That night I found Carlo and to my amazement he told me he'd been in
Central City with Dean.
"What did you do?"
"Oh, we ran around the bars and then Dean stole a car and we drove back
down the mountain curves ninety miles an hour."
"I didn't see you."
"We didn't know you were there."
"Well, man, I'm going to San Francisco."
"Dean has Rita lined up for you tonight."
"Well, then, I'll put it off." I had no money. I sent my aunt an airmail
letter asking her for fifty dollars and said it would be the last money I'd
ask; after that she would be getting money back from me, as soon as I got
that ship.
Then I went to meet Rita Bettencourt and took her back to the apartment. I
got her in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room.
She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex.
I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it,
but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. "What do you
want out of life?" I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
"I don't know," she said. "Just wait on tables and try to get along." She
yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to
tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together;
saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away
wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God
had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco.
My moments in Denver were coming to an end, I could feel it when I walked
her home, on the way back I stretched out on the grass of an old church
with a bunch of hobos, and their talk made me want to get back on that
road. Every now and then one would get up and hit a passer-by for a dime.
They talked of harvests moving north. It was warm and soft. I wanted to go
and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to
her this time, and calm her fears about men. Boys and girls in America have
such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex
immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk -- real
straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. I
heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains. I
wanted to pursue my star further.
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.
