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 he long, tapering, sensitive fingers that she used to talk wit like a Cleopatra Nile dance.
Dean sat in the farthest corner of the room, watching her with slitted eyes and saying,
"Ye yes, yes."
Janet was already aware of him; she turned to for protection.
Previous months of that summer I had a lot of time with her, talking about books and little thing she was interested in.
7
Nothing happened that night; we went to sleep.
Everything happened the next day.
In the afternoon De and I went to downtown Denver for our various chores and 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 sports goods store, calmly picked up a softball on the counter, came out, popping it up and down in his palm.
Nobody (iced; nobody ever notices such things.
It was a drowsy, 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 Grandad bourbon.
We started drinking it at Frankie's hoi 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 window and frightened her.
As we drank the bourbon 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."