The Big Rock Candy Mountain (94 page)

“How much you charge for a course in cheering-up?” Bo said, kidding her.

For just a moment her eyes were blank and cold as stone, and he found himself thinking that she looked a little like Emmy Schmaltz in the funny paper. Then she waved her handbag at him playfully. “It's just my nature,” she said. “I'm just a ray of sunshine.”

 

Dubois was shaving when Bo knocked and came in. He twisted around and waved the razor at a chair and tilted his head back to get at his throat, shooting his underlip out and squinting his eyes.

“What's all this new come-on for more dough?” Bo said.

“Be with you in a minute,” Dubois said. “Look in the bag there, there's a map.”

Bo opened the gladstone on the bed, lifted up shirts and socks, found a folded paper. He spread it out. There were angling plats laid out with names printed on them: Siskiyou, Magpie, Bozo, Alma, Pieut, Rosebud, Independent. Across the top of the map was a long arrow, and under it a double-lined box. “Being a sketch map of the Loafer Hills or Hobo District (unsurveyed) lying to the northwest of Winnemucca, Nevada. This is not a transit map, nor official as being absolutely accurate in all details, but believed to be approximately representative of the district. Black stars indicate approximately points where ore has been discovered to date.”

In the rectangle marked Della Mine, checked with red pencil, there were two black stars, and further to the right, at a large square marked Galway Gulch Town Sight, a red arrow led off the map to the margin, which read, “Call on Mr. Janson, he will show you correct location.”

“What's there new about this?” Bo said.

Dubois washed the razor and dabbed his throat with a towel. “See all those blanks around the Della, up toward the ridge? Those are the ones Janson holds options on. He's a long ways away, clear over in the Big Fortune, there, but he's right next door to Creer, see? And Creer's tunnel is going to turn something up. If we get to Janson before he catches on to what Creer's got, we ought to be able to buy him out cheap. He's got options on half of Nevada.”

“You're sure you didn't give him the idea you wanted them bad.”

“Do I look silly? I never cracked my mouth to Janson.” He slapped the towel over the rack. “How I figure it, after looking the place over again, is that the vein comes right down here through Creer's property, and maybe across the corner of the Big Fortune, and then right through the hill.” His finger made a wiggly line across the plats. “That means that probably all but the top one of those optioned properties is good, see? We ought to get that block of stuff for at least a half mile west.”

“Wills' doodlebug said the lead bent off north from the Della.”

Dubois smiled. “You know that doodlebug. I saw him demonstrate it once out on Exchange Street and it made a noise like a jackpot right in front of the Copper Bank.”

“Well, he wasn't so far wrong,” Bo said, and laughed. He watched Dubois slip a tie into his collar. “How soon would we have to pick up this stuff?”

“I'd say quick,” Dubois said. “The minute we start hauling ore out of there, and Creer hits anything, Janson'll be wise. We ought to get down there before the first of the month.”

Bo looked out the window at the flag flying from the postoffice building. “By God I don't see where I can raise seven hundred right away,” he said. The fury that lay always just under the surface, the balked, frustrated sense of waiting forever for something to happen, the hatred he had for the hard times, the clothes getting shabby, the way he had to cross the street when he saw O‘Brien coming, because he owed O'Brien a ninety dollar hotel bill from last year, lashed him to his feet. “Four thousand bucks I've poured into that God damned hole!” he said. “Next week it'll get moving, next month it'll make us rich. Only first we have to dig up another seven hundred apiece. I can't raise it. I'm broke.”

Dubois stood pursing his lips and frowning. “You got to expect things like that in the mining game. It's a slow racket, till you hit it right. Considering what that seven hundred may mean to you this time next year, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans.”

It was just possible, Bo thought, that Dubois was bleeding him and keeping him stringing along. His hands tightened, and he felt the numbness under the left thumb. But Dubois was in it as deep as anybody. He straightened his fingers again, feeling shaky. “I don't know,” he said, and sat down on the bed, pushing the gladstone bag aside. “If something doesn't break pretty soon I don't know what I'll do.”

“Try a loan,” Dubois said. “Ninety days ought to clear it. How about one of the boys over on the exchange?”

“They wouldn't lend me a dime.”

He saw Dubois looking at him queerly. “You really hard up?” Dubois said. “You really scratching bottom?”

“I've been scratching the bottom for three months,” Bo said. “Nothing coming in, everything going out. Whiskey business is gone. I used to be able to depend on that to pull me out of a hole.” He hesitated, realizing that he sounded too broke. “Oh, I've got it. I've got collateral from here to Winnemucca. It's the cash that crowds me. Nick Williams owes me four thousand—notes due two months ago. But Nick sells out of Reno and ties himself all up in a gambling boat off Long Beach, and I have to wait till he gets wheeling again.”

He glanced at Dubois' face to see how he was taking it. “What makes me the maddest is that God damn Patton in L.A.,” he said. “Did I tell you what that son of a bitch did?”

“No.”

“We used to do a lot of business together,” Bo said. “Plenty of times I've trusted him for three or four thousand. He kept on running a little booze, beating the liquor taxes. There was money in it, if he was careful. A year ago I sent him down a certified check for twenty-five hundred, to get me some stuff off the boat. I was sick, had a kind of stroke or something. Left me all numb down this side. So I sent him the money and was going after the stuff as soon as I felt a little better. Next I hear they've picked up his speedboat, and the grand jury indicts him on a conspiracy charge, and there goes my twenty-five hundred. Patton skips his bond and hits for the Philippines. Not a God damned word out of him since.”

“Tough,” Dubois said.

“I hope it's tough,” Bo said. “Now you want seven hundred.”

“It isn't me that wants it,” Dubois said. “I just think we'd be damn fools to let that possibility slide.”

Bo rose. His legs were tired, and he was filled with abrupt rage at the thought that he didn't even have a car any more, and would have to walk all the way back up to First South. “Well,” he said, “I don't know. I don't know whether I can raise it or not.”

“If you can‘t,” Dubois said, “why I suppose Clarence and I might scratch it up. I'd rather see us all even, though.”

“I'll go take a gander around,” Bo said.

“I'm going back down in about a week. Want to go along?”

“Yeah,” Bo said. “I would.”

“Okay. I'll let you know.”

 

Back in his room, Bo lifted the blind a little, dug in the desk drawer for the bundle of papers, and hunched down to go through them all carefully. Nick Williams' notes—due not two months ago, but a year and a half ago. If he wasn't so washed out he'd go down to the coast and take that four thousand out of that tinhorn's hide. He'd been over a year paying the other fifteen thousand, dribbling it out five hundred at a time so that you could never do anything with it, you never felt that you'd got your money. And then welch on the last four thousand, sell out and beat it. Four thousand. That would put him on his feet again if he could get it.

Carefully he laid the papers to one side and wrote a letter to Nick putting it up to him strong. But he knew when he sealed the envelope that there wasn't much chance. The fellow who had signed Williams' notes, the vice-president of a Las Vegas bank, had blown his brains out six months ago down in Needles. One chance in a thousand that Williams would honor his obligations, and how could you sue a guy living twelve miles off shore beyond the law?

He laid the letter on the bed and went back to the papers. Cards, addresses scrawled on envelopes, some of which he no longer remembered the significance of; slips for safety deposit boxes he no longer had; receipts for payments in a building and loan association he had been cleaned out of in 1931; a deposit book on a defunct bank. He threw them all in the waste basket, went on. A Nevada fishing license, two years old. A tax receipt for the cottage on Tahoe.

Picking it up in the fingers of his awkward left hand, he looked at it. He had almost forgotten he owned that place. Two thousand he must have sunk into that, and there was the boat, the motor, his shotgun and deer gun, equipment like stoves and refrigerators and furniture, a lot of it almost new.

Holding the slippery paper down hard, he scratched a note to a real estate shark in Reno. He would sell the whole place, just as it stood, two-car garage, boat, motor, guns, furniture, for ... He stopped, thinking. How much? Nobody would want to put two thousand into a summer cottage in times like these. Fifteen hundred? He wrote in the figures, putting a long firm bar on the five. Fifteen hundred cash. It was worth a damn sight more. He'd paid a hundred and twenty-five for the boat alone, and that much more for the motor.

“What I want,” he wrote, “is quick action. At the price I'm asking, you ought to be able to move it in a week. I'm clearing out everything I've got a finger in in Nevada, and I'm willing to take a loss.”

Still holding the opened pen, he pawed through the rest of the papers. Junk. His certificate of stock—only a notarized paper signed by both Wills and Dubois—showing that he had four thousand dollars, a third interest, in the Della Mine in the Loafer Hills district in Nevada. The insurance policy, only five hundred dollars, and he wouldn't have got that, with his blood pressure where it was, if it hadn't been for Hammond. The deed to the cemetery lot, and the receipt for the payment for perpetual care. Those he put together and put back into the desk.

Two possibilities, Williams and the Tahoe place, and only the Tahoe place worth much even as a possibility. If they both came through he'd be set. He should have been riding Nick's tail every week for the last year and a half. But he just hadn't felt well enough. He shook his fingers, trying to get a tingle. No dice.

If neither of them came through, he was in the hole. His diamonds had gone a year ago, when he was raising money to send to Patton. His watch? He took it out and looked at it. Fifteen dollars maybe, at a hock shop. He looked around the room. Suitcases? Maybe fifteen more. Overcoat? He might get five. He had paid ninety six months ago. He took his check book out of his coat and looked at the last stub. A hundred and three dollars left. He might as well close that out. There was no use paying a damned bank a dollar a month on an account like that.

Anger made him rock in the chair. Twelve hundred shot when the bank blew. The damned bankers sitting behind their mahogany taking your money and losing it for you. But he figured that dead account anyway. Eventually, when the Bank Examiner and the rest of them got through and got theirs, he might get another twenty or thirty percent of that. Forty or fifty altogether.

Forty or fifty? he said. I ought to get a hundred percent plus interest for all the time they've had it!

But maybe a couple of hundred more from the bank sometime. Next week. Next month. Next year.

Damn it to hell, he said. By rights he had six thousand dollars, over eight thousand counting what Patton skipped with. Only he didn't have it, any of it. And what if nothing paid off? Where was he going to raise seven hundred?

Maybe he ought to try selling out of the Della. It was a corner, it looked good. Somebody might take his four thousand interest off his hands clean.

And then what? Sit around on his can and eat up the four thousand and then what?

You didn't have a chance, not a show. You were sixty-one years old, sick, broke. Everybody you trusted snaked on you, beat it for the Philippines or the twelve-mile limit with your money. The woman you kept in style for two solid years turned iceberg as soon as the money got tight, cold-shouldered you in the lobby, wasn't in when you came around, even had the God damned gall to stay on in the same hotel and act like you were somebody she'd met once but didn't quite like.

By Jesus, it was ... ! Some day, he thought with his eyes narrowing, he'd kill that bitch. Nice as pie as long as he had the dough, and as soon as he slipped a little she was out hustling some other sugar daddy.

The bitch, the dirty blood-sucking gold-digging squaw. Some day he would kill her, so help him.

But he couldn't hang onto the rage. It seeped out of him, leaked away, left him sitting slumped and tired, thinking: Sixty-one years old, and sick and broke and alone. Who gives a damn about you now? They were all your friends when you had it. Now where are they? There isn't a soul cares whether you live or die.

Bruce, maybe? he said. Bruce had written a couple of times in the year and a half since he left. Maybe he'd got over the way he felt after Sis.... He tightened his muscles, staring hard at the wall, feeling the tears come hot and acid into his eyes. He put his forehead down on his arm and ground his teeth.

After a minute he raised his head again, thinking of Bruce in Minnesota. He worked after classes and then worked all summer. He might have something, he might be willing to help his old dad when he got in a hole.
He
had sent money back to Rock River, hadn't he, long after he'd run away from there. And they'd never done a damn thing for him, not a tenth as much as he'd done for Bruce. He took out another sheet of paper and unscrewed the pen.