us abreast went down the Spanish street into the middle of the dull brown lights. Old men sat on chairs in the night and looked like Oriental junkies and oracles. No one was actually looking at us, yet everybody was aware of everything we did. We turned sharp left into the smoky lunchroom and went in to music of campo guitars on an American ‘thirties jukebox. Shirt-sleeved Mexican cab-drivers and straw-hatted Mexican hipsters sat at stools, devouring shapeless messes of tortillas, beans, tacos, whatnot. We bought three bottles of cold beer—cerveza was the name of beer—for about thirty Mexican cents or ten American cents each. We bought packs of Mexican cigarettes for six cents each. We gazed and gazed at our wonderful Mexican money that went so far, and played with it and looked around and smiled at everyone. Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic. “Think of these cats staying up all hours of the night,” whispered Dean. “And think of this big continent ahead of us with those enormous Sierra Madre mountains we saw in the movies, and the jungles all the way down and a whole desert plateau as big as ours and reaching clear down to Guatemala and God knows where, whoo! What’ll we do? What’ll we do? Let’s move!” We got out and went back to the car. One last glimpse of America across the hot lights of the Rio Grande bridge, and we turned our back and fender to it and roared off.

Instantly we were out in the desert and there wasn’t a light or a car for fifty miles across the flats. And just then dawn was coming over the Gulf of Mexico and we began to see the ghostly shapes of yucca cactus and organpipe on all sides. “What a wild country!” I yelped. Dean and I were completely awake. In Laredo we’d been half dead. Stan, who’d been to foreign countries before, just calmly slept in the back seat. Dean and I had the whole of Mexico before us.

“Now, Sal, we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things. All the years and troubles and kicks—and now this! so that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this, you see, and understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven’t done before us—they were here, weren’t they? The Mexican war. Cutting across here with cannon.”

“This road,” I told him, “is also the route of old American outlaws who used to skip over the border and go down to old Monterrey, so if you’ll look out on that graying desert and picture the ghost of an old Tombstone hellcat making his lonely exile gallop into the unknown, you’ll see further ...”

“It’s the world,” said Dean. “My God!” he cried, slapping the wheel. “It’s the world! We can go right on to South America if the road goes. Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damn!” We rushed on. The dawn spread immediately and we began to see the white sand of the desert and occasional huts in the distance off the road. Dean slowed down to peer at them. “Real beat huts, man, the kind you only find in Death Valley and much worse. These people don’t bother with appearances.” The first town ahead that had any consequence on the map was called Sabinas Hidalgo. We looked forward to it eagerly. “And the road don’t look any different than the American road,” cried Dean, “except one mad thing and if you’ll notice, right here, the mileposts are written in kilometers and they click off the distance to Mexico City. See, it’s the only city in the entire land, everything points to it.” There were only 767 more miles to that metropolis; in kilometers the figure was over a thousand. “Damn! I gotta go!” cried Dean. For a while I closed my eyes in utter exhaustion and kept hearing Dean pound the wheel with his fists and say, “Damn,” and “What kicks!” and “Oh, what a land!” and “Yes!” We arrived at Sabinas Hidalgo, across the desert, at about seven o‘clock in the morning. We slowed down completely to see this. We woke up Stan in the back seat. We sat