The Big Rock Candy Mountain (66 page)

“Holy cats,” he said. “I could sell whiskey in this town as fast as I could haul it in. I guess you're not going to have as long a vacation as you figured on.”

“Well,” she said, a little tartly, “we might take two or three days to see the place. You said Heimie didn't expect you back for two weeks.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure, we can stay a while and look around.” He looked at the brown canvas wall, his fingers tapping lightly on the bed. “Say!” he said, “did it ever occur to you ... ?”

“What?”

Excitement lifted him to his feet. His head lifted, eyes narrowed, he stood hefting the roll of bills in his palm. “Could you get along here for a week or so, you and the kids?”

“For a week? Why?”

“Because,” Bo said, “I'm going back up to Canada after another load.”

“But why can't we all go?”

“I want to crowd it. Heimie expects me to take two weeks. All right, I'll take two weeks. But in the meantime I'll haul in a load on my own hook.”

“It's his car,” she said, “and you're supposed to be working for him.”

“Yeah,” Bo said, “and he owes me a car and a load of Scotch.”

In the glare of the gasoline lantern his eyes were glowing slits. Elsa noticed again how the upward curve at the outer edge of his eyebrows gave him a curiously devilish look. “Besides,” he said, “I've got a feeling our dealings with Heimie are almost over.”

“I don't know,” she said. “If you make this trip you'll be as bad as Heimie.”

“Oh for hell's sake!” he said, and turned away. In a moment he was back, not to argue, because his mind was made up, but to pursue another strand of the idea. “I might take Chet along. You and Bruce could stay here and be comfortable.”

“How comfortable do you think I could be with him along on a trip?”

“He came down this last trip, didn't he?”

“I was along,” she said. “I'll tell you right now, Bo, you can't take him. I wish you wouldn't go yourself.”

He tossed the roll impatiently in his hand and stared at her. “We'd sure get rich if we followed your line,” he said. “I can make us fifteen hundred bucks cold.”

“I'm not thinking about that,” she said stiffly. “I'm thinking of what you'll get yourself into. What'll you do afterward? Go back, or stay down here, or what? And if you stay down here what'll you do with Heimie's car? Steal it?”

“I'd just as soon.”

“Oh you fooll” she said. “You'll get shot dead in some alley some day.” Tears gathered on her lashes and she shook them off. “Go ahead,” she said. “Put yourself on Heimie's level, take all the chances you want. But you can't take Chet.”

“All right,” he said. “I won't take Chet.”

Just at evening, seven days later, Bo bumped off the road into the campsite under the maples. He was red-eyed, sleepless, unshaven, weary, but he had thirty-five cases on the car and trailer, and the car was a brand new Hudson Super-Six, a mighty seven-passenger behemoth that even under the mud and dust gleamed with an expensive luster. He had not broken a bottle, had a spot of trouble, or been so much as looked at suspiciously, and he was loose from Heimie for good. Heimie's Hudson he had left at Fort Benton. At first he had been tempted, he said, to keep all of Heimie's roll, drive the car over a bridge somewhere, and make out to have killed himself. He could have changed his name and they could have started out as Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, or Mr. and Mrs. Davis, with a nice fat bankroll. But he had got thinking of what Elsa would say to that, and in the end he had sent Heimie a cashier's check for his share of the first load, and had left his car in a Fort Benton garage with a message that he was through, quitting the business and going back to Dakota.

Now, he said, they could really roll. Now their hands were untied and the world ahead of them.

During the ten days in which he was disposing of the second load he bought clothes, two new suits and three pairs of shoes and two Panama hats. He sent Elsa into town to outfit the boys and herself, and in the evening, a two-bit cigar in his mouth and the top of the new, washed, polished car down to air their prosperity to the world, he drove them all out to Saltair and blew the lid in a Coney Island spree. He tossed silver dollars to the boys whenever they ran out of money, he took them over the roller coaster, through the Fun House, into the restaurant where they had lobster which none of them either liked very well or knew how to eat. Once or twice he looked critically at Elsa's dress, and on the way in, driving with the cool night wind stirring their hair above the plate-glass wind wings, he told her she'd better go in tomorrow and get something dressy. The stuff she'd bought was all right for every day, but she ought to have something snappy to step out in.

“Isn't this all right?” she said. “Just camping the way we are, I should think this would do. It's a nice little dress.”

“Sure it's a nice little dress,” he said. He fished for a cigar. “It would do all right in Great Falls, but you can't step out in it around here. You're in the big leagues, Mama. You're out of the bush leagues now.”

“Can I have a house to live in?” she said. “Now that we're rich and can have new clothes and a new car and can throw money around at resorts, can I have a house? I'd like to be dry when it rains, and have a bath out of something besides a pail for a change.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we'll go house hunting. And we won't be hunting any little dump, either.”

“When we're poor,” she said, “you're as miserly as old Scrooge, and when we make a few dollars you throw it around with both hands. You need a manager.”

“Only thing I need a manager for,” he said, “is to add up my money for me. I get so I can't add that high after while.” He blew a whiff of expensive smoke into the air and put his arm around her, driving one-handed like a young buck stepping out on a flapper date, and when she stabbed him in the ribs to make him quit playing the fool he quelled her with a smoke screen.

VII

Long afterward, Bruce looked back on the life of his family with half-amused wonder at its rootlessness. The people who lived a lifetime in one place, cutting down the overgrown lilac hedge and substituting barberry, changing the shape of the lily-pool from square to round, digging out old bulbs and putting in new, watching their trees grow from saplings to giants that shaded the house, by contrast seemed to walk a dubious line between contentment and boredom. What they had must be comfortable, pleasant, worn smooth by long use; they did not feel the edge of change.

It was not permanence alone that made what the Anglo-Saxons called home, he thought. It was continuity, the flux of fashion and decoration moving in and out again as minds and purses altered, but always within the framework of the established and recognizable outline. Even if the thing itself was paltry and dull, the history of the thing was not.

If one subscribed to the idea of home at all, one would insist on an attic for the family history to hide in. His mother had felt so all her life. She wanted to be part of something, an essential atom in a street, a town, a state; she would have loved to get herself expressed in all the pleasant, secure details of a deeply-lived-in house. She was cut out to be a wife and mother as few women were. Given half a chance, she would have done well at it.

But look, he said, at what she had to work with. Twelve houses at least in the first four years in Salt Lake, each house with its taint from preceding tenants, each with its own invulnerable atmosphere and that spiritual scent that the Chinese call the
feng shui.
Twelve houses in four years, in every part of the city. They moved in, circled around like a dog preparing to drop its haunches, and moved out again, without any chance of ever infusing any house with the quality of their own lives.

He remembered some of those houses: the first one, the pretentious place with the two cement urns like enormous pustules flanking the front walk. To that place his father brought ball players for beer-busts after the games, not for any commercial purpose but because he liked ball players and because now, feeling prosperous and meeting players who had been famous once in the big leagues, he liked to expand and play glad-hand host. That was about all there was left of that house in Bruce's memory: the brown men laughing with glasses in their hands, and his father circulating around with a pitcher. That house held them five months.

Then an abrupt declension in style. Perhaps Bo Mason had been knocked over or had lost a load or got in trouble somehow. Bruce never knew. But the second house was a ratty old place on the edge of a weedy field. The front door, decorated down its sides with lozenges of colored glass, had a bullet hole through it at the level of Bruce's eyes. In the back yard was a barren pear tree, and the lawn was mangy and run down. In this house, during the spell of hard times, his father started selling liquor by the drink. Bruce remembered coming home from high school and going into the kitchen to avoid the people crowding the parlor. Once in a while, when there was a rush, he had to serve drinks. He hated it. So did his mother. There was almost always. a quarrel after one of those afternoons. Then the Purity Squad raided the house next door and poured barrels of stinking mash out the second-story windows, and Bo Mason moved out quick. He never went back to the speakeasy business, perhaps because Elsa objected too much. Before long he was running liquor in from the coast.

A house by the municipal playground, a good one, with big trees and a wide back lawn, a house his mother liked and wanted to stay in. That was the year when a woman named Sarah Fallon boarded with them while she studied beauty culture, and Bruce remembered the dimes he used to earn every afternoon massaging her incipient double chin. The feel of that soft, moist skin clung to his fingers yet, a sharper memory than any other he had of the house. They moved from there because his father got suspicious of the pious Mormons next door. A man who drove a big car and came in and out with suitcases a good deal, but never seemed to have any regular working hours, was too likely to get the neighbors talking. You couldn't stay too long in one place.

So they moved, and moved again. A brick bungalow up on the avenues overlooking the long wooded sweep of the city; a two-story frame house where they boarded a ball player's wife and family one summer; another undistinguished bungalow; an old adobe house almost as old as the city, but cool and pleasant under its locust trees. They melted and flowed together in the mind, a montage of houses, crowding the recollections of four years. An apartment in a big brick block, a little doll house near a gully where the mocking birds sang madly on moonlit nights, a vague and telescoped memory of some time spent living with an automobile salesman on a chicken ranch south of town ...

What other houses? What else? They blurred and ran together. Things like the places you had lived got lost. They had importance in one context, but in the daily process of living they dwindled. There was school to take Bruce's time, there was the constant impatient agonized wish that he would ever start growing, get some muscle, get to be an athlete like Chet. There was the habit of walking on' tiptoe all the way to school to develop his calves, the secret exercises in the basement to harden his neck and arms. There were his envy and pride, oddly mixed, when Chet did something spectacular and got his name in the papers, and his moral horror when he found that Chet and all his gang of big-chested boys smoked cigarettes and played penny ante poker.

There was his pride in his grades at school, his caddying at the golf club and his growing interest in the game of golf. There were his fear of girls, his tormenting dreams, his adolescent agonies, his constant furious expenditure of energy in the effort to be a top scholar, an officer in the ROTC. His whole private life took up his time, and the life in his home he noticed only when it irritated or balked him. Moves from one house to another meant to him only the necessity of finding new cross-lot ways to school.

It was only in retrospect that the moves had any significance, only when he thought of what his mother's life must have been all that time; and even there, he realized, his memories were probably colored by a sentimental pity that had little relation to his mother's real feelings. She never complained, except humorously, about the life she led. Probably much of the time she was almost contented except for her constant nagging worry that Bo would get into trouble that he couldn't get out of. But there was nothing really unhappy about her life, in spite of its rootlessness, until the spring when Chet was seventeen.

It was cool in the locker room after the sun outside, and it felt good just to sit and feel the tiredness run down his arms and legs. His spikes scratched a little on the cement floor as he hunched his shoulders to lean forward with elbows on knees. His mind was full of visions.

They would have that one in the papers all right. Through the open windows he could hear the last ragged yell for West High, and the babble of voices and clack of spikes coming down the hall. The cheers he had got as he trotted off at Muddy's wave, not even stopping to lean into the huddle and give three for his beaten opponents, were still sweet in his ears, but he did not look up as the doors slammed open and the team swarmed in. Hands hit his back, knocking him further down in his slump on the bench, but he paid no attention. His eyes were fixed on the floor in a steady, completely-faked look of despondency or exhaustion.

Hands seized his bowed head and roughed it, and he looked up as if mad. Muddy Poole, the coach, stood there grinning. “Great stuff, Chet,” he said. “You really got in there and pitched that one.”

Chet glowered, then winked. “Guess I smacked a couple too, didn't I?” he said. He could see the newspapers now. “Mason Holds West to Three Hits.” “Chet Mason, star portsider of East High, held the strong West team to three meager bingles yesterday while his mates were collecting eight off the combined offerings of Rudd and Jenkins to win, 5-0. Two of East's hits were rousing doubles by Mason which drove in three runs ...”