29 December 2008

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 night, Neal suddenly hove up behind us in the stolen Plymouth and began tooting and tooting and crowding us over and screaming. The cabby’s face grew white. “Just a friend of mine” I said. Neal got disgusted with us and suddenly shot ahead ninety miles an hour and we watched his sad red tail-light vanishing towards the unseen mountains throwing spectral dust across the exhaust. Then he turned in at Johnny’s road and almost filled the ditch and took another right and pulled up in front of the house; just as suddenly took off again, U-turned and went back towards 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 myself and 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 corn-rows at the end of the road till finally the car couldn’t take any more and stopped dead under an old cottonwood near the old mill. “Can’t go any further” said Neal simply and got out and started walking back over the cornfield, about a half mile, in his shorts. We got back to the house and he went to sleep. Everything was in a horrible mess, all of Denver, Clementine, cars, children, poor Johnny, the livingroom splattered with beer and cans and I simply went to sleep myself. A cricket kept me awake for sometime. 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 who’s lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and he knows he never will. So they slowly wheeled the night and then long before the ordinary dawn the great red sun appeared far over entire territorial areas of dun land towards