on tattered feet, carrying an enormous windshield-shade, and wanted to know if I’d buy. “You like? Sixty peso. Habla Español? Sesenta peso. My name Victor.”

“Nah,” I said jokingly, “buy señorita.”

“Sure, sure!” he cried excitedly. “I get you gurls, onnytime. Too hot now,” he added with distaste. “No good gurls when hot day. Wait tonight. You like shade?”

I didn’t want the shade but I wanted the girls. I woke up Dean. “Hey, man, I told you in Texas I’d get you a girl—all right, stretch your bones and wake up, boy; we’ve got girls waiting for us.”

“What? what?” he cried, leaping up, haggard. “Where? where?”

“This boy Victor’s going to show us where.”

“Well, lessgo, lessgo!” Dean leaped out of the car and clasped Victor’s hand. There was a group of other boys hanging around the station and grinning, half of them barefoot, all wearing floppy straw hats. “Man,” said Dean to me, “ain’t this a nice way to spend an afternoon. It’s so much cooler than Denver poolhalls. Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?” he cried in Spanish. “Dig that, Sal, I’m speaking Spanish.”

“Ask him if we can get any tea. Hey kid, you got ma-ree-wa-na?”

The kid nodded gravely. “Sho, onnytime, mon. Come with me.”

“Hee! Whee! Hoo!” yelled Dean. He was wide awake and jumping up and down in that drowsy Mexican street. “Let’s all go!” I was passing Lucky Strikes to the other boys. They were getting great pleasure out of us and especially Dean. They turned to one another with cupped hands and rattled off comments about the mad American cat. “Dig them, Sal, talking about us and digging. Oh my goodness, what a world!” Victor got in the car with us, and we lurched off. Stan Shephard had been sleeping soundly and woke up to this madness.

We drove way out to the desert the other side of town and turned on a rutty dirt road that made the car bounce as never before. Up ahead was Victor’s house. It sat on the edge of cactus flats overtopped by a few trees, just an adobe crackerbox, with a few men lounging around in the yard. “Who that?” cried Dean, all excited.

“Those my brothers. My mother there too. My sistair too. That my family. I married, I live downtown.”

“What about your mother?” Dean flinched. “What she say about marijuana.”

“Oh, she get it for me.” And as we waited in the car Victor got out and loped over to the house and said a few words to an old lady, who promptly turned and went to the garden in back and began gathering dry fronds of marijuana that had been pulled off the plants and left to dry in the desert sun. Meanwhile Victor’s brothers grinned from under a tree. They were coming over to meet us but it would take a while for them to get up and walk over. Victor came back, grinning sweetly.

“Man,” said Dean, “that Victor is the sweetest, gonest, fran ticest little bangtail cat I’ve ever in all my life met. Just look at him, look at his cool slow walk. There’s no need to hurry around here.” A steady, insistent desert breeze blew into the car. It was very hot.

“You see how hot?” said Victor, sitting down with Dean in the front seat and pointing up at the burning roof of the Ford. “You have ma-ree-gwana and it no hot no more. You wait.”

“Yes,” said Dean, adjusting his dark glasses, “I wait. For sure, Victor m‘boy.”

Presently Victor’s tall brother came ambling along with some weed piled on a page of newspaper. He dumped it on Victor’s lap and leaned casually on the door of the car to nod and smile at us and say, “Hallo.” Dean nodded and smiled pleasantly at him. Nobody talked; it was fine. Victor proceeded to roll the biggest bomber anybody ever saw. He rolled (using brown bag paper) what amounted to a tremendous Corona cigar of tea. It was huge. Dean stared at it, popeyed. Victor casually lit it and passed it around. To drag on this thing was like leaning over a chimney and inhaling. It blew into your throat in one great blast of heat. We held our breaths and all let out just about simultaneously. Instantly we were all high. The sweat froze on our foreheads and it was suddenly like the beach at Acapulco. I looked out the back window of the car, and another and the strangest of Victor’s brothers—a tall Peruvian of an Indian