Doctor Sax (17 page)

Tragedy roared ahead of us–all Lowell with bated breath was watching from a thousand parapets natural and otherwise in the Lowell valley. Our mothers had said “Be careful”
and by noon they too, huddled in housewife coats, locked the door and suspended the ironing of the wash to come and peek at the river even though it entailed a long walk down Moody across Textile to the bridge-

Billy and I surveyed this remarkable sunny morning. The river came boiling in brown anger from the rivulets of the valley north, on the Boulevard cars were parked to see the river waving trees in its claw,—down at the Rosemont end of the dump a crowd was lined to face the Netherlandic havoc there, our little shitty beach in the reeds was now the bottom of the sea–I remembered all the boys who had drowned–
“Tu connassa tu le petit bonhomme Roger qui etait parent avec les Voyers du store? ll’s a noyer hier—dans riviere–a Rosemont–ta beach que t’appele”—
(Did you know the little boy Roger who was related to the Voyers of the store? He drowned yesterday–in the river– at Rosemont–your beach you call it.)— The River was Drowning Itself– It came over the Falls at the White Bridge not in its usual blue sheen and fall (among whitecaps snow) but sleered over in a brown and hungry slide sheen that only had to slip two feet and was in the foams of the bottom flood–the little children of the Orphanage on Pawtucket at the White Bridge were standing in watchful rows in the wire fences of the yard or down in the Grotto near the Cross, something huge and independent had come into their lives.

Dicky and I jumped down among the fenders and crap of the dumpslope, down to the water’s edge, where the flood just lapped up and fendered away in a sunkjunk beach of 90 degrees– We stood on this edge of this watery
precipice watching with eagle eye of Indians in the plateau morning for a chickencoop roof to bump into our hands. It came pirouetting in bumps along the fendered shore–we hooked it at our mooring with a small piece of rope on one end (tied to a car bumper stuck in the ground for ten years) and the other end more or less held by a board bridge with rocks on it, temporarily–chicken feathers we found as we romped up and down the tin roof. It was a solid raft, wood on the bottom, tin on deck–it measured fifty feet by thirty, immense– It had slipped over the swollen Falls without damage. But we never bargained for any long trip on the Merrimac Sea–we thought we had it securely tied, enough anyway, and at some point the rope broke, Dicky saw it and jumped on the dump–but I was strolling along the outer, or flood, edge of the chickenroof and didn’t hear (from eternity roar of river) what Dicky wanted to say—”Hey Jack–the rope broke–come on back.” In fact I was dreamily standing surveying that tremendous and unforgettable monstrous rush of humpbacked central waters Flooding at 60 miles an hour out of the rock masses beneath the Moody Bridge where the white horses were now drowned in brown and seemed to gather at the mouth of the rocks in a surging vibration of water to form this Middle lunge that seemed to tear the flood towards Lawrence as you watched–to Lawrence and the sea–and the Roar of that hump, it had the scaly ululating back of a sea monster, of a Snake, it was an unforgettable flow of evil and of wrath and of Satan barging thru my home town and rounding the curve of the Rosemont Basin and Centralville Snake Hill by that blue puff figure castle on the
meadow landlump in the rawmous clouds beyond– Also I was watching to see if the people in the Little Canada rock-cliff tenements that jutted over the river were evacuating their solidly founded homes at the hungry lip of the River’s brown torrential roar– Back of Laurier park the dump and the dumpshacks of Little Canada Aiken Street and old pest heur with his poolhall shack and come-alleys of dirtybook hookey toss-a-coin days that came later to make men of me and Dicky and Vinny and G.J. and Scotty and Lousy and Billy Artaud and Iddiboy and Skunk– In fact I might have been dreaming of Skunk, as Dicky yelled to me, the time Skunk was supposed to fight Dicky in the park-trail and somebody intervened in the long red dusk of ancient heroic events and now Skunk was a baseball star on our team but also his house in Rosemont was probably floating away–
all of it was drowned
… the dump, half the Laurier ballpark, tragic gangs of American Low-ellians were gathered on the opposite shore watching–in the wild sun-excited day I watched it all from my foaming deck–higher than my head the deluge roared 200 feet away– The sun was one vast white mass of radiance suspended in the aurobus of heaven like an auriola, an arcade shaft penetrated it all, there were slants of heaven and bedazzling impossible brilliances illuminating all furyfied the tremendous spectacles of flood– High up there in the white of the blue I saw it, the silly dove, a
pippione,
an Italian love bird, returning from the Himalayas the other side of the world-roof with an herb wrap’t round its leg, in a tiny leaf, the Monks of the Rooftop Monastery have sent Tibetan secrets to the King of Anti Evil, Doctor Sax,
Enemy of the Snake, Shade of Dark, Phantom Listener at My Window, Watcher With Green Face of Little Jewish Boys in Paterson Night Time when phobus claggett me gonigle bedoigne breaks his arse shroud on a giant pitrock black Passaic weyic manic madness in the smoony snow night of dull balls– A young and silly dove is yakking in the blue, circling the brown and slushy river with yaks of pipsqueak joy, demoniac manic bird of little paradise, come snowing from Ebon hills to bring our message herb–a pip-pione, weary with travel–now all eyes comes circling upon the flood, then veers in blinding day to the woods of flooded Lowell–a cape of ink furls upon the waters where Doctor Sax rows–a car comes to the meadow mud edge of the flood–Doctor Sax vanishes behind flooded bushes in a gloor– Moisture from trees in the gray drops plipping in the sullen moiling brown varnishy surface, full of skeel– The Dove descends, aims fluttering heart straight for the black arms of Sax upheld from his boat in gratitude and prayer. “O Palalakonuh!” he cries upon the desolated flood, “O Palalakonuh Beware!!”

“Jack! Jack!” Dicky is calling. “Get off the raft-the rope’s cut off–you’re floating away!”

I turn around and survey the damage–I take a quick run to the edge and look over at brown bottomless waters of the 90 degree dump and its receding from the last shoe
hold
fender at Dicky’s feet, a four-foot jump in just a second. .. I knew I could barely make it and so I wasn’t scared but simply jumped and landed on my feet
on
the dump and the raft wait out behind me to join humps of the main
midstream, where it was seen pitching and diving like a gigantic lid–it could have been my Ship.

NEWS CAME TO US
from subsidiary kids in the booming amazing morning like in a Tolstoy battle that the White Bridge was pronounced dangerous and nobody was crossing it, there were road blocks, and on the boulevard the River had found an ancient creek bed suitable to its new forward floodrush and used it to flow in a mad torrent across half of Pawtucketville and join its horror to Pine Brook deluges and a rush out back through already back-flooded Rosemont–further, news came of disasters in downtown Lowell, soon we couldn’t even get there, the canals were overflowed into, the mills were swimming, water was creeping in the business streets, pools were forming of whole redbrick railroad switch alleys behind the mills–all of it was just mad great news to us– The afternoon of the gray tragic flood-warning with my mother, I later returned with the gang to see the sandbag operations at Riverside Street where it dipped down lowest. Right there lived one of our grammar school teachers, Mrs. Wakefield, in a little white cottage covered with rose vines. They were piling sandbags across the street from her white fence. We stood at the sandbags, at the ripple up flood swell, and poked our fingers at them–we wanted the Flood to pierce thru and drown the world, the horrible adult routine world. G.J. and I made jokes about it–scuffled with
each other yakking in the tragic emergency flashlights and oilcup flares as the river rose–after supper we saw that the sandbag wall was higher. We wanted a real flood–we wished the workmen would go away. But next morning we came and saw the great snake hump roar of the river’s strong left arm slamming through the sandbag place 20 feet high and pouring through the blind gawp windows of Mrs. Wakefield’s brown vine weedy cottage with its last rooftop slipping over in the whirlpool–behind her a street-ful of rushing water– G.J. and I looked at each other in astonishment and impossible glee: IT HAD BEEN DONE!

Doctor Sax stood high above the parapets of Lowell, laughing. “I am ready,” he cried, “I am ready.” He pulled his little rubber boat from his slouch hat and blew it up again and paddled away with his rubber oar and Dove in pocket through the dismal forest flood waters of the night —towards the Castle–his hollow laugh echoed across the desolation. A giant spider crawled from the flood water and rushed on sixteen legs rapidly to the Castle on Snake Hill-

also nameless little ones did
rush there.

PAUL BOLDIEU’S HOME
that we used to climb rickety outdoor steps to–at the edge of the Cow Field near St. Rita’s church,—his dismal house where his mother made beans for his breakfast in the morning–where poor dim religious St. Mary Calendars hung in brown door behind the stove
—Pauls bedroom, where he kept his records in red ink of all our baseball batting averages–crazy Kid Faro (because of his gold tooth and green tweed suit on Sunday afternoon at the Crown Theater with rats in the balcony and the time we threw boxes of ice cream at the miser in the movie foreclosing the widow’s mortgage and a 90 year old cop came upstairs to try to find us)—Paul’s house was flooded, six feet of water made it necessary to ride to his porch in a rowboat–

Tremendous excitement filled all the riverside streets of Lowell where people–in the clear air of holiday-like mornings–massed at the lapping beautiful flood-edge—”I got a nose, you got a nose”— I’m roaming both sides of the bank, singing–I go across the White Bridge which ordinarily I cross every day to go to Bartlett Junior High and there’s the massive miraculous long-awaited monstrous flood-hump rolling thirty feet below at a speed of 60 miles an hour– massively more of the flood arcs down from New Hampshire, over highways sometimes–Paul’s house was smack in the middle of the new waterbed across low-ground Pawtucketville— “I got a nose–you got a nose—” Poor Paul–I can’t see him in all the crowd–there’s a roadblock thrown across Riverside Street at the monument of World War I with Lauzon’s uncle’s name on it where the river is eating at the lawn-back of it, the monument’s about to topple in the river–the river is not only roaring through Mrs. Wakefield’s home but comes lapping almost beyond the monument to the very bridge head of Varnum Avenue–but Varnum Avenue is also flooded a few hundred feet beyond at Scotty’s–out on the boulevard there’s a new river– G.J.
and I congratulate each other that our houses are built high on the rock of Pawtucketville–the Sandbank will never get wet–Sarah Avenue and Phebe Avenue survey immense vistas when you can see through the trees–the flood might rise like Noah’s flood and the mayor would know the difference in lower Lowell–in Pawtucketville Hump we could make a last ditch stand with a hastily improvised ark—”Clear the way gentlemen!” G.J. is asseverating at the sandbags as he tries to poke his fingers through—”From time immemoriam’s mortariums ye swabs avast ye’ve swabbed them seabags to the fore myzen mast god dam ye”—G.J.’s a regular Ahab at the Flood, a fiend at the Levee– Hungrily we prowl up and down the flood admiring the black madness, the demoniac river–it’s eating away everything that ever hated us–trees, houses, communities are capitulating– Mad glee fires in our souls, we hear now clearly the laugh of Doctor Sax penetrating the roar of the middle river, we feel the hum and Vibration of evil in the earth. When night comes we go striding with wild arms swinging into the matted leaves and rocks of the shore under Moody Street Bridge-we throw tiny feeble rocks into the mass … the rocks are hurled up–back-Along the tragic granite wall of the canal we see no more ancient watermarks of flood, or whitewashed numbers; the flood has reached a record peak. A famous St. Francis Lock in a Canal across town is saving the downtown District of Lowell from complete inundation. As it is, six feet of water fill my father’s printing plant–he has taken several despairing drives downtown looking at the water and even around Pawtucketville–

“I’ll never forget that time, Zagg, your father coughed” —G.J.’s talking to me as we prowl like rats—”in the alley wall, you know between the Club and Blezan’s store on Gershom you get those two wood walls each side of the street, I was on one side, your father on the other, one early morning last week, cold as hell you remember, I’m sending up smoke screens from my mouth, suddenly a great explosion rocked me to my knees–your father had coughed and the echo had hit my wall and bounced right off me —my ears exploded, I fell down on
one knee
Zagg no shit– I said (to regain my senses, no one there to slap me you understand)”—(reaching out and goosing me—) “Zagg–so I says, innocently, ‘Why Mr. Duluoz you do seem to have rather a bad cough there, don’t you know?’ ‘N-o-o,’ he says, no Gussie it ain’t so bad–just a little rasp, Gussie, just a little rasp in my throat’- A-a-oo-ay–
Brash!”
he yelled, lifting a leg–an imitation of big burpers laying explosive farts at board of directors meetings.

The flood roared on, Craw River–it came Raining and Weeping from Six Thousand Holes in the moisted Earth of all New England’s spring. Newspapermen were out on the bridge with photographers taking pictures of the river– newsreels from Boston–visiting Red Cross journalists
horn
the Hague Convention in Jersey City.

IT’S LENT AND PEOPLE GO ON WITH THEIR NOVENAS
—I’m in there at gray dusk Tuesday evening (the afternoon after the raft fiasco with Dicky I spent hours simply on my back
in the riverside grass at the cliff precipice under Moody Bridge, surveying the flood with drowsy time’s eye of summer and idly watching an airplane circling the river)—I’m at church, have to finish my Novena with which I can pray for anything I want later, besides they all told me to do my Novena, so I’m in church at dusk– More people than usual, they’re afraid of the Flood. Dimly you can hear it roaring behind the candle silence walls.