Читать книгу Dr. Sax - Jack Kerouac - Страница 10

Doctor Sax lived in the woods, he was no city shroud. I see him stalking with the incredible Jean Fourchette, woodsman of the dump, idiot, giggler, toothless-broken-brown, searched, sniggerer at fires, loyal beloved companion of long childhood walks– The tragedy of Lowell and the Sax Snake is in the woods, the world around–

In the fall there were great sere brown sidefields sloping down to the Merrimac all rich with broken pines and browns, fall, the whistle was just shrilled to end the third quarter in the wintry November field where crowds and me and father stood watching scuffling uproars of semipro afternoons like in the days of old Indian Jim Thorpe, boom, touchdown. There were deer in the Billerica woods, maybe one or two in Dracut, three or four in Tyngsboro, and a hunter’s corner in the Lowell Sun sports page. Great serried cold pines of October morning when school’s re-started and the apples are in, stood naked in the northern gloom waiting for denudement. In the winter the Merrimac River flooded in its ice; except for a narrow strip in the middle where ice was fragile with crystals of current the whole swingaround basin of Rosemont and the Aiken Street Bridge was laid flat for winter skating parties that could be observed from the bridge with a snow telescope in the gales and along the Lakeview side dump minor figures of Netherlander snowscapes are marooning in the whorly world of pale white snow. A blue saw cracks down across the ice. Hockey games devour the fire where the girls are huddled, Billy Artaud with clenched teeth is smashing the opponent’s hockey stick with a kick of spiked shoes in the fiendish glare of winter fighting days, I’m going backwards in a circle at forty miles an hour trailing the puck till I lose it on a bounce and the other Artaud brothers are rushing up pellmell in a clatter of Dit Clappers to roar into the fray–

This the same raw river, poor river, March melts, brings Doctor Sax and the rainy nights of the Castle.