Free Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac Page B

are sitting in shirtsleeves talking with cigarettes and laughing and little daughter standing amongst the weeds of the garden with her playpail and pigtails and we the railroad men with soft signs and no sound pick up our flower, according to same goodman train order that for the last entire lifetime of attentions ole conductor industrial worker harlotized Sherman has been reading carefully son so’s not to make a mistake:
    â€œSunday morning October 15 pick up flower car at Redwood, Dispatcher M.M.S.”
    I’D PUT A BLOCK OF WOOD under the wheels of the car and watch it writhe and crack as the car eased up on it and stopped and sometimes didnt at all but just rolled on leaving the wood flattened to the level of the rail with upthrusted crackee ends.— Afternoons in Lowell long ago I’d wondered what the grimy men were doing with big boxcars and blocks of wood in their hands and when far above the ramps and rooftops of the great gray warehouse of eternity I’d see the immortal canal clouds of redbrick time, the drowse so heavy in the whole July city it would hang even in the dank gloom of my father’s shop outside where they kept big rolltrucks with little wheels and flat silvery platforms and junk in corners and boards, the ink dyed into the oily wood as deep as a black river folded therein forever, contrasts for the whitepuff creamclouds outdoors that you just can see standing in the dust moted hall door over the old 1830 Lowell Dickens redbrick floating like in an old cartoon with little bird designs floating by too, all of a gray daguerrotype mystery in the whorly spermy waters of the canal.— Thus in the same way the afternoons in the S.P. redbrickalley, remembering my wonder at the slow grinding movement and squee of gigantic boxcars and flats and gons rolling by with that overpowering steel dust crenching closh and clack of steel on steel, the shudder of the whole steely proposition, a car going by with a brake on and so the whole brakebar—
monstre em-poudrement de jer en enjer
the frightening fog nights in California when you can see thru the mist the monsters slowly passing and hear the whee whee squee, those merciless wheels that one time Conductor Ray Miles on my student trips said, “When those wheels go over your leg they dont care about you” same way with that wood that I sacrifice.— What those grimy men had been doing some of em standing on top of the boxcars and signalling far down the redbrick canal alleys of Lowell and some old men slowly like bums moving around over rails with nothing to do, the big cut of cars squeeing by with that teethgritting cree cree and gigantic hugsteel bending rails into earth and making ties move, now I knew from working as on the Sherman Local on Sundays we dealt with blocks of wood because of an incline in the ground that made kicked cars keep going and you had to ride them brake them and stop them up with blocks. Lessons I learned there, like, “Put, tie a good brake on him, we dont want to start chasin the sonofabitch back to the City when we kick a car again him,” okay, but I’m playing the safety rules of the safety book to the T and so now here I am the rear man on the Sherman Local, we’ve set out our Sunday morning preacher blossom flower car and made curtsies bows to the sabbath God in the dark everything has been arranged in that fashion and according to old traditions reaching back to Sutter’s Mill and the times when the pioneers sick of hanging around the hardware store all week had put on their best vestments and smoked and jaw-bleaked in front of the wooden church and oldrailroad men of the 19th century the inconceivably ancient S.P. of another era with stovepipe hats and flowers in their lapels and had made the moves with the few cars into the goldtown milkbottle with the formality and the different chew the thinky thought,—They give the sign and kick a car, with wood in hand I run out,