The Town and the City

by Jack Kerouac

  “Who’s that?” he yelled, flying to his feet, half-asleep and tottering and uncomprehending. He heard a brief muffled cry of fear, a girl’s cry.

  “Joe?” she said.

  “Patricia?” he mumbled unbelievingly.

  “Joe, where’s the light? I can’t see anything.”

  Patricia herself found the light switch and clicked it on, flooding the room suddenly with a bright glaring light that made Joe wince.

  “What’s going on?” he croaked hoarsely. “What is this?”

  “Do you know that I’ve been waiting for you since six o’clock at home?” she said gravely. “You said you were going to come back. I told Walter and broke my date with him—well, we usually go dancing tonight at the lake. I told him I was going to see you and he understood—”

  “What are you doing standing in the middle of the room?” he cried irritably. “Sit down!”

  “Listen. I know everybody downstairs, my father’s best friend runs this hotel. I told them I was just coming up to see if you were in.”

  “What are they doing,” grinned Joe, “listening at the plumbing pipes?” As Joe said these things he had the strange sensation that it was two years ago and not now any more—as though in his sleep he had forgotten something important.

  “Well, listen, Joe,” said Patricia gravely, “if you’re going to tell me what you wanted to say, or whatever it is, let’s go outside someplace, we can’t stay here.”

  He began putting on his shoes, still yawning.

  “You’re acting strange,” said Patricia almost curiously.

  “I am?” he said, looking up solemnly at her.

  “You’re not like you were this morning or last night,” she said with pique in her tone. Joe was too sleepy and still a little too drunk to notice, and he spent the next few moments gravely washing his face and combing his hair, and even inspecting his face in the mirror awhile. Patricia just stood rigidly in the middle of the room watching him, her lip curled up in a kind of disgusted and irritated fascination, until he was ready to go, when her expression resumed its judicious blankness.

  Joe suddenly turned and stared at her. “Say, wait a minute!” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed and rubbing his jaw and looking vacantly straight ahead.

  Patricia stared at him indignantly and with some confusion.

  “I mean, this is funny, isn’t it?” continued Joe with a mischievous, tricky, lopsided grin on his face. “About us and everything, and the way we’ve been arguing. And you coming here.”

  “Joe, I told you I can’t stay in this room and I also told you—”

  “Hup!” cried Joe, standing up rigidly like a soldier at attention, but the tricky grin was still on his face. “Say, wait a minute! It is funny. Because when I woke up just now I almost forgot that you were Mrs. Fancy-pants now and no longer Pat Franklin—practically. I looked at you and everything seemed fine and nice, but now I just remembered—” And with this he wandered out of the room a little absentmindedly, opening the door and leaving it wide open behind him, but suddenly, with an infuriated bitter feeling that he could not conceal from her, he came back in the room just as she was following him out, and picked up his shaving kit from the dresser and stuffed it in his overcoat pocket, and went out again.

  “That’s that,” he muttered. “I’m going down to the Ford now and I’m off. Want me to drive you home? I’ve got the old rattletrap with me.”

  She said nothing, and suddenly Joe turned around and went back in the room, where the light was still shining, and sat on the windowsill gloomily. Patricia stood in the doorway in her threadbare coat—pensively. Joe jumped up and opened the window and looked out, where the snow had piled up an almost eerie silence in the streets.

  “I’m going home now, Pat, and don’t ask me why I came,” he said over his shoulder. “It was good while it lasted and I guess you agree with me.”

  “Agree? About what?”

  “About me leaving!” he suddenly almost yelled, and she was startled, even scared of him for a moment, and stood back against the door looking at him.

  “Yes,” the girl said at length, quietly, “I think that’s the best thing for you to do. I’m sorry you had to make the trip.”

  “Ah, shut up!” he snarled.

  “Yes, yes!” she suddenly snickered. “You’re right, I should never talk like that. Huh?”

  Joe was fumbling earnestly in his pockets for the car keys and at the same time for a cigarette. There were tears in his eyes. He loved her so much.

  Pat immediately walked across the room and handed him one from her purse and lit a match for him and held it up. He leaned to it abstractedly.

  “It all makes pretty good sense,” continued the girl in a firm, motherly tone of voice, “because after all you didn’t show up for two years and you didn’t even write, and now you’re going in the air force, and, well, as you say—that’s that.”

  “Yep,” said Joe, “that’s the ticket. By the way, say something to your mother for me, and the others. I better be going now before this storm gets bad.”

  And he suddenly planted a firm swift kiss on her lips, with the flair of a man kissing a woman good-bye impatiently, except that he lingered on her mouth for just the space of a moment more. He suddenly tore himself loose and walked off towards the door. And just as instantly he was lunging back and gripping her by the shoulder, as she herself stood there devouring his eyes with her own welling eyes.

  He pulled her to his side and began walking her towards the door, with their sides pressed tightly against each other and undulating closely. Finally, stopping short at the door, they turned to each other without parting, rolling into each other slowly, and embraced in a slow, feverish, tremendous kiss.

  “Yes, this,” Joe whispered in her neck, “this is the way we are.”

  And Patricia was lost in the deepest, most loving silence.

  Joe and the gloomy brooding Paul Hathaway went off to basic training together at an Army camp in Alabama.

  In the train at night while all the recruits howled and sang and told stories, Joe and Paul sat together silently and contemplated the rolling earth of mid-America by starlight, and wondered about their lives past, this inexpressible present, and their future in war and sadness. Paul Hathaway sat motionless with his dark face lowered scornfully to the vast night outside and he thought of his whole meaningless ravaged life. “I’ve been a bum all my life,” he said, “maybe I can do something worthwhile now, something different, maybe. Listen to those kids singing like they didn’t know they was going off to get their heads blown off. Christ, it’s nothin’ to sing about. Crazy bunch of basteds!” His dark eyes burned. “But me, I’ve been a bum all my life, and it don’t make much difference. So that’s that.”

  “Hey, you guys, how about a game of poker?” yelled somebody.

  “Shaddap,” said Paul Hathaway with indescribable scorn.

  And Joe just sat there reading and rereading this letter from Pat:

  Dear Joe,

  Promise me you’ll write and tell me where you’re going after basic training. What I said goes: where you go, I go. It doesn’t matter where, I’ll get a job and a place to live and when you have days off on leave I’ll be there to take care of you. I don’t want to be away from you any more, and I don’t want you to forget me again like you did the last time. If you do, Joe, it will be very easy for me to die. Do you understand that? Maybe I’m crazy, but don’t get mad at me for loving you and wanting to follow you. You’re mine and I’m yours, and you know I always was yours and always will be. I’m crazy about you, darling, please see that. There’s nothing else for me to do but be beside you, just beside you. Oh, how I miss you now.

  Pat

  Joe was destined not to leave Paul Hathaway’s side during the entire next two years in the service, thanks to their amazing luck. The swirl of orders and assignments and missions that were to come never separated them completely and always landed them back together in the same outfit an
d for the same duties more or less, to their wild yelling joy. This was just as the two cronies wanted it, naturally, and they helped the situation along by means of indefatigable intrigue and teamwork. After six weeks of basic training in Alabama they were sent to Denver for Air Force training.

  It was from there that Joe wrote a letter to Patricia. She promptly came out in a bus across the massive land, the Eastern hills, the Mississippi Valley, and the Great Plains altogether—two thousand miles of earth and America that she had never seen and that she was seeing now through the brooding eyes of love and sadness and womanly grandeur. When she got to Denver, weary and lost and frightened in the clanging morning streets of a new strange city, she made up her mind to stick it out. She got a job that very morning as a salesgirl in a department store, got a room downtown on Grant Street, and settled down to be near her Joe, just as she said she would.

  She even got a girl friend for Paul Hathaway. After long nights of dancing and drinking in the Larimer Street saloons, she cooked great breakfasts for the two soldiers, pressed their uniforms while they slept, woke them up with cigarettes and cups of coffee, and always sent them back to camp with a wonderful feeling of sweetness and joy. And all this was done in humblest loving silence.

  “Say, you joker, that’s some girl you’ve got there, that Pat!” admitted Paul Hathaway reluctantly. “I never did meet a girl like that before. And she followed you all the way out from back East.”

  One Sunday afternoon they had a picnic in the mountains, Joe Martin all trim and handsome in his uniform, Paul Hathaway grave and good-looking and soldierly with his parade cap tucked a-slant on his head, and Patricia, smiling and darkly beautiful, and little Bessie, whom Pat had brought along for Paul. They had their picture taken. It was a picture that Joe was going to keep in his wallet throughout the war and years later. It was a picture that really contained the lovely image of Patricia’s brooding devotion to him, as well as the whole legend of wartime America itself, a picture upon which was written the great story of wandering, sadness, parting, farewell, and war.

  One night Patricia and Joe passed the railroad station in downtown Denver, and there were the young wives with babies in their arms, the young soldier-wives who were beginning to wander the nation, tired and lonely and all wrapped in visions of love and remembrance and desperate devotion, traveling the thousands of night-miles across the continent in search of some pitiable little home or situation that would bring them close to their young husbands, if only for a few months. Joe and Patricia gazed at them with compassion and confusion.

  “See, Pat, that’s why I don’t think we should get married now, that’s my real reason,” Joe told her gently. “Understand that.”

  “Oh, but I wouldn’t mind, Joe!” she said joyfully.

  “I know you wouldn’t and they don’t either. But hell, look at those poor kids and just imagine what they’re going through just for the sake of—Well, I don’t know.”

  “All for love, Joe,” she smiled.

  “Yeah.”

  “You can’t tell a woman what isn’t right, Joe.”

  “Look at that little one there with the baby. She must be all of eighteen years old and look how tired she is. Where is she going, what is it all going to lead to? Nobody can tell about these things any more.”

  “It’s happened before. But I’ll do whatever you say, darling,” Pat whispered.

  They sat in the railroad station that night watching the young wives and the young soldiers and sailors sleeping on benches, passing the greater part of the night among the kids of their own generation as though they suddenly felt they didn’t belong anywhere else.

  Joe bought a fifth of whiskey and passed it around among the soldiers, while Patricia minded babies for the girls who had to make phone calls or get ready to entrain once again. And they all sat around chatting through the long night-hours while the trains arrived, discharging more and more of them, and trains departed, and good-byes were called, and more of them came and went, and they all looked somehow alike, mournful and lonesome, the young wives and the soldier-boys and the young civilians on their way to camp. In the station that night, a Carolina boy plucked on his guitar and sang songs, and the stationmaster, speaking over the public address system in the hollow, echoing, mournful voice of railroad stations, was calling: “One-thirty Rock Island train now loading on track four for Omaha, Des Moines, Davenport, and Chi-caw-go, and points East—Union Pacific train for Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, San Francisco, and points North to Portland, Tacoma, and Seattle, now arriving on track two—”

  The great wartime wanderings of Americans were just beginning. Great troop-trains rumbled by in the night everywhere, in Louisiana, in Oregon, in Kansas, in Virginia, and how many soldiers were in each of these trains, and what were their thoughts in sum and total and dark intensity? And the young wives were riding the trains with babies in their arms, and brooding, and waiting, and writing letters, and listening to the long hurled-back mournful howl of the train in the dark outside. Always, somehow, it was night, and the rolling land at night, and weary harassed sleep in coach-cars, and the railroad stations again, and a hollow melancholy voice calling the names of places:

  “Santa Fe, Fort Worth, Dallas, Shreveport, and New Awrleans—”

  And “Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and all points South—”

  It was a railroad landing and the crowds of khaki-clad soldiers searching eagerly, or waiting casually, or singing and shouting, and the sad blur of their faces as the train departed, and the vast infinite rolling land again, the oncoming of nighttime again, the clacking wheels, and thoughts, thoughts, thoughts in the night once more. And it seemed to be raining all the time too; and so many letters were written.

  Dearest Joey,

  We received your lovely letter and we’re all so proud of you for your promotion to Sargent. And aren’t you the fancy one going to Florida! Send me an orange, Joey, and send me a picture of the palm trees down there in sunny Florida. We are all well and we all love you and pray for you. Do your best, sonny boy, that’s all you can do, and take care of yourself, be extra careful. Your old mom prays for you every night and prays that you’ll be safe and sound no matter what. Here’s a big kiss from the whole family, including one from the old weazel himself your father.

  Mom.

  [And in the father’s handwriting]

  Hi there, Sarge! Remember me to the Southern belles down there!

  This is the pitiful way it was: and all the eerie feelings that young men were having in some strange part of the country far away from the places that had always been familiar in their lives, which were become unreal and fantastic now as a dream, and maddening and sorrowful too; and all the night-dreams woven out of three thousand miles of continental traveling and ten thousand miles of earth-traveling that were so gray and strange and pitiably enacted upon some deranged little map of the mind that was supposed to represent the continent of America and the earth itself. Sailors dreaming of the sea as some poignant little lake, or of their movements north and south, east or west on the terrific seas, as on some gray little canal or river, with life teeming on the banks; soldiers dreaming of America as some packed little place with mysterious fields and roads leading directly within walking dream-distance from state to state, or of islands in the Pacific as little puddle-jumps in the sweet small lake of the mind—all the vast and oceanic and terrific distances compressed by human necessity into something no bigger than a field, and a lake, or the palm of a hand.

  And then the bugle blowing in some Dakota army camp, and the rawboned, windburnt boys waking up again to the clear cold mornings and great snow-distances and distant hills, to drafty barracks and rough khaki trousers and the heavy G.I. boots clomping, waking up to steaming breakfasts, hot coffee, a cigarette, and then the windswept range and the peppery chatter of rifles firing in the frozen air, the broken cry of a sergeant, a puff of smoke, and someone rubbing his raw chapped hands together
and grinning steamily in the morning air.

  Or the Coast Guardsmen on some heaving little cutter off Labrador waking up to the violent squeak of the ship, the pitching and flopping on the waves, the wild dawn-light over the seething field of waters, and the cook’s slop bucket flying garbage into the sea, the acrid nauseous smell of cigarette smoke in the mess, the big red-faced gunner’s mate from Iowa slopping catsup all over his eggs, the little mascot-pups yapping broken cries in the North Atlantic wind, the rigging by the afterdeck squeaking and straining and the flag cracking in the wind, and the wide mournful spread of slow, smoking merchant ships crawling in formation around the horizon all dark and low-slung and cumbrous in the sea.

  Or the big B-17 revving on the field and blowing everyone back windswept and grinning, and the pilots striding across the field with their strapped-up gear talking earnestly and gesticulating, and the grimy mechanics scowling in the shed over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and the noise of mighty engines deafening the morning air in multidiscordant whining roars everywhere, and the sudden flash of sunlight off a passing wing, and men looking up absentmindedly and with pondering afterthought at the sky.

  It seemed as though a whole nation of men and women were beginning to wander with the war. They traveled on trains and busses and their familiar unknown faces were suddenly everywhere. In far-away towns where eleven o’clock had once been silence and the swish of treeleaves and the sleepy rush of Pinefork Creek, and the echoing howl of the Eleven-O-Two, now it was the crowds of warworkers hurrying for the busses and the midnight shift at the vast swooping sheds three miles out of town.

  Far off across a dusty Virginia field men toiled with their Lilliputian cranes upon the gigantic Gulliver-structure of the War Department, and it all shimmered and wove fantastically in the sun. Great flat dusty gashes were gouged into green fields as airfields came into being. By sleepy coastal villages they put up the shipyards, and inside at night huge hull-shapes were spawned by lights and sparking torches. Out of tremendous sheds that stood on the horizon a mile long they wheeled out the incredible airplanes and bulking tanks. Nothing seemed to get done as men and women went back and forth, talked, ate, slept, made love, “put in their hours,” drank, collected paychecks, argued, fought, leaned absorbedly over blueprints, hammered away at steel, walked around in absurd circles. Yet trains whipped across forlorn wildernesses and suddenly flashed past long camouflage-painted walls and fences surrounding whole territories of tanks and airplanes, and returned swiftly to the wilderness. Long flat-cars hauled big boxes across mountain passes, barges appeared in the Hudson River majestically bearing mighty gun-barrels and gun-mounts and Army locomotives and whole fleets of trucks, and out of the Golden Gate sailed the new heavy cruiser low and long and bristling in the waters. And suddenly, in some sleepy Indiana town, a jeep came bouncing in, stopped abruptly, someone got out with a red flag, and the khaki trucks came roaring one by one with the mystery of thousands suddenly passing and going somewhere swiftly.