As the cab honked outside and the kids cried and the dogs barked and Dean danced with Frankie I yelled every conceivable curse I could think over that phone and added all kinds of new ones, and in my drunken frenzy I told everybody over the phone to go to hell and slammed it down and went out to get drunk.
We stumbled over one another to get out of the cab at the roadhouse, a hillbilly roadhouse near the hills, and went in and ordered beers.
Everything was collapsing, and to make things inconceivably more frantic there was an ecstatic spastic fellow in the bar who threw his arms around Dean and moaned in his face, and Dean went mad again with sweats and insanity, and to add still more to the unbearable confusion Dean rushed out the next moment and stole a car right from the driveway and took a dash to downtown Denver and came back with a newer, better one.
Suddenly in the bar I looked up and saw cops and people were milling around the driveway in the headlights of cruisers, talking about the stolen car.
"Somebody's been stealing cars left and right here!" the cop was saying.
Dean stood right in back of him, listening and saying,
"Ah yass, ah yass."
The cops went off to check.
Dean came in the bar and rocked back and forth with the poor spastic kid who had just gotten married that day and was having a tremendous drunk while his bride waited somewhere.
"Oh, man, this guy is the greatest in the world!" yelled Dean.
"Sal, Frankie, I'm going out and get a real good car this time and we'll all go and with Tony too" (the spastic saint) "and have a big drive in the mountains."
And he rushed out.
Simultaneously a cop rushed in and said a car stolen from downtown Denver was parked in the driveway.
People discussed it in knots.
From the window I saw Dean jump into the nearest car and roar off, and not a soul noticed him.
A few minutes later he was back in an entirely different car, a brand-new convertible.
"This one is a beaut!" he whispered in my ear.
"The other one coughed too much – I left it at the crossroads, saw that lovely parked in front of a farmhouse.
Took a spin in Denver.
Come on, man, let's all go riding."
All the bitterness and madness of his entire Denver life was blasting out of his system like daggers.
His face was red and sweaty and mean.
"No, I ain't gonna have nothing to do with stolen cars."
"Aw, come on, man!
Tony'll come with me, won't you, amazing darling Tony?"
And Tony – a thin, dark-haired, holy-eyed moaning foaming lost soul – leaned on Dean and groaned and groaned, for he was sick suddenly and then for some odd intuitive reason he became terrified of Dean and threw up his hands and drew away with terror writhing in his face.
Dean bowed his head and sweated.
He ran out and drove away.
Frankie and I found a cab in the driveway and decided to go home.
As the cabby drove us up the infinitely dark Alameda Boulevard along which I had walked many and many a lost night the previous months of the summer, singing and moaning and eating the stars and dropping the juices of my heart drop by drop on the hot tar, Dean suddenly hove up behind us in the stolen convertible and began tooting and tooting and crowding us over and screaming.
The cabby's face grew white.
"Just a friend of mine," I said.
Dean got disgusted with us and suddenly shot ahead at ninety miles an hour, throwing spectral dust across the exhaust.
Then he turned in at Frankie's road and pulled up in front of the house; just as suddenly he took off again, U-turned, and went back toward town as we got out of the cab and paid the fare.
A few moments later as we waited anxiously in the dark yard, he returned with still another car, a battered coupe, stopped it in a cloud of dust in front of the house, and just staggered out and went straight into the bedroom and flopped dead drunk on the bed.
And there we were with a stolen car right on our doorstep.
I had to wake him up; I couldn't get the car started to dump it somewhere far off.
He stumbled out of bed, wearing just his jockey shorts, and we got in the car together, while the kids giggled from the windows, and went bouncing and flying straight over the hard alfalfa-rows at the end of the road whomp-ti-whomp till finally the car couldn't take any more and stopped dead under an old cottonwood near the old mill.
"Can't go any farther," said Dean simply and got out and started walking back over the cornfield, about half a mile, in his shorts in the moonlight.
We got back to the house and he went to sleep.
Everything was in a horrible mess, all of Denver, my woman friend, cars, children, poor Frankie, the living room splattered with beer and cans, and I tried to sleep.
A cricket kept me awake for some time.
At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, are big as roman candles and as lonely as the Prince of the Dharma who's lost his ancestral grove and journeys across the spaces between points in the handle of the Big Dipper, trying to find it again.
So they slowly wheeled the night, and then long before actual sunrise the great red light appeared far over the dun bleak land toward West Kansas and the birds took up their trill above Denver.
8
Horrible nauseas possessed us in the morning.
First thing Dean did was go out across the cornfield to see if the car would carry us East.
I told him no, but he went anyway. He came back pale.
"Man, that's a detective's car and every precinct in town knows my fingerprints from the year that I stole five hundred cars.
You see what I do with them, I just wanta ride, man!