The Big Rock Candy Mountain (45 page)

“Starting with three hundred dollars,” he said, “I can be worth over six hundred by the end of the week.”

“But you haven't got three hundred to start.”

He reached under the chair and got the bag, set it with a metallic clump on the table, untied the neck and poured a flood of silver dollars on the cloth.

“Well, where on earth ... !” she said.

Expertly he stacked two piles of dollars, shuffled them, melted them into one pile with a smooth drawing motion. “We're out of the woods,” he said.

She was facing him with her hands on the table, as if ready to rise. “Where did you get this?”

“Borrowed it.”

“Who from?”

“Chapman.”

“But ...”

He got up and went around to her. “This is how it is,” he said with his hands on her shoulders. “The flu'll hit us sure. It's already in Regina. And when it comes there won't be any way of getting in and out, or of bringing medicine in. So I'm going after some, to Chinook. I talked with the sawbones this afternoon.”

“But why should you have to borrow all this money?”

“Because I'm making the profit. You know what the best medicine for flu is?”

“Eucalyptus oil?” she said. “I don't know.”

“Good old-fashioned corn whiskey. So I'm going out like an old St. Bernard with a keg around my neck.”

He felt her stiffen under his hands, and she leaned forward. “Whiskey business!” she said.

“It isn't whiskey business,” he said in irritation. “Their damn fool prohibition law might kill off the whole town. Ask Doc O‘Malley. He wants a case of Irish himself.”

She stared across the table at the stacks of dollars. “What if you get caught?”

“Oh, caught! Who's going to be running around that prairie trying to catch anybody? Anyway it's a medical emergency.”

When she said nothing for a long time he pulled her chair sideways and looked at her face. “You still don't like it,” he said.

“I hate to see you get into that illegal business again,” she said. “And it's dangerous. What if a blizzard came up, or you got sick on the road?”

“I might dislocate my jaw yawning, too,” he said. “Hell, I can drive over there and back in less than two days.”

“I wonder,” she said. “I bet you it's snowing right now.”

He went to the window and looked. The yellow panes of Chance's house, next door, were streaked with wavering white. “It isn't even the end of October yet,” he said. “This'll be gone by morning. Even if it isn't I can wait a day.”

Elsa came up and took his arm, and he looked down at her worried face. “Bo,” she said, “I wish you wouldn't.”

For a moment he stood, almost hating her, hating the way she and the kids hung on him and held him back, loaded him with responsibilities and then hamstrung him when he tried to do anything. His teeth clicked, but he waited till the anger passed. “Look,” he said wearily. “This town's played out. It played out two or three years ago. Do you think I'd be sticking around here if it wasn't for you and the kids? I'd be off somewhere where there was money to be made, wouldn't I? Well, I'm sticking here, but you can't expect me not to make a living any way I can.”

“You brought us up here,” she said. “You said you didn't want to live anywhere without us. I believed you then, Bo.”

In spite of himself he heard his voice rising, and he faced her, shaking-handed. “I'm sticking,” he shouted. “I haven't run away, have I? I built you a house and made you a home, didn't I? But how in hell are we going to live in it without any money?”

Elsa looked at him, silent for a moment. “All right,” she said. “I said when I came back that I'd never try to interfere with you again. I made up my mind that I was your wife and I'd stay your wife, no matter what. But I just want you to remember, Bo, that I never asked for more than we had. I'd have been satisfied with just a bare living, if we could only keep what we've had up here. So don't ever say you did this for me or them. Don't ever forget that I was against it.”

Their eyes held for a moment, and he turned half away to look out the window. After a minute Elsa's hand touched his arm lightly. “Poor Bo,” she said. When he turned back her eyes were shining with tears.

“Poor Elsa, you mean,” he said. “Oh damn it, honey, you think I like to see us down to a hundred bucks with a whole winter ahead?”

“I know you don‘t,” she said. She moved against him and he put his arms around her. “What you don't see,” she said, “what you'll never see, is that there are things ten times worse than being poor.”

“I guess I never will,” he said. “Maybe you think it would be fun to go hungry, but I don't.”

“So you still think you'll go.”

He held her tightly against him, looking over her head at the open sack of money on the table, and his mind shut hard and tight. “I've got to,” he said. “Whether you see it or not.”

 

It still snowed in the morning, not heavily, but persistently, with a driving wind. For a few minutes Bo contemplated going away, but it was too thick, and with all the homesteaders crowded into the towns there would be no place to stop along the road if anything went wrong. So he spent the day canvassing the town discreetly, getting orders for five cases more without even proposi tioning the crowd at Anderson's. They were bulk-rye prospects anyway.

That afternoon he worked on the Ford in the shed. Under the seat he put a half dozen cans of canned heat, two spare sparkplugs, a couple pair of chains, and a little bottle of ether, trying to prepare for any sort of emergency. When a car wouldn't start, he had heard, a little ether in the sparkplug wells was like turpentine on a balky mule. With all that whiskey aboard he wasn't going to run any chance of getting stuck. He even cut up an old horse blanket, doubled it, and sewed it into a crude cover for the radiator. If the weather turned cold the radiator could freeze even with the motor running, and you wouldn't know it till you cracked the head or did some real damage.

There was gasoline left from the drum to fill the tank and a five gallon can. At the last minute, looking around for final preparations, Bo took out the back seat and set it against the wall. The car would hold more with the seat out.

After supper he sat in the kitchen while Elsa fried a chicken for his box lunch. It was Hallowe‘en, and the boys were both out. Bo kept going to the door and looking out. The snow had stopped, but the ground was humped with drifts, and it was still blowing. From the direction of town he heard the distant yelling of kids.

“If those shysters come horsing around the shed and bung up that car I'll fill their behinds with birdshot,” he said.

“It's locked, isn't it?”

“Locks don't stop kids when they get going on a tear.”

“I'll stay up and watch,” she said. “You should get to sleep early.”

He looked at her curiously, wondering how much she still objected, how much she was swallowing. She had a habit of swallowing things, and then years later you discovered that she hadn't forgotten them.

The kitchen door swung open, and Chet and Bruce rushed in. Their noses were red and leaking with the cold, their eyes starting out.

“The flu's hit town!” they said in a breathless burst. “Old Mrs. Rieger's got it.”

Bo shut the door. “How do you know?”

“Mr. McGregor said. We were out behind the Chinks‘, and he called us and said not to play any tricks because the flu was in town, and now all the kids are distributing flu masks and eucalyptus oil and we're going back right now.”

“No you're not,” Bo said. He looked at Elsa. “You chase these snickelfritzes up to bed. I'm going uptown to see what's going on.”

“You won't be able to go now,” she said, and the relief in her voice made him mad. “The town will be quarantined.”

“That quarantine's nothing but a word,” he said. “The town really needs the stuff now.”

“Go where?” Chet said.

His father pushed him into the dining room. “None of your beeswax. Go on up to bed, both of you.”

An hour uptown told him nothing he didn't know. Nobody would be allowed in or out of town, but that just made him grin. He could imagine people sitting out along the roads in the cold to warn people. Like hell. They'd be sealed up tight in their houses. At ten o‘clock he went home from the darkened and deserted main street, stoked the parlor heater for the night, and went up to bed. All the actual coming of the flu did was to make it surer that he could sell all the whiskey the Ford would carry.

In the clear, gray-and-white morning, he carried blankets and lunch box out to the shed. The snow had blown during the night, and a foot-deep drift with a deep bluish hollow at its inner edge curved around the corner of the barn. The thermometer read twenty-two above zero. The Ford smelled cold; it was hard to imagine that anything so cold would ever start.

Dumping the blankets and lunch, he went back to the house, dipped two steaming pails of water from the waterjacket of the range, and lugged them back out. They took careful pouring in the tiny hole, and he squinted in the gray indoor light, concentrating. When he had the radiator full he bent to feel the crank, engaged it, tried a half turn. It was like trying to lift the car with one hand. The cold oil gave heavily, reluctantly, to the crankshaft's turning. Whistling through his teeth, he went around to adjust spark and gas levers and switch the key to battery. Then with one finger hooked in the choke wire he bent and heaved, fighting the stiff inwards of the motor around. On his cheek he could feel the dim warmth of the water he had poured in.

Three minutes of laborious heaving loosened the crankshaft a little. He pulled the choke full out and threw his whole weight into the spin. After two ponderous twirls the motor coughed.

“Ha!” he said. He spun again, and again it coughed. It was a good feeling to have that stubborn frozen block of complicated metal giving before his pressure. He felt strong, heavy, able to twist the Ford any way he wanted to. The muscles hardened in his shoulder, and he heaved.

The motor coughed, caught, roared, died again in spite of his frantic coaxing of the choke wire. Another spin and it roared again, banging his knuckles against the mudguard. He choked it in quick bursts, laid his shoulder against the radiator to hold back the Ford's trembling, nuzzling eagerness, and watching his chance, ran around to pull down the spark and push up the gas lever. Only a frantic grab at the choke kept it from dying, and he nursed it carefully, leaning far inside the side-curtained darkness of the front seat. The switch to magneto was crucial: she survived it. He slipped the gas lever up and down, and she roared.

Okay, you old bugger, he said, and leaving it running, went back to the house sucking his skinned knuckles.

The boys were up, crowding their bottoms into the oven door and regarding the preparations with blurred and wondering eyes. Bo warmed his hands briefly before pulling on the big double mitts. When he picked up the bag of money he met Elsa's sober look.

“Now don't you worry, Sis.”

“How can I help worrying? A thousand things could happen.”

“You never saw me get into anything I couldn't get out of, did you?”

“There's always a first time,” she said.

“Where's Pa going?” Chet said.

“Just on a little trip,” Elsa said. She reached up to touch Bo's cheek. “Be awfully careful,” she said.

He bent and kissed her, sparred a moment with the boys in farewell, and eyed them all seriously from the doorway. It wouldn't do to get into any trouble on this trip, with the flu in town. “You stay close,” he said to Elsa. “I ought to be back tomorrow night, but if I'm not, don't worry. Something might hold me up till the day after.”

He ducked out, swinging the heavy bag of dollars, and ran down the path, feeling light, agile, like a boy again. As he drove out of the shed and bucked through a drift into the road up past Van Dam's toward the oil derrick he booped once on the rubber horn to Elsa, standing in the doorway with her arms folded across her breast and watching him.

 

The wind had blown from the north all night, and the dugway up to the south bench was almost bare. But on the bench the snow lay in long, ripple-marked drifts, not deep, but deep enough to hide the road in spots. There had been no guard or hindrance, not even a sign, along the road as he left town. Bo folded a blanket on the floorboards to set his feet on. It was cold, but not too cold, and he was glad for the absence of wind. The sun, flat along the bench, burned on the crests of the drifts and the air in front of the car glittered with sunstruck motes of frost.

Close in, the fences and the Russian thistle jammed against them had kept the road fairly clear, and even where the fences gave out the drifts were nowhere more than a foot deep. The snow was so granular, almost like coarse sand, that he rode over it as he might have over a hard-packed beach.

There was no sign of life, no smoke, in the homesteads he passed; the pastures were empty of stock. As the farms thinned out and the fences broke off at right angles to leave the road unmarked, the drifts were more frequent, and he had to look far ahead to the spots blown bare to make sure of staying on the trail. Once, bucking across a long drift, he dipped down in a swale and bogged down. Three minutes after he had shovelled out he ran smack into a fence, and there was no gate.

He got out to look around, but there was nothing to tell him where he was, only the dazzle of sun on snow and the patches of beaten and frozen grass. Climbing in again, he cramped the wheels sharp left and bumped along the fence. Within a half mile he came to a gate, and recognized it. He was at the edge of the horse pasture. That wasn't so bad. He'd be at his own homestead by noon, could stop off and have lunch inside, warm up a little before going on. Experimentally he moved his toes inside the heavy socks and elkhide moccasins. Not cold yet, just a little stiff from sitting still.