On the Road (36 page)

Remember that the Windsor, once Denver’s great Gold Rush hotel and in many respects a point of interest—in the big saloon downstairs bullet holes are still in the walls—had once been Dean’s home. He’d lived here with his father in one of the rooms upstairs. He was no tourist. He drank in this saloon like the ghost of his father; he slopped down wine, beer, and whisky like water. His face got red and sweaty and he bellowed and hollered at the bar and staggered across the dance-floor where honkytonkers of the West danced with girls and tried to play the piano, and he threw his arms around ex-cons and shouted with them in the uproar. Meanwhile everybody in our party sat around two immense tables stuck together. There were Denver D. Doll, Dorothy and Roy Johnson, a girl from Buffalo, Wyoming, who was Dorothy’s friend, Stan, Tim Gray, Babe, me, Ed Dunkel, Tom Snark, and several others, thirteen in all. Doll was having a great time: he took a peanut machine and set it on the table before him and poured pennies in it and ate peanuts. He suggested we all write something on a penny postcard and mail it to Carlo Marx in New York. We wrote crazy things. The fiddle music whanged in the Larimer Street night. “Isn’t it fun?” yelled Doll. In the men’s room Dean and I punched the door and tried to break it but it was an inch thick. I cracked a bone in my middle finger and didn’t even realize it till the next day. We were fumingly drunk. Fifty glasses of beer sat on our tables at one time. All you had to do was rush around and sip from each one. Canyon City ex-cons reeled and gabbled with us. In the foyer outside the saloon old former prospectors sat dreaming over their canes under the locking old clock. This fury had been known by them in greater days. Everything swirled. There were scattered parties everywhere. There was even a party in a castle to which we all drove—except Dean, who ran off elsewhere—and in this castle we sat at a great table in the hall and shouted. There were a swimming pool and grottoes outside. I had finally found the castle where the great snake of the world was about to rise up.

Then in the late night it was just Dean and I and Stan Shephard and Tim Gray and Ed Dunkel and Tommy Snark in one car and everything ahead of us. We went to Mexican town, we went to Five Points, we reeled around. Stan Shephard was out of his mind with joy. He kept yelling,
“Sonofabitch!
Hot
damn!”
in a high squealing voice and slapping his knees. Dean was mad about him. He repeated everything Stan said and phewed and wiped the sweat off his face. “Are we gonna get our kicks, Sal, travelin down to Mexico with this cat Stan! Yes!” It was our last night in holy Denver, we made it big and wild. It all ended up with wine in the basement by candlelight, and Charity creeping around upstairs in her nightgown with a flashlight. We had a colored guy with us now, called himself Gomez. He floated around Five Points and didn’t give a damn. When we saw him, Tommy Snark called out. “Hey, is your name Johnny?”

Gomez just backed up and passed us once more and said, “Now will you repeat what you said?”

“I said are you the guy they call Johnny?”

Gomez floated back and tried again. “Does this look a little more like him? Because I’m tryin my best to be Johnny but I just can’t find the way.”

“Well,
man,
come on with us!” cried Dean, and Gomez jumped in and we were off. We whispered frantically in the basement so as not to create disturbance with the neighbors. At nine o‘clock in the morning everybody had left except Dean and Shephard, who were still yakking like maniacs. People got up to make breakfast and heard strange subterranean voices saying, “Yes! Yes!” Babe cooked a big breakfast. The time was coming to scat off to Mexico.

Dean took the car to the nearest station and had everything shipshape. It was a ‘37 Ford sedan with the right-side door unhinged and tied on the frame. The right-side front seat was also broken, and you sat there leaning back with your face to the tattered roof. “Just like Min ’n’ Bill,” said Dean. “We’ll go coughing and bouncing down to Mexico; it’ll take us days and days.” I looked over the map: a total of over a thousand miles, mostly Texas, to the border at Laredo, and then another 767 miles through all Mexico to the great city near the cracked Isthmus and Oaxacan heights. I couldn’t imagine this trip. It was the most fabulous of all. It was no longer east-west, but magic south. We saw a vision of the entire Western Hemisphere rockribbing clear down to Tierra del Fuego and us flying down the curve of the world into other tropics and other worlds. “Man, this will finally take us to IT!” said Dean with definite faith. He tapped my arm. “Just wait and see. Hoo! Whee!”

I went with Shephard to conclude the last of his Denver business, and met his poor grandfather, who stood in the door of the house, saying, “Stan—Stan—Stan.”

“What is it, Granpaw?”

“Don’t go.”

“Oh, it’s settled, I
have
to go now; why do you have to do that?” The old man had gray hair and large almond eyes and a tense, mad neck.

“Stan,” he simply said, “don’t go. Don’t make your old grandfather cry. Don’t leave me alone again.” It broke my heart to see all this.

“Dean,” said the old man, addressing me, “don’t take my Stan away from me. I used to take him to the park when he was a little boy and explain the swans to him. Then his little sister drowned in the same pond. I don’t want you to take my boy away.”

“No,” said Stan, “we’re leaving now. Good-by.” He struggled with his grips.

His grandfather took him by the arm. “Stan, Stan, Stan, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.”

We fled with our heads bowed, and the old man still stood in the doorway of his Denver side-street cottage with the beads hanging in the doors and the overstuffed furniture in the parlor. He was as white as a sheet. He was still calling Stan. There was something paralyzed about his movements, and he did nothing about leaving the doorway, but just stood in it, muttering, “Stan,” and “Don’t go,” and looking after us anxiously as we rounded the corner.

“God, Shep, I don’t know what to say.”

“Never mind!” Stan moaned. “He’s always been like that.”

We met Stan’s mother at the bank, where she was drawing money for him. She was a lovely white-haired woman, still very young in appearance. She and her son stood on the marble floor of the bank, whispering. Stan was wearing a levi outfit, jacket and all, and looked like a man going to Mexico sure enough. This was his tender existence in Denver, and he was going off with the flaming tyro Dean. Dean came popping around the corner and met us just on time. Mrs. Shephard insisted on buying us all a cup of coffee.

“Take care of my Stan,” she said. “No telling what things might happen in that country.”

“We’ll all watch over each other,” I said. Stan and his mother strolled on ahead, and I walked in back with crazy Dean; he was telling me about the inscriptions carved on toilet walls in the East and in the West.

“They’re entirely different; in the East they make cracks and corny jokes and obvious references, scatological bits of data and drawings; in the West they just write their names, Red O‘Hara, Blufftown Montana, came by here, date, real solemn, like, say, Ed Dunkel, the reason being the enormous loneliness that differs just a shade and cut hair as you move across the Mississippi.” Well, there was a lonely guy in front of us, for Shephard’s mother was a lovely mother and she hated to see her son go but knew he had to go. I saw he was fleeing his grandfather. Here were the three of us—Dean looking for his father, mine dead, Stan fleeing his old one, and going off into the night together. He kissed his mother in the rushing crowds of 17th and she got in a cab and waved at us. Good-by, good-by.

We got in the car at Babe’s and said good-by to her. Tim was riding with us to his house outside town. Babe was beautiful that day; her hair was long and blond and Swedish, her freckles showed in the sun. She looked exactly like the little girl she had been. There was a mist in her eyes. She might join us later with Tim—but she didn’t. Good-by. Good-by.

We roared off. We left Tim in his yard on the Plains outside town and I looked back to watch Tim Gray recede on the plain. That strange guy stood there for a full two minutes watching us go away and thinking God knows what sorrowful thoughts. He grew smaller and smaller, and still he stood motionless with one hand on a washline, like a captain, and I was twisted around to see more of Tim Gray till there was nothing but a growing absence in space, and the space was the eastward view toward Kansas that led all the way back to my home in Atlantis.

Now we pointed our rattle snout south and headed for Castle Rock, Colorado, as the sun turned red and the rock of the mountains to the west looked like a Brooklyn brewery in November dusks. Far up in the purple shades of the rock there was someone walking, walking, but we could not see; maybe that old man with the white hair I had sensed years ago up in the peaks. Zacatecan Jack. But he was coming closer to me, if only ever just behind. And Denver receded back of us like the city of salt, her smokes breaking up in the air and dissolving to our sight.

It was May.
And how can homely afternoons in Colorado with its farms and irrigation ditches and shady dells—the places where little boys go swimming—produce a bug like the bug that bit Stan Shephard? He had his arm draped over the broken door and was riding along and talking happily when suddenly a bug flew into his arm and embedded a long stinger in it that made him howl. It had come out of an American afternoon. He yanked and slapped at his arm and dug out the stinger, and in a few minutes his arm had begun to swell and hurt. Dean and I couldn’t figure what it was. The thing was to wait and see if the swelling went down. Here we were, heading for unknowm southern lands, and barely three miles out of hometown, poor old hometown of childhood, a strange feverish exotic bug rose from secret corruptions and sent fear into our hearts. “What is it?”

“I’ve never known of a bug around here that can make a swelling like that.”

“Damn!” It made the trip seem sinister and doomed. We drove on. Stan’s arm got worse. We’d stop at the first hospital and have him get a shot of penicillin. We passed Castle Rock, came to Colorado Springs at dark. The great shadow of Pike’s Peak loomed to our right. We bowled down the Pueblo highway. “I’ve hitched thousands and thousands of times on this road,” said Dean. “I hid behind that exact wire fence there one night when I suddenly took fright for no reason whatever.”

We all decided to tell our stories, but one by one, and Stan was first. “We’ve got a long way to go,” preambled Dean, “and so you must take every indulgence and deal with every single detail you can bring to mind—and still it won’t all be told. Easy, easy,” he cautioned Stan, who began telling his story, “you’ve got to relax too.” Stan swung into his life story as we shot across the dark. He started with his experiences in France but to round out ever-growing difficulties he came back and started at the beginning with his boyhood in Denver. He and Dean compared times they’d seen each other zooming around on bicycles. “One time you’ve forgotten, I know—Arapahoe Garage? Recall? I bounced a ball at you on the corner and you knocked it back to me with your fist and it went in the sewer. Grammar days. Now recall?” Stan was nervous and feverish. He wanted to tell Dean everything. Dean was now arbiter, old man, judge, listener, approver, nodder. “Yes, yes, go on please.” We passed Walsenburg; suddenly we passed Trinidad, where Chad King was somewhere off the road in front of a campfire with perhaps a handful of anthropologists and as of yore he too was telling his life story and never dreamed we were passing at that exact moment on the highway, headed for Mexico, telling our own stories. O sad American night! Then we were in New Mexico and passed the rounded rocks of Raton and stopped at a diner, ravingly hungry for hamburgers, some of which we wrapped in a napkin to eat over the border below. “The whole vertical state of Texas lies before us, Sal,” said Dean. “Before we made it horizontal. Every bit as long. We’ll be in Texas in a few minutes and won’t be out till tomorrow this time and won’t stop driving. Think of it.”

We drove on. Across the immense plain of night lay the first Texas town, Dalhart, which I’d crossed in 1947. It lay glimmering on the dark floor of the earth, fifty miles away. The land by moonlight was all mesquite and wastes. On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, till the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows—and still we rolled. After Dalhart—empty crackerbox town—we bowled for Amarillo, and reached it in the morning among windy panhandle grasses that only a few years ago waved around a collection of buffalo tents. Now there were gas stations and new 1950 jukeboxes with immense ornate snouts and ten-cent slots and awful songs. All the way from Amarillo to Childress, Dean and I pounded plot after plot of books we’d read into Stan, who asked for it because he wanted to know. At Childress in the hot sun we turned directly south on a lesser road and highballed across abysmal wastes to Paducah, Guthrie, and Abilene, Texas. Now Dean had to sleep, and Stan and I sat in the front seat and drove. The old car burned and bopped and struggled on. Great clouds of gritty wind blew at us from shimmering spaces. Stan rolled right along with stories about Monte Carlo and Cagnes-sur-Mer and the blue places near Menton where dark-faced people wandered among white walls.

Texas is undeniable: we burned slowly into Abilene and all woke up to look at it. “Imagine living in this town a thousand miles from cities. Whoop, whoop, over there by the tracks, old town Abilene where they shipped the cows and shot it up for gumshoes and drank red-eye. Look out there!” yelled Dean out the window with his mouth contorted like W. C. Fields. He didn’t care about Texas or any place. Red-faced Texans paid him no mind and hurried along the burning sidewalks. We stopped to eat on the highway south of town. Nightfall seemed like a million miles away as we resumed for Coleman and Brady—the heart of Texas, only, wildernesses of brush with an occasional house near a thirsty creek and a fifty-mile dirt road detour and endless heat. “Old dobe Mexico’s a long way away,” said Dean sleepily from the back seat, “so keep her rolling, boys, and we’ll be kissing señoritas b‘dawn ’cause this old Ford can roll if y‘know how to talk to her and ease her along—except the back end’s about to fall but don’t worry about it till we get there.” And he went to sleep.