We got out of the car for air and suddenly both of us were stoned with joy to realize that in the darkness all around us was fragrant green grass and the smell of fresh manure and warm waters.
"We're in the South!
We've left the winter!"
Faint daybreak illuminated green shoots by the side of the road.
I took a deep breath; a locomotive howled across-the darkness, Mobile-bound.
So were we.
I took off my shirt and exulted.
Ten miles down the road Dean drove into a filling-station with the motor off, noticed that the attendant was fast asleep at the desk, jumped out, quietly filled the gas tank, saw to it the bell didn't ring, and rolled off like an Arab with a five-dollar tankful of gas for our pilgrimage.
I slept and woke up to the crazy exultant sounds of music and Dean and Marylou talking and the great green land rolling by.
"Where are we?"
"Just passed the tip of Florida, man – Flomaton, it's called."
Florida!
We were rolling down to the coastal plain and Mobile; up ahead were great soaring clouds of the Gulf of Mexico.
It was only thirty-two hours since we'd said good-by to everybody in the dirty snows of the North.
We stopped at a gas station, and there Dean and Marylou played piggyback around the tanks and Dunkel went inside and stole three packs of cigarettes without trying.
We were fresh out.
Rolling into Mobile over the long tidal highway, we all took our winter clothes off and enjoyed the Southern temperature.
This was when Dean started telling his life story and when, beyond Mobile, he came upon an obstruction of wrangling cars at a crossroads and instead of slipping around them just balled right through the driveway of a gas station and went right on without relaxing his steady continental seventy.
We left gaping faces behind us.
He went right on with his tale.
"I tell you it's true, I started at nine, with a girl called Milly Mayfair in back of Rod's garage on Grant Street – same street Carlo lived on in Denver.
That's when my father was still working at the smithy's a bit.
I remember my aunt yelling out the window,
'What are you doing down there in back of the garage?'
Oh honey Marylou, if I'd only known you then!
Wow! How sweet you musta been at nine."
He tittered maniacally; he stuck his finger in her mouth and licked it; he took her hand and rubbed it over himself.
She just sat there, smiling serenely.
Big long Ed Dunkel sat looking out the window, talking to himself.
"Yes sir, I thought I was a ghost that night."
He was also wondering what Galatea Dunkel would say to him in New Orleans.
Dean went on.
"One time I rode a freight from New Mexico clear to LA – I was eleven years old, lost my father at a siding, we were all in a hobo jungle, I was with a man called Big Red, my father was out drunk in a boxcar – it started to roll – Big Red and I missed it – I didn't see my father for months.
I rode a long freight all the way to California, really flying, first-class freight, a desert Zipper.
All the way I rode over the couplings – you can imagine how dangerous, I was only a kid, I didn't know – clutching a loaf of bread under one arm and the other hooked around the brake bar.
This is no story, this is true.
When I got to LA I was so starved for milk and cream I got a job in a dairy and the first thing I did I drank two quarts of heavy cream and puked."
"Poor Dean," said Marylou, and she kissed him.
He stared ahead proudly.
He loved her.
We were suddenly driving along the blue waters of the Gulf, and at the same time a momentous mad thing began on the radio; it was the Chicken Jazz'n Gumbo disk-jockey show from New Orleans, all mad jazz records, colored records, with the disk jockey saying,
"Don't worry about nothing!"
We saw New Orleans in the night ahead of us with joy.
Dean rubbed his hands over the wheel.
"Now we're going to get our kicks!"
At dusk we were coming into the humming streets of New Orleans.
"Oh, smell the people!" yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffing.
"Ah!
God!
Life!"