Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online

girls—“but you’ve got bedroom eyes, hey. Did I tell ya about the guy I didnt know who put his arm around me at the Girl Officers’ Ball?” She was a Girl Officer.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œDont you want to know if I asked him to take his hands off me—?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œDont be silly, I dont talk to strangers.”
    Pauline, brown hair, blue eyes, the great glistening stars in her lips—She too lived near a river, the Merrimack, but near the highway, the big bridge, the big carnival and football field—you could see the factories across the river. I spent many afternoons there conversing with her in the snow, about kisses, before meeting Maggie. All of a sudden one night she opens the damned door and kisses me—big stuff! The first night I met her all I could do was smell her hair in my bed, in my hair—told this to Lousy, I smelt her in his hair too. It interested Lousy. When I told him we’d finally kissed the night before (sitting with him on my bed with the gang G.J. Scotty Iddyboy sitting in chairs of my bedroom after supper talking about the team my mother doing the dishes my father at the radio) Lousy wanted me to kiss him like I had kissed Pauline. We did it, too; the others didnt even stop talking about the team. But now Maggie was another matter—her kisses, an expensive wine, we dont have much, nor often—hidden in the earth—limited, like Napoleon brandy—pretty soon no more. Marry, love somebody else? Impossible. “I love only you, Maggie,” I tried to say, no more success than with G.J. the little boy loves of puberty. I tried to assure her that she would never have cause for jealousy, truly. Enough of singing—I’ll sing later—the story of Maggie—the beginning of my jealousy, the things that happened.
    The mortality in my heart is heavy, they’re going to throw me in a hole already eaten by the dogs of dolor like a sick Pope who’s played with too many young girls the black tears flowing from his skeleton-hole eyes.
    Ah life, God—we wont find them any more the Nova Scotias of flowers! No more saved afternoons! The shadows, the ancestors, they’ve all walked in the dust of 1900 seeking the new toys of the twentieth century just as Céline says—but it’s still love has found us out, and in the stalls was nothing, eyes of drunken wolves was all. Ask the guys at the war.

8
    I see her head bowed in thinking of me, by the river, her beautiful eyes searching inside for the proper famous thought of me she loved. Ah my angel—my new angel, black, follows me now—I exchanged the angel of life for the other. Before the crucifix of Jesus in the house I stood attentively, sure of many things, I was going to see the tears of God and already I saw them in that countenance elongated white in plaster that gave life—gave life bitten, finished, droop-eyed, the hands nailed, the poor feet also nailed, folded, like winter cold feet of the poor Mexican worker you see in the street waiting for the guys to come with the barrels to empty the rags the crap and keeps one foot on the other to keep warm—Ah—The head bent, like the moon, like my picture of Maggie, mine and God’s; the dolors of a Dante, at sixteen, when we dont know conscience or what we’re doing.
    When I was younger, ten, I’d pray at the crucifix for the love of my Ernie Malo, a little boy in parochial school, son of a judge, who because he was like my dead brother Gerard I loved with as sublime a love—with the strangeness of childhood in it, for instance I’d pray at the picture of my brother Gerard, dead at nine when I was four, to insure the friendship, respect and grace of Ernie Malo—I wanted little Ernie to give me his hand, simply, and say to me, “Ti Jean, you you’re nice!” And—“Ti Jean, we’ll be friends always, we’ll go hunting together in Africa when