How do you know your father, who was an old horseplayer, just didn't momentarily communicate to you that Big Pop was going to win the race?
The name brought the feeling up in you, he took advantage of the name to communicate.
That's what I was thinking about when you mentioned it.
My cousin in Missouri once bet on a horse that had a name that reminded him of his mother, and it won and paid a big price.
The same thing happened this afternoon."
He shook his head.
"Ah, let's go.
This is the last time I'll ever play the horses with you around; all these visions drive me to distraction."
In the car as we drove back to his old house he said,
"Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes.
When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball.
The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world."
We told Jane about it.
She sniffed.
"It sounds silly to me."
She plied the broom around the kitchen.
Bull went in the bathroom for his afternoon fix.
Out on the road Dean and Ed Dunkel were playing basketball with Dodie's ball and a bucket nailed on a lamppost.
I joined in.
Then we turned 10 feats of athletic prowess.
Dean completely amazed me.
He had Ed and me hold a bar of iron up to our waists, and just standing there he popped right over it, holding his heels.
"Go ahead, raise it."
We kept raising it till it was chest-high.
Still he jumped over it with ease.
Then he tried the running broad jump and did at least twenty feet and more.
Then I raced him down the road.
I can do the hundred in 10:5.
He passed me like the wind.
As we ran I had a mad vision of Dean running through all of life just like that – his bony face outthrust to life, his arms pumping, his brow sweating, his legs twinkling like Groucho Marx, yelling,
"Yes!
Yes, man, you sure can go!"
But nobody could go as fast as he could, and that's the truth.
Then Bull came out with a couple of knives and started showing us how to disarm a would-be shiver in a dark alley.
I for my part showed him a very good trick, which is falling on the ground in front of your adversary and gripping him with your ankles and flipping him over on his hands and grabbing his wrists in full nelson.
He said it was pretty good.
He demonstrated some jujitsu.
Little Dodie called her mother to the porch and said,
"Look at the silly men."
She was such a cute sassy little thing that Dean couldn't take his eyes off her.
"Wow.
Wait till she grows up!
Can you see her cuttin down Canal Street with her cute eyes.
Ah!
Oh!"
He hissed through his teeth.
We spent a mad day in downtown New Orleans walking around with the Dunkels.
Dean was out of his mind that day.
When he saw the T amp; NO freight trains in the yard he wanted to show me everything at once.
"You'll be brakeman 'fore I'm through with ya!"