The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “You’ve been too busy to talk to me,” Bo said, and shrugged.

  “Who could talk to you?” she said. “The minute anybody opens their mouth you jump right down their throat about something. I don’t have to take that kind of treatment.”

  “No,” Bo said. “I guess not.”

  She was giving him the once-over, obviously wondering why he had asked her to sit down and talk. Let her wonder. He didn’t know himself, exactly. While he was looking up at her from under his eyebrows, she put out her finger and touched the new tie. “Mmm,” she said. “New tie.”

  “Check.”

  “Handsome.”

  “Glad you like it.”

  She looked around the lobby, humming a little song. The bulldog sniffed at Bo’s glittering shoes, and she jerked the leash. “So you’re not really mad at me,” she said.

  “No,” he said, watching her. “No, I’m not mad at you.”

  She slid off the arm of the chair onto the cushion, bent to un-snap the dog’s leash. “Heard anything from Dubois?”

  “I saw him this morning.”

  “You look as if something nice had happened,” she said.

  “Something nice has.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad!” she said. (He saw her fix her face for that one.) “What?”

  Now she was wondering just how nice she ought to be, estimating the value of what had happened, trying to guess whether he was worth making a play for and taking back on. The bitch. But she was good looking, you couldn’t deny it. The meat was put on her bones just right.

  “Oh, come on,” she said, and leaned a little forward. “You know I’d be glad to hear anything nice that had happened to you.”

  Whatever game it was he had been playing—and he didn’t know himself why he was sitting here gassing with her—was swallowed in the enormous angry contempt he felt. “Especially if you thought I’d made some dough,” he said.

  She was no longer leaning forward. “Now don’t start that again!” she said.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not true,” she said. “You think you put me up so damned handsome, and I ought to stick around while you let loose of nickels one by one! You talk about all the money you spent on me. All the money you ever spent on me you could put you know where, and it wouldn’t clog you either.”

  There was nothing in the whole lobby but her spiteful face. He wanted to reach out and slap it bloody. The blood came heavy and slow into his own face, a smothering weight of it. “You thought when you came in here I’d made a killing, didn’t you?” he said. “So you thought maybe you’d snuggle up and play sisters again. Well, you can go to hell. Maybe I’ve made a killing and maybe I haven’t ...”

  She stood up. “I don’t give a damn whether you have or not,” she said. “You could be rolling in gold and you’d still be nothing but a filthy old goat to me!”

  “If I was rolling in gold ...” he said, but she cut him off, whip-lashed him.

  “You could go roll in the manure for all I care. It wouldn’t make you smell any differentl”

  She started for the stairs, turned with set face to whistle up the dog, and disappeared. Bo worked his hands. He was standing, ready to leap after her, knock her down, kick her apart, beat her damned good-looking weasel face in. He breathed loudly, heard himself gasping for air, and sat down again.

  The clerk was looking at his nails behind the desk. In the doorway off to the side Mrs. Winter stood as if not quite sure she should come in at all. She must have come in the back way while they were shouting at each other. Furiously fumbling for a match to re-light his cigar, he ignored her, but she came over and sat down anyway.

  “Oh dear!” she said.

  He grunted.

  “I don’t see why she has to be that way,” Mrs. Winter said. When he didn’t answer she turned the handbag over in her lap and picked with her painted nails at the patterned alligator leather. “Don’t be downhearted about her,” she said. “It’ll all come around.”

  “If you think I’m downhearted about her,” he said through his teeth, “take another think!”

  She smiled and patted his knee. “That’s the way. Don’t let her bother you. Just between you and me ...” She leaned her skinny face toward him.

  “Just between you and me what?”

  “Just between you and me,” Mrs. Winter said, “she’s a bitch.”

  He grunted again. The anger had ebbed away, leaving the old dead weariness. Mrs. Winter smiled at him coaxingly. “You need a drink,” she said. “Come on up to my room and I’ll buy you one.”

  “Oh, I guess not, thanks.”

  “Come on. You’ll feel better after a shot.”

  He let her lead him up to her room on the second floor. He had not been in her room before. It was fussed up, he noticed. Curtains on the windows with tie-backs on them, woman’s junk around. Mrs. Winter got a bottle out of the bureau drawer and rinsed out the two bathroom glasses. She poured two stiff slugs and passed him one.

  “Success,” she said. “Everything you ever wanted.”

  “Mud in your eye,” he said automatically, and tossed it off. It went down smoothly, warmly, and he raised his eyes from the glass to see Mrs. Winter’s birdlike face smiling a birdlike smile at him.

  “Feel better?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Good Scotch.”

  “Have another.” She poured him one, and they sat on the edge of the bed and drank. This old crane of a Winter, he was thinking, was all right, even if she could hide behind a toothpick. By the third drink he was telling her about the Della, Patton, Nick Williams, the closed bank and the bankrupt building and loan association, the notes and the debts and the possibilities.

  “It’s hard,” she said. “Once you’ve been up it’s harder to climb back after a streak of bad luck. You’re all alone, too, aren’t you?”

  “All alone,” he said. “Got one boy left. He’s studying law in Minneapolis.” He felt for his wallet. “Want to see his picture?”

  He showed her the frayed newspaper photograph of Bruce with a golf bag over his arm, taken one day three or four years ago when he had been the medalist in a golf tournament.

  “He looks like you,” Mrs. Winter said.

  “He’s a bright kid,” Bo said, folding the picture back. “I haven’t seen him for a couple years, almost. Away at school.” The weariness had left him, but he felt sad. Everybody gone. Sis dead, Chet dead. “I had another boy,” he said. “Good ball player. He’d have made the big leagues with any kind of breaks. Died of pneumonia a little over three years ago.”

  “And your wife too,” Mrs. Winter said. “I know how it is. My husband died four years ago last April. I’ve just never seemed to belong anywhere since.”

  Bo heaved himself off the creaking bed. “I better run along,” he said. “Thanks for the drinks.”

  But Mrs. Winter was in front of him, her peaked face working. “Don’t go,” she said. “Please don’t go!”

  “Why not?”

  She twisted her twiggy fingers together. Her rings hung loosely, upside down, above the bony knuckles. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just.... I don’t know.”

  “Lonesome?”

  She nodded. “I guess. Lonesome as hell. I been through the mill. I just sort of feel like you’ve been too, you know how it is.”

  “Baby,” Bo said softly, “I’m not worth the try. I’m broke. I’m an old man, and I’m sick, and I’m broke. You’d be wasting your time. I couldn’t give you a thing.”

  “I don’t want anything,” she said. “It’s just tonight. I feel as if everybody’d gone away and left me. I wish you’d stay.”

  For some reason he kissed her, and felt her bony body crowd him, shivering. A sound that he meant for a laugh half strangled him. Not a soul in the whole damned town who wanted you except an old consumptive whore, and the hell of it was you liked it. “Look,” he said. “Think I’m a piker all you want. But I’m so strapped I couldn’t e
ven afford two dollars. What little I’ve got I’ve got to keep to eat on till something breaks.”

  “I don’t care about the two dollars,” she said.

  He thought briefly of Elaine up on the fourth floor, bedded down in her silk pajamas reading a magazine in bed, soft and warm and ten years younger than this poor old skin, and the thing that rose in him was quick and light as a bubble and bitter as a curse.

  “Okay,” he said.

  She was surprisingly passionate. Her thin arms were like a vise, her fingers like birds’ claws. For a while, for ten minutes, he was powerful, he felt his own weight and the undiminished strength of his body, but afterward he lay spent and breathing hard beside her, and when he got up quietly and got into his clothes and went down the night-lighted hall to his own room he was old and tired, and the numbness was back in his side and arm.

  2

  The sky that morning was like blue water with a white surf of clouds rolling eastward under a high wind, though no wind blew down on the city and the campus trees stirred only to the shrill of the seventeen-year locusts. Standing in the long line of gowned figures, waiting for the officials and the president and the visiting dignitaries to head the procession, Bruce sweated under the black serge and the heavy square of the mortar board. He opened the gown to let in some air, and as he did so his hand came close to the inner pocket of his coat, where the letters were. He reached in to feel them.

  There was no use to worry himself about what the last letter said and the others hinted. All those letters meant was that the old man wanted to squeeze some money out of him.

  Yes? he said. Then why did you telephone Joe Mulder in Salt Lake to go and see him, and tell Joe to lend him some money if he needed it, and send the bill to you?

  Because you were worried, he said. Sure you were worried. You are now. But you don’t believe it, anyway. If he’s down and out, you’ll give him what you can, but you’re not going to give him money just to throw down a worthless mine shaft.

  How much had he sent, anyway, since the first letter came in April? More than he could afford to send, anyway. You’re a sucker, he said. You let yourself be gouged because you have a sneaking feeling of guilt, God knows why. And you don’t even quite believe Joe when he writes that the old man is all right, a little worn looking, but all right. But of course he’s all right. You’d have heard if he wasn’t.

  And that damned stock. That was what really bothered him. Either that was a very shrewd way of pumping him for money, or it meant something. Why should the old man send on a paper indicating that he had put forty-seven hundred dollars into that mine, with the note: “Hang onto this stock, Bruce. Some day it will make you a lot of money. It’s all I’ve got left to give you. Good luck and don’t worry about me. I’m at the end of my rope, that’s all.”

  He looked up as the gowned line stirred and murmured. The president came down the steps of Northrop. At least this silly rigmarole was beginning. It irritated him to have to stand in a hot gown for two or three hours while they went through a lot of medieval mummery. He ought to be doing something, either getting on down and starting work in George Nelson’s office, or hitting for Salt Lake to see what he could do there.

  No sir, he said. I won’t go running out there on a wild goose chase. If he needs money to live he knows he can get it from Joe. If he’s sick, Joe will see that he gets into a home or a hospital. There’s nothing else I can do. I’m a fool to take that much trouble.

  It was the eighth of June. His father’s last letter had been written on the first. If he had made up his mind before he wrote that letter, why hadn’t anything happened by now? It wasn’t going to happen, that was why. Joe would telegraph or call if anything did, and Joe had sent no word except the airmail letter dated the fourth. The whole thing was a squeeze play. Talk about losing your pride! The Big Shot stooping to use a trick like that worthless stock!

  He tried to be angry, but all he could feel was a baffled sense of frustration, of pain and regret and loss. To get mad was to kick the old man when he was down, and whether he meant that last letter or not, he was down.

  The procession began to shuffle forward. He shuffled with it, still thinking, still bothered, and he forgot to hook up the throat of his gown until the officious man ahead of him turned around and motioned. Ah yes, the forms, he said, and walked shufflingly, tipping his head back to watch the clouds wheel over before the unheard, unfelt upper-air wind.

  He saw the young woman a long way away, coming up along the procession as if looking for someone, moving against the stream and searching the faces under the flat black caps. He almost chuckled, thinking what a job it would be to locate any one particular face in that half mile of people all dressed alike. She came on, peering, not waiting for the line to come past her, but walking fast herself, and when she got nearer he saw that it was Mary Trask, the secretary of the Law School, and then he knew that she was looking for him.

  He stepped out of line, aware that heads turned to watch him, and with a frozen quiet that was like walking in sleep he went to meet her. She was agitated, half out of breath.

  “Oh, I was afraid I wouldn’t catch you till you got in,” she said. “Can you come?”

  “Telephone?” Bruce said.

  “Yes. They tried at your room and the landlady told them you were at the exercises so they called the school.” They were already walking fast away from the line, across the clipped and manicured carpet of lawn under the still trees, with the locusts’ noise loud as a wind in the branches but not a leaf stirring. Mary glanced up at his face. “I’m afraid it’s something bad,” she said. “I wouldn’t have come, only they said it was a matter of life and death.”

  Bruce said nothing. He was locked tight, everything inside him put away and the doors slammed shut.

  Except for a couple of stenographers the office was empty. Mary let him in behind the hinged door and picked up the telephone. He saw her turn aside to avoid meeting his eyes, and there was relief in her voice when she got the operator. “This is the Law School,” she said. “Mr. Mason is here now.”

  Silently she handed the instrument to Bruce, and he stood listening to the far-off buzz, the half-heard monosyllables of the operator, the click of connections. In a minute now death would walk its slack wire from Salt Lake City to Minneapolis, that buzzing and those monosyllables and the mechanical clicks would jell down into their real meaning, and Joe’s voice would be saying ...

  “Hello!” he said.

  “One moment please.”

  It seemed to him that half his life had been spent going through this monotonous ritual of death. Long distance calls, telegraph messages, a flying trip to Salt Lake. He was like a vaudeville performer caught in an act he loathed but forced to go on through endless repetitions, starting at the same stale cues, going into his dance at the same habitual moments.

  “Hello,” Joe’s voice said. “Hello?”

  Bruce stiffened. “Hello,” he said. “Hello, Joe. What is it? Has he ... ?”

  “It’s hell,” Joe said. “You all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “He’s dead,” Joe said. “Shot himself this morning in the hotel lobby.”

  There was no shock in the words. Bruce was braced so hard that nothing could have moved him then. “Yeah,” he said.

  “It’s worse than you think,” Joe said. “He shot a woman too.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Bruce said. “Dead?”

  “Yes. I didn’t get her name. Maybe you’d know who she was. One of our workmen lives in that hotel. He heard about it just a minute after it happened, and I went right over. There wasn’t much I could do, so I started calling you.”

  “Yeah,” Bruce said. “Yeah, thanks, Joe. Can you do me a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “Have him taken up to the mortuary.”

  “I already did. The one where Chet and your mother were.”

  “Good,” Bruce said. He started to ask what about the police, saw Mary
Trask’s pained face as she listened, and said only, “I’ll be there tomorrow night. Have to drive. I haven’t got the money for a plane or train. Take me about thirty-six hours.”

  “Hell,” Joe said. “Hold it two hours and I’ll wire you some money. You can’t drive right through.”

  “I’d better drive,” Bruce said. “Look for me sometime before midnight tomorrow.”

  He hung up. The two stenographers were sitting behind their typewriters, watching and listening, Mary Trask was looking as if she might cry. The noise of the locusts rasped through the opened windows. “I’m sorry,” Mary said. “Is there anything ... ?”

  “Yes,” Bruce said. “If you would.” He stripped off the gown and mortar board and laid them on a desk. “Could you return these for me? They’re paid for. Somebody comes around to collect them, I think.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll fix it about the graduation. The dean will be back after the exercises, and I’ll see about a degree in absentia.”

  “That’s good of you,” he said. “Thanks very much.”

  “And you’re going to drive straight through to Salt Lake?”

  He nodded.

  “I couldn’t help hearing,” she said, confused. “I could lend you some money.”

  “No thanks, I’d rather drive.” He was already through the gate into the outer office.

  “Who?” Mary said, following him. “Who was it?”

  “My father,” Bruce said. “He’s dead.”

  He went outside. The last ragged end of the procession was disappearing into the building. He stood a moment on the edge of the grass to look in his wallet. Ten dollars, and his last check from the school wouldn’t be out for three or four days. He’d have to get some from George Nelson. This part too was familiar—the things to do, the mechanical completion of necessary details. Get the money—fifty ought to do it for the time being. Get a tank of gas. Stop by his room for some clothes? No. He would get along with what he was wearing, buy a shirt or two when he got there. Even while he planned the campaign he was hitting for the car, parked off at the edge of the campus, and within ten minutes he was in his uncle’s office explaining, his voice cold, his insides still frozen hard against any feeling whatever.