The Big Rock Candy Mountain (51 page)

As he was eating his second bowl of bread and milk for lunch, the young man named Vickers came back and said he needed some beds and bedding, so Chet helped him knock down both double beds and load them on the sleigh. He would sleep on the couch in the parlor. It was warmer there anyway, and it would be pretty nice to undress right by the fire and pop into bed without any cold old floor and stairs.

In the kitchen, making a list of things he had taken, Vickers saw the keg, the sacked bottles. “Your dad doesn't want to sell any of that, does he?” he said.

“Sure,” Chet said. “That's what he got it for, to sell for flu medicine.”

“What have you got?”

“Rye and bourbon,” Chet said promptly. “There isn't much bourbon left, I guess.” He rummaged. “Five bottles is all.”

“How much?” Vickers said, and reached for his wallet.

“Four dollars a bottle,” Chet said. He caught himself, shot a look at Vickers' face. If he got more than the regular price, they'd have to admit he had held the fort to a fare-thee-well. “Or is it four and a half?” he said. “I forget.”

Vickers' face was expressionless. “Sure it isn't five? I wouldn't want to cheat you.” Under his eyes Chet broke and fled into the other room. “I'll go look,” he said. “I think there's a list.”

He stood in the front hall a minute before he came back with his face business-like and his mind crafty. “Four-fifty,” he said casually. “I thought prob‘bly it was.”

Vickers counted twenty-two dollars out of the wallet, dug in his pocket for fifty cents, and picked up the ripped sack. He stood by the door and looked at Chet and laughed., “What are you going to do with the extra two-fifty?” he said.

Chet's heart stopped. His face began to burn. “What two-fifty?”

“Never mind,” Vickers said. “Have you got all you need to eat here?”

“I got crocks of milk,” Chet said in relief. He grinned at Vickers and Vickers grinned back. “Ma baked bread the other day, and there's spuds. I can go out and shoot a rabbit if I need some meat.”

“Oh,” Vickers said. His eyebrows went up. “You're a hunter, are you?”

“I shot rabbits all last fall for Mrs. Rieger,” Chet said. He tried to make it sound matter-of-fact. “She lent me the shotgun and shells. She had to have rabbits and prairie chicken and stuff because she's ‘nemic.”

“Mmm,” Vickers said. “I guess you can take care of yourself. How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“That's old enough,” said Vickers. “Well, Mervin, if you need anything you call the school and I'll see that you get it.”

“My name isn't Mervin. It's Chet ”

“Okay,” Vickers said. “Don't get careless with the fires.”

“What do you think I am?” Chet said in scorn. He raised his hand stiffly to Vickers and went back to his bread and milk, excited and triumphant. That two and a half would look pretty good. He wondered how Vickers knew he had been euchred. Because he changed the price, probably. Next time he'd know better than that. He took the money out of his pocket and counted it. Twenty-two fifty was a lot of dough. He'd show Mom and Pa whether he could hold the fort or not.

But holding the fort got tiresome. The house was too empty. Sitting in the parlor with a book he heard the walls tick and the floors creak as if under stealthy feet. He looked up every thirty seconds. Then he stood up, stretched his arms elaborately, yawned, and walked through the whole house, basement to attic, as if he were just strolling around. But his eyes were sharp, and he stepped back a little as he threw open the doors of closets and bedrooms. He whistled a little between his teeth.

Downstairs again, his suspicions laid but his boredom even greater, he remembered suddenly that he was the boss of the place. He could go where he liked and do what he pleased, as long as the cows got fed and milked and the house was warm. He thought of the two traps he had set at muskrat holes under the river bank. The flu had kept him from visiting them. It might be a good idea to take the gun and go out on a little hunt.

“Well,” he said in the middle of the parlor rug. “I guess I will.”

For an hour and a half he prowled the brush with his father's shotgun. Over on the path toward Heathcliff's he shot a snowshoe rabbit, white and furry and. big-footed, and lugged it triumphantly toward home. One of his traps yielded a stiffly-frozen muskrat, and the weight of his game made him proud as he came up the dugway swinging the rabbit by a foot, the muskrat by its plated tail.

Coming past the barn, he looked toward Van Dam‘s, then the other way, toward Chance's, hoping somebody would be out and see him. He whistled loudly, sang a little into the cold afternoon air, but the desertion of the whole street, the unbroken fields of snow where ordinarily there would be sled tracks and fox-and-geese paths, let a chill in on his pride. He came up the back steps soberly and opened the unlocked door.

The muskrat's slippery tail slid through his mittened hand and the frozen body thumped on the floor. Two men were in the kitchen. His chest tight with surprise and shock, Chet looked from one, standing by the whiskey keg, to the other, at the table with a cup before him. One he didn't know. The one at the table was Louis Treat, a halfbreed who hung out at the stable and sometimes worked a little for old man Purcell. All Chet knew of him was that he could braid horsehair ropes and used to sing a lot of dirty songs.

“Aha!” Louis Treat said. He smiled at Chet and made rubbing motions with his hands. “We ‘ave stop to get warm. You 'ave been hunting?”

“Yuh,” Chet said. He stood where he was, his eyes swinging to the other man by the keg. The man was looking at Louis.

“Ees nice rabbit there,” Louis said. His bright black eyes went over the boy. Chet lifted the rabbit and looked at the drops of frozen blood like red beads on the fur. “Yuh,” he said. He was thinking about what his father said. You could trust an Indian if he was your friend, and you could trust a white man if his pocketbook wasn't involved, and you could trust a Chink more than either, but you couldn't trust a halfbreed. He looked at the man by the keg and decided that he looked tough.

Louis' voice went on. “You ‘ave mushrat, too, eh? You lake me to 'elp you peel thees mushrat?” His hand dipped under his sheepskin and produced a long-bladed knife that snapped open with the pressure of his thumb on a button.

Chet stayed where he was. “No thanks,” he said. “I can peel him.”

Louis shrugged and put the knife away. Then he shook his shoulders inside the sheepskin, drained the cup he had been drinking from, and turned to thump the bung hard into the keg. “Ees tam we go,” he said. “We ‘ave been told to breeng thees w'iskey to the school.”

“Who told you?” Chet said. He felt his insides growing tighter and his mind setting like plaster of Paris. If Pa was here he would throw these robbers out in a minute and scatter them from here to Chance's. But Pa wasn‘t- here. He dropped the rabbit on the floor beside the muskrat, watching Louis Treat. You couldn't trust a halfbreed as far as you could throw a bull by the tail.

“The doctor, O‘Malley,” Louis said. He nodded to his companion., “You tak that end.”

The other man stooped to lay hold of the keg. Chet's breath had left him. He bit his lip, and then in one jump he was around the kitchen table, out of reach of them in the dining room door, and he had the shotgun pointed straight at their chests. Without taking his eyes from them he cocked both hammers, click, click.

Louis Treat swore. “Put down that gun, you fooll”

“No sir!” Chet said. “I won't put‘it down. You drop that keg and get out of here.”

The two men looked at each other. Louis set his end gently back on the chair and the other man did the same. “We ‘ave been sent,” Louis said. “You do not see w'at I mean. The doctor ...”

“Like hell!” Chet said. “If Doctor O‘Malley had wanted that he'd have had Mr. Vickers get it this afternoon.”

The second man ran his tongue over his teeth and spat on the floor. He looked at Louis. “Think he knows how to shoot that thing?”

Chet's chest expanded. The gun barrels trembled so that he braced them against the door frame. “I shot that rabbit, didn't I?” he said.

Louis Treat's teeth were bared in a thin smile. He shrugged. “You are a fool.”

“And you're a thief!” Chet said. He covered the two carefully as they backed out, and when they were down the steps he slammed the door and bolted it. Still carrying the cocked gun, he raced for the front hall, made sure the night lock was on, and peeked out. Louis and his friend were walking side by side up the bank of the irrigation ditch, the stranger pulling an empty box sled, Louis talking, throwing his hands around. ,

Very slowly and carefully Chet uncocked the hammers. Ordinarily he would have unloaded the gun, but not now, not with thieves like those around. He hung the gun above the mantel over the .30-30, looked in the door of the stove, threw on some lignite, went to the window again to see if he could still see the two men. Then he looked down at his hands. They were shaking. So were his knees. He sat down suddenly on the couch, unable to stand.

 

The days of holding the fort were long days. There was no one to talk to, no one to go hunting with, and he wouldn't have dared go hunting anyway, after what had happened that first day. The only people he saw were those who came to buy whiskey. Once his school teacher, Miss Landis, came apologetically and furtively with a two-quart fruit jar. He charged her four dollars a quart for rye and watched her hurry away toward the school with the jar under her coat. The men who came generally sat a while in the kitchen and told him about people who had died or got sick. They brought occasional news about the war. People were betting it would be over by Christmas.

But after three days people stopped coming for whiskey, and then there was only the twice-a-day telephone call to the school. His father was pretty sick. Then a day or two later his father was better but Mom had had a relapse because they got so short of beds they had to put Brucie in with her.

He moped around the house, milked the cow night and morning and couldn't possibly drink all the milk, so that the crocks piled up in the cellarway, all of them staying miraculously sweet, until he told the schoolhouse nurse about all the milk he had and Doctor O‘Malley sent down old Gundar Moe to get it for the sick people.

Sometimes he stood on the porch on sunny, cold mornings and watched Lars Poulsen's sled go out along the river toward the graveyard, and the thought that maybe Mom or Pa or Bruce might die and be buried out there on the knoll by the sandhills made him swallow and go back inside where he couldn't see how deserted the street looked, and where he couldn't see the sled and the steaming gray horses move out along the river. He prayed earnestly at night, with tears, that none of them would die. He resolved to be a son his parents could be proud of, and sat down at the piano determined to learn a piece letter-perfect before Mom came home. But the dry silence of the house weighed on him; he lay sometimes with his forehead on the keyboard, and listened to the sound of one monotonous note. It sounded different with his head down, and he could concentrate on how ðifferent it sounded so that he didn't get afraid.

Nights were worst. He lay awake on the couch and stared into the sleepy red eyes of the heater and heard noises that walked the house. The death watch ticked in the walls, and there were crosses in the lamp chimney when he lighted it to drive away the dark and the fear.

For a week he lived alone, eating rabbit and duck soup and milk and bread, counting the tedious hours, playing with the Erector set until he lost interest in it entirely. On the fifth day he decided to write a book. In an old atlas he found a tributary of the Amazon called the Tapájos, and wrote his title firmly across the top line of a school tablet: “The Curse of the Tapájos.” All that afternoon he wrote enthusiastically. He created a handsome young explorer and a sinister halfbreed guide very like Louis Treat. He lived for hours in the steaming Amazonian jungles, and when he got tired of those and the snakes got a little too thick even for his taste, he let his explorer emerge into a wide grassy pampa and see in the distance, crowning a golden hill, the lost city for which he had been searching. Then suddenly the explorer clutched his breast, reeled and fell, mysteriously stricken, and the halfbreed guide, smiling a sinister smile, disappeared quietly into the jungle. The curse of the Tapájos, which struck everyone who had ever set out in search of that lost city, had struck again. But the young hero was not dead ...

Chet chewed his pencil and looked up. It was going to be hard to figure out just how his hero escaped the curse, and was only stunned by it, not killed. He rose, thinking, and wandered over to the window. A sled came across the irrigation ditch bridge and pulled on up to the Chances‘. Out of it got Mr. Chance and Mrs. Chance and Harvey and Ed Chance. They were well, then. People were starting to come home cured. He rushed to the telephone and called the hospital. No, Regina Orullian said. His family weren't well yet, but they were getting better. How was he doing? Did he need anything? No, Chet said. He didn't need anything.

He was disappointed, but not too much so. The sight of the Chances coming home gave him new spirit. He wasn't the only soul on the street any more. That night after milking he took a syrup pail full over to the Chances. They were all weak, all smiling, and Mrs. Chance cried every time she tried to speak. They were awfully grateful for the milk. He promised them that he would bring milk every day, and chop wood for them until they got strong. When he went home wearing a halo of big words that Mr. Chance, whom everybody called Dictionary, had laid upon him, he felt virtuous, kindly, charitable, like a knight helping people in distress. He wondered if it might not be a good idea to have his explorer run onto a group of people, or maybe just a girl, in distress, and rescue them or her from some awful fate, cannibals or head hunters or spider men or something.