The Big Rock Candy Mountain (75 page)

“All right,” he said. “You're Tom Mix. You got me. What do you want?”

The deputy grabbed the sack and Bo let it go in contempt. It crashed on the floor with a thudding clink of smashed glass. The deputy, showing his teeth, let it lie there. “You're under arrest,” he said. “Possession and transportation.”

Bo's voice was perfectly controlled, the voice of a good citizen annoyingly bothered by officious officers. “Since when have you started arresting people for having a little liquor around for their own private use?”

“Own use my ass,” the deputy said. “Come on, you too.” He motioned to Chet, took a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and shook them.

Bo's eyes went narrow and black. “He's got nothing to do with whatever you're charging me with,” he said. “He's just a kid.”

“Would you like to handle this?” the deputy said. He handcuffed the two of them together, and for just an instant their eyes met, Chet's smoky, sullen, a little scared, Bo's bleak and gray. “Don't worry, kid,” Bo said. “This smart bastard is just showing off. You'll be out of this in an hour.”

“That's all right,” Chet said. He went along out to the deputies' car, feeling his chained hand brush against his father's as he walked, and his whole mind was emptied as if water had washed through it.

For an hour after lunch she had been sitting on the balcony with two women from Salt Lake, one a dancing instructor at the university, the other the wife of a professor. They were very pleasant women, easy to know, their voices quiet. The things they talked about let her for a little while look into a world that had been completely closed to her. The professor's wife had been reading a book by a man named Sinclair Lewis.

“You must read it,” she told Elsa. “It's priceless. I should think every Rotarian in the country would be squirming.”

“I think it's rather pathetic,” the dancing instructor said. “After his boy has run off and married the girl, you remember, Babbitt has to accept it and give the two his blessing. When he said that about never having been able once in his life to do what he really wanted to do, I could have wept.”

“The Civil War didn't abolish slavery,” Mrs. Webb said. “We're all slaves to something, just like Babbitt. I hate to think of what somebody might write about college professors, plugging along with their minds half on their work and half on a promotion. There are a thousand things George would like to do, but there he goes on reading themes and getting up lectures and going through the same old grind year after year, just getting acquainted with his students' minds and then having them pass the course and vanish. I should think that must be the worst feeling on earth, teaching freshmen in college. You'd never meet any minds but seventeen-year-old ones. Eventually your own mind must freeze at that level.”

“Have you noticed George deteriorating?” the instructor said.

“I notice he never gets his book done. That's where my slavery comes in. He's a slave to his classes and I'm a slave to the duty of driving him in to work on his book.” She smiled at Elsa. “What's your husband a slave to?”

“I don't know,” Elsa said. “Cigars, maybe.”

She could have come much closer than that, but it wouldn't do. Any consideration of his slavery or her own had to be kept for the nights when sleep wouldn't come and the thoughts went around in their circular paths, pacing the mind like animals caged. Neither she nor her thoughts had any place in the society of these women who could talk shop freely and openly, criticize their husbands because nobody would dare to think for a moment that their husbands were not respectable and estimable men. You criticized in public only when you hadn't really much to object to.

For an instant, sitting in the sweet afternoon sun with these women who read books, went to plays, knew music, moved in an atmosphere of ideas, she felt a pang of bitter black envy. It had never occurred to her why the world of criminals and lawbreakers was called the underworld, but it was clear now. You were shut out, you moved in the dark underneath, and if you came up for a brief time, as she was doing now, you knew, better than these women who accepted you in friendship as something you were not, that you were an uneasy visitor in a place where you didn't belong. Under other circumstances these women might really have been her friends. They could have played bridge or Mah Jong in the evenings, visited at each other's houses, loaned each other books, gone to plays or movies or musicals together.

“That's dreadfully true,” she said. “That about the slavery.”

The mail truck from Salt Lake came up across the bridge and stopped under the balcony. A boy carried the mail sack inside.

“There's what I'm a slave to,” the instructor said. She put away her petit point and stood up. “I just exist from one mail to the next. If the truck broke down some day and didn't get here at least with my newspaper I think I'd die.”

She went down after her mail, and the professor's wife held out the Lewis book. “Would you like to read this? I think you'd like it.”

“Why thank you,” Elsa said. “My son and I have been reading things aloud in the evenings. He'll be going to the university this fall.”

She riffled the pages, wondering when Bruce was coming up. He generally came around three, after he had gone through all his rituals of being a good camper. She stood up to look down the road, and it was then that she saw the Cadillac coming. It pulled into the parking lot and Bo got out, and she could tell from the very way he walked that something was wrong.

“Excuse me,” she said to Mrs. Webb, and laid the book down in her chair. “Here comes my husband ...”

In her room she heard him through in silence. “Well,” she said when he was done, “I guess I'd better start packing my things.”

“Do you think you ought to?” Bo said. “The doc said a couple months, at least.”

“Did you come up just to tell me to stay on here?” she said. Then she saw that he was hurt. He had run to her the minute he got into trouble, and he had come to take her back, but he didn't like to be told why he had come. “I wouldn't think of staying,” she said. “I feel worlds better. A month has been more than enough.”

“I want you to stay right here if you think you need to,” Bo said. “There's no point in coming down if you're going to get all run down again.”

Out of the weariness that had come back on her, Elsa smiled. “We'll be moving again, I suppose.”

“I guess we'll have to.”

He sat on the bed and watched her put her clothes in the bags. He was nervous and fidgety, stood up to look out the window, lit a cigar, let it go out, lit it again. “That damned show-off prohi,” he said. “Waving a gun around as if he was catching horse thieves. I wish to hell Chet hadn't been there.”

Elsa turned sharply. “Was Chet there?”

“Didn't I tell you?” Bo said. “They took him down to the station with me, but they let him loose right away. It was just that prohi trying to get himself a reputation. I don't think he'd ever made a raid before.”

Elsa only half heard him. She wanted to say “Oh my God!” and sit down on the bed and cry. Instead she said, quietly, “How did Chet take it?”

“All right. He was pretty white. He just kept his mouth shut till they turned him loose.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“No. I didn't get out till eleven-thirty. They didn't take the car, because they didn't have any evidence I'd been transporting in it, so I gave Chet the keys. When I got back this morning the car was in the garage and Chet was gone. I suppose he went to work, or else out to make some arrangements.”

“Arrangements for what?”

“I guess I didn't tell you that, either. I saw Bill Talbot and he's taking Chet along this trip.”

So it was better, she thought. That would keep him from thinking too much about it. But it was bad enough to have had him dragged off to jail. “That's the part I hate worst about this business,” she said. “To have the boys get mixed up in it ...”

“Do you think I like it?”

“You could have prevented it if you'd quit a long time ago.”

His face flushed darkly. “Kick me,” he said. “I'm down.”

“That isn't fair,” she said, almost crying.

“Is it fair to gouge me when I'm down? I'd have done anything to prevent that, if I could have.”

“Bo,” she said, “let's not fight. I'm sorry. I'm just sick about Chet, that's all.”

So you've given up again, her mind said. You've backed away when you knew you were right. You used to have more spirit than that.

Will you go on, she said, will you keep on backing away until your children are both blackened by this dirty business, or driven to something worse? She looked at Bo, his face haggard, almost old, the faint lines of bitterness and violence deepened around his mouth. He was miserable too, as miserable as she was.

But then why! she said. He could have got out of this business years ago.

What is your husband a slave to, Mrs. Mason? To himself, Mrs. Webb, to himself. To his notion that he has to make a pile, be a big shot, have a hundred thousand dollars in negotiable securities in his safety deposit box, drive a Cadillac car, have seven pairs of shoes with three-dollar trees for each pair, buy three expensive Panamas during a summer and wear a diamond worth fifteen hundred dollars in his tie. He doesn't know, he wouldn't know, what to do with money when he has it. Would he ever think of going to the theater, or reading a good book, or taking a trip somewhere just for the trip? He gave up reading books ten years ago, and even when he goes to a movie he goes only to kill three hours ...

“Chet'll be all right,” he said. “I wouldn't worry about him, Else.”

“I hope so,” she said. “He's more sensitive than you think, though. He has to show off a lot, and pretend he's older than he is. He lives on the admiration of his pals. And if this gets in the paper it'll hurt his pride so bad.... Is it in the paper?”

“Not very big,” Bo said. “It's there, though.”

“Poor Chet,” she said.

“We'll have to stop at Bruce's camp,” she said. “Maybe we could let him stay up here.”

“Moving, we could use him,” Bo said.

“Well, we'll see.” She took one bag and Bo the other. At the top of the stairs Elsa remembered Mrs. Webb and the book. “I have to run up again,” she said. “I'll meet you in the car.”

Up on the balcony she spoke to Mrs. Webb. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I guess I won't be able to read your book after all. My husband just came up and I have to go down with him.”

“I hope it isn't anything serious,” Mrs. Webb said.

“No. Nothing serious. I may come back in the next few days. I ... hope so. It's been a wonderful place.”

“If you don‘t,” Mrs. Webb said, “don't forget to come and call. I'd love to see you. Did I give you my address?”

“Yes,” Elsa said. “I hope you'll come and see me too.”

Mrs. Webb put out her hand. “It's been ever so nice to know you,” she said. “Be easy on yourself. You don't want to get sick again.”

“I feel almost as if I were leaving home,” Elsa said. “Will you say goodbye to Miss Sorenson for me?”

She broke away and went, and on the stairs she met Miss Sorenson and had to go through it again. Miss Sorenson had the paper under her arm, and as she got into the car Elsa thought miserably that now, probably, up there in the sun on the balcony, the two would read that news item, not very big but there all right, and know her for what she was. Next to her worry about how Chet was taking everything, that was the most miserable of many miserable thoughts. The only consolation was that the address she had given Mrs. Webb would be useless after a day or two. So even if Mrs. Webb missed that item in the paper, and came to call, she would find only blank windows and a closed door. At the very least, the underworld could hide.

 

She found more to worry about than even her worse anxieties could have anticipated. When, at the end of a week that left her sick and spent, she sat down in the afternoon with all of it settled, Chet gone, Bruce off with a friend's family on a tour of the southern parks, Bo downtown making the last of his undercover arrangements that would get him off lightly with a fine, she felt as if she had gone through an earthquake, and the world was still tipsily rocking. Moving hadn't helped any, either. Her curtains weren't up yet, there were boxes still unpacked in the kitchen, the linen was piled on top of the bed in the spare bedroom. The house, like her own life, was upside-down, but she couldn't do any more now. She just wanted to sit and cry. Even the realization of how burnt-out she felt sent a twinge through her, and she rested her forehead on her hand. Ah Chet, Chet, she said, blinking the tears. She had cried enough already, she thought in wonder, so that she shouldn't be able to cry any more.

She looked up at the uncurtained room. It was a pleasant enough room, far pleasanter than many she had lived in, but the windows were streaked, the shades hung a little crookedly in their brackets, the rug wasn't down yet and the furniture was arranged anyhow. It struck her as a cold room, an unlived-in room, as unfriendly to its new occupants as a barn. Whenever she moved anything the sound echoed. Outside, in the stretch of vacant lots that went for a half block down the street, children were yelling, and cars went up and down on the new pavement, but the sounds too were remote and indifferent. She was shut up here in this half-lived-in house, hidden behind its dirty windows, in isolation as complete as if she lived in Labrador.