The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  Chet was already back-tracking on the marriage business, postponing it in his mind. You couldn’t really bank on it, he told Laura. It wouldn’t pay to go getting themselves in a hole.

  But it was not really money that was making him cautious. It was the sign behind the door in his mind, the sign that said, “Chet Mason isn’t nineteen, he’s only seventeen.” It was easy to forget that when he was with Laura, but it kept coming back when he lay in bed and thought about things before sleeping.

  There was one more week of school, one more game in the high school league. Two days before he was to pitch against L.D.S., Laura came up to school after practice, and she and Chet and Van went over to Mad Maisie’s for a root beer. They were sitting there smoking cigarettes just off the edge of the school grounds when Muddy Poole came by. The next day both Chet and Van were dropped from the squad.

  That was a blow, no matter how the two tried to swagger it off. It made them celebrities of a kind, got them kidded in the halls, even made them the center of a righteous and indignant group. Muddy ought to have more loyalty to the school than to throw off his first-string battery right before a crucial game. If East lost this one, and West took Granite, then L.D.S. would win the championship. Muddy ought to be able to overlook smoking. What was a cigarette anyway?

  All that was pleasant enough, but still Chet was sullen when he went up to the field and sat in the bleachers to watch the game. He didn’t even bother to hunt up Van. Obscurely he hoped that something would go wrong, that the team would get in a hole and Muddy would have to come up in the stands and ask him to get in there and save the day. At the end of the second inning he saw his father come down the cement steps and find a seat, and before the end of an inning rise and go out again. Probably he had found out from somebody why Chet wasn’t pitching. Now there’d be a big blowup at home.

  God damn, Chet said, and sat glumly watching his team pound the L.D.S. pitcher for three runs in the third and two in the fourth. Hench, a little squirt with not half the stuff Chet had, settled down after giving up one run in the first, and had yielded only four hits by the time Chet got disgusted and left.

  “It serves you right,” his father said at supper that night. “It serves you damn well right. You had a chance, and you blew it. Maybe it’ll teach you something.”

  “Rub it in,” Chet said.

  “Maybe I need to rub it in. Maybe if it isn’t rubbed in it’ll run right off your thick hide.”

  “Oh, let it drop,” Chet said. “It isn’t worth making all this fuss about.”

  “It doesn’t matter to you, uh?”

  Chet raised his eyes. “Not very much.”

  “No,” his father said. His voice was acid with contempt. “I guess it wouldn‘t, at that. The only thing that’d matter to you is running around with this flapper of yours every night till one-two o’clock.”

  “Don’t you call her a flapper!” Chet said.

  His father looked at him a moment. “All right, she isn’t a flapper. She just doesn’t know when to go home to bed. Hasn’t she got anybody to tell her she can’t stay out all night every night?”

  “Oh, all night!”

  “Two last night,” his father said. “One-thirty the night before. Three the night before that. You haven’t been in before midnight for a week.”

  “Oh bushwah.”

  “Yes, bushwah. You haven’t.”

  “Bo,” Elsa said. To Chet she said, “You have been staying out awful late. It’s not good for you while you’re growing, and you don’t get your studying done.”

  “I do my studying at school,” Chet said. “And for gosh sake, I’m through growing.”

  “Well,” she said smiling. “We’d like to see you once in a while. You might stay home one night a week.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll stay home tonight. I’ll sit here and twiddle my thumbs till ten o‘clock and go to bed.”

  He had a date with Laura, but he was so mad at his family for grinding him down, and so sore about the game, that he just called her instead, sitting in the hall from eight fifteen till nine o‘clock with his lips confidentially close to the mouthpiece and his voice secret and soft. When he finally hung up he stretched elaborately and yawned. “Well, it’s almost nine,” he said. “Time for big athletes to go beddy bye.”

  His father did not rise to his sarcasm, and his mother only said, smiling, “I guess it wouldn’t do you any great harm.”

  So he went, and for an hour lay imagining how it would have been if L.D.S. had cracked down on Hench right at the beginning, and the sub catcher had let a pitch through him and allowed a run to come in, and the whole battery had fallen apart, and runs had kept coming across, so that Muddy had to come leaping up in the stands and get Chet and Van right down in their street clothes to save the day. He could hear the crowd yelling, nine for Mason, nine for Horsley, and he saw himself toeing the rubber in street shoes, rolling up his sleeves and going to it, and the succession of strikeouts, his fast one burning in there so fast that Van shook his mitt hand and grinned when he tossed the old apple back. Not a hit, not a walk, after his appearance in the fifth. Not an L.D.S. runner to reach first, while East whittled away at the big lead and got two here, one there, till they tied it up. It would have been something to come up in the eighth or ninth with the score tied and slam one down the right field line for two or three bases, driving Van in from second with the winning run, and have Van wait at home to shake his hand and pound him on the back. Then the two of them would walk off with the crowd yelling. Muddy would have to come up and stick out his hand and admit that when he threw them off the squad he threw away his ball club, and then they would have shaken hands and lighted up a cigarette right in his face.

  But instead of that East had won seven to two, the sub catcher hadn’t made a single error, and Hench had held L.D.S. to six hits. The little pipsqueak.

  Then graduation, he and Bruce graduating together, the assembly hall full of parents and all the little high school girls running around halls and lawns in their first formals, the long meeting when you sat and waited your turn to go up on the stage and get your football sweater, walking across and taking it from Muddy’s hand and going back and sitting down while the applause died for you and started for the next one. Muddy couldn’t cheat him out of that sweater, anyway. He’d earned that one, catching that fourth quarter pass and beating Provo six to nothing, and taking a kickoff eighty yards against Brigham City, and completing seven passes for three touchdowns against Granite. He’d earned that one, and plenty. And he sat in the row of athletes holding the sweater box in his lap, wondering if just maybe they’d give him a baseball letter too. He’d earned that too, the potlickers. East wouldn’t have taken the championship if he hadn’t won three games for them. But probably Muddy would hold a grudge and not even read his name off.

  The football candidates were finished, the basketball team had gone up one after another, the midget basketball team had climbed the stage to the accompaniment of polite clapping and snickers from the audience. Bruce was one of the little guys. He looked puny and skinny, even though he had suddenly started to grow in the last year and had shot up a couple of inches. Chet felt a little ashamed that his brother was such a runt. Probably he could have done all right in high school if he’d been bigger. He wasn’t bad at anything for his size.

  The Superintendent of Public Instruction was introduced, and stood up to present the silver loving cup representing the baseball championship to Muddy Poole. Muddy made a little speech, it was all due to the fellows, they had got in there and worked like mad and played the game clean and hard, and sat down. The names of the baseball team started, and the line where Chet sat began to shift as boys worked their way out to the aisles. Chet crossed his hands on his football sweater box and sat still. He almost caught himself breaking into a whistle. Van, down the row, turned and winked.

  Then Muddy read off Van’s name. Van shot a look at Chet, stood up, marched down the aisle, and was g
iven a sweater. Muddy read off others: Longabaugh, Mackay, Mason. Chet stood up and marched. Muddy, his face perfectly straight, held out the box and said without moving his lips, “I ought to charge you ten bucks for this, you stinker.” Chet grinned, conscious of the audience at his back, the row of teachers and dignitaries along the stage. “Horse collar,” he said, in the same stiff-lipped deadpan whisper. Muddy shoved the box hard in his belly, as a quarterback tucks the ball into the arms of a halfback coming around on a reverse, and Chet put his head down and made a play of running it off-stage for a touchdown. There were some smiles, some looks of formal surprise on the faces along the stage, some laughter from the audience. Chet skinned back into his seat over the crowded legs. Muddy was all right, a good guy.

  That was the cream of the assembly, as far as Chet was concerned, but there were a lot of other awards, pins for publications and opera and glee club and student offices. Chet was up twice more, for opera and glee club, and then once again with the glee club when it sang. Then the speakers, the valedictorian and the salutatorian and the Superintendent of Schools and the Commencement speaker, and the long queues forming for the passing out of the diplomas, and that was the end of that.

  That was the end of school, of stinking chem labs, of physics classes where you experimented with the laws of the pendulum, swinging plumb-bobs on strings down the stairwell from the third floor to the basement, so that girls going into the door of the girls’ gym could be bopped with them. Now was the end of practices after school, of showers in the steamy old shower room and towel fights between the lockers, of snake dances through the streets to celebrate victories, of operas in the old Salt Lake Theater where you sang tenor leads in Mademoiselle Modiste or The Red Mill. This was the end of lunches on the lawns while the gulls flew over crying, of butts snitched behind the corner of Mad Maisie‘s, of hot dogs and mustard and rootbeer over her messy counter, of toting a gun in ROTC drills and marching on hot spring days up through the lucerne toward the mountains, a whole battalion breaking ranks sometimes and tearing through the alfalfa when a racer snake slid from under the file-closer’s feet, all of them chasing the swift snake while the student officers yelled their heads off and howled commands that nobody minded and tossed around demerits that nobody listened to, and the commandant started back from Company A to see what was the matter.

  Now was the end of a lot of things. He held the rewards of the year in his hands and lap, sat among his fellows as he could now no longer, in quite the same way, sit among them. He was through school, grown up. It had been all right, but he didn’t want any more of it. Bruce said he was going on to college. Let him be the grind of the family. There was more fun in the world than that. There was his ball-playing job this summer, the possibility in the future of a tryout with the Bees, and the big leagues ahead.

  And in back of the hall somewhere, back where the first sharp spats of clapping started whenever his name was called to go up for an award, was Laura, and Laura was somehow the symbol of the end of all this. He turned his head and looked at the boys along the row, whispering together, snickering, telling jokes. Kids. Nothing but kids.

  His mother and father and Bruce were standing together near the arc light under the row of little planted maples when he came out with Laura. For a moment he would have slipped away if he could have. But the crowd was shoving behind him. He took Laura’s arm. “Come on,” he said, “you want to meet my folks?”

  “Oh gee!” Laura said. She made quick dabs at her hair and peeked into her compact mirror. “Do I look all right?”

  “You look swell.”

  “I’m scared,” she said. “What if they don’t like me?”

  “If they don‘t, that’s their tough luck.”

  He was a little nervous himself, for fear his old man would make some break, be grouchy about something. But it was all right. His father was dressed up fit to kill, black and white shoes, Panama hat, diamond in his tie, and his mother wore her best dress, the one that had cost eighty dollars and had been bought over her protests when the old man had a fit of generosity. Chet was glad she had it, anyhow. It looked nice. And you could always depend on Ma to be kind. She smiled at him and took Laura’s hand, and it was all right. His father kidded them. Didn’t Laura feel a little funny, going around with a Big Shot? She’d be lucky to kiss the hem of his garments now. He took off his Panama and clapped it on Chet’s head. “How’s the head size?” he said.

  “All right.”

  “Good,” his old man said. He kept looking out over the crowd, standing big and broad as a bridge pier while the crowd swirled around him. He seemed abstracted, almost embarrassed. His eyes met Chet‘s, wandered away, came back again. “Well, you’ve got more education now than either your mother or I had,” he said to Chet and Bruce. “Let’s see what you can do with it.”

  They looked at him and moved their lips, murmuring something.

  “It’s a big night for both of you,” Elsa said. “I’m proud of you both.” She turned to Laura. “They’re pretty good boys, both of them, even if they are so homely,” she said, and her smile asked Laura into the family, made her part of the circle.

  “Homely!” Laura said. “I think they’re two of the best looking boys in school.”

  “Now my head size is going up,” Chet said.

  Bruce kept looking at Laura. “I hate to be classed with him,” he said. “He looks like something you’d find in a rat trap. Like old second-hand cheese.”

  “I could think of something you look like,” Chet said, “but I’m too polite to mention it here.”

  “You look a good deal alike to me;” Elsa said. “How does that suit you?”

  “Rotten,” Bruce said.

  “Lousy,” said Chet. He reached over and took a poke at Bruce. “So you graduated from high school!” he said. “When you gonna get your first long pants?”

  “Horse collar,” Bruce said.

  They were all grinning, and it was a good feeling to be standing there all dressed up, something accomplished, everybody friendly and horsing around. “Mama,” Bo Mason said, “maybe we ought to take these young fry out to celebrate. Where shall we go?”

  “Where do they want to go?” Elsa said.

  “Where do you want to go?” Chet said to Laura.

  “Gee,” she said, “I ought to go home, really.”

  “Oh bushwah. How about a show?”

  “It’s pretty late, isn’t it?”

  “Not late at all,” Bo Mason said. “I often stay out after ten.”

  “Well, all right,” she said, laughing.

  “Haven’t you got a girl, Bruce?” Elsa said. “Wouldn’t you like to take somebody?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Bruce’s scared of girls,” Chet said. He tucked Laura’s arm boldly under his. “There’s a half dozen chase him around all the time, but he dowanna.”

  “Go lay a nice rough firebrick,” Bruce said.

  They went to the movies, and after the movies they stopped for ice cream, and on the way back to the car they passed a shooting gallery and Bruce and Chet and their father shot for kewpie dolls. Bruce won, and his father looked at him in something like amazement. “He’s been practicing up all spring on the rifle team,” Chet said.

  “Yeah,” his brother said. “And even when I’m out of practice I’ll take you on any old time.”

  “This seems funny,” Elsa said. “Remember back in Dakota when you won me a lot of kewpies and pennants and things at the carnival in Devil’s Lake?”

  “I was shooting a little better that day,” Bo said.

  “I guess. That was the day you won the state traps championship.”

  “Really?” Laura said.

  “He just looks that way,” Chet said, and poked his father’s shoulder, solid as a wall. “He used to be a shooter and a ball player and all sorts of things. Never think it to look at him now.”

  His father let loose a stinging cuff that just grazed Chet’s ear, and they sparred on th
e sidewalk, horsing around like kids, until Chet got self-conscious and quit. His father’s iron arm stuck out to jolt him one. “Get on any time,” his father said, holding the arm out straight. “Do some trick bar stuff. Chin yourself. Let me know when you do, though, so I don’t forget you’re there and drop you.”

  “Gee,” Laura said later, when he took her in. “I think your family’s swell. Your dad is a good egg.”

  “He’s all right,” Chet said.

  “And your mother’s so sweet. I just love her.”

  “So do I,” Chet said. “See you tomorrow?”

  “After class?”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you there.”

  He went back to the car and got in, and on the way home they all sang. It was funny, Chet thought as he got into bed. It was darned funny how the old man changed. One minute he was the damnedest old crab on earth, ordering you around and bawling you out, and the next he was a hell of a good guy. You could depend on Ma to be right in there, any time, even if she felt lousy, but you could never tell about the old man.

  He guessed that the old man was pretty proud of his kids tonight, maybe that explained it. He stewed around and raised hell, but he wanted you to be something all the time, and because he had never got past the eighth grade himself he thought education was the clear stuff. That was a laugh. He ought to go into a study hall sometime. Still, it was sort of nice to know that the old man was proud of you. It made you feel as if everything was all right. As he dropped off to sleep he had a curious feeling that his old man’s pride was somehow the best thing in the whole day.

  Now summer, the best part of the year. Rising at six thirty you could hear the birds making a great clatter in the back yard, and see robins running, their heads cocking sideways to listen, their beaks digging down hard and their legs bracing, and the night-crawlers coming out of the grass stretching and hanging on. You could smell the morning smell of sprinkled lawns, and hear from across the street the whir of a lawnmower, and as you ate breakfast alone in the kitchen the Tribune thudded on the front porch and you went to get it, propping it against the milk bottle as you ate.