The Big Rock Candy Mountain (91 page)

“You couldn't have stayed lost very long. I wasn't expecting you till tomorrow.”

“I don't know what was the matter,” his father said, rubbing his hand back and forth on the arm of the couch. “I was dazed, I guess. I've been over that road a hundred times.” He shook his head. “I left right after you called.”

Bruce watched him, wondering if he were quite right in the head. He must have driven like a madman.

“Down around Yermo somewhere,” his father said. “I got out on some God-forsaken road with sand to the running boards. Just ran around in circles in the desert. Didn't know where I was. Dazed, I guess.” He took out his watch, looked at it, turned it over in his hand two or three times, put it back in his pocket. His eyes came up to Bruce fleetingly, wavered away again.

“I'll get you something to eat,” Bruce said. He wondered how long they would play this game of steering away from mentioning her death. The old man came back from a trip and they passed banalities back and forth and had a snack to eat. In the kitchen he almost smiled. The old man was out again, like a bum who has been thrown out of jail and stands with the bars in his hands, wishing he was back in the warmth and light getting three meals a day.

“What ... time did she pass away?” his father said behind him.

Even that, Bruce thought. Even “pass away.” But there was such a strained harsh quality in the old man's voice that he turned around. The watch was in his father's hand again.

“A little after one,” Bruce said. “About one fifteen.” He saw the spasm cross the dark heavy face, the. harsh lines contracting as if at a sudden pain.

“That was twelve fifteen in L.A.,” the old man said. He turned the watch over slowly in his hand, looked at the face. He looked back at Bruce, swaying a little, breathing rapidly through his half-open mouth. “Look,” he said, and passed over the watch with its dangling chain.

The watch said fourteen minutes past twelve.

“I was in bed,” the old man said, and his tongue came out to touch his upper lip. “I heard it stop. I thought it needed winding, but it didn't. It wouldn't start again.”

The blank terror in his eyes made Bruce look away, down at the watch. He shook it, held it to his ear.

“That won't do any good,” his father said. “I tried everything.” His face contorted again, twisted, softened. He sat down on a kitchen chair and put his face in his hands, and his body shook. After a minute, unwillingly, not knowing exactly why he did it, Bruce laid a hand on the wide, shaking shoulder.

“It's no good now,” he said. “We just have to stand it.”

That was all he could think of to say. He did not believe in his father's grief. It was not grief, but self-pity and superstitious fear. With his hand on the heavy shoulder, troubled and embarrassed, he kept thinking, “You might have given her a little of this while she was alive.”

Bo Mason could not stand to stay in the place Elsa had died in. The door of the porch seemed to bother him. His eyes were always wandering to it with the vague, groping, puzzled expression that was now very frequent on his face. Every night he had nightmares, and on the fourth day they moved across the street.

Bruce, shrugging, carried their little household accumulation across. This move was all of a piece with the rest. The old man couldn't bear to think of her dead, pitied himself for being left, couldn't bring himself to mention her except in roundabout euphemisms like “passing away,” and now couldn't stand to be near the room she had died in. It made little difference to Bruce. In January, if he got back the scholarship he had written about, he would be pulling out for school again, and he would not be coming back.

He felt so little established in that barren apartment that he didn't even unpack his suitcases completely, but left them propped open on chairs in the bedroom. And this was what it finally came to. For thirty years his mother had tried to break the old man to family life, had wanted to make something rooted and continuous that would bridge the dissonant generations, and in the end, with her death, it came down to an apartment in which he and his father, the survivors, lived together in perpetual armed suspicion, with half-packed suitcases in the bedroom ready for instant flight.

He got a few jobs through friends at the university, typing theses and reading papers, and the money from those jobs he hoarded like a miser. There would be little enough to live on once he broke away, and he would ask nothing from the old man. Meantime, if he was keeping the house, he was entitled to anything he could save out of the expense money. He pinched nickels and dimes like a houswife hoarding for Christmas, spent little and went out little. In the time he had free from his jobs he sat in the apartment and read, read with lunch, read with dinner, read in bed, woke to read with breakfast. His friends he never called, even Joe Mulder; they would have tried to take him out and cheer him up. When he saw his father watching him, he made no sign, buried himself in a book, until the old man put on his new black hat and went out. For whole days, sometimes, there were not twenty words between them.

October slipped into the shortening, smoky days of November, and the color faded from the scarp of the Wasatch. In the afternoons the sun hung like a monstrous orange over the Oquirrhs, and the night air was bitter with smoke. On one such night Bo Mason tried to blunder through the barrier of suspicion that lay between him and his son.

He had come home for dinner, which was unusual, and after dinner, instead of going out again, he sat in the living room looking at a magazine. Every few minutes he looked over as if inviting conversation, but Bruce kept still. Finally his father said, slapping the magazine down on his lap, “By God, I don't see what a man can do.”

“What's the trouble?” Bruce said.

“Everything's the trouble,” the old man said. “Nobody's got a dime, there's no business, the place is dead as a doornail. There isn't a damn thing stirring, not a thing.”

“Haven't you got enough from the sale in Reno to hold you till things pick up?”

“That wouldn't last,” the old man said. “I've only got six thousand out of that so far. The rest is tied up in notes. And with nothing coming in you can't live on the interest on a few thousand.”

Bruce shrugged.

“I've been talking with some guys down at the Newhouse,” his father said. “They've got a proposition they want me to come in on.”

Something stirred in Bruce like a quick wind moving the leaves and then dying again. The old man was repeating the performance he had gone through with his wife every time a new bug hit him, asking advice, coming around and hinting and opening it up little by little. Only it wasn't advice he wanted. It was justification, encouragement.

“What sort of proposition?” Bruce said.

For a moment his father's eyes were quick and clear, the vague look gone from them. “A mine,” he said. “Looks like a pretty good thing.”

“A lot of mines look like pretty good things,” Bruce said. “Only when you take a good look you find that the good things have been blown into them with a shotgun.”

“All right,” his father said. “You know it all.”

“I don't know anything about it,” Bruce said. He felt himself flushing, and for a moment their dislike was hard and ugly, in the open. “I'd just be suspicious of any mining deal, on principle. The Utah Copper and the International and the Apex and all the other big mines have got every prospect in the state tagged, just waiting till it will pay them to open them up.”

“This mine,” his father said, “isn't even in Utah. It's in Nevada. And it's got gold enough in it to be damn well worth looking at.”

“Then look at it,” Bruce said. “I wasn't trying to knock it. I'm just suspicious of any kind of scheme that's going to make you rich overnight.”

“Uh,” his father said. The groping look had come back, and two little dewlaps of skin sagged below his jaw. He fumbled in his inside coat pocket and brought out a bundle of papers. “This is a fairly low-grade lead,” he said. “It'd take money to develop it, need a stamp mill and one thing and another. But it's a big lead, a vein twenty feet wide. We can get this fellow's claim and options on four claims joining it.”

“Have you had an assay?”

“Four ounces of gold to the ton,” the old man said. “Some silver, some lead.”

“How do you know the samples came out of that hole?”

“Paul Dubois has been down looking it over. He knows a sound mine when he sees one.”

“What do they want of you?”

“Want me to come in for a third. We could put up three or four thousand apiece, enough for some development. Then we incorporate and capitalize for a hundred thousand or so, sell enough stock to put in the mill. Once it gets producing we can either work it ourselves or sell out for a fat price to some big outfit.”

“Make a million dollars,” Bruce said. He laughed. “I'd sure want to take a good geologist down with me before I dove in a hole like that. And I'd want to know about water, and transportation, and a lot of other things.”

“There isn't time for much of that,” his father said. “Hartford Consolidated is snooping around. They had a prospector out there last month. And there's a tunnel going in on the other side of the hill, about three miles off. If we want to get the jump, we've got to move fast.”

When Bruce sat looking at him silently, the old man's brows drew down and his face darkened. “I suppose you'd say it was dangerous.”

“When somebody wants you to jump quick,” Bruce said, “there's a good chance there's something fishy. But it's your funeral. Have you got the three or four thousand?”

“I'm not so hard up I couldn't raise three thousand,” his father said. “I could sell some stock. The damn stuff's never going to come up again anyway. I've still got some Firestone and some U. S. Steel.”

“Suit yourself,” Bruce said. “I'm no gambler, and I don't know beans about mines.”

The old man put the papers back into his pocket. Bruce had never made a move to look at them. “Well, we'll see,” his father said. He was wearing the black tie he had bought for the funeral, and there was a stain on it. Picking up his hat, he started for the door. “I may be out pretty late,” he said.

The door closed, and Bruce sat thinking. If the old man started playing the wildcat mines he'd be cleaned in a year. He was not a good gambler. He was careful and suspicious to a point, and then he opened up like a grain chute in an elevator. Anybody who got past his first caution could pump him like a well.

And I don't give a damn if they do, he said. Remembering the miserly unwillingness of his father to get a nurse, he tightened his lips across his teeth. Not so hard up he couldn't raise three thousand. And now mourning! he said. Now it's a black felt hat and a black tie, and an armband probably, if he could get anybody to sew one on him.

Oh yes, he said, sitting furiously with his hands tight on the book. You can't come back and accuse me of anything. I wear black to commemorate my bereavement! I have put the cross above my door and tossed the salt over my left shoulder and spun three times round and said the words. My dead can't touch me. I have fulfilled the forms, buried the body deep in the ground, spread flowers on the earth, paid the sexton for perpetual care of the grave lot. And I have bought a new black hat and a black tie.

I hope, he said to the barren walls of the apartment, they roll him for everything he's got and leave him stranded in the gutter without carfare to the poorhouse.

 

In the last week of November, when the leaves were pulpy in the gutters and piled high on the curbings waiting for the trash trucks, Bruce borrowed a shotgun and went duck shooting up on Bear River Bay with a carfu! of friends. For just that one day, in spite of cold and chilblains and a raw, wet wind, he felt liberated and happy. It was so much positive joy to crouch uncomfortably in the blind waiting for the swift flights to come over, listening to the sodden boom of an automatic up the marshes; so much fun to leap upright in the tules and slap the padded butt to his shoulder, follow the speeding ducks with the muzzle, lead them a little, let go and be thumped by the recoil. It was so much fun to see a racing long-necked duck fold suddenly and fall like a stone that he wondered at himself. Why should it be fun to kill ducks? What possible joy was it to spread death, when you had yourself lived with death too much, and hated the very word? But he could not deny that it gave him a hot bright pleasure.

Maybe it was just the fun of knowing you were a fairly decent shot. The ducks were scared, and flew fast. Not everybody could hit a target the size of a saucepan, moving sixty miles an hour.

And that was something he had learned from his old man. At least in the business of killing his instruction had been good. But even that reflection couldn't spoil the fun of being outdoors, getting the wind on him, seeing the brown tules emerge from the mist and the gray channels of water open up as the light grew.

He thought of Chet, lost and miserable, the heart taken out of him, his health shot, trying to learn taxidermy in the last months of his life, going out in his off hours to the salt marshes and shooting small birds, fussing with them on the bench in the basement, working in patient protective abstraction with wadding and glue and pins, the mailorder taxidermy book open beside the crows and magpies and snipe he had brought home. Chet had always loved to hunt. For an instant, in the cold circle of tules under the sky like cold lead, he felt naked and alone and scared, and he would have given anything to have Chet there with him, just for an hour, just to say hello, just to lend him the gun for a shot or two.