certainly never bore his son when it came to finding things to do and talk about. He woke up with a
start and stared at me. It took him a minute to recognize who I was. .What are you going to the
Coast for, Sal?. he asked, and went back to sleep in a moment.
In the afternoon we went to Graetna, just Bull and me. We drove in his old Chevy. Dean’s
Hudson was low and sleek; Bull’s Chevy was high and rattly. It was just like 1910. The bookie joint
was located near the waterfront in a big chromium-leather bar that opened up in the back to a
tremendous hall where entries and numbers were posted on the wall. Louisiana characters lounged
around with Racing Forms. Bull and I had a beer, and casually Bull went over to the slot| machine
and threw a half-dollar piece in. The counters I clicked .Jackpot. - .Jackpot. - .Jackpot. - and the
last!
.Jackpot. hung for just a moment and slipped back to .Cherry.. He had lost a hundred dollars
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or more just by a hair. .Damn!. yelled Bull. .They got these things adjusted. You could see it right
then. I had the jackpot and the mechanism clicked it back. Well, what you gonna do.. We examined
the Racing Form. I hadn’t played the horses in years and was bemused with all the new names.
There was one horse called Big Pop that sent me into a temporary trance thinking of my father, who
used to play the horses with me. I was just about to mention it to Old Bull when he said, .Well I
think I’ll try this Ebony Corsair here..
Then I finally said it. .Big Pop reminds me of my father..
He mused for just a second, his clear blue eyes fixed on mine hypnotically so that I couldn’t tell
what he was thinking or where he was. Then he went over and bet on Ebony Corsair. Big Pop won
and paid fifty to one.
.Damn!. said Bull. .I should have known better, I’ve had experience with this before. Oh, when
will we ever learn?.
.What do you mean?.
.Big Pop is what I mean. You had a vision, boy, a vision. Only damn fools pay no attention to
visions. How do you know your father, who was an old horseplayer, just didn’t momentarily
communicate to you that Big Pop was going to win the race? The name brought the feeling up in you,
he took advantage of the name to communicate. That’s what I was thinking about when you
mentioned it. My cousin in Missouri once bet on a horse that had a name that reminded him of his
mother, and it won and paid a big price. The same thing happened this afternoon.. He shook his
head. .Ah, let’s go. This is the last time I’ll ever play the horses with you around; all these visions
drive me to distraction.. In the car as we drove back to his old house he said, .Mankind will
someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is;
right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the
next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he
undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear
someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can
blow up the world..
We told Jane about it. She sniffed. .It sounds silly to me.. She plied the broom around the
kitchen. Bull went in the bathroom for his afternoon fix.
Out on the road Dean and Ed Dunkel were playing basketball with Dodie’s ball and a bucket
nailed on a lamppost. I joined in. Then we turned 10 feats of athletic prowess. Dean completely
amazed me. He had Ed and me hold a bar of iron up to our waists, and just standing there he
popped right over it, holding his heels. .Go ahead, raise it.. We kept raising it till it was chest-high.
Still he jumped over it with ease. Then he tried the running broad jump and did at least twenty feet
and more. Then I raced him down the road. I can do the hundred in 10:5. He passed me like the
wind. As we ran I had a mad vision of Dean running through all of life just like that - his bony face
outthrust to life, his arms pumping, his brow sweating, his legs twinkling like Groucho Marx, yelling,
.Yes! Yes, man, you sure can go!. But nobody could go as fast as he could, and that’s the truth.
Then Bull came out with a couple of knives and started showing us how to disarm a would-be shiver
in a dark alley. I for my part showed him a very good trick, which is falling on the ground in front of
your adversary and gripping him with your ankles and flipping him over on his hands and grabbing his
wrists in full nelson. He said it was pretty good. He demonstrated some jujitsu. Little Dodie called
her mother to the porch and said, .Look at the silly men.. She was such a cute sassy little thing that
Dean couldn’t take his eyes off her.
.Wow. Wait till she grows up! Can you see her cuttin down Canal Street with her cute eyes. Ah!
Oh!. He hissed through his teeth.
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We spent a mad day in downtown New Orleans walking around with the Dunkels. Dean was out
of his mind that day. When he saw the T & NO freight trains in the yard he wanted to show me
everything at once. .You’ll be brakeman ‘fore I’m through with ya!. He and I and Ed Dunkel ran
across the tracks and hopped a freight at three individual points; Marylou and Galatea were waiting
in the car. We rode the train a half-mile into the piers, waving at switchmen and flagmen. They
showed me the proper way to get off a moving car; the back foot first and let the train go away from
you and come around and place the other foot down. They showed me the refrigerator cars, the ice
compartments, good for a ride on any winter night in a string of empties. .Remember what I told you
about New Mexico to LA?. cried Dean. .This was the way I hung on . . ..
We got back to the girls an hour late and of course they were mad. Ed and Galatea had decided
to get a room in New Orleans and stay there and work. This was okay with Bull, who was getting
sick and tired of the whole mob. The invitation, originally, was for me to come alone. In the front
room, where Dean and Marylou slept, there were jam and coffee stains and empty benny tubes all
over the floor; what’s more it was Bull’s workroom and he couldn’t get on with his shelves. Poor
Jane was driven to distraction by the continual jumping and running around on the part of Dean. We
were waiting for my next GI check to come through; my aunt was forwarding it. Then we were off,
the three of us - Dean, Marylou, me. When the check came I realized I hated to leave Bull’s
wonderful house so suddenly, but Dean was all energies and ready to do.
In a sad red dusk we were finally seated in the car and Jane, Dodie, little boy Ray, Bull, Ed, and
Galatea stood around in the high grass, smiling. It was good-by. At the last moment Dean and Bull
had a misunderstanding over money; Dean had wanted to borrow; Bull said it was out of the
question. The feeling reached back to Texas days. Con-man Dean was antagonizing people away
from him by degrees. He giggled maniacally and didn’t care; he rubbed his fly, stuck his finger in
Marylou’s dress, slurped up her knee, frothed at the mouth, and said, .Darling, you know and I
know that everything is straight between us at last beyond the furthest abstract definition in
metaphysical terms or any terms you want to specify or sweetly impose or harken back . . .. and so
on, and zoom went the car and we were off again for California.
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8
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you
see their specks dispersing? - it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean
forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
We wheeled through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back toward the mud-
splashed, crabbed old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two-lane highway to
Baton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, crossed the Mississippi at a place called Port
Alien. Port Alien - where the river’s all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we
swung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a ,
bridge and crossed eternity again. What is the Mississippi River? - a washed clod in the rainy night, a
soft plopping ( from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the tide down the eternal
waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, down
along, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Alien, and Port
Orleans and Port of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice, and the Night’s Great Gulf, and out.
With the radio on to a mystery program, and as I looked out the window and saw a sign that said
USE COOPER’S PAINT and I said, .Okay, I will.. we rolled across the hoodwink night of the
Louisiana plains - Lawtell, Eunice, Kinder, and De Ouincy, western rickety towns becoming more
bayou-like as \\e reached the Sabine. In Old Opelousas I went into a grocery store to buy bread and
cheese while Dean saw to gas and oil. It was just a shack; I could hear the family eating supper in the
back. I waited a minute; they went on talking. I took bread and cheese and slipped out the door. We
had barely enough money to make Frisco. Meanwhile Dean took a carton of cigarettes from the gas
station and we were stocked for the voyage - gas, oil, cigarettes, and food. Crooks don’t know. He
pointed the car straight down the road.
Somewhere near Starks we saw a great red glow in the sky ahead; we wondered what it was; in
a moment we were passing it. It was a fire beyond the trees; there were many cars parked on the
highway. It must have been some kind of fish-fry, and on the other hand it might have been anything.
The country turned strange and dark near Deweyville. Suddenly \\e were in the swamps.
.Man, do you imagine what it would be like if we found a jazzjoint in these swamps, with great
big black fellas moanin guitar blues and drinkin snakejuice and makin signs at us?.
.Yes!.
There were mysteries around here. The car was going over a dirt road elevated off the swamps
that dropped on both sides and drooped with vines. We passed an apparition; it was a Negro man in
a white shirt walking along with his arms up-spread to the inky firmament. He must have been
praying or calling down a curse. We zoomed right by; I looked out the back window to see his white
eyes. .Whoo!. said Dean. .Look out. We better not stop in this here country.. At one point we got
stuck at a crossroads and stopped the car anyway. Dean turned off the headlamps. We were
surrounded by a great forest of viny trees in which we could almost hear the slither of a million
copperheads. The only thing we could see was the red ampere button on the Hudson dashboard.
Marylou squealed with fright. We began laughing maniac laughs to her. We were scared too. We
wanted to get out of this mansion of the snake, this mireful drooping dark, and zoom on back to
familiar American ground and cowtowns. There was a smell of oil and dead water in the air. This
was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read. An owl hooted. We took a chance on one of the dirt
roads, and pretty soon we were crossing the evil old Sabine River that is responsible for all these
swamps. With amazement we saw great structures of light ahead of us. .Texas! It’s Texas!
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Beaumont oil town!. Huge oil tanks and refineries loomed like cities in the oily fragrant air.
.I’m glad we got out of there,. said Marylou. .Let’s play some more mystery programs now..
We zoomed through Beaumont, over the Trinity River at Liberty, and straight for Houston. Now
Dean got talking about his Houston days in 1947. .Hassel! That mad Hassel! I look for him
everywhere I go and I never find him. He used to get us so hung-up in Texas here. We’d drive in
with Bull for groceries and Hassel’d disappear. We’d have to go looking for him in every shooting
gallery in town.. We were entering Houston. .We had to look for him in this spade part of town
most of the time. Man, he’d be blasting with every mad cat he could find. One night we lost him and
took a hotel room. We were supposed to bring ice back to Jane because her food was rotting. It
took us two days to find Hassel. I got hung-up myself - 1 gunned shopping women in the afternoon,
right here, downtown, supermarkets. - we flashed by in the empty night - .and found a real gone
dumb girl who was out of her mind and just wandering, trying to steal an orange. She was from
Wyoming. Her beautiful body was matched only by her idiot mind. I found her babbling and took her
back to the room. Bull was drunk trying to get this young Mexican kid drunk. Carlo was writing
poetry on heroin. Hassel didn’t show up till midnight at the jeep. We found him sleeping in the back
seat. The ice was all melted. Hassel said he took about five sleeping pills. Man, if my memory could
only serve me right the way my mind works I could tell you every detail of the things we did. Ah, but
we know time. Everything takes care of itself. I could close my eyes and this old car would take care
of itself..
In the empty Houston streets of four o’clock in the morning a motorcycle kid suddenly roared
through, all bespangled and bedecked with glittering buttons, visor, slick black jacket, a Texas poet
of the night, girl gripped on his back like a papoose, hair flying, onward-going, singing, .Houston,
Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas - and sometimes Kansas City - and sometimes old Antone, ah-haaaaa!.
They pinpointed out of sight. .Wow! Dig that gone gal on his belt! Let’s all blow!. Dean tried to
catch up with them. .Now wouldn’t it be fine if we could all get together and have a real going
goofbang together with everybody sweet and fine and agreeable, no> hassles, no infant rise of
protest or body woes misconceptalized or sumpin? Ah! but we know time.. He bent to it and
pushed the car.
Beyond Houston his energies, great as they were, gave out and I drove. Rain began to fall just as
I took the wheel. Now we were on the great Texas plain and, as Dean said, .You drive and drive
and you’re still in Texas tomorrow night.. The rain lashed down. I drove through a rickety little
cowtown with a muddy main street and found myself in a dead end. .Hey, what do I do?. They
were both asleep. I turned and crawled back through town. There wasn’t a soul in sight and not a
single light. Suddenly a horseman in a raincoat appeared in my headlamps. It was the sheriff. He had
a ten-gallon hat, drooping in the torrent. .Which way to Austin?. He told me politely and I started
off. Outside town I suddenly saw two headlamps flaring directly at me in the lashing rain, Whoops, I
thought I was on the wrong side of the road; { eased right and found myself rolling in the mud; I
rolled back to the road. Still the headlamps came straight for me. At the last moment I realized the
other driver was on the wrong side of the road and didn’t know it. I swerved at thirty into the mud; it
was flat, no ditch, thank God. The offending car backed up in the downpour. Four sullen
fieldworkers, snuck from their chores to brawl in drinking fields, all white shirts and dirty brown
arms, sat looking at me dumbly in the night. The driver was as drunk as the lot.
He said, .Which way t’Houston?. I pointed my thumb back. I was thunderstruck in the middle of
the thought that they had done this on purpose just to ask directions, as a panhandler advances on
you straight up the sidewalk to bar your way. They gazed ruefully at the floor of their car, where
empty bottles rolled, and clanked away. I started the car; it was stuck in the mud a foot deep. I
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sighed in the rainy Texas wilderness.
.Dean,. I said, .wake up..
.What?.
.We’re stuck in the mud..
.What happened?. I told him. He swore up and down. We put on old shoes and sweaters and
barged out of the car into the driving rain. I put my back on the rear fender and lifted and heaved;
Dean stuck chains under the swishing wheels. In a minute we were covered with mud. We woke up
Marylou to these horrors and made her gun the car while we pushed. The tormented Hudson heaved
and heaved. Suddenly it jolted out and went skidding across the road. Marylou pulled it up just in
time, and we got in. That was that -the work had taken thirty minutes and we were soaked and
miserable.
I fell asleep, all caked with mud; and in the morning when I woke up the mud was solidified and
outside there was snow. We were near Fredericksburg, in the high plains. It was one of the worst
winters in Texas and Western history, when cattle perished like flies in great blizzards and snow fell
on San Francisco and LA. We were all miserable. We wished we were back in New Orleans with
Ed Dunkel. Marylou was driving; Dean was sleeping. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the
other reaching back to me in the back seat. She cooed promises about San Francisco. I slavered
miserably over it. At ten I took the wheel - Dean was out for hours - and drove several hundred
dreary miles across the bushy snows and ragged sage hills. Cowboys went by in baseball caps and
earmuffs, looking for cows. Comfortable little homes with chimneys smoking appeared along the
road at intervals. I wished we could go in for buttermilk and beans in front of the fireplace.
At Sonora I again helped myself to free bread and cheese while the proprietor chatted with a big
rancher on the other side of the store. Dean huzzahed when he heard it; he was hungry. We couldn’t
spend a cent on food. .Yass, yass,. said Dean, watching the ranchers loping up and down Sonora
main street, .every one of them is a bloody millionaire, thousand head of cattle, workhands,
buildings, money in the bank. If I lived around here I’d go be an idjit in the sagebrush, I’d be
jackrabbit, I’d lick up the branches, I’d look for pretty cowgirls - hee-hee-hee-hee! Damn! Bam!.
He socked himself. .Yes! Right! Oh me!. We didn’t know what he was talking about any more. He
took the wheel and flew the rest of the way across the state of Texas, about five hundred miles, clear
to El Paso, arriving at dusk and not stopping except once when he took all his clothes off, near
Ozona, and ran yipping and leaping naked in the sage. Cars zoomed by and didn’t see him. He
scurried back to the car and drove on. .Now Sal, now Marylou, I want both of you to do as I’m
doing, disemburden yourselves of all that clothes - now what’s the sense of clothes? now that’s what
I’m sayin - and sun your pretty bellies with me. Come on!. We were driving west into the sun; it fell
in through the windshield. .Open your belly as we drive into it.. Marylou complied; unfuddyduddied,
so did I. We sat in the front seat, all three. Marylou took out cold cream and applied it to us for
kicks. Every now and then a big truck zoomed by; the driver in high cab caught a glimpse of a
golden beauty sitting naked with two naked men: you could see them swerve a moment as they
vanished in our rear-view window. Great sage plains, snowless now, rolled on. Soon we were in the
orange-rocked Pecos Canyon country. Blue distances opened up in the sky. We got out of the car
to examine an old Indian ruin. Dean did so stark naked. Marylou and I put on our overcoats. We
wandered among the old stones, hooting and howling. Certain tourists caught sight of Dean naked in
the plain but they could not believe their eyes and wobbled on.
Dean and Marylou parked the car near Van Horn and made love while I went to sleep. I woke
up just as we were rolling down the tremendous Rio Grande Valley through Glint and Ysleta to El
Paso. Marylou jumped to the back seat, I jumped to the front seat, and we rolled along. To our left
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across the vast Rio Grande spaces were the moorish-red mounts of the Mexican border, the land of
the Tarahumare; soft dusk played on the peaks. Straight ahead lay the distant lights of El Paso and
Juarez, sown in a tremendous valley so big that you could see several railroads puffing at the same
time in every direction, as though it was the Valley of the World. We descended into it.
.Clint, Texas!. said Dean. He had the radio on to the Glint station. Every fifteen minutes they
played a record; the rest of the time it was commercials about a high-school correspondence course.
.This program is beamed all over the West,. cried Dean excitedly. .Man, I used to listen to it day
and night in reform school and prison. All of us used to write in. You get a high-school diploma by
mail, facsimile thereof, if you pass the test. All the young wranglers in the West, I don’t care who, at
one time or another write in for this; it’s all they hear; you tune the radio in Sterling, Colorado, Lusk,
Wyoming, I don’t care where, you get Glint, Texas, Glint, Texas. And the music is always cowboy
hillbilly and Mexican, absolutely the worst program in the entire history of the country and nobody
can do anything about it. They have a tremendous beam; they’ve got the whole land hogtied.. We
saw the high antenna beyond the shacks of Glint. .Oh, man, the things I could tell you!. cried Dean,
almost weeping. Eyes bent on Frisco and the Coast, we came into El Paso as it got dark, broke. We
absolutely had to get some money for gas or we’d never make it.
We tried everything. We buzzed the travel bureau, but no one was going west that night. The
travel bureau is where you go for share-the-gas rides, legal in the West. Shifty characters wait with
battered suitcases. We went to the Greyhound bus station to try to persuade somebody to give us
the money instead of taking a bus for the Coast. We were too bashful to approach anyone. We
wandered around sadly. It was cold outside. A college boy was sweating at the sight of luscious
Marylou and trying to look unconcerned. Dean and I consulted but decided we weren’t pimps.
Suddenly a crazy dumb young kid, fresh out of reform school, attached himself to us, and he and
Dean rushed out for a beer. .Come on, man, let’s go mash somebody on the head and get his
money..
.I dig you, man!. yelled Dean. They dashed off. For a moment I was worried; but Dean only
wanted to dig the streets of El Paso with the kid and get his kicks. Marylou and I waited in the car.
She put her arms around me. I said, .Dammit, Lou, wait till we get to Frisco..
.I don’t care. Dean’s going to leave me anyway..
.When are you going back to Denver?. .I don’t know. I don’t care what I’m doing. Can I go
back east with you?.
.We’ll have to get some money in Frisco.. .I know where you can get a job in a lunchcart
behind the counter, and I’ll be a waitress. I know a hotel where we can stay on credit. We’ll stick
together. Gee, I’m sad.. .What are you sad about, kid?.
.I’m sad about everything. Oh damn, I wish Dean wasn’t so crazy now.. Dean came twinkling
back, giggling, and jumped in the car.
.What a crazy cat that was, whoo! Did I dig him! I used to know thousands of guys like that,
they’re all the same, their minds work in uniform clockwork, oh, the infinite ramifications, no time, no
time . . .. And he shot up the car, hunched over the wheel, and roared out of El Paso. .We’ll just
have to pick up hitchhikers. I’m positive we’ll find some. Hup! hup! here we go. Look out!. he
yelled at a motorist, and swung around him, and dodged a truck and bounced over the city limits.
Across the river were the jewel lights of Juarez and the sad dry land and the jewel stars of
Chihuahua. Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back,
out of the corner of her eye - with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide
it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazywayed,
a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew
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would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-
containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad. Dean was convinced Marylou was a
whore; he confided in me that she was a pathological liar. But when she watched him like this it was
love too; and when Dean noticed he always turned with his big false flirtatious smile, with the
eyelashes fluttering and the teeth pearly white, while a moment ago he was only dreaming in his
eternity. Then Marylou and I both laughed - and Dean gave no sign of discomfiture, just a goofy
glad grin that said to us, Ain’t we gettin our kicks anyway? And that was it.
Outside El Paso, in the darkness, we saw a small huddled figure with thumb stuck out. It was our
promised hitchhiker. We pulled up and backed to his side. .How much money you got, kid?. The
kid had no money; he was about seventeen, pale, strange, with one undeveloped crippled hand and
no suitcase. .Ain’t he sweet?. said Dean, turning to me with a serious awe. .Come on in, fella, we’ll
take you out - . The kid saw his advantage. He said he had an aunt in Tulare, California, who owned
a grocery store and as soon as we got there he’d have some money for us. Dean rolled on the floor
laughing, it was so much like the kid in North Carolina. .Yes! Yes!. he yelled. .We’ve all got aunts;
well, let’s go, let’s see the aunts and the uncles and the grocery stores all the way ALONG that
road!!. And we had a new passenger, and a fine little guy he turned out to be, too. He didn’t say a
word, he listened to us. After a minute of Dean’s talk he was probably convinced he had joined a
car of madmen. He said he was hitchhiking from Alabama to Oregon, where his home was. We
asked him what he was doing in Alabama.
.I went to visit my uncle; he said he’d have a job for me in a lumber mill. The job fell through, so
I’m comin back home..
.Coin home,. said Dean, .goin home, yes, I know, we’ll take you home, far as Frisco anyhow..
But we didn’t have any money. Then it occurred to me I could borrow five dollars from my old
friend Hal Hingham in Tucson, Arizona. Immediately Dean said it was all settled and we were going
to Tucson. And we did.
We passed Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the night and arrived in Arizona at dawn. I woke up
from a deep sleep to find everybody sleeping like lambs and the car parked God knows where,
because I couldn’t see out the steamy windows. I got out of the car. We were in the mountains: there
was a heaven of sunrise, cool purple airs, red mountainsides, emerald pastures in valleys, dew, and
transmuting clouds of gold; on the ground gopher holes, cactus, mesquite. It was time for me to drive
on. I pushed Dean and the kid over and went down the mountain with the clutch in and the motor off
to save gas. In this manner I rolled into Benson, Arizona. It occurred to me that I had a pocket
watch Rocco had just given me for a birthday present, a four-dollar watch. At the gas station I asked
the man if he knew a pawnshop in Benson. It was right next door to the station. I knocked, someone
got up out of bed, and in a minute I had a dollar for the watch. It went into the tank. Now we had
enough gas for Tucson. But suddenly a big pistol-packing trooper appeared, just as I was ready to
pull out, and asked to see my driver’s license. .The fella in the back seat has the license,. I said.
Dean and Marylou were sleeping together under the blanket. The cop told Dean to come out.
Suddenly he whipped out his gun and yelled, .Keep your hands up!.
.Offisah,. I heard Dean say in the most unctious and ridiculous tones, .offisah, I was only
buttoning my flah.. Even the cop almost smiled. Dean came out, muddy, ragged, T-shirted, rubbing
his belly, cursing, looking everywhere for his license and his car papers. The cop rummaged through
our back trunk. All the papers were straight.
.Only checking up,. he said with a broad smile. .You can go on now. Benson ain’t a bad town
actually; you might enjoy it if you had breakfast here..
.Yes yes yes,. said Dean, paying absolutely no attention to him, and drove off. We all sighed
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with relief. The police are suspicious when gangs of youngsters come by in new cars without a cent in
their pockets and have to pawn watches. .Oh, they’re always interfering,. said Dean, .but he was a
much better cop than that rat in Virginia. They try to make headline arrests; they think every car
going by is some big Chicago gang. They ain’t got nothin else to do.. We drove on to Tucson.
