certainly never bore his son when it came to finding things to do and talk about. He woke up with astart and stared at me. It took him a minute to recognize who I was. .What are you going to theCoast for, Sal?. he asked, and went back to sleep in a moment.In the afternoon we went to Graetna, just Bull and me. We drove in his old Chevy. Dean’sHudson was low and sleek; Bull’s Chevy was high and rattly. It was just like 1910. The bookie jointwas located near the waterfront in a big chromium-leather bar that opened up in the back to atremendous hall where entries and numbers were posted on the wall. Louisiana characters loungedaround with Racing Forms. Bull and I had a beer, and casually Bull went over to the slot| machineand threw a half-dollar piece in. The counters I clicked .Jackpot. - .Jackpot. - .Jackpot. - and thelast!.Jackpot. hung for just a moment and slipped back to .Cherry.. He had lost a hundred dollars90or more just by a hair. .Damn!. yelled Bull. .They got these things adjusted. You could see it rightthen. I had the jackpot and the mechanism clicked it back. Well, what you gonna do.. We examinedthe Racing Form. I hadn’t played the horses in years and was bemused with all the new names.There was one horse called Big Pop that sent me into a temporary trance thinking of my father, whoused to play the horses with me. I was just about to mention it to Old Bull when he said, .Well Ithink I’ll try this Ebony Corsair here..Then I finally said it. .Big Pop reminds me of my father..He mused for just a second, his clear blue eyes fixed on mine hypnotically so that I couldn’t tellwhat he was thinking or where he was. Then he went over and bet on Ebony Corsair. Big Pop wonand paid fifty to one..Damn!. said Bull. .I should have known better, I’ve had experience with this before. Oh, whenwill we ever learn?..What do you mean?..Big Pop is what I mean. You had a vision, boy, a vision. Only damn fools pay no attention tovisions. How do you know your father, who was an old horseplayer, just didn’t momentarilycommunicate to you that Big Pop was going to win the race? The name brought the feeling up in you,he took advantage of the name to communicate. That’s what I was thinking about when youmentioned it. My cousin in Missouri once bet on a horse that had a name that reminded him of hismother, and it won and paid a big price. The same thing happened this afternoon.. He shook hishead. .Ah, let’s go. This is the last time I’ll ever play the horses with you around; all these visionsdrive me to distraction.. In the car as we drove back to his old house he said, .Mankind willsomeday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is;right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within thenext hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies heundergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clearsomeday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they canblow up the world..We told Jane about it. She sniffed. .It sounds silly to me.. She plied the broom around thekitchen. Bull went in the bathroom for his afternoon fix.Out on the road Dean and Ed Dunkel were playing basketball with Dodie’s ball and a bucketnailed on a lamppost. I joined in. Then we turned 10 feats of athletic prowess. Dean completelyamazed me. He had Ed and me hold a bar of iron up to our waists, and just standing there hepopped right over it, holding his heels. .Go ahead, raise it.. We kept raising it till it was chest-high.Still he jumped over it with ease. Then he tried the running broad jump and did at least twenty feetand more. Then I raced him down the road. I can do the hundred in 10:5. He passed me like thewind. As we ran I had a mad vision of Dean running through all of life just like that - his bony faceoutthrust to life, his arms pumping, his brow sweating, his legs twinkling like Groucho Marx, yelling,.Yes! Yes, man, you sure can go!. But nobody could go as fast as he could, and that’s the truth.Then Bull came out with a couple of knives and started showing us how to disarm a would-be shiverin a dark alley. I for my part showed him a very good trick, which is falling on the ground in front ofyour adversary and gripping him with your ankles and flipping him over on his hands and grabbing hiswrists in full nelson. He said it was pretty good. He demonstrated some jujitsu. Little Dodie calledher mother to the porch and said, .Look at the silly men.. She was such a cute sassy little thing thatDean couldn’t take his eyes off her..Wow. Wait till she grows up! Can you see her cuttin down Canal Street with her cute eyes. Ah!Oh!. He hissed through his teeth.91We spent a mad day in downtown New Orleans walking around with the Dunkels. Dean was outof his mind that day. When he saw the T & NO freight trains in the yard he wanted to show meeverything at once. .You’ll be brakeman ‘fore I’m through with ya!. He and I and Ed Dunkel ranacross the tracks and hopped a freight at three individual points; Marylou and Galatea were waitingin the car. We rode the train a half-mile into the piers, waving at switchmen and flagmen. Theyshowed me the proper way to get off a moving car; the back foot first and let the train go away fromyou and come around and place the other foot down. They showed me the refrigerator cars, the icecompartments, good for a ride on any winter night in a string of empties. .Remember what I told youabout New Mexico to LA?. cried Dean. .This was the way I hung on . . ..We got back to the girls an hour late and of course they were mad. Ed and Galatea had decidedto get a room in New Orleans and stay there and work. This was okay with Bull, who was gettingsick and tired of the whole mob. The invitation, originally, was for me to come alone. In the frontroom, where Dean and Marylou slept, there were jam and coffee stains and empty benny tubes allover the floor; what’s more it was Bull’s workroom and he couldn’t get on with his shelves. PoorJane was driven to distraction by the continual jumping and running around on the part of Dean. Wewere waiting for my next GI check to come through; my aunt was forwarding it. Then we were off,the three of us - Dean, Marylou, me. When the check came I realized I hated to leave Bull’swonderful house so suddenly, but Dean was all energies and ready to do.In a sad red dusk we were finally seated in the car and Jane, Dodie, little boy Ray, Bull, Ed, andGalatea stood around in the high grass, smiling. It was good-by. At the last moment Dean and Bullhad a misunderstanding over money; Dean had wanted to borrow; Bull said it was out of thequestion. The feeling reached back to Texas days. Con-man Dean was antagonizing people awayfrom him by degrees. He giggled maniacally and didn’t care; he rubbed his fly, stuck his finger inMarylou’s dress, slurped up her knee, frothed at the mouth, and said, .Darling, you know and Iknow that everything is straight between us at last beyond the furthest abstract definition inmetaphysical terms or any terms you want to specify or sweetly impose or harken back . . .. and soon, and zoom went the car and we were off again for California.928What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till yousee their specks dispersing? - it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we leanforward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.We wheeled through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back toward the mud-splashed, crabbed old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two-lane highway toBaton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, crossed the Mississippi at a place called PortAlien. Port Alien - where the river’s all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where weswung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a ,bridge and crossed eternity again. What is the Mississippi River? - a washed clod in the rainy night, asoft plopping ( from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the tide down the eternalwaterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, downalong, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Alien, and PortOrleans and Port of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice, and the Night’s Great Gulf, and out.With the radio on to a mystery program, and as I looked out the window and saw a sign that saidUSE COOPER’S PAINT and I said, .Okay, I will.. we rolled across the hoodwink night of theLouisiana plains - Lawtell, Eunice, Kinder, and De Ouincy, western rickety towns becoming morebayou-like as 。。e reached the Sabine. In Old Opelousas I went into a grocery store to buy bread andcheese while Dean saw to gas and oil. It was just a shack; I could hear the family eating supper in theback. I waited a minute; they went on talking. I took bread and cheese and slipped out the door. Wehad barely enough money to make Frisco. Meanwhile Dean took a carton of cigarettes from the gasstation and we were stocked for the voyage - gas, oil, cigarettes, and food. Crooks don’t know. Hepointed the car straight down the road.Somewhere near Starks we saw a great red glow in the sky ahead; we wondered what it was; ina moment we were passing it. It was a fire beyond the trees; there were many cars parked on thehighway. It must have been some kind of fish-fry, and on the other hand it might have been anything.The country turned strange and dark near Deweyville. Suddenly 。。e were in the swamps..Man, do you imagine what it would be like if we found a jazzjoint in these swamps, with greatbig black fellas moanin guitar blues and drinkin snakejuice and makin signs at us?..Yes!.There were mysteries around here. The car was going over a dirt road elevated off the swampsthat dropped on both sides and drooped with vines. We passed an apparition; it was a Negro man ina white shirt walking along with his arms up-spread to the inky firmament. He must have beenpraying or calling down a curse. We zoomed right by; I looked out the back window to see his whiteeyes. .Whoo!. said Dean. .Look out. We better not stop in this here country.. At one point we gotstuck at a crossroads and stopped the car anyway. Dean turned off the headlamps. We weresurrounded by a great forest of viny trees in which we could almost hear the slither of a millioncopperheads. The only thing we could see was the red ampere button on the Hudson dashboard.Marylou squealed with fright. We began laughing maniac laughs to her. We were scared too. Wewanted to get out of this mansion of the snake, this mireful drooping dark, and zoom on back tofamiliar American ground and cowtowns. There was a smell of oil and dead water in the air. Thiswas a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read. An owl hooted. We took a chance on one of the dirtroads, and pretty soon we were crossing the evil old Sabine River that is responsible for all theseswamps. With amazement we saw great structures of light ahead of us. .Texas! It’s Texas!93Beaumont oil town!. Huge oil tanks and refineries loomed like cities in the oily fragrant air..I’m glad we got out of there,. said Marylou. .Let’s play some more mystery programs now..We zoomed through Beaumont, over the Trinity River at Liberty, and straight for Houston. NowDean got talking about his Houston days in 1947. .Hassel! That mad Hassel! I look for himeverywhere I go and I never find him. He used to get us so hung-up in Texas here. We’d drive inwith Bull for groceries and Hassel’d disappear. We’d have to go looking for him in every shootinggallery in town.. We were entering Houston. .We had to look for him in this spade part of townmost of the time. Man, he’d be blasting with every mad cat he could find. One night we lost him andtook a hotel room. We were supposed to bring ice back to Jane because her food was rotting. Ittook us two days to find Hassel. I got hung-up myself - 1 gunned shopping women in the afternoon,right here, downtown, supermarkets. - we flashed by in the empty night - .and found a real gonedumb girl who was out of her mind and just wandering, trying to steal an orange. She was fromWyoming. Her beautiful body was matched only by her idiot mind. I found her babbling and took herback to the room. Bull was drunk trying to get this young Mexican kid drunk. Carlo was writingpoetry on heroin. Hassel didn’t show up till midnight at the jeep. We found him sleeping in the backseat. The ice was all melted. Hassel said he took about five sleeping pills. Man, if my memory couldonly serve me right the way my mind works I could tell you every detail of the things we did. Ah, butwe know time. Everything takes care of itself. I could close my eyes and this old car would take careof itself..In the empty Houston streets of four o’clock in the morning a motorcycle kid suddenly roaredthrough, all bespangled and bedecked with glittering buttons, visor, slick black jacket, a Texas poetof the night, girl gripped on his back like a papoose, hair flying, onward-going, singing, .Houston,Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas - and sometimes Kansas City - and sometimes old Antone, ah-haaaaa!.They pinpointed out of sight. .Wow! Dig that gone gal on his belt! Let’s all blow!. Dean tried tocatch up with them. .Now wouldn’t it be fine if we could all get together and have a real goinggoofbang together with everybody sweet and fine and agreeable, no> hassles, no infant rise ofprotest or body woes misconceptalized or sumpin? Ah! but we know time.. He bent to it andpushed the car.Beyond Houston his energies, great as they were, gave out and I drove. Rain began to fall just asI took the wheel. Now we were on the great Texas plain and, as Dean said, .You drive and driveand you’re still in Texas tomorrow night.. The rain lashed down. I drove through a rickety littlecowtown with a muddy main street and found myself in a dead end. .Hey, what do I do?. Theywere both asleep. I turned and crawled back through town. There wasn’t a soul in sight and not asingle light. Suddenly a horseman in a raincoat appeared in my headlamps. It was the sheriff. He hada ten-gallon hat, drooping in the torrent. .Which way to Austin?. He told me politely and I startedoff. Outside town I suddenly saw two headlamps flaring directly at me in the lashing rain, Whoops, Ithought I was on the wrong side of the road; { eased right and found myself rolling in the mud; Irolled back to the road. Still the headlamps came straight for me. At the last moment I realized theother driver was on the wrong side of the road and didn’t know it. I swerved at thirty into the mud; itwas flat, no ditch, thank God. The offending car backed up in the downpour. Four sullenfieldworkers, snuck from their chores to brawl in drinking fields, all white shirts and dirty brownarms, sat looking at me dumbly in the night. The driver was as drunk as the lot.He said, .Which way t’Houston?. I pointed my thumb back. I was thunderstruck in the middle ofthe thought that they had done this on purpose just to ask directions, as a panhandler advances onyou straight up the sidewalk to bar your way. They gazed ruefully at the floor of their car, whereempty bottles rolled, and clanked away. I started the car; it was stuck in the mud a foot deep. I94sighed in the rainy Texas wilderness..Dean,. I said, .wake up...What?..We’re stuck in the mud...What happened?. I told him. He swore up and down. We put on old shoes and sweaters andbarged out of the car into the driving rain. I put my back on the rear fender and lifted and heaved;Dean stuck chains under the swishing wheels. In a minute we were covered with mud. We woke upMarylou to these horrors and made her gun the car while we pushed. The tormented Hudson heavedand heaved. Suddenly it jolted out and went skidding across the road. Marylou pulled it up just intime, and we got in. That was that -the work had taken thirty minutes and we were soaked andmiserable.I fell asleep, all caked with mud; and in the morning when I woke up the mud was solidified andoutside there was snow. We were near Fredericksburg, in the high plains. It was one of the worstwinters in Texas and Western history, when cattle perished like flies in great blizzards and snow fellon San Francisco and LA. We were all miserable. We wished we were back in New Orleans withEd Dunkel. Marylou was driving; Dean was sleeping. She drove with one hand on the wheel and theother reaching back to me in the back seat. She cooed promises about San Francisco. I slaveredmiserably over it. At ten I took the wheel - Dean was out for hours - and drove several hundreddreary miles across the bushy snows and ragged sage hills. Cowboys went by in baseball caps andearmuffs, looking for cows. Comfortable little homes with chimneys smoking appeared along theroad at intervals. I wished we could go in for buttermilk and beans in front of the fireplace.At Sonora I again helped myself to free bread and cheese while the proprietor chatted with a bigrancher on the other side of the store. Dean huzzahed when he heard it; he was hungry. We couldn’tspend a cent on food. .Yass, yass,. said Dean, watching the ranchers loping up and down Sonoramain street, .every one of them is a bloody millionaire, thousand head of cattle, workhands,buildings, money in the bank. If I lived around here I’d go be an idjit in the sagebrush, I’d bejackrabbit, I’d lick up the branches, I’d look for pretty cowgirls - hee-hee-hee-hee! Damn! Bam!.He socked himself. .Yes! Right! Oh me!. We didn’t know what he was talking about any more. Hetook the wheel and flew the rest of the way across the state of Texas, about five hundred miles, clearto El Paso, arriving at dusk and not stopping except once when he took all his clothes off, nearOzona, and ran yipping and leaping naked in the sage. Cars zoomed by and didn’t see him. Hescurried back to the car and drove on. .Now Sal, now Marylou, I want both of you to do as I’mdoing, disemburden yourselves of all that clothes - now what’s the sense of clothes? now that’s whatI’m sayin - and sun your pretty bellies with me. Come on!. We were driving west into the sun; it fellin through the windshield. .Open your belly as we drive into it.. Marylou complied; unfuddyduddied,so did I. We sat in the front seat, all three. Marylou took out cold cream and applied it to us forkicks. Every now and then a big truck zoomed by; the driver in high cab caught a glimpse of agolden beauty sitting naked with two naked men: you could see them swerve a moment as theyvanished in our rear-view window. Great sage plains, snowless now, rolled on. Soon we were in theorange-rocked Pecos Canyon country. Blue distances opened up in the sky. We got out of the carto examine an old Indian ruin. Dean did so stark naked. Marylou and I put on our overcoats. Wewandered among the old stones, hooting and howling. Certain tourists caught sight of Dean naked inthe plain but they could not believe their eyes and wobbled on.Dean and Marylou parked the car near Van Horn and made love while I went to sleep. I wokeup just as we were rolling down the tremendous Rio Grande Valley through Glint and Ysleta to ElPaso. Marylou jumped to the back seat, I jumped to the front seat, and we rolled along. To our left95across the vast Rio Grande spaces were the moorish-red mounts of the Mexican border, the land ofthe Tarahumare; soft dusk played on the peaks. Straight ahead lay the distant lights of El Paso andJuarez, sown in a tremendous valley so big that you could see several railroads puffing at the sametime in every direction, as though it was the Valley of the World. We descended into it..Clint, Texas!. said Dean. He had the radio on to the Glint station. Every fifteen minutes theyplayed a record; the rest of the time it was commercials about a high-school correspondence course..This program is beamed all over the West,. cried Dean excitedly. .Man, I used to listen to it dayand night in reform school and prison. All of us used to write in. You get a high-school diploma bymail, facsimile thereof, if you pass the test. All the young wranglers in the West, I don’t care who, atone time or another write in for this; it’s all they hear; you tune the radio in Sterling, Colorado, Lusk,Wyoming, I don’t care where, you get Glint, Texas, Glint, Texas. And the music is always cowboyhillbilly and Mexican, absolutely the worst program in the entire history of the country and nobodycan do anything about it. They have a tremendous beam; they’ve got the whole land hogtied.. Wesaw the high antenna beyond the shacks of Glint. .Oh, man, the things I could tell you!. cried Dean,almost weeping. Eyes bent on Frisco and the Coast, we came into El Paso as it got dark, broke. Weabsolutely had to get some money for gas or we’d never make it.We tried everything. We buzzed the travel bureau, but no one was going west that night. Thetravel bureau is where you go for share-the-gas rides, legal in the West. Shifty characters wait withbattered suitcases. We went to the Greyhound bus station to try to persuade somebody to give usthe money instead of taking a bus for the Coast. We were too bashful to approach anyone. Wewandered around sadly. It was cold outside. A college boy was sweating at the sight of lusciousMarylou and trying to look unconcerned. Dean and I consulted but decided we weren’t pimps.Suddenly a crazy dumb young kid, fresh out of reform school, attached himself to us, and he andDean rushed out for a beer. .Come on, man, let’s go mash somebody on the head and get hismoney...I dig you, man!. yelled Dean. They dashed off. For a moment I was worried; but Dean onlywanted to dig the streets of El Paso with the kid and get his kicks. Marylou and I waited in the car.She put her arms around me. I said, .Dammit, Lou, wait till we get to Frisco...I don’t care. Dean’s going to leave me anyway...When are you going back to Denver?. .I don’t know. I don’t care what I’m doing. Can I goback east with you?..We’ll have to get some money in Frisco.. .I know where you can get a job in a lunchcartbehind the counter, and I’ll be a waitress. I know a hotel where we can stay on credit. We’ll sticktogether. Gee, I’m sad.. .What are you sad about, kid?..I’m sad about everything. Oh damn, I wish Dean wasn’t so crazy now.. Dean came twinklingback, giggling, and jumped in the car..What a crazy cat that was, whoo! Did I dig him! I used to know thousands of guys like that,they’re all the same, their minds work in uniform clockwork, oh, the infinite ramifications, no time, notime . . .. And he shot up the car, hunched over the wheel, and roared out of El Paso. .We’ll justhave to pick up hitchhikers. I’m positive we’ll find some. Hup! hup! here we go. Look out!. heyelled at a motorist, and swung around him, and dodged a truck and bounced over the city limits.Across the river were the jewel lights of Juarez and the sad dry land and the jewel stars ofChihuahua. Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back,out of the corner of her eye - with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hideit in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazywayed,a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew96would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad. Dean was convinced Marylou was awhore; he confided in me that she was a pathological liar. But when she watched him like this it waslove too; and when Dean noticed he always turned with his big false flirtatious smile, with theeyelashes fluttering and the teeth pearly white, while a moment ago he was only dreaming in hiseternity. Then Marylou and I both laughed - and Dean gave no sign of discomfiture, just a goofyglad grin that said to us, Ain’t we gettin our kicks anyway? And that was it.Outside El Paso, in the darkness, we saw a small huddled figure with thumb stuck out. It was ourpromised hitchhiker. We pulled up and backed to his side. .How much money you got, kid?. Thekid had no money; he was about seventeen, pale, strange, with one undeveloped crippled hand andno suitcase. .Ain’t he sweet?. said Dean, turning to me with a serious awe. .Come on in, fella, we’lltake you out - . The kid saw his advantage. He said he had an aunt in Tulare, California, who owneda grocery store and as soon as we got there he’d have some money for us. Dean rolled on the floorlaughing, it was so much like the kid in North Carolina. .Yes! Yes!. he yelled. .We’ve all got aunts;well, let’s go, let’s see the aunts and the uncles and the grocery stores all the way ALONG thatroad!!. And we had a new passenger, and a fine little guy he turned out to be, too. He didn’t say aword, he listened to us. After a minute of Dean’s talk he was probably convinced he had joined acar of madmen. He said he was hitchhiking from Alabama to Oregon, where his home was. Weasked him what he was doing in Alabama..I went to visit my uncle; he said he’d have a job for me in a lumber mill. The job fell through, soI’m comin back home...Coin home,. said Dean, .goin home, yes, I know, we’ll take you home, far as Frisco anyhow..But we didn’t have any money. Then it occurred to me I could borrow five dollars from my oldfriend Hal Hingham in Tucson, Arizona. Immediately Dean said it was all settled and we were goingto Tucson. And we did.We passed Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the night and arrived in Arizona at dawn. I woke upfrom a deep sleep to find everybody sleeping like lambs and the car parked God knows where,because I couldn’t see out the steamy windows. I got out of the car. We were in the mountains: therewas a heaven of sunrise, cool purple airs, red mountainsides, emerald pastures in valleys, dew, andtransmuting clouds of gold; on the ground gopher holes, cactus, mesquite. It was time for me to driveon. I pushed Dean and the kid over and went down the mountain with the clutch in and the motor offto save gas. In this manner I rolled into Benson, Arizona. It occurred to me that I had a pocketwatch Rocco had just given me for a birthday present, a four-dollar watch. At the gas station I askedthe man if he knew a pawnshop in Benson. It was right next door to the station. I knocked, someonegot up out of bed, and in a minute I had a dollar for the watch. It went into the tank. Now we hadenough gas for Tucson. But suddenly a big pistol-packing trooper appeared, just as I was ready topull out, and asked to see my driver’s license. .The fella in the back seat has the license,. I said.Dean and Marylou were sleeping together under the blanket. The cop told Dean to come out.Suddenly he whipped out his gun and yelled, .Keep your hands up!..Offisah,. I heard Dean say in the most unctious and ridiculous tones, .offisah, I was onlybuttoning my flah.. Even the cop almost smiled. Dean came out, muddy, ragged, T-shirted, rubbinghis belly, cursing, looking everywhere for his license and his car papers. The cop rummaged throughour back trunk. All the papers were straight..Only checking up,. he said with a broad smile. .You can go on now. Benson ain’t a bad townactually; you might enjoy it if you had breakfast here...Yes yes yes,. said Dean, paying absolutely no attention to him, and drove off. We all sighed97with relief. The police are suspicious when gangs of youngsters come by in new cars without a cent intheir pockets and have to pawn watches. .Oh, they’re always interfering,. said Dean, .but he was amuch better cop than that rat in Virginia. They try to make headline arrests; they think every cargoing by is some big Chicago gang. They ain’t got nothin else to do.. We drove on to Tucson.