Free Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac

cold night snow of fields it was the melting of our hearts we thought forever—The clock was our big symbol.
    â€œWell I’ll see you some time.”
    â€œNot under this clock, kid.”
    I’d walk home alone, two hours to kill before track practice, up Moody in the wake of all the others long home and already changed for backlot yellings; Iddyboy had led the parade a long time ago with his books and eager eediboy stride (“How there boy?”)—old drunks in the Silver Star and other Moody saloons watching the parade of kids—Now it was two—sad walk up through the slums, up the hill, over the bridge into the bright keen cottages and hills of Pawtucketville, perdu, perdu. Far on the Rosemont basin were the afternoon skaters in their blue; over their heads the dreams of clouds long sobbed for and lost.
    I climbed the stairs to my home on the fourth floor over the Textile Lunch—nobody in, gray dismal light filtering through the curtains—In gloom I take out my Ritz crackers peanut butter and milk from the pantry with its neat newspaper lining—no housewife of the Plastic Fifties had less dust—Then, kitchen table, the light from the north window, gloom views of grief-stricken birch on hills beyond the white raw roofs—my chess set and book. The book from the library; Scotch Gambit, Queen’s Gambit, scholarly treatises on the combination of openings, the glistening chess pieces palpable to dramatize defeats—It was how I’d become interested in old classical-looking library books, tomes, chess critiques some of them falling apart and from the darkest shelf in the Lowell Public Library, found there by me in my overshoes at closing time—

    I pondered a problem.
    The green electric clock in the family since 1933 traveled its poor purring little second-hand around and around the elevated yellow numbers and dots—the paint chipping was leaving them half black, half lost—time herself rolling electrically or otherwise was eating at paints, dust slowly gathering on the hour-hand, in the works inside, in the corners of the Duluoz closets—The second-hand kisses the minute-hand sixty times an hour 24 hours a day and still we swallow in hope of life.
    Maggie was far away from my thoughts, it was my rest hour—I went to the windows, looked out; looked in the mirror; sad pantomimes, faces; lay in the bed, everything unutterably gloomy, yawning, slow to come—when it would come I wouldnt know the difference. In the bleak, birds squeak. I flexed my current muscles at the mirror’s flat unbending blind blare—On the radio dull booming statics half obliterated lowly songs of the time—Down on Gardner Street old Monsieur Gagnon spat and walked on—The vultures were feeding on all our chimneys, tempus . I stopped at the phosphorescent crucifix of Jesus and inwardly prayed to sorrow and suffer as He and so be saved. Then I walked downtown again to track, nothing gained.
    The high school street was empty. A late winter afternoon pinkbleak light had fallen over it now, it had been reflected in Pauline’s sad eyes—Sagging old snowbanks, a black tree, weak sister sun on the side of an old building—the keen speechless winter blue beginning to appear over eastern eve roofs as the western ones pulse to the rose of distant dayfire dimming off the low cloudbanks. The last clerk’s stacking sales slips in Bon Marche’s. Dusk bird bulleted to his darknesses. I hurried to the indoor track, where the runners drummed on boards in a dark inside tragedy of their own. Coach Joe Garrity stood bleakly clocking his new 600-yard hope who in gladiator doom pumped and pulled elastic legs to expectation. Little kids threw final meaningless socks at the farthest baskets as Joe hollered to clear the gym, echoing. I ran into the lockers to jump into my track shorts and tightfitting slipper sneakers. The gun barked the first 30-yard heat, the