Dean was drunk and didn't care.
We went out together and crossed the cornfield in the moonlight.
I saw groups of people on the dark dirt road.
"Here they come!" I heard.
"Wait a minute," I said.
"What's the matter, please?"
The mother lurked in the background with a big shotgun across her arm.
"That damn friend of yours been annoying us long enough.
I'm not the kind to call the law.
If he comes back here once more I'm gonna shoot and shoot to kill."
The high-school boys were clustered with their fists knotted.
I was so drunk I didn't care either, but I soothed everybody some.
I said,
"He won't do it again.
I'll watch him; he's my brother and listens to me.
Please put your gun away and don't bother about anything."
"Just one more time!" she said firmly and grimly across the dark.
"When my husband gets home I'm sending him after you."
"You don't have to do that; he won't bother you any more, understand.
Now be calm and it's okay."
Behind me Dean was cursing under his breath.
The girl was peeking from her bedroom window.
I knew these people from before and they trusted me enough to quiet down a bit.
I took Dean by the arm and back we went over the moony cornrows.
"Woo-hee!" he yelled.
"I'm gonna git drunk tonight."
We went back to Frankie and the kids.
Suddenly Dean got mad at a record little Janet was playing and broke it over his knee: it was a hillbilly record.
There was an early Dizzy Gillespie there that he valued –
"Congo Blues," with Max West on drums.
I'd given it to Janet before, and I told her as she wept to take it and break it over Dean's head.
She went over and did so.
Dean gaped dumbly, sensing everything.
We all laughed.
Everything was all right.
Then Frankie-Maw wanted to go out and drink beer in the roadhouse saloons.
"Lessgo!" yelled Dean.
"Now dammit, if you'd bought that car I showed you Tuesday we wouldn't have to walk."
"I didn't like that damn car!" yelled Frankie.
Yang, yang, the kids started to cry.
Dense, mothlike eternity brooded in the crazy brown parlor with the sad wallpaper, the pink lamp, the excited faces.
Little Jimmy was frightened; I put him to sleep on the couch and trussed the dog on him.
Frankie drunkenly called a cab and suddenly while we were waiting for it a phone call came for me from my woman friend.
She had a middle-aged cousin who hated my guts, and that earlier afternoon I had written a letter to Old Bull Lee, who was now in Mexico City, relating the adventures of Dean and myself and under what circumstances we were staying in Denver.
I wrote:
"I have a woman friend who gives me whisky and money and big suppers."
I foolishly gave this letter to her middle-aged cousin to mail, right after a fried-chicken supper.
He opened it, read it, and took it at once to her to prove to her that I was a con-man.
Now she was calling me tearfully and saying she never wanted to see me again.
Then the triumphant cousin got on the phone and began calling me a bastard.