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 k away anyway.
"Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they'll never change, how completely 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 barbershop 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 I 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 forgot- -, ten 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.