The Big Rock Candy Mountain (79 page)

It had never seemed that he and Chet had much in common, that they had ever run together much. Chet had been above and beyond him, with the big gang. But there were thousands of ties, millions, so many that he was amazed and saddened. They were brothers, something he had never really considered before.

Had been, he said. Had been brothers. That was all gone. Everything that had force to make them brothers was already done. If he wanted to find a brother now he had to find him in the past, in recollections that he hadn't even known were there.

He bit his lips together and bent his forehead against the cold windowpane. But he did not cry much. His eyes were dry when they ran through the shacktowns and suburbs of Council Bluffs and across the river and into Omaha.

 

For two hundred miles across Nebraska he thought of nothing except how clean the Union Pacific kept its trains. At Kearney he bought a newspaper and read it through painstakingly, knowing what he was looking for and completely aware that it was not there. People died everywhere, all the time. Why should anyone in Omaha take note that Chet Mason had died suddenly in Salt Lake City? Who was Chet Mason that anyone should mark his death? Yet the strange lethargy that held him, the torpor waiting on complete realization, did not believe that slip of yellow paper in his overcoat pocket, and the absence of any notice in the paper was almost comforting. He knew he would not believe Chet was dead until he had more proof than the telegram.

At North Platte he bought another paper. At Cheyenne he bought another. From Cheyenne clear on across the plateau to Rock Springs he sat in the club car playing poker with three drummers, and won eighty cents. When they hiked the ante he left the game and went back to his seat to try to sleep. Out past the panes of double glass the moon silvered the empty waste of the Wyoming Plateau, and the telegraph poles were like the ticking second-hand of a watch, the muted racket of the wheels the grinding of a remorseless mechanism carrying him closer and closer to the time when he had to wake up.

When the train swung out of the canyon in a long curve and backed into the yards at Ogden he roused himself and got off for a cup of coffee. Forty miles to go. In the station washroom he washed and combed his hair, and at the newsstand he bought a Salt Lake paper.

He didn't look into it until the train started again. Then he went back to the men's room and sat down. He found it immediately, a little three-inch story on the local page, and the fact that Chet was not stuck away in a column of nameless and unimportant deaths brought him an instant of fierce pride. “Former High School Athlete Dies,” it said. So Chet was not entirely unknown. Some of the people reading that three-inch notice would recall games he had starred in, plays he had made spectacularly.

Why try to fool yourself? he said. Why pretend that Chet was anything, amounted to anything? Why back up your grief by making believe Chet mattered to anyone outside his family? He mattered to you, isn't that enough? Does he have to be important to other people before you'll think him worth a tear?

But those three inches of type helped, nevertheless. He was more calm when he stepped off the train than he had been all day, and when he saw his mother, alone, coming toward him with her face twisting toward tears, he did not break down. He spread his arms and she came into them.

“Ah, Bruce,” she said.

He held her tightly, looking over her head at the people moving toward the exits. “Mom,” he said.

She was back out of his arms, shaking tears from her eyes, trying to smile. “You've got an overcoat,” she said. “I imagined you coming through in this cold weather without either hat or coat.”

“I borrowed it,” he said. “Where's Pa?”

His mother looked at him. “He ... couldn't come.” Bruce put his arm around her and led her toward the exit. “Let's not talk,” he said. “Let's not try to explain anything.”

“I came down in a taxi,” she said. “Your dad is terribly broken up. He's like a madman. Just walks and walks. He hasn't slept at all.”

She took a handkerchief out of her purse and fumbled with it while he called a cab. In the car she held his hand hard without saying anything. Bruce stared stonily at the back of the driver's neck.

At home Bo Mason met them at the door, shook Bruce's hand, stared into his face a moment, and swung around to disappear into his bedroom. He did not come out again, but later, as he lay sleeplessly staring upward in the bed that he and Chet had, shared during the Christmas vacation less than a month ago, Bruce heard a sudden cry from the room down the hall, a smothered scream and the thud of feet heavy on the floor, and his mother's voice saying, “Bo, Bo, please! Bo, you mustn't ! Get back into bed, please.” After that there was a sound that made Bruce grit his teeth in the dark, the sound of his father sobbing, a muffled, uncontrolled weeping, a little shameful and completely shattering.

 

When Bruce got up his father had already gone. “He had to get out,” his mother said. “He can't stand to be still a minute.”

She waited on Bruce at breakfast, even tried to butter his toast. She was pale but perfectly composed. On an impulse, while he was eating, he reached out and covered her hand with his. “Mom,” he said, and his smile was so great a strain that it hurt. “You're taking it like a Trojan.”

“What else can you do?” she said.

“Would it help to tell me about it?”

“If you like,” she said, her eyes steady and clear. “I guess there are ... two or three things I ought to tell you.”

“Where are Laura and the baby?”

“That's part of it,” she said. “Laura left him, you know. She took the baby and left to live with her family just a few days after you went back.”

“But you said in your letters ...”

“I didn't want to bother you with it,” she said. “I thought it might straighten out.”

“They were fighting pretty much at Christmas,” Bruce said. “Did she... when he got sick ... ?”

“When he got bad. It went so fast. He was only in the hospital two days. Afterwards she went all to pieces. She's in bed now.”

“It's a little late, isn't it?” he said. “She might have shown a little of that when it would do some good.”

Her eyes were steady and very blue. “You're thinking about your dad too.”

“Maybe I am. Maybe I'm thinking about myself. Everybody but you.”

“Don‘t,” she said. He watched her, thinking that there was a dignity, a nobility almost, in the clean bony curve of her temple, the way her hair went back from her forehead, the way her mouth could be firm without being hard or bitter. “Please don't even hint anything like that to your dad,” she said. “That's what makes him crazy, almost. He blames himself for everything.” She shook her head. “I don't know,” she said. “It's everybody's fault. Chet's too. We tried to do something for him, tried to get him to go to business school. He started for a while, you know, and then he quit. I found out after three weeks that he'd never been near the place after the first few days, and had got his tuition money back.”

“What was he doing?”

“It's such an unhappy, tangled mess,” she said, and shook her head again. “Chet was having trouble with Laura, and she kept throwing it up to him that she was working and all he could do was drive a taxi, and I think ...” She laughed a little as if in pain. “I've never talked to you like this. I think she wouldn't let him come to bed with her. For a long time. You know how Chet was. He got sullen and swore he'd find somebody else, and they had a fight.”

Very carefully Bruce said, “Was he running around with another woman, then?”

“You mean about the tuition money.”

“Yes.”

“He didn't have any other woman,” she said. “He just...” Her face flushed, and she bit her lips. “That taxi job was no good,” she said. “It threw him in with a lot of no-good people.”

There were tears in her eyes. “He never did get a decent break,” Bruce said.

“Oh, let's be honest,” she said, almost violently. “Chet was a good boy, he always was, but he was impulsive, and I'm afraid he was a little weak. He made a lot of mistakes, but you couldn't blame him for them because he
was
such a nice boy really. He just ... I guess Chet didn't have much backbone.” She stared at him, her eyes bright with the tears that swam in them. “It hurts me to say it, and I don't say it to blame him,” she said. “He
was
decent, and generous, wasn't he? But he didn't have much backbone. He got hurt too easily.”

“It might take a lot of backbone to live with Laura,” Bruce said.

“Oh, let's not blame her either,” she said. “Chet had bad luck. If he'd been stronger he could have come out of it, but it whipped him.” She turned her face half away and sat with her hand pressed against her mouth.

Bruce stood up and went around the table to put his hand on her shoulder. “It sounds like sentimental hypocrisy,” he said slowly, “but maybe Chet's better off. Maybe he couldn't ever have got back.”

“You know what he said to me just before he died?” she said. “I talked to him just an hour or two before, when he came out of the coma. He knew then that he was going to die, and I think he was almost glad. It was as if just then he was more peaceful than he'd been any time in years. Just as I was leaving he took hold of my hand and said, ‘I'm leaving you the dirty work, Mom. I'm sorry. That was the last thing he ever ...

Bruce's jaws were locked, but he couldn't break down. The old man was already doing too much of that, throwing more strain on her. Chet, sick and lost, had already done too much of that. He stood with his face stiff and dry as paper, with his hand on her shoulder.

“Bruce,” she said, “do you believe in a Heaven, a hereafter? That we might see Chet again?”

For a long minute he did not reply. When he did he almost whispered, he was so afraid of taking something away from her. “No,” he said.

“I guess I don't either,” she said. “Ever since he died I've been wondering if I still believed that, but I really don't. It's too much to wish for. It would be too good. I guess I've about come to believing that anything we wish for too much is bound never to happen. Probably it's better that way.”

 

“What can I do?” Bruce asked later. “Are there any arrangements I can take care of?”

“Everything's done.”

“Would you like to go down with me, to see him?”

“No,” she said. “I've said goodbye. I'd rather you saw him alone.”

“I don't like to leave you.”

“You go,” she said. “I'll be all right. I'll be getting lunch.”

“Why don't we go out to eat?”

“It's better when I have something to do,” she said.

He took a streetcar to the funeral parlor, spoke Chet's name to the girl in the office, and was directed to the third room on the right. His feet dragged in the deep carpet. Panic mounted in him as he passed the first door, the second. Quick glances, as if he shouldn't look in at all, showed him empty rooms like sitting rooms. The third door was also open. He came up to it slowly, stopped outside, and looked in.

He had had no previous acquaintance with death, and he did not know how it can make an outsider of a living person. From the moment he looked in the door he was ill at ease, an intruder, and the emotion that made him move on tiptoe was not so much grief or fear as embarrassment. Chet lay fully dressed, ready for burial, on the wheeled table under the windows. There were three or four baskets of flowers in the room, and the quiet was so deep that his own breathing bothered him.

For a long time he stood beside Chet simply looking. This was the end of it, then. This was the way you said goodbye, when he was already beyond all goodbyes, beyond hearing you when you said you wished you'd been a better brother, had understood better, had given him a hand when you could. Now that it was too late you wished you could tell him how you'd felt about that cigarette lighter at graduation, when you knew really, without his ever saying so, that he was desperate and sick and lonely, down to his last dime and quarreling with his wife and ashamed of having come crawling back. You wished you believed that he could understand you now as you stood thinking it, how you had really felt that gift, how you had known he was reaching out for you, trying to indicate a love that neither you nor he could ever indicate, and how you were really his friend and brother, you'd stick to him as he was asking you to. This was the way it was, all of it too late. There was that in death which made the living humble and ashamed.

He reached out and touched one of the stiff inhuman hands. “So long, boy,” he said softly, and backed out. He was so shaken that he had to go into one of the empty rooms and stand looking out into the dirty snow for a long time before he dared go out through the hushed office and into the street.

The funeral was set for two-thirty. At twelve-thirty Bruce and his mother sat down to lunch alone. “It's probably no use waiting for Pa,” she said. “He couldn't eat anyhow.”

In the middle, of the meal he came in, his eyes bloodshot, his face sallow and sagging, his hands curiously fumbling and helpless. He sat down and began eating as if he tasted nothing.

“Anybody call?” he said.

“Harry Birdsall,” Elsa said. “And Mrs. Webb, a woman I met up at Brighton that summer. I haven't heard from her since. It was nice of her to call now.”

“None of Chet's friends?”

“No,” she said. “Now Bo, don't...”