Jack Lives Here

By Lynnette Lounsbury

Somewhere North of February, 2001 and South of the border...

Lulu has an overactive mind, and a tendency to say what she thinks. A girl burning with questions. When she suspects that an author writing under the pseudonym James Carousel for the New Yorker is actually Jack Kerouac, who is not dead but alive and well and living in the fry pan heat of Baja Mexico, she sets out find him. Finally face to face with the elusive author, she convinces him to go On The Road one last time in a bizarre and perilous journey to discover whether truth is as important as belief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lynnette Lounsbury
• Release date: Jun 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476254241

Lynnette Lounsbury

Lynnette Lounsbury married an American thinking she might score a Green Card but was double-crossed and ending up living in Sydney, Australia, which she now loves. She divides her time unequally between writing, lecturing, studying Ancient History and raising two wild things. She recently realized none of her skills will be useful post-apocalypse so is trying to befriend people who hunt, build and understand machines. (Facebook her if this is you.) Look for more books out soon, because writing is a fabulous, incurable disease.

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Jack Lives Here

Lynnette Lounsbury

Smashwords edition

Copyright ©2012 Lynnette Lounsbury

ISBN: 9781476254241

This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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CHAPTER 1

Somewhere a little north of February, 2001 and South of the border.

I knew it was the right place as soon as I saw the giant bull-moose sitting up to its hairy, antique carpet haunches in a semi-inflated children’s swimming pool. Water was sneaking over the side to run for its life into the firebrand sand that hissed and rolled in waves all around the sprawled sunburnt house. The pool was under two of those trees that stagger across the whole of Mexico and cast about as much shade as a Masai warrior – Booja trees? Boojum? I’d heard the driver of the rattle-tin bus say the word at least a hundred times during the six-hour dustbowl drive but he had so few teeth and so much tobacco in his gums I could scarcely figure a word of what he said, except when he told me I owed him another ten bucks just to get off the bus. Off a bus that had only the merest suggestion that there had ever been vinyl over the rusted spring seats that sang their own tuneless song as we jounced over stray dogs, rocks and children to finally stop here at the right house.

The moose looked at me with the clear bright gaze of a being that wished me dead, or himself, angry at God and the world for allowing it to be so fucking hot. He leaned forward a little in what may have been an attempt to rise, leap and charge me, trampling my thin, shrimp-taco food poisoned frame into the landscape but just the turning of his head caused such a rush of water to make its escape that he turned carefully back to his position facing the trees and left me to my business. My business seeming suddenly a lot more like crazed stalkings of the He does love me back, I know it! kind, than the intelligent discovery I had been convincing myself it was. I was hesitant about my next course of action for the first time in the six weeks it had taken me to get from my big cool home in Chillingham, Australia to frypan Baja in Mexico.

I made the pretence of looking round the house for more props to my conclusions when all I really wanted, and at this scattered point, needed, was some time to think on what I would say when the door was opened. The house was old and big, the type you hear called a hacienda in the movies but without all the care that would ever allow it to be cinematic. It was faded and bits were falling off, not bits of paint, though that was happening all over as well, bit actual bits of the house, which led me to believe it must be made of mud. I was right and when I found myself with a right chunk of it in my hand, I wrapped it in the first thing I pulled from my pack, my last pair of clean underwear and kept it, though certainly not for money, which it might be worth if I could prove my suspicions, but for the fact that it meant something to me. There were archways all over the place, some of them leading only to other archways and I expected Zorro to ride through on his stallion at any moment, past the scratched guitar that leaned against the wall and the whole lot of nothing hanging on the old unstrung washing line.

And I knew from the nothing and the everything that this was the perfect place to hide – with no trees and just the big old sun to keep your secret, where everyone could see you in plain sight and just look straight past. No one would ever look for you here, not really, in the cliché and the obviousness of it all.

It was so quiet out there that you could hear the sand shifting, just like sitting in a beanbag when you are trying to read a book but all you can hear are the beans moving around and it seems like the sounds are coming from inside your head rather than half an inch away. The sand was just the same, though with the amount of it stuck in my ears I wondered if it wasn’t really in my brain and this whole crazy scheme was just that. I took a few more hesitant steps and heard my rotten old sandshoe scuff on something metal like a piece of spaceship was buried out here in this crazy alien place, and without thinking of danger I reached down and brushed off the grit in my curiosity to see what was stuck under the sand. It will be hard to convince anyone of what I found down there but the god honest truth was that an anti-tank land mine was lurking beneath my foot. A huge thing the size of my backpack and I wondered who would have planted such a dangerous stupid piece of metal in the ground. I know about these things because my grandfather was a vet at Long Tan and collects all sorts of weapons to hang on his wall in a strange twisted shrine and one of those pieces was a decommissioned tank mine just like this one. Whoever put this thing here either didn’t know much about the thing or was hoping only to keep away things of quite extraordinary size because someone of my weight or even quite a few kilos heavier was never going to set off such a powerful piece of machinery and its proximity to the house showed an equal ignorance since there was a good chance of some heavy arse shrapnel peppering those stucco walls if it did go off. I was feeling remarkably unwanted after this little discovery and it was with trepidation that I began to think about my next move, be it going ahead to the house or high-tailing back to the bus stop to catch the next worn wheels out of here.

I was still in this state of self-doubt when the thing I hadn’t expected to happen occurred and set me on the back foot with no advantage of surprise or arrival. A man walked around the side of the house, through several of the arches, leaning heavily on them being as he was ancient as the hills, and pissed into the sand not more than ten metres from where I was standing. He didn’t seem to see me and I froze not wanting to move and be seen or stand and stare and he talked soothingly to his johnson asking it to please fucking work this time and if it gave him any trouble there’d be no more Monica Morello for the rest of its goddamn short limp life. He peed slowly a few drops at a time, the sand eating each before the next worked up the courage to leave and while he waited impatiently I watched and stared at his face wondering who he was, this eighty year old grandpa who lived in this house. If he was a friend of the man I had come to find then he must certainly know the truth of his identity and his American accent told me he was at least a compatriot.

He didn’t bother to zip up his pants when he was finally done because he was wearing what really amounted to a sarong of faded earthy colours wrapped around him like a skirt, loose enough that half of his naked sweat and gravity-soaked buttocks were exposed out of the hang-down at the back and I tried not to watch as he wandered back into the recesses of the courtyard. I was a little set back now with all this hesitation working its way into my brain and making it impossible to get myself going again until I heard the moose breathing a dry and disgusted breath in my direction and decided it was only a matter of time and the rising temperature of that water before he bothered to get up and get me the hell off his land. I walked to the door, a huge wooden thing with a crusted brass ring from Spain or Portugal that was meant for softer weather than this and had grown spines and jagged angry skin in the heat of its new home. I reached for it and had to take another step and my foot pulled on an old piece of string tied tight across the front step of the place. It hit the sand and pulled an old rusted bell hidden in the cacti at the side of the house, some sort of crazy alarm system, which hardly creaked out a sound but let me know without a doubt that the inhabitants of this place didn’t want to be crept up on.

I didn’t think the noise from the bell would awaken the spider that resided on its crumbling handle let alone anyone within the house, but before I could even turn back to the door it was open and a man the colour and texture of beef jerky was looking down at me with the stare of someone who considered this an interruption he could do most certainly without. I stammered and stuttered out my name, Lulu, which I hate because I will sound like a child or a Hawaiian dancer till the day I die, but my parents named me for a great grandmother who discovered some sort of plant back in Wales and is famous in the world of botany. He yelled back over his shoulder, We got ourselves a hot little baby out here Chicco, a gorgeous little thing, and there was a holler from inside like someone stricken with emphysema was glad to hear that news, and then he turned to me and said with a kind of edgy friendliness that told me he might set his moose on me if I didn’t turn tail, What can I do for you young lady Lulu? He was straight to the point and so I thought I should be too even though I had hoped to bluff through a conversation with him or the one inside to see if I was up the garden or if I had actually stumbled onto a state secret.

I’m looking for Jack, does he live here?

That was when the moose charged me, leaping like a stag out of the pool and spraying water and fur into the air as its legs tangled around themselves in the sand and it snorted towards me, head down and broken dagger antlers aimed for my chest. I should have moved the hell out of there but being charged by a two tonne moose in Mexico was a thought so much out of my head at the time that I did the clichéd thing and froze on that spot waiting for some kind of end to my story. I needn’t have worried one scrap about the dripping snarling thing because it landed its remarkable body weight on the tank mine at that instant and the thing went off with a boom that woke the Mexican dead and sent sand a hundred metres