Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye – with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.
Dean was convinced Marylou was a whore; he confided in me that she was a pathological liar.
But when she watched him like this it was love too; and when Dean noticed he always turned with his big false flirtatious smile, with the eyelashes fluttering and the teeth pearly white, while a moment ago he was only dreaming in his eternity.
Then Marylou and I both laughed – and Dean gave no sign of discomfiture, just a goofy glad grin that said to us, Ain't we gettin our kicks anyway?
And that was it.
Outside El Paso, in the darkness, we saw a small huddled figure with thumb stuck out.
It was our promised hitchhiker.
We pulled up and backed to his side.
"How much money you got, kid?"
The kid had no money; he was about seventeen, pale, strange, with one undeveloped crippled hand and no suitcase.
"Ain't he sweet?" said Dean, turning to me with a serious awe.
"Come on in, fella, we'll take you out – " The kid saw his advantage.
He said he had an aunt in Tulare, California, who owned a grocery store and as soon as we got there he'd have some money for us.
Dean rolled on the floor laughing, it was so much like the kid in North Carolina.
"Yes!
Yes!" he yelled.
"We've all got aunts; well, let's go, let's see the aunts and the uncles and the grocery stores all the way ALONG that road!!"
And we had a new passenger, and a fine little guy he turned out to be, too.
He didn't say a word, he listened to us.
After a minute of Dean's talk he was probably convinced he had joined a car of madmen.
He said he was hitchhiking from Alabama to Oregon, where his home was.
We asked him what he was doing in Alabama.
"I went to visit my uncle; he said he'd have a job for me in a lumber mill.
The job fell through, so I'm comin back home."
"Coin home," said Dean, "goin home, yes, I know, we'll take you home, far as Frisco anyhow."
But we didn't have any money.
Then it occurred to me I could borrow five dollars from my old friend Hal Hingham in Tucson, Arizona.
Immediately Dean said it was all settled and we were going to Tucson.
And we did.
We passed Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the night and arrived in Arizona at dawn.
I woke up from a deep sleep to find everybody sleeping like lambs and the car parked God knows where, because I couldn't see out the steamy windows.
I got out of the car.
We were in the mountains: there was a heaven of sunrise, cool purple airs, red mountainsides, emerald pastures in valleys, dew, and transmuting clouds of gold; on the ground gopher holes, cactus, mesquite.
It was time for me to drive on.
I pushed Dean and the kid over and went down the mountain with the clutch in and the motor off to save gas.
In this manner I rolled into Benson, Arizona.
It occurred to me that I had a pocket watch Rocco had just given me for a birthday present, a four-dollar watch.
At the gas station I asked the man if he knew a pawnshop in Benson.
It was right next door to the station.
I knocked, someone got up out of bed, and in a minute I had a dollar for the watch.
It went into the tank.
Now we had enough gas for Tucson.
But suddenly a big pistol-packing trooper appeared, just as I was ready to pull out, and asked to see my driver's license.
"The fella in the back seat has the license," I said.
Dean and Marylou were sleeping together under the blanket.
The cop told Dean to come out. Suddenly he whipped out his gun and yelled,
"Keep your hands up!"
"Offisah," I heard Dean say in the most unctious and ridiculous tones, "offisah, I was only buttoning my flah."
Even the cop almost smiled.
Dean came out, muddy, ragged, T-shirted, rubbing his belly, cursing, looking everywhere for his license and his car papers.