The Big Rock Candy Mountain (78 page)

“When she came out that morning with the queer look on her face and said that she'd found a big lump in her breast, their eyes jumped to meet each other, and it seemed to me that all of a sudden I could see what living together twenty-five years can do to two people. They asked and answered a dozen questions in that one look.

“I remember her operation, too, the way the old man woke me at six in the morning to go to the hospital. He probably hadn't slept much. But he couldn't stand it down there. He held her hand while they gave her the ether—and I suppose I was jealous that she wanted him, not me—but the minute they began getting ready, and Cullen came out of the washroom with his scrubbed hands in the air for a nurse to pull the gloves on, the old man lurched out as white as chalk. Once or twice during the operation I saw his face looking in the operating room door, but it never stayed more than a second or two, and when Cullen came back with the slides and said it was malignant, that it meant radical surgery, we had to hunt for two or three minutes to find the old man. He was sitting out on the fire escape, gray clear to the lips. He just nodded when Cullen told him, and he never made a move to come in again. If he had he probably would have fainted, because it was like a butcher's block.

“Afterwards he visited her twice a day, brought her candy, filled her room with flowers. He even tried to talk to me about her and get me to say she would probably be all right now, wouldn't she? There wasn't anything left for cancer to grow in, was there? I'm afraid I didn't give him much help. I didn't think then, and I don't now, that she has more than a fifty-fifty chance of its not coming back. I suppose I acted cold, but it was only because I was talking to him. I agonized over it enough, because I love my mother, and respect her, more than anyone I have ever met, and that's not anything a psychologist can grin about. Why shouldn't I? There's a positive flame in her, a curious little bright flame that never goes down.

“But the old man was good to her then. He wouldn't have talked her into going to visit Kristin if he had been thinking only of himself. Maybe he thought that she might not live long, that he owed her a visit home. He suggested that she go through Hardanger and see the people they'd known when they were first married, and just before she left, when Chet and Laura and the baby came in from the mine, he agreed without a whimper to take them in. Give him credit: he's kept them ever since, even if he has grumbled.

“She enjoyed that trip. Nobody in Hardanger recognized her at first, and she had fun being mysterious and letting recognition dawn on them. They gave her the keys to the town, apparently. That must be a curious feeling, to go back after twenty-five years and see all your friends grown gray and fat and bald, and count the stones in the graveyard, and know that you've grown older along with everything else. Anyway she enjoyed it, and she came back in better health.

“Maybe she'll get by. Maybe there's a chance that after I finish here I can get her to break loose from that life. She deserves some friends, she deserves a rest. She's had too long a vacation from any sort of normal woman's life.

“It's an almost marvellous fact that a dozen years of living among bootleggers and pimps and bellhops and all the little scummy riffraff on the edge of the criminal class hasn't touched her—simply hasn't touched her. Neither has the constant sacrifice she has had to make of her own wishes and her own life. It's almost comical to see how completely those small-time thugs respect her. She has been the repository of the confessions and woes of half a dozen kept women, she's been within smelling distance of a dozen stinking episodes, she has had for companions altogether too many foul-mouthed, unscrupulous, lying, cheating, vicious people, but all they have succeeded in doing is to make her kindly-wise. For all her yielding and her self-sacrificing, there is something in her that doesn't give when it's pushed at. She only gives up her wishes, never herself.”

 

Bruce stretched his cramped fingers and looked up. This could go on all night and he would be no closer to what he was after. Probably when he read over what he had written he wouldn't even agree with half of it. He picked up his mother's letter again. No mention of how the double-family arrangement was going now, nothing about how the old man was behaving. Chet had finally agreed to go back to the business school, which he had started once and then dropped. His father was looking at a little sporting goods shop down on Second South, with the idea that he might buy it and set Chet up as manager. They hadn't said anything to Chet yet, and it was still only an idea, but she hoped it would come about. Chet was sick now, in bed. A week ago they had driven up to watch the ski jumping at Ecker Hill, and Chet had helped push some people out of the snow, and had got overheated and caught cold. He was running a little fever, and if he didn't get over it by tomorrow she was going to send him down to the hospital. The baby was fine, it was wonderful to have a child around the house again.

Without moving from the desk, Bruce scribbled off a letter. He had been hitting the books pretty solidly since he came back. Examinations came up next week, but he wasn't worrying too much. Maybe he'd go over to see Kristin one of these days. She was one of the great cookie-makers, and whenever he got tired of cafeteria food he liked to go over and have an orgy at her house. Also her kids were nice kids and George was a good quiet sensible sort of guy. A little home atmosphere was good after a few weeks of grinding. Too bad Chet was sick. “Give him an enema,” he said, “from me.”

Feet clumped on the hall linoleum and knuckles rapped at his door.

“Come in,” Bruce said.

It was Brucker, the fellow from the floor below, a graduate student in economics. “Just got sick of sitting on my tail,” he said, peering in. “You busy?”

“No. Come on in.”

His visitor flopped on the cot. “If I ever again hear the words Malthus, Mill, Pareto, or Marx,” he said, “I'll puke.”

“That's something I've been meaning to ask you,” Bruce said. “Who is this guy Marx?”

Brucker stared at him. “You go to hell.”

“Come on, tell me about him. What'd he write?”

“I'll strangle you,” the economist said. “I'm in no mood to be toyed with.”

Bruce laughed. “By the end of next week there won't be a sane man in the house.”

“There isn't one now,” Brucker said. “Boyer is down in his room lying on the bed playing with his toes, cackling like a madman. Nicholson has clutched his books unto his breast and rushed into the night toward the library so as to avoid a fine. Hadley has chucked the whole works and gone hunting a woman. How do you manage to stay up in this attic dungeon and crack the books?”

“One way is to send your only good pants to the cleaner's so you can't go out. Or maybe you have two pairs of pants.”

“Three,” Brucker said. “All of them so thin on the backside you can read a newspaper through them. That's why I'm studying economics.”

“Come on out and let the wind blow through them,” Bruce said. “I've got to mail a letter.”

They went down the two flights of stairs and Bruce opened the door. Brucker sniffed. “What's that smell?” he said suspiciously.

“I don't smell anything.”

“By God, I do believe it's fresh air,” the economist said.

As they walked to the corner, their collars up against the still cold, a messenger boy on a bicycle passed them. Under the arclight his face looked blue. He had a muffler wrapped around his ears and his cap crammed down over it. “Brrr!” Brucker said. “I'll never again send a telegram in the winter time. It's cruelty to animals.”

They sprinted from the corner back to the house, yelling, racing each other in an unpremeditated burst of energy up the stairs. At the top they met the messenger, his nose red and leaking. “Mason live up here?” he said.

“Yeah,” Bruce said, surprised. “Here.”

He watched the boy take the yellow envelope out of his hat. The single hall bulb threw his shadow hulking down the wall of the stairway. “Got a telegram with a money order attached,” he said. “You sign right here.”

“A money order?” Bruce said. He looked at Brucker and frowned. The shadow of the runty messenger heaved on the wall as the boy extended the book. Bruce looked at it without reaching out. The certainty was like ice in his throat. He looked again at Brucker. His voice came out of his tight throat in a dry, difficult whisper.

“My brother's dead!” he said.

He had been playing with Chet and a bunch of other kids in the loft of Chance's barn, back in Whitemud, and Chet had slid down the hay on top of him and they had had a fight. Chet had thumped him unmercifully, got him down and tried to make him holler enough, but he wouldn't holler enough, even when Chet bent his arm back in a hammerlock and he felt his shoulder heaving out of joint. “I'll give you an enema!” he kept screaming. “God damn you, just wait, I'll give you an enema!”

“Friend or enema?” Chet said. He put his grinning face down close to Bruce's and twisted his arm harder. “Come on, friend or enema?”

“Enema!” Bruce screamed. “Do you hear me, enema!”

Chet's face began to fade, the grin dwindled and sobered until the face hanging above him was serious and frowning, thinning away, going ...

“Chet,” his mother's voice said, and without surprise Bruce saw that she was there and that the kids had gone. “Chet, I wish you'd try not to scowl so. You look as if you didn't have a friend in the world.”

“I'll give him an enema!” Bruce screamed. He opened his eyes and saw the row of green chair backs, the blue night lights, the sprawling figures of sleepers, the pale gleam of bunched pillows half falling off the arms into the aisle. Outside there was a thin and watery light, not yet strong enough to be called daylight, but not quite darkness. His mouth was bitter with the taste of coal smoke, and his throat was sore.

In the curious unreality of the chair car, less real than the dream. he had just awakened from, he straightened himself, lifted his aching shoulder from its cramped position. Half stupefied, he rose and rocked back between the sleepers to the men's room, rinsed his mouth, washed his face and hands, looked at himself in the mirror. His face was pale and floating, his tie twisted, and for a long time he stood stupidly wondering where he'd got the overcoat. It wasn't his. He didn't own one. He had got around to combing his hair before the realization came to him, not suddenly, but as a dull transition from not-knowing to knowing. Brucker's coat. He remembered Brucker, solicitous, almost anguished, and himself wandering down the hall, shaking off Brucker's hands, standing with his back to the top of the stairs while the messenger boy's scared face went on down and the fact of death lay in the hall like a heavy foul smell. Then Brucker putting him on the twelve-fifteen later, pressing his overcoat on him, shaking his hand hard, wringing it, his face stiff with sympathy. A good guy, a good friend.

He moved a spittoon with his foot so that he could sit down on the leather bench by the window. The pane was so streaked that he could barely see out. What he could see looked like Nebraska. Farms, windmills, occasional trees, fields and fences, a strip of ghostly highway and a car on it, its lights still on. He put his hand in his overcoat pocket, felt the paper, drew it out yellow and crumpled, read it again.

“Chester passed away this morning wiring you train fare love. Harry Mason.”

Harry Mason, Bruce thought. Not “Dad.” Not “Father.” Harry Mason. As if he didn't dare use any familiar word, or were so confused he didn't know quite what he was doing. Or as if the loss of his one son had made him realize what a bottomless gulf lay between himself and the other. A stiff and formal telegram. Chester passed away this morning ...

Oh Jesus, Bruce said, poor mother!

Tears squeezed between his lids, and at the sound of a step in the aisle he rose quickly and washed his face again. The brakeman looked through the curtain, nodded, and went on. Bruce went back to his seat and lay down, his eyes close to the smeared window, staring out across the flat land. It couldn't be Nebraska. It had to be Minnesota or Iowa. They weren't due in Omaha till sometime around six. Then a thousand miles of Nebraska and Wyoming and Utah. He'd get into Salt Lake at the worst possible time, two or three in the morning.

Chet is dead, he said. Your brother has died suddenly, and you are on your way back to his funeral. Your father has sent you a telegram and a money order. You change at Omaha to the Union Pacific and you will arrive very early in the morning in Salt Lake. You will see your mother with the knife in her. You will see Chet's wife, whom you do not much like, parading her grief, and his little girl bewildered and whimpering. You will also see your father, whom you hate, and how will he be taking it? He always liked Chet better than you, even though he treated him harder.

And Chet, he said, is dead. His life is finished at twenty-three, before it had a chance to begin. Never, he said. Not ever. He was, and now is not.

Suddenly he was flooded by memories of terrifying clarity, he and Chet trapping muskrats together on the river in Canada, playing soldier down in the burnouts on the homestead, singing together in school cantatas, getting into fights over the Erector set, swimming in the bare-naked hole down by where Doctor O‘Malley's tent used to be pitched, playing map games on the long ride down from the Canadian border to Utah. The smell of gasoline from the auxiliary can in the hot grove near Casper, the mourning doves that cooed all that morning from the cottonwoods, and the ledge up behind, where they killed the rattlesnake. The pride he had felt, the tremendous exuberant exultation, when Chet caught the pass in the last quarter to beat Provo, and himself running out on the field hysterical with “school spirit,” pushing through players slimed with black mud from head to foot, only their eyes unmuddied, to grab Chet's hand and pound him on the back, and the way Chet had grinned almost in embarrassment behind his mask of mud, still holding the ball in his big muddy hands ...