The Big Rock Candy Mountain (64 page)

But the car gone, and the whole load, two or three thousand dollars gone as surely as if they had taken the sum in hundred dollar bills and touched a match to them. It served her right. She had been thinking of that bank balance almost in the same terms Bo had. She had been seeing ultimate security and emancipation in it. It was just as well for her to learn that security was not there, that the whole thing could disappear like mist touched by the sun “I'm going to bed,” Bo said. “If anybody calls or comes around I'm out of town and you don't know when I'll be back.”

 

Three days later he hunted up Heimie in the Smoke Shop. Heimie, elegant in a lavender silk shirt, pinstripe suit, yellow shoes, had a greeting as mellow as syrup. He led Bo into the back room and sent the counter man for a bottle.

“You made a quick trip,” he said.

“What makes you think I've been anywhere?” Bo said, and stared at Heimie hard. Heimie shrugged and let it go.

The bottle came and Heimie poured two shots. “Here's how,” he said. Bo drank, watching him. It would have been a pleasure to reach. across the table and slap that light secretive smile off Heimie's mouth, but it wouldn't do. You had to know when somebody had you, or you'd wash out fast.

Heimie's smile deepened. He twirled the whiskey glass slowly. “Thought any more about that proposition?” he said.

“I'm willing to listen.”

“Ah,” Heimie said. “That's what I've been wanting to hear. You're too valuable a man to waste your talents working alone.” Steadily smiling, inviting Bo to make a double meaning out of that if he chose, he leaned his impeccable elbows on the table and dropped his voice. “What is it you want to know, now?”

“I want to know what the proposition is,” Bo said impatiently. “How do I know whether it's any good or not?”

“You want to go on hauling down from the line?”

“That's my racket,” Bo said. “I don't want anything to do with any still, if that's what you mean.”

“Beans can handle that all right.” Heimie pursed his lips, thinking. “What would you say to a proposition like this: You haul down to us here, whole loads. You don't have to fuss around with deliveries or collections or anything. Just whole loads, dump them off and you're
clean. And
protected.”

“What would I get out of it?”

“What's it worth?”

“I can make six hundred a load at least, hauling for myself.”

“But you take chances,” Heimie said. “You take a lot more chances. Law all over the place, and getting thicker. And they have to pinch somebody, see? They're fixed not to pinch our boys, so they have to make their reputations on the stragglers and lone wolves. It's a good setup to be in on.”

“How much?” Bo said.

“What about two hundred a load?”

“Don't make me laugh.”

“That's high pay, boy, for a job that's safe as a church.”

“But it isn't high enough,” Bo said, “and it isn't as safe as you make out. What if I got hijacked?”

He watched Heimie's face closely, but Heimie didn't tumble. His face was still smiling, faintly amused.

The organization will take that chance, not you,” Heimie said.

“But I don't think it's much of a risk.” He grew more confidential, huddling across the table and squinting as he figured in his head. “Now look,” he said, “you're the best man I know at getting in and out with stuff. We can use you, and you can use us. We'd be suckers to work against each other, but that's what we'd be doing if you didn't come in. But two hundred a load—well, make it two fifty—is damn good for what you'd be doing.”

“We aren't getting anywhere,” Bo said heavily. “Now I'll make you a proposition. I'm willing to come in, on any kind of terms that gives me a decent cut. I'll haul down from Govenlock for you for fifteen bucks a case, no less, you putting up the money for the stuff and paying me cash on the nose when I bring it in. You guarantee protection, and let me be the judge of when it's safe to make a trip. And if I don't haul for anybody but you, you'd have to furnish me a car.”

“Say, now, wait a minute!” Heimie had his hands up, warding off imaginary blows. “Fifteen a case? And protection? And a car? You want a gold mine.”

“That's what you've got,” Bo said. “Why shouldn't I want one?”

“You've got an exaggerated idea of how much there is in this business,” Heimie said, still playfully. He took out a pencil and figured on an envelope. “Make it twelve a case, and you furnish the car, and it's a go.”

“Couldn't do it,” Bo said.

“Fifteen a case would be four hundred and fifty a load.”

“That's a whole lot less than I'm making now.”

Heimie shook his head, at first slowly, then emphatically. “We couldn't afford that kind of money.”

“Listen,” Bo said. “This is a business deal, isn't it?”

“What else?”

“And I'm going to be a kind of hired man in it.”

“Not exactly.”

“Exactly,” Bo said. “And I'll be doing the hard and the dangerous part, and you know it damn well. So I'm worth wages enough to keep me interested in working hard for you, and it's up to you to put up the car. You don't ask a truck driver' to furnish his own hack.”

“Suppose we did put up a car,” Heimie said after a pause. “Would you haul for twelve?”

“Fifteen.”

“Then I guess we can't get together.” Heimie's voice grew crisp. “Twelve a case, and we'll put up a car. That's as deep as we can go. Take it or leave it?”

For a moment Bo hesitated. He didn't like it at any price, but there wasn't much else he could do. “Okay,” he said finally. “I'll take it.”

Toward the end of May Bo came home from town with his special look of excited secrecy, his air of being possessed by great schemes, which could only be divulged little by little, with suspense and the aggravation of Elsa's curiosity. He began by asking, quite casually, if she wanted to go on a-little trip.

“Up to Govenlock?” she said.

“No. A real trip.”

“Sure. Where?”

“Yellowstone, maybe. Salt Lake City. All around.”

“You mean—just for the trip?”

“Sure.”

“Kids too?”

“Kids too.”

“That would be wonderful!” she said. “Can we afford it?”

Bo's wink was almost grim. “I'm going to see that we can afford it. This is where I catch up a little on Heimie and his outfit.”

“Oh,”
she
said, and her animation faded. “You mean we'll be hauling a load.”

“For the love of Mike,” he said, “did you think we could go off touring just for the fun of it?”

“Some people do.”

“Some people are richer than we are, too. Come on out in the garage, I want to show you something.”

He took her out and showed her: an auto tent, folding beds that hooked to the running boards, a food box bolted to the right front fender, with shelves and boxes and a lid that folded down for a table. “Everything the very latest,” he said. “This is due to be a trip in style.”

“But the kids,” she said. “What if we should get caught?”

“That's just it. With the kids along we wouldn't even get stopped. No prohi is stopping families on a tour. He'd lose his job the first time he searched some big shot's car.”

She was silent, and her eyes came up to meet his. “It's so much like using them,” she said.

He snorted. “They'd have the time of their lives. We'd camp out, see some scenery, take it easy. There isn't a chance for a hitch.”

“Where would we be hauling to?”

Bo smiled, his lips tight across his teeth. “Heimie wants to open up some new territory. Salt Lake City, especially. And I've been such a good dog he's sending me. It's only incidental that if I get knocked over down there he'd wash his hands of me and not know anything about any agreement. But that's all right.”

“Why?” she said. “Why would you go?”

“Because I can get even with the son of a bitch,” Bo said. “I'm taking his load in the car, all right, but I'm hooking on a trailer of my own.”

“That's double-crossing him.”

“You're damned right,” Bo said. “The old double-x, just what he pulled on me.”

He pulled her back to the house, talking all the time. “I'm going up to Govenlock day after tomorrow. You'll have to pack up and store what stuff we've collected. We've lived in this house long enough. Can you be ready soon as the kids are out of school?”

“I guess so,” she said, “but ...”

“But nothing. This is going to be the nicest trip you ever had.”

“I know it would be fun for me. I was thinking about the kids.”

“I'll bet you a hundred dollars they'd stow away if we tried to leave them behind.”

She laughed uncertainly. “I guess they would, at that.” Her laugh died, and she threw him a pained and anxious look. “I keep thinking of that dummy you took along once,” she said. “Now you're taking all of us for the same reason. We'll all be camouflage.”

He looked at her with such utter lack of comprehension that she gave up.

They pulled out in broad daylight, with the neighbors out to see them off, going publicly like any tourists, their lunch box high on the right fender, the rest of that whole side wedged with suitcases in the luggage carrier, the tent and camp beds strapped on the iron grill back of the spare tire. In the tonneau the boys' heads stuck up through a mountainous load. Bo laughed as he packed them in. “Whiskey to right of them, whiskey to left of them, whiskey on top of them gurgled and thundered,” he said. Sixteen cases of whiskey, camping equipment, food, and four people were in the car. They sat on dynamite and waved goodbye to the neighbors and pulled out boldly through the town on the road to Fort Benton, and at Fort Benton, back in a dusty alley behind a warehouse, they picked up the loaded trailer carrying fourteen more cases of whiskey, and crossed the Missouri and started south. The detour to Fort Benton took them almost a half day out of their way, but it made the trailer safe. Eventually, that night, they wound up in the pass above where Bo had been hijacked in November.

The next night, after slogging all day through heavy gumbo mud, they camped in the clear evening with the sun pink on the Crazy Mountains east of them, and the next day they were in Yellowstone, one loaded car among dozens of dusty loaded cars, one family of tourists among the hundreds who peeked into the smoking caverns of geysers and tossed chocolate bars to bears and strung out behind the road construction gangs on dusty unsurfaced grades through the timber. All of that was fun. Elsa never failed to wave at cars they met or passed; they rarely failed to wave at her, and the feeling of being free and open and in society again, part of a good-natured fraternity of gypsies, pleased her almost more than the scenery.

Yellowstone took them exactly one day. In spite of his belief that he was taking it easy, seeing the sights, Bo pushed the Hudson along. A half hour was enough for the canyon, fifteen minutes apiece sufficed for two or three of the more notable geysers, ten minutes was enough to stop and feed some old robber bear. Elsa and the boys looked enviously at parties starting out on horseback, at enticing trails leading off to Mount Washburn or Cody or the Tetons. For all that, they were outside the boundaries of the park by seven the next morning, and that night they were creeping through heavy construction again on the edge of Blackfoot, Idaho.

The roadbed was almost impassable, the detours worse. When they were within sight of the trees of the town they hit a
chuckhole
that rocked them clear to the axle. Bo winced and gritted his teeth, and the boys whooped from the back seat, pushing the shifted load back off them.

“Smell anything?” Bo said.

Elsa sniffed. “No.”

“I do,” Chet said.

“God damn!” Bo said. He stopped the car and got out, sniffing over the load. “Busted one, that's sure,” he said finally. “But it would be like hunting for a needle in a haystack.”

“What can you do?”

“Nothing, now. If we get to a good out-of-the-way camp I can unload.”

Ahead of them the late sun burned through the tops of a long line of Lombardy poplars, and the roadside was deep green and cool-smelling with alfalfa. “This is a pretty town,” Elsa said. “I don't know when I've seen a town so green.”

“Irrigation,” Bo said.

There were ditches along the road, a wide canal running off across the meadow toward the north. When they pulled past the big U.S. ROYAL CORD scroll bearing the history of Blackfoot, Elsa said, “It would be nice if we could camp here somewhere, it's so cool and green,” and five minutes later, when they came to the town tourist park, green-lawned under a canopy of trees, Bo looked at her once and pulled in. Broken bottle or no broken bottle, this was too pleasant a camp ground to miss.

They found a spot under the trees near the irrigation ditch, and after supper Bo rummaged a little in search of the broken bottle. But the load was too solid, and he didn't dare unload completely now, with tourists pulling in every few minutes and settling down for the night. A car was parked and a tent went up hardly fifty feet away. All he could do was settle everything back in and tuck quilts and blankets in tightly all around, to keep the smell as muffled as possible. By nine o‘clock they were in bed.

It was barely daylight when Bo sat up abruptly, creaking the iron framework of the bed. “Hey!” a voice was saying outside the tent. “Hey, wake up!”