People got up to make breakfast and heard strange subterranean voices saying,
"Yes!
Yes!"
Babe cooked a big breakfast.
The time was coming to scat off to Mexico.
Dean took the car to the nearest station and had everything shipshape.
It was a
'37 Ford sedan with the right-side door unhinged and tied on the frame.
The right-side front seat was also broken, and you sat there leaning back with your face to the tattered roof.
"Just like Min' Bill," said Dean.
"We'll go coughing and bouncing down to Mexico; it'll take us days and days."
I looked over the map: a total of over a thousand miles, mostly Texas, to the border at Laredo, and then another 767 miles through all Mexico to the great city near the cracked Isthmus and Oaxacan heights.
I couldn't imagine this trip. It was the most fabulous of all.
It was no longer east-west, but magic south.
We saw a vision of the entire Western Hemisphere rockribbing clear down to Tierra del Fuego and us flying down the curve of the world into other tropics and other worlds.
"Man, this will finally take us to IT!" said Dean with definite faith.
He tapped my arm.
"Just wait and see.
Hoo!
Wheel"
I went with Shephard to conclude the last of his Denver business, and met his poor grandfather, who stood in the door of the house, saying,
"Stan – Stan – Stan."
"What is it, Granpaw?"
"Don't go."
"Oh, it's settled, I have to go now; why do you have to do that?"
The old man had gray hair and large almond eyes and a tense, mad neck.
"Stan," he simply said, "don't go.
Don't make your old grandfather cry.
Don't leave me alone again."
It broke my heart to see all this.
"Dean," said the old man, addressing me, "don't take my Stan away from me.
I used to take him to the park when he was a little boy and explain the swans to him.
Then his little sister drowned in the same pond.
I don't want you to take my boy away."
"No," said Stan, "we're leaving now.
Good-by."
He struggled with his grips.
His grandfather took him by the arm.
"Stan, Stan, Stan, don't go, don't go, don't go."
We fled with our heads bowed, and the old man still stood in the doorway of his Denver side-street cottage with the beads hanging in the doors and the overstaffed furniture in the parlor.
He was as white as a sheet. He was still calling Stan.
There was something paralyzed about his movements, and he did nothing about leaving the doorway, but just stood in it, muttering,
"Stan," and "Don't go," and looking after us anxiously as we rounded the corner.
"God, Shep, I don't know what to say."
"Never mind!" Stan moaned.
"He's always been like that."
We met Stan's mother at the bank, where she was drawing money for him.
She was a lovely white-haired woman, still very young in appearance.
She and her son stood on the marble floor of the bank, whispering.
Stan was wearing a Levi outfit, jacket and all, and looked like a man going to Mexico sure enough.