excited that night because his cousin Sam Brady, was meeting us at a bar. He was wearing a clean T-shirt and beaming all over. “Now listen, Sal, I must tell you about Sam—he’s my cousin.”
“By the way, have you looked for your father?”
“This afternoon, man, I went down to Jiggs’ Buffet where he used to pour draft beer in tender befuddlement and get hell from the boss and go staggering out—no—and I went to the old barber-shop next to the Windsor—no, not there—old fella told me he thought he was—imagine!—working in a railroad gandy-dancing cookshack or sumpin for the Boston and Maine in New England! But I don’t believe him, they make up fractious stories for a dime. Now listen to hear. In my childhood Sam Brady my close cousin was my absolute hero. He used to bootleg whisky from the mountains and one time he had a tremendous fist fight with his brother that lasted two hours in the yard and had the women screaming and terrified. We used to sleep together. The one man in the family who took tender concern for me. And tonight I’m going to see him again for the first time in seven years, he just got back from Missouri.”
“And what’s the pitch?”
“No pitch, man, I only want to know what’s been happening in the family—I have a family, remember—and most particularly, Sal, I want him to tell me things that I’ve forgotten in my childhood. I want to remember, remember, I do!” I never saw Dean so glad and excited. While we waited for his cousin in the bar he talked to a lot of younger downtown hipsters and hustlers and checked on new gangs and goings-on. Then he made inquiries after Marylou, since she’d been in Denver recently. “Sal, in my young days when I used to come to this corner to steal change off the newsstand for bowery beef stew, that rough-looking cat you see out there standing had nothing but murder in his heart, got into one horrible fight after another, I remember his scars even, till now years and y-e-a-r-s of standing on the corner have finally softened him and chastened him ragely, here completely he’s become sweet and willing and patient with everybody, he’s become a fixture on the corner, you see how things happen?”
Then Sam arrived, a wiry, curly-haired man of thirty-five with work-gnarled hands. Dean stood in awe before him. “No,” said Sam Brady, “I don’t drink any more.”
“See? See?” whispered Dean in my ear. “He doesn’t drink any more and he used to be the biggest whiskyleg in town, he’s got religion now, he told me over the phone, dig him, dig the change in a man—my hero has become so strange.” Sam Brady was suspicious of his young cousin. He took us out for a spin in his old rattly coupe and immediately he made his position clear in regard to Dean.
“Now look, Dean, I don’t believe you any more or anything you’re going to try to tell me. I came to see you tonight because there’s a paper I want you to sign for the family. Your father is no longer mentioned among us and we want absolutely nothing to do with him, and, I’m sorry to say, with you either, any more.” I looked at Dean. His face dropped and darkened.
“Yass, yass,” he said. The cousin continued to drive us around and even bought us ice-cream pops. Nevertheless Dean plied him with innumerable questions about the past and the cousin supplied the answers and for a moment Dean almost began to sweat again with excitement. Oh, where was his raggedy father that night? The cousin dropped us off at the sad lights of a carnival on Alameda Boulevard at Federal. He made an appointment with Dean for the paper-signing next afternoon and left. I told Dean I was sorry he had nobody in the world to believe in him.
“Remember that I believe in you. I’m infinitely sorry for the foolish grievance I held against you yesterday afternoon.”
“All right, man, it’s agreed,” said Dean. We dug the carnival together. There were merry-go-rounds, Ferris wheels, popcorn, roulette wheels, sawdust, and hundreds of young Denver kids in jeans wandering around. Dust rose to the stars together with every sad music on earth. Dean was wearing washed-out tight levis and a T-shirt and looked suddenly like a real Denver character again. There were motorcycle kids with visors and mustaches and beaded jackets hanging around the shrouds