#mysterious stranger pushing saloon doors
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This is a snippet (edited) of Cowgirl Nat 🤠 pls tell me you love her as much as I do. That cocky cowgirl. Puts everyone in their place with a tilt of her hat and a shot from her gun 😏
-⧗-
Natasha pushed the wooden saloon doors open, the heels of her boots clicking against the tiled floor as she sauntered in. Her hat was dipped low over her face and she paused, surveying the room with a smirk before tipping it from her head, allowing her red waves to tumble around her shoulders. They were messy from hours of riding in the wind, but it suited her without fail.
Her green eyes darted across every familiar face, occasionally giving a slight smile if she felt that individual was worth her time. She held every single person in a trance, except the bartender who was all too familiar with her ways.
Natasha strolled up to the bar and leaned her forearms against the dark wood, crossing one leg over the other which accentuated the curve of her hips in her jeans. The brunette on a stool to her right choked on her beer and hid her spluttering mess behind her pitcher.
“My usual please, Barton,” Natasha husked with a wink to the bartender who pushed a bottle in her direction. As old friends, they went way back, and Clint was always delighted when she returned to pay him a visit. “Is this seat taken?”
The brunette, dressed in a plaid button down shirt, shook her head and scooted over, blinking in disbelief that she was being spoken to.
“Thanks darlin’.” If Y/n was stood up, she would have crumbled to the floor at those two words combined with Natasha’s southern drawl. She was new to the area, only stopping through to get her horse’s hooves checked over. But my goodness was she glad she picked this particular bar. She owed Clint Barton a massive favour.
Natasha slid onto the velvet-topped stool and sipped her drink, slender fingers tapping on the glass in her hand. She glanced at the woman to her right, taking her in with a simple flick up and down.
“I’ve not seen you before. You not from around here?” Natasha knew everyone who was anyone in this small town. It wasn’t hard to keep track, really, and visitors became fast spreading news.
“I’m only stopping by. Left my horse down at the stable at the end of town- gotta sort her hooves out.” Natasha nodded, knowing Bishop Stables was widely known for their services. “I’m guessing it’s obvious I’m a stranger?”
Natasha laughed around the rim of her bottle, green eyes sparkling in the dim light. “I know my people,” she replied, gesturing to the full tables behind them. “And I’d remember a face like yours, darling.” Y/n’s suddenly darted from Natasha’s face to the fringe on the waistcoat she wore. Never had she been such a mess in front of a stranger before, but this mysterious redhead was far more than just a regular stranger. She was captivating, and judging by the flirty glances she sent to several women scattered across the bar, she knew it.
“And does a gorgeous woman like you have a pretty name to match?” Natasha turned on her stool completely, resting a bare forearm on the bar in order to give Y/n her full attention.
“I’m Y/n. And you are..?”
“Natasha Romanoff, at your service.” The redhead quickly put her hat on and tipped it forwards, eliciting a laugh from the woman opposite. Clint eyed their interaction as he dried some glasses, grinning to himself at how effective Natasha’s charm truly was. She turned it on with the tip of her hat and a flash of her smile, making men and women alike stop dread in their tracks.
“Hey, Romanoff, give us a dance, will ya?” A leering voice echoed above the general hum of conversation and Y/n watched as Natasha rolled her eyes and adjusted her gun that sat in a holster on her hip.
“Give it up, Stark, you’re barking at a knot.” The man in question jeered at her and banged his beer bottle on the barrel table, several men around him doing the same.
But Natasha just stood up, squared her shoulders and fired her handgun in their direction, the bullet slamming into the wall mere inches above Stark’s head. She blew the smoke off her gun with a cocky smirk and shoved it back in the holster. The entire saloon fell silent, aside from Clint’s mutterings about yet another hole to fix thanks to his fiery friend.
Natasha waited a second longer, almost daring Stark and his guys to test her again. But they didn’t, now only watching her warily as she turned back to her new woman and held out her hand with a small flourish. Her other hand grabbed her hat from the bar and set it atop of her flaming hair.
“How about I show you around? And get you away from these coffee boilers before they start on you too.” Natasha nodded over to Stark’s table and Y/n shuddered, practically smelling their beer breaths from where she was sat.
“You’d do that? I haven’t had much of a chance to look around.” Y/n downed the rest of her drink and slid the pitcher back to Clint with a grateful smile.
Natasha helped Y/n down from her stool and rested her hand on her large belt buckle. “Well, lucky for you darlin’, you’ve got the best tour guide this town has to offer.” Y/n blushed and accepted Natasha’s arm, walking beside her as they stepped out into the blazing midday sun, leaving the darkness of the saloon behind them.
“Where do you want to start?” Y/n looked up and down the sandy street, eyeing the wooden and old stone buildings that faced her.
“You’re the guide, you tell me.” Was that just another reason to hear Natasha speak? Y/n would never admit the answer to that.
Natasha rubbed her hands together. “Perfect. My favourite place… the armoury. If you don’t walk out of there wanting a new pistol, then I really haven’t done my job right.” Natasha set off down the centre of the street, her boots crunching the gravel underfoot. Y/n just blindly followed, her hand resting casually on her gun in case anyone tried to challenge her. Small towns weren’t usually all that accommodating of foreigners, but she’d clearly done something right by befriending Natasha.
Everyone gave them a wide berth, gossiping and whispering to themselves as they passed. But Natasha was extremely well respected, so if she accepted a visitor, everyone else would too. The social hierarchy certainly placed her close to the top. And for Y/n? Well… she was just getting started.
#natasha romanoff#marvel#fanfic#natasha romanoff x reader#natasha romanoff x female#natasha romanoff x female reader#natasha romanoff fluff#natasha romanoff fanfic#black widow#scarlett johansson#cowgirl#natasha romanoff hot#natasha romanoff imagine#wlw
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#2 w/ farmer/elliott perhaps?
thank you!! damn that was fast, haha. so, since i'm writing this as a little drabble/super super short fic, let me introduce to you my farmer, nick. three essential things you must know about her: she's tall, she's got light feet, and she has a source that tells her almost everything she needs to know about the town. by tall i mean 5'11 which isnt too far off from elliott's height acc to this guide:
so many of you guys are asking for elliott content and another person asked for the same prompt but flustered elliott so i'll respond to that with a link to this :) this is adorable and so cute so here ya go:
2- “No no no, sorry! I just-… I honestly didn’t think you even knew my name.”
Elliott stretches in his seat, his joints popping with disuse. It's nearly the afternoon and he needs a change of view-- his inspiration's dragging at the sight of the worn plank walls and the atmosphere in his rather cramped cabin. In fairness, it's cozy when he returns home from the crowded saloon, but right now, what he really needs is a healthy dose of sea air.
Elliott rises and leaves his desk as it is, taking his coat off the back of his chair. He pushes it back with a scrape and turns to the door, pulling it open. A creak echoes through his tiny shack, but it's drowned by the sudden sound of waves crashing on the shore and the calling seagulls.
He locks the door behind him and admires the view. He had been so enamored by the view that he didn't hesitate to lease the cabin from its previous owner when he first came-- then, regret set in when he realized that the owner really meant shack. The view always made up for it, though. It's a world of difference compared to Zuzu City and that just made it so much better.
"Oh, what's that?" Elliott says to himself, noticing something strange. He quickens his strides and inspects the oddity-- the broken plank bridge is no longer broken. His lips quirk up into a smile of delight and bemusement. He had always wanted to properly explore the other side of the river's mouth but who had fixed it...?
He tests the bridge with a foot. He can swim and the river isn't too large, but he's not aure how deep it is. To Elliott's astonishment, the bridge doesn't wobble under his weight. It's structurally sound-- did Robin fix it?
Elliot hurries across the bridge and catches sight of the tideland. He heads towards it and grins when he sees the little creatures and the crabs scuttling around, careful to avoid disturbing them. He looks at each and every tidepool and only then does he notice the footprints in the sand, shallow and barely noticeable.
Elliott turns to look at the old docks and he's surprised to see the silhoutte of a person fishing-- and evidently struggling. Elliott considers going to see who that mysterious person is (clearly not Willy, the stranger's not nearly as scruffy) but he takes another look at the rotting wood and changes his mind.
He'll meet whoever it is if they come back to land soon. In truth, he's hoping that it's the newcomer-- the new granger living on the very nearly abandoned Salem Farm. Leah's offered him a fair amount of gossip that she overheard in the Saloon and presented it to him with a surprising eagerness.
"I didn't quite catch her name, I would've asked Marnie but she wasn't there. First, she's tall. I'm not quite sure how tall but Mayor Lewis said she's taller than him, which isn't really much, honestly, but she's supposed to be pretty tall. He vaguely gestured around here," she had said, making a cut movement somewhere around Elliott's chin. "She's also very nice but hard-to-read, which Mayor Lewis complained about. I don't think it's so much of a problem, personally."
Leah had carried on with more waffle but it sufficed to say that Elliott wasn't very intrigued with those pieces of information. It was only when he caught sight of her inside the Saloon just as she was about to leave and just as he returned from the loo.
He didn't quite catch the sound of her voice, unfortunately, but he did catch a glimpse of short, dark hair, deeply tanned skin, and one elegant, long-fingered hand waving goodbye. And that was it.
Elliott's got a thing for intriguing not-quite-meetings and airs of mystery, to put it lightly, and he found himself writing about this short-haired, nameless, faceless person.
"Hey, Elliott. How goes it?"
Elliott jolts, nearly falling into the tide pool as he whirls around and almost comes face to face with a stranger. His face has probably done that one comical expression of surprise that Leah never fails to laugh at. Oh, hell, he didn't even hear her come close!
"Oh, sorry about that. I didn't mean to startle you," the stranger says, taking a step back and holding out her hand. "Nicola Salem, local newcomer. You can call me Nick. You must be Elliott, you live on that old shack there, don't you?"
Elliott hesistantly takes her hand. His face feels hot with embarassment. If there is something he believes in, it's probably that first impressions matter and he's never going to recover from this encounter.
"I-- yes, I live in the shack. I mean-- yes, I'm Elliott. Pleasure to meet you, Nicola," he says. Much to his displeasure, it comes out in a slight stammer. Ah, fuck.
"I never did catch your last name, but it doesn't matter, there aren't many other redhead writers named Elliott living in dilapidated shacks on the beach, are there? And I said you could call me Nick. No formalities here, don't worry."
Elliott smiles-- she's rather cheeky. Nick's much, much prettier than he expected. And... much taller. Her eyes are large and a curious shade of what's usually called hazel-- instead, he doesn't limit her eye color to a word and tries not to stare at the brilliant shades of blue, brown, and green. She's as tanned as she last was-- oh, she has dimples.
His face is probably as red as his hair, an unflattering shade of pink, but he steadies his voice to maintain some semblance of dignity. He opens his mouth to speak when he realizes that he's been staring at her a moment too long.
"Say, I've come off too strong, haven't I? I'm terribly sorry, Elliott, I really must've startled you. If you'd prefer, I'm not too busy later and... we can properly introduce ourselves at the Saloon, what do you say? Drinks on me if you're going. And you don't have to accept the invitation either, I don't mind."
Nick winces and takes another step back, a disconcerted look on her face.
Elliott takes a step forward. “No, no, no, sorry, it's fine! It's fine. I just-- I honestly didn’t think you even knew my name. So, it's fine. You startled me, yes, but I'm perfectly fine, now.”
"Oh. Oh, well, then, I'm glad," she replies uncertainly.
"I think I'll take you up on that invitation, if it's still open," Elliot offers, finally recovering from his brief moments of awkwardness. "I certainly don't mean to impose."
Nick stares at him for second, and then two. Then, she smiles widely. "Sure, sure, eight o'clock, then! I'll-- I'll see you around!" She turns away from him, a hand up in goodbye.
"Yes, same to... you," Elliott replies, trailing off as Nick vanishes from sight.
He shakes his head he turns to leave the tideland. Cloth sticks to his ankle-- grimacing, he peels off the wet cuffs of his trousers and heads back across the river to his shack. He was so distracted he didn't notice!
Elliott enters his cabin again. It no longer looks cramped. Pulling the chair towards him, he revels in its clatter and scrape. He gets to writing, glancing at the clock to note the time.
Four more hours.
Elliott turns back to his papers, smiling to himself.
#sdv#sdv fic#sdv headcanons#sdv elliot#stardew valley#stardew#stardew elliott#sdv elliott#stardew hcs#i got carried away a little#follow 👑 share ❤️ enjoy 🍑#asks open#also send me prompts
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Chapter 1
Dib sighed as he looked down at the shiny bar he had just wiped clean. Another day another..well..day. nothing much happened in his town, nothing that he had been able to look for at least. Dib basically lived in his bar, working under his father who was barely ever there and always working on new drinks to 'help people' or he's made up something and grew too sick to even come and bartend in his own saloon.
He set the raggedy old cloth down onto the table and grumbled, resting his head on his hand before quickly sitting up when the first people started coming in. The saloon usually was filled to the brim with gruff looking men trying to act tough and gambling all their money away in games of poker, Dib was the only one that stood out. He was tall and lanky, having not grown any hair on his face and instead having Carmel colored freckles splattered around. He was in his mid 20s and felt like he was wasting his life away, serving drinks and every once and awhile hooking up with a guy or gal for the night. Today had seemed like a slow one, what Dib wasn't prepared for was the sight of a short yet bulky looking creature walking in. He said nothing, glancing up from his spot sorting drinks and could make out dark green skin in the room with splotches of lighter green on his face..like Dibs own freckles. He looked quickly back down again when more people walked in, standing when he heard the squeak of the cushioned barstool Inferno of him. He was going to have to oil that later.
Dib stood and suddenly he had made eye contact with the creature, long locks of black hair reaching down to his chin and wearing, atleast what Dib thought, a hideous magenta vest with a dark grey dress shirt underneath.
"How may I help you?"
Dib asked casually, keeping eye contact with the other and examining the brief sight of sharp teeth when the other spoke
"A shot of whiskey- actually make it a bottle, today has been rough"
Dib chuckled and crouched down, grabbing a bottle and speaking
"The day has just started, you must be a busy man"
"You could say that"
Dib cracked a smile at the vague comment, crouching down to grab bottles and letting hid mind race. It was quite boring where he worked besides some bar fights here and there, so Dib took this as an opportunity to solve a mystery and maybe put some excitement into his life. The man stood back up and set down the green glass bottle in front of the stranger, leaning against the counter as they grabbed it and popped open the top
"So stranger, I've never seen you before"
Dib took note of stray people walking in and immediately walking out after seeing the green skinned weirdo
"I tend to keep a low profile, but I'm sure you've heard my name before"
They said, holding out the bottle in a majestic pose
"Mmmm...jog my memory would you?"
Dib couldn't help but hold in a chuckled at the disappointed look on the others face
"I'll have you know that I'm one of the most well known Mafia bosses around"
That sparked Dibs memory
"Well that seemed to get a reaction out of you"
Zim grinned and took another chug of his bottle, staring at Dibs dumbfounded face in amusement
"Zim Ira? In my bar?"
Dib laughed and held his head. It wasn't exactly a mystery he could solve but it was good enough
"You've got to be kidding me"
"I'm not!-"
"I mean I knew people admired his work but to go this far?"
"Would you shut up!-"
"The ugly suit too"
Dib was about to comment again but stopped at the sound of glass breaking, whiskey spilling on the floor and the scarce people in the room looking over to the bar
"I told you to shut up boy"
A broken glass bottle was held up to Dibs face, the broken glass tip barely touching his nose as Zim glared at him
"Now get me another whiskey bottle before I get it myself and use your skull as a cup"
Dib nodded timidly and picked up another bottle, setting it down and getting the cap thrown at his glasses. They hung off his nose for a second before being pushed back up
"You-"
"Don't talk human, I don't want to be burdened by your pathetic noises"
Dib shut up and looked to the side, trying to bring his focus onto something..literally anything. He soon brought his eyes back to Zim. The man was about average height, maybe a little taller. He could see the freckles on his skin more clearly now and noticed that they weren’t just one shade of green but different shades both darker and lighter than his base shade. His hair was shiny and looked unnaturally oily, a wig perhaps? That left Dib to wonder what was underneath it. A bare head? Antenna? Horns?
"Quit your staring"
Dib was snapped out of his thoughts and looked back to Zims eyes. They were a light yellow with a light shade of pink underneath. The iris was a purple color..unique for anyone and something he hadn't seen before
"Oh uh...sorry"
Dib apologized, averting his eyes and looking down at the bar. He'd clean it if it weren't for the fact he could already see his reflection in the mahogany surface. What was he supposed to do now?
"Listen this is my bar and you're-"
A finger pressed against Dibs lips, a clawed one he noted, and he grumbled. Zim was about to say something but the doors opened and a high voice squealed
"Zim!"
A silver haird boy looking to be about 12 to 14 ran over and hugged the man
"Gir! You're not allowed to be in here!"
Zim pushed the boy away but they only persisted. Their clothing looked about the same as the Mafia bosses except the vest was a silver instead of a ugly dark magenta
"Oh is this your brother?"
Dib teased, Zim hissing and picking up the boy
"Go stand outside Gir now"
"But Tak said she wanted to see you!"
Dib took note of how Zik froze and composed himself, clearing his throat and narrowing his eyes at Dib
"Put it on a tab"
He ordered before taking the younger hand gently and walking him out of the bar
(I've never wrote something completely on my own before so be nice to me please🤲)
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🕯 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐰𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐬𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐥𝐬
𝑻𝒂𝒓𝒐𝒕 𝑪𝒂𝒓𝒅𝒔 - Tarot card reading is a form of cartomancy whereby practitioners use tarot cards purportedly to gain insight into the past, present or future. ... A regular tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which can be split into two groups, the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. ~ ☾︎
Merry Christmas (eve lol) @raggedy-dxctor :)
"Thank you for coming, see you next time!" Escorting their last customer the exhausted barista tiredly pushed through the swinging saloon doors - the enthusiastic smile forced on their lips instantly fading. Today was another busy work day, grateful they didn't have to work afterhours or clean up after any drunk, unwelcomed guests - they shuffled behind the tall bistro table. They took a deep breath, pulling at their face in a drowsy manner and ruffling the hazel strands of disheveled hair that were falling messily infront of their glasses. As they reached for a cup of cider, disgustingly throwing a glance at the egg liquor next to it - the door bells chimed. With a annoyed roll of their citrine colored eyes they pushed up their glasses, huffing while turning around to rather rudely urge the visitor out.
"I don't know if you can read but we're clo-" Cipher stopped abruptly, gulping way too audibly than intended. They gripped the dark wood of the table surface and cleared their throat - straightening their posture and taking a better look at the person who had decided to disturb their peace this late. Immediately Cipher's intuition sparked, a wave of uneasiness and discomfort flashed through their skin - goosebumps rising over the exposed skin of their arms. The person was a stranger to the young bar owner, usually he recognized customers and knew them by name - hell he even offered tarot readings to get to know them better. But this particular intruder was a complete mystery, dark robe and hood covering his form, shadows casted over every feature on his face - a proper look at his eyes would have helped.
The stranger only stood in silence, pulling their white-fur rimmed hood up and further over their head - there was snow dusted over their black robes. A traveler from the north. Cipher had wondered for a moment why a person from that far away was here of all places but quickly remembered the awkward atmosphere between them. She cleared her throat and with unsure movements licked over his dry lips - the foreigner cocked their head and continued to eye them. "I guess another order won't bother me, please take a seat." The incomer nodded subtly and strolled towards a tucked away table in the furthest away corner - what a pain in the ass. Cipher mustered their most polite smile and with a deep sigh made his way towards the cloaked individual. They in return only shot her a swift glance, hidden eyes boring into their golden ones - there it was again such a uneasy aura.
"What would you like to order? I would presume something warm seeing you had a long, cold journey behind you." They pointed to the snow layered on their robes, in which the stranger faintly shook it off. They couldn't help the soft snort that passed their lips. "A glass of water, extra ice please." Cipher was taken aback, not only by the choice of order he placed but by his voice - it was horse and gravelly, making them wonder when the last time was he drank something. The long trip from the north and the freezing temperatures he must have faced clearly left an impact on his throat. The young bartender nodded and was about to turn away when the mysterious guest spoke up: "You offer tarot readin's correct?" Their face wrinkled in suprise, glee pooling in their eyes and twinkling with excitement. "I do! Would you like one?"
And finally Cipher's customer tugged his hood down, strands of black hair disheveled - frostbitten fingertips remained gripping the black material of his cowl. His eyes were a piercing blue, like broken sapphire and bioluminescence water and Cipher payed close attention to the way the color wavered between shades. "Yes, I wouldn't have asked if I didn't want one." A sarcastic prick too huh, just her luck tonight - Cipher threw him a short nod and headed back behind the bar table. They could feel his presence in the room, constantly throwing a sneaky look over his shoulders to see him aimlessly staring out the window - what a creep. They prepared his desired ice water and grabbed a tarot deck prior to walking to the weirdo's table. He observed her movements as she sat down across from him and placed down his water. He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest and mask hiding his expression - Cipher noted how how cold his eyes looked, lifeless even.
"So, how did you know I do my readings? You are obviously not from around this place." Cipher began shuffling the cards in his hands, eyes not leaving the moving deck once as they spoke. The stranger scoffed, rolling his eyes dismissivly and cocking his slit eyebrow at the wanted poster on the wall. "Words spread fast across the highlands," he paused before continuing "oh, and there's this massive sign outside your bar." Cipher's cheeks reddened, focusing on the task at hand again. "Right, yes of course." The northern resident didn't respond, but only tilted his head in what seemed either amusement or smugness - Cipher couldn't tell.
They layed out the cards on the dark wood of the table and took a moment to stabilize their energy. Closing their eyes to focus, Cipher turned around the first of four cards that fell out, the strong message buzzing in their ears. "Now, let's see what the spirits have to say to you!" The noirette perched his elbows on the surface and rested his chin atop of gloved hands - observing Cipher's movements carefully with cautious eyes.
Three of cups - upright.
Queen of swords - reversed.
The moon - reversed.
Death - upright.
Cipher squinted, concentration swirling like stardust around them. "Your first card was a three of cups turned upright, that one represents friendship, happiness and community- you're most likely going to meet somebody new soon or have already met them." The stranger nodded softly, blue orbs lazily taking in the revealed cards, he seemed to take his time looking at their designs and representing pictures. "That person will bring happiness into your life that you never experienced before, maybe even the first feeling of it in a long while." Usually the bartender received bigger reactions from his guests but this one only waited for them to present him the next one. Cipher cleared his throat: "I'm getting a feeling it's not only one particular person but a larger group or sorts - maybe you will join a guild?" The stranger ridiculed the answer with a quick scoff, not giving them anything more.
"Your next card was the Queen of swords reversed - cold hearted, cruel and bitterness. I'm curious about this one." A calm uneasiness washed over the bartender's shoulders, sweeping the sound of distant wind howling with it. "Now this card has lots of different directions as to what it can mean, but in your case - you appear to be putting others off-side." A quirked brow is all they saw change on the stranger's face, his expression covered by the dark mask. "A loner I see," she snickered "A fan of isolating yourself from others, it often puts you in the light of being mean, intolerant or narrow-minded - you should work on that." The blue eyed traveler looked offended, mumbling something incoherent under his breath that Cipher didn't pick up on - she debated on asking him to speak up but decided against it.
Two cards left, yet it seemed like there was much more to this guy's reading. Cipher dragged his fingers over the detailed drawings on the cards, magic buzzing in their fingertips. "Alright, next up- oh." The moon reversed - guilt flooded Cipher's senses, she felt as if this card could have been for both of them.
"Oh?" The unexpected voice of the stranger caused Cipher to jump, they shook their head to dismiss the confusion. "I just haven't seen this card show up often that's all." They picked up the card and set it infront of him, the piece of paper felt extremely heavy in their hand. "Fear, confusion and misinterpretation - I believe you may try to bury unknown feelings deep within your subconscious so you can avoid your dark corners. You aren't ready to face your emotions either - pushing them to the side and pretending as if they don't exist." Cipher glanced at him across the table, blue eyes meeting sulphur gold - they released a breath they didn't know they were holding in. Surprisingly, the late incomer didn't react negatively to the accusations Cipher spurted out - instead urging them to continue qith a flick of their wrist.
"The last one you got is-", Cipher paused, eyes wide and curious , "Death." Before any panic was spread he hastily explained: "D-Don't worry - the death card doesn't represent death itself!" The stranger across from them laughed lowly, the rattling of metal filling Cipher's ears - she felt a teasing look being thrown her way. "I'm aware of that no worries."
He nodded, scolding themselves for jumping to conclusions. "Metamorphosis, the end of a cycle, a new beginning and change." A small smile plastered itself on their lips, this was a good sign - they made sure to let the stranger now by relaxing their gestures. "This could relate back to your first card, a new beginning might just be around the corner - you're near it but there's still a few steps you have to take before you notice it yourself." Quickly they added: "Either way, all cards seem to be pointing to a positive change in your life." The transient inclined his head in understandment, pulling his hood over his head again as he bagan standing up. Cipher didn't even acknowledge when he managed to drink his water but the glass was empty, only a single ice cube melting at the bottom.
The bartender collected their cards, piling them back up and securing them in a tight grip. "Thank you." The stranger bowed lightly and dropped a small bag of coins on the counter, back already turned towards Cipher. "No problem, but please - if you come again do it at a reasonable time yeah?" He laughed, throwing a hidden look over his shoulder - he gripped the handle and dissappeared soundlessly into the night. The young librarian dropped himself in their most comfy chair behind the bar, staring at ceiling - mind filled with thoughts of the weird stranger that decided to spontaneously pay them a visit. Tiredness getting the better of them, they swallowed down the last of their tea and closed their book for the night. If it weren't for that lunatic I could have been in bed by now.
On their way to their bedroom she suddenly halted. Fast. Very fast. They snatched the old wanted poster of off the wall and gave it a stern look, scanning the picture on it intensly. The stranger who visited them, the one they just had a tarot session with, the weirdo who busted into their bar at an ungodly hour - was the same person on that poster. Utterly shocked they took a deep,shaky breath - hands gripping the torn paper harshly.
Under the table, fallen out of the deck - was a card.
Ace of swords - reversed.
Confusion, brutality and chaos.
Watch your next christmas gift be me stormin' your house /threat
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save a horse, ride a cowboy
summary: you meet a cowboy in a bar.
pairings: dean winchester x reader
warnings: drinking (brief). cowboy sex. inappropriate use of lasso (aka light bondage). cussing.
a/n: i haven’t watched enough supernatural to be writing this but between cherry’s dean smut and this gifset...let’s just say i’ve been inspired. (i did not proof read this you’ve been warned)
“You’ve gotta be kidding me. Dude, what is it with you and the fucking Wild West?” Your friend Marina is unafraid to voice her distaste as you pull into the parking lot of ‘Marty’s Saloon’. “Fucking saloon. I can’t believe I trusted you to pick the bar.”
“Quit whining,” You shoot back, gathering your purse. You give her a pointed look as you two approach the door. “You’d fuck John Wayne, too.”
“John Wayne, yeah, if I was straight and 20 years younger,” Marina replies, raising her voice to be heard above the crackling country that envelopes the pair of you. “These are hobos, Y/N. Hobo- well, maybe not.”
She jerks her chin. At the corner of the bar, just across the dance floor crowded with plaid-clad drunks, is a brooding man with a wide-brimmed hat and a solemn expression. Marina elbows you, like you could take your eyes off him if you wanted to. He turns his head, then, quirking a brow. You avert your gaze quickly, dragging your friend towards the opposite end of the bar as she laughs at your awkwardness.
“How long’s it been for you?” She pokes, smiling into the shitty beer the bartender’s just slid her. “And how many drinks will it take you to go talk to Lone Ranger?”
--------------
Two beers and a tequila shot later, you’re sliding into the seat next to him. He doesn’t look at you; he keeps his eyes trained on the same whiskey that’s been in his hand since you walked in. He’s even stranger up close - a silver bolo tie beneath the collar of his crisp white button up. Dark blazer tossed over one muscular thigh. An empty gun holster on his hip. Without looking at you, he speaks, and you’ll be damned if his deep baritone doesn’t make you want to drop to your knees right there.
“Can I help you with something, sweetheart?” He drawls. Just as you draw your lower lip between your teeth he shifts, turning his body to face you. You shrug, trying to seem aloof.
“Depends. Figured I could help you with something,” You offer. You thank whatever’s up there that your voice doesn’t shake as jade green eyes bore into your own. “Looked a little lonely down here all by yourself.”
The mystery man shoots a glance over your shoulder; at Marina, you assume, though she’s far too busy chatting up the bartender. “I don’t mind bein’ lonely. But you’re welcome to keep me company.”
Eventually, he grows tired of the dive the pair of you are holed up in. He stands abruptly, downs the rest of his drink, and holds out the hand not gripping his jacket. You glance back at Marina - doing body shots with a girl not the bartender, but still a stranger - and decide she can hold her own for...20, 30 minutes? It’s not until he’s got you backed up against the side of his car that you think to ask. You push at his chest, breathless.
“Wait, wait,” You pant. “What’s your name?”
“Siegfried,” He deadpans before dipping down to nip at your throat. Fine, you think, don’t need to know his name to have a good time, right? “Door.”
He slots his lips against yours once more in a bruising kiss as you fumble behind you. Once you’ve got the door open, he’s quickly ushering you inside. Slick leather slides against your back as your shirt rides up. He’s barely got the door closed before he’s sliding his pants off. You scramble to do the same, adrenaline making your fingers shake. You’ve just kicked off your jeans and panties and he’s pulling you into his lap, mouth reattaching itself to your jaw. It’s him that stops you, then, leaning over to root around in his floorboard. He comes up with something that takes you a minute to recognize in the darkness.
“You’ve got to be joking,” You remark once you realize what he’s got. He only raises his eyebrows, and maybe it’s been awhile, but you’re not an idiot. You cross your wrists behind your back, and the sweet smile he gives you at the action makes warmth bloom in your stomach.
“That okay?” He murmurs, checking the knot. You hum in affirmation - hell, it’s more than okay, if the ache between your legs is anything to go by. You don’t know why this man has a fucking lasso in his car, but you don’t mind how he’s putting it to use.
“Condom?” You mutter, tipping your head back to give him better access to do as he pleases. You lean back from where you’re perched low on his thighs. He digs in his pocket - his pants are only down to his knees, and you can’t remember the last time someone was that desperate for you, but maybe he’s like you. Desperate for anything. You can’t see much in the dimness, but the combination of streetlamps and bar light filtering through the windows catches his eyes as he grips your hips. Something glints in his gaze, something dark, primal, as he slides his cock through your folds and glides against your clit once, twice, thrice. Finally, he nudges against your hole; you’re so wet from a simple make-out session you feel like a damn teenager.
Somewhere along the way, he’s lost the hat. You’re just about to make a comment on it when he slides in. Your jaw drops, hands flinching against the restraints with the urge to grip his shoulders. His hands on your hips steady you
“Shit,” He hisses, but he’s smiling as he tucks his face into your collarbone. “So goddamn tight.”
You whimper in response, not quite trusting your own voice, as embarrassing as it may be. All thoughts of embarrassment are out the window, however, as soon as he thrusts up into you. He maintains his grip on your hips, sure to leave marks for tomorrow morning as he continues his steady drive into your core. As you adjust, you begin to rock your hips in time with his, eventually building up the courage to fuck yourself on his cock. He groans when you do, tipping his head back against the seat. While you move, chasing your high, one hand travels from your hip to your ass, the other circling around to your clit. The hand on your ass is not long lasting, however, tugging your shirt up just enough that he can slip a tit between his lips. Your wail rocks the car more than anything else, you’re positive.
“Close,” You cry as he continues to lave at your nipple. He bites it, just a kittle, a gentle tug with his teeth before he switches to your other breast. His hand on your clit grows more insistent and you’re halfway between riding him and rutting against him in desperation. You sink deep enough in one instance that it hits just where you need it, your gasp catching his attention.
“Yeah, honey?” He asks, and his hands have returned to your waist. He’s not quite thrusting, but he’s aiding your efforts in that he reaches deeper than before. Over and over he impales you upon his cock; you begin to shake, movements growing ever-frantic as you clench around him. He groans into your ear. “Yes, baby, fuck, just like that.”
Your thighs quiver, his own legs keeping yours separate as you shake and whine in his lap. He’s not far behind; you feel the heat of his release even through the condom as you slump against him. He rubs your back, bordering intimate before he reaches down to untangle the lasso from your wrists. You roll them a little, flexing your fingers, as he wordlessly hands you your jeans. The pair of you redress in silence. By the time you’re stepping out of the car, his hat is back on and your shirt is re-tucked, like nothing ever happened. The blossoming hickeys on your neck say otherwise.
“I...Thanks, I guess,” You mutter, kicking yourself. This man just gave you the est orgasm of your life, no guess about it. You never did know how to end these things. He settles it for you, offering you only a wink and a slap on the ass as you walk away. And if you said you weren’t seeing green eyes and smug smirks in your dreams for a month after, you’d be lying.
#dean winchester smut#dean winchester x reader#dean winchester x you#cowboy! dean winchester#dean winchester x reader smut#supernatural smut#carolmaximoffs
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Lawless
~ Chapter 2 ~ Masterlist
Word Count: 1683
Scorpion's Roost
Solidarity, Texas
(Dedicated to all 100+ followers. Enjoy!)
Undertaker left the saloon that afternoon utterly confused. What whas that cowboy doing? He didn't understand humans, ever since he turned immortal he forgot all about being one. All memories left him except one particular one. Why it stayed, he had no idea. It tormented him.
Eventually his walking led to him being inside the comfort of his funeral parlor. His gathered up thoughts were pushed to the back of his mind as he took off his hat and overcoat. A large black cat met him at the door. It was pudgy, and the look on its face resembled one an irritated human could pull. Its face was also very pudgy, and a shrill meow left its mouth to gain the attention of the tall man.
"I just got home, Paul. Settle down please. It's been a long day." Another shrill meow. "Who cares if I've been drinking?! I'm immortal, it's not gonna hurt me. Now leave me be, I want to be alone." A scoff-like noise came from the cat, then he left, his pudgy paws padding on the floorboard. "Ever since he put himself in a cat, he's been more annoying than ever, I swear." Undertaker told himself.
Sighing, Undertaker pulled off his shoes and threw them somewhere. He'll find them in the morning. His socks, belt, vest and shirt flew off somewhere as well, leaving him in just his slacks. His pale skin glowed in the moonlight from a window, as well as the mysterious patterns on his arms. Intricate demonic designs littered his arms like sleeves, stopping at his shoulders. They appeared the night he turned immortal.
Undertaker staggered a little, the whiskey in his body finally taking effect. His head buzzed. He took slow and steady steps to his bedroom, careful not to bump into any precious coffins he made. Blueprints littered the countertops everywhere, with all sorts of designs for coffins.
His staggering journey took him to his wanted destination and he flopped facedown on his bed, inhaling the scent of his own cologne and a hint of cat. 'Paul must've slept here', He thought.
Deciding not to get up, his mind wandered back to the small cowboy at the bar. He didn't understand humans and their frivolous ways. Always rubbing themselves against each other for pleasure just to end up sad and lonely afterword. Letting out a yawn, he turned himself over to stare at the ceiling, eventually falling asleep from the large amount of whiskey in his body.
*~*
Light snores escaped Undertaker's body. He seemed peaceful, until his occasional twitches turned into thrashes. Fire was all he could see. Orange flames swallowing up a house. Screams. All he could do was watch in horror as the house he grew up in was swallowed by bright flames. "Mother! Father! Kane!" His mouth moved on its own. The screams died down, until all you could hear was the crackling of the fire. Undertaker fell to his knees, helpless. He just watched his parents and brother die in a fire caused by his foolish hand.
A scream left the lips on the undead man and he flew up from his bed. Sweat and tears dripped down his body and cheeks as his breathing staggered. Undertaker gripped his head in his hands and slowed his breathing to a normal rate. He hated falling asleep. This nightmare plagued him.
After calming himself for a few minutes, Undertaker slowly got out of his bed and found his scattered clothes one by one. He placed them in a basket and went back to his bedroom. Paul, the cat, sat on his bed. "I don't need to hear anything from you." Undertaker growled out. The cat just shook his head and jumped off the bed, heading to another part of the parlor. Sighing, Undertaker grabbed clothes from his dresser and a towel and headed to the pond behind the parlor.
He stripped his pants and undergarments and padded into the cool water. The cold temperature didn't bother him. There was a bucket with cleaning supplies at the other side of the pond, but Undertaker didn't bother to grab it for right now. He wanted to relax.
*~*
After sitting in the water for a while, Undertaker decided it was time to wash himself so he moved towards the bucket. He quickly dunked his head underwater to get it wet and grabbed the shampoo, but stopped when he heard voices. 'What the fuck? This is my private pond!', he thought.
The voices grew louder and Undertaker panicked and dipped his head underwater until only his eyes and top of his head could be seen. Who needs to breathe anyways?
The cowboy and his partner appeared from the bushes surrounding the pond, followed by two other guys. They were both big and burly, but the darker haired one was just a bit shoter than the bigger blonde.
"Voila. Found it a couple weeks ago while me n' Scott were running from a sheriff. Been our secret pond since." The bigger of the four said. 'Except this is my pond and I made it myself, dick head.', Undertaker narrowed his eyes. The small cowboy scanned the pond and smiled. "Last one in is a rattlesnakes lover!" He shouted and started stripping.
Undertakers eyed widened. 'No, no no no no!' He watched in horror as the four strangers stripped to their undergarments and jumped into his pond. 'And I thought I would have a good day...' He thought. The cowboy started splashing everybody, getting lots of water on the bank and dirtying up the clean water with dirt and debris.
'That fuckin does it.' Undertaker's eyes became black. The rest of his head emerged from the water, and he focused in on the cowboy from yesterday. 'Want to intrude on my life? Fine.' His horns started to sprout, but the cowboy noticed him.
"Hey! Its the man from the bar yesterday! What are you doing in this pond?" The three other men looked to where the cowboy had pointed out. Undertaker quickly averted his eyes back to green and the horn nubs desappeared. He said nothing.
"Shawn, who's that?" The cowboy's original companion asked. The two other men stayed silent. The cowboy- Shawn -chuckled. "Just some hot guy from the bar yesterday. Surprise seeing you here! How'd you find the pond?" Shawn asked. Undertaker narrowed his eyes. "I live in the building right in front of this pond. I own it." He spat.
Shawn's eyes widened, then narrowed in confusion. "But Kev-"
"GET OUT!" Undertaker yelled. His eyes turned back to black and he stood up fully, exposing his muscular torso and marked arms. Shawn blushed.
A growl started in the throat of Undertaker, and the four outlaws panicked and scrambled over one another to try to get out and away from the demonic man in the pond. They grabbed their stuff and jumped the fence, the taller of the four accidentally knocking over Shawn's original companion in the process.
Undertaker sighed in annoyance, and his eyes slowly turned back to normal. His bath was ruined, the pond probably contaminated, and he just exposed himself to the cowboy from the bar. He mentally slapped himself and finished his washing.
*~*
Grabbing his new clothes and towel, he quickly dried himself and put on black slacks, grey dress shirt and black dress vest. He would ditch the tie and overcoat today, he planned to spend the day inside his parlor working on coffins.
He walked up the path to his parlor, making sure Paul's food bowl was filled, as well as the flower garden not trampled or littered with bugs. The daisy's were nice and fragrent, the roses with beautiful colors, snapdragons at attention, and the peonies-
"What the hell happened to my peonies?!" Undertaker exclaimed. Dirt and flowers were scattered. Boot prints led a trail to the other side of the parlor. "Somebody dug up my peonies..."
Paul stalked up and sat his pudgy body beside Undertaker. His shrill meow didn't faze Undertaker, he was too busy mourning the loss of his flowers and plotting ways to kill the flower murderer.
Undertaker kneeled down and palmed at the dug up soil, finding tiny roots from flowers and scattered petals. "I'm gonna kill whoever did this." He growled. Paul meowed and licked one his paws. Undertaker still didn't bat an eye.
Sighing, he stood back up and walked through the back door of his parlor, Paul hot on his heels. Or however fast a fat cat can keep up with a 6'10 zombie.
Inside, Undertaker threw his dirty clothes and towel in a nearby room and walked to the front doors of his parlor. 'I really don't want to open today but I guess I have to.' He thought as he opened the doors, letting mid-morning light flood his front room.
He looked around, and noticed pink on the ground. He looked, and a bad bouqet of pink peonies messily thrown together sat on the ground. The roots were still intact. Grunting, Undertaker bent down and picked up the bouqet. A messy note was attached.
'Sorry for playing in your pond. I hope these make up a good apology. - Shawn'
"I'm gonna fucking kill him." Undertaker growled. He resisted the urge to hold the flowers close, as he was in broad daylight, but he did when he turned to go back in his parlor. "Of all people, why did HE get invloved in two days worth of my life?!" He thought aloud.
Paul padded up to Undertaker and gave another shrill meow. This time, Undertaker noticed him and rolled his eyes. "No, I don't even know him. He just came up to me in the bar yesterday and tried to fraternize with me." Undertaker replied. Paul meowed harshly. "Shut up! Not like you can do anything, you're just a cat." Paul huffed, and swiped at the mans ankles.
Undertaker pulled his leg up just in time and shooed off his pesky human-like cat. Paul ran off, leaving Undertaker with his peonies and murderous thoughts.
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— the shadows have teeth -- wip introduction
- - GENRE: ya/na gothic horror/supernatural western, murder mystery, wynonna earp meets stranger things
- - SYNOPSIS: cursed. broken. frozen.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Mountain ranges beyond compare, waving towers of grass, spiked cacti, and a few singular homes that have stood the test of time. A ghostly town that to the rest of America, doesn't exist. Time moves strangely in this range of town, a fact that the residents just accept. The clouds drift, the saloon doors swing aimlessly, and the curse remains unbroken for another hundred years. Within a span of acres and acres, where the two rivers connect and split northwards and then trickle into streams, that's the boundary line. Crooked and wavy due to the rivers, and then abruptly going straight across the west bound railroad, this triangle of land has kept its inhabitants within their own personal western hell for the last hundred years.To step outside that boundary means hellish death for some, for some it means the unknown and abandoned railways. For the brave, it means a long stretch of highway that leads to civilization. But the ones who have made their home Copperhead since the early 19th century know that it is a little weird. Cursed in a way. Why does this curse exist? Who knows. Someone probably shot someone's daughter's boyfriend in the barn and a jealous witch cursed them. Who gives a fuck at this point? It keeps the demons within it, the witches safe from becoming government experiments, and the humans just live humbly. Maybe Copperhead is better off staying frozen in 1800.
But when a stranger, half-dead and bloody, arrives on the Quinn’s ranch, a series of unlucky and horrific events lead a particular group of teenagers to discover the dark demonic underbelly of their tiny western town. Shaken to its roots, Copperhead’s unusual residents must finally face the dark history that placed them in the frozen grip of their curse.
You see, Copperhead has a demon problem. These demons are immortal, unlovable, monstrosities. Kinda. You see, about 140 years ago, a gunslinger, outlaw gang swept into town and murdered a bunch of people. Standard stuff, except the town was protected by a pact that the humans had made with the witches of the era. So, that gang was cursed, or something like that. Now, all of the members of that original gang must live eternally in the arid climate, and let's just say they weren't just cursed to live forever. Many of them have become twisted versions of their evils selves, the curse taking its toll and wreaking havoc on their humanity. Hating humans is the least of their problems, when they have to worry about stepping out of the boundary, keeping their demonic eyes hidden, and trying to keep their sanity. If they want it at all. The cursed can't hurt the humans or else they'll lose their grip on reality and on their sanity, and would be impossible to stop.
featuring: demons, a two-hundred year curse, witches, found family trope, queer characters, murder, horror elements, magic, a lot of strange description and a town that is definitely very weird.
- - THEMES: finding yourself, absolving guilt, revenge, forgiveness, what makes a monster?, free will vs. fate
- - POVS: it’s written in multiples povs and is in past tense, third person
- - STATUS: outlining / discovery writing
- - CHARACTERS: MADELINE ‘MADDOX’ QUINN, who finds the bloody, broken girl on their ranch and shoots at the shadows. ANNA DOE, the stranger who pissed off a demon and can’t remember her own name. JULIAN STEELE, a tired ™ witch who just wants a normal life. THE STEELE FAMILY (aka elliot, kieran, violet, & flynn) who keep fucking up Julian’s quiet life. ISA EROS, a four-hundred year old witch who keeps messing with everyone’s love life. CLEMENTINE THORNE, a precious cinnamon roll yoga instructor who is also a demon. AMBROSE WAINWRIGHT, a demon man who can’t make up his fucking mind. JACKSON S. CLARK, a horrifying monster who you do not want to piss off. DR. FRANCIS RADCLIFFE, the maker of the most horrible decisions. and finally, THE GRAY ONE & GRIM, two mystery figures who are at the epicenter of all this drama.
more detailed character introductions to come.
EXCERPT UNDER THE CUT. please interact with this post in some way if you’d like to be added to the tag list <33
There came a point on any given night when the clouds rolled in from deep in the valley with a biting wind and sudden lack of stars. It was a telltale sign to the residents of Copperhead that the devils were out to play. Usually, the civilians knew by feeling when they were coming and either packed it on home or risked the chance of being ripped apart. As long as they went out with a whiskey in their hand, most of the men didn’t care. But the drunks came stumbling home as their wives pulled their curtains tightly closed and prayed for peace. The chatter from inside the warmly lit buildings of Copperhead seemed to quiet for a while, an unnatural, yet organic silence falling over the town’s center square. It usually took a few hours, but then the darkly clad figures would start to meander in. At a glance, they would have looked normal. Just a bunch of newcomers sweeping into the Crystal Snake for a pint and a hand of cards, but the air seemed to ripple around them as one or two entered, the atmosphere taking on a heavier and dimmer weight. Anyone who came too close was choked on the feeling of rot that coiled around them.
Outside the Crystal Snake, the clouds had parted to reveal the sliver of ghostly moon and its crown of stars. In a swirl of cream skirts and long red hair, Isa Eros exited the bar with a cigarette tucked between her fingers. Leaning on the post outside of the bar, her eyes scoured the dark night. Despite being late July, a chill had seeped into the air, spreading goosebumps down the bare skin of her arms. How easy it would have been to slip away from the bar and her shift and nip down to the Rattler. Refresh the spark underneath her skin, lit the flame inside her stomach. Life had been so boringly quiet lately, nothing a little spell wouldn’t fix. Copperhead had grown, many of the children grown up into young adults who would soon make even more babies. With a little magic under her fingernails she could weave a simple Cupid’s arrow and sling it at the most taken man in town in hopes of sewing some mischief into the town gossip pool.
Her spine tingled with the thought of it.
The clouds continued to shift away, the lights that hung on the houses illuminated the wide road into town flickered a few times. But then, July seemed to remember what her job was and the sticky warmth swept in again. And with it was a lone rider on a jet-black horse. Just as quickly as her goosebumps came and went, they prickled Isa’s skin again. She’d known that beautiful stallion and tall figure anywhere. He ambled up, reining his horse next to the others and swung gracefully off as if he’d been riding a horse for the last hundred and fifty years. Which, Isa knew, he had.
Before she could move back into the bar, a cold sweat broke out across her skin and the dew drops of sweat that had gathered on her forehead now made her feel clammy. With a slightly hitched gait, nondescript black suit and hat, Jackson S. Clark moved past the antique post and into the dim glow from the bar. “Isa.” His voice collided with her and made her shudder, his lightning blue eyes pinning her to the spot. He was slow moving, a cane in his hand as he climbed the stairs.
“Jack of Knives,” She replied, her voice smooth, but clipped. He tipped the brim of his hat to her, and her heart jumped to her throat at the sight of his claws. Despite the inherent fear that tangled with her curiosity, she kept a warm smile on her lips, hip cocked out, and chest pushed forward. She looked away to snap her fingers in front of her cigarette, the end flaring with a sudden flame that ticked off her fingers. She inhaled deeply, letting it out slowly. The smoke clouded the air and just as it drifted away, Jack was gone.
She let out a sigh of relief and her trembling knees forced her to sit on the top step.
xxx
The bar doors opened and the laughter cut off. Except for a few gambling tables. The candle’s tiny flames shivered for a second, before returning to their cheerful glow and the chattered roared back to life. Jack lifted his hat off his head and slide his fingers carefully through his hair, smoothing the thinning dark waves. He stepped quietly up to the bar, smiling at the noticeable stiffens from the old men sitting closest to the door. The bartender wasn’t looking his way yet, and so he placed his hat on the counter and began to tap his nails on the hardwood.
Eyes darkened as they trailed to the source of the noise. Wicked iron claws tapped rhythmically, loud and sharp. The click of them would have faded to white noise, if they drew attention at all, had the nails not been tapered into perfect iron points. “Hey, Jackie boy.” A familiar southern lilt paused the tapping.
“Doc,” Jack’s voice was alluring, even if there was something off about him. He turned on his heel to face the dark clad figure he was sure would be grinning at him. The candles shivered again as another devil passed next to them, the light dimming around the two figures. Jack said nothing as Doc sidled up to him, leaning on the bar and clearly already quite drunk. Doc’s gray eyes already had a shimmer to them, a laughter on his lips. But Jack didn’t doubt that his fingers would be steady on his pistol slung on his hips.
Doc simply smirked, one elbow on the bar and the other on his hip. There seemed to be a stare down between the two of them, but the smile never faltered. Doc wasn’t afraid of Jack, he couldn’t be. He had no mortality to lose, his own southern charm matching the false gentlemanly wit of his darker counterpart. They’d be in this world for a hundred and so years, and had somehow, even though they lay on two sides of the coin, could respect each other.
A whiskey slid down the bar and quickly Doc swiped it just before it was caught in iron claws. “Jack be nimble, Jack better be quick,” Doc murmured as he straightened, about to saunter back to his table of poker. But right before he could get out of range, the cane swung out and the snake head topper bit into Doc’s shoulder and halted him. Doc turned slowly, removing his hat and facing Jack.
But the iron devil was already in front of Jack, grabbing onto his wrist and curling his talons into the soft flesh of his wrist. Jack said nothing, just went to pluck the whiskey from Doc’s hands when he felt something press into his stomach. “Don’t worry, Jackie, I’m not happy to see you,” Doc murmured, pressing the silver pistol into Jack’s stomach. “Wouldn’t want to do this in front of the ladies,” He jerked his head to a few scantily clad girls giggling by one of the booths and at Isa, who had just reentered to tackle her next shift of serving drinks.
Blood welled up underneath Jack’s nails, his grip becoming stronger. Doc’s smile twitched and a hint of pain shone in his darkened gray eyes. Sweat curled on the edge of his brow, the feverish pallor of his skin evident up close. Red flashed on the tips and Doc winced as Jack pulled away. Four crescent burns lay on the inside of his wrist now, the shallow slices cauterized shut. Doc twirled his pistol back into his low slung belt and headed back over to his table, pulling his sleeve down over the welts. Jack didn’t bother trying to conceal his wicked slice smile.
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Dating Man In Alton Texas
Dating Man In Alton Texas Map
Dating Man In Alton Texas Police Department
Dating Man In Alton Texas
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About 3 ½ miles from the present-day town of Corinth, in Denton County, Texas, once stood the small village of Alton, which, for a decade, served as the Denton County seat. When Denton County was formed in 1846, the first pioneers chose a place along Pecan Creek for the first county seat and named it Pinckneyville, in honor of Texas’ first governor, James Pinckney Henderson.
But, Pinckneyville would hold the title only two years and never develop into a town. Water shortages forced the county seat to move to a new site in June 1848. Located less than a mile from present-day Corinth, on a high ridge between Pecan Creek and Hickory Creek, the new townsite was called Alton.
Though Commissioners were appointed and directed to lay out a town and sell lots, there are no records that this was ever done and no public buildings were ever erected. In fact, the only residence that existed was that of a man named W.C. Baines, who established a farmstead long before the designation of the new county seat.
County business was held at the Baines’ residence, most of the time, under the shade trees in his yard. The location of the second county seat also proved to be unfavorable due to a lack of potable water and the state legislature soon directed that the site be moved again.
The third county seat location was designated in November 1850, about five miles southwest of present-day Corinth on Hickory Creek. The new site retained the name of Alton and submitted an application for a post office. This location did grow and before long it boasted a hotel and two stores.
By 1856, the small town boasted a number of homes, a blacksmith shop, three stores, a school, saloon, hotel, two doctors, and several lawyers. The Hickory Creek Baptist Church, which continues to stand, was organized in 1855.
Though the fledgling town had begun to grow, the location of the county seat was still unsatisfactory for the majority of Denton County residents, who soon petitioned for yet, another county seat – one that was more centrally located and again, one with better water. Put to a vote in November 1856, the county seat was moved again to Denton. Townsite lots began to be auctioned in January 1857.
In the meantime, Alton began to die as many of its businesses moved to the new county seat. In May 1859, its post office doors closed forever.
There is little remaining of the old townsite today, with the exception of the Hickory Creek Baptist Church and the old Alton Cemetery, which contains graves that date back to 1852. The church is located at 5724 Teasley Lane ( F.M. Road 2181), Denton, Texas. Next to the church is the cemetery.
Years later, in 1884, long after Alton had died, an iron through-truss bridge was built over Hickory Creek on Copper Canyon Road, south of the old townsite. Built by the King Bridge Company of Cleveland, Ohio, the 145-foot long bridge would serve area travelers for more than a century. Called the Old Alton Bridge, sometimes the Argyle bridge, and is better known amongst the locals as “Goatman’s Bridge,” it was first built to carry horses, but would later carry vehicles across the creek.
Alton Bridge Sign
It continued to be used until about 2001 when it was replaced with a concrete-and-steel bridge and a new road, which straightened out a sharp curve. Before the new bridge was built, motorists were required to honk their horns on the one-lane bridge to let other travelers know they were coming.
The bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in July 1988 and closed to vehicle traffic in 2001. It is open only to pedestrians today.
Not only is the Old Alton Bridge a picturesque historic site, but it is also said to be haunted by the “Goatman,” hence the nickname of the bridge.
Half a century after the bridge was built, an African-American man named Oscar Washburn, settled with his family near the bridge. Earning his living raising goats, he was soon called the “Goatman” by the locals. An honest businessman, his goat raising business was a success. Unfortunately; there were those who did not welcome a successful black man within their midst.
When Washburn posted a sign on the bridge that advertised “this way to the Goatman,” it angered local Klansman. On a dark night in August 1938, these hateful men crossed the bridge without their headlights, then, burst into Washburn’s home and drug him from his family to the bridge.
The Klansman then fitted a noose over his head and pushed him over the side of the bridge. However, when they looked over to make sure he was dead, they could see only the rope. Washburn was gone and was never seen again. The hateful Klansman then went back to his home and killed the rest of his family.
Ever since that fateful day, a number of strange things have reportedly occurred on and around the bridge. Many believe that the Goatman haunts the overpass and the nearby woods. The tale continues that when travelers crossed the bridge at night with their headlights off, they would meet the Goatman on the other side. These tales are obviously old, as the bridge has been closed to vehicle traffic since 2001.
Dating Man In Alton Texas Police Department
A number of other reports tell of numerous abandoned cars that have been found near the bridge, with their occupants missing.
Others report seeing a ghostly man herding goats over the bridge, while others say they have seen an apparition staring at them, holding a goat head under each arm. Stranger stories even include people having seen a creature that resembles a half-goat, half-man.
More tales of strange noises have also been described including the sounds of horses’ hoof beats on the bridge, splashing in the creek below, maniacal laughter, and inhuman like growling coming from the surrounding woods.
Visitors sometimes tell of seeing mysterious lights in the area, of car doors, locking and unlocking of their own accord, and numerous vehicle breakdowns while near the old viaduct.
According to legend, if you visit on Halloween and honk your car horn twice, visitors can see Goatman’s glowing eyes.
Ghost Towns: America’s Lost World DVD. At Legends’ General Store.
Dating Man In Alton Texas
And, the Goatman is evidently not alone. Other reports tell of a woman’s spirit who wanders the area allegedly in search of her lost baby. Maybe that spirit is that of La Llorona, who is well known as haunting the rivers of the Southwest.
The bridge is located about seven miles south of Denton. Take I-35E S/US-77 S to exit 463 and merge into the I-35 Frontage Rd. Turn right at Lillian Miller Pkwy and go 0.8 miles, where the road becomes Farm to Market Rd 2181/Teasley Ln, continue 3.2 miles and turn right at Old Alton Rd.
© Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, updated October 2019.
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For A Long Time Looking at Stars
Pairing: Shane x Farmer
Genre: romance, hurt/comfort, slow burn, angst
Rating: explicit
Warnings: suicide, self-harm, alcoholism
Summary: Taking place in a realistic Stardew Valley universe (no magic), this is a long, serious fic about falling in love while dealing with the ups and downs of mental illness.
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CHAPTER 1
It was the last one of the night – Shane Daniels was out of money.
He tilted his head back, draining the lukewarm dregs from the bottom of his glass. It clanged loudly when dropped to the sticky wood table and he glanced around to see if the noise had startled anyone – to his surprise the saloon was alive with chatter and laughter, as distant to Shane as he was to it.
It was spring in the valley but the nights were still long, and the air bit with unexpected teeth when he exited the stuffy bar. Tugging his hood higher and shoving his hands in his pockets, he slouched away from the muffled laughter and headed home. When he arrived the lights were off, and pausing at the door he could hear no noise – his aunt was probably already in her room. Those three beers at Gus’s hadn’t been nearly enough, but if he was quiet he could grab the bottle from his sock drawer and sneak back out without having to deal with her.
Sneaking out of the house at twenty-nine years old. Son of a bitch, he thought, tucking it in his pocket with shame.
Twenty-nine going on forty-five, that was. The bags below his eyes, tinted ruby. The five o’clock shadow that darkened his jaw no matter how close the shave. The way if he swept back the hair from his forehead several gray hairs poked through the nearly black ones, and the way, in the last few years, that his face had bloated from drinking. On busy nights the bar swarmed with both the early-twenties crowd and the middle-aged regulars, and while he was closer in age to the former, the latter was closer in spirit.
Weary, cynical spirit.
He reentered the darkness and started along the well-worn path from the ranch to Cindersap forest, and from there to the lake and the dock that had long been his brooding spot.
Son of a bitch, he thought again, seeing the silhouette near the shore.
Should he head back? There was no such thing as welcome company in this piss-water little hamlet, where everyone knew where you worked, where you slept, what groceries you bought or that you’d just seen the town doctor for that rash on your stomach. Shane closed his eyes, wishing it’d disappear into the forest like some shadow creature – somehow that’d be less terrifying. But when he opened them again not only was the figure still there, its upper half was turned toward him.
His eyes adjusted to the dark and he could make out a girl with light blond hair, who, like Shane, was hunched against the cold in a hoodie.
“Thought I heard someone,” she said.
“Yeah, well, not staying,” Shane replied gruffly, already facing to leave.
“Hey, do you know what time it is?”
Time for me to get the fuck out of here.
He pulled up his sleeve to check the watch on his inner wrist, and without turning around called back, “10:45.”
“Cool, thanks.”
He took out the bottle, unscrewing the cap and taking a long swig above his head before walking away again. He’d barely taken his first step when he heard, “Wait!” and turned to see the girl take a few steps toward him.
“What do you want now?” he demanded, patience short.
“You – this is pretty forward of me, but you don’t have a smoke I could bum, do you?”
So she’d seen him drinking straight from the neck and assumed he was a smoker. Natural thing to assume, he guessed, but he wasn’t – not enough money to go around for more than one vice. And who the hell was this chick anyway?
“No."
“Probably for the best,” she murmured, more to herself than Shane. “Thanks anyway.”
The way she scratched the back of her neck while looking around, then turned and anxiously rubbed her arms as she walked away – he could tell she was jonesing. He hesitated, knowing the feeling. For a moment some of his old compassion returned, overriding even his hatred of strangers and idle pleasantries; he heaved a frustrated sigh and walked over to where she stood.
“Here.”
She stared at the bottle of Jack he'd shoved at her, debating, then pushed out a hand that was hiding in her hoodie sleeve and took it. The bottle paused before her lips, she raised an eyebrow. “You know this only makes it worse, right?”
He shrugged. “Don’t have to.”
Closing her eyes she took a rather heroic swig, spine shivering as it hit her. “Thanks,” she said, capping it and offering it back.
“Go ahead.”
“No, that’s enough.” She handed it to him and put her hands in her pockets. “I’m glad you didn’t have a cigarette. I’m supposed to be quitting. And if that’s not hard enough on its own, try being plastered and craving one.”
Shane looked at her curiously; he didn’t often look at people curiously, but that’s because after a few months of living in Pelican Town – total population less than his old middle school – he thought he’d already seen everyone there was to see. Especially this far out: the ranch skirted the edge of town and the lake went out of it completely. He had no idea where this girl had come from. Maybe she was from the city, visiting a friend or relative. She didn’t look rural, what with her high blonde ponytail, and the little stud on one side of her nose that kept catching the moonlight, shimmering like a small star.
“Oh well." She smiled at Shane with one corner of her mouth. “At least there’s no 24/7 convenience store here, right? Forced to ride it out.”
“Right." He wished he could leave again. Was it wrong to just turn and walk away? He could go by the river instead; it wasn’t as private, the ranch being well within sight, but at least he’d be by himself.
The girl was sharp though. She took one glance at Shane and said, “I’m imposing, aren’t I?”
“What?”
“This was supposed to be your dock. Well, not your dock, but you came out here to be alone, right?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he mumbled.
She shrugged. “I’ll go. Thanks for not having a smoke, mystery man. Saved me from going back to day zero.”
Then she walked away, and Shane couldn’t remember meeting anyone else in this town who’d offered to leave him alone without having to be told to fuck off first. They learned quickly after that, but still – no one else ever got it right on the first try.
All things considered the taste of unexpected small talk wasn’t as bitter as usual.
Pelican Town was snug deep in the heart of Stardew Valley, miles from the city where Shane had spent his whole life. He’d only been living there a few months – he and Jas, his seven-year-old goddaughter, moved in with Aunt Marnie on her ranch just before winter.The valley was familiar to him: the ranch and its animals, the river and lake, this very dock where he’d started coming as a boy when his parents dropped him off for a few weeks every summer. It was different as an adult and life in the valley didn’t suit him at all, but he’d run out of choices and if he had to be stuck in some hellish small town at least it was one that had places like the lake, places that carried some of his few good memories.
Marnie had always been good to him. In fact, she seemed to like him better than his own parents ever did. When Marnie got tipsy she liked to giggle and fall over herself like a twenty-year-old girl, rather than, say, make Shane dodge projectile beer bottles aimed at his head. She was chattier than he liked in a roommate, and far too interested in his life and goings-on, but she meant well. She never yelled or threw shit at him, and what more could he ask?
It was the same cloistered valley he'd known as a boy, the same too-empty/too-exposed feeling when walking around town, nothing to do and yet feeling like he was under the microscope of every bored housewife and nosy shopkeeper. A few things had changed, though – he'd never been here in spring before, and miserable as the town made him the cherry blossoms were rather pretty. The lake was a few inches lower, the water murkier than it used to be, and there was a wooden sign in front of the dock now, one that hadn’t been there before:
In loving memory of Emmet Wakeshire
Emmet Wakeshire once owned a great expanse of farmland just north of the ranch. Shane had never met the man, who’d died some years ago, but he knew that Emmet built the dock with his own two hands – when he wasn’t much older than Shane, as Marnie told it. The farm was one of the ranch’s closest neighbors and Marnie had been good friends with the old man, speaking of him often and fondly, erecting the sign as a memorial after he passed.
Shane walked to the edge of the dock and sat with his legs dangling, opening the whiskey and drawing out his pocketknife. He absentmindedly opened and closed it while staring at the hushed surface of the water.
Not much older than Shane, she’d said. He tried to think if he’d ever built anything in his whole life. A pyramid of beer cans in his room once, when he was sixteen. Sometimes they asked him to assemble cardboard display cases for holiday chocolate at JojaMart – once even entrusted him with snapping together an extra shelf when they’d ordered too much spaghetti sauce.
A regular architect, really.
A cloud drifted over the moon, Shane drank, and the lake was quiet but for small, pretty sounds: leaves rustling against other leaves, cicadas like cymbal brushes, hissing in the grass. The foam on the water stretched its white fingers out to shore, slinking back when they could stretch no further. He took a long swallow. Once upon a time it burned, like it had for the girl, but those days were gone and these days it went down like tea: warm, smooth, soothing. He laid down with his arms stretched behind his neck, his body heavy.
The stars were so much brighter here than the city. He felt thirteen again, lying on the same dock, staring at the same sky, feeling the same melancholy detachment from everything around him. Wishing just once he could look at the sky and feel wonder or awe instead. One star shone brighter than the rest and he stared at it, until the rest of the stars faded in the background and the bright one was the only thing he could see, pulsing like a beacon.
He felt lonely. Lonely at home, in town, at work, at the bar. Lonely out here too of course, but here it was different – here he was supposed to feel lonely. Insignificant, like everything else in this world. A cluster of atoms, huddled together in the shape of a human as if that meant something.
The universe wasn’t cold and uncaring; quite the opposite. It was telling him that if he didn’t want to be here, it was okay. It would continue to rustle and foam and pulse without him. It was okay if he didn’t want to stay much longer.
-----------
On Monday Shane awoke to the shrill sound of his alarm.
As much as he loathed his job, it at least got him out of bed in the morning – more than he could say for anything else. Without the looming threat of joblessness (and not being able to afford Marnie’s rent, on top of his nights at the saloon) the siren call of those sheets was too strong. Not that he’d never caved, but JojaMart did keep it from becoming a routine.
The bright smell of coffee was the only other incentive to get up. He poured himself some, thankful Marnie was on the phone and couldn’t do more than nod good morning, and headed to the bathroom to shower.
At least there’s hot water, he thought as the steam from it filled the room, fogging the mirror and glass doors. He turned his face to the showerhead, the scorching water pounding his eyelids.
The town had a runty suburbia that Shane had to pass through on his way to work, and that morning he saw Emily, the assistant barkeep, tending to the flowerbeds beneath her window. Scant rays of sun shone on her blue pixie-cut hair, and she smiled kindly when she saw him. Emily smiled kindly at everybody.
“Morning, Shane!” she said. He nodded at her.
Emily was okay. A little out there perhaps, a little too hippie-eccentric for Shane’s tastes, but she wasn’t annoying about it – one of those live and let live types. She and Gus were the only people who'd warmed to Shane since he arrived, though he supposed it worked both ways – they were among the only people he hadn’t told to get bent. Possibly because they saw each other five or six nights a week at the saloon, and miserable as he was he didn’t actually seek to make things awkward. That they were naturally kind and patient people who put up with his moodiness? That was just another enabler.
He passed Dr. Harvey’s clinic next. Harvey was decent as far as the villagers went, nerdy and quiet and with a greater respect for privacy than most of them. But he was also only in his mid-thirties and an MD with his own private practice – a conspicuous reminder each day of Shane’s own stupidity. The doctor sat at his front desk, scribbling notes with his tongue protruding from under his handlebar moustache.
What a fucking moustache too. Shane could’ve ridden it to town.
His head hurt like hell; he’d stayed at the dock far too long, until over half the bottle was gone. May have even passed out for awhile when he was laying down, because it was after two in the morning when he stumbled home for a shitty four hours of sleep.
Next he passed the large front window of Pierre’s General Store, Pierre himself straightening the sign on a bin of potatoes. He avoided Pierre’s if he could help it. Though it was closer to the ranch than JojaMart, the few times he’d swung by on the weekend for a six-pack (or twelve-pack, or twenty-four, depending on his mood and wallet), the shopkeeper’s judgmental eyes said it all – Shane’s habits at the saloon weren’t exactly a secret.
And so, hands in pockets and head down as he tried to quickly pass the little grocer, he didn’t notice the front door swing open until he was almost hit squarely in the face.
“Shit! I’m sorry!” cried a voice, and Shane, trying to still his beating heart, realized with annoyance that it was the same girl as the previous night.
Must be on a morning cigarette run.
He’d been several beers in when they met last night, and apparently in a bizarrely social mood because seeing her today – with throbbing head and bloodshot eyes – he wanted to snap his fingers and make her fucking disappear. This. This was what he hated about small towns. No anonymity, anywhere. Not even with strangers.
She wore the same hoodie as the evening before, along with jeans dusted with dirt, and for the few seconds before opening the door she’d been as deeply lost in her own thoughts as Shane had been in his.
“I didn’t see you!” she said quickly. “I’m sorry if – oh.” Her face shifted in recognition. “It’s you. Hi.”
“Yeah,” he grunted, trying to sidestep her, but she stepped back in front of him with eyes searching his face.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Like it’s any of her business. Probably thinks we’re friends now or something.
“I’m late,” he said angrily.
“I didn’t hit you with the door, did I?”
“Just fuck off.”
This time he successfully stepped around her, leaving the stunned girl staring after him on the sidewalk. She didn’t know who he was yet. Perhaps she’d just think him bipolar.
He really didn’t care.
--------------
Hey guys, if you enjoyed this, there is LOTS more - 45 chapters, to be exact. You can find them here:
http://archiveofourown.org/works/9634940/chapters/21766157
Thanks for reading!
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3
First thing, we went to a bar down on Market Street and decided everything-that we would stick together and be buddies till we died. Dean was very quiet and preoccupied, looking at the old bums in the saloon that reminded him of his father. "I think he's in Denver-this time we must absolutely find him, he may be in County Jail, he may be around Larimer Street again, but he's to be found. Agreed?"
Yes, it was agreed; we were going to do everything we'd never done and had been too silly to do in the past. Then we promised ourselves two days of kicks in San Francisco before starting off, and of course the agreement was to go by travel bureau in share-the-gas cars and save as much money as possible. Dean claimed he no longer needed Marylou though he still loved her. We both agreed he would make out in New York.
Dean put on his pin-stripe suit with a sports shirt, we stashed our gear in a Greyhound bus locker for ten cents, and we took off to meet Roy Johnson who was going to be our chauffeur for two-day Frisco kicks. Roy agreed over the phone to do so. He arrived at the corner of Market and Third shortly thereafter and picked us up. Roy was now living in Frisco, working as a clerk and married to a pretty little blonde called Dorothy. Dean confided that her nose was too long-this was his big point of contention about her, for some strange reason-but her nose wasn't too long at all. Roy Johnson is a thin, dark, handsome kid with a pin-sharp face and combed hair that he keeps shoving back from the sides of his head. He had an extremely earnest approach and a big smile. Evidently his wife, Dorothy, had wrangled with him over the chauffeuring idea-and, determined to make a stand as the man of the house (they lived in a little room), he nevertheless stuck by his promise to us, but with consequences; his mental dilemma resolved itself in a bitter silence. He drove Dean and me all over Frisco at all hours of day and night and never said a word; all he did was go through red lights and make sharp turns on two wheels, and this was telling us the shifts to which we'd put him. He was midway between the challenge of his new wife and the challenge of his old Denver poolhall gang leader. Dean was pleased, and of course unperturbed by the driving. We paid absolutely no attention to Roy and sat in the back and yakked.
The next thing was to go to Mill City to see if we could find Remi Boncoeur. I noticed with some wonder that the old ship Admiral Freebee was no longer in the bay; and then of course Remi was no longer in the second-to-last compartment of the shack in the canyon. A beautiful colored girl opened the door instead; Dean and I talked to her a great deal. Roy Johnson waited in the car, reading Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris. I took one last look at Mill City and knew there was no sense trying to dig up the involved past; instead we decided to go see Galatea Dunkel about sleeping accommodations. Ed had left her again, was in Denver, and damned if she still didn't plot to get him back. We found her sitting crosslegged on the Oriental-type rug of her four-room tenement flat on upper Mission with a deck of fortune cards. Good girl. I saw sad signs that Ed Dunkel had lived here awhile and then left out of stupors and disinclinations only.
"He'll come back," said Galatea. "That guy can't take care of himself without me." She gave a furious look at Dean and Roy Johnson. "It was Tommy Snark who did it this time. All the time before he came Ed was perfectly happy and worked and we went out and had wonderful times. Dean, you know that. Then they'd sit in the bathroom for hours, Ed in the bathtub and Snarky on the seat, and talk and talk and talk- such silly things."
Dean laughed. For years he had been chief prophet of that gang and now they were learning his technique. Tommy Snark had grown a beard and his big sorrowful blue eyes had come looking for Ed Dunkel in Frisco; what happened (actually and no lie), Tommy had his small ringer amputated in a Denver mishap and collected a good sum of money. For no reason under the sun they decided to give Galatea the slip and go to Portland, Maine, where apparently Snark had an aunt. So they were now either in Denver, going through, or already in Portland.
"When Tom's money runs out Ed'll be back," said Galatea, looking at her cards. "Damn fool-he doesn't know anything and never did. All he has to do is know that I love him."
Galatea looked like the daughter of the Greeks with the sunny camera as she sat there on the rug, her long hair streaming to the floor, plying the fortune-telling cards. I got to like her. We even decided to go out that night and hear jazz, and Dean would take a six-foot blonde who lived down the street, Marie.
That night Galatea, Dean, and I went to get Marie. This girl had a basement apartment, a little daughter, and an old car that barely ran and which Dean and I had to push down the street as the girls jammed at the starter. We went to Galatea's, and there everybody sat around-Marie, her daughter, Galatea, Roy Johnson, Dorothy his wife-all sullen in the overstaffed furniture as I stood in a corner, neutral in Frisco problems, and Dean stood in the middle of the room with his balloon-thumb in the air breast-high, giggling. "Gawd damn," he said, "we're all losing our fingers-hawr-hawr-hawr."
"Dean, why do you act so foolish?" said Galatea. "Camille called and said you left her. Don't you realize you have a daughter?"
"He didn't leave her, she kicked him out!" I said, breaking my neutrality. They all gave me dirty looks; Dean grinned. "And with that thumb, what do you expect the poor guy to do?" I added. They all looked at me; particularly Dorothy Johnson lowered a mean gaze on me. It wasn't anything but a sewing circle, and the center of it was the culprit, Dean- responsible, perhaps, for everything that was wrong. I looked out the window at the buzzing night-street of Mission; I wanted to get going and hear the great jazz of Frisco-and remember, this was only my second night in town.
"I think Marylou was very, very wise leaving you, Dean," said Galatea. "For years now you haven't had any sense of responsibility for anyone. You've done so many awful things I don't know what to say to you."
And in fact that was the point, and they all sat around looking at Dean with lowered and hating eyes, and he stood on the carpet in the middle of them and giggled-he just giggled. He made a little dance. His bandage was getting dirtier all the time; it began to flop and unroll. I suddenly realized that Dean, by virtue of his enormous series of sins, was becoming the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the lot.
"You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what's hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you're silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time."
That's what Dean was, the HOLY GOOF.
"Camille is crying her heart out tonight, but don't think for a minute she wants you back, she said she never wanted to see you again and she said it was to be final this time. Yet you stand here and make silly faces, and I don't think there's a care in your heart."
This was not true; I knew better and I could have told them all. I didn't see any sense in trying it. I longed to go and put my arm around Dean and say, Now look here, all of you, remember just one thing: this guy has his troubles too, and another thing, he never complains and he's given all of you a damned good time just being himself, and if that isn't enough for you then send him to the firing squad, that's apparently what you're itching to do anyway . . .
Nevertheless Galatea Dunkel was the only one in the gang who wasn't afraid of Dean and could sit there calmly, with her face hanging out, telling him off in front of everybody. There were earlier days in Denver when Dean had everybody sit in the dark with the girls and just talked, and talked, and talked, with a voice that was once hypnotic and strange and was said to make the girls come across by sheer force of persuasion and the content of what he said. This was when he was fifteen, sixteen. Now his disciples were married and the wives of his disciples had him on the carpet for the sexuality and the life he had helped bring into being. I listened further.
"Now you're going East with Sal," Galatea said, "and what do you think you're going to accomplish by that? Camille has to stay home and mind the baby now you're gone-how can she keep her job?-and she never wants to see you again and I don't blame her. If you see Ed along the road you tell him to come back to me or I'll kill him "
Just as flat as that. It was the saddest night. I felt as if I was with strange brothers and sisters in a pitiful dream. Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying, "Yes, yes, yes," as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I am convinced they were, and the others suspected as much and were frightened. He was BEAT-the root, the soul of Beatific. What was he knowing? He tried all in his power to tell me what he was knowing, and they envied that about me, my position at his side, defending him and drinking him in as they once tried to do. Then they looked at me. What was I, a stranger, doing on the West Coast this fair night? I recoiled from the thought.
"We're going to Italy," I said, I washed my hands of the whole matter. Then, too, there was a strange sense of maternal satisfaction in the air, for the girls were really looking at Dean the way a mother looks at the dearest and most errant child, and he with his sad thumb and all his revelations knew it well, and that was why he was able, in tick-tocking silence, to walk out of the apartment without a word, to wait for us downstairs as soon as we'd made up our minds about time. This was what we sensed about the ghost on the sidewalk. I looked out the window. He was alone in the doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness-everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being.
"Come on, Galatea, Marie, let's go hit the jazz joints and forget it. Dean will be dead someday. Then what can you say to him?"
"The sooner he's dead the better," said Galatea, and she spoke officially for almost everyone in the room.
"Very well, then," I said, "but now he's alive and I'll bet you want to know what he does next and that's because he's got the secret that we're all busting to find and it's splitting his head wide open and if he goes mad don't worry, it won't be your fault but the fault of God."
They objected to this; they said I really didn't know Dean; they said he was the worst scoundrel that ever lived and I'd find out someday to my regret. I was amused to hear them protest so much. Roy Johnson rose to the defense of the ladies and said he knew Dean better than anybody, and all Dean was, was just a very interesting and even amusing con-man. I went out to find Dean and we had a brief talk about it.
"Ah, man, don't worry, everything is perfect and fine." He was rubbing his belly and licking his lips.
4
The girls came down and we started out on our big night, once more pushing the car down the street. "Wheeoo! let's go!" cried Dean, and we jumped in the back seat and clanked to the little Harlem on Folsom Street.
Out we jumped in the warm, mad night, hearing a wild tenorman bawling horn across the way, going "EE-YAH! EE-YAH! EE-YAH!" and hands clapping to the beat and folks yelling, "Go, go, go!" Dean was already racing across the street with his thumb in the air, yelling, "Blow, man, blow!" A bunch of colored men in Saturday-night suits were whooping it up in front. It was a sawdust saloon with a small bandstand on which the fellows huddled with their hats on, blowing over people's heads, a crazy place; crazy floppy sponren wandered around sometimes in their bathrobes, bottles clanked in alleys. In back of the joint in a dark corridor beyond the splattered toilets scores of men and women stood against the wall drinking wine-spodiodi and spitting at the stars-wine and whisky. The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from "EE-yah!" to a crazier "EE-de-lee-yah!" and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn't give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd, and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. A six-foot skinny Negro woman was rolling her bones at the man's hornbell, and he just jabbed it at her, "Ee! ee! ee!"
Everybody was rocking and roaring. Galatea and Marie with beer in their hands were standing on their chairs, shaking and jumping. Groups of colored guys stumbled in from the street, falling over one another to get there. "Stay with it, man!" roared a man with a foghorn voice, and let out a big groan that must have been heard clear out in Sacramento, ah-haa! "Whoo!" said Dean. He was rubbing his chest, his belly; the sweat splashed from his face. Boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattlety-boom! A big fat man was jumping on the platform, making it sag and creak. "Yoo!" The pianist was only pounding the keys with spread-eagled fingers, chords, at intervals when the great tenorman was drawing breath for another blast-Chinese chords, shuddering the piano in every timber, chink, and wire, boing! The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around; his hat was over his eyes; somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, baughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air. Dean was directly in front of him with his face lowered to the bell of the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man's keys, and the man noticed and laughed in his horn a long quivering crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; and finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long time as everything else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come swarming from the nearest precinct. Dean was in a trance. The tenorman's eyes were fixed straight on him; he had a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was, and they began dueling for this; everything came out of the horn, no more phrases, just cries, cries, "Baugh" and down to "Beep!" and up to "EEEEE!" and down to clinkers and over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything, up, down, sideways, upside down, horizontal, thirty degrees, forty degrees, and finally he fell back in somebody's arms and gave up and everybody pushed around and yelled, "Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!" Dean wiped himself with his handkerchief.
Then up stepped the tenorman on the bandstand and asked for a slow beat and looked sadly out the open door over people's heads and began singing "Close Your Eyes." Things quieted down a minute. The tenorman wore a tattered suede jacket, a purple shirt, cracked shoes, and zoot pants without press; he didn't care. He looked like a Negro Hassel. His big brown eyes were concerned with sadness, and the singing of songs slowly and with long, thoughtful pauses. But in the second chorus he got excited and grabbed the mike and jumped down from the bandstand and bent to it. To sing a note he had to touch his shoetops and pull it all up to blow, and he blew so much he staggered from the effect, and only recovered himself in time for the next long slow note. "Mu-u-u-usic pla-a-a-a-a-a-ay!" He leaned back with his face to the ceiling, mike held below. He shook, he swayed. Then he leaned in, almost falling with his face against the mike. "Ma-a-a-ake it dream-y for dan-cing" - and he looked at the street outside with his lips curled in scorn, Billie Holiday's hip sneer-"while we go ro-man-n-n-cing"-he staggered sideways-"Lo-o-o-ove's holi-da-a-ay"-he shook his head with disgust and weariness at the whole world-"Will make it seem"-what would it make it seem? everybody waited; he mourned-"O-kay." The piano hit a chord. "So baby come on just clo-o-o-ose your pretty little ey-y-y-y-yes"-his mouth quivered, he looked at us, Dean and me, with an expression that seemed to say, Hey now, what's this thing we're all doing in this sad brown world?- and then he came to the end of his song, and for this there had to be elaborate preparations, during which time you could send all the messages to Garcia around the world twelve times and what difference did it make to anybody? because here we were dealing with the pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man, so he said it and sang it, "Close-your-" and blew it way up to the ceiling and through to the stars and on out-"Ey-y-y-y-y-y-es"-and staggered off the platform to brood. He sat in the corner with a bunch of boys and paid no attention to them. He looked down and wept. He was the greatest.
Dean and I went over to talk to him. We invited him out to the car. In the car he suddenly yelled, "Yes! ain't nothin I like better than good kicks! Where do we go?" Dean jumped up and down in the seat, giggling maniacally. "Later! later!" said the tenorman. "I'll get my boy to drive us down to Jamson's Nook, I got to sing. Man, I live to sing. Been singin 'Close Your Eyes' for two weeks-I don't want to sing nothin else. What are you boys up to?" We told him we were going to New York in two days. "Lord, I ain't never been there and they tell me it's a real jumpin town but I ain't got no cause complainin where I am. I'm married, you know."
"Oh yes?" said Dean, lighting up. "And where is the darling tonight?"
"What do you mean?" said the tenorman, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. "I tole you I was married to her, didn't I?"
"Oh yes, oh yes," said Dean. "I was just asking. Maybe she has friends? or sisters? A ball, you know, I'm just looking for a ball."
"Yah, what good's a ball, life's too sad to be ballin all the time," said the tenorman, lowering his eye to the street. "Shh-eee-it!" he said. "I ain't got no money and I don't care tonight."
We went back in for more. The girls were so disgusted with Dean and me for gunning off and jumping around that they had left and gone to Jamson's Nook on foot; the car wouldn't run anyway. We saw a horrible sight in the bar: a white hipster fairy had come in wearing a Hawaiian shirt and was asking the big drummer if he could sit in. The musicians looked at him suspiciously. "Do you blow?" He said he did, mincing. They looked at one another and said, "Yeah, yeah, that's what the man does, shhh-ee-it!" So the fairy sat down at the tubs and they started the beat of a jump number and he began stroking the snares with soft goofy bop brushes, swaying his neck with that complacent Reichianalyzed ecstasy that doesn't mean anything except too much tea and soft foods and goofy kicks on the cool order. But he didn't care. He smiled joyously into space and kept the beat, though softly, with bop subtleties, a giggling, rippling background for big solid foghorn blues the boys were blowing, unaware of him. The big Negro bullneck drummer sat waiting for his turn. "What that man doing?" he said. "Play the music!" he said. "What in hell!" he said. "Shh-ee-eet!" and looked away, disgusted.
The tenorman's boy showed up; he was a little taut Negro with a great big Cadillac. We all jumped in. He hunched over the wheel and blew the car clear across Frisco without stopping once, seventy miles an hour, right through traffic and nobody even noticed him, he was so good. Dean was in ecstasies. "Dig this guy, man! dig the way he sits there and don't move a bone and just balls that jack and can talk all night while he's doing it, only thing is he doesn't bother with talking, ah, man, the things, the things I could-I wish-oh, yes. Let's go, let's not stop-go now! Yes!" And the boy wound around a corner and bowled us right in front of Jamson's Nook and was parked. A cab pulled up; out of it jumped a skinny, withered little Negro preacherman who threw a dollar at the cabby and yelled, "Blow!" and ran into the club and dashed right through the downstairs bar, yelling, "Blowblowblow!" and stumbled upstairs, almost falling on his face, and blew the door open and fell into the jazz-session room with his hands out to support him against anything he might fall on, and he fell right on Lampshade, who was working as a waiter in Jamson's Nookthat season, and the music was there blasting and blasting and he stood transfixed in the open door, screaming, "Blow for me, man, blow!" And the man was a little short Negro with an alto horn that Dean said obviously lived with his grandmother just like Tom Snark, slept all day and blew all night, and blew a hundred choruses before he was ready to jump for fair, and that's what he was doing.
"It's Carlo Marx!" screamed Dean above the fury.
And it was. This little grandmother's boy with the taped-up alto had beady, glittering eyes; small, crooked feet; spindly legs; and he hopped and flopped with his horn and threw his feet around and kept his eyes fixed on the audience (which was just people laughing at a dozen tables, the room thirty by thirty feet and low ceiling), and he never stopped. He was very simple in his ideas. What he liked was the surprise of a new simple variation of a chorus. He'd go from "ta-tup-tader-rara . . . ta-tup-tader-rara," repeating and hopping to it and kissing and smiling into his horn, to "ta-tup-EE-da-de-dera-RUP! ta-tup-EE-da-de-dera-RUP!" and it was all great moments of laughter and understanding for him and everyone else who heard. His tone was clear as a bell, high, pure, and blew straight in our faces from two feet away. Dean stood in front of him, oblivious to everything else in the world, with his head bowed, his hands socking in together, his whole body jumping on his heels and the sweat, always the sweat, pouring and splashing down his tormented collar to lie actually in a pool at his feet. Galatea and Marie were there, and it took us five minutes to realize it. Whoo, Frisco nights, the end of the continent and the end of doubt, all dull doubt and tomfoolery, good-by. Lampshade was roaring around with his trays of beer; everything he did was in rhythm; he yelled at the waitress with the beat; "Hey now, babybaby, make a way, make a way, it's Lampshade comin your way," and he hurled by her with the beers in the air and roared through the swinging doors into the kitchen and danced with the cooks and came sweating back. The hornman sat absolutely motionless at a corner table with an untouched drink in front of him, staring gook-eyed into space, his hands hanging at his sides till they almost touched the floor, his feet outspread like lolling tongue his body shriveled into absolute weariness and entranced sorrow and what-all was on his mind: a man who knocked self out every evening and let the others put the quietus him in the night. Everything swirled around him like a cloud. And that little grandmother's alto, that little Carlo Marx hopped and monkeydanced with his magic horn and blew two hundred choruses of blues, each one more frantic than the! other, and no signs of failing energy or willingness to call any-| thing a day. The whole room shivered.
On the corner of Fourth and Folsom an hour later I stood 1 with Ed Fournier, a San Francisco alto man who waited with! me while Dean made a phone call in a saloon to have Roy I Johnson pick us up. It wasn't anything much, we were just I talking, except that suddenly we saw a very strange and insane sight. It was Dean. He wanted to give Roy Johnson the I address of the bar, so he told him to hold the phone a minute ] and ran out to see, and to do this he had to rush pellmell through a long bar of brawling drinkers in white shirtsleeves, go to the middle of the street, and look at the post signs. He did this, crouched low to the ground like Groucho Marx, his feet carrying him with amazing swiftness out of the bar, like an apparition, with his balloon thumb stuck up in the night, and came to a whirling stop in the middle of the road, looking everywhere above him for the signs. They were hard to see in the dark, and he spun a dozen times in the road, thumb upheld, in a wild, anxious silence, a wild-haired person with a ballooning thumb held up like a great goose of the sky, spinning and spinning in the dark, the other hand distractedly inside his pants. Ed Fournier was saying, "I blow a sweet tone wherever I go and if people don't like it ain't nothin I can do about it. Say, man, that buddy of yours is a crazy cat, looka him over there"-and we looked. There was a big silence everywhere as Dean saw the signs and rushed back in the bar, practically going under someone's legs as they came out and gliding so fast through the bar that everybody had to do a double take to see him. A moment later Roy Johnson showed up, and with the same amazing swiftness. Dean glided across the street and into the car, without a sound. We were off again.
"Now, Roy, I know you're all hung-up with your wife about this thing but we absolutely must make Forty-sixth and Geary in the incredible time of three minutes or everything is lost. Ahem! Yes! (Cough-cough.) In the morning Sal and I are leaving for New York and this is absolutely our last night of kicks and I know you won't mind."
No, Roy Johnson didn't mind; he only drove through every red light he could find and hurried us along in our foolishness. At dawn he went home to bed. Dean and I had ended up with a colored guy called Walter who ordered drinks at the bar and had them lined up and said, "Wine-spodiodi!" which was a shot of port wine, a shot of whisky, and a shot of port wine. "Nice sweet jacket for all that bad whisky!" he yelled.
He invited us to his home for a bottle of beer. He lived in the tenements in back of Howard. His wife was asleep when we came in. The only light in the apartment was the bulb over her bed. We had to get up on a chair and unscrew the bulb as she lay smiling there; Dean did it, fluttering his lashes. She was about fifteen years older than Walter and the sweetest woman in the world. Then we had to plug in the extension over her bed, and she smiled and smiled. She never asked Walter where he'd been, what time it was, nothing. Finally we were set in the kitchen with the extension and sat down around the humble table to drink the beer and tell the stories. Dawn. It was time to leave and move the extension back to the bedroom and screw back the bulb. Walter's wife smiled and smiled as we repeated the insane thing all over again. She never said a word.
Out on the dawn street Dean said, "Now you see, man, there's real woman for you. Never a harsh word, never a complaint, or modified; her old man can come in any hour of the night with anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time. This is a man, and that's his castle." He pointed up at the tenement. We stumbled off. The big night was over, A cruising car followed us suspiciously for a few blocks. We bought fresh doughnuts in a bakery on Third Street and ate them in the gray, ragged street. A tall, bespectacled, well-dressed fellow came stumbling down the street with a Negro in a truck-driving cap. They were a strange pair. A big truck rolled by and the Negro pointed at it excitedly and tried to express his feeling. The tall white man furtively looked over his shoulder and counted his money. "It's Old Bull Lee!" giggled Dean. "Counting his money and worried about everything, and all that other boy wants to do is talk about trucks and things he knows." We followed them awhile.
Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.
We had to sleep; Galatea Dunkel's was out of the question. Dean knew a railroad brakeman called Ernest Burke who lived with his father in a hotel room on Third Street. Originally he'd been on good terms with them, but lately not so, and the idea was for me to try persuading them to let us sleep on their floor. It was horrible. I had to call from a morning diner. The old man answered the phone suspiciously. He remembered me from what his son had told him. To our surprise he came down to the lobby and let us in. It was just a sad old brown Frisco hotel. We went upstairs and the old man was kind enough to give us the entire bed. "I have to get up anyway," he said and retired to the little kitchenette to brew coffee. He began telling stories about his railroading days. He reminded me of my father. I stayed up and listened to the stories. Dean, not listening, was washing his teeth and bustling around and saying, "Yes, that's right," to everything he said. Finally we slept; and in the morning Ernest came back from a Western Division run and took the bed as Dean and I got up. Now old Mr. Burke dolled himself up for a date with his middle-aged sweetheart. He put on a green tweed suit, a cloth cap, also green tweed, and stuck a flower in his lapel.
"These romantic old broken-down Frisco brakemen live sad but eager lives of their own," I told Dean in the toilet. "It was very kind of him to let us sleep here."
"Yass, yass," said Dean, not listening. He rushed out to geta travel-bureau car. My job was to hurry to Galatea Dunkel's for our bags. She was sitting on the floor with her fortune-telling cards.
"Well, good-by, Galatea, and I hope everything works out fine."
"When Ed gets back I'm going to take him to Jamson's Nook every night and let him get his fill of madness. Do you think that'll work, Sal? I don't know what to do."
"What do the cards say?"
"The ace of spades is far away from him. The heart cards always surround him-the queen of hearts is never far. See this jack of spades? That's Dean, he's always around."
"Well, we're leaving for New York in an hour."
"Someday Dean's going to go on one of these trips and never come back."
She let me take a shower and shave, and then I said good-by and took the bags downstairs and hailed a Frisco taxi-jitney, which was an ordinary taxi that ran a regular route and you could hail it from any corner and ride to any corner you want for about fifteen cents, cramped in with other passengers like on a bus, but talking and telling jokes like in a private car. Mission Street that last day in Frisco was a great riot of construction work, children playing, whooping Negroes coming home from work, dust, excitement, the great buzzing and vibrating hum of what is really America's most excited city- and overhead the pure blue sky and the joy of the foggy sea that always rolls in at night to make everybody hungry for food and further excitement. I hated to leave; my stay had lasted sixty-odd hours. With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it. In the afternoon we were buzzing toward Sacramento and eastward again.
5
The car belonged to a tall, thin fag who was on his way home to Kansas and wore dark glasses and drove with extreme care; the car was what Dean called a "fag Plymouth"; it had no pickup and no real power. "Effeminate car!" whispered Dean in my ear. There were two other passengers, a couple, typical halfway tourist who wanted to stop and sleep everywhere. The first stop would have to be Sacramento, which wasn't even the faintest beginning of the trip to Denver. Dean and I sat alone in the back seat and left it up to them and talked. "Now, man, that alto man last night had IT-he held it once he found it; I've never seen a guy who could hold so long." I wanted to know what "IT" meant. "Ah well"- Dean laughed-"now you're asking me impon-de-rables- ahem! Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it- everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT-" Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.
Then I began talking; I never talked so much in all my life. I told Dean that when I was a kid and rode in cars I used to imagine I held a big scythe in my hand and cut down all the trees and posts and even sliced every hill that zoomed past the window. "Yes! Yes!" yelled Dean. "I used to do it too only different scythe-tell you why. Driving across the West with the long stretches my scythe had to be immeasurably longer and it had to curve over distant mountains, slicing off their tops, and reach another level to get at further mountains and at the same time clip off every post along the road, regular throbbing poles. For this reason-O man, I have to tell you, NOW, I have IT-I have to tell you the time my father and I and a pisspoor bum from Larimer Street took a trip to Nebraska in the middle of the depression to sell flyswatters. And how we made them, we bought pieces of ordinary regular old screen and pieces of wire that we twisted double and little pieces of blue and red cloth to sew around the edges and all of it for a matter of cents in a five-and-ten and made thousands of flyswatters and got in the old bum's jalopy and went clear around Nebraska to every farmhouse and sold them for a nickel apiece-mostly for charity the nickels were given us, two bums and a boy, apple pies in the sky, and my old man in those days was always singing 'Hallelujah, I'm a bum, bum again.' And man, now listen to this, after two whole weeks of incredible hardship and bouncing around and hustling in the heat to sell these awful makeshift flyswatters they started to argue about the division of the proceeds and had a big fight on the side of the road and then made up and bought wine and began drinking wine and didn't stop for five days and five nights while I huddled and cried in the background, and when they were finished every last cent was spent and we were right back where we started from, Larimer Street. And my old man was arrested and I had to plead at court to the judge to let him go cause he was my pa and I had no mother. Sal, I made great mature speeches at the age of eight in front of interested lawyers . . ." We were hot; we were going east; we were excited.
"Let me tell you more," I said, "and only as a parenthesis within what you're saying and to conclude my last thought. As a child lying back in my father's car in the back seat I also had a vision of myself on a white horse riding alongside over every possible obstacle that presented itself: this included dodging posts, hurling around houses, sometimes jumping over when I looked too late, running over hills, across sudden squares with traffic that I had to dodge through incredibly-" "Yes! Yes! Yes!" breathed Dean ecstatically. "Only difference with me was, I myself ran, I had no horse. You were a Eastern kid and dreamed of horses; of course we won't assume such things as we both know they are really dross and literary ideas, but merely that I in my perhaps wilder schizophrenia actually ran on foot along the car and at incredible speeds sometimes ninety, making it over every bush and fence and farmhouse and sometimes taking quick dashes to the hills and back without losing a moment's ground . . ."
We were telling these things and both sweating. We had completely forgotten the people up front who had begun to wonder what was going on in the back seat. At one point the driver said, "For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there." Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
"Oh, man! man! man!" moaned Dean. "And it's not even the beginning of it-and now here we are at last going east together, we've never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE." Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, "Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there-and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! 'Well now,' " he mimicked, " 'I don't know-maybe we shouldn't get gas in that station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don't know, well I just don't feel like it anyway . . .' Man, you dig all this." He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they'd never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning, too.
In Sacramento the fag slyly bought a room in a hotel and invited Dean and me to come up for a drink, while the couple went to sleep at relatives', and in the hotel room Dean tried everything in the book to get money from the fag. It was insane. The fag began by saying he was very glad we had come along because he liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn't like girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had taken the male role and the man the female role. Dean plied him with businesslike questions and nodded eagerly. The fag said he would like nothing better than to know what Dean thought about all this. Warning him first that he had once been a hustler in his youth, Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the bathroom. The fag became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Dean's final motives, turned over no money, and made vague promises for Denver. He kept counting his money and checking on his wallet. Dean threw up his hands and gave up. "You see, man, it's better not to bother. Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken." But he had sufficiently conquered the owner of the Plymouth to take over the wheel without remonstrance, and now we really traveled.
We left Sacramento at dawn and were crossing the Nevada desert by noon, after a hurling passage of the Sierras that made the fag and the tourists cling to each other in the back seat. We were in front, we took over. Dean was happy again. All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road. He talked about how bad a driver Old Bull Lee was and to demonstrate-"Whenever a huge big truck like that one coming loomed into sight it would take Bull infinite time to spot it, 'cause he couldn't see, man, he can't see." He rubbed his eyes furiously to show. "And I'd say, 'Whoop, look out, Bull, a truck,' and he'd say, 'Eh? what's that you say, Dean?' 'Truck! truck!' and at the very last moment he would go right up to the truck like this-" And Dean hurled the Plymouth head-on at the truck roaring our way, wobbled and hovered in front of it a moment, the truckdriver's face growing gray before our eyes, the people in the back seat subsiding in gasps of horror, and swung away at the last moment. "Like that, you see, exactly like that, how bad he was." I wasn't scared at all; I knew Dean. The people in the back seat were speechless. In fact they were afraid to complain: God knew what Dean would do, they thought, if they should ever complain. He balled right across the desert in this manner, demonstrating various ways of how not to drive, how his father used to drive jalopies, how great drivers made curves, how bad drivers hove over too far in the beginning and had to scramble at the curve's end, and so on. It was a hot, sunny afternoon. Reno, Battle Mountain, Elko, all the towns along the Nevada road shot by one after another, and at dusk we were in the Salt Lake flats with the lights of Salt Lake City infinitesimally glimmering almost a hundred miles across the mirage of the flats, twice showing, above and below the curve of the earth, one clear, one dim. I told Dean that the thing that bound us all together in this world was invisible, and to prove it pointed to long lines of telephone poles that curved off out of sight over the bend of a hundred miles of salt. His floppy bandage, all dirty now, shuddered in the air, his face was a light. "Oh yes, man, dear God, yes, yes!" Suddenly he stopped the car and collapsed. I turned and saw him huddled in the corner of the seat, sleeping. His face was down on his good hand, and the bandaged hand automatically and dutifully remained in the air.
The people in the back seat sighed with relief. I heard them -whispering mutiny. "We can't let him drive any more, he's absolutely crazy, they must have let him out of an asylum or something."
I rose to Dean's defense and leaned back to talk to them. "He's not crazy, he'll be all right, and don't worry about his driving, he's the best in the world."
"I just can't stand it," said the girl in a suppressed, hysterical whisper. I sat back and enjoyed nightfall on the desert and waited for poorchild Angel Dean to wake up again. We were on a hill overlooking Salt Lake City's neat patterns of light and he opened his eyes to the place in this spectral world where he was born, unnamed and bedraggled, years ago.
"Sal, Sal, look, this is where I was born, think of it! People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal. EE! Look!" He was so excited it made me cry. Where would it all lead? The tourists insisted on driving the car the rest of the way to Denver. Okay, we didn't care. We sat in the back and talked. But they got too tired in the morning and Dean took the wheel in the eastern Colorado desert at Craig. We had spent almost the entire night crawling cautiously over Strawberry Pass in Utah and lost a lot of time. They went to sleep. Dean headed pellmell for the mighty wall of Berthoud Pass that stood a hundred miles ahead on the roof of the world, a tremendous Gibraltarian door shrouded in clouds. He took Berthoud Pass like a June bug-same as at Tehachapi, cutting off the motor and floating it, passing everybody and never halting the rhythmic advance that the mountains themselves intended, till we overlooked the great hot plain of Denver again-and Dean was home.
It was with a great deal of silly relief that these people let us off the car at the corner of Ayth and Federal. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
6
Now we had a number of circumstances to deal with in Denver, and they were of an entirely different order from those of 1947. We could either get another travel-bureau car at once or stay a few days for kicks and look for his father.
We were both exhausted and dirty. In the John of a restaurant I was at a urinal blocking Dean's way to the sink and I stepped, out before I was finished and resumed at another urinal, and said to Dean, "Dig this trick."
"Yes, man," he said, washing his hands at the sink, "it's a very good trick but awful on your kidneys and because you're getting a little older now every time you do this eventually years of misery in your old age, awful kidney miseries for the days when you sit in parks."
It made me mad. "Who's old? I'm not much older than you are!"
"I wasn't saying that, man!"
"Ah," I said, "you're always making cracks about my age. I'm no old fag like that fag, you don't have to warn me about! my kidneys." We went back to the booth and just as the waitress set down the hot-roast-beef sandwiches-and ordinarily Dean would have leaped to wolf the food at once-I said to cap my anger, "And I don't want to hear any more of it." - And suddenly Dean's eyes grew tearful and he got up and left his food steaming there and walked out of the restaurant. I wondered if he was just wandering off forever. I didn't care, = I was so mad-I had nipped momentarily and turned it down on Dean. But the sight of his uneaten food made me sadder than anything in years. I shouldn't have said that ... he likes to eat so much . . . He's never left his food like this . . . What the hell. That's showing him, anyway.
Dean stood outside the restaurant for exactly five minutes and then came back and sat down. "Well," I said, "what were you doing out there, knotting up your fists? Cursing me, thinking up new gags about my kidneys?"
Dean mutely shook his head. "No, man, no, man, you're all completely wrong. If you want to know, well-"
"Go ahead, tell me." I said all this and never looked up from my food. I felt like a beast.
"I was crying," said Dean.
"Ah hell, you never cry."
"You say that? Why do you think I don't cry?"
"You don't die enough to cry." Every one of these things I said was a knife at myself. Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out: how ugly I was and what filth I was discovering in the depths of my own impure psychologies.
Dean was shaking his head. "No, man, I was crying."
"Go on, I bet you were so mad you had to leave."
"Believe me, Sal, really do believe me if you've ever believed anything about me." I knew he was telling the truth and yet I didn't want to bother with the truth and when I looked up at him I think I was cockeyed from cracked intestinal twistings in my awful belly. Then I knew I was wrong.
"Ah, man, Dean, I'm sorry, I never acted this way before with you. Well, now you know me. You know I don't have close relationships with anybody any more-I don't know what to do with these things. I hold things in my hand like pieces of crap and don't know where to put it down. Let's forget it." The holy con-man began to eat. "It's not my fault! it's not my fault!" I told him. "Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don't you see that? I don't want it to be and it can't be and it won't be."
"Yes, man, yes, man. But please harken back and believe me."
"I do believe you, I do." This was the sad story of that afternoon. All kinds of tremendous complications arose that night when Dean and I went to stay with the Okie family. These had been neighbors of mine in my Denver solitude of two weeks before. The mother was a wonderful woman in jeans who drove coal trucks in winter mountains to support her kids, four in all, her husband having left her years before when they were traveling around the country in a trailer. They had rolled all the way from Indiana to LA in that trailer. After many a good time and a big Sunday-afternoon drunk in crossroads bars and laughter and guitar-playing in the night, the big lout had suddenly walked off across the dark field and never returned. Her children were wonderful. The eldest was a boy, who wasn't around that summer but in a camp in the mountains; next was a lovely thirteen-year-old daughter who wrote poetry and picked flowers in the fields and wanted to grow up and be an actress in Hollywood, Janet by name; then came the little ones, little Jimmy who sat around the campfire at night and cried for his "pee-tater" before it was half roasted, and little Lucy who made pets of worms, horny toads, beetles, and anything that crawled, and gave them names and places to live. They had four dogs. They lived their ragged and joyous lives on the little new-settlement street and were the butt of the neighbors' semi-respectable sense of propriety only because the poor woman's husband had left her and because they littered up the yard. At night all the lights of Denver lay like a great wheel on the plain below, for the house was in that part of the West where the mountains roll down foothilling to the plain and where in primeval times soft waves must have washed from sea-like Mississippi to make such round and perfect stools for the island-peaks like Evans and Pike and Longs. Dean went there and of course he was all sweats and joy at the sight of them, especially Janet, but I warned him not to touch her, and probably didn't have to. The woman was a great man's woman and took to Dean right away but she was bashful and he was bashful. She said Dean reminded her of the husband gone. "Just like him-oh, he was a crazy one, I tell ya!"
The result was uproarious beer-drinking in the littered living room, shouting suppers, and booming Lone Ranger radio.
The complications rose like clouds of butterflies: the woman -Frankie, everyone called her-was finally about to buy a jalopy as she had been threatening to do for years, and had recently come into a few bucks toward one. Dean immediately took over the responsibility of selecting and naming the price of the car, because of course he wanted to use it himself so as of yore he could pick up girls coming out of high school in the afternoons and drive them up to the mountains. Poor innocent Frankie was always agreeable to anything. But she was afraid to part with her money when they got to the car lot and stood before the salesman. Dean sat right down in the dust of Alameda Boulevard and beat his fists on his head. "For a hunnerd you can't get anything better!" He swore he'd never talk to her again, he cursed till his face was purple, he was about to jump in the car and drive k away anyway. "Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they'll never change, how completely and how unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to act, this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing frightens em more than what they want-it's my father my father my father all over again!"
Dean was very 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 barbershop 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 I 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 forgot- -, ten 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 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 he long, tapering, sensitive fingers that she used to talk wit like a Cleopatra Nile dance. Dean sat in the farthest corner of the room, watching her with slitted eyes and saying, "Ye yes, yes." Janet was already aware of him; she turned to for protection. Previous months of that summer I had a lot of time with her, talking about books and little thing she was interested in.
7
Nothing happened that night; we went to sleep. Everything happened the next day. In the afternoon De and I went to downtown Denver for our various chores and 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 sports goods store, calmly picked up a softball on the counter, came out, popping it up and down in his palm. Nobody (iced; nobody ever notices such things. It was a drowsy, 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 Grandad 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 window and frightened her. As we drank the bourbon 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 they trusted me enough to quiet down a bit. I took Dean by the arm and back we went over the moony cornrows.
"Woo-hee!" he yelled. "I'm gonna git drunk tonight." We went back to Frankie and the kids. Suddenly Dean got mad at a record little Janet was playing and broke it over his knee: it was a hillbilly record. There was an early Dizzy Gillespie there that he valued-"Congo Blues," with Max West on drums. I'd given it to Janet before, and I told her as she wept to take it and break it over Dean's head. She went over and did so. Dean gaped dumbly, sensing everything. We all laughed. Everything was all right. Then Frankie-Maw wanted to go out and drink beer in the roadhouse saloons. "Lessgo!" yelled Dean. "Now dammit, if you'd bought that car I showed you Tuesday we wouldn't have to walk."
"I didn't like that damn car!" yelled Frankie. Yang, yang, the kids started to cry. Dense, mothlike eternity brooded in the crazy brown parlor with the sad wallpaper, the pink lamp, the excited faces. Little Jimmy was frightened; I put him to sleep on the couch and trussed the dog on him. Frankie drunkenly called a cab and suddenly while we were waiting for it a phone call came for me from my woman friend. She had a middle-aged cousin who hated my guts, and that earlier afternoon I had written a letter to Old Bull Lee, who was now in Mexico City, relating the adventures of Dean and myself and under what circumstances we were staying in Denver. I wrote: "I have a woman friend who gives me whisky and money and big suppers."
I foolishly gave this letter to her middle-aged cousin to mail, right after a fried-chicken supper. He opened it, read it, and took it at once to her to prove to her that I was a con-man. Now she was calling me tearfully and saying she never wanted to see me again. Then the triumphant cousin got on the phone and began calling me a bastard. As the cab honked outside and the kids cried and the dogs barked and Dean danced with Frankie I yelled every conceivable curse I could think over that phone and added all kinds of new ones, and in my drunken frenzy I told everybody over the phone to go to hell and slammed it down and went out to get drunk.
We stumbled over one another to get out of the cab at the roadhouse, a hillbilly roadhouse near the hills, and went in and ordered beers. Everything was collapsing, and to make things inconceivably more frantic there was an ecstatic spastic fellow in the bar who threw his arms around Dean and moaned in his face, and Dean went mad again with sweats and insanity, and to add still more to the unbearable confusion Dean rushed out the next moment and stole a car right from the driveway and took a dash to downtown Denver and came back with a newer, better one. Suddenly in the bar I looked up and saw cops and people were milling around the driveway in the headlights of cruisers, talking about the stolen car. "Somebody's been stealing cars left and right here!" the cop was saying. Dean stood right in back of him, listening and saying, "Ah yass, ah yass." The cops went off to check. Dean came in the bar and rocked back and forth with the poor spastic kid who had just gotten married that day and was having a tremendous drunk while his bride waited somewhere. "Oh, man, this guy is the greatest in the world!" yelled Dean. "Sal, Frankie, I'm going out and get a real good car this time and we'll all go and with Tony too" (the spastic saint) "and have a big drive in the mountains." And he rushed out. Simultaneously a cop rushed in and said a car stolen from downtown Denver was parked in the driveway. People discussed it in knots. From the window I saw Dean jump into the nearest car and roar off, and not a soul noticed him. A few minutes later he was back in an entirely different car, a brand-new convertible. "This one is a beaut!" he whispered in my ear. "The other one coughed too much-I left it at the crossroads, saw that lovely parked in front of a farmhouse. Took a spin in Denver. Come on, man, let's all go riding." All the bitterness and madness of his entire Denver life was blasting out of his system like daggers. His face was red and sweaty and mean. "No, I ain't gonna have nothing to do with stolen cars." "Aw, come on, man! Tony'll come with me, won't you, amazing darling Tony?" And Tony-a thin, dark-haired, holy-eyed moaning foaming lost soul-leaned on Dean and groaned and groaned, for he was sick suddenly and then for some odd intuitive reason he became terrified of Dean and threw up his hands and drew away with terror writhing in his face. Dean bowed his head and sweated. He ran out and drove away. Frankie and I found a cab in the driveway and decided to go home. As the cabby drove us up the infinitely dark Alameda Boulevard along which I had walked many and many a lost night the previous months of the summer, singing and moaning and eating the stars and dropping the juices of my heart drop by drop on the hot tar, Dean suddenly hove up behind us in the stolen convertible and began tooting and tooting and crowding us over and screaming. The cabby's face grew white.
"Just a friend of mine," I said. Dean got disgusted with us and suddenly shot ahead at ninety miles an hour, throwing spectral dust across the exhaust. Then he turned in at Frankie's road and pulled up in front of the house; just as suddenly he took off again, U-turned, and went back toward town as we got out of the cab and paid the fare. A few moments later as we waited anxiously in the dark yard, he returned with still another car, a battered coupe, stopped it in a cloud of dust in front of the house, and just staggered out and went straight into the bedroom and flopped dead drunk on the bed. And there we were with a stolen car right on our doorstep.
I had to wake him up; I couldn't get the car started to dump it somewhere far off. He stumbled out of bed, wearing just his jockey shorts, and we got in the car together, while the kids giggled from the windows, and went bouncing and flying straight over the hard alfalfa-rows at the end of the road whomp-ti-whomp till finally the car couldn't take any more and stopped dead under an old cottonwood near the old mill. "Can't go any farther," said Dean simply and got out and started walking back over the cornfield, about half a mile, in his shorts in the moonlight. We got back to the house and he went to sleep. Everything was in a horrible mess, all of Denver, my woman friend, cars, children, poor Frankie, the living room splattered with beer and cans, and I tried to sleep. A cricket kept me awake for some time. At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, are big as roman candles and as lonely as the Prince of the Dharma who's lost his ancestral grove and journeys across the spaces between points in the handle of the Big Dipper, trying to find it again. So they slowly wheeled the night, and then long before actual sunrise the great red light appeared far over the dun bleak land toward West Kansas and the birds took up their trill above Denver.
8
Horrible nauseas possessed us in the morning. First thing Dean did was go out across the cornfield to see if the car would carry us East. I told him no, but he went anyway. He came back pale. "Man, that's a detective's car and every precinct in town knows my fingerprints from the year that I stole five hundred cars. You see what I do with them, I just wanta ride, man! I gotta go! Listen, we're going to wind up in jail if we don't get out of here this very instant."
"You're damned right," I said, and we began packing as fast as our hands could go. Dangling neckties and shirttails, we said quick good-bys to our sweet little family and stumbled off toward the protective road where nobody would know us. Little Janet was crying to see us, or me, or whatever it was, go-and Frankie was courteous, and I kissed her and apologized.
"He sure is a crazy one," she said. "Sure reminds me of my husband that run away. Just exactly the same guy. I sure hope my Mickey don't grow up that way, they all do now."
And I said good-by to little Lucy, who had her pet beetle in her hand, and little Jimmy was asleep. All this in the space of seconds, in a lovely Sunday morning dawn, as we stumbled off with our wretched baggage. We hurried. Every minute we expected a cruising car to appear from around a country bend and come sloping for us.
"If that woman with the shotgun ever finds out, we're cooked," said Dean. "We must get a cab. Then we're safe." We were about to wake up a farm family to use their phone, but the dog drove us away. Every minute things became more dangerous; the coupe would be found wrecked in the cornfield by an early-rising country man. One lovely old lady let us use her phone finally, and we called a downtown Denver cab, but he didn't come. We stumbled on down the road. Early-morning traffic began, every car looking like a cruiser. Then we suddenly saw the cruiser coming and I knew it was the end of my life as I had known it and that it was entering a new and horrible stage of jails and iron sorrows. But the cruiser was our taxi, and from that moment on we flew east.
At the travel bureau there was a tremendous offer for someone to drive a '47 Cadillac limousine to Chicago. The owner had been driving up from Mexico with his family and got tired and put them all on a train. All he wanted was identification and for the car to get there. My papers assured him everything would come off right. I told him not to worry. I told Dean, "And don't scrounge with this car." Dean was jumping up and down with excitement to see it. We had to wait an hour. We lay on the grass near the church where in 1947 I had passed some time with panhandling hobos after seeing Rita Bettencourt home, and there I fell asleep from sheer horror exhaustion with my face to the afternoon birds. In fact they were playing organ music somewhere. But Dean hustled around town. He talked up an acquaintance with a waitress in a luncheonette, made a date to take her driving in his Cadillac that afternoon, and came back to wake me with the news. Now I felt better. I rose to the new complications.
When the Cadillac arrived, Dean instantly drove off with it "to get gas," and the travel-bureau man looked at me and said, "When's he coming back? The passengers are all ready to go." He showed me two Irish boys from an Eastern Jesuit school waiting with their suitcases on the benches.
"He just went for gas. He'll be right back." I cut down to the corner and watched Dean as he kept the motor running for the waitress, who had been changing in her hotel room; in fact I could see her from where I stood, in front of her mirror, primping and fixing her silk stockings, and I wished I could go along with them. She came running out and jumped in the Cadillac. I wandered back to reassure the travel-bureau boss and the passengers. From where I stood in the door I saw a faint flash of the Cadillac crossing Cleveland Place with Dean, T-shirted and joyous, fluttering his hands and talking to the girl and hunching over the wheel to go as she sat sadly and proudly beside him. They went to a parking lot in broad daylight, parked near the brick wall at the back (a lot Dean had worked in once), and there, he claims, he made it with her, in nothing flat; not only that but persuaded her to follow us east as soon as she had her pay on Friday, come by bus, and meet us at Ian MacArthur's pad on Lexington Avenue in New York. She agreed to come; her name was Beverly. Thirty minutes and Dean roared back, deposited the girl at her hotel, with kisses, farewells, promises, and zoomed right up to the travel bureau to pick up the crew.
"Well, it's about time!" said the Broadway Sam travel-bureau boss. "I thought you'd gone off with that Cadillac."
"It's my responsibility," I said, "don't worry"-and said that because Dean was in such obvious frenzy everybody could guess his madness. Dean became businesslike and assisted the Jesuit boys with their baggage. They were hardly seated, and I had hardly waved good-by to Denver, before he was off, the big motor thrumming with immense birdlike power. Not two miles out of Denver the speedometer broke because Dean was pushing well over no miles an hour.
"Well, no speedometer, I won't know how fast I'm going. I'll just ball that jack to Chicago and tell by time." It didn't seem we were even going seventy but all the cars fell from us like dead flies on the straightaway highway leading up to Greeley. "Reason why we're going northeast is because, Sal, we must absolutely visit Ed Wall's ranch in Sterling, you've got to meet him and see his ranch and this boat cuts so fast we can make it without any time trouble and get to Chicago long before that man's train." Okay, I was for it. It began to rain but Dean never slackened. It was a beautiful big car, the last of the old-style limousines, black, with a big elongated body and whitewall tires and probably bulletproof windows. The Jesuit boys-St. Bonaventura-sat in the back, gleeful and glad to be underway, and they had no idea how fast we were going. They tried to talk but Dean said nothing and took off his T-shirt and drove barechested. "Oh, that Beverly is a sweet gone little gal-she's going to join me in New York-we're going to get married as soon as I can get divorce papers from Camille-everything's jumping, Sal, and we're off. Yes!" The faster we left Denver the better I felt, and we were doing it fast. It grew dark when we turned off the highway at Junction and hit a dirt road that took us across dismal East Colorado plains to Ed Wall's ranch in the middle of Coyote Nowhere. But it was still raining and the mud was slippery and Dean slowed to seventy, but I told him to slow even more or we'd slide, and he said, "Don't worry, man, you know me."
"Not this time," I said. "You're really going much too fast." And he was flying along there on that slippery mud and just as I said that we hit a complete left turn in the highway and Dean socked the wheel over to make it but the big car skidded in the grease and wobbled hugely.
"Look out!" yelled Dean, who didn't give a damn and wrestled with his Angel a moment, and we ended up backass in the ditch with the front out on the road. A great stillness fell over everything. We heard the whining wind. We were in the middle of the wild prairie. There was a farmhouse a quarter-mile up the road. I couldn't stop swearing, I was so mad and disgusted with Dean. He said nothing and went off to the farmhouse in the rain, with a coat, to look for help.
"Is he your brother?" the boys asked in the back seat. "He's a devil with a car, isn't he?-and according to his story he must be with the women."
"He's mad," I said, "and yes, he's my brother." I saw Dean coming back with the farmer in his tractor. They hooked chains on and the farmer hauled us out of the ditch. The car was muddy brown, a whole fender was crushed. The farmer charged us five dollars. His daughters watched in the rain. The prettiest, shyest one hid far back in the field to watch and she had good reason because she was absolutely and finally the most beautiful girl Dean and I ever saw in all our lives.
She was about sixteen, and had Plains complexion like wild roses, and the bluest eyes, the most lovely hair, and the modesty and quickness of a wild antelope. At every look from us she flinched. She stood there with the immense winds that blew clear down from Saskatchewan knocking her hair about her lovely head like shrouds, living curls of them. She blushed and blushed.
We finished our business with the farmer, took one last look at the prairie angel, and drove off, slower now, till dark came and Dean said Ed Wall's ranch was dead ahead. "Oh, a girl like that scares me," I said. "I'd give up everything and throw myself on her mercy and if she didn't want me I'd just as simply go and throw myself off the edge of the world." The Jesuit boys giggled. They were full of corny quips and Eastern college talk and had nothing on their bird-beans except a lot of ill-understood Aquinas for stuffing for their pepper. Dean and I paid absolutely no attention to them. As we crossed the muddy plains he told stories about his cowboy days, he showed us the stretch of road where he spent an entire morning riding; and where he'd done fence-mending as soon as we hit Wall's property, which was immense; and where old Wall, Ed's father, used to come clattering on the rangeland grass chasing a heifer and howling, "Git im, git im, goddammit!" "He had to have a new car every six months," said Dean. "He just couldn't care. When a stray got away from us he'd drive right after it as far as the nearest waterhole and then get out and run after it on foot. Counted every cent he ever made and put it in a pot. A mad old rancher. I'll show you some of his old wrecks near the bunkhouse. This is where I came on probation after my last hitch in a joint. This is where I lived when I wrote those letters you saw to Chad King." We turned off the road and wound across a path through the winter pasture. A mournful group of whitefaced cows suddenly milled across our headlights. "There they are! Wall's cows! We'll never be able to get through them. We'll have to get out and whoop em up! Hee-hee-hee!!" But we didn't have to do that and only inched along through them, sometimes gently bumping as they milled and mooedlike a sea around the car doors. Beyond we saw the light of Ed Wall's ranch house. Around this lonely light stretched hundreds of miles of plains.
The kind of utter darkness that falls on a prairie like that is Inconceivable to an Easterner. There were no stars, no moon, no light whatever except the light of Mrs. Wall's kitchen. What lay beyond the shadows of the yard was an endless view of the world that you wouldn't be able to see till dawn. After knocking on the door and calling out in the dark for Ed Wall, who was milking cows in the barn, I took a short careful walk into that darkness, about twenty feet and no more. I thought I heard coyotes. Wall said it was probably one of his father's wild horses whinnying in the distance. Ed Wall was about our age, tall, rangy, spike-toothed, laconic. He and Dean used to stand around on Curtis Street corners and whistle at girls. Now he took us graciously into his gloomy, brown, unused parlor and fished around till he found dull lamps and lit them and said to Dean, "What in the hell happened to yore thumb?"
"I socked Marylou and it got infected so much they had to amputate the end of it."
"What in the hell did you go and do that for?" I could see he used to be Dean's older brother. He shook his head; the milk pail was still at his feet. "You always been a crackbrained sonofabitch anyhow."
Meanwhile his young wife prepared a magnificent spread in the big ranch kitchen. She apologized for the peach ice cream: "It ain't nothin but cream and peaches froze up together." Of course it was the only real ice cream I ever had in my whole life. She started sparsely and ended up abundantly; as we ate, new things appeared on the table. She was a well-built blonde but like all women who live in the wide spaces she complained a little of the boredom. She enumerated the radio programs she usually listened to at this time of night. Ed Wall sat just staring at his hands. Dean ate voraciously. He wanted me to go along with him in the fiction that I owned the Cadillac, that I was a very rich man and that he was my friend and chauffeur. It made no impression on Ed Wall.
Every time the stock made sounds in the barn he raised his head to listen.
"Well, I hope you boys make it to New York." Far from believing that tale about my owning the Cadillac, he was convinced Dean had stolen it. We stayed at the ranch about an hour. Ed Wall had lost faith in Dean just like Sam Brady-he looked at him warily when he looked. There were riotous days in the past when they had stumbled around the streets of Laramie, Wyoming, arm-in-arm when the haying was over, but all this was dead and gone.
Dean hopped in his chair convulsively. "Well yes, well yes, and now I think we'd better be cutting along because we gotta be in Chicago by tomorrow night and we've already wasted several hours." The college boys thanked Wall graciously and we were off again. I turned to watch the kitchen light recede in the sea of night. Then I leaned ahead.
9
In no time at all we were back on the main highway and that night I saw the entire state of Nebraska unroll before my eyes. A hundred and ten miles an hour straight through, an arrow road, sleeping towns, no traffic, and the Union Pacific streamliner falling behind us in the moonlight. I wasn't frightened at all that night; it was perfectly legitimate to go no and talk and have all the Nebraska towns- Ogallala, Gothenburg, Kearney, Grand Island, Columbus- unreel with dreamlike rapidity as we roared ahead and talked. It was a magnificent car; it could hold the road like a boat holds on water. Gradual curves were its singing ease. "Ah, man, what a dreamboat," sighed Dean. "Think if you and I had a car like this what we could do. Do you know there's a road that goes down Mexico and all the way to Panama?-and maybe all the way to the bottom of South America where the Indians are seven feet tall and eat cocaine on the mountainside? Yes! You and I, Sal, we'd dig the whole world with a car like this because, man, the road must eventually lead to the whole world. Ain't nowhere else it can go -right? Oh, and are we going to cut around old Chi with this thing! Think of it, Sal, I've never been to Chicago in all my life, never stopped."
"We'll come in there like gangsters in this Cadillac!"
"Yes! And girls! We can pick up girls, in fact, Sal, I've decided to make extra-special fast time so we can have an entire evening to cut around in this thing. Now you just relax and I'll ball the jack all the way." "Well, how fast are you going now?"
"A steady one-ten I figure-you wouldn't notice it. We've still got all Iowa in the daytime and then I'll make that old Illinois in nothing flat." The boys fell asleep and we talked and talked all night.
It was remarkable how Dean could go mad and then suddenly continue with his soul-which I think is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road-calmly and sanely as though nothing had happened. "I get like that every time in Denver now-I can't make that town any more. Gookly, gooky, Dean's a spooky. Zoom!" I told him I had been over this Nebraska road before in '47. He had too. "Sal, when I was working for the New Era Laundry in Los Angeles, nineteen forty-four, falsifying my age, I made a trip to Indianapolis Speedway for the express purpose of seeing the Memorial Day classic hitch, hiking by day and stealing cars by night to make time. Also I had a twenty-dollar Buick back in LA, my first car, it couldn't pass the brake and light inspection so I decided I needed an out-of-state license to operate the car without arrest so went through here to get the license. As I was hitchhiking through one of these very towns, with the plates concealed under my coat, a nosy sheriff who thought I was pretty young to be hitchhiking accosted me on the main drag. He found the plates and threw me in the two-cell jail with a county delinquent who should have been in the home for the old since he couldn't feed himself (the sheriff's wife fed him) and sat through the day drooling and slobbering. After investigation, which included corny things like a fatherly quiz, then an abrupt turnabout to frighten me with threats, a comparison of my handwriting, et cetera, and after I made the most magnificent speech of my life to get out of it, concluding with the confession that I was lying about my car-stealing past and was only looking for my paw who was a farmhand hereabouts, he let me go. Of course I missed the races. The following fall I did the same thing again to see the Notre Dame-California game in South Bend, Indiana-trouble none this time and, Sal, I had just the money for the ticket and not an extra cent and didn't eat anything all up and back except for what I could panhandle from all kinds of crazy cats I met on the road and at the same time gun gals. Only guy in the United States of America that ever went to so much trouble to see a ball-game."
I asked him the circumstances of his being in LA in 1944. "I was arrested in Arizona, the joint absolutely the worst joint I've ever been in. I had to escape and pulled the greatest escape in my life, speaking of escapes, you see, in a general way. In the woods, you know, and crawling, and swamps- up around that mountain country. Rubber hoses and the works and accidental so-called death facing me I had to cut out of those woods along the ridge so as to keep away from trails and paths and roads. Had to get rid of my joint clothes and sneaked the neatest theft of a shirt and pants from a gas station outside Flagstaff, arriving LA two days later clad as gas attendant and walked to the first station I saw and got hired and got myself a room and changed name (Lee Buliay) and spent an exciting year in LA, including a whole gang of new friends and some really great girls, that season ending when we were all driving on Hollywood Boulevard one night and I told my buddy to steer the car while I kissed my girl- I was at the wheel, see-and he didn't hear me and we ran smack into a post but only going twenty and I broke my nose. You've seen before my nose-the crooked Grecian curve up here. After that I went to Denver and met Marylou in a soda fountain that spring. Oh, man, she was only fifteen and wearing jeans and just waiting for someone to pick her up. Three days three nights of talk in the Ace Hotel, third floor, southeast corner room, holy memento room and sacred scene of my days-she was so sweet then, so young, hmm, ahh! But hey, look down there in the night thar, hup, hup, a buncha old bums by a fire by the rail, damn me." He almost slowed down. "You see, I never know whether my father's there or not." There were some figures by the tracks, reeling in front of a woodfire. "I never know whether to ask. He might be anywhere." We drove on. Somewhere behind us or in front of us in the huge night his father lay drunk under a bush, and no doubt about it-spittle on his chin, water on his pants, molasses in his ears, scabs on his nose, maybe blood in his hair and the moon shining down on him.
I took Dean's arm. "Ah, man, we're sure going home now." New York was going to be his permanent home for the first time. He jiggled all over; he couldn't wait.
"And think, Sal, when we get to Penney we'll start hearing that gone Eastern bop on the disk jockeys. Geeyah, roll, old boat, roll!" The magnificent car made the wind roar; it made the plains unfold like a roll of paper; it cast hot tar from itself with deference-an imperial boat. I opened my eyes to a fanning dawn; we were hurling up to it. Dean's rocky dogged face as ever bent over the dashlight with a bony purpose of its own.
"What are you thinking, Pops?"
"Ah-ha, ah-ha, same old thing, y'know-gurls gurls gurls."
I went to sleep and woke up to the dry, hot atmosphere of July Sunday morning in Iowa, and still Dean was driving and driving and had not slackened his speed; he took the curvy corndales of Iowa at a minimum of eighty and the straightaway 110 as usual, unless both-ways traffic forced him to fall in line at a crawling and miserable sixty. When there was a chance he shot ahead and passed cars by the half-dozen and left them behind in a cloud of dust. A mad guy in a brand-new Buick saw all this on the road and decided to race us. When Dean was just about to pass a passel the guy shot by us without warning and howled and tooted his horn and flashed the tail lights for challenge. We took off after him like a big bird. "Now wait," laughed Dean, "I'm going to tease that sonofabitch for a dozen miles or so. Watch." He let the Buick go way ahead and then accelerated and caught up with it most impolitely. Mad Buick went out of his mind; he gunned up to a hundred. We had a chance to see who he was. He seemed to be some kind of Chicago hipster traveling with a woman old enough to be-and probably actually was-his mother. God knows if she was complaining, but he raced. His hair was dark and wild, an Italian from old Chi; he wore a sports shirt. Maybe there was an idea in his mind that we were a new gang from LA invading Chicago, maybe some of Mickey Cohen's men, because the limousine looked every bit the part and the license plates were California. Mainly it was just road kicks. He took terrible chances to stay ahead of us; he passed cars on curves and barely got back in line as a truck wobbled into view and loomed up huge. Eighty miles of Iowa we unreeled in this fashion, and the race was so interesting that I had no opportunity to be frightened. Then the mad guy gave up, pulled up at a gas station, probably on orders from the old lady, and as we roared by he waved gleefully. On we sped, Dean barechested, I with my feet on the dashboard, and the college boys sleeping in the back. We stopped to eat breakfast at a diner run by a white-haired lady who gave us extra-large portions of potatoes as church-bells rang in the nearby town. Then off again.
"Dean, don't drive so fast in the daytime."
"Don't worry, man, I know what I'm doing." I began to flinch. Dean came up on lines of cars like the Angel of Terror. He almost rammed them along as he looked for an opening. He teased their bumpers, he eased and pushed and craned around to see the curve, then the huge car leaped to his touch and passed, and always by a hair we made it back to our side as other lines filed by in the opposite direction and I shuddered. I couldn't take it any more. It is only seldom that you find a long Nebraskan straightaway in Iowa, and when we finally hit one Dean made his usual no and I saw flashing by outside several scenes that I remembered from 1947-a long stretch where Eddie and I had been stranded two hours. All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day.
"Ah hell, Dean, I'm going in the back seat, I can't stand it any more, I can't look."
"Hee-hee-hee!" tittered Dean and he passed a car on a narrow bridge and swerved in dust and roared on. I jumped in the back seat and curled up to sleep. One of the boys jumped in front for the fun. Great horrors that we were going to crash this very morning took hold of me and I got down on the floor and closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep. As a seaman I used to think of the waves rushing beneath the shell of the ship and the bottomless deeps there under-now I could feel the road some twenty inches beneath me, unfurling and flying and hissing at incredible speeds across the groaning continent with that mad Ahab at the wheel. When I closed my eyes all I could see was the road unwinding into me. When I opened them I saw flashing shadows of trees vibrating on the floor of the car. There was no escaping it. I resigned myself to all. And still Dean drove, he had no thought of sleeping till we got to Chicago. In the afternoon we crossed old Des Moines again. Here of course we got snarled in traffic and had to go slow and I got back in the front seat. A strange pathetic accident took place. A fat colored man was driving with his entire family in a sedan in front of us; on the rear bumper hung one of those canvas desert waterbags they sell tourists in the desert. He pulled up sharp, Dean was talking to the boys in the back and didn't notice, and we rammed him at five miles an hour smack on the waterbag, which burst like a boil and squirted water in the air. No other damage except a bent bumper. Dean and I got out to talk to him. The upshot of it was an exchange of addresses and some talk, and Dean not taking his eyes off the man's wife whose beautiful brown breasts were barely concealed inside a floppy cotton blouse. "Yass, yass." We gave him the address of our Chicago baron and went on.
The other side of Des Moines a cruising car came after us with the siren growling, with orders to pull over. "Now what?"
The cop came out. "Were you in an accident coming in?" "Accident? We broke a guy's waterbag at the junction." "He says he was hit and run by a bunch in a stolen car." This was one of the few instances Dean and I knew of a Negro's acting like a suspicious old fool. It so surprised us we laughed. We had to follow the patrolman to the station and there spent an hour waiting in the grass while they telephoned Chicago to get the owner of the Cadillac and verify our position as hired drivers. Mr. Baron said, according to the cop, "Yes, that is my car but I can't vouch for anything else those boys might have done."
"They were in a minor accident here in Des Moines." "Yes, you've already told me that-what I meant was, I can't vouch for anything they might have done in the past."
Everything was straightened out and we roared on. Newton, Iowa, it was, where I'd taken that dawn walk in 1947. In the afternoon we crossed drowsy old Davenport again and the low-lying Mississippi in her sawdust bed; then Rock Island, a few minutes of traffic, the sun reddening, and sudden sights of lovely little tributary rivers flowing softly among the magic trees and greeneries of mid-American Illinois. It was beginning to look like the soft sweet East again; the great dry West was accomplished and done. The state of Illinois unfolded before my eyes in one vast movement that lasted a matter of hours as Dean balled straight across at the same speed. In his tiredness he was taking greater chances than ever. At a narrow bridge that crossed one of these lovely little rivers he shot precipitately into an almost impossible situation. Two slow cars ahead of us were bumping over the bridge; coming the other way was a huge truck-trailer with a driver who was making a close estimate of how long it would take the slow cars to negotiate the bridge, and his estimate was that by the time he got there they'd be over. There was absolutely no room on the bridge for the truck and any cars going the other direction. Behind the truck cars pulled out and peeked for a chance to get by it. In front of the slow cars other slow cars were pushing along. The road was crowded and everyone exploding to pass. Dean came down on all this at no miles an hour and never hesitated. He passed the slow cars, swerved, and almost hit the left rail of the bridge, went head-on into the shadow of the unslowing truck, cut right sharply, just missed the truck's left front wheel, almost hit the first slow car, pulled out to pass, and then had to cut back in line when another car came out from behind the truck to look, all in a matter of two seconds, flashing by and leaving nothing more than a cloud of dust instead of a horrible five-way crash with cars lurching in every direction and the great truck humping its back in the fatal red afternoon of Illinois with its dreaming fields. I couldn't get it out of my mind, also, that a famous bop clarinetist had died in an Illinois car-crash recently, probably on a day like this. I went to the back seat again.
The boys stayed in the back too now. Dean was bent on Chicago before nightfall. At a road-rail junction we picked up two hobos who rounded up a half-buck between them for gas. A moment before sitting around piles of railroad ties, polishing off the last of some wine, now they found themselves in a muddy but unbowed and splendid Cadillac limousine headed for Chicago in precipitous haste. In fact the old boy up front who sat next to Dean never took his eyes off the road and prayed his poor bum prayers, I tell you. "Well," they said, "we never knew we'd get to Chicaga sa fast." As we passed drowsy Illinois towns where the people are so conscious of Chicago gangs that pass like this in limousines every day, we were a strange sight: all of us unshaven, the driver barechested, two bums, myself in the back seat, holding on to a strap and my head leaned back on the cushion looking at the countryside with an imperious eye-just like a new California gang come to contest the spoils of Chicago, a band of desperados escaped from the prisons of the Utah moon.
When we stopped for Cokes and gas at a small-town station people came out to stare at us but they never said a word and I think made mental notes of our descriptions and heights in case of future need. To transact business with the girl who ran the gas-pump Dean merely threw on his T-shirt like a scarf and was curt and abrupt as usual and got back in the car and off we roared again. Pretty soon the redness turned purple, the last of the enchanted rivers flashed by, and we saw distant smokes of Chicago beyond the drive. We had come from Denver to Chicago via Ed Wall's ranch, 1180 miles, in exactly seventeen hours, not counting the two hours in the ditch and three at the ranch and two with the police in Newton, Iowa, for a mean average of seventy miles per hour across the land, with one driver. Which is a kind of crazy record.
10
Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of hobos, some of them sprawled out on the street with their feet on the curb, hundreds of others milling in the doorways of saloons and alleys. "Wup! wup! look sharp for old Dean Moriarty there, he may be in Chicago by accident this year." We let out the hobos on this street and proceeded to downtown Chicago. Screeching trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, the smell of fried food and beer in the air, neons winking-"We're in the big town, Sal! Whooee!" First thing to do was park the Cadillac in a good dark spot and wash up and dress for the night. Across the street from the YMCA we found a redbrick alley between buildings, where we stashed the Cadillac with her snout pointed to the street and ready to go, then followed the college boys up to the Y, where they got a room and allowed us to use their facilities for an hour. Dean and I shaved and showered, I dropped my wallet in the hall, Dean found it and was about to sneak it in his shirt when he realized it was ours and was right disappointed. Then we said good-by to those boys, who were glad they'd made it in one piece, and took off to eat in a cafeteria. Old brown Chicago with the strange semi-Eastern, semi-Western types going to work and spitting. Dean stood in the cafeteria rubbing his belly and taking it all in. He wanted to talk to a strange middle-aged colored woman who had come into the cafeteria with a story about how she had no money but she had buns with her and would they give her butter. She came in napping her hips, was turned down, and went out flipping her butt. "Whoo!" said Dean. "Let's follow her down the street, let's take her to the ole Cadillac in the alley. We'll have a ball." But we forgot that and headed straight for North Clark Street, after a spin in the Loop, to see the hootchy-kootchy joints and hear the bop. And what a night it was. "Oh, man," said Dean to me as we stood in front of a bar, "dig the street of life, the Chinamen that cut by in Chicago. What a weird town-wow, and that woman in that window up there, just looking down with her big breasts hanging from her nightgown, big wide eyes. Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there."
"Where we going, man?"
"I don't know but we gotta go." Then here came a gang of young bop musicians carrying their instruments out of cars. They piled right into a saloon and we followed them. They set themselves up and started blowing. There we were! The leader was a slender, drooping, curly-haired, pursy-mouthed tenorman, thin of shoulder, draped loose in a sports shirt, cool in the warm night, self-indulgence written in his eyes, who picked up his horn and frowned in it and blew cool and complex and was dainty stamping his foot to catch ideas, and ducked to miss others-and said, "Blow," very quietly when the other boys took solos. Then there was Prez, a husky, handsome blond like a freckled boxer, meticulously wrapped inside his sharkskin plaid suit with the long drape and the collar falling back and the tie undone for exact sharpness and casualness, sweating and hitching up his horn and writhing into it, and a tone just like Lester Young himself. "You see, man, Prez has the technical anxieties of a money-making musician, he's the only one who's well dressed, see him grow worried when he blows a clinker, but the leader, that cool cat, tells him not to worry and just blow and blow-the mere sound and serious exuberance of the music is all he cares about. He's an artist. He's teaching young Prez the boxer. Now the others dig!!" The third sax was an alto, eighteen-year-old cool, contemplative young Charlie-Parker-type Negro from high school, with a broad gash mouth, taller than the rest, grave. He raised his horn and blew into it quietly and thoughtfully and elicited birdlike phrases and architectural Miles Davis logics. These were the children of the great bop innovators.
Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety-leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother's woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest-Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie-Charlie Parker in his early days when he was nipped and walked around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched-out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can't feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy get out phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.
Stranger flowers yet-for as the Negro alto mused over everyone's head with dignity, the young, tall, slender, blond kid from Curtis Street, Denver, jeans and studded belt, sucked on his mouthpiece while waiting for the others to finish; and when they did he started, and you had to look around to see where the solo was coming from, for it came from angelical smiling lips upon the mouthpiece and it was a soft, sweet, fairy-tale solo on an alto. Lonely as America, a throat pierced sound in the night.
What of the others and all the soundmaking? There was the bass-player, wiry redhead with wild eyes, jabbing his hips at the fiddle with every driving slap, at hot moments his mouth hanging open trancelike. "Man, there's a cat who can really bend his girl!" The sad drummer, like our white hipster in Frisco Folsom Street, completely goofed, staring into space, chewing gum, wide-eyed, rocking the neck with Reich kick and complacent ecstasy. The piano-a big husky Italian truck-driving kid with meaty hands, a burly and thoughtful joy. They played an hour. Nobody was listening. Old North Clark bums lolled at the bar, whores screeched in anger. Secret Chinamen went by. Noises of hootchy-kootchy interfered. They went right on. Out on the sidewalk came an apparition-a sixteen-year-old kid with a goatee and a trombone case. Thin as rickets, mad-faced, he wanted to join this group and blow with them. They knew him and didn't want to bother with him. He crept into the bar and surreptitiously undid his trombone and raised it to his lips. No opening. Nobody looked at him. They finished, packed up, and left for another bar. He wanted to jump, skinny Chicago kid. He slapped on his dark glasses, raised the trombone to his lips alone in the bar, and went "Baugh!" Then he rushed out after them. They wouldn't let him play with them, just like the sandlot football team in back of the gas tank. "All these guys live with their grandmothers just like Tom Snark and our Carlo Marx alto," said Dean. We rushed after the whole gang. They went into Anita O'Day's club and there unpacked and played till nine o'clock in the morning. Dean and I were there with beers.
At intermissions we rushed out in the Cadillac and tried to pick up girls all up and down Chicago. They were frightened of our big, scarred, prophetic car. In his mad frenzy Dean backed up smack on hydrants and tittered maniacally. By nine o'clock the car was an utter wreck; the brakes weren't working any more; the fenders were stove in; the rods were rattling. Dean couldn't stop it at red lights, it kept kicking convulsively over the roadway. It had paid the price of the night. It was a muddy boot and no longer a shiny limousine. "Wheel" The boys were still blowing at Neets'.
Suddenly Dean stared into the darkness of a corner beyond the bandstand and said, "Sal, God has arrived."
I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own English summer's-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went back to his dark corner, old God Shearing, and the boys said, "There ain't nothin left after that."
But the slender leader frowned. "Let's blow anyway."
Something would come of it yet. There's always more, a little further-it never ends. They sought to find new phrases after Shearing's explorations; they tried hard. They writhed and twisted and blew. Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men') souls to joy. They found it, they lost, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned-and Dean sweated at the table and told them to go, go, go. At nine o'clock in the morning everybody-musicians, girls in slacks, bartenders, and the one little skinny, unhappy trombonist- staggered out of the club into the great roar of Chicago day to sleep until the wild bop night again.
Dean and I shuddered in the raggedness. It was now time to return the Cadillac to the owner, who lived out on Lake Shore Drive in a swank apartment with an enormous garage underneath managed by oil-scarred Negroes. We drove out there and swung the muddy heap into its berth. The mechanic did not recognize the Cadillac. We handed the papers over. He scratched his head at the sight of it. We had to get out fast, We did. We took a bus back to downtown Chicago and that was that. And we never heard a word from our Chicago baron about the condition of his car, in spite of the fact that he had our addresses and could have complained.
11
It was time for us to move on. We took a bus to Detroit, Our money was now running quite low. We lugged our wretched baggage through the station. By now Dean's thumb bandage was almost as black as coal and all unrolled. We were both as miserable-looking as anybody could be after all the things we'd done. Exhausted, Dean fell asleep in the bus that roared across the state of Michigan. I took up a conversation with a gorgeous country girl wearing a low-cut cotton blouse that displayed the beautiful sun-tan on her breast tops. She was dull. She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do. "And what else do you do for fun?" I tried to bring up boy friends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done-whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. "What do you want out of life?" I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. She didn't have the slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother's for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear-something like the one she wore last Easter, white bonnet, roses, rose pumps, and lavender gabardine coat. "What do you do on Sunday afternoons?" I asked. She sat on her porch. The boys went by on bicycles and stopped to chat. She read the funny papers, she reclined on the hammock. "What do you do on a warm summer's night?" She sat on the porch, she watched the cars in the road. She and her mother made popcorn. "What does your father do on a summer's night?" He works, he has an all-night shift at the boiler factory, he's spent his whole life supporting a woman and her outpoppings and no credit or adoration. "What does your brother do on a summer's night?" He rides around on his bicycle, he hangs out in front of the soda fountain. "What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?" She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.
And Dean and I, ragged and dirty as if we had lived off locust, stumbled out of the bus in Detroit. We decided to stay up in all-night movies on Skid Row. It was too cold for parks. Hassel had been here on Detroit Skid Row, he had dug every shooting gallery and all-night movie and every brawling bar with his dark eyes many a time. His ghost haunted us. We'd never find him on Times Square again. We thought maybe by accident Old Dean Moriarty was here too-but he was not. For thirty-five cents each we went into the beat-up old movie and sat down in the balcony till morning, when we were shooed downstairs. The people who were in that all-night movie were the end. Beat Negroes who'd come up from
Alabama to work in car factories on a rumor; old white bums; young longhaired hipsters who'd reached the end of the road and were drinking wine; whores, ordinary couples, and housewives with nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in. If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn't be better gathered. The picture was Singing Cowboy Eddie Dean and his gallant white horse Bloop, that was number one; number two double-feature film was George Raft, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre in a picture about Istanbul. We saw both of these things six times each during the night. We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we were permeated completely with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East when morning came. All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience. I heard big Greenstreet sneer a hundred times; I heard Peter Lorre make his sinister come-on; I was with George Raft in his paranoiac fears; I rode and sang with Eddie Dean and shot up the rustlers innumerable times. People slugged out of bottles and turned around and looked everywhere in the dark theater for something to do, somebody to talk to. In the head everybody was guiltily quiet, nobody talked. In the gray dawn that puffed ghostlike about the windows of the theater and hugged its eaves I was sleeping with my head on the wooden arm of a seat as six attendants of the theater converged with their night's total of swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that reached to my nose as I snored head down-till they almost swept me away too. This was reported to me by Dean, who was watching from ten seats behind. All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and the gone were swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned. What would I have said to him from my rubbish womb? "Don't bother me, man, I'm happy where I am. You lost me one night in Detroit in August nineteen forty-nine. What right have you to come and disturb my reverie in this pukish can?" In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Cafe on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchments on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all?-anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.
Gibberishly Dean and I stumbled out of this horror-hole at dawn and went to find our travel-bureau car. After spending a good part of the morning in Negro bars and chasing gals and listening to jazz records on jukeboxes, we struggled five miles in local buses with all our crazy gear and got to the home of a man who was going to charge us four dollars apiece for the ride to New York. He was a middle-aged blond fellow with glasses, with a wife and kid and a good home. We waited in the yard while he got ready. His lovely wife in cotton kitchen dress offered us coffee but we were too busy talking. By this time Dean was so exhausted and out of his mind that everything he saw delighted him. He was reaching another pious frenzy. He sweated and sweated. The moment we were in the new Chrysler and off to New York the poor man realized he had contracted a ride with two maniacs, but he made the best of it and in fact got used to us just as we passed Briggs Stadium and talked about next year's Detroit Tigers.
In the misty night we crossed Toledo and went onward across old Ohio. I realized I was beginning to cross and re-cross towns in America as though I were a traveling salesman -raggedy travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying. The man got tired near Pennsylvania and Dean took the wheel and drove clear the rest of the way to New York, and we began to hear the Symphony Sid show on the radio with all the latest bop, and now we were entering the great and final city of America. We got there in early morning. Times Square was being torn up, for New York never rests. We looked for Hassel automatically as we passed.
In an hour Dean and I were out at my aunt's new flat in Long Island, and she herself was busily engaged with painters who were friends of the family, and arguing with them about the price as we stumbled up the stairs from San Francisco. "Sal," said my aunt, "Dean can stay here a few days and after that he has to get out, do you understand me?" The trip was over. Dean and I took a walk that night among the gas tanks and railroad bridges and fog lamps of Long Island. I remember him standing under a streetlamp.
"Just as we passed that other lamp I was going to tell you a further thing, Sal, but now I am parenthetically continuing with a new thought and by the time we reach the next I'll return to the original subject, agreed?" I certainly agreed. We were so used to traveling we had to walk all over Long Island, but there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean, and we could only go so far. We clasped hands and agreed to be friends forever.
Not five nights later we went to a party in New York and I saw a girl called Inez and told her I had a friend with me that she ought to meet sometime. I was drunk and told her he was a cowboy. "Oh, I've always wanted to meet a cowboy."
"Dean?" I yelled across the party-which included Angel Luz Garcia, the poet; Walter Evans; Victor Villanueva, the Venezuelan poet; Jinny Jones, a former love of mine; Carlo Marx; Gene Dexter; and innumerable others-"Come over here, man." Dean came bashfully over. An hour later, in the drunkenness and chichiness of the party ("It's in honor of the end of the summer, of course"), he was kneeling on the floor with his chin on her belly and telling her and promising her everything and sweating. She was a big, sexy brunette- as Garcia said, "Something straight out of Degas," and generally like a beautiful Parisian coquette. In a matter of days they were dickering with Camille in San Francisco by longdistance telephone for the necessary divorce papers so they could get married. Not only that, but a few months later Camille gave birth to Dean's second baby, the result of a few nights' rapport early in the year. And another matter of months and Inez had a baby. With one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever. So we didn't go to Italy.
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