The Big Rock Candy Mountain (25 page)

That night he sat at one of the two tables in the north end of the bunkhouse with a stack of papers before him and a neatly sharpened pencil in his fist. The other table was crowded with card players, seven or eight of them sitting in on one game, and he saw, when he looked up from his brooding abstraction and his figuring, that other men were hanging around as if they wished he'd clear out and leave the table empty for them. Ordinarily he would have got up and given it to them, or got up a game himself, but now he did not move. When somebody hollered for drinks he reached the key to the liquor box out of his pocket and handed it without a word to Mah Li. The Chink was good; he had savvy. He had never made as much as a ten cent mistake in the liquor sales.

He bent his head and looked at the figures before him, orderly as an accountant's books, plus and minus, expense and profit, stacked in neat columns. He was doing all right. Three months of bunking the crew, even on a sub-contract that cost him twenty percent of his profits, had paid for the lumber, the bedsprings and ticks, the stoves, lamps, tables. The liquor had brought him in two hundred dollars clear in the last month, and that was gravy. He wasn't supposed to sell it, but who was going to come around and close him up? Even the poker games that went on every night till after midnight totalled up into a surprising sum, because every game chipped in a kitty to buy cards and chips and pay for the lights. That was fair enough. He had thought a buck a game was enough; now it turned out it was three times more than enough. The accumulated kitties totalled forty-three dollars, and he had cards and chips enough to last a year. There was also the surplus that Mah Li turned up with every week. He got five dollars a week extra for dealing fan tan and monte as a house game, and he turned over his chips to the penny. In the month and a half he had been with Bo he had brought in a hundred and thirty dollars above his wages.

It was all right, he was out of the woods. He totalled up the checks he had just written and deducted them from his bank balance. He had six hundred dollars in the bank, he owned the bunkhouse and its furnishings, and he had built it so that it could be unbolted and loaded on a flat and taken on down the line on a day's notice when necessary. In three months of actual operations, with his liquor sales and gambling profits, he was that far ahead, and he had arrived in Swift Current with hardly a dime. It just went to show you that if you had any push and got into a new country you could coin money. Not the way Purcell was coining it, but Purcell hadn't started from scratch five months ago, either.

He sat hunched over his papers, hardly seeing the long smoky room with men sprawling in their bunks playing solitaire, reading magazines or newspapers, just sitting or lying, talking, arguing. He hardly smelled the thick smell of hot iron and bitter lignite smoke and tobacco smoke and socks and the heavy odor of fifty men jammed into one warm room. He hardly heard the jumble of talk, as thick and languid as the smells. Five months since he had pulled out of Washington. He' hadn't written and he hadn't heard.

Well, how could she write? he said impatiently. How would she know where I was?

For a moment he had almost pulled the curtain that hung over that part of his mind, but he pulled it back. There'd be about one more month of working weather. After that there'd be only a skeleton crew on. But there'd be enough to break even, maybe enough so he could keep the Chink on to cook for him and take care of the place. He'd be close to a thousand dollars ahead of the game, and he could coast until spring, when the big gangs would be back and the steel would come on down from Ravenscrag.

Maybe another year of it, he said. Another year would leave him sitting pretty. His mind edged close to the thing he was trying to think of. If he went back to Elsa in a year or a year and a half with a good fat bankroll and a good proposition of some kind up here, would she ... ?

Oh Jesus, he said, I don't know.

“Hey, Bo,” somebody said. “You got any dice around?”

Bo looked up. Three men were standing under the lamp looking at him. “I don't know,” he said. “Maybe I have.”

He got up and went toward the cupboard at his back.

“We're gonna teach this heathen Chinee to shoot craps,” the man said. “He's too God damn good at fan tan. That's his own game. He invented it.”

Bo found a box of dice in the cupboard and picked out a pair. “You going to let yourself get trimmed, Mah Li?”

“No savvy claps,” Mah Li said. “Fella can teach?”

He stood at the edge of the table in his black smock and baggy cotton pants, his yellow face bland and smiling.

Bo laughed. “Don't let ‘em hook you, boy. You're playing for the house.”

“Tly hard for Lady Luck,” Mah Li said.

Bo sat down again. If he took part of that six hundred and bought a lot or two from Purcell he'd be paying Purcell a good profit. But the town was barely started, steel wasn't into it yet. Once the rails came in there would be a boom, and he ought to be able to sell off his lots easy. You had to keep money working or it got lazy on you.

But what about that other? he said. What about Elsa and the kids down there? Looking up at the jammed room,, the bunks double-decked along both sides, the stoves squat and ugly at each end, the lamps hanging from their wires, he knew he couldn't bring them up to a place like this. He couldn't go down there and try to make things up and then bring them up to live in a bunkhouse with fifty men. He'd have to have a place to bring them to. Let it go a year and he could have a place, a good place.

And how do you know she'd. come? he said. What does she feel like, left there to run that café alone with two little kids to take care of? How much does she hold that night against you? Maybe she'll never come back to you.

But good hell, she shouldn't hold a grudge like that, he said. I lost my temper, sure, but ...

And you ran out on her, said whoever he was arguing with.

Because I was ashamed of myself, he said. Good God, how could I go back there that night? How could I go back the next morning, for that matter? How could I go back in a week, with my tail between my legs? And after I'd stayed away a week how could I go back at all?

You could have written a letter, the arguer said.

Yeah? he said. Saying what?

He looked morosely at the papers, swept them together and slipped a rubber band around them. He ought to be over seeing Purcell, or doing something useful. Or he might, as soon as the work stopped for the winter, go back to Swift Current or Regina and see what the railroad was holding its town lots at. They might sell cheaper than Purcell would.

Why didn't you write a letter? the arguer said. Why don't you write a letter right now? Are you going to let her sit there forever not knowing whether you're dead or alive? What are you afraid of?

He stared somberly at the little group between stove and bunk, down on their knees and shooting craps. Mah Li was shaking the dice against his ear. Lonesome was a long ways away, the Chink said. Velly busy most time. But how about the next six months when nothing was stirring and he had to sit in the very middle of nowhere without anything to be busy about? He'd be chewing the fat of this argument with himself every night for six months.

Well, hell, he said, and went and got a tablet from the cupboard. But when he sat down and looked at the plain white sheet it was an impossible job to put marks on it. What could he say? Go down on his knees and apologize?

Write her a letter, the arguer said. Tell her you're all right. Tell her you're thinking about her and the kids. Send her some money.

That's an idea, he said, and pulling his check book out he dated a check. How much? A hundred dollars? That would put him pretty short for any real estate deals. Make it fifty. Not expecting anything, she would be as pleased with fifty as a hundred, and it would leave him more to work with. They oughtn't to need more. They had the café, and living where they did they didn't have many expenses.

He made out the check and set the indelible pencil on the top of the tablet sheet. “Whitemud, Saskatchewan,” he made the pencil write. “Oct. 17, 1913.” Then he sat and looked helplessly at the white page. It was a long time, and his lip was stained with indelible violet, before he put down anything else.

When Elsa opened the door the statue on the stair post made her think of Helm, as it always did. The ragged boy had stood barelegged, lifting a bunch of cherries to his lips, in Helm's hall just as he stood here. Bo had always used it for a hatrack, slinging his derby from the hall and ringing the uplifted hand. And as always, she looked at it only a moment, because she knew that if she let herself remember she would make herself miserable.

Mrs. Bohn, the landlady, looked out from the kitchen door at the end of the hall. “Letter for you, Mrs. Mason. I put it on the hall table there.”

“Letter?” Elsa said. She rummaged among the half-dozen envelopes and picked hers out. The face was scrawled with pencilled addresses, from Richmond through the three or four places she had moved to in Seattle, trying to find a place where the boys would be taken care of while she worked. But. the original address was. in Bo's hand, written in indelible pencil smeared and running violet from some time when a postman had walked in the rain.

For a moment she stood quietly, one hand on the stair rail under the varnished pedestal of the cherry boy. Then she went on up the stairs, tiredly, lifting herself as if she carried a burden on her back and pulling with her hand to help her heavy legs.

 

The window of her room looked out over a plateau of roofs, over the beetle-back shapes of the carbarns caught in a spider web of tracks. Beyond the barns the land rose to a wooded hill, a better residential district with white houses and spread green handkerchiefs of lawn. Under the ceiling of high fog the air was remarkably clear, with a cool grayness in it, no shadows, no contrasts, only the pellucid transparency that left every color and every detail clean and distinct.

She had pulled the rocking chair near to the window, looping back the curtains she had carried from boarding house to boarding house in an effort to make every room seem a little bit familiar, a little bit like home. Bo's letter lay in her lap, and a check for fifty dollars on a bank in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Everything in the letter, and everything behind the letter, was perfectly clear: his shame, his unwillingness to face the consequences of his own acts, his impatience at restraint and responsibility and the gnawing awareness that he was still responsible. He could neither accept those responsibilities nor run completely away from them. When he tried to shoulder them he was always chafing under the burden, and when he ran away his conscience bothered him, he worried, he finally sent a check to justify himself and persuade himself that what had happened was only an interruption, not a break. She knew too that the coming of the letter and the check would force a final decision upon her. She couldn't put it off or refuse to think what the ultimate end would be. She had to make up her mind.

The letter lay face up in her lap, and she bent her head to read it again.

Dear Elsa,

This is the first time I've had a chance to send on any money to help you out. I had to look around a while, and it took quite a while to get started up here, but I'm started now and doing pretty well. I'm running a bunkhouse for the grading crew on a sub-contract—I got in too late to pick up any contracts first hand, and probably I couldn't have got one anyway because you have to have a responsible business or post a bond, and I was pretty broke. But it's going to be a pretty good thing. Work will stop in about a month, and I'll hibernate till it opens again in the spring, and sort of keep my eye open for something permanent. This bunkhouse racket is good as long as it lasts, and will give us a stake, but I'll have to locate something to take its place when it folds up.

This is pretty fine country, flat like Dakota, with a nice river valley running through it, some timber in the valley and a nice stream. Every night when I go out and take a walk along the river I see beavers swimming around. The whole valley practically is owned by a fellow named Purcell, a big rancher. It used to be prime Indian country. A bunch of them are camped over in the bend now, with cow guts strung all over the tops of their shanties drying out. They smell like a stockyard and they'll swipe anything loose. My Chink that I've got working for me is scared to death of them, but they're harmless enough. I bought a pair of elk-hide moccasins from one the other day.

Well, Else, I hope the joint is going ok and that you've been able to clear off the payments I hope you and the kids are okay too. This winter, maybe, I can get away to come down and talk over everything with you. It's pretty lonesome up here, and I think about you and the kids a lot. I've got a lot to explain, I know, but I know we can straighten it out as soon as I get loose to come back to the States. I guess we both sort of lost our heads that night, and I'm sorry as hell for what I did. You can't ask any fairer than that.

Anyway, Else, this looks good up here, and the kids could have ponies of their own and have a fine time. I won a couple Indian ponies in a poker game over at the Half-Diamond Bar, that's Purcell's ranch, about a month ago. Won them from the son of a British earl, so they ought to be pretty hot-blooded nags. It looks as if this time we might get clear out of the woods. Let me know how you and the kids are getting along.

Love,
Bo

 

Through the window she watched a red streetcar crawl along a branch of the spider web and disappear under the barn. I hope the joint is going ok. If he had thought at all he might have known she couldn't take care of two children and run that place all by herself, when it was all the two of them could do when they were both there. He could make himself believe what he wanted to believe, that she was right where he had left her, secure enough, waiting to be taken back.