The Big Rock Candy Mountain (35 page)

The boy wondered, looking at first one, then another. They were both laughing at him. Then it hit him. “Fourth of July!” he said.

“Okay,” his father said. He cuffed at him again, but missed. “Maybe we'll go into Chinook for the Fourth. Fireworks, ballgame, parade, pink lemonade sold in the shade by an old maid.”

“Wheel” the boy said. He stooped and wrestled the pup, and afterward, when he lay panting on the ground, resting, and the pup gave up lapping his ears and lay down too, he thought that he had the swellest Ma and Pa there was.

That night his father showed him how to get the pup in a corner and make him sit up, bracing his back against the wall. For long, patient hours in the next few days he braced the pup. there and repeated, “Sit up! Sit up! Sit up!” while he shoved back the slipping hind feet, straightened the limp spine, lifted the dropping front paws. You had to say the command a lot, his father said, and you had to reward him when he did it right. And you had to do only one trick at a time. After he learned to sit up you could teach him to jump over a stick, roll over, speak, shake hands, and play dead. The word for playing dead was “charge!” He would teach him, Bruce thought, to do that next, so they could play war. It would be better than having Chet there, because Chet never would play dead. He always argued and said he shot you first.

When he wasn't training the pup he was dreaming of Chinook and the ballgame and parade and fireworks, sky rockets, Roman candles, pinwheels. He was curious about pinwheels, because he remembered a passage in
Peck's
Bad Boy and His Pa where a pinwheel took after Pa and cornered him up on the sofa. But he was curious about all fireworks; he had never seen any except firecrackers. And the finest thing of all to imagine was the mountains, because Pa and Ma decided that since they were that close, they might as well drive up to the mountains too, and take the whole day.

His father teased him. Probably, he said, it would rain pitchforks on the Fourth. But his mother said Oh Pa, don't talk like that.

Then on the afternoon of the third they all stood in the yard and watched the southeast. Thunderheads were piling up there, livid white in front and black and ominous behind. Thunder rumbled like a wagon over a bridge.

“It'll pass over,” Elsa said, and patted Bruce on the back. “It just wouldn't be fair if it rained now and spoiled our holiday.”

The boy looked up and saw his father's dubious expression. “Do you think it'll blow over, Pa? Hardly any have blown over yet.”

“Bound to blow over,” his father said. “Law of averages. They can't all make a rain.”

But the boy remembered three rains from that same quarter that same month that had gone on for twenty-four hours. He stayed in the yard watching, hoping against hope until the wall of dark was almost to the fireguard and the advance wind was stirring dust in the yard, stayed until the first large drops fell and puffed heavily in the dust, stayed until his mother pulled him inside with dark speckles all over his shirt. “Don't you worry,” she said. “It'll be clear tomorrow. It has to be.”

That night he stayed up until nine, waiting to see if the steady downpour would stop, hating the whisper of the rain outside and the gravelly patter on the roof. The tomcat awoke and stretched on the couch, jumped off with a sudden soft thud and went prowling into the sleeping porch, but the boy sat up. His parents were reading, not saying much. Once or twice he caught them looking at him, and always the house whispered with the steady, windy sound of the rain. This was no thunder shower. This was a drencher, and it could go on for two days, this time of year. His father had said so, with satisfaction, of other rains just like it.

When his mother finally sent him off to bed he went unwillingly, undressed slowly to see if the rain wouldn't stop before he got his shoes off, his stockings off, his overalls off. But when he was in his nightshirt it still rained steadily and insistently, and he turned into his pillow wanting to cry. A big tear came out and he felt it hanging on the side of his nose. He lay very still for fear it would fall off. He strangled the sob that jumped in his throat because that would make the drop fall, and while he was balancing the drop he fell asleep.

 

After the night's rain the yard was spongy and soft under the boy's bare feet. He stood at the edge of the packed dooryard in the flat thrust of sunrise looking at the ground washed clean and smooth and trackless, feeling the cool mud under his toes. Experimentally he lifted his right foot and put it down in a new place, pressed, picked it up again to look at the neat imprint of straight edge and curving instep and the five round dots of toes. The air was so fresh that he sniffed as he would have sniffed the smell of cinnamon.

Lifting his head, he saw how the prairie beyond the fireguard looked darker than in dry times, healthier with green-brown tints, smaller and more intimate somehow than it did when the heat waves crawled over scorched grass and carried the horizons backward into dim and unseeable distances. And standing in the yard above his one clean footprint, feeling his own verticality in all that spread of horizontal land, he sensed that as the prairie shrank he grew. He was immense. A little jump would crack his head on the. sky; a stride would take him to any horizon.

His eyes turned into the low south sky, cloudless, almost colorless in the strong light. Just above the brown line of the horizon, faint as a watermark on pale blue paper, was the tracery of the mountains, tenuous and far-off, but today accessible for the first time. His mind had played among those ghostly summits for uncountable lost hours: today, in a few strides, they were his. And more. Under the shadow of those peaks, those Bearpaws that he and his mother always called the Mountains of the Moon, was Chinook, the band, the lemonade stands, the parade, the ballgame, the fireworks.

The pup lay watching, belly down on the damp ground. In a gleeful spasm the boy stooped to flap the dog's ears, then bent and spun in a wild wardance while the pup barked. And when his father came to the door in his undershirt, yawning, running a hand up the back of his head and through his hair, peering out from gummed eyes to see how the weather looked, the boy's voice was one deep breathing relief from yesterday's rainy fear.

“It's clear as a bell,” he said.

His father yawned again, clopped his jaws, rubbed his eyes, mumbled something from a mouth furry with sleep. He stood on the step scratching himself comfortably, looking down at boy and dog.

“Going to be hot,” he said slyly.“Might be too hot to drive.”

“Aw, Pal”

“Going to be a scorcher. Melt you right down to axle grease riding in that car.”

The boy regarded him doubtfully, saw the lurking sly droop of his mouth. “Aw, we are too going!”

At his father's laugh he burst from his immobility like a sprinter starting, raced one complete circle around the house with the dog after him. When he flew around past his father again his voice trailed out behind him at the corner. “Gonna feed the hens,” he said. His father looked after him, scratched his knee, laughed suddenly, and went back indoors.

Through chores and breakfast the boy moved with the dream of a day's rapture in his eyes, but that did not keep him from swift and agile helpfulness. He didn't even wait for commands. He scrubbed himself twice, slicked down his hair, hunted up clean clothes, wiped the mud from his shoes and put them on. While his mother packed the shoebox of lunch he stood at her elbow proffering aid. He flew to stow things in the topless old Ford. He got a rag and polished the brass radiator. Once or twice, jumping around to help, he looked up to see his parents looking at each other with the knowing, smiling expression in the eyes that said they were calling each other's attention to him.

“Just like a racehorse,” his father said, and the boy felt foolish, swaggered, twisted his mouth down, said “Aw!” But in a moment he was hustling them again. They ought to get going, with fifty miles to drive. Long before they were ready he was standing beside the Ford, licked and immaculate and so excited that his feet jumped him up and down without his own volition or knowledge.

It was eight o‘clock before his father came out, lifted off the front seat, poked the flat stick down into the gas tank, and pulled it out dripping. “Pretty near full,” he said. “If we're going to the mountains too we better take a can along, though. Fill that two-gallon one with the spout.”

The boy ran, dug the can out of the shed, filled it at the spigot of the drum that stood on a plank support to the north of the house. When he came back, his left arm stuck straight out and the can knocking against his leg, his mother was settling herself into the back seat among parcels and waterbags.

“Goodness,” she said. “This is the first time I've been the first ready since I don't know when. I should think you'd have done all this last night.”

“Plenty time.” The father stood looking down at the boy. “All right, racehorse. You want to go to this shindig you better hop in.”

The boy was up in the front seat like a squirrel. His father walked around to the front of the car. “Okay,” he said. “Look sharp, now. When she kicks over, switch her to magneto and pull the spark down.”

The boy said nothing. He looked upon the car with respect and a little awe. They didn't use it much, and starting it was a ritual like a firedrill. The father unscrewed the four-eared brass plug, looked down into the radiator, screwed the cap back on, and bent to take hold of the crank. “Watch it, now,” he said.

The boy felt the gentle heave of the springs, up and down, as his father wound the crank. He heard the gentle hiss in the bowels of the engine as the choke wire was pulled out, and his nose filled with the strong, volatile odor of gasoline. Over the slope of the radiator his father's brown strained face looked up. “Is she turned on all right?”

“Yup. She's on battery.”

“Must have flooded her. Have to let her rest a minute.”

They waited, and then after a few minutes the wavelike heaving of the springs again, the rise and fall of the blue shirt and bent head over the radiator, the sighing swish of the choke, a stronger smell of gasoline. The motor had not even coughed.

The two voices came simultaneously from the car. “What's the matter with it?”

His brow puckered in an intent scowl, Bo stood back blowing mighty breaths. “Son of a gun,” he said. Coming round, he pulled at the switch, adjusted the spark and gas levers. A fine mist of sweat made his face shine like dark oiled leather.

“There isn't anything really wrong, is there?” Elsa said, and her voice wavered uncertainly on the edge of fear.

“I don't see how there could be,” Bo said. “She's always started right off, and she was running all right when I drove her in here.”

The boy looked at his mother sitting erect and stiff among the things on the seat. She was all dressed up, a flowered dress, a hat with hard green varnished grapes on it pinned to her red hair. For a moment she sat, stiff and nervous. “What will you have to do?” she said.

“I don't know. Look at the motor.”

“Well, I guess I'll get out of the sun while you do it,” she said, and fumbled her way out of the clutter.

The boy felt her exodus like a surrender, a betrayal. If they didn't hurry up they'd miss the parade. In one motion he bounced out of the car. “Gee whiz!” he said. “Let's do something. We got to get started.”

“Keep your shirt on,” his father grunted. Lifting the hood, he bent his head inside. His hand went out to test wires, wiggle sparkplug connections, make tentative pulls at the choke. The weakly-hinged hood slipped and came down across his wrist, and he swore. “Get me the pliers,” he said.

For ten minutes he probed and monkeyed. “Might be the plugs,” he said at last. “She doesn't seem to be getting any fire through her.”

Elsa, sitting on a box in the shade, smoothed her flowered dress nervously. “Will it take long?”

“Half hour.”

“Any day but this!” she said. “I don't see why you didn't make sure last night.”

Bo breathed through his nose and bent into the engine again. “It was raining last night,” he said.

One by one the plugs came out, were squinted at, scraped, the gap tested with a thin dime. The boy stood on one foot, then the other, time pouring like a flood of uncatchable silver dollars through his hands. He kept looking at the sun, estimating how much time there was left. If they got started right away they might still make it for the parade, but it would be close. Maybe they'd drive right up the street while the parade was on, and be part of it ...

“Is she ready?” he said.

“Pretty quick.”

He wandered over by his mother, and she reached out to put an arm around him. “Well, anyway we can get there for the band and the ballgame and the fireworks,” he said. “If she doesn't start till noon we can make it for those.”

She said, “Pa'll get it going in a minute. We won't miss anything, hardly.”

“You ever seen skyrockets, Ma?”

“Once.”

“Are they fun?”

“Wonderful,” she said. “Just like a million stars all colors all exploding at once.”

His feet took him back to his father, who straightened up with a belligerent grunt. “Now!” he said. “If the sucker doesn't start now ...”

And once more the heaving of the springs, the groaning of the turning engine, the hiss of the choke. He tried short, sharp half-turns, as if to catch the motor off guard. Then he went back to the stubborn, laboring spin. The back of his shirt was stained darkly, the curving dikes of muscles along the spine's hollow showing cleanly where the cloth stuck. Over and over, heaving, stubborn at first, then furious, till he staggered back panting.