The Big Rock Candy Mountain (10 page)

The gangling man grinned and shook his head and stuck his two dollars in his pocket.

“Shill,” Bo whispered.

“What?”

“Tell you later. Go ahead and bet him.”

Feeling horribly conspicuous, she stepped up and laid her dollar down. The man began shifting his shells, crooning. But she knew better than to listen to his talk. She kept her eyes on his hands, distinctly saw him put the pea under a shell and then shift the shells bewilderingly, but not so rapidly that she didn't keep her eye triumphantly on the right one. She reached out and put her finger on it. There was nothing underneath.

“But where was it?” she said when they were walking again. “I saw him put it there.”

“Palms it in his hand,” Bo said. “A clever rigger can make you think there's a pea under every one.”

“But that other man won.”

“He was a shill, a booster. When business is slack he comes around and wins once in a while to keep the suckers coming.”

How he could tell that the man was a shill she had no idea, but he knew all about things like this and she knew nothing about anything. And he was the trap-shooting champion of North Dakota. He was also very big and good looking. She saw women turn to look at him in the street. But there was one thing she wanted to ask him, until she forgot about it in the excitement of the games they played all up and down the street. If games like these were always fixed in favor of the house, then what about the poker game that Jud had been in that afternoon? Was that crooked too? Or were poker games like that pure games of skill where a professional gambler like Jud would naturally win? There was a great deal she didn't know, sure enough. She listened to Bo's tutoring carefully whenever he bent to tell her something in that warm, intimate voice.

It was after ten, and black dark under the cottonwoods, when they groped back to the team. Elsa went quietly, guided by Bo's hand, full to the chin with new experiences. She had ridden on a ferris wheel and a merry-go-round. She had gone for a ride around a miniature race track in a horseless carriage, the first automobile she had ever seen, a stinking, explosive, dangerous-looking affair. She had been scared to death, putting on the ulster and goggles; when the man had gone behind and spun the crank and the explosions started right underneath her, she had jumped, she thought, a mile. After the dizzy whirl around the track she had climbed out shakily and pushed up the goggles, standing laughing under the hanging lanterns, and Bo had stopped laughing suddenly and stared at her. “God, your eyes are blue,” he had said.

He was just dreadfully nice, she thought. It was his day, but it was hers too. Everything he had done had been shared with her, as if he didn't care about winning the championship and the money unless she had it too. She had collected kewpies, canes, pennants with “Devil's Lake, No. Dak.” across them in yellow felt. She had won a box of chocolates, eaten candy popcorn and drunk lemonade and pop until she couldn't eat or drink any more. She had seen a show where a man in rube costume came out and sang a song about two rubes who went to a circus and got in a peck of trouble. Bo had liked that. He had stamped and clapped till the man came back and did the interminable song all over again, prancing around in his chin whiskers and straw hat and red topped boots and bandanna.

Bo was singing the song himself as he helped her over the rough ground:

“Where's it go from there?”

She took a firmer hold on her plunder, each article of which she had vowed she would put away and never part with. “Something about throwing them out in a hurry? I don't know. I don't see how you remember so much of it.”

“They don't get thrown out yet. Something about two girls fainting. I got it.” He sang three or four lines more.

“That's wonderful,” she said, genuinely impressed. “I never saw such a memory.”

She stubbed her toe in a root and stumbled wildly in the dark. A doll slipped from her arms and Bo fumbled for it. When he rose his arms went around her suddenly, and he kissed her. Her arms were so full of bundles that she could only twist her face away. “Wait!” she said desperately.

He kept his arms around her. “Why? They're way up ahead.”

“Please. Not now.”

“Don't forget you've got to be a sport. No welching.”

“I won't welch,” she said. Whatever happened she wouldn't welch now. That was the thing he disliked Eva so for. She wasn't a sport.

His low laugh stirred in her hair. “Ninety-seven more,” he said.

The rest of the way to the buggy she was silent, wondering how she could ever do it. Ninety-seven kisses, not in fun, not the kisses of a boy in a game, but the kisses of a man seven or eight or nine years older than she was, who had been all over and maybe had a past. And a saloon-keeper, a lawbreaker, really.

Briefly, as Jud's flaring match lighted a carriage lamp and the buggy emerged in the dim glow, she was reminded of the one admirer she had ever had, middle-aged mousy old Henry Mossman, who ran the hardware store in Indian Falls and who last spring had proposed to her at a picnic. He had sandy mustaches like a haycock, and he seemed always to smell of shoe-blacking, and he was meek, apologetic, at once gentle and ridiculous. He had proposed to her in the buggy as they drove home through the firefly-streaked darkness. The situation now was close enough to that other that she had a moment of dizziness, almost as if she were dreaming, as if she had been carried in a circle and washed up in a place and time where she had been before. But there weren‘t, she reminded herself, any fireflies here. And there was nothing meek or apologetic about Bo Mason. Imagine Henry Mossman working it so you had to kiss him a hundred times!

“What're you laughing at?” Bo said.

“I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“Nothing you'd care about.”

“I care about anything you care about.”

“Well, you wouldn't care about this.”

Jud came around and lighted the other lamp. Bo brought in the horses and hitched up. “Want me to drive?” Jud said.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

The wheels crackled through leaves and twigs as they turned into the road, leaving the calliope still wheezing and the little colored horses of the merry-go-round still rising and falling in the torchlight glare of the shore. Then hard road, the beat of trotting hoofs, the yellow blur of the carriage lamps coasting alongside, the flow of cold air around the unequal silhouettes of Jud and Eva, and the snugness as Bo tucked the buffalo robe around her feet. His arm went around her shoulders and she did not move.

She saw the shadow of Jud put an arm around the shadow of Eva, and heard the murmur of low words. Eva must be over her peeve. That was good. It would be a shame to ride all that way home mad. It would be ...

Bo leaned close and kissed her, holding it a long time. She heard Eva's clothes rustle as she turned in the front seat to look back, but she did not even have the impulse to free herself. Instead she leaned back further in the seat and smiled into the misty sky. “Two,” she said, so softly that the front seat couldn't hear.

A long time later, when her hands were cold and her feet chilled and her lips bruised with Bo's kisses, the buggy stopped and she saw the gable of Karl's house. She had given up her attempt to keep count and hold him to the letter of her bargain. He might have kissed her a hundred or five hundred times.

No one made a move. Eva, muffled against Jud, squealed once in a stage whisper. Murmured words and a giggle came back, then a breathless, hushed squeak. Bo kissed her again, and when he let her go she saw his teeth in the misty dark.

“Don‘t!” Eva said from the front seat, and her shadow squirmed as if trying to get away.

“Why not?” Jud said, quite loud.

“Because you tickle.”

“Isn't anybody getting off here?” Jud said.

“I hate to,” said Elsa, and did not move. She looked at Bo, tried to make out his eyes. She pecked him with a swift kiss, pressed him back when he started to rise and help her out. “I'll just hop out and run,” she said, whispering close into his ear. “It was a beautiful day.” She pressed his hands, gathered her skirts, and jumped from the tire to the ground, half falling. When she popped up again she was right beside Jud, and caught his sudden movement. Eva huddled in her coat. She said goodnight to them and ran indoors.

There was much to think about in bed, many excitements, the memory of Bo's kisses, the eagerness and frankness of his admiration when he stopped laughing beside the automobile and said, “God, your eyes are blue!” He must like her, he must like her a lot. He wasn't the sort of person to pretend anything, and everything that had happened all day had said as plainly as it could be said that he was in love with her. That was a delicious thing to sleep with, a thought that could be hugged. But there was the other thought, the troublesome one, and the complete clarity with which she had seen what she had seen gave her a minute of sacred solemnity. Where was she going, and what kind of people was she going with? Because there wasn't any doubt: when she straightened up suddenly beside Jud after jumping from the buggy he had just been pulling his hand out from under Eva's dress.

“It isn't any of my business,” Karl said. “I just got this letter from Nels. Or maybe it is my business. I don't know. I just thought I'd come and talk to you.”

“What's the matter, is he scared I'll abduct his daughter?” Bo said.

“I don't know that he's scared of anything special. He just wants to know who you are and what you intend to do. He's pretty pious. I suppose he just wants to make sure of you.”

“How'd he ever hear about me in the first place?”

“Probably she wrote home,” Karl said. A man going out of the poolhall slapped Karl on the back, and he turned around and grinned and nodded. “In a way I'm responsible for her,” he said to Bo. “Just how serious is this, anyway?”

He watched Bo take out his knife and begin carefully paring his nails. The heavy-lidded eyes were somber and the dark face expressionless. Then he looked straight up at Karl. “Why, if you come down to that,” he said, “I guess it's pretty serious.”

“You mean you're going to marry her?”

“I haven't asked her,” Bo said.

“But you're going to.”

“I guess maybe I am,” Bo said, “if I ever get up the nerve.”

“I can imagine how scared you are,” Karl said. “She thinks you're a little tin god on wheels.”

Bo lifted his eyes again, and Karl felt the glance like something heavy, like a pressure. “You sound as if she was making a mistake to think that,” Bo said. “If she does.”

Karl waved his hands helplessly. He didn't want to get into this. Nels ought to have written to Elsa, or to Bo himself, if he wanted to know so much. He put a man in a bad position. “She's an awful nice kid,” he said.

“I never denied that.”

“But she's just a kid,” Karl said. “That's the only thing that bothers me. She's never been anywhere before, she don't know much. She's just a nice good-looking kid that some careless guy could take advantage of pretty easy.”

“Thanks,” Bo said, eyeing him. “Thanks very much.”

“I never said you were taking advantage of her,” Karl said. “I just said she didn't have any experience, she's got no way of judging people because all the people she ever saw were Norske farmers with their feet in a furrow.”

“Just what is it you've got against me as her husband?” Bo said.

“I didn't say I had anything against you!” Karl said. His voice rose complainingly.
“Herregud,
I've been your friend for six years, haven't I? Only she isn't nineteen yet. She shouldn't be rushed.”

“I haven't been rushing her,” Bo said. “I've been making myself stay away from her for a week.” His eyes were still cold, uncomfortably steady on Karl's face. “Spill it,” he said.

“Oh hell,” Karl said. He jingled the change in his pocket and looked toward the door. A wind blew scraps of paper and gray dust past the windows. “How am I going to tell Nels what you do, for one thing?” he said. “I can't just write and say, ‘Bo's a good guy that runs a blind pig here in town.' Nels won't like it.” He shook his head. “He might even try to stop it,” he said.

“How would he stop it?”

“He might make her come home.”

“I bet you any amount of money,” Bo said, “that she wouldn't go. She ran away from him once, didn't she? He's got a hell of a lot of business trying to run her now.”

“Do you want to take her in to live in a room in that hotel?” Karl said. “Can you see her as the wife of a guy that runs a pig? She's just the wrong kind for you, Bo. She's cut out to have a nice house and a bunch of kids and make somebody a good wife. Your kind of life would break her heart in a year.”

“Suppose I told you I'm selling the joint.”

“You are?”

“I might.”

“Then what would you do?”

“I've been looking over a hotel in Grand Forks,” Bo said. “If that's any of your business.”

Karl wrinkled his forehead. “I don't want you to get sore at me,” he said. “If I was doing the marrying I'd just as soon marry you. But I don't know that Elsa should, by God if I do. You're a rambler. You might both wish you hadn't.”