All pep and juices was Bull.
"Say, did I ever tell you about Dale's father?
He was the funniest old man you ever saw in your life.
He had paresis, which eats away the forepart of your brain and you get so's you're not responsible for anything that comes into your mind.
He had a house in Texas and had carpenters working twenty-four hours a day putting on new wings.
He'd leap up in the middle of the night and say,
'I don't want that goddam wing; put it over there.'
The carpenters had to take everything down and start all over again.
Come dawn you'd see them hammering away at the new wing.
Then the old man'd get bored with that and say,
'Goddammit, I wanta go to Maine!'
And he'd get into his car and drive off a hundred miles an hour – great showers of chicken feathers followed his track for hundreds of miles.
He'd stop his car in the middle of a Texas town just to get out and buy some whisky.
Traffic would honk all around him and he'd come rushing out of the store, yelling,
'Thet your goddam noith, you bunth of bathats!'
He lisped; when you have paresis you lips, I mean you lisps.
One night he came to my house in Cincinnati and tooted the horn and said,
'Come on out and let's go to Texas to see Dale.'
He was going back from Maine.
He claimed he bought a house – oh, we wrote a story about him at college, where you see this horrible shipwreck and people in the water clutching at the sides of the lifeboat, and the old man is there with a machete, hackin at their fingers.
'Get away, ya bunth a bathats, thith my cottham boath!'
Oh, he was horrible.
I could tell you stories about him all day.
Say, ain't this a nice day?"
And it sure was.
The softest breezes blew in from the levee; it was worth the whole trip.
We went into the house after Bull to measure the wall for a shelf.
He showed us the dining-room table he built. It was made of wood six inches thick.
"This is a table that'll last a thousand years!" said Bull, leaning his long thin face at us maniacally.
He banged on it.
In the evenings he sat at this table, picking at his food and throwing the bones to the cats.
He had seven cats.
"I love cats.
I especially like the ones that squeal when I hold 'em over the bathtub."
He insisted on demonstrating; someone was in the bathroom.
"Well," he said, "we can't do that now.
Say, I been having a fight with the neighbors next door."
He told us about the neighbors; they were a vast crew with sassy children who threw stones over the rickety fence at Dodie and Ray and sometimes at Old Bull.
He told them to cut it out; the old man rushed out and yelled something in Portuguese.
Bull went in the house and came back with his shotgun, upon which he leaned demurely; the incredible simper on his face beneath the long hatbrim, his whole body writhing coyly and snakily as he waited, a grotesque, lank, lonely clown beneath the clouds.
The sight of him the Portuguese must have thought something out of an old evil dream.
We scoured the yard for things to do.
There was a tremendous fence Bull had been working on to separate him from the obnoxious neighbors; it would never be finished, the task was too much.
He rocked it back and forth to show how solid it was.
Suddenly he grew tired and quiet and went in the house and disappeared in the bathroom for his pre-lunch fix.
He came out glassy-eyed and calm, and sat down under his burning lamp.
The sunlight poked feebly behind the drawn shade.
"Say, why don't you fellows try my orgone accumulator?
Put some juice in your bones.
I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!"