When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.
"Okay, old Dean, I'll say nothing."
PART FIVE
Dean drove from Mexico City and saw Victor again in Gregoria and pushed that old car all the way to Lake Charles, Louisiana, before the rear end finally dropped on the road as he had always known it would.
So he wired Inez for airplane fare and flew the rest of the way.
When he arrived in New York with the divorce papers in his hands, he and Inez immediately went to Newark and got married; and that night, telling her everything was all right and not to worry, and making logics where there was nothing but inestimable sorrowful sweats, he jumped on a bus and roared off again across the awful continent to San Francisco to rejoin Camille and the two baby girls.
So now he was three times married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife.
In the fall I myself started back home from Mexico City and one night just over Laredo border in Dilley, Texas, I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said,
"Go moan for man," and clomped on back to his dark.
Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America?
I struggled and hurried to New York, and one night I was standing in a dark street in Manhattan and called up to the window of a loft where I thought my friends were having a party.
But a pretty girl stuck her head out the window and said,
"Yes?
Who is it?"
"Sal Paradise," I said, and heard my name resound in the sad and empty street.
"Come on up," she called.
"I'm making hot chocolate.," So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long.
We agreed to love each other madly.
In the winter we planned to migrate to San Francisco, bringing all our beat furniture and broken belongings with us in a jalopy panel truck.
I wrote to Dean and told him.
He wrote back a huge letter eighteen thousand words long, all about his young years in Denver, and said he was coming to get me and personally select the old truck himself and drive us home.
We had six weeks to save up the money for the truck and began working and counting every cent.
And suddenly Dean arrived anyway, five and a half weeks in advance, and nobody had any money to go through with the plan.
I was taking a walk in the middle of the night and came back to my girl to tell her what I thought about during my, walk.
She stood in the dark little pad with a strange smile.
I told her a number of things and suddenly I noticed the hush in the room and looked around and saw a battered book on the radio.
I knew it was Dean's high-eternity-in-the-afternoon Proust.
As in a dream I saw him tiptoe in from the dark hall in his stocking feet.
He couldn't talk any more.
He hopped and laughed, he stuttered and fluttered his hands and said,
"Ah – ah – you must listen to hear."
We listened, all ears.
But he forgot what he wanted to say.
"Really listen – ahem.
Look, dear Sal – sweet Laura – I've come – I'm gone – but wait – ah yes."
And he stared with rocky sorrow into his hands.
"Can't talk no more – do you understand that it is – or might be – But listen!"
We all listened.
He was listening to sounds in the night.
"Yes!" he whispered with awe.
"But you see – no need to talk any more – and further."
"But why did you come so soon, Dean?"
"Ah," he said, looking at me as if for the first time, "so soon, yes.
We – we'll know – that is, I don't know.
I came on the railroad pass – cabooses – old hard-bench coaches – Texas – played flute and wooden sweet potato all the way."
He took out his new wooden flute.
He played a few squeaky notes on it and jumped up and down in his stocking feet.
"See?" he said.
"But of course, Sal, I can talk as soon as ever and have many things to say to you in fact with my own little bangtail mind I've been reading and reading this gone Proust all the way across the country and digging a great number of things I'll never have TIME to tell you about and we STILL haven't talked of Mexico and our parting there in fever – but no need to talk.
Absolutely, now, yes?"