Bull isn't here now.
Isn't that a fire or something over there?"
We both looked toward the sun.
"You mean the sun?"
"Of course I don't mean the sun – I heard sirens that way.
Don't you know a peculiar glow?"
It was toward New Orleans; the clouds were strange.
"I don't see anything," I said.
Jane snuffed down her nose.
"Same old Paradise."
That was the way we greeted each other after four years; Jane used to live with my wife and me in New York.
"And is Galatea Dunkel here?" I asked.
Jane was still looking for her fire; in those days she ate three tubes of benzedrine paper a day.
Her face, once plump and Germanic and pretty, had become stony and red and gaunt.
She had caught polio in New Orleans and limped a little.
Sheepishly Dean and the gang came out of the car and more or less made themselves at home.
Galatea Dunkel came out of her stately retirement in the back of the house to meet her tormentor.
Galatea was a serious girl.
She was pale and looked like tears all over.
Big Ed passed his hand through his hair and said hello.
She looked at him steadily.
"Where have you been?
Why did you do this to me?"
And she gave Dean a dirty look; she knew the score.
Dean paid absolutely no attention; what he wanted now was food; he asked Jane if there was anything.
The confusion began right there.
Poor Bull came home in his Texas Chevy and found his house invaded by maniacs; but he greeted me with a nice warmth I hadn't seen in him for a long time.
He had bought this house in New Orleans with some money he had made growing black-eyed peas in Texas with an old college schoolmate whose father, a mad-paretic, had died and left a fortune.
Bull himself only got fifty dollars a week from his own family, which wasn't too bad except that he spent almost that much per week on his drug habit – and his wife was also expensive, gobbling up about ten dollars' worth of benny tubes a week.
Their food bill was the lowest in the country; they hardly ever ate; nor did the children – they didn't seem to care.
They had two wonderful children: Dodie, eight years old; and little Ray, one year.
Ray ran around stark naked in the yard, a little blond child of the rainbow.
Bull called him "the Little Beast," after W.
C.
Fields.
Bull came driving into the yard and unrolled himself from the car bone by bone, and came over wearily, wearing glasses, felt hat, shabby suit, long, lean, strange, and laconic, saying,
"Why, Sal, you finally got here; let's go in the house and have a drink."
It would take all night to tell about Old Bull Lee; let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned not only out of necessity but because he wanted to.
He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa in his time, only to see what was going on; he married a White Russian countess in Yugoslavia to get her away from the Nazis in the thirties; there are pictures of him with the international cocaine set of the thirties – gangs with wild hair, leaning on one another; there are other pictures of him in a Panama hat, surveying the streets of Algiers; he never saw the White Russian countess again.
He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark.
In Paris he sat at cafe tables, watching the sullen French faces go by.
In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world.
In Istanbul he threaded his "way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts.
In English hotels he read Spengler and the Marquis de Sade.
In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just for two minutes too long for a drink, and wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it.
He did all these things merely for the experience.
Now the final study was the drug habit.
He was now in New Orleans, slipping along the streets with shady characters and haunting connection bars.
There is a strange story about his college days that illustrates something else about him: he had friends for cocktails in his well-appointed rooms one afternoon when suddenly his pet ferret rushed out and bit an elegant teacup queer on the ankle and everybody hightailed it out the door, screaming.
Old Bull leaped up and grabbed his shotgun and said,