He still had his old office over a garage down the street – the rolltop desk was still there, together with countless dusty papers of past excitement and moneymaking.
He had invented a special air-conditioner. He put an ordinary fan in a window frame and somehow conducted cool water through coils in front of the whirring blades.
The result was perfect – within four feet of the fan bull; – and then the water apparently turned into steam in the hot day and the downstairs part of the house was just as hot as usual.
But I was sleeping right under the fan on Chad's bed, with a big bust of Goethe staring at me, and I comfortably went to sleep, only to wake up in twenty minutes freezing to death.
I put a blanket on and still I was cold.
Finally it was so cold I couldn't sleep, and I went downstairs.
The old man asked me how his invention worked.
I said it worked damned good, and I meant it within bounds.
I liked the man.
He was lean with memories.
"I once made a spot remover that has since been copied by big firms in the East.
I've been trying to collect on that for some years now.
If I only had enough money to raise a decent lawyer… " But it was too late to raise a decent lawyer; and he sat in his house dejectedly.
In the evening we had a wonderful dinner his mother cooked, venison steak that Chad's uncle had shot in the mountains.
But where was Dean?
7
The following ten days were, as W.
C.
Fields said, "fraught with eminent peril" – and mad.
I moved in with Roland Major in the really swank apartment that belonged to Tim Gray's folks.
We each had a bedroom, and there was a kitchenette with food in the icebox, and a huge living room where Major sat in his silk dressing gown composing his latest Hemingwayan short story – a choleric, red-faced, pudgy hater of everything, who could turn on the warmest and most charming smile in the world when real life confronted him sweetly in the night.
He sat like that at his desk, and I jumped around over the thick soft rug, wearing only my chino pants.
He'd just written a story about a guy who comes to Denver for the first time.
His name is Phil.
His traveling companion is a mysterious and quiet fellow called Sam.
Phil goes out to dig Denver and gets hung-up with arty types.
He comes back to the hotel room. Lugubriously he says,
"Sam, they're here too."
And Sam is just looking out the window sadly.
"Yes," says Sam, "I know."
And the point was that Sam didn't have to go and look to know this.
The arty types were all over America, sucking up its blood.
Major and I were great pals; he thought I was the farthest thing from an arty type.
Major liked good wines, just like Hemingway.
He reminisced about his recent trip to France.
"Ah, Sal, if you could sit with me high in the Basque country with a cool bottle of Poignon Dix-neuf, then you'd know there are other things besides boxcars."
"I know that.
It's just that I love boxcars and I love to read the names on them like Missouri Pacific, Great Northern, Rock Island Line.
By Gad, Major, if I could tell you everything that happened to me hitching here."
The Rawlinses lived a few blocks away.
This was a delightful family – a youngish mother, part owner of a decrepit, ghost-town hotel, with five sons and two daughters.
The wild son was Ray Rawlins, Tim Gray's boyhood buddy.
Ray came roaring in to get me and we took to each other right away.
We went off and drank in the Colfax bars.
One of Ray's sisters was a beautiful blonde called Babe – a tennis-playing, surf-riding doll of the West.
She was Tim Gray's girl.
And Major, who was only passing through Denver and doing so in real style in the apartment, was going out with Tim Gray's sister Betty.
I was the only guy without a girl.
I asked everybody, "Where's Dean?"
They made smiling negative answers.