The Big Rock Candy Mountain (72 page)

 

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.

You went out tiptoeing, so as not to wake the family, and your chest couldn't hold all the air it wanted, and at the corner, in the first light of the sun just breasting the Wasatch, you leaned against a tree and had your first cigarette of the day. In the early morning the sounds that at mid-day were an indistinct and blurred overtone were distinct and clear. The rumble of a truck coming down the unpaved hill past the old brewery, the even clop of a milk-horse, the whistling of the little sheeny opening his doors and running down his awning half way up the block, the thud of a flat wheel on the streetcar as it came around the upper curve and started down toward your corner. As you swung aboard your nose gave up the whiff of honey locust it had been smelling and smelled instead the familiar dust-and-ozone-and-oil smell of the streetcar, and you went to find a seat between the men with lunchpails like your own on their laps.

At Third South and State you got off to join the other guys waiting for the smelter truck. If merchandise was being unloaded into the sidewalk doors of Auerbach's store, you ran hurdle races over bales and cartons. If you got there early, and there was nothing else to do, you could horse the deaf-and-dumb newspaper vendor who came up to wave his papers in your face and make his ungodly noises. “Umwaooo! Umiayah!” When you just stood looking across the street and pretended you didn't hear, he would get furious, thrust a paper right under your nose, almost jump up and down. Then you could act surprised, eye him coldly, say “What?”, put one hand up around your ear. You could always get a laugh from people going by, and it sure made the old guy mad.

Work at the mill was a joke. Half the time you couldn't have found anything to do if you'd wanted to. You just sat and threw the old bull around, or chucked rocks at tin cans, or went up to the roofless backhouse and read a magazine until somebody hammered on the door and threatened to tip you over if you didn't get the hell out.

About three you went out and peppered the ball around, held battery practice, batting practice, infield practice, fungoed out flies. Generally you got up a game of rounders for the last half hour before the five-thirty truck pulled out. On the way in to town you could generally talk the driver into stopping at Otto‘s, on Thirty-Ninth South, for a pitcher of home brew, the whole gang of you storming into Otto's parlor to guzzle his cold black beer, pouring some into a saucer for the cat and watching him get tight, hanging around till the truck driver got scared he'd be called for staying on the road too long.

You got home about six thirty in time for a shower before supper, while Bruce crabbed at you for not getting home in time to do your share of lawn mowing, and your old man sat on the porch reading the
Telegram
and going out once in a while to move the sprinkler around the lawn. If you didn't have a date with Laura, you telephoned her until someone wanted the phone. It made the old man sore sometimes to have you hang onto the phone for an hour, but what the hell.

It was a swell life, and he was pitching good ball, never got into trouble once except when Tooele rooters started shooting a mirror into his eyes from the stands. That made him so mad he blew up entirely, walked two men, allowed three hits, and wild-pitched another run home before the manager jerked him. All the Dagoes and Greasers and Wops and Bohunks in the Tooele stands razzed the hell out of him, giving him the old hip-hip as he walked off. But that was the only time anything had gone wrong. He had won two games, saved another for Pearson, and lost only that one, and his team was tied for the lead at six won and two lost. It was a swell life.

The best part of it was the secret part, the nights with Laura at Lagoon, at Saltair, at movies—times when they borrowed Van's bug, or went out with Van and some girl and drank beer, coming home loud and late, parking under the poplars of some dark street and growing quiet, necking. It was hard to find anywhere to go to make love really. The cockpit of a bug was no place, especially if you were really in love and your girl didn't like the idea of being jammed up in a seat and maybe some snooper or cop come by and flash a light on you. Laura was always cautious when Van was around anyway. She thought he talked too much.

Then they moved. It made little difference to Chet except that now he had to walk two blocks to the carline. But it made a difference when his mother broke down and had to go up in the mountains to Brighton for a rest. That meant he was camping in the house with Bruce and his father, and when Bruce went up to Brighton too to live in a tent below the inn, then Chet and his father were the only ones left. They got their own meals or ate out: because of his father's business they had never had a maid or a cook. After a while, when Chet had got home too late, and the supper his father had fixed was all cold and the old man mad about it, they quit making believe they were keeping house. Chet left before his father was up, came home often to find the house empty, went out again to see Laura and came home late, and often for two days at a time they didn't even see each other. The old man couldn't stay around the house much. It gave him the jim-jams, so that often he stayed out till midnight just to avoid being in the place alone. “The damn place is like a morgue,” he said. “I wish to hell your mother would get well.”

“So do I,” Chet said. “You going up Sunday to see her?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I'll come along,” Chet said. He really ought to. She'd been up there two weeks and he hadn't even written her a letter. He'd been going to, but then Bruce went up, and there didn't seem any point in a letter as long as he was there. “Maybe Laura could come along,” he said. “Is that all right?”

“Can't you go anywhere without her in your hip pocket?”

“I don't see that it'd be so awful to take her along.”

“All right, take her along. Only don't forget you're going up there to see your mother, not squire your Laura around.”

“Don't worry,” Chet said. “I guess I appreciate Ma as much as you do.”

The sun was slow coming over the mountains. The bedroom in the log lodge was cold, and she dressed shivering. But there was always a fire in the huge rock fireplace on the mezzanine where she had breakfast, and when she went out on the second-floor balcony and around the corner into the early sun she stepped from cool to warm instantly, as if the bar of shadow the corner threw was an insulating wall. There was a dewy smell of balsam fir, and the air was so high and pure that it made her lightheaded.

Sitting on the balcony in the mornings, waiting for Bruce to come up from his camp, she could see out over the whole little settlement, the old collapsing frame hotel, the glint of Silver Lake beyond it, the Twin Lakes foot trail a brown line against the green mountainside. It was fun to sit and look up a half mile, past tim berline, to the snow that still lay in northern crevices, and to let her eyes swing around the whole circular rim of the divide, over the fir and aspen that floored the cirque, over the peaks sharp and clean between her and the farther sky. A smoke always went up from the girls' camp on Lake Katherine, a straight feather among the trees, and sometimes there was a distant rumble of blasting from Park City, nine miles over the divide. Chipmunks ran along the top rail of the balcony looking for peanuts or crumbs: the first time she got one to come into her lap for a nut she laughed aloud for the pure joy of having made friends with something.

She felt guilty for having so much fun. Poor Bo and Chet were batching down in town in the heat, the house probably a mess, nobody to get their meals. She ought to go back down and take care of them. But she didn't really want to. The way she lived up here—everything done for her, the balsam smell good in her nostrils even while she slept, reading a little and walking a little and napping a little in the afternoons—was a condition so unusual and pleasant that the thought of breaking it off was like Sunday-morning awakening to a lazy sleeper. Let it go on a little while longer.

Bruce came whistling along the road and stopped under the balcony to look up at her, his face a thin brown wedge. He had a camera on a strap over his shoulder, and a loose, almost-empty knapsack in his hand. “Howdo, Modom,” he said. “Feeling pretty spry?”

“Spry as a cricket,” she said. “I think every morning is more wonderful than the last one.”

“How'd you sleep?”

“Like a log.”

“Eat a good breakfast?”

“Enormous,” she said, and patted her stomach.

“Lessee your tongue.”

She stuck her tongue out, leaning over the balcony rail, and he squinted up at it. “I guess you're all right,” he said. “Want to go for a walk?”

“I was just hoping you would. It's such a lovely morning.”

“I know a good trail up around the edge of Mount Majestic. Once you get up the slope you walk along under the aspens for a mile or so. It's pretty nice, only it's a little far.”

“Let's go,” she said. “I feel as if I could walk all day.”

Up the long trail through the firs they walked slowly. In openings along the trail the columbines were pure and tall and white, sometimes a space of half an acre solidly white with them. Farther up, as they climbed a brown rooty path around the flank of the mountain, the columbines were not so large, not so tall, but their petals were touched with the palest blue and pink, like the blush of blood through a transparent skin.

“It's the altitude,” Bruce said. “When you get up high they get that tinge.”

“I know I shouldn't pick any,” Elsa said. “But do you suppose one each would matter?”

“I guess not,” he said seriously. “They only reproduce from seed, and a lot of old dames come up here and pick an armful and then there aren't any more.”

“I don't want to be an old dame, then, I guess,” she said.

“Here.” He picked her one of each color, and she folded them into her book, amused at his solemn air of being the personal care-taker of the whole mountain, and very fond of him.

They came over a steep hump that had her warm and breathless, her legs tired, and before them lay a level trail cut through the aspen. Through the thin trees on the lower edge of the trail she could look over a long oceanic roll of ridges and peaks, a forested valley stretching southward, the blue glimmer of water. Clouds like cottonwool coasted over the peaks on the Alta side, snagged on spines of rock, blew eastward in frayed strings.

“Those are the Ontario Lakes,” Bruce said, pointing. “The valley is Bonanza Flat.”

Elsa sat down on a stone, filling her eyes with green and blue distance. The sun through the thin aspen leaves was warm, the earth was fragrant with bark and mould and bitter leaf smell.

“Oh dear!” she said. “I don't ever want to go back.”

“How'd a cabin be right here?” Bruce said. “With that view in your eye? You could ski on over to Park City when you needed supplies in winter, and stay the year around.”

“You build it sometime and I'll come be your housekeeper.”

“I'd like to,” Bruce said. “Don't ever think I wouldn't.” His eyes, she thought, were strangely dark and brooding. You could never tell what he was thinking. He steered you off when you got close.

“What made you say that?”

“What?”

“What you just said.”

“I don't know,” he said. “I'd like it. Wouldn't you?”

“It might be a pretty hard life.”

“That kind of a hard life is easier than a lot of other kinds,” he said. He stared down over the twinkling trees, flowing like bright water down the slope into Bonanza Flat. “Last time I came across here it was raining cats and dogs,” he said, and Elsa understood that he had changed the subject. That was all he was going to say about that other, whatever it was.

“When was that?” she said.

“Last year. That was the day after we spent the night in the Park City jail.”

“What?”

“Sure. We went over to a ballgame, walked over along the old tramway, and in the afternoon it rained so we couldn't walk back. We didn't have any money, so we asked a cop what to do and he let us sleep in the jail.”

“For goodness sake,” she said. “You never told me about that.”

“Sure I did.”

“You never did.” She shivered her shoulders. “That's the last place I'd ever want to sleep,” she said. “I'd rather walk in the rain.”

“It was all right. The cockroaches were a little bad.”

Arms hooked around his hunched-up knees, he looked down across the valley, and Elsa watched him with pity, knowing that what had been in his mind a minute before was sullenness about his father's business, bitterness that the days weren't always like this. She couldn't have told how she knew what was in his mind. Perhaps that reference to jail. There had been a shadow on her own thoughts, instantly, at that word.

“Well,” she said, “shall we walk some more?”

“I don't care. How do you feel?”

“Maybe we'd better start back,” she said. “Pa may come up to have Sunday dinner with us, and it's getting on toward eleven now.”