"Yes, yass, yes."
"You can't go all over the country having babies like that' Those poor little things'll grow up helpless.
You've got to offer them a chance to live."
He looked at his feet and nodded.
In the raw red dusk we said good-by, on a bridge over a superhighway.
"I hope you'll be in New York when I get back," I told him.
"All I hope, Dean, is someday we'll be able to live on the same street with our families and get to be a couple of oldtimers together."
"That's right, man – you know that I pray for it completely mindful of the troubles we both had and the troubles coming, as your aunt knows and reminds me.
I didn't want the new baby, Inez insisted, and we had a fight.
Did you know Marylou got married to a used-car dealer in Frisco and she's having a baby?"
"Yes.
We're all getting in there now."
Ripples in the upside-down lake of the void, is what I should have said.
The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down.
He took out a snapshot of Camille in Frisco with the new baby girl.
The shadow of a man crossed the child on the sunny pavement, two long trouser legs in the sadness.
"Who's that?"
"That's only Ed Dunkel.
He came back to Galatea, they're gone to Denver now.
They spent a day taking pictures."
Ed Dunkel, his compassion unnoticed like the compassion of saints.
Dean took out other pictures.
I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness.
Pitiful forms of ignorance.
"Good-by, good-by."
Dean walked off in the long red dusk.
Locomotives smoked and reeled above him.
His shadow followed him, it aped his walk and thoughts and very being.
He turned and waved coyly, bashfully. He gave me the boomer's highball, he jumped up and down, he yelled something I didn't catch.
He ran around in a circle. All the time he came closer to the concrete corner of the railroad overpass.
He made one last signal.
I waved back.
Suddenly he bent to his life and walked quickly out of sight.
I gaped into the bleakness of my own days.
I had an awful long way to go too.
2
The following midnight, singing this little song,
Home in Missoula, Home in Truckee, Home in Opelousas, Ain't no home for me.
Home in old Medora, Home in Wounded Knee, Home in Ogallala, Home I'll never be,
I took the Washington bus; wasted some time there wandering around; went out of my way to see the Blue Ridge, heard the bird of Shenandoah and visited Stonewall Jackson's grave; at dusk stood expectorating in the Kanawha River and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia; at midnight Ashland, Kentucky, and a lonely girl under the marquee of a closed-up show.
The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn.
Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon.
The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem.
By night Missouri, Kansas fields, Kansas night-cows in the secret wides, crackerbox towns with a sea for the end of every street; dawn in Abilene.
East Kansas grasses become West Kansas rangelands that climb up to the hill of the Western night.
Henry Glass was riding the bus with me.
He had got on at Terre Haute, Indiana, and now he said to me,
"I've told you why I hate this suit I'm wearing, it's lousy – but ain't all."
He showed me papers.
He had just been released from Terre Haute federal pen; the rap was for stealing and selling cars in Cincinnati.