The Big Rock Candy Mountain (83 page)

In July Bruce's mother reminded him that if he wanted to have friends come and stay a while she would be glad to have them, so he wrote to Joe Mulder in Salt Lake, and later in the month Joe and his sister came down. Bruce half expected to have his father object to putting them up. It had happened before. What was the idea of asking everybody in the world to come see you, eat up twenty dollars' worth of food, burn up a lot of gas, cost you a lot of money and waste your time? Let them stay at a hotel if they wanted to stop over. But this time his father even seemed to want them. Perhaps being free of the fear of the law let him loosen up; perhaps he merely was proud of himself and his place and wanted to show off. Anyway, to Bruce's half-cynical surprise, he put himself out. He was jovial at table, he took the visitors for boat rides, he personally escorted them through the club and showed them how to shoot craps, he made booming wisecracks to the dealer so that people looked over at him, and Bruce saw them whisper to each other. Must be the boss. Look at him toss out the bucks, there! Big shot, obviously.

Joe and his sister were delighted. They whirled through Reno like a pair of sand devils. They loved the gambling, they were tickled by the way you could go up to any cop and ask where the nearest speakeasy was and have him direct you. There was no city or state liquor law, and the city cops didn't have any percentage in enforcing federal laws. They loved the mineral springs where Bo took them all swimming, they were full of admiration for how rich Bo Mason was, and they laughed themselves helpless at his wisecracks. Even Bruce, grudgingly, admitted that he was really funny when he got wound up. The night after the swimming Bo was still expansive. He took them out to Steamboat Springs, set them up to dinner, flirted with Helen Mulder and kidded her pink, crooked a lordly finger at the soulful-eyed Mexican with the guitar who was singing sweet sad sentimental songs to the diners, and had him over to sing Helen's favorites. For every song he tossed the Mexican a silver dollar, and for an hour afterward, after he had gone to sing hopefully at other tables, the Mexican kept looking back at the Mason table, showing his teeth and eyes, flirting at a distance with the girl there, hoping that the big man with the diamond would crook his finger again. That was quite an evening. Bo stooped to dance—a thing he had not done in twenty-five years—and he cut his shift at the club.

 

For a good many weeks there was nothing wrong with that summer. The jazzy excitement of Reno could be sluffed off in the lake's quiet, the hangover of too many cigarettes and too late hours could be dissipated simply by lying under the pines and watching the shifting color of the lake that Mark Twain called the most beautiful in the world. There were books to read and good long hours of puttering with tools, the hands busy and the mind quiet.

The club was still doing well, though the fantastic take of the early summer had fallen off. The prize fight crowd which had come in to watch the Baer-Uzcudun fight, and the Basque sheep herders who had come in in droves to bet money on their wood-chopping countryman against the Livermore butcher boy, had flocked out again. Rings still went into the Truckee regularly, and the court house pillars still acquired new smears of lipstick from the grateful mouths of pilgrims, and the kids who planted dime-store rings in the river and then fished them out again to sell to gullible tourists still did a fair business. The town was good, but not as good as it had been. Business at the club fell off just enough to make Bo sit down occasionally to his figuring, to make him curse the neon company that charged twelve hundred dollars for a sign, to make him chew his lips over the two men who came in one afternoon with plenty of money in their pockets and played dimes on the chuck-a-luck cage. In one afternoon they took four hundred dollars out of the game with their little penny-ante bets, and it made Bo mad. There were several things like that. The faro game had a streak of losing, until Bo had half a mind to take faro out of the club entirely. There wasn't enough percentage in favor of the house. A smart gambler could win at it, and most of the people who played it were professionals as slick as the dealers. Yet in the long run you couldn't afford to close out the monte games and lose those professionals.

Increasingly Bo left the finishing of the cottage to Bruce, and even when he did work on the place he was likely to be jerky and irritable, to burst into an inordinate flood of swearing if he made a mistake or couldn't get a joint to fit or hurt his hands. He complained of headaches and sleeplessness.

“Why don't you just rest when you come up here?” Elsa said. “You're down there too much, and then you come up here and work instead of resting. Just sit around and take it easy, or go fishing.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'd better do that. No use getting myself run down.”

But he couldn't sit still. The first morning he tried it he read the paper for an hour and sat for a half hour more on the porch. By ten thirty he was out in the yard making a bench out of two short lengths of log and a wide slab of pine. It would, he said, make a nice place for anyone to sit down under the trees if they wanted to lazy around in the yard.

Every night the faro game was in the red when checks were counted after the midnight change of shifts. After a week, following a talk with Laurent, Bo fired one of the dealers, a little cold-eyed man who had been a boxer, and hired a dealer newly arrived from one of the gambling boats outside the twelve-mile limit off Long Beach. O‘Brien, the dismissed dealer, was sore. He called Bo names and got abusive and violent, until Bo had him thrown out of the place by a couple of shills.

“The God damned guy,” he said later up at the lake. “He's been losing at that table ever since he went in there. We pay those cookies twenty bucks a day. That ought to be plenty to make them want to work for the house. What does he want, for Christ sake? I wouldn't be surprised if he'd been chiseling all the time.”

“Well, he's fired,” Elsa said. “I wouldn't worry about him.”

“I'm not worrying about him. The hell with him. I'm worrying about that monte game. We're making money on everything else. If we made money on that we'd be in clover. It takes the profits from two crap tables to pay for that damn thing.”

“Doesn't it work in streaks?” she said. “Won't it start winning again sometime?”

“That's what I'm talking about!” he said. “Sure it will. It's got to. But this streak has gone on for three weeks. Can't you understand what I'm telling you?”

“You needn't get mad at me,” she said. “I'm not making it lose. I should think if you're going to be a gambler you'd have to make up your mind to take what the luck brings.”

In his glare there was something like pity for anyone who could make a remark like that.

 

The next afternoon Bruce was sitting in a bathing suit on the gunwale of the boat, repairing the cobbled rigging, when his mother came down to the shore. “Can you drive me into town this afternoon?” she said. “I hate to take you away from the lake on such a nice day, but I've got to go in.”

“Sure,”
he said. “Need some groceries?”

He was bending down twisting a wire tight with pliers, and when she didn't answer he looked up. Her face wore a deprecatory grimace, and her eyes were puckered at the corners.

“I've got to see the
doctor,”
she said.

He laid down the pliers. “What for?”

“I'm sorry,”
she said, and he saw that she was embarrassed. “I didn't tell you. The lumps have been coming back, and I'm taking x-ray treatments. I'd have gone in with Pa, only he went early, and I'd have had to wait till midnight to get back.”

“You needn't worry about that,” he said. “I'm not doing anything.” He turned to pull the boat further up on the sand. When he stood up and turned she was still standing there, looking at him.

“You should have told me,” he said. “How long have you been taking treatments?”

“Since about April.” Her eyes puckered still more, and she put her arm around him as they walked up the cottage. “I hate to be a worry and a bother and an expense,” she said.

“Nuts to that. Do the treatments work?”

“They take the lumps away, all right, but others keep coming, up in my armpit. They're all just in the skin. I go in once a month. I hate it. They cost like anything.”

“Forget what they cost. Don't they give you bad effects?”

“They knock me out a little sometimes.” She laughed. “I fainted once. Scared your dad half to death.”

“I should think.” He opened the screen door for her and shook his fist under her nose. “From now on,” he said, “don't you hide things like that from me. You need me to keep you looking after yourself.”

She paused on the steps, her blue, clear eyes searching his. Then she patted his hand lightly. “Don't you start worrying,” she said. “It's just little nodules under the skin.”

But when she went into her bedroom to dress before going into town he sat on the couch and stared into the black empty fireplace and felt the heavy beating of his own pulse. In the one minute when he looked into her eyes by the door he had seen that she knew she was going to die.

Three people were in the doctor's office. There would be at least a half hour to wait. “There isn't any use of your waiting around,” Elsa said. “I can sit here and read a magazine and you can come back in an hour or so.”

“Well,” he said, “I've got a few things to buy.” He looked at her uncertainly, thinking that there wasn't much chance to talk to the doctor about her as long as she was here. He could go over to the club and see what the old man knew. “I'll just be a little while,” he said.

At the club the crowd was even thicker than usual. He pushed his way through it to the cashier's window, leaned on the ledge to look around. His father was not in sight. The cashier, a young Basque who played football for St. Mary‘s, raised his eyebrows and lifted his head in recognition.

“My dad around anywhere?” Bruce said.

“I thought he went home,” the cashier said. He shook his head slightly, as if to say, half-smiling, “Too bad!”

“What for?”

The cashier fished for a cigarette. “You didn't see it, then.”

“See what?”

“Come on in,” the cashier said. He clicked the lock and pushed the door open. Puzzled, Bruce went in and shut the door after him. “What happened?”

“I thought probably you'd seen it,” the cashier said. “Little mixup. O‘Brien came around with a gun and a pair of brass knucks.”

“The faro dealer?”

“Was. Your dad canned him, that's what he was mad about. He got a few drinks in him and came over to clean up.”

“What'd he do?”

The cashier seemed embarrassed. “Knocked the old man down,” he said. “Right over in front of the slot machines. Old man wasn't expecting anything. They were just standing there arguing a little when O‘Brien let one fly.” He looked at Bruce sidelong. “Give them an even break, your old man'd bust him in two,” he said. “He wasn't expecting anything.”

“Don't apologize,” Bruce said. “A guy half his size knocked him down.”

“Knocked him kicking,” the cashier agreed. “Hung a shiner on him big as a plate. Course he's younger than the old man, and in better shape. Couple shills grabbed O‘Brien and took him down cellar, but Pete's a pretty good friend of O'Brien's. I imagine they just opened the door and turned him loose in the Alley.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said. He looked out through the grilled window at the milling people, men with straw hats on the backs of their heads, coats over their arms; dealers in long eyeshades bending, reaching, leaning back to let their mouths go loose on the interminable chants. Right over in front of the slot machines, right in the middle of the crowd, with a couple of hundred people around, the Big Shot had been knocked silly by a little bantam who came to his shoulder. It was funny. It made him want to laugh right out loud.

But he didn't laugh right but loud. He was ashamed and furious, and he hated the apologetic cashier who really wanted to laugh, who was outside it and could laugh, but who didn't quite dare laugh in the face of the boss's son.

“You think he went back up to the lake?”

“I don't know,” the cashier said. “He left here with a towel over his eye. I supposed he was going to a doc. If I had that eye I sure wouldn't be around at work for a day or two.”

“I suppose I'd better get on back and see how he's doing,” Bruce said. He nodded to the cashier and let himself out.

In the hot bright street the traffic was thick. Cars coated with dust from the desert nosed into the curb to let out women in bloomers and wrinkled blouses and men in creased plus-fours. But the traffic and the blare of horns and the heat and the hot tourists and the light blazing up from the sidewalk were out beyond Bruce, beyond arm's length, and between them and his eyes was the image he had had ever since he stepped out of the office, the image of his father, summer jacket, stickpin, heavy dark face, Big Shot air, going down kicking under O‘Brien's fist, and the surprised look on his face, the purpling skin, the expression of heavy struggling impotence and rage and consternation. It was not a pretty image; it made him crawl. In spite of the heat, he walked very fast back to the doctor's office.

His mother was not in the waiting room. He peeked through the door and saw her sitting in a muslin gown, one shoulder bare, with her breast pressed against a little window in the wall. She turned her head at his step, and smiled at him, making a little face.