The Big Rock Candy Mountain (3 page)

Standing below the plank seats, Elsa felt people's eyes on her. Men spoke to Karl, and he grinned, squinting up into the sun, saying, “Hello Gus, hello George, hello. Ought to be a hot game.”

“We got it on ice,” somebody said, and there was a laugh.

Feeling conspicuous, Elsa stood silently under her big hat while her uncle picked out a place in the stands. Then someone was calling from a buggy over on the first base line: “Come on over here. You'll melt down to grease in that stand.”

“Ah,” Karl said. “There's Helm. That'll be better.”

The woman who had called beckoned. Elsa saw a broad, dark face, a wide hat, a shapeless body in a loud, intolerably hot-looking dress, a cluster of children. Then they were at the wheel of the buggy, and Karl was saying, “This is Helm, Elsa. Never call her Mrs. Helm or she'll burst a blood vessel.”

Grinning with bad teeth, Helm stuck down a broad hand, her dark eyes running over every detail of the girl's hair, dress, face. At the first clutch of her hand Elsa thought her knuckles would crumble. She flushed, grew angry, and squeezed back with all her strength until she felt her knuckles slip back into line and the broad palm in hers begin to give. For an instant more they gripped each other, until Helm opened eyes and mouth in astonishment.

“My God!” she said loudly. “You're strong as a horse. Where'd you get it?”

“Milking cows,” Elsa said sweetly. Give me another chance and I'll squeeze your fingernails off, she thought. She wished Karl hadn't brought her over here.

, “Come on up,” Helm said. She stuck down her hand again, and in one mighty heave hauled the girl up beside her, where she inspected her again, closely, with brown shining eyes.

“You ain't so light, either. How much do you weigh?”

“I don't know. A hundred and thirty or thirty-five.”

“I got you by a hundred pounds, honey,” Helm said. She rum-. bled with laughter, and her thick fingers pinched experimentally at Elsa's arm. “You don't dint easy, either. First off, I had you pegged for one of these ladies with fainting spells and weak chests.”

Jammed uncomfortably close to Helm's radiating bulk, Elsa looked around into the box of the democrat, at the clot of children there. Helm caught her looking. “Ain't that a brood for you? They all look like their granpa. He was a Sioux Indian.”

“Are you?” Elsa said.

“Half,” Helm said. “The best half, if there's any choice.” She picked at a tooth with her fingernail, her eyes warm behind the broad hand. “Their old man was a good-for-nothing,” she said. “After he got all these he run off and left me with a shape like a bale-a hay. Good riddance to bad rubbish.” She got whatever she was digging for and took her hand away. “You like baseball?”

“Very much,” Elsa said stiffly. She didn't know what to make of this great vulgar woman, but Karl, sprawling on the grass beside the buggy, must have thought she was all right or he wouldn't have come to sit with her.

“This ought-a be a good game,” Helm said. “We got a team, last few years. Got a catcher used to play in the Three-Eye League.”

“Oh?”

“You watch him. He's a one. Bo Mason's his name.”

“He runs the bowling alley next to my store,” Karl said. “If he didn't have a trick knee he'd be in the big leagues.”

“Oh!” Elsa said. “I think I met him the morning I came. Is he dark, sort of slim—looks slimmer than he really is?”

“That's him,” Helm said. “Parts his hair in the middle and a hide like shoe leather.”

A minute later she pointed. “In the blue shirt,” she said. Elsa looked, and saw the young man of that first morning. As he said something to a companion his teeth were very white in his almost negroid face. She wondered how he got so dark running a bowling alley. That would keep him inside, out of the sun, she would think. And she didn't know whether she liked his looks or not. There was a kind of rolling swagger in his walk, and as the home team pegged the ball around the infield he kept making bright remarks. A little of the smart alec in him.

 

But he was as good as they said he was. In the very first inning he caught an Oasis man trying to steal second, caught him by three feet with a perfect ankle-high peg. After that the opposing baserunners took short leads and went down only with the crack of the bat. When he came up to bat the first time, Mason was out on a screaming grass-cutter that the first baseman tried in vain to get out of the way of, but in the fifth he drove in two runs with a thunderous triple that chased the centerfielder far back in the wild mustard. Helm, pounding Elsa on the back, announced three times that it would have been a homer sure except for that trick knee.

In the seventh inning the score was tied, eight to eight. The first two Oasis hitters were easy outs. The next one was a slugger. The stocky youngster on the mound took his time, mopping his neck with a bandanna between pitches. Squatting on his hams behind the plate, Bo Mason talked it up. Easy out, easy out! Give him the old dark one.

The pitcher wound up and threw. Strike! The hitter swung so hard he had to put the end of his bat down to keep from falling. “You need a little oil on your hinges, son,” Mason told him, and the stands hooted. Next pitch, ball. Next one, ball again. Mason's soothing voice went out over the infield. “All right, boy. Can't hit what he can't see. Right down the old alley. Let him swing like a shutter in a cyclone. Feed it to him, he's got a glass eye.”

The next pitch was grooved, and the Oasis slugger rode it deep into left field. The fielder lost it in the sun, and the runner went down to second, his feet pumping quick explosions in the dust. A strained look showed him the fielder still chasing the rolling ball, and he legged it for third, where the players on the sidelines waved him frantically home.

Mason, his teeth showing in his dark face, waited spraddle-legged in front of home plate. The relay from the short stop reached him two steps ahead of the runner, who swerved, skidded, and scrambled back for third. He was in the box. The crowd was on its feet, yelling, as Mason chased him carefully back, holding the throw. He faked, then threw, and the runner reversed and tore for home again. But the ball was there before him, and the catcher blocked the baseline. The Oasis man put his head down and butted through under Mason's ribs, and Mason, as he was plowed out of the path, lifted the ball and tagged him, hard, on the top of his bare head.

The sound of ball on skull cracked in the heat, and the grand-stand let go a long, shivering “Ahhhhhhhhhh!” This might mean a fight. They stood higher in the stands, eyes joyful and faces expectant. “Atta boy, Bo!” they said. “Atsy old way to slow him down!”

Karl Norgaard was standing by the buggy wheel, his pinkish hair damp. He was concentrating on the figure of the Oasis man, slowly pushing himself up from the dust with his flat palms. Karl's voice rose with him in the expectant hush, thin, tremulous, singsong: “Batter we gat a doctor. Ay tank he ban sunstruck.”

The stands exploded in mirth that rode the thick hot air and echoed off the elevators. The Oasis man scowled, looking at Mason, standing just off the baseline with the ball in his hand. Contemptuously Mason pulled off his mitt and turned his back, walking over to the Hardanger bench. With his head down the Oasis man started after him, pursued by the hoots of the spectators, who began to jump down from the lower tiers to get in on the scrap. But other Oasis players grabbed their fellow's elbows and held him while he stood in the clover, fists balled, swearing. Then abruptly he jerked himself loose and ran back into centerfield, and the crowd settled back.

After that there wasn't much to the game. Hardanger batted around in the eighth; the final score was sixteen to nine. After the game Helm yelled until Bo Mason came over, and as he stood talking at the buggy wheel Elsa forgot her dislike for his smart alec streak. He was the best player there, there was no question. But his grin embarrassed her when they were introduced, and she sat back in the hot sweaty alley between Helm and the rail and let the others talk.

“What were you trying to do, kill that guy?” Karl said.

Mason laughed. “He ran me down, didn't he? He wants to play rough I can play rough too.”

“I bet he can't get his hat on for a week,” Helm said. “How about some beer? You look hot, Bo.”

“You could fry eggs on me,” Mason said. “Sure. Over at your place?”

Elsa, sitting uncertainly beside Helm, caught her uncle's grin. “You want to come along, Elsa?”

The girl flushed and laughed. “I don't drink beer,” she said, and was furious at how squeaky her voice sounded. They laughed at her, and Helm patted her on the back with a hand like a leg of lamb. “You don't have to, honey,” she said. “We c'n take care of that.”

In the hot morning hush Elsa walked down the plank sidewalk toward her uncle's store. There wasn't enough housework to keep her busy more than a few hours a day, even on Mondays, when she washed, and Saturdays, when she baked. It was a problem to know what to do with her time. Unlike her father, Karl did not have many books around, and though he had given her money to subscribe to the
Ladies'
Home
Journal,
the first number hadn't come yet.

She could have called on Helm, but the prospect was still a little terrifying. As she thought over that afternoon with the beer drinkers she felt a little weak. They had all got a little tipsy, they had laughed uproariously, they had told jokes that she knew weren't quite clean, and she had just pretended not to hear. Before long, if she didn't watch out, she wouldn't know what was respectable and what wasn't. Fiddlesticks, she said. What was wrong about it? But she didn't quite dare call on Helm.

In the window of the hotel she caught sight of her reflection, and was pleased. The white dress, perfectly ironed, not yet wilted by the heat; the red hair puffed like a crown in front; the round, erect figure, slim in the waist, full breasted. When she walked past three young men lounging on the sidewalk she stepped self-consciously. Feeling their eyes on her, she hurried a little in spite of herself. She was ten steps past when she heard the low whistle and the voice: “Oh you kid!”

She remembered the time she had bloodied George Moe's nose for him when he got smart about her hair. Men were just the same. They'd say smart alec things and if you turned on them, even if you bloodied their noses, they'd laugh even more. But she would have liked to say something sharp to that loafer. Oh you kid! The smart alecs.

But anyway, the next window told her, she looked nice, cool as a cloud.

In front of her uncle's store she almost ran into Bo Mason, bare-headed, his pomaded hair sleek as a blackbird's breast. As he looked at her his eyes were sleepy, the full upper lids making them narrower than they really were. His voice was slow and warm. “Hel loooo!”

“Hello.”

“Going somewhere?”

“No. Just looking around.”

“Seeing the city?” He lifted his head to laugh, and she saw the corded strength of his neck. He pointed down the street to the weed-grown flats dwindling off into dump ground and summer fallow. “You must take a stroll in the park,” he said. “Five thousand acres of cool greenery. This is one of the show towns of Dakota. Prosperous! Did you see that magnificent hotel on the corner as you came by? Gilded luxury, every chamber in it, the fulfilled dream of one of Hardanger's most public-spirited citizens.”

Elsa was a little astonished. She said demurely, “Very imposing. Bath in every room?”

“Some rooms two, so a man and his wife can both be clean same time.”

“Must take a lot of water.”

“Oh, they've got water to burn. Gigantic well just outside, clean pure alkali water, no more than seven dead cats in it at any time.”

“You don't sound as if you liked the hotel much.”

“I love it,” he said. “I love it so much I live there. I love this whole town. Just the spot for an ambitious young man to make his fortune.”

Curiosity uncoiled itself and stretched. She took a peek at the swinging doors behind him. Maybe he wasn't doing so well in his place. Bowling alley, was it? All she could see was a dark stretch of bar and two dim yellow lamps in wall brackets. Into the bright hot sunlight came the jaded click of pool balls.

“What're you doing, really?” Bo said.

“Nothing. I thought I might help Uncle Karl in the store.”

“Let's go have a soda.”

Elsa hesitated, her eyes on the darkly polished bar inside. It looked almost like a saloon, but she knew saloons were prohibited in North Dakota. Her curiosity rose on tiptoe, peering. “Why, that'd be nice,” she said.

Instead of turning into his own place, he took her arm and led her down to the corner. “Why can't we have it in your place?” she said. “Then you wouldn't have to pay for it.”

His look was amused. “You want to go in my place?”

“Why not?”

“Naw,” he said, and moved her along. “My place is a billiard hell. It's a man's joint. You'd scare away my two customers.”

“But you sell drinks, though, soft drinks?”

“Soft enough. But Joe down here makes better sodas.”

She wondered if he might be running an illegal saloon. That ought, according to what the Reverend Jacobsen had always said, to make him one of the undesirable element. Looking at him again, curiously, she saw only that he looked clean, brown, athletic. She didn't ever recall seeing a man who looked so clean. Either the respectability she had been brought up in was narrow, or Bo Mason wasn't one of the bad element. But he drank beer, and told stories that weren't always quite nice. But so did her uncle, and he was respectable. And so did Helm, and Helm was a woman.