This was his tender existence in Denver, and he was going off with the naming tyro Dean.
Dean came popping around the corner and met us just on time.
Mrs. Shephard insisted on buying us all a cup of coffee.
"Take care of my Stan," she said.
"No telling what things might happen in that country."
"We'll all watch over each other," I said.
Stan and his mother strolled on ahead, and I walked in back with crazy Dean; he was telling me about the inscriptions carved on toilet walls in the East and in the West.
"They're entirely different; in the East they make cracks and corny jokes and obvious references, scatological bits of data and drawings; in the West they just write their names, Red O'Hara, Blufftown Montana, came by here, date, real solemn, like, say, Ed Dunkel, the reason being the enormous loneliness that differs just a shade and cut hair as you move across the Mississippi."
Well, there was a lonely guy in front of us, for Shephard's mother was a lovely mother and she hated to see her son go but knew he had to go.
I saw he was fleeing his grandfather.
Here were the three of us – Dean looking for his father, mine dead, Stan fleeing his old one, and going off into the night together.
He kissed his mother in the rushing crowds of 17th and she got in a cab and waved at us.
Good-by, good-by.
We got in the car at Babe's and said good-by to her.
Tim was riding with us to his house outside town.
Babe was beautiful that day; her hair was long and blond and Swedish, her freckles showed in the sun.
She looked exactly like the little girl she had been.
There was a mist in her eyes.
She might join us later with Tim – but she didn't.
Good-by, good-by.
We roared off.
We left Tim in his yard on the Plains outside town and I looked back to watch Tim Gray recede on the plain.
That strange guy stood there for a full two minutes watching us go away and thinking God knows what sorrowful thoughts.
He grew smaller and smaller, and still he stood motionless with one hand on a washline, like a captain, and I was twisted around to see more of Tim Gray till there was nothing but a growing absence in space, and the space was the eastward view toward Kansas that led all the way back to my home in Atlantis.
Now we pointed our rattly snout south and headed for Castle Rock, Colorado, as the sun turned red and the rock of the mountains to the west looked like a Brooklyn brewery in November dusks.
Far up in the purple shades of the rock there was someone walking, walking, but we could not see; maybe that old man with the white hair I had sensed years ago up in the peaks.
Zacatecan Jack.
But he was coming closer to me, if only ever just behind.
And Denver receded back of us like the city of salt, her smokes breaking up in the air and dissolving to our sight.
4
It was May.
And how can homely afternoons in Colorado with its farms and irrigation ditches and shady dells – the places where little boys go swimming – produce a bug like the bug that bit Stan Shephard?
He had his arm draped over the broken door and was riding along and talking happily when suddenly a bug flew into his arm and embedded a long stinger in it that made him howl.
It had come out of an American afternoon.
He yanked and slapped at his arm and dug out the stinger, and in a few minutes his arm had begun to swell and hurt.
Dean and I couldn't figure what it was.
The thing was to wait and see if the swelling went down.
Here we were, heading for unknown southern lands, and barely three miles out of hometown, poor old hometown of childhood, a strange feverish exotic bug rose from secret corruptions and sent fear into our hearts.
"What is it?"
"I've never known of a bug around here that can make a swelling like that."
"Damn!"
It made the trip seem sinister and doomed.
We drove on.
Stan's arm got worse.
We'd stop at the first hospital and have him get a shot of penicillin.
We passed Castle Rock, came to Colorado Springs at dark.
The great shadow of Pike's Peak loomed to our right.
We bowled down the Pueblo highway.
"I've hitched thousands and thousands of times on this road," said Dean.
"I hid behind that exact wire fence there one night when I suddenly took fright for no reason whatever."