The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Page 45
“He wasn’t so sleepy out hunting, either,” Bruce said. “Remember when we saw him dive into the river on top of the mudhen?”
That was the way of their uprooting. “Remember the time ... ?” Five years in that town had made it home. Elsa wondered if her boys would have the same homesick memories of that barren little river-bottom village as she had of the maple-lined streets and the creamery and the white-steepled church in Indian Falls. Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone.
You never knew either how many people you thought of with kindness, the people who now met you on the street as you went about pulling up all the little roots that had gone down in five years, and shook your hand, and said don’t forget us, don’t get so prosperous over there in the States that you never remember your old friends ...
There was no time for regrets. Maybe this whiskey business, for all its illegality, was as good as anything they could have chosen. There were no places on earth any more where opportunity lay new and shining and untouched. The old days when people used to rush to Dakota or California or Alaska in search of easy wealth were gone forever; she and Bo together had tried one or two of those worn-out dreams, to their sorrow. But if he could do as well as he said he could at this business, and then get out, he at least would have been preserved from his own irritability and restlessness and bad temper.
So she went carefully pulling up the little roots that gave with a slight unwilling tug, and left the future to Bo. He was so sure of it.
In the sun-slanting, dew-fresh morning they stood for the last time on the porch, the loaded car nosing the front fence. Not even the rush of packing had ruffled Bo’s temper this time. He locked the door, tossed the key in his hand, looked at Elsa, puckered his lips in a jigging whistle, and winked. He rubbed his finger down the door-frame.
“Goodbye, Old Paint,” he said. Elsa was looking through the front window at the bare room, its raw floor showing inside the frame of painted border. The mantel Bo had put in with the intention of some day building a fireplace under it was empty of knickknacks, the picture of three white horses floating-maned against a background of storm was gone, and only its clean oval shape remained on the wall.
She touched Bo’s arm. “Let’s try,” she said. “Let’s try awful hard this time.”
They went out to the car, the boys half hysterical with excitement, singing loudly, “Goodbye, Old Paint, I’m leavin’ Cheyenne, I’m leavin’ Cheyenne, I’m goin’ to Montana, Goodbye, Old Paint ...”
“You want to wake up the whole town?” Bo said. He shoved them into the back seat, where they squirmed their way neck-deep into the luggage. Their heads stuck out like the heads of young owls in a nest.
“Open your mouth and I’ll drop in a mouse,” Bo said.
They had to leave the key with George McKenna, out on the east edge of town. At the low swampy spot that had been made into the dumpground the road split, leaving the dump like an island in the middle, and as they bumped over the right-hand fork they smelled the foul stench from the garbage and bones and offal thrown out there.
“Pee-you!” Elsa said, and held her nose. The boys echoed her. “Pee-you! Pee-you-willy!” They clamped their noses shut and pretended to fall dead.
“I better get to windward of that coming back,” Bo said.
They left the key with McKenna, shook hands with him twice (he was very affable now that Bo had paid up the long-standing grocery bill) and started back, really leaving now. The things they saw as they passed had the sharpness of things seen for the last time. They noticed things they had never consciously noticed before, the way the hills came down into the river on the north like three folds in a blanket, the extreme height of the stovepipe on the Chinaman’s shack below Poverty Flat. The boys chanted at everything they saw, “Goodbye, Old Chinaman, Goodbye, Old Whitemud River, Goodbye, Old Dumpground, Goodbye.”
“Hold your noses,” Bo said. He eased the car into the windward fork around the dump. “Somebody sure dumped something rotten.” .
He stared ahead, bending forward a little, and Elsa heard him swear under his breath. The car jumped ahead over the bumpy trail.
“What?” Elsa said. She looked at his set face, the dark look of anger in it. Then she saw too, with a hard, flinching pain, and closed her lips tight over her teeth. Hurry, she said. Oh, hurry, get by before he sees it!
But the boys were not missing anything. They were half standing, excited by the burst of speed and the reckless bouncing. She knew he saw it before she heard him cry out; she could feel his seeing it like a bright electric shock, the way she had once felt the pain of a woman in the travelling dentist’s chair when the dentist dug a living nerve out of the woman’s tooth and there was a livid tableau, the woman sitting with face lifted, half rising from the chair, the dentist scrambling stupidly on hands and knees looking for the wire of pain he had dropped. Then she heard Bruce’s cry.
“Oh!” he said. “It’s Socks! Ma, it’s Socks! Stop, Pa, there’s Socks!”
His father drove grimly ahead, not turning or speaking, and Elsa shook her head. Bruce screamed, and neither of them turned or spoke. And when he dug down into the luggage, burrowing in and hiding his head, shaking with long smothered sobs, there was no word in the car except Chet’s “Gee whiz, he still had his hobbles on!”
So they left town, and as they wound up the dugway to the bench none of them had the heart to look back on the town they were leaving, on the flat river bottom green with spring, its village, snuggled in the loops of river. Their minds were all on the bloated, skinned body of the colt, the sorrel hair left below the knees, the iron braces still on the broken front legs.
Wherever you go, Elsa was thinking, whenever you move and go away, you leave a death behind.
VI
It was two o‘clock in the morning when Bo hit the outskirts of Great Falls. Through the uncurtained front of the car the air was cold, with a faint remembrance of leaf-fires in its smell. Across the river on his left, the high stack of the copper smelter went up like a great dark lamp chimney above the huddled houses of Little Chi. Downriver he could see a glow of light from the power station on Rainbow Falls.
Bumping across the cartracks, easing the car over a rutted intersection, feeling the built-up springs sink heavily, clear down, on a slow bump, he swung left to avoid the main streets. His headlights, knocked out of line somewhere on the trip, glared along front porches, fences, up into the thinning color of the maples. Then the street, the alley, the turn, the branches of the crabapple tree over the garage, and he swung in, dimming the lights and climbing out stiffly to fumble among his keys. From Govenlock to Great Falls, on that kind of road, was all you wanted to drive.
For a moment, standing inside in the glow of the dimmed lights, he wondered if he ought to unload, but the weariness of driving ached in his shoulders, and he snapped the padlock on the garage doors, opened the wire gate in the fence, and went up to the back door.
He heard the bell ring far inside the house, and as he waited under the frosty, star-spiked sky a little wind stirred the creeper over the back porch trellis. Probably Elsa would be scared to death. She always jumped a yard when the doorbell rang.
The window above him opened, and her voice called down, “Who is it?”
“Me,” Bo said.
“Oh good!” she said. “Just a minute.”
The key turned in the kitchen door and he stepped inside, still in the dark. His hands reached out and felt her, pulled her close. She was in her nightgown. “Mmmmm!” he said, and kissed her. She snapped on the light.
“I bet you’re tired,” she said. “Do you want something to eat?”
“I might use a sandwich at that. How’ve you been?”
“All right. Chet got his nose broke.”
“Fighting?” .
“He’s out for football, gone clean crazy about it. I never see him from morning till night except when he drags home after dark with half the skin-off him.” ,
“Heimie come over after his stuff?” he said.
“Yes. Day before yesterday.”
“Pay you?”
“No. He said he’d see you when you came back.”
Bo grunted.
“I wish you didn’t have to work with that crowd,” she said.
“They’ve got contacts. It would have taken me a long time to work in here alone.”
“You’d have made more.”
“Once I got in. But we weren’t doing anything very wonderful till the last few months. Besides that, if you work with those guys a little you’re safer. They’d as soon stool you off as look at you.”
She went to the icebox, and he saw the corrugated metal interior, a package of sliced bacon, bottles of milk, oranges, a roast, of some kind, a glass-covered dish of butter.
“Quite a bit different from the old cellar hole,” he said. The fat richness of the food, the clean crinkled metal, the kitchen with white woodwork and linoleum floor, filled him with a sense of luxurious prosperity. Elsa ought to like it. She’d been hollering for a nice home for fifteen years.
“Yes,” she said. “Only I never had to be afraid that anyone would come and take the cellar hole away from me.”
“For God’s sake,” he said disgustedly, and filled his mouth with bread. “You wouldn’t be satisfied if you were a calf and your ma was giving liquid gold.”
“Oh, I’m satisfied,” she said. “I’ve got everything I could want here, sure enough.” She started out into the hall.
“Where you going?”
“To get a kimono. It’s chilly.”
“Heck with it,” Bo said. He reached out and pulled her onto his lap, eating with one hand while with the other he caressed the creased softness of her stomach. “You feel pretty nice through silk,” he said.
Elsa laughed. “I should think you’d be too tired to feel anything.”
“Never too tired,” Bo said. “Is there any hot water?”
“I think so.”
“Hot dog,” he said. “Hot running water, bath tub six feet long, and a chicken in a silk nightgown. I’d have been home hours ago if I’d thought of that.”
She smiled, arching away from his arm, and he saw that she was very glad to have him home, that she liked his hand on her, that the beauty parlor he had made her go to had done things for her hair and skin. He bit her. “You hit the grit,” he said. “I’ll be along before you can say Ishmael Rabinowitz.”
When he woke in the morning he lay watching the sun that lay like a wide yellow board under the blind. There were noises downstairs—Elsa getting the kids off to school. He stretched luxuriously in the wide bed, kicked the covers off and inspected his white feet, his heavy, white-skinned calves with the black hair worn nearly off where the garters went around.
“Old piano legs,” he said, but he liked his legs, the way the muscles hardened into flat plates when he wiggled his feet.
Chet, with the whole middle of his face bandaged, came in and stood looking at him, eyes solemn over the gauze. “Hi, Pa.”
“Hi,” Bo said. “Who you been mixing it with, Jess Willard?”
“Football,” Chet said. “I got my nose broke.”
“Somebody must’ve kicked pretty high.”
“Oh, you don’t kick in football. Just once in a while.”
“What do they call it football for?”
“Because ... I don’t know.” Chet’s eyes wandered around the bedroom. He seemed at once indifferent and ill at ease.
“Pa.”
“What?”
“Could I have four dollars?”
Bo stared. “You don’t want much. What are you planning to do, go into business?”
“I want a football. If I had one of my own I could practice around after school.”
“Yuh,” Bo said. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat in his nightshirt, looking at Chet. It didn’t take long to give a kid millionaire ideas. A year ago a dime would have looked like a fortune to this one.
“I might make the first team next year,” Chet said. “I’d be a sophomore, and if I gained ten pounds or so and got so I could throw passes good I could ...”
“You could get your behind in a sling,” Bo said. “Do all the other kids get busted up the way you do?”
“This isn’t anything,” Chet said. He passed his fingers tenderly over the taped gauze. “Sloppy Johnson bust his collarbone last week. He’s on the team.”
“So if you could have a football and practice a lot maybe you could get on the team and break a leg,” Bo said. He laughed, tickled at the solemn earnestness of this little squirt with the patched face. “Hand me my pants,” he said. He fumbled in the pants, found the wallet, leafed off a five-dollar bill. “I’ll want change.”
“You bet,” Chet said. “Thanks, Pa, a lot. I’ll bring the change after school.”
He scooted out, went downstairs like a falling safe. Bo laughed. It was a good feeling to give a kid something when he wanted it that much. Sitting on the bed, leisurely pulling on his socks, he thought, I’ll give it to him, too. I’ll have it to give all of them. Give me another few months, let the roads stay open a few weeks longer ... He began dressing more purposefully. He had to see Heimie, get a half dozen things, get things organized so he could pull out tomorrow. And if Heimie wanted part of this load he’d. have to be satisfied with two or three cases. There was more in it the other way.
“Got anything to eat for a starving Armenian?” he said in the kitchen.
“Oh, a few odds and ends.” She took bacon and toast from the oven and set them before him. “How many eggs?”
“Make it three. I’ve got a lot to do.”
“Going to unload?”
“No. I’m leaving it right there. I’ll be pulling out again in the morning.”
“Where?”
“Right on down to Nebraska.”
She turned to watch the frying eggs, but he could see by the set of her shoulders and the angle of her head that she was going to pro‘test.
“I’m scared of that trip,” she said. “It’s so long.”
“That’s why there’s more money in it.”
“And more risk,” she said.
“That’s the chance you take,” Bo said. “I want to get this sold and get back to Govenlock for another load before the roads get too bad. Then we can live off the fat of the land the rest of the winter.”
He wolfed his breakfast, wiped his mouth, kissed her, and went out, walking fast. At the drugstore on the corner he bought four two-for-a-quarter cigars and turned into Central Avenue, letting the fragrant smoke fill his mouth. At the door of Chapell’s Garage he slowed, looking in. Frank Chapell was burning waste in the office stove.
“Mornin‘,” he said. “Thought you was out of town.”
“Was,” Bo said.
“Anything stirring up north?”
“Quiet as a church.”
“Same here,” Frank said. “Anything I can do for you?”
Bo gave Chapell a cigar. “I’m looking for a Wyoming license plate. Got any?”
“Might have.”
Chapell looked under the bench at the rear of the shop. “Pair of Utahs, pair of Oregons, couple sets of Montanas.”
“It’s better when there’s only one plate. Couldn’t pick me up one, could you?”
“When you want it?”
“This afternoon.”
“Come around sometime after three,” Frank said. “I think I can smouge you one.”
From Chapell’s Bo went to Strain’s Department Store and found a floor walker. “I want to buy a clothes dummy,” he said.
The floor walker looked baffled. “You mean a
regular dummy? Window dummy?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get the manager.”
“I’d rather have a dead one,” Bo said, and laughed at the floor walker’s startled face.
He waited for the manager, waited again while that polite gentleman looked back among the invoices to see what dummies cost, and finally bought one for sixteen dollars, twice what he thought it was worth. Across the street at Gill’s Hardware he bought two boxes of large-headed roofing nails, and with those in his overcoat pockets walked the last block and a half to the Smoke House, guarded by its wooden Indian and flanked on either side of the door by peephole slot machines saying “Adults Only.”
Heimie Hellman was eating breakfast at the counter with his overcoat and hat on, and while he ate the shine from the barber-shop next door sat jackknifed on a portable stool and shined his yellow shoes. Bo, coming in the door, let his lip curl slightly. Ladies’ man, probably pimp. He was too God damned elegant in his yellow shoes and tan silk shirt and velvet-collared coat.
Heimie looked over, lifted his head and half shut his eyes and opened his mouth, the whole gesture like an act. He lifted a hand, and as Bo slid onto a stool beside him, he tossed a quarter to the shine, who grinned and went.
“Well,” Heimie said. “How they hanging?”
“Okay.”
Heimie shook his head in an admiration that might have been ironic. “How do you do it?” he said. “Every other guy I know has been knocked over at the line one time or another. You just go up and come back like you was driving in the park.” He smiled at Bo, thumping a cigarette on the counter gently. “You must have a rabbit’s foot,” he said.
“I just happen to know roads the law never heard of,” Bo said. “Things moving here?”
“Little slow yet. We’ll start turning it over when people begin buying for Christmas.”
Bo looked down the counter and watched the waiter draw a cup of coffee. “You won’t want anything for a while then.”
“What did you bring?”
“White Horse and Haig and Haig.”
“You can’t get what good Scotch is worth around here,” Heimie said. “Most of. our customers are pikers, ‘sa fact. Rather rot their guts out than pay for good stuff.”