Man ain't safe going around this country any more without a gun."
He pulled back his coat and showed us his revolver.
Then he opened the drawer and showed us the rest of his arsenal.
In New York he once had a sub-machine-gun under his bed.
"I got something better than that now – a German Scheintoth gas gun; look at this beauty, only got one shell.
I could knock out a hundred men with this gun and have plenty of time to make a getaway.
Only thing wrong, I only got one shell."
"I hope I'm not around when you try it," said Jane from the kitchen.
"How do you know it's a gas shell?"
Bull snuffed; he never paid any attention to her sallies but he heard them.
His relation with his wife was one of the strangest: they talked till late at night; Bull liked to hold the floor, he went right on in his dreary monotonous voice, she tried to break in, she never could; at dawn he got tired and then Jane talked and he listened, snuffing and going thfump down his nose.
She loved that man madly, but in a delirious way of some kind; there was never any mooching and mincing around, just talk and a very deep companionship that none of us would ever be able to fathom.
Something curiously unsympathetic and cold between them was really a form of humor by which they communicated their own set of subtle vibrations.
Love is all; Jane was never more than ten feet away from Bull and never missed a word he said, and he spoke in a very low voice, too.
Dean and I were yelling about a big night in New Orleans and wanted Bull to show us around.
He threw a damper on this.
"New Orleans is a very dull town.
It's against the law to go to the colored section.
The bars are insufferably dreary."
I said, "There must be some ideal bars in town."
"The ideal bar doesn't exist in America.
An ideal bar is something that's gone beyond our ken.
In nineteen ten a bar was a place where men went to meet during or after work, and all there was was a long counter, brass rails, spittoons, player piano for music, a few mirrors, and barrels of whisky at ten cents a shot together with barrels of beer at five cents a mug.
Now all you get is chromium, drunken women, fags, hostile bartenders, anxious owners who hover around the door, worried about their leather seats and the law; just a lot of screaming at the wrong time and deadly silence when a stranger walks in."
We argued about bars.
"All right," he said, "I'll take you to New Orleans tonight and show you what I mean."
And he deliberately took us to the dullest bars.
We left Jane with the children; supper was over; she was reading the want ads of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
I asked her if she was looking for a job; she only said it was the most interesting part of the paper.
Bull rode into town with us and went right on talking.
"Take it easy, Dean, we'll get there, I hope; hup, there's the ferry, you don't have to drive us clear into the river."
He held on.
Dean had gotten worse, he confided in me.
"He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence."
He looked at Dean out of the corner of his eye.
"If you go to California with this madman you'll never make it.
Why don't you stay in New Orleans with me?
We'll play the horses over to Graetna and relax in my yard.
I've got a nice set of knives and I'm building a target.
Some pretty juicy dolls downtown, too, if that's in your line these days."
He snuffed.
We were on the ferry and Dean had leaped out to lean over the rail.
I followed, but Bull sat on in the car, snuffing, thfump.
There was a mystic wraith of fog over the brown waters that night, together with dark driftwoods; and across the way New Orleans glowed orange-bright, with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, till you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden and Panama.
The ferry fires glowed in the night; the same Negroes plied the shovel and sang.
Old Big Slim Hazard had once worked on the Algiers ferry as a deckhand; this made me think of Mississippi Gene too; and as the river poured down from mid-America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One.
Strange to say, too, that night we crossed the ferry with Bull Lee a girl committed suicide off the deck; either just before or just after us; we saw it in the paper the next day.
We hit all the dull bars in the French Quarter with Old Bull and went back home at midnight.
That night Marylou took everything in the books; she took tea, goofballs, benny, liquor, and even asked Old Bull for a shot of M, which of course he didn't give her; he did give her a martini.
She was so saturated with elements of all kinds that she came to a standstill and stood goofy on the porch with me.