The Big Rock Candy Mountain (82 page)

At sunset he was still wheeling across the plains toward Chamberlain, the sun fiery through the dust and the wide wings of the west going red to saffron to green as he watched, and the horizon ahead of him vast and empty and beckoning like an open gate. At ten o‘clock he was still driving, and at twelve. As long as the road ran west he didn't want to stop, because that was where he was going, west beyond the Dakotas toward home.

The summer cottage nestled back in a bay in the tall cedars and pines on the east slope of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. The water in front, beyond the strip of gravelly beach, was in the mornings clear emerald, and sometimes at moonset clear gold. Strung out along the shores were the summer homes of the wealthy and comfortable, and of the not-so-wealthy and not-so-comfortable who wished to appear so. A few miles up the road toward the summit was the monument to the Donner Party, symbol of all the agony in the service of dubious causes, archetype of the American saga of rainbow-chasing, dream and denouement immortalized in cobble-rock and granite, its pioneer Woman and unconsciously ironic portrait of endurance and grief.

In the cottage, still not finished, its bedrooms only partly partitioned off, its windows still stopped with bent nails, its yard littered with a half-raked-up mess of shavings, nail kegs, ends of two-by-fours, and chips, Bruce and his mother lived for a while a summer idyll.

His mother was proud of the cottage. “Pa built most of it himself,” she said. “He had some carpenters put up the studding and the frame, but he sheathed the whole thing, and shingled the roof, and framed the windows and doors, and even made all the inside doors and cupboards, in his spare time. He's been working like a horse every minute—too much, but I think he liked it. Didn't you, Papa?”

“There's still plenty to do,” his father said. “You can take off your shirt any time and fall to. Soon as we finish up the inside here we can start landscaping.”

He was heavier than when Bruce had last seen him. His cheeks sagged a little, his mouth was rarely without a cigar in it, his columnar neck had softened and whitened, and he had obviously been cultivating a hearty laugh. His plans for the cottage were grandiose. What they had here was just a beginning, turn out to be the servants' wing when they got steaming along. This big room here, with the fireplace, would stay the main living room, but sooner or later they'd build a wing straight off the back, and another wing off that to make a sort of enclosed court—pave it with flagstones for outdoor dining, looking out on the lake. The kitchen and storeroom and laundry room could be built off the other way, where the view was blocked by the woods. Then they'd have some guy come up and plow the yard up and dump on loam, and sow a lawn, and shine the whole grounds up, put in plenty of shrubs and flowers, maybe a little stone terrace. Make it the snappiest place on the lake.

“What do you want to do, make a mansion out of it?” Bruce said. “What's the matter with pine needles for a yard?”

“Hell with that,” his father said. “This isn't just any old shanty in the woods. This is a house. Once we get the driveway scraped off and gravelled we can live up here most of the winter, put in a woodburning furnace. If it gets too cold we can run over to the coast for a couple of months of the year.”

“Well,” Bruce said. “Give me my orders. I haven't done anything with my hands for so long I've about forgotten how.”

Thereafter the two of them worked every morning, nailing in window stops, fitting shutters to the outside frames, lining the interior with wallboard. Bruce protested at the wallboard. “What can you do with it after it's in?” he said. “You can only paint it, and then it'll look like a cheap imitation of a town house. Why not leave the studs showing? It looks more like what it is, then.”

“You don't know the seat of your pants from ten cents a week,” his father said amiably. “How can you make a room look like anything as long as it's unfinished? You want this place to look like the homestead?”

“That's all right up in the woods.”

“Not for me,” his father said. “You can build yourself a ratty little shack somewhere if you want. I'm making this one snappy.”

“Why not make it really finished, then? Plaster it, put on mouldings, cover the floors, lay in parquetry, go in for indirect lighting and picture windows.”

His father made a sound of disgust. He wanted a snappy place, not a shack. But he wasn't going to blow his whole roll on it, either. He'd use his own labor and wallboard instead of lath and plaster, and he would get, Bruce assured him, exactly what he wanted—a compromise, a half-baked thing.

Elsa stayed out of it. She told Bruce that she was saying nothing whatever about how the house should be made unless Bo asked her. He was having so much fun puttering that she'd rather let him jazz the whole place up than protest. He loved building things, it took his mind off Chet and business. Not that he had many business worries. The .gambling house was coining money, even with expenses over twenty thousand a month. “He's in the money,” she said. “That's where he's always wanted to be. Let him play with it any way he wants. It isn't worth an argument. The lake is so lovely no kind of house can spoil it.”

“It's just silly, that's all,” Bruce said. “Wallboard isn't necessary at all, but he spends a couple hundred dollars for it that he might have put into something good. Then he has to buy panel strips to cover the cracks. Then he has to buy paint. He just builds up a lot of unnecessary expense. First thing you know he'll be putting in crystal chandeliers.”

His mother smiled. “I wouldn't be surprised. What harm does it do?”

Bruce shrugged and let it go. But he couldn't keep from arguing again when his father came out from town with a five-gallon pail of brown paint. “Good Lord,” he said, “what do you want to paint it for? Those shakes will weather the loveliest soft gray in about two years.”

But within an hour he was swinging a paint brush, and he swung it rebelliously for the next week, putting two coats of oak-leaf brown over the shakes that he would much rather not have touched. He was maliciously pleased at how bad it looked, but his father found nothing wrong with it. He came out, looked it over with approbation, and produced a pail of white for the trim. “How's your painting arm?” he said.

Bruce shrugged. “Now that the place is ruined this far, we might as well finish it.”

His father shot him a quick, suspicious glare. “Oh, ruined!” he said. “You got a lot of funny ideas in college. Don't colleges believe in paint?”

“Not in the wrong places. But I'll paint it. It needs it now, as far as that goes.” He ducked out of the argument, because every word he said betrayed to the old man the chasm that separated them. It wasn't worth it. He kept his mouth shut when it came time to mix saffron and green shingle stain for the roof. He didn't even open it to squawk at the line of round niggerhead stones that his father one Sunday laid neatly along the edge of the drive, and he was not at all surprised when his father came out the next morning with a paint bucket and painted them all white.

“Give him another week and he'll be putting blue spots on them,” he told his mother. “The more he works on this place the more it looks like Camp Cozy.”

“He's a good carpenter,” his mother said, as if that settled something.

“Sure he's a good carpenter. He's a heck of a good carpenter. He's a cabinet maker. But why doesn't he stick to carpentry or cabinet making, and let somebody whose taste isn't all in his mouth design things? Why does he have to add all these nightmares?”

“He said the stones would outline the drive so people coming in wouldn't run off.”

“Who's coming in?” he said. “Once a week, maybe, somebody from Reno. Every other day a delivery truck. What if they did run off? They've got reverse gears on their cars.”

She laughed at him. “You're butting your head against a wall,” she said. “He'll do it the way he wants, no matter what you or anybody else says.”

“And we get blamed for his taste. People drive by and look at the place and hold their noses and say, ‘Holy cats, look at the monstrosity.' ”

“Do you care?” she said curiously. “Even if it were as bad as you say, which it isn‘t, would you care? Does it matter that much to you what people think?”

“I don't know. It just makes me mad. The way he has of putting his fingerprints on everything. This place ought to be yours, and look it, not his.”

“Ah Bruce,” she said. “You're hard on your father.”

The expression he saw in her face surprised him. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm an intolerant lout. Let's go for a swim.”

It wasn't worth an argument. His mother was right. And with the old man gone from noon until almost midnight they had the place to themselves. They could swim, fish, putt around the lake in the motor boat. The boat had a mast step in it, and in a few afternoons Bruce cobbled a mast out of a cedar pole, got an old sail from a camper down the lake, and improvised a rig. He was no sailor, but it was fun to come ghosting into the bays over the water that shifted cobalt to emerald, and to hear the silence along the forested shore. A motor was all right, it was a lazy man's way to go boating or fishing. He supposed it matched his old man, somehow. But a sail, even a clumsy and inefficient one, was better. A canoe was better. Even a rowboat was better. The more laborsaving the machinery the less the pleasure. But not for Bo Mason. He believed in modern improvements. Anything that wasn't the latest was an old granny system. He had even come to the point now where an unpaved road was a personal insult, and a detour a deliberate conspiracy to spoil his day. Considering the roads he had driven on in his time, that was quite a step.

His father's was a curious state of mind, Bruce reflected. He and his mother would probably have been content to sit on the pine needles and watch the lake. They would never have finished the cottage inside, or painted it outside, or lined up the driveway, or projected any landscaping. They liked the present, they preferred the static, but for the old man today was only a time in which to get steamed up about tomorrow. The world went forward as a wheel turns, and if you didn't keep up with it you were an old fogy. Your bank account got bigger, your needs became more and more elaborate, your appetites required stronger and stronger stimulation, your ideas of what was your just due became more grandiose. Even the gastro-intestinal tract, he said. Even the amount of laxatives you take to keep your bowels open. Last year one Feenamint, this year two Ex-Laxes, next year three Seidlitz powders. By God, it was laughable. Oh for the tomorrow when you have graduated to Pluto Water. Oh for the day of the daily enema.

Yet he enjoyed those weeks. He liked working with tools, he liked fishing, swimming, sailing. He liked the days when they all went down to Reno. He had fun playing nickels on the chuck-a-luck cage, methodically playing the odd and doubling when he lost. He took pleasure in the two or three dollars he won every time he went in, and he even got a certain rueful enjoyment out of the cleaning the game took him for when it finally took him.

He played the slot machines and had beers at the bar and watched the crowds mill through the place, jamming up by the crap tables and the Wheel of Fortune and the roulette wheels, thinning out toward the back where the intent games of poker and blackjack and panguingui went on, thinning out still more at the very back, where deadpan Chinamen and professional gamblers sat endlessly playing faro.

He met dozens of gamblers, shills, bouncers. Prize fighters and movie stars, and tourists and shrill women surged through the place night and day. When one of the janitors of the club died of a heart attack in the little back room among his brooms and brushes, his father offered him the job, twelve dollars a day for pushing a broom eight hours among the multitudinous feet. He might have taken that job if his mother had not asked him to pass it up.

It took only a few visits to the club to understand his father's excitement about the place. There was excitement merely in the stacks of silver dollars on the tables, in the flat chants of the dealers, in the screeches of touring school teachers when they hit the jackpot on a slot machine or won two dollars at craps. There was excitement in the three or four “floor managers,” his father among them, who went constantly through the crowd keeping an eye out for pickpockets or slot machine sluggers. The afternoon when a much-advertised fugitive from justice passed a stolen traveler's check at the cashier's window and was picked up at the door by a pair of bouncers, relieved of his shoulder gun, and led off to jail, was a fine and thrilling afternoon.

There was something not so thrilling about what was done with the men who were occasionally caught cheating or slugging a machine. Bruce had seen them two or three times being led quietly downstairs by a pair of husky bouncers, and he had seen the bouncers come back after about fifteen minutes and quietly mingle with the crowd again. None of the tinhorns ever came up. When he asked his father what went on down there his father said the bouncers beat hell out of them and tossed them out into Douglas Alley by a back door.

He could see how the big money, the quick money, the easy money, could take hold on his father. He did not know how deeply it had taken hold until one afternoon when a photographer and a reporter from a magazine came to shoot and investigate the place. Bruce saw his father shouldering through the crowd with his glad-hand smile, his hearty laugh, escorting the photographer around. He saw him laughing with self-conscious playfulness when the photographer stood him up at the edge of the crowd and took a shot of him, summer jacket, stickpin, smile and all. When the article appeared only a couple of weeks later Bo Mason loomed over the crowd, his chin up, his smile gleaming, his hand up in a gesture of greeting or fellowship. The Big Shot. The instant he saw it Bruce was reminded of the night he and Chet graduated from high school and Chet came up to get his football sweater. The same look, the same inability to keep the gratified and self-gratula tory smile off the mouth, the same playing for the gallery. He hated that picture and the things it reminded him of. He didn't want to think of Chet that way.