It was a wonderful porch Bull had.
It ran clear around the house; by moonlight with the willows it looked like an old Southern mansion that had seen better days.
In the house Jane sat reading the want ads in the living room; Bull was in the bathroom taking his fix, clutching his old black necktie in his teeth for a tourniquet and jabbing with the needle into his woesome arm with the thousand holes; Ed Dunkel was sprawled out with Galatea in the massive master bed that Old Bull and Jane never used; Dean was rolling tea; and Marylou and I imitated Southern aristocracy.
"Why, Miss Lou, you look lovely and most fetching tonight."
"Why, thank you, Crawford, I sure do appreciate the nice things you do say."
Doors kept opening around the crooked porch, and members of our sad drama in the American night kept popping out to find out where everybody was.
Finally I took a walk alone to the levee.
I wanted to sit on the muddy bank and dig the Mississippi River; instead of that I had to look at it with my nose against a wire fence.
When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got?
"Bureaucracy!" says Old Bull; he sits with Kafka on his lap, the lamp burns above him, he snuffs, thfump.
His old house creaks.
And the Montana log rolls by in the big black river of the night. " Tain't nothin but bureaucracy.
And unions!
Especially unions!"
But dark laughter would come again.
7
It was there in the morning when I got up bright and early and found Old Bull and Dean in the back yard.
Dean was wearing his gas-station coveralls and helping Bull.
Bull had found a great big piece of thick rotten wood and was desperately yanking with a hammerhook at little nails imbedded in it.
We stared at the nails; there were millions of them; they were like worms.
"When I get all these nails out of this I'm going to build me a shelf that'll last a thousand years!" said Bull, every bone shuddering with boyish excitement.
"Why, Sal, do you realize the shelves they build these days crack under the weight of knickknacks after six months or generally collapse?
Same with houses, same with clothes.
These bastards have invented plastics by which they could make houses that last forever.
And tires.
Americans are killing themselves by the millions every year with defective rubber tires that get hot on the road and blow up.
They could make tires that never blow up.
Same with tooth powder.
There's a certain gum they've invented and they won't show it to anybody that if you chew it as a kid you'll never get a cavity for the rest of your born days.
Same with clothes.
They can make clothes that last forever.
They prefer making cheap goods so's everybody'll have to go on working and punching timeclocks and organizing themselves in sullen unions and floundering around while the big grab goes on in Washington and Moscow."
He raised his big piece of rotten wood.
"Don't you think this'll make a splendid shelf?"
It was early in the morning; his energy was at its peak.
The poor fellow took so much junk into his system he could only weather the greater proportion of his day in that chair with the lamp burning at noon, but in the morning he was magnificent.
We began throwing knives at the target.
He said he'd seen an Arab in Tunis who could stick a man's eye from forty feet.
This got him going on his aunt, who went to the Casbah in the thirties.
"She was with a party of tourists led by a guide.
She had a diamond ring on her little finger.
She leaned on a wall to rest a minute and an Ay-rab rushed up and appropriated her ring finger before she could let out a cry, my dear.
She suddenly realized she had no little finger.
Hi-hi-hi-hi-hi!"
When he laughed he compressed his lips together and made it come out from his belly, from far away, and doubled up to lean on his knees.
He laughed a long time.
"Hey Jane!" he yelled gleefully.
"I was just telling Dean and Sal about my aunt in the Casbah!"
"I heard you," she said across the lovely warm Gulf morning from the kitchen door.
Great beautiful clouds floated overhead, valley clouds that made you feel the vastness of old tumbledown holy America from mouth to mouth and tip to tip.