The Big Rock Candy Mountain (48 page)

He braced himself against the body, said “Go!” and heaved forward. The Swede jammed on the pedal, forgot to feed gas, and killed the engine.

“Gas!” Bo yelled. “Give it the gas!”

Ole dropped his hands from the wheel and leaned away. His face was pitiful, as if he were going to cry. Bo took a deep breath and swallowed his rage, cranked, braced himself again. “Now take it easy,” he said. “When I say go, let her in slow and give her plenty of gas.”

This time the Swede gave her too much, and went roaring and spinning up the coulee side, out of control, scared to death and with his foot frozen to the gear pedal, so that Bo, encumbered with his heavy coat, had to sprint alongside and jump on the running board to yank on the hand brake. He was breathing hard when he climbed in, and his mind was red hot. The air inside the curtains was so thick with spilled whiskey it was almost intoxicating.

By the time they reached Gadke's the tracks were drifted half full, only the top edges clear, and the gray sky was spitting snow as hard as hail against the windshield. The wind increased steadily, pushing against the bellied sidecurtains, pouring in the V-shaped hole where Bo had torn the eyelet. And it was getting colder. He could feel it getting colder by the quarter-hour, feel it in his bones and in his mind. This was going to be a regular old he-blizzard, and he was still forty miles from home. At the horse pasture gate he stopped long enough to fit the radiator blanket on, thanking his stars he had had sense enough to make it.

There was no worrying about the trail now. The best he could do was to follow his yesterday's tracks, hoping to God they held out. His jaw clenched on him automatically as he drove, and at intervals he sat back and loosened it. Then the tense concentration of trying to see ahead through the drift and the murky white darkness crept into his muscles again, until he came to and forcibly relaxed once more. Ole sat beside him, humped in the quilt.

They passed through the horse pasture faster than Bo had been able to go coming out. The not-quite-covered tracks did that for them, at least. But at the far gate of the pasture Bo stood outside the Ford, his eyes slitted against the drift, and wondered whether to stay with the tracks, off the road, or try to pick up the trail. He hadn't been far off that time. If he started straight out from the gate he ought to hit his tracks again within a half mile. It was taking chances, but there wasn't much time. The wind by now was a positive force, a thing you fought against. Drift and falling snow were indistinguishable, the air was thick with stinging pebbles, the visibility hardly fifty feet. It was so cold that his eyes stung and watered, his nose leaked. When he wiped it with the back of his mitt he felt the slick ice on the leather.

He piled in beside the Swede. “How do you feel?” he said. “Okay?”

Ole nodded, and they started again. Bo was driving partly by sight, partly by feel now. The wind was from the northwest. He wanted to go almost exactly northeast. If he kept the wind square against the left sidecurtains, kept them stiff and strained as a sail, he couldn't go far wrong. The minute they flapped or slackened he was circling. Either that or the wind was shifting. But you didn't think about that.

Ahead of him was a whirling blur of light, the whole world driving, moving, blowing under his wheels. It was like driving on fast water, except when bumps or holes or burnouts bounced them clear down to the axle. Bo squinted, peering, his stiff hands clenched on the wheel. There were almost-effaced tracks ahead. He'd hit it, right on the nose. But the tracks turned off left, and the slack in the sidecurtains when he started to follow them stopped him. He had almost followed his own tracks the wrong way. That would have been a nice one. He backed and started in the other direction.

He knew he was off the road. The feel of the tires told him that. But as long as he kept the wind there, he'd eventually run into the graded road paralleling the south bench. He'd get her in, by the gods, if he had to drive the last twenty miles by ear.

The tires hit the road again. He could feel it, smooth and hard and sunken, though his eyes showed him no difference. Within five minutes the ruts were gone. He swung into the wind, feeling for them like a blind man, his body tense, one with the body of the car. And in the moment when he turned, feeling, the wind burst furiously against the sidecurtain and tore it loose, and he was blinded and muffled in cloth and icy isinglass.

Cursing, he stepped on the pedals and fought the frantic flapping thing out of his face. The eyelets were all ripped now, and there was no fastening it down. Wind and snow drove into the hole, hammering his eyes shut, peppering his face. His fury ripped out of him in shouted swearing as he twisted, trying to fasten the curtain somehow. The Swede was a hindrance to his movements, and he shoved him over in the seat with one fierce hunch of the shoulder. Eventually he had to grope in the back seat and find one of Ole's blankets, poke it up over the metal bar along the top, pull it down through, and sit on both ends. It wasn't as good as the curtain, and it made the car almost as dark as night, but it kept that paralyzing wind out of his face while he drove.

The thing became a nightmare. He sat within the dark cabin of the car, his numb feet ready to jump on the pedals, his mitt slipping up and down the smooth wheel to feed or retard gas, his eyes glued on the flowing, dirty-gray-white world ahead. In an hour he was on and off the road a dozen times.

The strain and cold stiffened his legs and arms, but the excitement got into him, too. He turned to look at Ole, only his long nose and white eyebrows showing above the quilt, and in the steady motor-sounding and wind-sounding and snow-pebble-sounding silence of the car he opened his mouth and yelled.

“Yippee!” he yelled. “Powder River, let ‘er buck!”

The Swede jumped six inches, and his lugubrious, startled face turned. “You tank ve make it?” he said.

Bo laughed, jamming the Ford recklessly through a drift. “You're God damned right Ay tank ve make it,” he said. He leaned back, stretching, relaxing his tightened muscles for the twentieth time. The whirl of snow visible through the windshield lifted briefly, showing him a drift deeper than most, long and crested and fringed with blowing tatters of snow. He stepped on the low pedal and dragged down the gas, and then when they were halfway through the drift, slugging through it like a boat through a wave, he saw the fence dead ahead.

His hands yanked the wheel around and his feet stabbed at brake and reverse at the same time. The Ford shuddered, swung, skidded, caught, hit something big and solid under the drift, and very slowly, as if careful not to hurt or break anything, turned over on its side.

The Swede's two hundred pounds came down on Bo, smashing him against the blanket curtain. He felt the snow under the blanket crush and give, heard bottles smash, and then he was fighting back against Ole's dead weight, reaching out through the clumsy coat and mitts and blanket to turn the switch and cut the motor, still running on its side.

“Get off!” he roared. “Get your damned dead carcass out of here!”

Elsa saw the storm coming by mid-morning. At noon, when she was certain it was going to be bad, she sent the boys out after buckets of lignite, and herself went out to the barn, broke open two bales of hay with the pliers, and tumbled the packed dusty slabs down into the mangers. If the wind blew hard for very long she might not be able to get out for a while.

The wind was up strong when she closed the barn doors; she had to wrestle them with all her weight. Worry about Bo drove her to sit by the kitchen window afterward, staring across the vacant lot toward the south road. The air was striated and thick with driving snow. Sometimes such a gust drove in from the river bend that Van Dam's house and shed and the low windmill tower were blotted out, and only the madly-whirling blades remained in sight. Jim Van Dam ought to do something about that mill. It would blow to pieces if he didn't.

She was about to call Chet and send him over to tell them their mill was up, but another look at the wind and snow outside made her hesitate. And the boys should be kept in because of the flu. She reached for her coat, stooping to see if the blades were still there.

“I'm going over to Van Dam‘s,” she called into the other room. “You stay in the house, both of you.”

Her eyes screwed shut, body doubled against the gusts, she made her way across the lot and up to the Van Dam's kitchen door. Her knock went rattling down the wind. No one could possibly have heard it. She pushed on the knob, and the wind blew her into the kitchen.

Jim Van Dam, a lumpy quilt around him, was sitting on the oven door with a dishpan between his feet. He did not look up, but his wife, holding his forehead, turned a white face and made a sick grimace with her mouth. Then he gagged and retched, and she clung to him, holding him upright.

“He just took sick this morning,” Mrs. Van Dam said. “He was all right till after breakfast, and then he said he felt queer and I gave him some calomel, and he's been throwing up for a half hour.”

She didn't say, “Now he's got it!” but she might just as well have. Elsa took off her coat. “Where's little Jimmy?” she said.

“Upstairs. I wouldn't let him come down too close.”

“Haven't you got a couch in the parlor?”

“Yes.”

“We ought to get him to bed,” Elsa said. She looked at Jim Van Dam, contracted in a heavy chill. But when she stooped to help Mrs. Van Dam get him to his feet and lead him in to the couch, the other woman's eyes met hers. “Oh Lord,” Mrs. Van Dam said. “Now you've got close to him.”

“I'd have got close, one way or another,” Elsa said. “None of us can hide away, I guess.”

She stayed until the sick man was in bed. Then she brought in a good supply of coal and kindling and two buckets of water from the well. The windmill, she saw, was already ruined, its whole broad tail gone. But it was no time to be worrying about windmills. When she sat inside again having a cup of coffee with Mrs. Van Dam she tried not to see the tears that dropped on the oilcloth, or the scrawny thinness of Mrs. Van Dam's arms. But even more than that she tried not to see the picture that her mind kept trying to uncover, a picture of Bo fighting his way back through this blizzard, maybe sick himself. If Jim Van. Dam was all right at breakfast and was this sick by noon, Bo could have had the same thing happen ...

“I'll go call up Doctor O‘Malley,” she said. “He'll probably want to send a rig to take Jim to the schoolhouse. They've got the schoolteachers nursing, and he'd get better care there.” “Thank you,” Mrs. Van Dam said. “I guess that'd be better. I'm no good. When I knew he had it I just went all to pieces. I...”

“Don't worry,” Elsa said. “Give him a hot lemonade and some salts when he can hold them down, and I'll see if I can't get somebody. They may not be able to get around till tomorrow, if this keeps up, but I'll run over and see if you need anything.”

 

It was not until the odd jobs, the telephoning, the grim preparatory look through the medicine cupboard, were all done that worry crept up on her and stayed. It came obliquely, discreetly, while the wind leaned its weight against the house, howled around the eaves, strained the frame until the walls creaked. No car could get a mile in such weather. She had confidence in Bo, he could get through if anyone could, but that was just the trouble. He might very well have started from Chinook while there was only that pre-storm haze, that ominous coppery blurring over the sun, thinking that he could run through before it broke. And once it broke he wouldn't stop. He'd butt right ahead, stubborn as a mule, no matter how cold it got or how the wind blew.

She went to the front window and looked at the thermometer hung on the outside frame. Two below. An hour ago it had been five above, at noon ten above. The longer he drove—if he was driving—the worse it got.

Her nervousness wouldn't let her sit still. She went to the sewing machine and got out the dress she was making for Freda Appleton, who was getting married next month. One way to keep from worrying was to stitch buttonholes. But every few minutes during the two hours she sat sewing she kept getting up to stoke the stove, shake down ashes, walk to the window and see the temperature down to four below, to five, to eight. The boys squabbled over the Erector set on the dining room table, and she separated them and punished Chet with only half her mind on what she was doing. If Bo had started after breakfast he ought to be in now. The clock said a quarter to five. Still, he hadn't promised to be home tonight. He would certainly have stopped along the road, at Cree or Gadke‘s, or maybe at Robsart if he had chosen that road. He was probably sitting by some fire not two hours away from home, waiting for the storm to blow out.

But suppose the snow blocked the roads and stayed. There would be no moving the car till spring.

Oh fiddle, she said. He can take care of himself. He could get a bobsleigh or something.

With all that liquor aboard? her mind said. What would he do with that? Suppose he stopped somewhere and they called in the police ...

She spun it back and forth, stitching steadily at the monotonous buttonholes that went from neck to waist down the back of the dress. The stove glowed dull red in the corner, but over where she sat under the lamp, needing light now to see, it was cold. Occasionally attention stiffened her body as she thought she heard noises that were not the wind. Once she was sure she heard a car, but the window showed nothing, and when she tried to look out the back door it was nailed fast by the wind. For a minute she stood listening: the sound did not come again. Before she quite gave it up she went out on the front porch, half blocked by an angled drift laid in on the side-swipe of wind, and stood for a minute with the snow buzzing in the air around her, settling on hair and dress.