The Big Rock Candy Mountain (47 page)

“Seven cases middle-price bourbon,” Bo said. “What you got?”

He took a bottle of beer out of an opened barrel and yanked the cap off on a nailhead. The beer was icy cold and faintly skunky. “You ought to keep the light off beer in white bottles,” he said. Frank, lifting cases around, only grunted through his muffler.

“I'll have to split up on you,” he said finally. “I ain't got seven cases all one kind.”

“Okay, long as it isn't rotgut.” Sitting on a box, Bo tipped the beer and watched Frank pull cases together, watched him roll a keg from behind some barrels of beer.

“How much does that come to?” he said.

Frank figured on a barrel head. “Two hundred and ninety-four even.”

“Sharpen your pencil a little,” Bo said. “This is a wholesale deal.”

“I already figured it wholesale. I don't make more'n a buck or two a case at that price.”

“Tell you what,” Bo said. “If it was for me, I'd never buy a bottle of it till I got a jobber's price. When a town buys whiskey for medicine it ought to get the lowdown. But you throw in another case of bourbon and I'll give you three hundred even.”

Frank shook his head. “I couldn't do it. That's a whole case for six bucks. I wouldn't make a dime.”

“That's the only kind of a deal I'm interested in,” Bo said. “I went over to the hospital and talked to the guy from the Last Chance, because I couldn't raise anybody out in front here. He wanted to sell me the stuff, but I'd have to hunt up a relative of his to get it. I thought it'd be easier here. But if you don't want to talk business ...”

Frank backed away further. “You been over to the hospital?” he said. His voice was a squawk. “What the hell do you come around me for?”

“You don't want to do business, uh?”

“All right, take it,” Frank said. “Take your nine cases and get out of here.”

“Now you're talking sense,” Bo said. He held out the bag, but Frank put his hands behind him. “Put it on the table,” he said. He stood back while Bo carried the sacks outside. “I'm not sticking my nose in the car you're driving, even,” he said.

Bo worked swiftly in the late gray light. The seat took three flat cases neatly, and three more on top of those brought the load level with the sides. The keg, heavy and clumsy, he wrestled into the footspace in front of the back seat, and one of the three remaining cases he wedged beside the keg, padding it with a blanket. The last two he put in front, one in the seat and one on the floor. Then he covered the whole load with blankets and threw the gasoline can on top.

Frank was still standing back. “You count out the money,” he said. “I'm not touching it till the wife bakes it in the oven.”

“Okay,” Bo said. “Strike a light.”

Selby lighted a candle, and very carefully and contemptuously Bo counted out the stacks of dollars and the roll of bills. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Selby said. “Dump ‘em back in the bag.”

The last thing Bo saw, as he backed out of the alley, Frank was carrying the sack before him as if it might explode. He would probably bake the glove he had touched the bag with, too. Bo laughed. As he bumped across the intersection of alley and street he whistled. The springs hit bottom on the slightest jar. No batting over burnouts on the way back. That was another reason for not starting back now. He'd need daylight to find the road and keep on it.

 

He slept that night at the livery stable, where he found two men taking care of a whole barnful of stock belonging to people in the hospital. They didn't want him at first. He loosened them up by going back to the car and breaking out a bottle of bourbon. After that they let him drive into the grain shed and make himself a bed of hay beside the car. When he lay down in his clothes, the fur coat wrapped around him under the blankets, he heard their voices loud through the partition, heard the stamp and blow of horses and the knocking of a cow's horns against the stanchions. The hay he had piled on the floor rustled under his weight, and sometime during the night he heard a dog sniffing under the shed door. The thought of food for tomorrow crossed his mind, but he let it drift. There was some bread left, and a wing of chicken, and if he got an early start he'd be back in Whitemud by early afternoon. Everything was jake. The bottle to the stablemen was a good investment. Keep them from getting too curious.

It was barely daylight when he woke. There was a yellow-spoked wheel directly in front of his eyes, and he lay wondering for a minute. His shoulders and hips were stiff and his feet cold. The wheel revolved a little, stopped, went around a little the other way, and he blinked his eyes clear and saw the car, the crack of light under the shed door.

He stood up, stamped his feet, swung his arms. A look into the Ford showed him the load untouched. In the other room he heard the stablemen snoring. Driven by ravenous hunger, he went through the partition door and into the stable. There were a half dozen milk pails on a bench. Four cows, in improvised stanchions, swung their heads to look at him. He hunted up a stool, tipped straw out of a pail, and sat down to the nearest one. The quart of milk he drew down was foamy and warm and slightly sickening, and it spilled on his coat as he tipped the pail to drink, but it laid the devil in his stomach. He drank it all, resting between gulps.

The stablemen were still asleep when he went through to the shed. There was the question of warm water for the Ford. He turned the radiator petcock and went out in back with a pail. The pump was there, a wide smooth icicle hanging like a white tongue from its mouth. The pump complained stiffly, but finally brought up water, and with the bucket in his hand he went in and started a fire in the sheetiron stove. When he came in with a second pail one of the stablemen was sitting up. His face was contracted and his eyes bloodshot. He looked incuriously at Bo for a few minutes and lay down again with his face to the wall. The other one snored on. They were still in their bunks when Bo poured the hot water into the rust-smelling gullet of the Ford and bent to crank.

At eight o‘clock he was headed out of town, following his own solitary tracks of yesterday. There was not a soul anywhere about except for a woman who pulled back her front curtains to look as he went by.

It was not as clear as it had been the day before. The sun, straight ahead of him for the first two miles, before the north road switched off, was pale behind a thin screen of mist. Occasional snake-trails of snow moved in the road, wriggled a few yards, and died. Inside the side-curtains it did not seem cold.

As he drove, Bo was juggling figures. Sometimes, having difficulty keeping them straight in his head, he took his hands off the wheel and drew them in the palm of his mitt. The case to Doc O‘Malley would bring him sixty-five; the keg, at three dollars a quart, would be another two hundred and forty. That was his original investment, right there. The whole eight cases of bourbon were gravy. At four dollars a bottle—and there were ninety-six bottles, or ninety-five since he'd given one to the stablemen—and four times ninety-five was.... He figured on his mitt, one eye on the road. Three hundred and eighty, all clear profit. Not so bad, he said to the Ford, not so bad. He remembered the time only a couple of weeks ago when he had nearly lost his mind because his ducks had spoiled. That all seemed very childish and primitive, something out of the backwoods. One good break, and he was past all that scrabbling for a living.

He ate the fragments left in the lunch box and threw the box out the window. There were no tracks on the straight road except his own. The sun, on his right now, was barely visible through the mist. He took a firmer grip on the wheel and pulled the gas lever down a notch. It might snow, and he needed those tracks. Ahead of him the erratic wind lifted a trail of dry snow across the road.

His feet, unprotected now by a folded blanket, felt the cold first. When he stamped them he realized that they had been getting colder all the time. In one way cold was good. There wouldn't be much snow if the temperature dropped. But the road ahead was now crawling with lifting ropes of drift. He swore. Wind was just as bad, worse. It would cover his tracks in an hour if it blew. The sky was grayer now, too, the whole world darkening over the white waste. He dropped the gas lever another. notch.

Where the road turned off to Cree he stopped, hesitating between choices. He ought to stop somewhere and get warm, have a cup of coffee, before tackling the last fifty miles. But there might be no one left at Cree. His own place would be like an icehouse, and the kerosene stove wouldn't do more than warm his hands. The only place he was sure of was Ole‘s, and Ole wouldn't be tickled to death to see him. He jammed his foot hard on the low pedal. Ole would see him anyway..

Rather than risk losing his way he followed his own tracks, going carefully across the roadless, flat and stopping in Ole's yard. The wind blew smoke down to the ground, making him turn his head. The barometer must be clear to the bottom, if smoke wouldn't rise.

Ole didn't answer his first knock, and he put his shoulder against the door. Locked. He pounded again, listened. “Coom in,” the Swede‘s,voice said.

“The door's locked!” Bo yelled.

He waited, leaning his weight impatiently against the homemade door. In a minute the latch clicked and Ole, still in his orange-banded sweater, backed away to let him come in. The minute he looked at the Swede's face a slow, climbing rage tightened in Bo's stomach and chest. Ole's face was drawn and sick, his eyes glittering like blue ice, his mouth chapped and stained in the corners.

“What's the matter?” Bo said sharply. “You sick?”

“Ay don't feel gude,” Ole said. “Ay ant felt gude for couple days.”

“Well for Christ sake why didn't you come into Chinook with me yesterday?”

Ole didn't answer, and Bo stood with his hands spread over the stove, watching the drawn face. He was sick all right. He was sick as a horse. His hands shook, and when he stooped to sit down in the bunk he had to reach back and ease himself down. So now, Bo said, I suppose I've got this big ox on my hands with the Ford already so loaded she hits bottom on every bump!

“You were a damn fool to stay out here alone in the first place,” he said.

Ole shook with a heavy chill, grabbed his hands together and held them to still their trembling, but said nothing.

“Got any coffee?”

Ole's eyes lifted to the stove. Bo took the top off the pot, saw that there was a good pint of black liquid inside, and shoved it onto the hot part of the stove. While he waited for it to boil he went out and got a bottle of bourbon. “Where's your corkscrew?” he said.

“Ay an't got vun.”

“Oh for ... !” Angrily Bo pawed through the half dozen knives and forks and spoons on the cupboard shelf. Nothing, not even a paring knife. He tipped the bottle neck down and gave the bottom a stiff, flat-palmed smack, hitting it so hard that pain jolted up his wrist. You had to hit it just right to jar the cork loose, and it was a damn fool stunt anyway. He had seen a man cut his hand half off trying it. But if this big dumb Ole didn't have a corkscrew there was nothing else to do. He jolted the bottle again, savagely. On the fifth try he caught it right. The cork started a quarter of an inch, and he got the blade of his knife under it and lifted carefully till it came out.

He poured a tin cup a third full and handed it to Ole. “This is supposed to be medicine,” he said. “See what it does for you.”

He had a swig himself out of the bottle, corked it and stuck it in the pocket of his coat. The coffee pot was steaming, rocking a little on the stove.

“Got a cup or anything you haven't used lately?” Bo said. Ole's mouth opened helplessly, he wrinkled his forehead, looking at the cupboard.

“Well, what the hell,” Bo said. He found a saucepan and poured coffee into it for himself, filled the Swede's cup. “Drink that damn quick,” he said. “We got to get out of here.”

His own coffee was black and bitter, with grounds floating in it, but he drank it in gulps, scalding hot. In ten minutes he had the bundled Swede outside with a quilt around him. The two cases of whiskey in the front seat had to be shifted to the back. That was bad, because they were loose and might bounce and break, but there was nothing else he could do. He boosted Ole inside and tucked the quilt in, went inside to snatch two blankets off the bunk, dumped the coffee pot into the fire and kicked the draft shut, and closed the door.

There was a definite wind now, a creeping, close-to-the-ground wind that he could feel as a steady pressure from the northwest. The drifting didn't seem to be much worse. The snow was packed, and only the top dust blew. But it was cold. It was cold as all billy hell. And if it hadn't been for this jinx Swede he'd be almost to Gadke's by now. As he climbed in he looked with distaste at Ole's muffled face. A guy that big ought to be all man.

Ole was definitely a jinx. At the first coulee head, still within sight of his shack, they had to run through a shallow swale drifted a foot deep on one side. Bo took it charging, but something under the snow, burnout or badger hole, rocked them with a solid, bouncing shock, and the Ford hit bottom and died in the drift. The inside filled with the smell of whiskey.

“God damn!” Bo said. He yanked the sidecurtain loose, ripping one of the eyelets, and swarmed over the side. God knew how many bottles were busted. There wasn't even time to look now. That wind was too dangerous. Hard pebbles stung his face, and he looked up to see that they were not drift, but snow.

Shovelling like a dynamo, he cleared the wheels and threw the shovel inside. “Can you drive?” he said to Ole.

Ole shook his head. “You're going to anyway,” Bo said. “Shove over here.” He showed Ole how to let the brake off and push down on the low pedal, feeding gas at the same time. “When I say go, let her have it,” he said.