with his tale. “I tell you it’s true, I started at nine, with a girl called Milly Mayfair in back of Rod’s garage on Grant Street—same street Carlo lived on in Denver. That’s when my father was still working at the smithy’s a bit. I remember my aunt yelling out the window, ‘What are you doing down there in back of the garage?’ Oh honey Marylou, if I’d only known you then! Wow! How sweet you musta been at nine.” He tittered maniacally; he stuck his finger in her mouth and licked it; he took her hand and rubbed it over himself. She just sat there, smiling serenely.

Big long Ed Dunkel sat looking out the window, talking to himself. “Yes sir, I thought I was a ghost that night.” He was also wondering what Galatea Dunkel would say to him in New Orleans.

Dean went on. “One time I rode a freight from New Mexico clear to LA—I was eleven years old, lost my father at a siding, we were all in a hobo jungle, I was with a man called Big Red, my father was out drunk in a boxcar—it started to roll—Big Red and I missed it—I didn’t see my father for months. I rode a long freight all the way to California, really flying, first-class freight, a desert Zipper. All the way I rode over the couplings—you can imagine how dangerous, I was only a kid, I didn’t know—clutching a loaf of bread under one arm and the other hooked around the brake bar. This is no story, this is true. When I got to LA I was so starved for milk and cream I got a job in a dairy and the first thing I did I drank two quarts of heavy cream and puked.”

“Poor Dean,” said Marylou, and she kissed him. He stared ahead proudly. He loved her.

We were suddenly driving along the blue waters of the Gulf, and at the same time a momentous mad thing began on the radio; it was the Chicken Jazz’n Gumbo disk-jockey show from New Orleans, all mad jazz records, colored records, with the disk jockey saying, “Don’t worry ‘bout nothing!” We saw New Orleans in the night ahead of us with joy. Dean rubbed his hands over the wheel. “Now we’re going to get our kicks!” At dusk we were coming into the humming streets of New Orleans. “Oh, smell the people!” yelled Dean with his face out the window sniffing. “Ah! God! Life!” He swung around a trolley. “Yes!” He darted the car and looked in every direction for girls. “Look at her!” The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter. We bounced in our seats. “And dig her!” yelled Dean, pointing at another woman. “Oh, I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!” He spat out the window; he groaned; he clutched his head. Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement and exhaustion.

We bounced the car up on the Algiers ferry and found ourselves crossing the Mississippi River by boat. “Now we must all get out and dig the river and the people and smell the world,” said Dean, bustling with his sunglasses and cigarettes and leaping out of the car like a jack-in-the-box. We followed. On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls—bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa vales and things that had drowned in Three Forks, where the secret began in ice. Smoky New Orleans receded on one side; old, sleepy Algiers with its warped woodsides bumped us on the other. Negroes were working in the hot afternoon, stoking the ferry furnaces that burned red and made our tires smell. Dean dug them, hopping up and down in the heat. He rushed around the deck and upstairs with his baggy pants hanging halfway down his belly. Suddenly I saw him eagering on the flying bridge. I expected him to take off on wings. I heard his mad laugh all over the boat—“Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!” Marylou was with him. He covered everything in a jiffy, came back with the full story, jumped in the car just as everybody was tooting to