It was agreed upon.
My sister-in-law made a spread, and the three battered travelers sat down to eat.
Marylou had not slept since Denver.
I thought she looked older and more beautiful now.
I learned that Dean had lived happily with Camille in San Francisco ever since that fall of 1947; he got a job on the railroad and made a lot of money.
He became the father of a cute little girl, Amy Moriarty.
Then suddenly he blew his top while walking down the street one day.
He saw a '49 Hudson for sale and rushed to the bank for his entire roll.
He bought the car on the spot.
Ed Dunkel was with him.
Now they were broke.
Dean calmed Camille's fears and told her he'd be back in a month.
"I'm going to New York and bring Sal back."
She wasn't too pleased at this prospect.
"But what is the purpose of all this?
Why are you doing this to me?"
"It's nothing, it's nothing, darling – ah – hem – Sal has pleaded and begged with me to come and get him, it is absolutely necessary for me to – but we won't go into all these explanations – and I'll tell you why… No, listen, I'll tell you why."
And he told her why, and of course it made no sense.
Big tall Ed Dunkel also worked on the railroad.
He and Dean had just been laid off during a seniority lapse because of a drastic reduction of crews.
Ed had met a girl called Galatea who was living in San Francisco on her savings.
These two mindless cads decided to bring the girl along to the East and have her foot the bill.
Ed cajoled and pleaded; she wouldn't go unless he married her.
In a whirlwind few days Ed Dunkel married Galatea, with Dean rushing around to get the necessary papers, and a few days before Christmas they rolled out of San Francisco at seventy miles per, headed for LA and the snowless southern road.
In LA they picked up a sailor in a travel bureau and took him along for fifteen dollars' worth of gas.
He was bound for Indiana.
They also picked up a woman with her idiot daughter, for four dollars' gas fare to Arizona.
Dean sat the idiot girl with him up front and dug her, as he said,
"All the way, man! such a gone sweet little soul.
Oh, we talked, we talked of fires and the desert turning to a paradise and her parrot that swore in Spanish."
Dropping off these passengers, they proceeded to Tucson.
All along the way Galatea Dunkel, Ed's new wife, kept complaining that she was tired and wanted to sleep in a motel.
If this kept up they'd spend all her money long before Virginia.
Two nights she forced a stop and blew tens on motels.
By the time they got to Tucson she was broke.
Dean and Ed gave her the slip in a hotel lobby and resumed the voyage alone, with the sailor, and without a qualm.
Ed Dunkel was a tall, calm, unthinking fellow who was completely ready to do anything Dean asked him; and at this time Dean was too busy for scruples.
He was roaring through Las Cruces, New Mexico, when he suddenly had an explosive yen to see his sweet first wife Marylou again.
She was up in Denver.
He swung the car north, against the feeble protests of the sailor, and zoomed into Denver in the evening.
He ran and found Marylou in a hotel.
They had ten hours of wild lovemaking.
Everything was decided again: they were going to stick.
Marylou was the only girl Dean ever really loved.
He was sick with regret when he saw her face again, and, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being.
She understood Dean; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad.
To soothe the sailor, Dean fixed him up with a girl in a hotel room over the bar where the old poolhall gang always drank.
But the sailor refused the girl and in fact walked off in the night and they never saw him again; he evidently took a bus to Indiana.
Dean, Marylou, and Ed Dunkel roared east along Colfax and out to the Kansas plains.
Great snowstorms overtook them.