The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “Like me better than anybody?”

  “Oh,” she said, shivering. “Much!” She stood on tiptoe, pecked him with a kiss, and whipped laughing inside the dressing room before he could grab her. He was remembering the soft resilience of her body all the way over to his own room. She had a nice shape, more roundness to her, a better armful than any of these high school kids. She was a woman, not any little half-baked kid. There was no percentage in playing around with kids.

  They went barefoot together out the long pier. To their right the pavilion was a blaze of light, the Moorish minarets lifting like green mushrooms from the glare, people moving around, the sound of barkers and the roar of the roller coaster and the yells of girls in the shake-up concessions coming loud and yet unimportant across the oily water. The air was cool, but when they slipped down the stairs and into the brine it felt warm, almost lukewarm, with a slippery, half-sticky feel to it from the salt.

  For a while they floated quietly, the buoyant water holding them cradled, their feet lifting helplessly high in the water. Paddling himself like a canoe, Chet came close to Laura’s vague pale shape. Heavy-sounding as cement, the water slopped against the salt-crusted piles under the pier.

  “This is nice,” Laura said. “This is ever so much nicer than sitting in the car.”

  “This is a pretty good place,” Chet said. “It’s fun working out here.”

  They drifted and paddled. “Wonder what Van and Gladys are doing now?” Chet said.

  Laura said nothing for quite a while. “Do you like Gladys?” she said finally.

  “I guess so. I don’t know. Why?”

  “I think she’s cheap.”

  “Yuh, I guess she is, a little.” He rowed himself around in a circle and came back to position with his feet pointing toward Laura. “She’s probably giving Van quite a workout in that tunnel.”

  “That’s just it,” Laura said. Her voice was sharp. “I don’t think a place like that is decent. They just fix it so all sorts of things can go on, and people like Van and Gladys like it.”

  “Oh well,” Chet said. “Van can take care of himself. He’s a pretty handy boy with the women.”

  They were silent again, floating under the blurred noises of the pavilion. “Chet,” Laura said.

  “Uh?”

  “You’re not like that, are you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Van. Chasing girls all the time just to see what he can get. Picking the cheapest ones because they’re easy.”

  “I picked you,” Chet said. “Not for that reason, though.”

  “I know you’re not like that,” she said. She waded toward him, the brine shining around her white shoulders. “You’re clean,” she said, standing close to him and speaking with a shiver in her voice. “Just to look at you I could tell you were clean. Just to look at your hands.”

  “My hands?” he said stupidly.

  “You’ve got beautiful hands,” she said. “So big and long and square. I noticed them before I ever knew you, when I just saw you at a ballgame.”

  Chet laughed self-consciously. “Big hands are a help playing ball.”

  She reached out and took one, stroking it. “The skin is just like satin on them,” she said. “Like a girl’s skin. I think you can judge people by their hands, don’t you? Better than by their faces. I watch the hands of people down at school. Most of them are skinny, like claws, or else big fat wads of things.”

  Her voice in the dark praising him, flattering him; the feel of her fingers moving on the skin of his hands, their skins touching with the slightly-sticky, slightly-slippery feeling of the salt water on them, excited him. He pulled her close, hard against him. “You’re ... beautiful,” he said. The word was hard to get out.

  Playfully she leaned back against his encircling arms and swayed as if she were in a hammock, and every movement brushed her body against his. He licked his lips, tasting salt, and cringed away a little from the intimate kiss of their skins under water.

  “How old are you anyway, Chet?” she said.

  “Nineteen,” Chet said. He had lied about his age so consistently at school, because he hated being the youngest member of the football team, that he almost believed it himself.

  “Only nineteen,” she said, almost as if disappointed. “I’m twenty-one, did you know that?”

  “I could tell you weren’t any punk kid,” he said. “These little high school flappers give me a pain.”

  “They’re no worse than the boys,” she said. “They all go around pretending to be so grown up, necking and fooling around. They’ve got no more intention of getting married than the man in the moon.”

  “Married!” Chet said. The word was like the word “beautiful,” a solemn and importunate and scary sound. “There’s plenty of time to get married,” he said.

  She had stopped swinging, and seemed to be searching his face, but in the dim light that flaked off the water he couldn’t see her well. Then her head turned. “I never thought very much ...” he was saying, before he realized that she was crying.

  “Good hell,” he said. “What’s the matter, Laura?”

  She continued to cry silently, standing with her face twisted away from him, and he gathered her unprotestingly close. “You shouldn’t cry,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just ... keep thinking ... how impossible it is,” Laura said. She wiped her eyes on her upper arms to keep from getting salt in her eyes.

  “How impossible what is?”

  “You’re only nineteen.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “You won’t want to get married for a long time,” she said, the words strangling out sideways, ending in a wail. “If I can’t marry you I don’t ever want to get married!”

  Chet swallowed, standing very still, his arms like wood around her. “Well, good hell,” he said. “I love you, you know that, don’t you?”

  She was hard against him again, her fingers clenched on his arms. “Oh, I do!” she said. “I do, and I love you too, Chet. Terribly. I love you more than anything in the whole world.”

  Chet lifted his head and looked over her white cap at the thick, glimmering water and the lights curving up along the roller coaster scaffolding in an intricate tracery that wavered in reflection toward him across the moving surface. “Aw honey,” he said, and patted her back.

  “Chet,” she said, and put her face in the hollow of his shoulder. “I’m such a baby. I’ve been thinking and thinking, and I didn’t know how you felt, whether you thought of me the way I did of you. A girl can’t go on forever not knowing. I hate my home, and school, and everything but you. The only fun I have is watching you play ball and being proud of you, and seeing you afterwards.”

  Chet swelled his chest, got self-conscious, and pushed her backward with it until she half laughed. He swung her around in the water like a pinwheel, and his strength seemed like something superhuman, something that could break down anything, tear things up by the roots, give him whatever he wanted. “I tell you what,” he said. “Soon as I’m out of school I’ll get a job and we’ll save, and pretty soon we’ll get married. We don’t have to wait till I’m twenty-one. I could pass for twenty-one most places.”

  “Oh, Chet,” she said, her breath against his skin. “Oh, Chet!”

  They stood in the deep shadow of the pier, their bodies locked together. Laura made tiny whimpering noises as he kissed her, breaking her mouth away and bringing it back eagerly. A chill not from the water shook Chet till his teeth chattered. With one hand he unbuttoned the shoulder strap of her suit.

  Above them, as they stood in water to their shoulders, the noise of merrymakers in the concessions drifted unmeaningly, and the light splintered and shook over the moving water.

  “Where can we go?” he whispered. “Up on the pier?”

  Her hands pushed against his chest and she waded backward, stooping for the fallen suit around her ankles. “No,” she said. “No, Chet, not now, I don’t
want to, please!

  “Please, Chet,” she said, as he reached for her again. He stopped, watching her pull the dark suit on again. She came up to him, ran her hands up and down his sides, pulled them away with a little laugh and put them behind her. “Oh Chet,” she said, “you’ll think I’m one of those like Gladys.”

  “Bushwah,” Chet said sullenly. “You couldn’t be like Gladys if you tried. But I don’t see why you won’t. We love each other, don’t we?”

  “If we didn’t I’d be so ashamed I could die,” Laura said. “If I didn’t know we’d be married, sometime soon ...”

  “It can’t be too soon for me,” Chet said.

  She laid her head against his shoulder, and instantly the blood leaped up in his veins, hot and throbbing. “That’ll be lovely,” she said with a little sigh.

  “Then why not? There’s nobody around. It’s dark up there. Come on.”

  “No, no please.”

  “Why not?”

  “Chet,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t carry anything around with you, do you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those ... protection.”

  “Oh,” he said. “No. But ...”

  “See?” she said. “I knew you didn’t. I knew you were clean. So you see, it wouldn’t be safe, Chet.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Please wait.”

  “Oh, all right,” he said. “But you’re driving me crazy.”

  They climbed the ladder to the pier. Walking back to the dressing rooms he had his arm around her under the suit, and by the time they reached her door they were stammering, stopping every five feet to kiss passionately. “Why not in here?” he said.

  She beat her fists against his chest, but there was laughter in her voice, and she punctuated every four words with a kiss. “You great big impatient bullying thing!” she said. “Can’t you even wait till I get used to the idea of being engaged?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’ll have to,” she said, and whisked in the door. He jumped after her, but the latch had clicked. A dim foot and ankle poked out below the swinging door. “Here,” she said. “You can kiss my big toe.”

  Chet stooped and took her ankle, caressed it a moment, bent and bit her big toe savagely. She squealed, smothered the sound quickly.

  “That’ll teach you,” he said, and stalked off. But while he was dressing he was thinking how he had almost had her. Jeez, it was hard to imagine that it had been him out there in the water with her, and her suit off ... But it was all right anyway. She thought he was the clear goods, and now that they were engaged it was going to be hunky-dory, no fooling. And she was a real woman, none of your fifteen-year-old hallway flappers, and Jesus, Jesus, it was wonderful.

  It was already too late, he knew, to meet Van and Gladys at the car. They’d probably be off somewhere in the dark getting in their licks. He and Laura would have to ride home on the train, but that would be all right too, sitting on the steps of the open car with the wind off the salt flats, and the smell of the flats that was like no other smell on earth, a stink almost, so that the first time you smelled it you held your nose, but it grew on you, and before long you found yourself sniffing it, liking it, a salt, exciting, sea-smell that was wonderful to take in great gulps when you were driving or riding the train at night. And now there’d be Laura right next, snuggling against him with her head on his shoulder.

  Engaged, he said. Holy cats.

  Back in his mind was a door that he could open any time he wanted to but he didn’t want to now. Behind the door was a sign, and it said in big letters—but he didn’t look at the letters because what was the point?—“Chet Mason isn’t nineteen, he’s only seventeen.” He didn’t open the door and he didn’t look at the sign, but he knew it was there and he knew what it said.

  3

  The papers had it. Chet sat at breakfast eating by feel, his eyes pasted to the sport page of the Tribune. That had all that about the stingy East southpaw and about only two West runners reaching second, and about his two doubles. But what held his attention longest was the Sports Chatter column. Bill Talbot, the manager of the Salt Lake Bees, had seen the game from the stands, and had remarked to the reporter that he had seldom seen a high school pitcher with more promise. A good curve ball, the reporter said. But it wasn’t the curve that interested Talbot. Anybody could learn to throw a hook. “The kids you want to watch,” he said, “are the ones that can throw a baseball a mile a minute and keep it up all afternoon. When their fast one hops, you want to watch them extra close. This kid’s fast one hops.”

  Spooning his breakfast food automatically, Chet looked through the wall, which opened suddenly to show him trying out on a green diamond with the Bees, striking out the head of the lineup one—two—three while Bill Talbot stood on the third base line watching. He saw the headlines at the end of a season, when Mason was announced as the standout pitcher in the Coast League with a record of twenty-five won and six lost. He saw the Big League scouts coming, heard the prices they quoted to Talbot, saw his picture on a sport page snapped at the top of his windup with his spikes in the air, and underneath the legend, “Seventy-five Thousand Dollar Beauty goes to Cardinals.” He saw himself playing ball with Collins and Sisler and Ruth and Schulte. He saw himself starting a game in the World Series, and the headlines and the chatter about that: “Miller Huggins, masterminder for the New York Yanks, has his work cut out for him to think up some magic to counteract the stuff his Yanks will have thrown at them today via the good left arm of Chet Mason, brilliant young freshman hurler who this season set a record for strikeouts in the National League ...”

  He pushed the cereal bowl away and reached for a roll. His mother, clearing up the rest of the dishes, looked at him and smiled. “Got it memorized?”

  “Oh, bushwah,” Chet said. He grinned and waved the paper in her face. “See what Bill Talbot said? Did you get an eyeful of that ‘promise’ stuff? You’ll grin out of the other side of your face when I’m pitching in the big leagues and drawing down twenty-five thousand a year and splitting a World Series melon every fall.”

  He didn’t know his father had come into the room until he heard him grunt. “Maybe you’d better get out of short pants before you start swallowing all of Bill Talbot’s guff,” he said. “What was the matter with those guys yesterday? All sick?”

  “I was just throwin’ it past ‘em,” Chet said.

  His father laughed and looked across at his mother. “Modest, isn’t he?”

  “Terrible,” she said. “But I guess he must have been just a little bit good.”

  “Just a little bit my eye,” Chet said. “I was terrific. My fast one was hopping four inches.”

  “You know me, All” his father said.

  “Well, it was.”

  “How about those six bases on balls?”

  “I didn’t walk six guys.”

  His father’s big blunt hand came down and took the paper and held it in front of his nose. “Bases on balls, off Mason, six,” he read from the box score. Chet took the paper and read it for himself. “They must have got it wrong,” he said. “Even if this is right, how about those eleven strikeouts?”

  “I don’t care how many you strike out. If you walk six guys you put six possible runs on base.”

  “None of ‘em got past second.”

  “But they might have,” his father said. “Six walks are as good as six singles.”

  “Well, the umpire was blind in both eyes,” Chet said. “You had to groove it or it was a ball.”

  “Now we’ve got an Alibi Ike around the place,” Bo Mason said. He chopped out a laugh from down below his belt. “Come on out in the yard,” he said. “Let’s see this hot one of yours.”

  “You couldn’t hang onto it,” Chet said. “It takes a good catcher to catch me.”

  “I was catching guys faster than you when you were nothing but a vague idea,” his father said, “and doing it with my bare hands.”
>
  “You won’t need the mitt then,” Chet said.

  His father looked at him. “Come on, Smarty,” he said. “Get that pillow and a baseball and get out and let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Chet dug the mitt, his own glove, and a ball from the hall closet. “Bo,” Elsa said as they went past her, “I don’t think you’ve played catch with the kids for ten years.”

  Chet winked. “This’ll be the last time. I’m going to blow him over backwards.”

  He would show the old man whether or not he had a fast one. They laid down a folded dishtowel from the clothesline for a plate, and Chet stepped off the distance. He put his toe on an imaginary rubber, took an easy windup, and lobbed one over. It plunked into his father’s mitt and came back smartly. For a few minutes they tossed the ball back and forth, warming up. “All right,” his father said. “Let one go.”

  Chet wound up and threw. The ball smacked into the mitt with a flat, wet-leather sound. The return throw stung. “High and outside to a right hander,” his father said. “Ball one. Come on now, quit babying them.”

  Chet pitched again, a perfect waist-high strike. “Okay,” his father said. “Pitch to me.”

  He held his mitt for a target, low and inside. Chet threw him a hook that broke a little late, and he had to move the mitt six inches. “Hit where I call for ‘em,” his father said. “Never mind the roundhouse stuff.”

  He moved the mitt thereafter only when he had to to stop a pitch, and Chet threw at the target, really trying to put it squarely in the pocket, bearing down as if the bases were loaded and nobody out. He walked the first imaginary batter, struck out the next two, walked another, and everything he threw his father took handily, peppering the ball back with a sharp wrist throw.

  “You must have had a pretty fair peg to second when you were playing ball,” Chet said.

  “Fair,” his father said drily. “I used to stand on home plate and throw balls into a barrel in center field on the first bounce.”

  He pulled off the mitt, examined his pink palm, and tossed the mitt to Chet. “That’s enough,” he said, and took a cigar from his leather case. He squinted at Chet speculatively, and Chet, wondering what the old man thought of his pitching, looked off down the street as if expecting someone.