The Big Rock Candy Mountain (15 page)

 

The solitaire grew on him slowly in the days when receipts and expenses chased each other in an endless circle and the big companies took their drummers off the road and the bank had been cleaned out. It became a ritual, a kind of intent solitary fortune-telling game. Every evening he sat down at the table with cards and a tablet and pencil. The game never varied. He bought the deck for fifty-two dollars and got back five for every card he put up. For hours, some nights, she heard the stiff riffle of cards, the slipping noise as he thumbed the deck, the light smack as he laid them down. Looking up, she saw his dark, intent face, dark even in winter, bent over the game. When the last card was gone he leaned over and added figures to the long string on the tablet, adding or subtracting from his total gain or loss. Then the riffle again, the expert flip of the cut, the light smack of a new layout going down. Sometimes, cleaning up, she looked with baffled wonder at the columns of figures on a discarded tablet sheet, the thousands of dollars of mythical debt, and once in a while at top or bottom a string of aimless figures elaborately penmanlike, neat sevens and nines and twos with curly tails, or signatures with strong flowing downstrokes: Harry G. Mason, Harry G. Mason. 7 7 7 7 7 7, 2 2 2 2 2 2, 9 9 9—and the debt going up in fantastic figures from page to page. She learned to know that whenever the aimless signatures and the strings of numbers appeared on the pages, he was more baffled and restless and prowling and dissatisfied than usual, that somebody had ducked on his bill or that he and Jud had lost money in a poker game in the room behind the bar.

It did no good to laugh at him or get mad at him. He wanted, he said, to see how much he would stand to make from a solitaire game if he ever had a gambling house. When she asked him if he were planning on starting a gambling house he said no, of course not. But he wanted to know. She knew that he attached cabalistic importance to his figures. If he made money off his game one night, that meant that the next day the bar would do a good business, or there would be a couple more rooms rented. If he lost, the next day would be bad. So he did his best never to lose. He would play five games more just to see if he couldn't pick it up. When he lost on those he would play five more, and then ten more, and then fifteen more, just to make it an even fifty games for the evening, and if he had a string of games in which he did not win at all he became angry and intent and touchy, and went to bed angrily leaving cards and tablet sheets scattered over the table.

When he finally threw the deck down one night and said he had lost fifty-six thousand dollars on five thousand games, she thought he might be over that streak. But the next night he was playing solitaire cribbage, with the purpose, he said, of determining exactly what the average crib hand was. But cribbage too he used like a crystal ball. If he won as often as he lost, then the hotel would pull out of it and be a decent proposition. If he lost seventy-five out of a hundred games, it was a washout, they might as well sell it tomorrow, or give it away. If he won seventy-five out of a hundred, they'd make a mint.

She shook her head and smiled, remembering that. She couldn't remember how it had ended. So many evenings were blended into one composite recollection that she didn't know for sure whether he had been playing solitaire up to the time Pinky Jordan came to town, or whether he had stopped of his own accord. All she knew was that by the time Pinky Jordan came the hotel was a hopeless weight on their backs, that even Jud was getting the look of failure and defeat that it seemed to her now lay like mildew over all of them. And Eva still living with Jud in the hotel, not married but going by the name of Mrs. Chain, having attacks of her gall bladder trouble or whatever it was that ailed her, and needing attention like an invalid half the time. They were all tired out and low when Pinky Jordan came. Perhaps that was why he seemed like a comet across their horizon.

That day Elsa remembered as clearly as if it had been last week. (And why not? she said. If it hadn't been for him we wouldn't be here in Washington now, we wouldn't have gone back to Indian Falls that winter, we wouldn't have done anything, probably, except go on trying to make the hotel pay. Why wouldn't I remember an afternoon that changed our whole lives?) At the end of an opaque, telescoped gap in her life there was a little man with a nicked ear and a whiskey voice, a kind of Pied Piper who whistled one tune and up came all the roots of the people who heard him.

She was sitting in the chair behind the desk, resting after putting the children away for their naps and trying not to hear the random talk that came through the door of the blind pig, brazenly halfway open because of the heat. Chester had been down before going to bed, and Bo had swatted him with buggy pillows and tickled him into spasms and had ended by setting him on the bar and giving him a sip of beer. When she sailed in and rescued him, Bo had been disgusted, almost nasty. “Oh for God sakes!” he said. “What's the harm in that?” Jud, tending bar, winked at her and raised his shoulders eloquently. A couple of drummers had laughed.

Then as she sat behind the desk the screen door of the lobby opened and a little hatless baldheaded man came in. His face was a fiery rose-pink, and his bald red scalp was scrawled with bluish veins above the temples. His breath, when he leaned confidentially toward her, almost knocked her down. His voice was a whiskey voice. She had learned to recognize that. “I was told,” said his hoarse whisper, “that a man could get a drink in here.”

She jingled the bell for Bo, not even bothering to deny that they served liquor, as she ordinarily would have. This man was obviously no officer, but only a tramp or barfly wandering in on his way through town. Bo came hurriedly to the door, looked the man over, and motioned him inside. The door he left ajar.

She heard the clump of a bottle on the bar, and a low mutter of talk. Shortly the whiskey voice rose. “I'll have another'n of those.”

Altogether he ordered five drinks in the course of an hour, in his hoarse, commanding whisper. The dead summer afternoon drifted on. A boy going past opened and slammed the screen door just to hear the noise. “Gimme another‘n,” said the whiskey voice from the bar.

Drowsily, without much interest but with nothing else to occupy her attention, she heard Bo come over and set one up for the stranger as he always did when anyone was buying freely. After a time the whiskey voice said, “How much, barkeep?”

Jud's voice said, “One seventy-five,” and change clinked on the bar.

“Ain't got the change,” the whiskey voice said. “You got a gold scale?”

“Hell no,” Jud said, and laughed. “What for?”

“This's all I got with me.” There was a sodden thump on the wood, and for once Elsa heard excitement and haste in Jud's voice. “I'll be damned,” he said. “Hey, Bo, this guy wants to pay off in gold dust.”

But the rapid steps, the noise of crowding, the exclamations, were at the bar almost as soon as he started to speak. “Where in hell did you get that?” Bo said.

“Klondike,” said the superior, bored whiskey voice, “if that's any-a your business.”

“No offense, no offense,” Bo said. “We just don't see any of that around here. Pan it yourself?”

“Right out of the gravel, boys.”

He must have poured some into his palm, for there were whistles and exclamations. Elsa strained her ears, but she needn't have. The men in the pig were almost shouting. “Jumping Jesus,” a drummer said. “How much is that poke worth?”

“Oh—five, six hundred.”

“Quite a slug to be lugging around,” Bo said.

“More where that came from,” the stranger said. “Plennnty more salted away, boys. Never carry more than I need.”

“I'll go try the drugstore for a scale,” Bo said. “How much an ounce?”

“Eighteen bucks.”

Bo laughed, a short, incredulous chop of sound. “You have to spend your money with an eyedropper at that rate.”

Pinky Jordan stayed all afternoon to soak up the admiration he had aroused. After she had brought the baby down in his buggy and set Chester to playing with his blocks, Elsa heard scraps of the tales he was holding his listeners with. Three more men had come back with Bo from the drugstore, and all afternoon others kept dropping in to have a beer and listen to stories of hundreds of miles of wild timberland, hundreds of thousands of caribou, hundreds of millions of salmon in suicidal dashes up the rivers; of woods full of bear and deer and otter and fox and wolverine and mink; of fruit salads on every tree in berry time. You didn't need to work for a living. You picked it off the bushes, netted it out of the river, shot it out of the woods, panned it out of the gravel in your front yard.

“You know how much a frenna mine got for one silver fox skin?” the whiskey voice was saying as she drew near the door once with the broom as an excuse. “For one, leetle, skin?” The voice was confidential and dramatic. “Four hunnerd dollahs.”

There were whistles, clickings against the teeth. “Four hunnerd dollahs,” Pinky Jordan said, “an' he traded it out of a halfbreed for a flannel shirt and a sheath knife. You wanna make your fortune, genlemen, you go on up to God's country. Flowin‘th milk and honey.”

It was nearly supper time when Pinky Jordan, drunk on his own eloquence and the uncounted drinks his listeners had poured for him, wobbled out of the lobby. Bo was at his elbow, telling him confidentially that sometimes they got up a little game in the evenings. Be glad to have him drop in. Just a friendly little game, no high stakes, but pleasant. They'd be glad to have him.

Pinky Jordan nodded owlishly, winked both eyes so that his naked red scalp pulled down over his brows like a loose slipping skullcap. From the desk Elsa watched him in the horizontal light of evening hesitating on the front sidewalk, a little man with a red bald head and a nick out of his right ear as if someone had taken a neat bite from it. Then he started up the walk, kicking at a crumpled piece of paper. Each time he came up behind it, measured his kick, booted it a few feet, and staggered after it to measure and kick again. On the fourth kick he stubbed his toe and fell into the street, and the men who had been looking after him from lobby and sidewalk ran to set him straight again. He jerked his kingly elbows out of their hands and staggered out of sight.

Pinky Jordan never returned for the poker game, though Bo tried all the next day to locate him around town. But he had done his work. He left behind him a few dollars' worth of gold dust in a shot glass behind Bo Mason's bar. He also left behind him a vision of clean wilderness, white rivers and noble mountains, forests full of game and fabulously valuable fur, sand full of glittering grains. And he left in Bo, fretted by hard times and the burden of an unpaid mortgage and the worry and wear of keeping his nose too long to an unprofitable grindstone, a heightened case of that same old wandering itch that had driven him from town to town and job to job since he was fourteen.

He was born with the itch in his bones, Elsa knew. He was always telling stories of men who had gone over the hills to some new place and found a land of Canaan, made their pile, got to be big men in the communities they fathered. But the Canaans toward which Bo's feet had turned had not lived up to their promise. People had been before him. The cream, he said, was gone. He should have lived a hundred years earlier.

Yet he would never quite grant that all the good places were filled up. There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing. He hadn't found it in Chicago or Milwaukee or Terre Haute or the Wisconsin woods or Dakota; there was no place and no business where you took chances and the chances paid off, where you played, and the play was profitable. Ball playing might have been it, if he had hit the big time, but bad luck had spoiled that chance. But in the Klondike ... the Klondike, Elsa knew as soon as he opened his mouth to say something when Pinky Jordan was gone, was the real thing, the thing he had been looking for for a lifetime.

“Let me show you,” he said, and brought the shot glass containing Pinky Jordan's immortal dust. His mind was whitehot with visions, and he vibrated like a harp to his own versions of Pinky's yarns. There was a place without these scorching summers that fried the meat on your bones; there was a place where banks didn't close and panics didn't reach, where they had no rules and regulations a man had to live by. You stood on your own two feet and to hell with the rest of the world. In the Klondike the rivers ran gold and silver fox skins fetched four hundred dollars apiece and the woods were full of them.

She was not surprised when he proposed selling the hotel and lighting out. It took him only three or four days to arrive at that plan, but she was ready for it.

“Do you know what time of year it is?” she said.

His look was suspicious, as if he suspected her of plotting to throw hindrances in his path. “It doesn't take any astrologer to know it isn't Christmas,” he said, and ran a finger inside the sweating band of his collar.

“No,” she said, “but by the time you sell this place, and get to Seattle, and take a boat to Alaska or wherever it is you go, it will be Christmas.”

His look this time was as heavy as a hand pushing against her. “What of it?”

“I believe you'd take those two little kids up there right in the dead of winter,” she said.

“Winter's the fur season. Jud and I could go out trapping, and you and the kids could stay in town.”

“Is Jud going?”

“Sure, if we do. He's all hot to go.”