go!. yelled Dean. .Ole Stan is right. Ole Stan don’t care! He’s so high on those women and that tea
and that crazy out-of-this-world impossi-ble-to-absorb mambo blasting so loud that my eardrums
still beat to it - wheel he’s so high he knows what he’s doing!. We took off our T-shirts and roared
through the jungle, bare-chested. No towns, nothing, lost jungle, miles and miles, and down-going,
getting hotter, the insects screaming louder, the vegetation growing higher, the smell ranker and hotter
until we began to get used to it and like it. .I’d just like to get naked and roll and roll in that jungle,.
said Dean. .No, hell, man, that’s what I’m going to do soon’s I find a good spot.. And suddenly
Limon appeared before us, a jungle town, a few brown lights, dark shadows, enormous skies
overhead, and a cluster of men in front of a jumble of woodshacks - a tropical crossroads. We
stopped in the unimaginable softness. It was as hot as the inside of a baker’s oven on a June night in
New Orleans. All up and down the street whole families were sitting around in the dark, chatting;
occasional girls came by, but extremely young and only curious to see what we looked like. They
were barefoot and dirty. We leaned on the wooden porch of a broken-down general store with
sacks of flour and fresh pineapple rotting with flies on the counter. There was one oil lamp in here,
and outside a few more brown lights, and the rest all black, black, black. Now of course we were so
tired we had to sleep at once and moved the car a few yards down a dirt road to the backside of
town. It was so incredibly hot it was impossible to sleep. So Dean took a blanket and laid it out on
the soft, hot sand in the road and flopped out. Stan was stretched on the front seat of the Ford with
both doors open for a draft, but there wasn’t even the faintest puff of a wind. I, in the back seat,
suffered in a pool of sweat. I got out of the car and stood swaying in the blackness. The whole town
had instantly gone to bed; the only noise now was barking dogs. How could I ever sleep? Thousands
of mosquitoes had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles. Then a bright idea came to
me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out flat on my back. Still there was no
breeze, but the steel had an element of coolness in it and dried my back of sweat, clotting up
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thousands of dead bugs into cakes on my skin, and I realized the jungle takes you over and you
become it. Lying on the top of the car with my face to the black sky was like lying in a closed trunk
on a summer night. For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that
caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me. The atmosphere and I became the same. Soft
infinitesimal showers of microscopic bugs fanned down on my face as I slept, and they were
extremely pleasant and soothing. The sky was starless, utterly unseen and heavy. I could lie there all
night long with my face exposed to the heavens, and it would do me no more harm than a velvet
drape drawn over me. The dead bugs mingled with my blood; the live mosquitoes exchanged further
portions; I began to tingle all over and to smell of the rank, hot, and rotten jungle, all over from hair
and face to feet and toes. Of course I was barefoot. To minimize the sweat I put on my bug-smeared
T-shirt and lay back again. A huddle of darkness on the blacker road showed where Dean was
sleeping. I could hear him snoring. Stan was snoring too.
Occasionally a dim light flashed in town, and this was the sheriff making his rounds with a weak
flashlight and mumbling to himself in the jungle night. Then I saw his light jiggling toward us and heard
his footfalls coming soft on the mats of sand and vegetation. He stopped and flashed the car. I sat up
and looked at him. In a quivering, almost querulous, and extremely tender voice he said,
.Dormiendo?. indicating Dean in the road. I knew this meant .sleep..
.Si, dormiendo..
.Bueno, bueno. he said to himself and with reluctance and sadness turned away and went back
to his lonely rounds. Such lovely policemen God hath never wrought in America. No suspicions, no
fuss, no bother: he was the guardian of the sleeping town, period.
I went back to my bed of steel and stretched out with my arms spread. I didn’t even know if
branches or open sky were directly above me, and it made no difference. I opened my mouth to it
and drew deep breaths of jungle atmosphere. It was not air, never air, but the palpable and living
emanation of trees and swamp. I stayed awake. Roosters began to crow the dawn across the brakes
somewhere. Still no air, no breeze, no dew, but the same Tropic of Cancer heaviness held us all
pinned to earth, where we belonged and tingled. There was no sign of dawn in the skies. Suddenly I
heard the dogs barking furiously across the dark, and then I heard the faint clip-clop of a horse’s
hooves. It came closer and closer. What kind of mad rider in the night would this be? Then I saw an
apparition: a wild horse, white as a ghost, came trotting down the road directly toward Dean. Behind
him the dogs yammered and contended. I couldn’t see them, they were dirty old jungle dogs, but the
horse was white as snow and immense and almost phosphorescent and easy to see. I felt no panic
for Dean. The horse saw him and trotted right by his head, passed the car like a ship, whinnied
softly, and continued on through town, bedeviled by the dogs, and clip-clopped back to the jungle
on the other side, and all I heard was the faint hoofbeat fading away in the woods. The dogs
subsided and sat to lick themselves. What was this horse? What myth and ghost, what spirit? I told
Dean about it when he woke up. He thought I’d been dreaming. Then he recalled faintly dreaming of
a white horse, and I told him it had been no dream. Stan Shephard slowly woke up. The faintest
movements, and we were sweating profusely again. It was still pitch dark. .Let’s start the car and
blow some air!. I cried. .I’m dying of heat.. .Right!. We roared out of town and continued along
the mad highway with our hair flying. Dawn came rapidly in a gray haze, revealing dense swamps
sunk on both sides, with tall, forlorn, viny trees leaning and bowing over tangled bottoms. We
bowled right along the railroad tracks for a while. The strange radio-station antenna of Ciudad
Mante appeared ahead, as if we were in Nebraska. We found a gas station and loaded the tank just
as the last of the jungle-night bugs hurled themselves in a black mass against the bulbs and fell
fluttering at our feet in huge wriggly groups, some of them with wings a good four inches long, others
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frightful dragonflies big enough to eat a bird, and thousands of immense yangling mosquitoes and
unnamable spidery insects of all sorts. I hopped up and down on the pavement for fear of them; I
finally ended up in the car with my feet in my hands, looking fearfully at the ground where they
swarmed around our wheels. .Lessgo!. I yelled. Dean and Stan weren’t perturbed at all by the
bugs; they calmly drank a couple of bottles of Mission Orange and kicked them away from the water
cooler. Their shirts and pants, like mine, were soaked in the blood and black of thousands of dead
bugs. We smelled our clothes deeply.
.You know, I’m beginning to like this smell,. said Stan. .I can’t smell myself any more..
.It’s a strange, good smell,. said Dean. .I’m nor. going to change my shirt till Mexico City, I
want to take it all in and remember it.. So off we roared again, creating air for hot. caked faces.
Then the mountains loomed ahead, all green. After this climb we would be on the great central
plateau again and ready to roll ahead to Mexico City. In no time at all we soared to an elevation of
five thousand feet among misty passes that overlooked steaming yellow rivers a mile below. It was
the great River Moctezuma. The Indians along the road began to be extremely weird. They were a
nation in themselves, mountain Indians, shut off from everything else but the Pan-American Highway.
They were short and squat and dark, with bad teeth; they carried immense loads on their backs.
Across enormous vegetated ravines we saw patchworks of agriculture on steep slopes. They walked
up and down those slopes and worked the crops. Dean drove the car five miles an hour to see.
.Whooee, this I never thought existed!. High on the highest peak, as great as any Rocky Mountain
peak, we saw bananas growing. Dean got out of the car to point, to stand around rubbing his belly.
We were on a ledge where a little thatched hut suspended itself over the precipice of the world. The
sun created golden hazes that obscured the Moctezuma, now more than a mile below.
In the yard in front of the hut a little three-year-old Indian girl stood with her finger in her mouth,
watching us with big brown eyes. .She’s probably never seen anybody parked here before in her
entire life!. breathed Dean. .Hel-lo, little girl. How are you? Do you like us?. The little girl looked
away bashfully and pouted. We began to talk and she again examined us with finger in mouth. .Gee,
I wish there was something I could give her! Think of it, being born and living on this ledge - this
ledge representing all you know of life. Her father is probably groping down the ravine with a rope
and getting his pineapples out of a cave and hacking wood at an eighty-degree angle with all the
bottom below. She’ll never, never leave here and know anything about the outside world. It’s a
nation. Think of the wild chief they must have! They probably, off the road, over that bluff, miles
back, must be even wilder and stranger, yeah, because the Pan-American Highway partially civilizes
this nation on this road. Notice the beads of sweat on her brow,. Dean pointed out with a grimace of
pain. .It’s not the kind of sweat we have, it’s oily and it’s always there because it’s always hot the
year round and she knows nothing of non-sweat, she was born with sweat and dies with sweat.. The
sweat on her little brow was heavy, sluggish; it didn’t run; it just stood there and gleamed like a fine
olive oil. .What that must do to their souls! How different they must be in their private concerns and
evaluations and wishes!. Dean drove on with his mouth hanging in awe, ten miles an hour, desirous
to see every possible human being on the road. We climbed and climbed.
As we climbed, the air grew cooler and the Indian girls on the road wore shawls over their heads
and shoulders. They hailed us desperately; we stopped to see. They wanted to sell us little pieces of
rock crystal. Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours with such soulful intensity that not
one of us had the slightest sexual thought about them; moreover they were very young, some of them
eleven and looking almost thirty. .Look at those eyes!. breathed Dean. They were like the eyes of
the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus. And
they stared unflinching into ours. We rubbed our nervous blue eyes and looked again. Still they
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penetrated us with sorrowful and hypnotic gleam. When they talked they suddenly became frantic
and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves. .They’ve only recently learned to sell these
crystals, since the highway was built about ten years back - up until that time this entire nation must
have been silent!.
The girls yammered around the car. One particularly soulful child gripped at Dean’s sweaty arm.
She yammered in Indian. .Ah yes, ah yes, dear one,. said Dean tenderly and almost sadly. He got
out of the car and went fishing around in the battered trunk in the back - the same old tortured
American trunk - and pulled out a wristwatch. He showed it to the child. She whimpered with glee.
The others crowded around with amazement. Then Dean poked in the little girl’s hand for .the
sweetest and purest and smallest crystal she has personally picked from the mountain for me.. He
found one no bigger than a berry. And he handed her the wristwatch dangling. Their mouths rounded
like the mouths of chorister children. The lucky little girl squeezed it to her ragged breastrobes. They
stroked Dean and thanked him. He stood among them with his ragged face to the sky, looking for
the next and highest and final pass, and seemed like the Prophet that had come to them. He got back
in the car. They hated to see us go. For the longest time, as we mounted a straight pass, they waved
and ran after us. We made a turn and never saw them again, and they were still running after us. .Ah,
this breaks my heart!. cried Dean, punching his chest. .How far do they carry out these loyalties and
wonders! What’s going to happen to them? Would they try to follow the car all the way to Mexico
City if we drove slow enough?.
.Yes,. I said, for I knew.
We came into the dizzying heights of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The banana trees gleamed golden
in the haze. Great fogs yawned beyond stone walls along the precipice. Below, the Moctezuma was
a thin golden thread in a green jungle mat. Strange crossroad towns on top of the world rolled by,
with shawled Indians watching us from under hatbrims and rebozos. Life was dense, dark, ancient.
They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands
outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their
hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the
poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges
and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching
out our hands in the same, same way. Our broken Ford, old thirties upgoing America Ford, rattled
through them and vanished in dust.
We had reached the approaches of the last plateau. Now the sun was golden, the air keen blue,
and the desert with its occasional rivers a riot of sandy, hot space and sudden Biblical tree shade.
Now Dean was sleeping and Stan driving. The shepherds appeared, dressed as in first times, in long
flowing robes, the women carrying golden bundles of flax, the men staves.
Under great trees on the shimmering desert the shepherds sat and convened, and the sheep
moiled in the sun and raised dust beyond. .Man, man,. I yelled to Dean, .wake up and see the
shepherds, wake up and see the golden world that Jesus came from, with your own eyes you can
tell!.
He shot his head up from the seat, saw one glimpse of it all in the fading red sun, and dropped
back to sleep. When he woke up he described it to me in detail and said, .Yes, man, I’m glad you
told me to look. Oh, Lord, what shall I do? Where will I go?. He rubbed his belly, he looked to
heaven with red eyes, he almost wept.
The end of our journey impended. Great fields stretched on both sides of us; a noble wind blew
across the occasional immense tree groves and over old missions turning salmon pink in the late sun.
The clouds were close and huge and rose. .Mexico City by dusk!. We’d made it, a total of nineteen
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hundred miles from the afternoon yards of Denver to these vast and Biblical areas of the world, and
now we were about to reach the end of the road.
.Shall we change our insect T-shirts?.
.Naw, let’s wear them into town, hell’s bells.. And we drove into Mexico City.
A brief mountain pass took us suddenly to a height from which we saw all of Mexico City
stretched out in its volcanic crater below and spewing city smokes and early dusklights. Down to it
we zoomed, down Insurgentes Boulevard, straight toward the heart of town at Reforma. Kids
played soccer in enormous sad fields and threw up dust. Taxi-drivers overtook us and wanted to
know if we wanted girls. No, we didn’t want girls now. Long, ragged adobe slums stretched out on
the plain; we saw lonely figures in the dimming alleys. Soon night would come. Then the city roared
in and suddenly we were passing crowded cafes and theaters and many lights. Newsboys yelled at
us. Mechanics slouched by, barefoot, with wrenches and rags. Mad barefoot Indian drivers cut
across us and surrounded us and tooted and made frantic traffic. The noise was incredible. No
mufflers are used on Mexican cars. Horns are batted with glee continual. .Whee!. yelled Dean,
.Look out!. He staggered the car through the traffic and played with everybody. He drove like
an Indian. He got on a circular glorietta drive on Reforma Boulevard and rolled around it with its
eight spokes shooting cars at us from all directions, left, right, izquierda, dead ahead, and yelled and
jumped with joy. .This is traffic I’ve always dreamed of’ Everybody goes.’. An ambulance came
balling through. American ambulances dart and weave through traffic with siren blowing; the great
world-wide Fellahin Indian ambulances merely come through at eighty miles an hour in the city
streets, and everybody just has to get out of the way and they don’t pause for anybody or any
circumstances and fly straight through. We saw it reeling out of sight on skittering wheels in the
breaking-up moil of dense downtown traffic. The drivers were Indians. People, even old ladies, ran
for buses that never stopped. Young Mexico City businessmen made bets and ran by squads for
buses and athletically jumped them. The bus-drivers were barefoot, sneering and insane, and sat low
and squat in T-shirts at the low, enormous wheels. Ikons burned over them. The lights in the buses
were brown and greenish, and dark faces were lined on wooden benches.
In downtown Mexico City thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and long-lapeled jackets
over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys,
some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were
rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to
jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec.
You came out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served
coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined
themselves along the dark and narrow streets and their sorrowful eyes gleamed at us in the night. We
wandered in a frenzy and a dream. We ate beautiful steaks for forty-eight cents in a strange tiled
Mexican cafeteria with generations of marimba musicians standing at one immense marimba - also
wandering singing guitarists, and old men on corners blowing trumpets. You went by the sour stink of
pulque saloons; they gave you a water glass of cactus juice in there, two cents. Nothing stopped; the
streets were alive all night. Beggars slept wrapped in advertising posters torn off fences. Whole
families of them sat on the sidewalk, playing little flutes and chuckling in the night. Their bare feet
stuck out, their dim candles burned, all Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp. On corners old
women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in tortillas and served them with hot
sauce on newspaper napkins. This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that
we knew we would find at the end of the road. Dean walked through with his arms hanging zombie-
like at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes gleaming, and conducted a ragged and holy tour that lasted
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till dawn in a field with a boy in a straw hat who laughed and chatted with us and wanted to play
catch, for nothing ever ended.
Then I got fever and became delirious and unconscious. Dysentery. I looked up out of the dark
swirl of my mind and I knew I was on a bed eight thousand feet above sea level, on a roof of the
world, and I knew that I had lived a whole life and many others in the poor atomistic husk of my
flesh, and I had all the dreams. And I saw Dean bending over the kitchen table. It was several nights
later and he was leaving Mexico City already. .What you doin, man?. I moaned.
.Poor Sal, poor Sal, got sick. Stan’ll take care of you. Now listen to hear if you can in your
sickness: I got my divorce from Camille down here and I’m driving back to Inez in New York
tonight if the car holds out..
.All that again?. I cried.
.All that again, good buddy. Gotta get back to my life. Wish I could stay with you. Pray I can
come back.. I grabbed the cramps in my belly and groaned. When I looked up again bold noble
Dean was standing with his old broken trunk and looking down at me. I didn’t know who he was
any more, and he knew this, and sympathized, and pulled the blanket over my shoulders. .Yes, yes,
yes, I’ve got to go now.
Old fever Sal, good-by.. And he was gone. Twelve hours later in my sorrowful fever I finally
came to understand that he was gone. By that time he was driving back alone through those banana
mountains, this time at night.
When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible
complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes. .Okay,
old Dean, I’ll say nothing..
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PART FIVE
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Dean drove from Mexico City and saw Victor again in Gregoria and pushed that old car all the
way to Lake Charles, Louisiana, before the rear end finally dropped on the road as he had always
known it would. So he wired Inez for airplane fare and flew the rest of the way. When he arrived in
New York with the divorce papers in his hands, he and Inez immediately went to Newark and got
married; and that night, telling her everything was all right and not to worry, and making logics where
there was nothing but inestimable sorrowful sweats, he jumped on a bus and roared off again across
the awful continent to San Francisco to rejoin Camille and the two baby girls. So now he was three
times married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife.
In the fall I myself started back home from Mexico City and one night just over Laredo border in
Dilley, Texas, I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths
smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man
with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he
passed, he said, .Go moan for man,. and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should
at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America? I struggled and hurried to
New York, and one night I was standing in a dark street in Manhattan and called up to the window
of a loft where I thought my friends were having a party. But a pretty girl stuck her head out the
window and said, .Yes? Who is it?.
.Sal Paradise,. I said, and heard my name resound in the sad and empty street.
.Come on up,. she called. .I’m making hot chocolate.,. So I went up and there she was, the girl
with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to
love each other madly. In the winter we planned to migrate to San Francisco, bringing all our beat
furniture and broken belongings with us in a jalopy panel truck. I wrote to Dean and told him. He
wrote back a huge letter eighteen thousand words long, all about his young years in Denver, and said
he was coming to get me and personally select the old truck himself and drive us home. We had six
weeks to save up the money for the truck and began working and counting every cent. And suddenly
Dean arrived anyway, five and a half weeks in advance, and nobody had any money to go through
with the plan.
I was taking a walk in the middle of the night and came back to my girl to tell her what I thought
about during my, walk. She stood in the dark little pad with a strange smile. I told her a number of
things and suddenly I noticed the hush in the room and looked around and saw a battered book on
the radio. I knew it was Dean’s high-eternity-in-the-afternoon Proust. As in a dream I saw him tiptoe
in from the dark hall in his stocking feet. He couldn’t talk any more. He hopped and laughed, he
stuttered and fluttered his hands and said, .Ah - ah - you must listen to hear.. We listened, all ears.
But he forgot what he wanted to say. .Really listen - ahem. Look, dear Sal - sweet Laura - I’ve
come - I’m gone - but wait - ah yes.. And he stared with rocky sorrow into his hands. .Can’t talk
no more - do you understand that it is - or might be -But listen!. We all listened. He was listening
to sounds in the night. .Yes!. he whispered with awe. .But you see - no need to talk any more - and
further..
.But why did you come so soon, Dean?.
.Ah,. he said, looking at me as if for the first time, .so soon, yes. We - we’ll know - that is, I
don’t know. I came on the railroad pass - cabooses - old hard-bench coaches - Texas -played
flute and wooden sweet potato all the way.. He took out his new wooden flute. He played a few
squeaky notes on it and jumped up and down in his stocking feet. .See?. he said. .But of course,
Sal, I can talk as soon as ever and have many things to say to you in fact with my own little bangtail
mind I’ve been reading and reading this gone Proust all the way across the country and digging a
great number of things I’ll never have TIME to tell you about and we STILL haven’t talked of
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Mexico and our parting there in fever - but no need to talk. Absolutely, now, yes?.
.All right, we won’t talk.. And he started telling the story of what he did in LA on the way over in
every possible detail, how he visited a family, had dinner, talked to the father, the sons, the sisters what
they looked like, what they ate, their furnishings, their thoughts, their interests, their very souls; it
took him three hours of detailed elucidation, and having concluded this he said, .Ah, but you see
what I wanted to REALLY tell you - much later - Arkansas, crossing on train - playing flute - play
cards with boys, my dirty deck -won money, blew sweet-potato solo - for sailors. Long long awful
trip five days and five nights just to SEE you, Sal..
.What about Camille?.
.Gave permission of course - waiting for me. Camille and I all straight forever-and-ever . . ..
.And Inez?.
.I - I - I want her to come back to Frisco with me live other side of town - don’t you think?
Don’t know why I came.. Later he said in a sudden moment of gaping wonder, .Well and yes, of
course, I wanted to see your sweet girl and you - glad of you - love you as ever.. He stayed in New
York three days and hastily made preparations to get back on the train with his railroad passes and
again recross the continent, five days and five nights in dusty coaches and hard-bench crummies, and
of course we had no money for a truck and couldn’t go back with him. With Inez he spent one night
explaining and sweating and fighting, and she threw him out. A letter came for him, care of me. I saw
it. It was from Camille. .My heart broke when I saw you go across the tracks with your bag. I pray
and pray you get back safe. ... I do want Sal and his friend to come and live on the same street. ... I
know you’ll make it but I can’t help worrying - now that we’ve decided everything. . . . Dear Dean,
it’s the end of the first half of the century. Welcome with love and kisses to spend the other half with
us. We all wait for you. [Signed] Camille, Amy, and Little Joanie.. So Dean’s life was settled with
his most constant, most embittered, and best-knowing wife Camille, and I thanked God for him.
The last time I saw him it was under sad and strange circumstances. Remi Boncoeur had arrived in
New York after having gone around the world several times in ships. I wanted him to meet and
know Dean. They did meet, but Dean couldn’t talk any more and said nothing, and Remi turned
away. Remi had gotten tickets for the Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera and insisted
Laura and I come with him and his girl. Remi was fat and sad now but still the eager and formal
gentleman, and he wanted to do things the right way, as he emphasized. So he got his bookie to
drive us to the concert in a Cadillac. It was a cold winter night. The Cadillac was parked and ready
to go. Dean stood outside the windows with his bag, ready to go to Penn Station and on across the
land.
.Good-by, Dean,. I said. .I sure wish I didn’t have to go to the concert..
.D’you think I can ride to Fortieth Street with you?. he whispered. .Want to be with you as
much as possible, m’boy, and besides it’s so durned cold in this here New Yawk .... I whispered to
Remi. No, he wouldn’t have it, he liked me but he didn’t like my idiot friends. I wasn’t going to start
all over again ruining his planned evenings as I had done at Alfred’s in San Francisco in 1947 with
Roland Major.
.Absolutely out of the question, Sal!. Poor Remi, he had a special necktie made for this evening;
