The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “Now don’t you worry, Sis.”

  “How can I help worrying? A thousand things could happen.”

  “You never saw me get into anything I couldn’t get out of, did you?”

  “There’s always a first time,” she said.

  “Where’s Pa going?” Chet said.

  “Just on a little trip,” Elsa said. She reached up to touch Bo’s cheek. “Be awfully careful,” she said.

  He bent and kissed her, sparred a moment with the boys in farewell, and eyed them all seriously from the doorway. It wouldn’t do to get into any trouble on this trip, with the flu in town. “You stay close,” he said to Elsa. “I ought to be back tomorrow night, but if I’m not, don’t worry. Something might hold me up till the day after.”

  He ducked out, swinging the heavy bag of dollars, and ran down the path, feeling light, agile, like a boy again. As he drove out of the shed and bucked through a drift into the road up past Van Dam’s toward the oil derrick he booped once on the rubber horn to Elsa, standing in the doorway with her arms folded across her breast and watching him.

  The wind had blown from the north all night, and the dugway up to the south bench was almost bare. But on the bench the snow lay in long, ripple-marked drifts, not deep, but deep enough to hide the road in spots. There had been no guard or hindrance, not even a sign, along the road as he left town. Bo folded a blanket on the floorboards to set his feet on. It was cold, but not too cold, and he was glad for the absence of wind. The sun, flat along the bench, burned on the crests of the drifts and the air in front of the car glittered with sunstruck motes of frost.

  Close in, the fences and the Russian thistle jammed against them had kept the road fairly clear, and even where the fences gave out the drifts were nowhere more than a foot deep. The snow was so granular, almost like coarse sand, that he rode over it as he might have over a hard-packed beach.

  There was no sign of life, no smoke, in the homesteads he passed; the pastures were empty of stock. As the farms thinned out and the fences broke off at right angles to leave the road unmarked, the drifts were more frequent, and he had to look far ahead to the spots blown bare to make sure of staying on the trail. Once, bucking across a long drift, he dipped down in a swale and bogged down. Three minutes after he had shovelled out he ran smack into a fence, and there was no gate.

  He got out to look around, but there was nothing to tell him where he was, only the dazzle of sun on snow and the patches of beaten and frozen grass. Climbing in again, he cramped the wheels sharp left and bumped along the fence. Within a half mile he came to a gate, and recognized it. He was at the edge of the horse pasture. That wasn’t so bad. He’d be at his own homestead by noon, could stop off and have lunch inside, warm up a little before going on. Experimentally he moved his toes inside the heavy socks and elkhide moccasins. Not cold yet, just a little stiff from sitting still.

  He was lost twice in the horse pasture, finding his way back into the road each time by following the water ditch. Once he had to shovel out. When he pulled up toward Gadke’s at eleven-thirty he decided to stop there rather than go on to the homestead. Any story would do to tell them. He was being sent for flu medicine, that was all.

  But there was no one at Gadke’s. The barn doors were nailed shut with cleats, the blinds in the house were drawn. Bo swore, kicking his numb feet together, and pulled out again. It was the homestead for lunch after all.

  For a while he pounded his feet on the blanket and sang to keep warm, but it was too hard to follow the trail and sing at the same time. The biggest branch of the trail turned off just past Gadke‘s, and left only a pair of shallow ruts. In undrifted snow he could have followed them, but the drifts changed everything. In ten more minutes he was off the road again.

  He swung left in a wide circle, but there were only drifts and bare grass. Under one wheel the bottom fell out of a drifted burnout, and the shock rattled his teeth. The motor died and he had to get out and crank. It infuriated him to be lost in a country he had driven through two dozen times. It was the damned snow; everything looked different.

  All right, he said, and climbed in again. Lose the road, drive by ear. The sun was straight ahead of him. He couldn’t go far wrong if he headed straight south, unless he hit a coulee he couldn’t cross. The burnouts were enough to kink his neck, but if the Ford could stand them he could.

  Within a mile he came to the edge of a coulee ten or fifteen feet deep and a hundred wide. “Damn!” he said, and sat peering through the windshield. The snow was deep in the coulee bottom, too deep. So it was go around. He cramped the wheels to the right and bucked drifts along the top till he got to the rounded, windswept edge where the grass was bare. All the coulees in this country ran east and south. If he went far enough west he ought to head this one.

  He came to the head and saw the shack at the same time. It was a one-room, slant-roofed leanto, covered with tarpaper outside and striped vertically with lath. He had pulled into the yard, his eye on the thin smoke from the stovepipe, before he recognized the place as Ole Pederson’s. He swore unbelievingly. He was within six miles of his own farm, and hadn’t recognized a thing till he bumped into Ole’s yard. But at least he was somewhere. Ole Pederson was a dumb Swede, but his fire was as warm as anybody’s.

  Feeling good again now that he had passed the bad part, now that Montana lay ahead of him, with marked roads, he hammered on the door. Inside he heard movement: he hammered again. “Hey, Ole!” he said.

  The door opened and Ole Pederson, taller than the door by a good two inches, stood there stooping. He wore a black sweater with a wide orange stripe around the middle like the stripe of a Poland hog. His pale hair was wispily on end, as if he had been lying down, and his eyes were suspicious.

  “Hi,” Bo said. He started in, but Ole half closed the door, keeping his long melancholy face in the crack.

  “Ay don’t tank you batter coom in har,” he said.

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  “Anyt‘ing,” Ole said wearily. “Ain’t anyt’ing matter. But Ay don’t tank you better coom in.”

  “What the hell?” Bo said. He peered at Ole’s pale, long-cheeked face. “You sick?”

  “No,” Ole said. “Ay ban’t sick. Ay yust don’t vant to gat sick. Ay don’t vant to run you out, but you batter go on.”

  “Hell,” Bo said. “I couldn’t give you the flu. I haven’t got it.”

  “Var you coom from? V‘itemud?”

  “Yeah. And there’s no flu there. Come on, let me in, I’m cold.”

  “Val, Ay don’t know ...”

  With one quick step Bo crowded into the shack. “Hell’s afire,” he said. “You don’t need to be scared of me. I’m healthy.”

  Ole backed up till he sat down on the bunk in the corner. He ran a great splay hand through his hair. “Ay vish you didn’t coom in har,” he said.

  Bo had his mitts off, warming his hands over the stove. “Take it easy. How long have you been holed up?”

  “Two veeks.”

  “Haven’t you seen anybody all that time?”

  “Two farmers,” Ole said. “Ay rather be alone than catch flu.”

  Bo eyed him half in contempt. His fingers tingled with the heat, and he felt his toes, stiff and deeply aching when he set his weight on one foot or the other. Opening the box of lunch, he spread bread and butter and chicken on the table. A half sandwich went down in two bites, and he sank his teeth in a drumstick, cold and meaty and succulent. “Help yourself,” he said with his mouth full.

  Ole looked, but made no move, so Bo picked up the other drumstick and tossed it to him. He caught it clumsily in his lap and sat holding it, lugubrious and stubborn. Bo dropped the leg bone in the pail behind the stove and started on a second joint.

  “Why don’t you go into town where the doctors are, if you’re scared of the flu?” he said.

  Ole shook his head. “Ay don’t vant to go to town.” His face, which had been pale as cheese when Bo came in, was flushed now
, clear to the roots of the yellow hair. Maybe the big dumb guy was sick and didn’t know it.

  “I’m going into Chinook, if you want to come along,” Bo said.

  When Ole shook his head again, Bo shrugged and pulled on his mitts, rolling the remains of the chicken in its napkin. “Well, that’s your lookout,” he said. “Thanks for the hospitality.”

  Ole sat on his bunk and with obvious relief watched him get ready to go.

  “How do I get to the Chinook road?” Bo said. “Up along your fence?”

  “It’s a half mile,” Ole said. “Turn right at the corner.”

  “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

  “Ay tank Ay stay har.”

  Bo shrugged and left him. He bumped down across the flats, turned right at the fence corner, and found the road. Fifteen minutes later he was on the narrow graded road coming up past Cree, in Montana, and with a contented sigh he settled back to let the Ford plow ahead. It was easy from here. Three hours and he’d be in Chinook. Eight hours for the whole hundred miles. That was good time, considering. And coming back he’d have his own tracks to follow.

  At four o‘clock, the sun already a dry yellow ball in the haze, he pulled into the empty street and stopped before the Palace Hotel. With the bag of money under his coat he climbed out, stiff and clumsy with cold, and stepped up on the plank sidewalk. It was funny there wasn’t anyone around. Not a man, not a horse, not a sleigh or a car, was in the street. The hotel front was blank; he saw his own fur reflection coming to meet him in the front window. And the door, when he thumbed the latch and put his shoulder against the panel, was locked.

  “Well I’ll be ...” he said. He cupped a hand over his eyes and put his nose against the glass. The desk was there, deserted. The chairs were there, the big-bellied stove, but there was no sign of life. Bo stepped back, his chest beginning to churn with slow rage. Now what if the flu had closed up the whole place? What if the saloons were closed? With narrowed eyes and lips compressed he started walking.

  He saw the white flutter of paper on the saloon door before he reached the corner. “Closed while the flu is on,” it said. “City Ordernance.”

  Savagely, his feet beginning to ache as walking brought the blood back, he cut across the deserted street to the other saloon where he had bought beer last summer. There was no sign up, but the doors were locked.

  Involuntary swearing broke out of him. No place to sleep. Not a joint in the whole stinking, cowardly town open. No place to buy the whiskey he had driven a hundred cold miles for. But by God, somebody would have to open up, or he’d beat their door down.

  He had knocked without success on three doors, up the street past the business section, when he saw a man hurrying along the opposite sidewalk. The man wore a white mask over his face, and his head was covered by a heavy fur cap with deep earlaps. Bo crossed over.

  “What’s the matter around here?” he said.

  The man’s eyes, sharp black holes between brown fur and white mask, darted at him, looked him up and down. “Where’d you come from?”

  Bo let his face go dead and stupid. “I just come in off the farm. What’s the matter, there ain’t a place in town open.”

  “We got the flu,” the man said. “The place is quarantined.”

  “Good gosh,” Bo said. “Is that right?” He kept the man standing impatiently while he fingered his chin. “Hell, I wanted to buy me some whiskey,” he said, “I heard there was this flu around, but I didn’t know it was in town here.”

  “Everything’s closed,” the man said. “You can’t even leave town, now you’re in.” He seemed rather pleased to see Bo stuck. “You got to get a mask, too. That’s orders.”

  “How’d I get a mask if nothing’s open?”

  “Hospital,” the man said. “Block up the first cross street on the right.”

  He started off, but Bo laid a hand on his arm. “Look,” he said. “If I can’t get out of here I still want a bottle or two. Where’s a barkeep or somebody live?”

  The man laughed. “The whole bunch from the Last Chance is in the hospital.”

  “Isn’t there another one?”

  “There’s the Silver Dollar. Frank Selby lives right back of the joint. But you won’t get him to open up.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll try anyway,” Bo said. He watched the man’s slight hurrying figure go up the street, and wrinkled his lip and spat in the snow.

  The Silver Dollar saloon ran back from a two-story false front for seventy or eighty feet, a bare blank wall for half its length. At the back end, where it became living quarters, there were two windows and a door approached by three wooden steps. The green shades were drawn on the windows.

  Bo went up the steps, the bag of money under his coat, and knocked. For two minutes he waited without an answer. He banged on the storm door with the whole weight of his fist. One of the blinds, he thought, twitched slightly, but no one came to the door. He lifted his fist and thundered on the wood.

  “Who’s there?” a woman’s voice whined suddenly. She must have tiptoed to the door, for the voice came directly through the boards in front of him.

  “I have to see Frank Selby,” Bo said. “It’s important.”

  “He isn’t seeing anybody,” the woman said.

  “He’s got to see me,” Bo said. “The doctor sent me.”

  There was a moment’s silence, then the inner door was opened and the woman’s face looked at him through the little window in the storm door. She had a red, wet-looking harelip. “What’s the doctor want?” she said.

  “I’m from Harlem. The doctor there sent me over for whiskey for medicine.”

  The woman shook her head. “You’ll have to get it somewheres else. We’re closed.”

  Quietly, out of her sight, Bo put his thumb on the storm-door latch, depressed it gently. As she started to shut the inner door he opened the outer one swiftly and stuck his foot in the crack. The woman confronted him furiously, shoving at the blocked door. “Go away!” she said. “You can’t come-butting in here!”

  Bo took the bag from under his coat. “Look,” he said. “I was sent over here in an emergency. I want three hundred bucks’ worth of liquor for that whole town. And I’m not going back without it. You think I drove over here for fun?”

  The woman stared at the bag, then at him. She licked the red split in her lip. Still exerting pressure on the door, she called, “Frank!”

  In a minute her husband’s face appeared over hers in the crack, a fat face, bartender-pale, with drooping sandy mustaches. “What is this?” he said. “What you trying to do?”

  Lifting the bag before the man’s hard eyes, Bo said, “I was sent over from Harlem for a carload of whiskey. They need it for flu medicine.”

  Both faces remained stuck behind the door’s edge. “Jesus, man,” Frank said, “I can’t sell you nothing. The law’s closed me up on account of this-here epidermic.”

  Bo rattled the bag. “I guess three hundred bucks ought to be worth opening up for.”

  “What’s the matter with Joe’s place in Harlem?”

  “He’s burned down. That’s why I had to come over here.”

  Frank eyed the bag again. “All right,” he said finally. “You wait right there.” Bo took his foot out of the door and it closed smartly. He laughed. In five minutes Frank came out, a sheepskin around his ears, the strings of a flu mask dangling inside it and a muffler wrapped around mouth and nose.

  “Afraid of freezing your handlebars?” Bo said.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” said Selby, through the muffler and mask “You stay six feet away from me if you want me to sell you any thing. Where’s your car?”

  “In front of the Palace.”

  “Drive it around behind the joint, clear around the house part and halfway up the inside. I don’t want anybody snooping around.”

  When Bo brought the Ford around Frank opened a side door and backed away to a safe distance. “All right,” he said. “What you want, now?”
r />   “Got any kegs of rye?”

  “Couple.”

  “How much?”

  “I’d have to figure,” Frank said. He figured. “Ninety-six.”

  “Okay. One of those. How about Irish?”

  “How much you want?”

  “Case.”

  “I’ll see.” He rummaged among a stack of case goods against the wall. The air in the storeroom was still and cold, full of the smell of whiskey and straw and burlap. “Here she is,” Frank said. He swung the case out by its burlap ear. “What else?”

  “Seven cases middle-price bourbon,” Bo said. “What you got?”

  He took a bottle of beer out of an opened barrel and yanked the cap off on a nailhead. The beer was icy cold and faintly skunky. “You ought to keep the light off beer in white bottles,” he said. Frank, lifting cases around, only grunted through his muffler.

  “I’ll have to split up on you,” he said finally. “I ain’t got seven cases all one kind.”

  “Okay, long as it isn’t rotgut.” Sitting on a box, Bo tipped the beer and watched Frank pull cases together, watched him roll a keg from behind some barrels of beer.

  “How much does that come to?” he said.

  Frank figured on a barrel head. “Two hundred and ninety-four even.”

  “Sharpen your pencil a little,” Bo said. “This is a wholesale deal.”

  “I already figured it wholesale. I don’t make more’n a buck or two a case at that price.”

  “Tell you what,” Bo said. “If it was for me, I’d never buy a bottle of it till I got a jobber’s price. When a town buys whiskey for medicine it ought to get the lowdown. But you throw in another case of bourbon and I’ll give you three hundred even.”

  Frank shook his head. “I couldn’t do it. That’s a whole case for six bucks. I wouldn’t make a dime.”

  “That’s the only kind of a deal I’m interested in,” Bo said. “I went over to the hospital and talked to the guy from the Last Chance, because I couldn’t raise anybody out in front here. He wanted to sell me the stuff, but I’d have to hunt up a relative of his to get it. I thought it’d be easier here. But if you don’t want to talk business ...”