in back of the tents with pretty girls in levis and rose shirts. There were a lot of Mexican girls too, and one amazing little girl about three feet high, a midget, with the most beautiful and tender face in the world, who turned to her companion and said, “Man, let’s call up Gomez and cut out.” Dean stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of her. A great knife stabbed him from the darkness of the night. “Man, I love her, oh, love her ...” We had to follow her around for a long time. She finally went across the highway to make a phone call in a motel booth and Dean pretended to be looking through the pages of the directory but was really all wound tight watching her. I tried to open up a conversation with the lovey-doll’s friends but they paid no attention to us. Gomez arrived in a rattly truck and took the girls off. Dean stood in the road, clutching his breast. “Oh, man, I almost died....”
“Why the hell didn’t you talk to her?”
“I can‘t, I couldn’t ...” We decided to buy some beer and go up to Okie Frankie’s and play records. We hitched on the road with a bag of beer cans. Little Janet, Frankie’s thirteen-year-old daughter, was the prettiest girl in the world and was about to grow up into a gone woman. Best of all were her long, tapering, sensitive fingers that she used to talk with, like a Cleopatra Nile dance. Dean sat in the farthest corner of the room, watching her with slitted eyes and saying, “Yes, yes, yes.” Janet was already aware of him; she turned to me for protection. Previous months of that summer I had spent a lot of time with her, talking about books and little things she was interested in.
7
Nothing happened that night; we went to sleep. Everything happened the next day. In the afternoon Dean and I went to downtown Denver for our various chores and to see the travel bureau for a car to New York. On the way home in the late afternoon we started out for Okie Frankie‘s, up Broadway, where Dean suddenly sauntered into a sportsgoods store, calmly picked up a softball on the counter, and came out, popping it up and down in his palm. Nobody noticed; nobody ever notices such things. It was a drowsy, hot afternoon. We played catch as we went along. “We’ll get a travel-bureau car for sure tomorrow.”
A woman friend had given me a big quart of Old Granddad bourbon. We started drinking it at Frankie’s house. Across the cornfield in back lived a beautiful young chick that Dean had been trying to make ever since he arrived. Trouble was brewing. He threw too many pebbles in her window and frightened her. As we drank the bourbon in the littered living room with all its dogs and scattered toys and sad talk, Dean kept running out the back kitchen door and crossing the cornfield to throw pebbles and whistle. Once in a while Janet went out to peek. Suddenly Dean came back pale. “Trouble, m‘boy. That gal’s mother is after me with a shotgun and she got a gang of high-school kids to beat me up from down the road.”
“What’s this? Where are they?”
“Across the cornfield, m‘boy.” Dean was drunk and didn’t care. We went out together and crossed the cornfield in the moonlight. I saw groups of people on the dark dirt road.
“Here they come!” I heard.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What’s the matter, please?”
The mother lurked in the background with a big shotgun across her arm. “That damn friend of yours been annoying us long enough. I’m not the kind to call the law. If he comes back here once more I’m gonna shoot and shoot to kill.” The high-school boys were clustered with their fists knotted. I was so drunk I didn’t care either, but I soothed everybody some.
I said, “He won’t do it again. I’ll watch him; he’s my brother and listens to me. Please put your gun away and don’t bother about anything. ”
“Just one more time!” she said firmly and grimly across the dark. “When my husband gets home I’m sending him after you.”
“You don’t have to do that; he won’t bother you any more, understand. Now be calm and it’s okay.” Behind me Dean was cursing under his breath. The girl was peeking from her bedroom window. I knew these people from before and