The Big Rock Candy Mountain (11 page)

Bo had finished paring his nails. He shut the knife with a snick and put it in his pocket. “You're an old busybody,” he said. “Why don't you go back and tend to your store?”

Karl shrugged and pushed himself away from the bar. “Give me a beer first.”

While Bo got out a bottle and glass Karl watched him. He was a nice guy. He was a hell of a nice guy. But what kind of a life would it be for that innocent of an Elsa, tagging him around from one thing to another? Bo wasn't a sticker. He chased rainbows too much. “You really gone on her?” he said. “You going to become a reformed character and settle down and be an alderman?”

Bo scraped the foam from Karl's glass with an ivory stick and dropped the bottle in a box under the bar. A man across the room was pulling the handle of the slot machine. “I told him,” somebody back by the pool tables said loudly, “that I'd cut it for fodder before I'd pay any such cut to a thrashing crew ...”

“Look,” Bo said. “How many times do I have to tell you? I want to marry her. I'm not pretending to be something I'm not, but I'm not saying I'm going on here sitting on my tail in this little joint, either. If she wants to marry me on those terms, whose business is it but hers and mine? Write her old man and tell him anything you please. I'll write him myself if you want. I'm not trying to pull any fast ones. Sure she's a nice girl. She's so nice I can't believe it, considering the way she was brought up. She's a peach. She deserves a lot, I know it. I want to try to give it to her.”

“Yeah,” Karl said. “Well, nobody could ask for more than that. I wasn't trying to break it up, you understand. It was just that I got this letter ...”

He stopped. Bo was looking past him toward the man by the slot machine against the far wall. Moving swiftly, he raised the board and stepped out from behind the bar. He was almost at the man's shoulder before the other heard him, and turned. He was a tall, loosely-built man, a bum or an itinerant laborer with a ragged elbow in his coat. He turned and squawked almost in the same instant, and then Bo collared him.

 

Elsa looked up from the letter with puckered brows, looked unhappily out the window. It was a gray, unpleasant day, and the wind blew, rattling the window frame. The tight-lipped, strained face of her mother looked at her from the German silver frame of the daguerreotype. She felt miserable and discontented, and she hadn't seen Bo for days. Hardanger, her uncle's house, the people she knew here, were a foreign land and a foreign people. She had cut herself off from home, and now there was no real home here.

Her eyes went back to the letter. Sarah, Kristin wrote, was pretty hard to get along with sometimes. She was funny. One minute she'd be apologetic, and let Erling run all over her, and act as if she were a stray that had been let in, and the next she'd be snappish, trying to run the whole place. And she agreed with Pa that something should be done about Elsa, before she flew off the handle and married some good for nothing. Who was Bo Mason, anyway? Pa seemed to be worried about him. Was he nice? Where had she met him?

Elsa stood up. Let him think what he pleased. He would think the worst, because that was the way he was, but that didn't bother her. She knew Bo a lot better than he did, and if she chose to marry him—and were asked—she would. And what right had Sarah to talk! Marrying a man twice as old as she was, and then presuming to dictate the marriages of other people!

Angrily the girl threw on her coat and went outside. Until five in the afternoon she walked as fast as her legs would carry her, out through flattened weedy fields, across strips of summer fallow, over the corner of the dump-ground among wheels of old buggies, pieces of scrap iron, papers, tin cans rusted and plugged with bullet holes from the target-shooting of boys, the bones of a cow gnawed by dogs or coyotes. The slough confronted her, a saucer of stagnant water rimmed with tules, with mudhens floating close to shore and a wary flock of canvasbacks swimming out in the open water. She walked clear around it, feeling through her coat the coming of deep fall; the going away of warmth from the earth was like some loss of warmth and energy in herself.

And Kristin, wanting to get away from home too, asking if there wasn't someone in Hardanger who needed a girl—Kristin who couldn't bake, couldn't clean house without leaving the corners full of dust puppies and the wallpaper smeared where her broom had brushed down cobwebs. Indian Falls, the place she had called home and still unconsciously thought of as home, must be as bad as she had thought it when she left, if Kris wanted to leave too. But the sister she wanted to come to was lonesome in a strange and barren town.

Her feet kicked in flat brown reeds, sank in muck, squashed through wet hummocks of meadow, found dry ground again. How long would she go on living in someone else's house, eating someone else's bread, with never anything to call her own except the clothes she wore and the thoughts she thought? It would be nice, she thought irrationally, to take piano lessons. But there wasn't a piano in any house open to her. There wasn't anything she could do, no way she could use her time to improve herself, except by reading, and even finding books was difficult.

She kicked a pebble down the ruts worn by the dump wagons. What's the matter with you? she said, and impatience put length in her strides again. Mooning around like a calf, wishing you were somewhere else, or somebody else, and wanting things you can't have.

But I know what I want, she said. I want a place of my own where I can sit down and everything there is mine and everything I do means something.

And you want Bo in it, she said.

Well what if I do? she answered.

Her feet found plank sidewalk under them. She was on the prairie end of Main Street. At the confectionery she hesitated. An ice cream soda might be nice. But the wind whipping around the corner changed her mind. A cup of coffee at home would be better. She hurried faster. The fogged sun had gone completely, and the wind had a bite.

It was too bad, she thought as she neared the bowling alley, that Bo didn't run a place women could go to. She would have liked to drop in sometimes. She would like to right now, and see why he hadn't been over. But then he would think she was chasing him. With her head down against the wind she went past his door.

She was a half dozen steps past when she heard the uproar inside, and Bo's voice, saying, “All right. I'll just fix you so you won't be tempted again.”

She shrank back into her uncle's doorway just as the swinging doors of the poolhall burst open and Bo, holding a man by the front of his coat, pushed him through and backed him to the edge of the sidewalk. Though the stranger was almost as big as Bo, he looked beaten. There was a ragged hole in the elbow of his coat. The crowd that had poured out after them stood in a cluster on the sidewalk. Elsa saw Karl, still in his store apron and his black sateen cuff protectors. “Now,” Bo said, “how many times did you slug that machine?”

The man's quick eyes shifted from Bo to the crowd and back. He wet his lips. “I'll make it good, mister,” he said. His hand fumbled in his pocket.

“How many times?”

“Just once.” The tramp's hands quit fumbling, came up to lie lightly on Bo's wrist. “That guy was right close. He c'n tell you. I only did it once. I was hongry and needed a cup-a coffee.”

“Why didn't you ask for a cup of coffee?”

“I didn't think you'd hand it out, mister. Honest to God, I'll make it good.”

He almost babbled, his eyes on Bo's heavy dark face. It was so changed a face from his usual one that Elsa felt her stomach draw in. Bo kept his left hand rigid in the man's coat, teetering him on the eighteen-inch drop-off into the street. “Well, turn about's fair play. That's right, isn't it? Even-Stephen,” Bo said softly. “That's all I'm going to slug you, see? Only once.”

The crowd snickered, then someone grunted, a startled sound, as Bo's right fist smashed up. The tramp toppled backward into the street and lay where he fell, with a smear of blood on his mouth and his hat ten feet away from him in the dust.

Bo swung to go back inside, pushing through the men whose eyes still fed on the man lying in the street. Then he saw Elsa, flattened against her uncle's door. His expression changed, the hard, tough look left his face, and he took two steps toward her, but before he could come any further she turned and ran.

She did not look back, but she heard the windy
whoosh!
of the swinging doors as someone went through then, and the voice of someone in the crowd. “Jee-suss!” the voice said. “I'll just slug you once, he says, and then he socks him. Turn about's fair play, he says ...”

Elsa, hurrying home with her stomach sick and her mind hot with outrage, saw nothing. Her mind was too full of the image of the fear-stricken face of the tramp and the abrupt stillness of his body in the street and the smear of blood on his mouth. He had been hit when he was begging for mercy, when he was making no attempt to resist, when he was offering to make good whatever it was he had done. Any man with a bit of pity in him would have let him go.

Too furious to think, she went and sat on her bed upstairs, stooped to run icy hands through the mass of her hair. Quite suddenly, not knowing she was going to do it, she began to cry.

 

He appeared so suddenly that there was no way to avoid him. It was eight o‘clock. She had finished the supper dishes and was sweeping the kitchen, aware of the pipe smell from the parlor where Karl was reading, aware dimly that it had started to drizzle outside, and that she ought to shut the kitchen door. But she finished sweeping first, stooping with the dustpan, and when she rose he was in the doorway, rain dripping from the curled brim of his derby and the shoulders of his coat dark with wet.

For a moment she confronted him, dustpan in hand, as if he had been a burglar. He leaned against the jamb and said nothing, but his eyes were steady and his face serious. There was no trace around his mouth of the toughness she had seen that afternoon. She looked for it in the instant she faced him, but it was his nice face she saw, the smooth skin dark and healthy looking, the jaw square, the gray eyes lighted with somber warmth. She dropped her eyes to his hand, the hand that had been a brutal fist that afternoon, hooked in his lapel: a square brown hand with long square-ended fingers, a strong, heavy wrist.

With a twist of his body he straightened away from the jamb. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she said. She stepped to the door, brushing him as she went by, and dumped the dustpan in the can, came back and shut the door, folded the tablecloth and put it away.

“I thought I'd better come over,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I thought maybe I ought to do a little explaining.”

“Is there anything to explain?”

“There's plenty to explain. You saw me hit that guy.”

She faced him then, furiously. “Yes, I saw you hit him! I saw you hit him when he wasn't fighting back and was begging you not to.”

Annoyance brushed his face, was smoothed away again. His voice was quiet, as if he were maintaining his patience and explaining something to a child. “There's only one way you can treat those guys,” he said.

“He said he'd pay you back for whatever it was he did.”

“Sure. Sure he'd pay me back, long as I had him. And you know what he'd do? Next place he went into he'd slug some other machine. Guys like that will go on slugging machines till someone shows them it isn't healthy.”

“I suppose you did it just to teach him a lesson!”

Bo flushed. Leaning against the door, he breathed through his nose, pressing his lips together. She couldn't keep her temper now; she had to tell him what she thought of him. “What if he did slug a machine?” she said. “It's a gambling thing, isn't it?”

“Sort of.”

She took her hands from her apron pockets, shoved them back in again hard because she couldn't keep them from shaking. “Remember what you told me at the carnival?” she said. “Remember what you said about it was all right to take advantage of a gambling game because any game like that was crooked? Any gambling game is crooked. Jud said so himself. What that tramp did was just what you and Jud did when you both threw at once.”

“It isn't the same,” Bo said. “It isn't anything like the same.”

“I don't see any difference. You bullied the man at the carnival when he objected. What if the tramp had bullied you the same way?”

“He'd have got his head knocked off.”

“He did anyway.” Elsa opened her hands inside her pockets. They were sweating in the palms.

“I explained to you,” Bo said. “You let these guys get away with things like that and they'll cheat everybody up and down the line.”

She couldn't see him any more because her eyes were blurry. “That was the most brutal thing I ever saw,” she said.

He did not speak for a moment, but when he did his voice was rougher. “You shouldn't have been around there,” he said. “That's a man's place. It's no place for a woman.”

She looked at him, almost stammering. “Excuse me,” she said. “I didn't know the sidewalks were some place I shouldn't go. But I suppose you have to have them clear so you can beat somebody up every once in a while!”

“Listen, Elsa ...”

“Listen nothing! I thought you were big and strong and fine, and now I find out that all you use your strength for is to hit people who beg you not to. If you'd shown any mercy at all, the least bit of pity ...”

“Just because I sock a damn tinhorn that slugs my machine, I'm that bad.”