The Big Rock Candy Mountain (36 page)

“God damn!” he said. “What you suppose is the matter with the thing?”

“She didn't even cough once,” the boy said, and staring up at his father's face full of angry bafflement he felt the cold fear touch him. What if it wouldn't start at all? What if, all ready to go, they had to unload the Ford and not even get out of the yard? His mother came over and they stood close together looking at the car and avoiding each other's eyes.

“Maybe something got wet last night,” she said.

“Well, it's had plenty of time to dry out,” Bo said.

“Isn't there something else you can try?”

“We can jack up the hind wheel, I guess. But there's no damn reason we should have to.”

“Well, if you have to, you'll have to,” she said briskly. “After planning it for a week we can't just get stuck like this. Can we, son?”

Bruce's answer was mechanical, his eyes steady on his father. “Sure not,” he said.

His father opened his mouth to say something, looked hard at the boy, and shut his lips again. Without a word he pulled out the seat and got the jack.

The sun climbed steadily while they jacked up one hind wheel and blocked the car carefully so it wouldn't run over anybody if it started. The boy let off the brake and put it in high, and when they were ready he sat in the seat so full of hope and fear that his whole body was one tight concentration. His father stooped, his cheek pressed against the radiator as a milker's cheek touches the flank of a cow. His shoulder dropped, jerked up. Nothing. Another jerk. Nothing. Then he was rolling in a furious spasm of energy, the wet dark back of his shirt rising and falling. Inside the motor there was only the futile swish of the choke and the half-sound, half-feel of cavernous motion as the crankshaft turned over. The Ford bounced on its spring as if its front wheels were coming off the ground on every upstroke. Then it stopped, and the father was hanging on the radiator, breathless, dripping wet, swearing: “Son of a dirty, lousy, stinking, corrupted ... !”

The boy stared from his father's angry wet face to his mother‘s, pinched with worry. The pup lay down in the shade and put its head on its paws. “Gee whiz!” the boy said. “Gee whiz!” He looked at the sun, and the morning was half gone.

Jerking with anger, his father threw the crank.halfway across the yard and took a step or two toward the house. “The hell with the damn thing!” he said.

“Bo, you can‘t!”

He stopped, glared at her, took an oblique look at Bruce, bared his teeth in an irresolute, silent swearword. “But God, if it won't go!”

“Maybe if you hitched the horses to it,” she said.

His laugh was short and choppy. “That'd be fine!” he said. “Why don't we just hitch the team to this damned old boat and pull it into Chinook?”

“But we've got to get it started. Why wouldn't it be all right to let the team pull it around? You push it on a hill sometimes and it starts.”

He looked at the boy again, jerked his eyes away exasperatedly, as though he held his son somehow accountable. The boy stared, mournful, defeated, ready to cry, and his father's head swung back unwillingly. Then abruptly he winked, mopped his head and neck, and grinned. “Think you want to go, uh?”

The boy nodded. “All right,” his father said crisply. “Fly up in the pasture and get the team. Hustle!”

On the high lope the boy was off up the coulee bank. Under the lip of the swale, a quarter of a mile west, the bay backs of the horses and the black dot of the cold showed. Usually he ran circumspectly across that pasture, because of the cactus, but now he flew. With shoes it was all right, and even without shoes he would have run. Across burnouts, over stretches so undermined with gopher holes that sometimes he broke through to the ankle, skimming over patches of cactus, soaring over a badger hole, plunging into the coulee and up the other side, he ran as if bears were after him. The black colt, spotting him, lifted his tail and took off in a spectacular stiff-legged sprint, but the bays merely lifted their heads and watched. He slowed, came up walking, laid a hand on the mare's neck and untied the looped halter rope. She stood for him while he scrambled and kicked himself up, and then they were off, the mare in an easy lope, the gelding trotting after, the colt stopping his wild showoff career and wobbling hastily and ignominiously after his departing mother.

They pulled up before the Ford, and the boy slid off to throw the halter rope to his father. “Shall I get the harness?” he said, and before anyone could answer he was off running, to come back dragging one heavy harness with the tugs trailing. He dropped it, turned to run again, his breath laboring in his lungs. “I'll get the other‘n,” he said.

With a short, almost incredulous laugh Bo looked once at Elsa and threw the harness over the mare. When the second one came he laid it on the gelding, pushed against the heavy shoulder to get the horse into place. The gelding resisted, pranced a little, got a curse and a crack across the nose, jerked back and trembled and lifted his feet nervously, and set one shod hoof on his owner's instep. Bo, unstrung by the heat and the hurry and the labor and the exasperation of a morning when nothing went right, kicked the gelding in the belly. “Get in there, you damned big blundering ox! Back, back up. Whoa now, whoa!”

With a heavy rope for a towline and the disengaged trees of the wagon for a rig he hitched the now-skittish team to the car. Without a word he stooped and lifted the boy to the mare's back. “All right,” he said, and his face relaxed in a quick grin. “This is where we start her. Ride them around in a circle, not too fast.”

Then he climbed into the Ford, turned the switch to magneto, fussed with the levers. “Let ‘er go!” he said.

The boy kicked the mare ahead, twisting as he rode to watch the Ford heave forward off the jack as a tired, heavy man heaves to his feet, and begin rolling after him over the uneven ground, jerking and kicking and growling when his father put it in gear. The horses settled as the added weight came on the line, flattened into their collars, swung in a circle, bumped each other, skittered. The mare reared, and the boy shut his eyes and clung. When he came down, her leg was entangled in the tug and his father was climbing cursing out of the car to straighten her out. His father was mad again and yelled at him. “Keep ‘em apart! There isn't any tongue. You got to keep Dick over on his own side.”

Now again the start, the flattening into the collars, the snapping tight of the tugs. This time it went smoothly, the Ford galloped after the team in lumbering, plunging jerks. The mare's eyes rolled white, and she broke into a trot, pulling the gelding after her. Desperately the boy clung to the knotted and shortened reins, his ears alert for the grumble of the Ford starting behind him. The pup ran beside the team yapping, crazy with excitement.

They made three complete circles of the back yard between house and chicken coop before the boy looked back again. “Won't she start?” he yelled. He saw his father rigid behind the wheel, heard his ripping burst of swearwords, saw him bend and glare down into the mysterious inwards of the engine through the pulled-up floorboards. Guiding the car with one hand, he fumbled down below, one glaring eye just visible over the cowl.

“Shall I stop?” the boy shouted. Excitement and near-despair made his voice a tearful scream. But his father's wild arm waved him on. “Go on, go on! Gallop ‘em! Pull the guts out of this thing!”

And the galloping—the furious, mud-flinging, rolling-eyed galloping around the circle already rutted like a road, the Ford, now in savagely-held low, growling and surging and plowing behind; the mad yapping of the dog, the erratic scared bursts of runaway from the colt, the boy's mother in sight briefly for a quarter of each circle, her hands to her mouth and her eyes sick, and behind him in the Ford his father in a strangling rage, yelling him on, his lips back over his teeth and his face purple.

Until finally they stopped, the horses blowing, the boy white and tearful and still, the father dangerous with unexpended wrath. The boy slipped off, his lip bitten between his teeth, not crying now but ready to at any moment, the corners of his eyes prickling with it, and his teeth locked on his misery. His father climbed over the side of the Ford and stood looking as if he wanted to tear it apart with his bare hands.

Shoulders sagging, tears trembling to fall, jaw aching with the need to cry, the boy started toward his mother. As he came near his father he looked up, their eyes met, and he saw his father's blank with impotent rage. Dull hopelessness swallowed him. Not any of it, his mind said. Not even any of it. No parade, no ballgame, no band, no fireworks. No lemonade or ice cream or paper horns or firecrackers. No close sight of the mountains that throughout four summers had called like a legend from his horizons. No trip, no adventure, none of it, nothing.

Everything he felt was in that one still look. In spite of him his lip trembled, and he choked on a sob, his eyes on his father's face, on the brows pulling down and the eyes narrowing.

“Well, don't blubber!” his father shouted at him. “Don't stand there looking at me as if I was to blame for your missed picnic!”

“I can‘t—help it,” the boy said, and with terror he felt the grief swelling up, overwhelming him, driving his voice out of him in a wail. Through the blur of his crying he saw the convulsive tightening of his father's face, and then all the fury of a maddening morning concentrated itself in a swift backhand blow that knocked the boy staggering.

He bawled aloud, from pain, from surprise, from outrage, from pure desolation, and ran to bury his face in his mother's lap. From that muffled sanctuary he heard her angry voice. “No,” she said. “Go on away somewhere till he gets over it.”

She rocked him against her, but the voice she had for his father was bitter. “As if he wasn't hurt enough already!” she said.

He heard the heavy quick footsteps going away, and for a long time he lay crying into the voile flowers. When he had cried himself out, and had listened apathetically to his mother's soothing promises that they would go in the first chance they got, go to the mountains, have a picnic under some waterfall, maybe be able to find a ballgame going on in town, some Saturday—when he had listened and become quiet, wanting to believe it but not believing it at all, he went inside to take his good clothes and his shoes off and put on his old overalls again.

It was almost noon when he came out to stand in the front yard looking southward toward the impossible land where the Mountains of the Moon lifted above the plains, and where, in the town below the peaks, crowds would now be eating picnic lunches, drinking pop, getting ready to go out to the ball ground and watch heroes in real uniforms play ball. The band would be braying now from a bunting-wrapped stand, kids would be playing in a cool grove, tossing firecrackers ...

In the still heat his eyes searched the horizon for the telltale watermark. There was nothing but waves of heat crawling and lifting like invisible flames; the horizon was a blurred and writhing flatness where earth and sky met in an indistinct band of haze. This morning a stride would have taken him there; now it was gone.

Looking down, he saw at his feet the clean footprint he had made. in the early morning. Aimlessly he put his right foot down and pressed. The mud was drying, but in a low place he found a spot that would still take an imprint. Very carefully, as if he performed some ritual for his life, he went around, stepping and leaning, stepping and leaning, until he had a circle six feet in diameter of delicately exact footprints, straight edge and curving instep and the five round dots of toes.

His father's voice awakened him next morning. Stretching his back, arching against the mattress, he looked over at his parents' end of the porch. His mother was up too, though he could tell from the flatness of the light outside that it was still early. He lay on his back, letting complete wakefulness come on, watching a spider that dangled on a golden, shining thread from the rolled canvas of the blinds. The spider came down in tiny jerks, his legs wriggling, and then went up again in the beam of sun. From the other room his father's voice rose loud and cheerful:

The boy slid his legs out of bed and yanked the nightshirt over his ears. He didn't want his father's face poking around the door, saying, “I plow deep while sluggards sleep!” He didn't want to be joked with. Yesterday was too sore a spot in his mind. He had been avoiding his father ever since the morning before, and he was not yet ready to accept any joking or attempts to make up. Nobody had a right hitting a person for nothing, and you bet they weren't going to be friends. Let him whistle and sing out there, pretending that nothing was the matter. The whole awful morning yesterday was the matter, the missed Fourth of July was the matter, that crack on the ear was the matter.

In the other room, as he pulled on his overalls, the bacon was snapping in the pan, and he smelled its good morning smell. His father whistled, sang:

Bruce pulled the overall straps up and went into the main room. His father stopped singing and looked at him. “Hello, Cheerful,” he said. “You look like you'd bit into a wormy apple.”

The boy mumbled something and went out to wash at the bench. It wasn't any fun waking up today. You kept thinking about yesterday, and how much fun it had been waking up then, when you were going to do something special and fancy. Now there wasn't anything to do except the same old things: run the traps, put out some poison, read the Sears Roebuck catalogue.