commented 'You reckon if you put them things in the ground something'll grow up?' Without cracking a smile, of course, and the other boys heard him and laughed. And they were the silliest shoes in America; I brought them along specifically because I didn't want my feet to sweat in the hot road for fear I'd develop another case of phlebitis, and except for the rain in Bear Mtn. they proved to be the best possible shoes for my journey. So I laughed with them. And they'd become pretty ragged by now, the bits of colored leather stuck up like pieces of a fresh pineapple, with my toes showing through. Well, we had another shot and laughed. As in a dream we zoomed through small crossroad towns smack out of the darkness and passed long lines of lounging harvest hands and cowboys in the night and were back out there. They watched us pass in one motion of the head and we saw them slap their thighs from the continuing dark the other side of town – we were a funny looking crew. A lot of men were in this country at that time of year, it was harvest time. The Dakota boys were fidgeting. 'I think we'll get off at the next pisscall, seems like there's a lot of work around here.' 'All you got to do is move north when it's over here,' counseled Montana Slim, 'and jess follow the harvest till you get to Canada.' The boys nodded vaguely; they didn't take much stock in his advice. Meanwhile the blond young fugitive sat the same way; every now and then Gene leaned over from his Buddhistic trance over the rushing dark plains and said something tenderly in the boy's ear. The boy nodded. Gene was taking care of him, even his moods and his fears. I wondered where the hell they would go and what they could do. They had no cigarettes. I squan­dered my pack on them I loved them so. They were grateful and gracious. They never asked; I kept offering. Montana Slim had his own but never passed the pack. We zoomed through another crossroads town, passed another line of tall lanky men in jeans, clustered in the dim light like moths on the desert, and returned to the tremendous darkness...and the stars overhead were as pure and bright, because of the increasingly thin air as we mounted the high hill of the western plateau about a foot a mile, so they say, and a mile a minute, pure clean air, and no trees obstructing any low-levelled stars anywhere. And once I saw a moody whitefaced cow in the sage by the road as we flitted by. It was like riding a railroad train, just as steady and just as straight. By and by we came to a town, slowed down, Montana Slim said 'Ah, pisscall' but the Minnesotans didn't stop and went right on through. 'Damn, I gotta piss,' said Slim. 'Go over the side' said somebody. 'Well, I will' he said, and slowly, as we all watched he inched to the back of the platform on his ass, holding on as best he could till his legs dangled over. Somebody knocked on the window of the cab to bring this to the attention of the brothers. Their great smiles broke as they turned. As just as Slim was ready to proceed, precarious as it was already, they began zig-zagging the truck at 70 miles an hour. He fell back a moment; we saw a whale's spout in the air; he struggled back to a sitting position. They swung the truck. Wham, over he went on his side, pissing all over himself. In the roar we could hear him faintly cursing with the whine of a man far across the hills. 'Damn ...damn..' He never knew we were doing this deliberately, he just struggled with his lot, and just as grim as Job. When he was finished, as such, he was wringing wet, and now he had to edge and shimmy his way back, and with a most woebegone look, and everybody laughing, except the sad blond boy, and the Minnesotans roaring in the cab. I handed him the bottle to make up for it. 'What the hail,' he said, 'was they doing that on purpose?' 'They sure were.' 'Well damn me, I didn't know that. I know I tried it back in Nebraska and didn't have half so much trouble.' We came suddenly into the town of Ogallala, and here the fellows in the cab called out 'Pisscall!' and with great good delight. Slim stood sullenly by the truck rueing a lost opportunity. The two Dakota boys said goodbye to everybody and figured they'd start harvesting here. We watched them disappear in the night towards the shacks at the end of town where lights were burning, where a watcher of the night in jeans said the employ­ment men would be. I had to buy more cigarettes. Gene and the blond boy followed me to stretch their legs. We walked into the least likely place in the world, a kind of lonely plains sodafountain for the local teenage girls and boys. They were dancing, a few of them, to the music on the jukebox. There was a lull when we came in. Gene and Blondey just stood there looking at nobody; all they wanted were cigarettes. There were some pretty girls, too. And one of them made eyes at Blondey and he never saw it and if he had, he wouldn't have cared he was so sad and gone. I bought a pack each for them; they thanked me. The truck was ready to go. It was getting on midnight now and cold. Gene who'd been around the country more times than he could count on his fingers and toes said the best thing to do now was for all of us to bundle up under the big tarpaulin or we'd freeze. In this manner, and with the rest of the bottle, we kept warm as the air grew ice cold and pinged our ears. The stars seemed to get brighter the more we climbed the High Plains. We were in Wyoming now. Flat on my back I stared straight up at the magnificent firmament, glorying in the time I was making, in how far I had come from sad Bear Mtn. after all, how everything worked out in the end, and tingling with kicks at the thought of what lay ahead of me in Denver---whatever, whatever it would be and good enough for me. And Mississippi Gene began to sing a song. He sang it in a melodious quiet voice, with a river accent, and it was simple, just 'I got a purty little girl, she's sweet six-teen, she's the purti-est thing you ever seen,' repeating it with other lines thrown in, all concerning his life in general and how far he'd been and how he wished he could go back to her but he done lost her. I said 'Gene that's the prettiest song.' 'It's the sweetest I know,' he said with a smile. 'I hope you get where you're going and be happy when you do.' 'I always make out and move along one way or the other.' Montana Slim was asleep. He woke up and said to me 'Hey Blackie, how about you and me making Cheyenne together tonight before you go to Denver.' 'Sure thing.' I was drunk enough to go for anything. And the truck reached the outskirts of Cheyenne, we saw the high red lights of the local radio station, and suddenly we were bucking through a great strange crowd of people that poured on both sidewalks. 'Hell's bells, it's Wild West Week' said Slim. Great crowds of businessmen, fat businessmen in boots and tengallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire bustled and whoopeed on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne; further down were the long stringy boulevard lights of new downtown Cheyenne. The celebration was focusing on oldtown. Blank guns went off. The saloons were crowded to the sidewalk. I was amazed and at the same time I had never seen anything so really ridiculous: in my first shot at the west I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition. Man I rubbed my eyes. We had to jump off the truck and say goodbye, the Minnesotans weren't interested in hanging around. I was sad to see them go and realized that I would never see any of them again, but that's the way it was. 'You'll freeze your ass tonight,' I warned, 'then you'll burn 'em in the desert tomorrow afternoon.' 'That's allright with me long's as we get out of this cold night' said Gene. And the truck left, threading its way through the crowds and nobody paying any attention to the strangeness of it and of the kids inside the tarpaulin watching the town like babes from a coverlet. I watched it disappear into the night. Mississippi Gene was gone; bound for Og-den and then God knows what. I was with Montana Slim and we started in hitting the bars. I had about ten dollars, eight of which I foolishly squandered that night on drinking. First we milled with all the cowboydudded tourists and oilmen and ranchers, at bars, in doorways, on the sidewalk, then I shook Slim for awhile who by now was wandering a little slaphappy in the street from all the whisky and beer: he was that kind of drinker, his eyes got glazed, in a minute he'd be telling an absolute stranger about things. I went into a chili joint and the waitress was Spanish and beautiful. I ate, and then I wrote her a little love note on the back of the bill. The chili joint was deserted; everybody was drinking. I told her to turn the bill over. She read it and laughed. It was a little poem about how I wanted her to come and see the night with me. 'I'd love to Chiquito but I have a date with my boyfriend.' 'Can't you shake him?' 'No, no, I don't' she said sadly; and I loved the way she said it. 'Some other time I'll come by here,' I said, and she said 'Any time, kid.' Still I hung around just to look at her and had another cup of coffee. Her boyfriend came in sullenly and wanted to know when she was off. She bustled around to close the place quick. I had to get out. I gave her a smile when I left. Things were going on as wild as ever outside, except that the fat burpers were getting drunker and whooping up louder. It was funny. There were Indian chiefs wandering around in big head­dresses and really solemn among the flushed drunken faces. I saw Slim tottering along and joined him. He said 'I just wrote a postcard to my Paw in Montana. You reckon you can find a mailbox and put it in.' It was a strange request; he gave me the postcard and tottered through the swinging doors of a saloon. I took the card, went to the box and took a quick look at it. 'Dear Paw, I'll be home Wednesday. Everything's all right with me and I hope the same's with you. Richard.' It gave me a different idea of him; how tenderly polite he was with his father. I went in the bar and joined him. Sometime in the distant dawn I planned to get on the road for Denver, the last 100 miles but instead of that we picked up two girls who were wandering in the crowds, a pretty young blonde and a fat brunette sister of some kind. They were dumb and sullen but we wanted to make them. We took them to a rickety nightclub that was already closing and there I spent all but two dollars on Scotches for them and beer for us. I was getting drunk and didn't care; everything was fine. My whole being and purpose was pointed at the little blonde's middle; I wanted to go in there with all my strength. I hugged her and wanted to tell her. The nightclub closed and we all wandered out in the rickety dusty streets. I looked up at the sky; the pure wonderful stars were still there, burning. The girls wanted to go to the bus station so we all went, but they apparently wanted to go there to meet some sailor who was there waiting for them, a cousin of the fat girl's, and the sailor had friends with him. I said to the blonde 'What's up.' She said she wanted to go home, in Colorado just over the line south of Cheyenne. 'I'll take you in a bus,' I said. 'No, the bus stops on the hiway and I have to walk across that damned prairie all by myself. I spend all afternoon looking at the damn thing and I don't aim to walk over it tonight.' 'Ah listen, we'll take a nice walk in the prairie flowers.' 'There ain't no flowers there,' she said. 'I want to go to New York, I'm sick and tired of this. Ain't no place to go but Cheyenne and ain't nothing in Cheyenne.' 'Ain't nothing in New York.' 'Hell there ain't' she said with a curl of her lips. The bus station was crowded to the doors. All kinds of people were waiting for buses or just standing around; there were a lot of Indians, who watched everything with their stony eyes. The girl disengaged herself from my talk and joined the sailor and the others. Slim was dozing on a bench. I sat down. The floors of bus stations are the same all over the country, they're always covered with butts and spit and a sadness that only bus stations have. For a moment it was no different than being in Newark except that I knew the great hugeness outside that I loved so much. I rued the way I had broken up the purity of my entire trip, saving every dime and not drinking and not dawdling and really making time, by fooling around with this sullen girl and spending all my money. It made me sick. I hadn't slept in so long I got too tired to curse and fuss and went off to sleep; eventually I curled up on the entire seat with my canvas bag for a pillow, and in that way slept till eight o'clock in the morning among the dreamy murmurs and noises of the station and of hundreds of people passing. I woke up with a big head­ache. Slim was gone...to Montana I guess. I went outside. And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, in hints and mighty visitation, far off, the great snowy-tops of the Rocky Mountains. I took a deep breath. I had to get to Denver, at once. First I ate a breakfast, a modest one of toast and coffee and one egg, and then I cut out of town to the hiway. The Wild West festival was still going on, I left it behind me: they were having rodeos and the whooping and jumping was about to start all over again. I wanted to see my gangs in Denver. I went over a rail­road overpass and reached a crossroads of shacks where two highways forked off, both for Denver. I took the one nearest the mountains so I could look at them, and pointed myself that way. I got a ride right off from a young fellow from Connecticut who was driving around the country in his jaloppy painting; he was the son of an editor in the East. He talked and talked; I was sick from drinking and from the altitude. At one point I almost had to stick my head out the window. But I made it, and by the time he let me off at Longmont Colo. I was feeling normal again and had even started telling him about the state of my own travels. He wished me luck. It was beautiful in Longmont. Under a tremendous old tree was a bed of green lawngrass belonging to a gas station. I asked the attendant if I could sleep there and he said sure; so I stretched out a wool shirt, lay my face flat on it, with an elbow out, and with one eye cocked at the snowy Rockies in the hot sun for just a moment, I fell asleep for two delicious hours, the only discomfiture being an occasional Colorado ant. 'And here I am in Colorado!' I kept thinking gleefully. 'Damn! damn! damn! I'm making it!'

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