I wasn't scared at all; I knew Dean.
The people in the back seat were speechless.
In fact they were afraid to complain: God knew what Dean would do, they thought, if they should ever complain.
He balled right across the desert in this manner, demonstrating various ways of how not to drive, how his father used to drive jalopies, how great drivers made curves, how bad drivers hove over too far in the beginning and had to scramble at the curve's end, and so on.
It was a hot, sunny afternoon.
Reno, Battle Mountain, Elko, all the towns along the Nevada road shot by one after another, and at dusk we were in the Salt Lake flats with the lights of Salt Lake City infinitesimally glimmering almost a hundred miles across the mirage of the flats, twice showing, above and below the curve of the earth, one clear, one dim.
I told Dean that the thing that bound us all together in this world was invisible, and to prove it pointed to long lines of telephone poles that curved off out of sight over the bend of a hundred miles of salt.
His floppy bandage, all dirty now, shuddered in the air, his face was a light.
"Oh yes, man, dear God, yes, yes!"
Suddenly he stopped the car and collapsed.
I turned and saw him huddled in the corner of the seat, sleeping.
His face was down on his good hand, and the bandaged hand automatically and dutifully remained in the air.
The people in the back seat sighed with relief.
I heard them -whispering mutiny.
"We can't let him drive any more, he's absolutely crazy, they must have let him out of an asylum or something."
I rose to Dean's defense and leaned back to talk to them.
"He's not crazy, he'll be all right, and don't worry about his driving, he's the best in the world."
"I just can't stand it," said the girl in a suppressed, hysterical whisper.
I sat back and enjoyed nightfall on the desert and waited for poor child Angel Dean to wake up again.
We were on a hill overlooking Salt Lake City's neat patterns of light and he opened his eyes to the place in this spectral world where he was born, unnamed and bedraggled, years ago.
"Sal, Sal, look, this is where I was born, think of it!
People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal. EE!
Look!"
He was so excited it made me cry.
Where would it all lead?
The tourists insisted on driving the car the rest of the way to Denver.
Okay, we didn't care.
We sat in the back and talked.
But they got too tired in the morning and Dean took the wheel in the eastern Colorado desert at Craig.
We had spent almost the entire night crawling cautiously over Strawberry Pass in Utah and lost a lot of time.
They went to sleep.
Dean headed pellmell for the mighty wall of Berthoud Pass that stood a hundred miles ahead on the roof of the world, a tremendous Gibraltarian door shrouded in clouds.
He took Berthoud Pass like a June bug – same as at Tehachapi, cutting off the motor and floating it, passing everybody and never halting the rhythmic advance that the mountains themselves intended, till we overlooked the great hot plain of Denver again – and Dean was home.
It was with a great deal of silly relief that these people let us off the car at the corner of Ayth and Federal.
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go.
But no matter, the road is life.
6
Now we had a number of circumstances to deal with in Denver, and they were of an entirely different order from those of 1947.
We could either get another travel-bureau car at once or stay a few days for kicks and look for his father.
We were both exhausted and dirty.
In the John of a restaurant I was at a urinal blocking Dean's way to the sink and I stepped, out before I was finished and resumed at another urinal, and said to Dean,
"Dig this trick."
"Yes, man," he said, washing his hands at the sink, "it's a very good trick but awful on your kidneys and because you're getting a little older now every time you do this eventually years of misery in your old age, awful kidney miseries for the days when you sit in parks."
It made me mad.
"Who's old?
I'm not much older than you are!"
"I wasn't saying that, man!"
"Ah," I said, "you're always making cracks about my age.
I'm no old fag like that fag, you don't have to warn me about! my kidneys."
We went back to the booth and just as the waitress set down the hot-roast-beef sandwiches – and ordinarily Dean would have leaped to wolf the food at once – I said to cap my anger,