“I do believe you, I do.” This was the sad story of that afternoon. All kinds of tremendous complications arose that night when Dean and I went to stay with the Okie family.
These had been neighbors of mine in my Denver solitude of two weeks before. The mother was a wonderful woman in jeans who drove coal trucks in winter mountains to support her kids, four in all, her husband having left her years before when they were traveling around the country in a trailer. They had rolled all the way from Indiana to LA in that trailer. After many a good time and a big Sunday-afternoon drunk in crossroads bars and laughter and guitar-playing in the night, the big lout had suddenly walked off across the dark field and never returned. Her children were wonderful. The eldest was a boy, who wasn’t around that summer but in a camp in the mountains; next was a lovely thirteen-year-old daughter who wrote poetry and picked flowers in the fields and wanted to grow up and be an actress in Hollywood, Janet by name; then came the little ones, little Jimmy who sat around the campfire at night and cried for his “pee-tater” before it was half roasted, and little Lucy who made pets of worms, horny toads, beetles, and anything that crawled, and gave them names and places to live. They had four dogs. They lived their ragged and joyous lives on the little new-settlement street and were the butt of the neighbors’ semi-respectable sense of propriety only because the poor woman’s husband had left her and because they littered up the yard. At night all the lights of Denver lay like a great wheel on the plain below, for the house was in that part of the West where the mountains roll down foothilling to the plain and where in primeval times soft waves must have washed from sealike Mississippi to make such round and perfect stools for the island-peaks like Evans and Pike and Longs. Dean went there and of course he was all sweats and joy at the sight of them, especially Janet, but I warned him not to touch her, and probably didn’t have to. The woman was a great man’s woman and took to Dean right away but she was bashful and he was bashful. She said Dean reminded her of the husband gone. “Just like him—oh, he was a crazy one, I tell ya!”
The result was uproarious beer-drinking in the littered living room, shouting suppers, and booming Lone Ranger radio. The complications rose like clouds of butterflies: the woman—Frankie, everyone called her—was finally about to buy a jalopy as she had been threatening to do for years, and had recently come into a few bucks toward one. Dean immediately took over the responsibility of selecting and naming the price of the car, because of course he wanted to use it himself so as of yore he could pick up girls coming out of high school in the afternoons and drive them up to the mountains. Poor innocent Frankie was always agreeable ‘to anything. But she was afraid to part with her money when they got to the car lot and stood before the salesman. Dean sat right down in the dust of Alameda Boulevard and beat his fists on his head. “For a hunnerd you
can’t
get anything better!” He swore he’d never talk to her again, he cursed till his face was purple, he was about to jump in the car and drive it away anyway. “Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they’ll never change, how com-pletely and how unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to act, this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing frightens em more than what they
want
—it’s
my father my father my father
all over again!”
Dean was very excited that night because his cousin Sam Brady, was meeting us at a bar. He was wearing a clean T-shirt and beaming all over. “Now listen, Sal, I must tell you about Sam—he’s my cousin.”
“By the way, have you looked for your father?”
“This afternoon, man, I went down to Jiggs’ Buffet where he used to pour draft beer in tender befuddlement and get hell from the boss and go staggering out—no—and I went to the old barber-shop next to the Windsor—no, not there—old fella told me he thought he was—imagine!—working in a railroad gandy-dancing cookshack or sumpin for the
Boston and Maine
in New England! But I don’t believe him, they make up fractious stories for a dime. Now listen to hear. In my childhood Sam Brady my close cousin was my absolute hero. He used to bootleg whisky from the mountains and one time he had a tremendous fist fight with his brother that lasted two hours in the yard and had the women screaming and terrified. We used to sleep together. The one man in the family who took tender concern for me. And tonight I’m going to see him again for the first time in seven years, he just got back from Missouri.”
“And what’s the pitch?”
“No pitch, man, I only want to know what’s been happening in the family—I have a family, remember—and most particularly, Sal, I want him to tell me things that I’ve forgotten in my childhood. I want to remember, remember, I do!” I never saw Dean so glad and excited. While we waited for his cousin in the bar he talked to a lot of younger downtown hipsters and hustlers and checked on new gangs and goings-on. Then he made inquiries after Marylou, since she’d been in Denver recently. “Sal, in my young days when I used to come to this corner to steal change off the newsstand for bowery beef stew, that rough-looking cat you see out there standing had nothing but murder in his heart, got into one horrible fight after another, I remember his scars even, till now years and y-e-a-r-s of standing on the corner have finally softened him and chastened him ragely, here completely he’s become sweet and willing and patient with everybody, he’s become a
fixture
on the corner, you see how things happen?”
Then Sam arrived, a wiry, curly-haired man of thirty-five with work-gnarled hands. Dean stood in awe before him. “No,” said Sam Brady, “I don’t drink any more.”
“See? See?” whispered Dean in my ear. “He doesn’t drink any more and he used to be the biggest whiskyleg in town, he’s got religion now, he told me over the phone, dig him, dig the change in a man—my hero has become so strange.” Sam Brady was suspicious of his young cousin. He took us out for a spin in his old rattly coupe and immediately he made his position clear in regard to Dean.
“Now look, Dean, I don’t believe you any more or anything you’re going to try to tell me. I came to see you tonight because there’s a paper I want you to sign for the family. Your father is no longer mentioned among us and we want absolutely nothing to do with him, and, I’m sorry to say, with you either, any more.” I looked at Dean. His face dropped and darkened.
“Yass, yass,” he said. The cousin continued to drive us around and even bought us ice-cream pops. Nevertheless Dean plied him with innumerable questions about the past and the cousin supplied the answers and for a moment Dean almost began to sweat again with excitement. Oh, where was his raggedy father that night? The cousin dropped us off at the sad lights of a carnival on Alameda Boulevard at Federal. He made an appointment with Dean for the paper-signing next afternoon and left. I told Dean I was sorry he had nobody in the world to believe in him.
“Remember that I believe in you. I’m infinitely sorry for the foolish grievance I held against you yesterday afternoon.”
“All right, man, it’s agreed,” said Dean. We dug the carnival together. There were merry-go-rounds, Ferris wheels, popcorn, roulette wheels, sawdust, and hundreds of young Denver kids in jeans wandering around. Dust rose to the stars together with every sad music on earth. Dean was wearing washed-out tight levis and a T-shirt and looked suddenly like a real Denver character again. There were motorcycle kids with visors and mustaches and beaded jackets hanging around the shrouds in back of the tents with pretty girls in levis and rose shirts. There were a lot of Mexican girls too, and one amazing little girl about three feet high, a midget, with the most beautiful and tender face in the world, who turned to her companion and said, “Man, let’s call up Gomez and cut out.” Dean stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of her. A great knife stabbed him from the darkness of the night. “Man, I love her, oh,
love
her ...” We had to follow her around for a long time. She finally went across the highway to make a phone call in a motel booth and Dean pretended to be looking through the pages of the directory but was really all wound tight watching her. I tried to open up a conversation with the lovey-doll’s friends but they paid no attention to us. Gomez arrived in a rattly truck and took the girls off. Dean stood in the road, clutching his breast. “Oh, man, I almost died....”
“Why the hell didn’t you talk to her?”
“I can‘t, I couldn’t ...” We decided to buy some beer and go up to Okie Frankie’s and play records. We hitched on the road with a bag of beer cans. Little Janet, Frankie’s thirteen-year-old daughter, was the prettiest girl in the world and was about to grow up into a gone woman. Best of all were her long, tapering, sensitive fingers that she used to talk with, like a Cleopatra Nile dance. Dean sat in the farthest corner of the room, watching her with slitted eyes and saying, “Yes, yes, yes.” Janet was already aware of him; she turned to me for protection. Previous months of that summer I had spent a lot of time with her, talking about books and little things she was interested in.
7
Nothing happened that night;
we went to sleep. Everything happened the next day. In the afternoon Dean and I went to downtown Denver for our various chores and to see the travel bureau for a car to New York. On the way home in the late afternoon we started out for Okie Frankie‘s, up Broadway, where Dean suddenly sauntered into a sportsgoods store, calmly picked up a softball on the counter, and came out, popping it up and down in his palm. Nobody noticed; nobody ever notices such things. It was a drowsy, hot afternoon. We played catch as we went along. “We’ll get a travel-bureau car for sure tomorrow.”
A woman friend had given me a big quart of Old Granddad bourbon. We started drinking it at Frankie’s house. Across the cornfield in back lived a beautiful young chick that Dean had been trying to make ever since he arrived. Trouble was brewing. He threw too many pebbles in her window and frightened her. As we drank the bourbon in the littered living room with all its dogs and scattered toys and sad talk, Dean kept running out the back kitchen door and crossing the cornfield to throw pebbles and whistle. Once in a while Janet went out to peek. Suddenly Dean came back pale. “Trouble, m‘boy. That gal’s mother is after me with a shotgun and she got a gang of high-school kids to beat me up from down the road.”
“What’s this? Where are they?”
“Across the cornfield, m‘boy.” Dean was drunk and didn’t care. We went out together and crossed the cornfield in the moonlight. I saw groups of people on the dark dirt road.
“Here they come!” I heard.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What’s the matter, please?”
The mother lurked in the background with a big shotgun across her arm. “That damn friend of yours been annoying us long enough. I’m not the kind to call the law. If he comes back here once more I’m gonna shoot and shoot to kill.” The high-school boys were clustered with their fists knotted. I was so drunk I didn’t care either, but I soothed everybody some.
I said, “He won’t do it again. I’ll watch him; he’s my brother and listens to me. Please put your gun away and don’t bother about anything. ”
“Just one more time!” she said firmly and grimly across the dark. “When my husband gets home I’m sending him after you.”
“You don’t have to do that; he won’t bother you any more, understand. Now be calm and it’s okay.” Behind me Dean was cursing under his breath. The girl was peeking from her bedroom window. I knew these people from before and they trusted me enough to quiet down a bit. I took Dean by the arm and back we went over the moony cornrows.
“Woo-hee!” he yelled. “I’m gonna git drunk tonight.” We went back to Frankie and the kids. Suddenly Dean got mad at a record little Janet was playing and broke it over his knee: it was a hillbilly record. There was an early Dizzy Gillespie there that he valued—“Congo Blues,” with Max West on drums. I’d given it to Janet before, and I told her as she wept to take it and break it over Dean’s head. She went over and did so. Dean gaped dumbly, sensing everything. We all laughed. Everything was all right. Then Frankie-Maw wanted to go out and drink beer in the roadhouse saloons. “Lessgo!” yelled Dean. “Now dammit, if you’d bought that car I showed you Tuesday we wouldn’t have to walk.”
“I didn’t like that damn car!” yelled Frankie. Yang, yang, the kids started to cry. Dense, mothlike eternity brooded in the crazy brown parlor with the sad wallpaper, the pink lamp, the excited faces. Little Jimmy was frightened; I put him to sleep on the couch and trussed the dog on him. Frankie drunkenly called a cab and suddenly while we were waiting for it a phone call came for me from my woman friend. She had a middle-aged cousin who hated my guts, and that earlier afternoon I had written a letter to Old Bull Lee, who was now in Mexico City, relating the adventures of Dean and myself and under what circumstances we were staying in Denver. I wrote: “I have a woman friend who gives me whisky and money and big suppers.”
I foolishly gave this letter to her middle-aged cousin to mail, right after a fried-chicken supper. He opened it, read it, and took it at once to her to prove to her that I was a con-man. Now she was calling me tearfully and saying she never wanted to see me again. Then the triumphant cousin got on the phone and began calling me a bastard. As the cab honked outside and the kids cried and the dogs barked and Dean danced with Frankie I yelled every conceivable curse I could think over that phone and added all kinds of new ones, and in my drunken frenzy I told everybody over the phone to go to hell and slammed it down and went out to get drunk.
We stumbled over one another to get out of the cab at the roadhouse, a hillbilly roadhouse near the hills, and went in and ordered beers. Everything was collapsing, and to make things inconceivably more frantic there was an ecstatic spastic fellow in the bar who threw his arms around Dean and moaned in his face, and Dean went mad again with sweats and insanity, and to add still more to the unbearable confusion Dean rushed out the next moment and stole a car right from the driveway and took a dash to downtown Denver and came back with a newer, better one. Suddenly in the bar I looked up and saw cops and people were milling around the driveway in the headlights of cruisers, talking about the stolen car. “Somebody’s been stealing cars left and right here!” the cop was saying. Dean stood right in back of him, listening and saying, “Ah yass, ah yass.” The cops went off to check. Dean came in the bar and rocked back and forth with the poor spastic kid who had just gotten married that day and was having a tremendous drunk while his bride waited somewhere. “Oh, man, this guy is the greatest in the world!” yelled Dean. “Sal, Frankie, I’m going out and get a real good car this time and we’ll all go and with Tony too” (the spastic saint) “and have a big drive in the mountains.” And he rushed out. Simultaneously a cop rushed in and said a car stolen from downtown Denver was parked in the driveway. People discussed it in knots. From the window I saw Dean jump into the nearest car and roar off, and not a soul noticed him. A few minutes later he was back in an entirely different car, a brand-new convertible. “This one is a beaut!” he whispered in my ear. “The other one coughed too much—I left it at the crossroads, saw that lovely parked in front of a farmhouse. Took a spin in Denver. Come on, man, let’s
all
go riding.” All the bitterness and madness of his entire Denver life was blasting out of his system like daggers. His face was red and sweaty and mean.