"Nice sweet jacket for all that bad whisky!" he yelled.
He invited us to his home for a bottle of beer.
He lived in the tenements in back of Howard.
His wife was asleep when we came in.
The only light in the apartment was the bulb over her bed.
We had to get up on a chair and unscrew the bulb as she lay smiling there; Dean did it, fluttering his lashes.
She was about fifteen years older than Walter and the sweetest woman in the world.
Then we had to plug in the extension over her bed, and she smiled and smiled.
She never asked Walter where he'd been, what time it was, nothing.
Finally we were set in the kitchen with the extension and sat down around the humble table to drink the beer and tell the stories.
Dawn.
It was time to leave and move the extension back to the bedroom and screw back the bulb.
Walter's wife smiled and smiled as we repeated the insane thing all over again.
She never said a word.
Out on the dawn street Dean said,
"Now you see, man, there's real woman for you.
Never a harsh word, never a complaint, or modified; her old man can come in any hour of the night with anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time.
This is a man, and that's his castle."
He pointed up at the tenement.
We stumbled off.
The big night was over, A cruising car followed us suspiciously for a few blocks.
We bought fresh doughnuts in a bakery on Third Street and ate them in the gray, ragged street.
A tall, bespectacled, well-dressed fellow came stumbling down the street with a Negro in a truck-driving cap.
They were a strange pair.
A big truck rolled by and the Negro pointed at it excitedly and tried to express his feeling.
The tall white man furtively looked over his shoulder and counted his money.
"It's Old Bull Lee!" giggled Dean.
"Counting his money and worried about everything, and all that other boy wants to do is talk about trucks and things he knows."
We followed them awhile.
Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.
We had to sleep; Galatea Dunkel's was out of the question.
Dean knew a railroad brakeman called Ernest Burke who lived with his father in a hotel room on Third Street.
Originally he'd been on good terms with them, but lately not so, and the idea was for me to try persuading them to let us sleep on their floor.
It was horrible.
I had to call from a morning diner.
The old man answered the phone suspiciously.
He remembered me from what his son had told him.
To our surprise he came down to the lobby and let us in.
It was just a sad old brown Frisco hotel.
We went upstairs and the old man was kind enough to give us the entire bed.
"I have to get up anyway," he said and retired to the little kitchenette to brew coffee.
He began telling stories about his railroading days.
He reminded me of my father.
I stayed up and listened to the stories.
Dean, not listening, was washing his teeth and bustling around and saying, "Yes, that's right," to everything he said.
Finally we slept; and in the morning Ernest came back from a Western Division run and took the bed as Dean and I got up.
Now old Mr. Burke dolled himself up for a date with his middle-aged sweetheart.
He put on a green tweed suit, a cloth cap, also green tweed, and stuck a flower in his lapel.
"These romantic old broken-down Frisco brakemen live sad but eager lives of their own," I told Dean in the toilet.
"It was very kind of him to let us sleep here."