The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  All the same, when his turn came up and she watched him go down alone, to stand in the lonely focal point between spectators and traps and break twenty-five straight, holding his fire sometimes until she almost yelled for him to shoot, but always shooting in time, picking off the birds close to the water when their swift flight had slowed in the drop—when she watched him like an infallible machine scatter the clay saucers one after another, she held her breath and felt something like a prayer on every shot. When his gun missed fire on the twenty-second bird she was in an agony for fear it counted against him, for fear it would make him nervous as the bad bird had in the first round. But they gave him another, and he broke it, and then the last three.

  He came back with his face as expressionless as if he had just been for a drink of water, and when she clapped her hands he pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Lucky,” he said. “I’ll probably miss a dozen next round.”

  But his eyes did not think he would. They told her privately that he was going out there and score another possible. The last three men finished shooting, and the referee called out the running scores: Olson, seventy-three; Mason, seventy-three; Carter, seventy-three ; Gulbransen and Smith, seventy-one.

  “Tied for first!” Elsa said. He just rubbed his shoulder, pounded sore by the kick of the gun, and kept his eye on the shooter coming up. ,

  “I wonder where that Jud is?” Eva said. She had hardly said a word in the hour and a half they had been sitting there. She twisted and fidgeted, looking through the crowd.

  “I’m going to look for him,” she said. “He gets gabbing and never thinks what time it is.”

  Bo paid no attention to her words or her departure. He sprawled back, watching Olson shoot. His actions were faster than in previous rounds. They had to be. The birds came at sharp angles, from unexpected traps, and almost every shot was a quartering one. He ran nine, snapped a hurried side shot at a saucer spinning wide from the fifth trap. A tiny fragment zinged from the clay, its click coming back after the roar of the gun. The bird fell solidly into the water. “Lost bird,” the referee droned. Olson, red in the face, protested, but the official waved him back. “Dusted target is no bird,” he said.

  The hustler was coming through. “Condon up, Mason on deck, Williams in the hole.”

  “All right, honey,” Bo said softly. “Hold your right ear and pray.”

  He went down early, sitting at the official table while Condon shot, and when Condon was through he went out and shot another possible, shoot, relax, shoot, relax, break the breech and kick the smoking shells out on the ground, reload, shoot, relax, snap up the barrels, find the spinning disc in the split second of its rise, hands and eyes working together surely, impeccably. When he reached twenty without a miss Elsa was on her knees. When he broke the last bird hissing out at a high angle she was on her feet.

  “Harder they get the easier they are for that guy,” a man next to her said. She nodded, waiting for Bo to come back.

  “You did it!” she said. “Bo, it was wonderful!”

  His eyes were warm and intimate, his voice a purr. “I had something to shoot for,” he said. He took her hand and sat down beside her while the last two unimportant shooters finished out their rounds. Then they were calling Bo Mason back to the table, and a man was standing, bellowing through a megaphone. “The winna! Harry Mason of Hardanger, singles champion of North Dakota! Harry Mason wins the fifty-dolla cash prize and the silva cup with a score of ninety-eight. That’s shootin‘, folks! Give him a hand!”

  He dropped the megaphone to clap, stopped that to pump Bo’s hand. The crowd clapped and cheered. The representative of a sporting goods house was introduced and presented Bo with a shiny new repeating shotgun. Bo made a play of trying it out, winced and staggered when the butt touched his shoulder. The crowd laughed. Elsa saw that they liked him. Men went up to talk to him, and he was still speaking over his shoulder as he walked up the slope. Behind him the referee was shouting, “Runner-up, Bill Olson of Mandan. Bill Olson ...”

  “Where’ll we go?” Bo said. He held a gun under each arm, a packet of new bills in one hand. “This dough’ll burn my pocket out.”

  “Anywhere,” she said. “Bo, I think it’s wonderful!”

  “You do?”

  “Well ... some ways.” They laughed.

  “Where’s Eva, do you suppose?”

  Elsa stopped. “My goodness, we’ll never find her, in this crowd.”

  “Serve her right,” Bo said. “Jud told her where to stay.”

  “But where can Jud be?”

  “Jud? Jud’s in a poker game.”

  “Is that...”

  “He’d be a sucker to pass up a carnival like this. We probably won’t see him till late.”

  It wasn’t very nice of Jud, Elsa thought as Bo dragged her off exuberantly toward the fair. If he was going to do that, what did he bring her for at all?

  They deposited the guns in the headquarters tent for safe-keeping, and three quarters of an hour later they found Eva disconsolately eating Norwegian cakes and trying to make conversation with the booth attendant, a plump, rosy Norwegian woman who spoke only a dozen words of English.

  “I got hungry,” Eva said. “And I lost all my money on that horse race thing, and Jud isn’t anywhere around. I looked all over. If they weren’t giving these cakes away free I’d be starved by now, for all he cares.”

  The Norwegian woman pressed kringler and cups of coffee on them. They ate and licked their fingers. “Mange tak,” Elsa said to the woman, and smiled at her. The three of them went off down the street.

  “Bo won,” Elsa said. “Did you know that? He’s champion of North Dakota.”

  “That’s fine,” Eva said. Her eyes were roving among the passing people. She stumbled on her skirts, and flew into a vixenish rage. “That’s fine,” she said. “Maybe you can shoot that big fool of a Jud for me when we find him.”

  “Hell with him,” Bo said. He winked at Elsa. “Let’s go have some fun.”

  They bought a bag of sunflower seeds from a Russian huckster and were experimentally trying out the peanut-like taste when the ferris wheel loomed in front of them. Bo hustled them into a swinging chair. Eva squealed as the wheel began to climb, carrying them up over the trees, over the fungus-growth of colored tents. The sun, which had been just down when they got aboard, showed like a thin red plate on the horizon. They reached the zenith, and the bottom dropped out of Elsa’s stomach as they rolled down into the shadow.

  “How do you like it?” Bo said.

  “Wonderful!” she said. “It’s like flying.”

  “Let’s go around again.”

  They went around three times more until the thrill was worn off it. Eva declined. From the rising, swing-like seat climbing toward twelve o‘clock position Elsa saw her below in the edge of the crowd with her head turning right and left in search of Jud. She felt sorry for Eva. Such a frivolous, helpless, selfish thing. She must feel awful, being left that way.

  But when they climbed out after their fourth ride Jud was there. “Oh-oh!” Bo said. “Now we’ll have to referee a fight.”

  “I don’t care!” Eva was saying violently. “You said you’d be back in a little while, and I waited hours. If there was any other way of getting home I’d go right now. I’d have gone hours ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jud said. “I got detained. That was a pretty big deal Joe had up his sleeve. Turned out I made some money on it.”

  “What sort of a deal?”

  “You wouldn’t understand it, birdie,” Jud said. “Business.” He put his arm down around Eva’s shoulders and she shook it off.

  “Eva got tired watching us shoot,” Bo said. “We found her a while back stuffing herself with Scandihoovian cake.”

  “I wouldn’t have had even that if it hadn’t been free!” Eva said.

  “Well that’s too bad, birdie,” Jud said. “Let’s go find something to eat right now.”

  “I’m not hungry now.”
r />   “Quit your wrangling,” Bo said. “Let’s go see the show.”

  Lamps and Japanese lanterns were on down the carnival street, and crowds milled before booths and tents and tables. The nasal rigmarole of a barker stopped them before a long, narrow tent lighted by a half dozen lamps that threw jigging shadows on the walls. At the end, thirty feet or so from the counter that closed the entrance, a grinning Negro face bobbed and grimaced through a hole in the back curtain painted to represent a jungle river. The Negro’s head came right out of the spread terrific jaws of a crocodile.

  “Hit the nigger in the head, get a good ten cent seegar,” the barker said. “Three balls for a dime, folks. Try your skill and accuracy. Hit the nigger baby on the head get a handsome cane and pennant.” His lips moved over the drone of words like the lips of an ape kissing, and he spoke on steadily through inhalation and exhalation, never varying the penetrating nasal whine.

  “Want a cane?” Bo said. He stepped over to the counter.

  “Me too,” Jud said.

  The barker shoved over six balls from a pile stacked like cannon balls. He stood back, indifferent to his present customers, his eyes on the passing crowd, his lips moving over the nasal pour of sound. Bo motioned to Jud. “Go ahead. Knock his head off.”

  The black grinning face in the crocodile’s throat weaved and bobbled; the curtain billowed out and in. In the inadequate light it was a deceptive target. Jud removed his coat and folded it on the counter. Then he wound up and threw, awkwardly, Elsa noticed, like a girl. The ball dented a deep shadowy hole in the canvas and dropped. The grinning face opened its mouth, cackled. Then it became fixed, its mouth stretched wide, and Elsa stared, so perfect was the illusion of a succession of red gaping mouths swallowing one another.

  “Take him,” Bo said. “Your bird.”

  Jud threw again. The face weaved easily sideward. “There’s a percentage in favor of the house,” Jud said. His big hand went clear around the third ball as he squinted, aiming. Beside him Bo stood ready, and just as Jud let go he snapped a quick wrist throw. The balls travelled side by side. The swivel-necked colored boy rolled away from Jud‘s, saw Bo’s coming, rolled back. Jud’s ball hit him solidly on the skull and bounced clear to the tent roof.

  “Got him!” Jud said. His incongruously masculine bellow of laughter filled the entrance. The Negro face pulled back in, leaving the crocodile a dark round hole for a throat. The barker stopped his bored droning and came over angrily. “What‘sa idea?” he said. “You can’t both peg at once.”

  “You never said we couldn‘t,” Bo said. “Come across with a cane.”

  “I don’t pay on that. You both threw at once.”

  Bo’s neck and shoulders stiffened as he leaned over the counter. Elsa could not see his face, but she heard his voice, soft. “This guy hit the nigger on the head,” he said. “You owe him a cane.”

  Peaked and white with anger, the barker glared at him. “Like hell!”

  “You aren’t very smart, fella,” Bo said. He raised one hand as the barker started to speak. “And I wouldn’t hey rube, either.”

  “Tough guy, uh?” the barker said.

  “No. I just like to see people pay off when they lose.”

  After a minute the barker threw a cane onto the counter. Bo took it, laid down his two remaining balls, tossed two dimes on top of them so that they rolled off the board, and handed the cane to Eva.

  Walking uncomfortably beside him, Elsa said, “Do you suppose the Negro is hurt? Jud threw that awful hard.”

  He laughed. “You can’t hurt a coon hitting him on the head.”

  Almost immediately came the barker’s voice. “Try your luck, folks. Try your skill and accuracy. Hit the nigger baby on the head, get a good ten cent seegar ...”

  “Bo,” Elsa said.

  “Uh?”

  “Was it fair to throw both at once like that?”

  He stared at her. “Sure. Every game in this carnival is a skin game. You got to out-smart ‘em.”

  “The percentage is always in favor of the house,” Jud said.

  Bo took her arm and pointed. “There’s a sample. Go on over and try your luck.”

  Curiously she crossed the street to where a small crowd had gathered around a table. A man at the table was manipulating three half walnut shells so fast that she couldn’t follow his fingers. Bo stooped to whisper. “This is one of the oldest skin games in the world. Thimblerigger.” He pressed a dollar into her hand and nodded to her, go ahead.

  Elsa watched the man’s hands. His mouth went constantly in an unintelligible flow of sound like a barker’s at the throwing tent. Finally the hands came to rest, the shells in a neat row. A tall, gangling, hayseedy man in overalls threw down a silver dollar and put his finger on one shell. “Follered her all the way,” he said. He turned the shell over, and the pea was there.

  “Can’t win all the time,” the thimblerigger said. He threw a dollar to the man, and his hands went intricately among the shells, caressing, touching, turning, mixing. Now and again he opened his hand and showed the pea, or raised a shell to reveal it. “Can’t win all the time. Sometimes a quick eye beats a quick hand. Down with your bets, folks. Nothing up the sleeve, an open game of skill. Try your luck again, mister?”

  The gangling man grinned and shook his head and stuck his two dollars in his pocket.

  “Shill,” Bo whispered.

  “What?”

  “Tell you later. Go ahead and bet him.”

  Feeling horribly conspicuous, she stepped up and laid her dollar down. The man began shifting his shells, crooning. But she knew better than to listen to his talk. She kept her eyes on his hands, distinctly saw him put the pea under a shell and then shift the shells bewilderingly, but not so rapidly that she didn’t keep her eye triumphantly on the right one. She reached out and put her finger on it. There was nothing underneath.

  “But where was it?” she said when they were walking again. “I saw him put it there.”

  “Palms it in his hand,” Bo said. “A clever rigger can make you think there’s a pea under every one.”

  “But that other man won.”

  “He was a shill, a booster. When business is slack he comes around and wins once in a while to keep the suckers coming.”

  How he could tell that the man was a shill she had no idea, but he knew all about things like this and she knew nothing about anything. And he was the trap-shooting champion of North Dakota. He was also very big and good looking. She saw women turn to look at him in the street. But there was one thing she wanted to ask him, until she forgot about it in the excitement of the games they played all up and down the street. If games like these were always fixed in favor of the house, then what about the poker game that Jud had been in that afternoon? Was that crooked too? Or were poker games like that pure games of skill where a professional gambler like Jud would naturally win? There was a great deal she didn’t know, sure enough. She listened to Bo’s tutoring carefully whenever he bent to tell her something in that warm, intimate voice.

  It was after ten, and black dark under the cottonwoods, when they groped back to the team. Elsa went quietly, guided by Bo’s hand, full to the chin with new experiences. She had ridden on a ferris wheel and a merry-go-round. She had gone for a ride around a miniature race track in a horseless carriage, the first automobile she had ever seen, a stinking, explosive, dangerous-looking affair. She had been scared to death, putting on the ulster and goggles; when the man had gone behind and spun the crank and the explosions started right underneath her, she had jumped, she thought, a mile. After the dizzy whirl around the track she had climbed out shakily and pushed up the goggles, standing laughing under the hanging lanterns, and Bo had stopped laughing suddenly and stared at her. “God, your eyes are blue,” he had said.

  He was just dreadfully nice, she thought. It was his day, but it was hers too. Everything he had done had been shared with her, as if he didn’t care about winning the championship and the money unless she h
ad it too. She had collected kewpies, canes, pennants with “Devil’s Lake, No. Dak.” across them in yellow felt. She had won a box of chocolates, eaten candy popcorn and drunk lemonade and pop until she couldn’t eat or drink any more. She had seen a show where a man in rube costume came out and sang a song about two rubes who went to a circus and got in a peck of trouble. Bo had liked that. He had stamped and clapped till the man came back and did the interminable song all over again, prancing around in his chin whiskers and straw hat and red topped boots and bandanna.

  Bo was singing the song himself as he helped her over the rough ground:He pulled Si’s whiskers so all-fired hard

  That his chin got as long as the neck of a gourd.

  All at once I see Si grin and then

  I knew his troubles was at an end,

  And sure enough, with his knife so keen

  He cut his whiskers close to his chin ...

  “Where’s it go from there?”

  She took a firmer hold on her plunder, each article of which she had vowed she would put away and never part with. “Something about throwing them out in a hurry? I don’t know. I don’t see how you remember so much of it.”

  “They don’t get thrown out yet. Something about two girls fainting. I got it.” He sang three or four lines more.

  “That’s wonderful,” she said, genuinely impressed. “I never saw such a memory.”

  She stubbed her toe in a root and stumbled wildly in the dark. A doll slipped from her arms and Bo fumbled for it. When he rose his arms went around her suddenly, and he kissed her. Her arms were so full of bundles that she could only twist her face away. “Wait!” she said desperately.

  He kept his arms around her. “Why? They’re way up ahead.”