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Show RIVER "No," I said. "I'm not scairt of getting drowned." "You are crazy," said Thurmond. He lurched forward, got close to my face, and spoke with the conviction of an Old Testament prophet. "You gonna be food for fishes is what you gonna be." Thurmond got to me. Here was a kid who at twelve was far more practical than I was at twenty-one. But was he so hard boiled that he didn't have any dreams? I glared at him and mumbled, "Maybe so," and took the oars and rowed back to shore. Ralph asked if I wanted to ride up to town. I hadn't taken a shower since I'd been in Berkeley and I asked Ralph if he had one I could use. He laughed and said, "It isn't much of a shower, but you can use it." All of us, including Thor, piled into Ralph's battered Lincoln Continental. Ralph was the only longhair I'd ever met who drove a Continental, even one that looked like it had been worked over by John Henry & Hammer. I asked him about it. "Junk," he said. "Pure junk." We rode over an elevated roadway above the swamp that separated the park from the town. I was amazed at the calm that Ralph maintained while the brothers raged about him. The confines of the car seemed to hype up their manic energies a couple of notches. Hands on the front seat, they bounced on the back, thumped and climbed over each other to give Thor friendly whacks, howling the whole time like coyotes with the Love Sick Blues. Despite the decibel level, Ralph kept up a running conversation with them, talking quietly, reasoning with them as logically as if they had been college professors. Thurmond continually bent his logic. "Gimme a dollar, Ralph." -28- |