The Big Rock Candy Mountain (62 page)

“How about it?” he said to the dark dummy at his side. “Want to take a little trip through the mountains?” He nudged her, and she tilted stiffly against the side. “Okay,” he said. “You don't have to be scared of me, chicken.”

 

Out of town, past street lamps and houses, the road clear now and deserted, planing into whiteness under the lights, the weeds brittle in the passing glare along the roadside, the country ahead and aside and behind all dark and lost and only the ribbon of glare-lighted road slipping visible into invisible, real into unreal. The driver of an automobile on a lonely road is a set of perceptions mounted in the forehead of a mechanical monster. The air that comes through the sidecurtains is the air of another planet, the only real world is the narrow cabin from which he sees unreal shapes writhe by, fences and trees and bridge rails, the mouths of culverts jammed with tumbleweed, the snaky road with its parallel-and-then-unparallel lines, the ruts of rainy drivers still unerased and serpentining between the even boundaries of the grade. Those flashes of the unreal world become before long completely absorbing ; the eye clings to them, is filled and satisfied by them; the brain asks no other business than to see. A car approaches with glaring lights, and the world broadens momentarily into an alley of pasture and creek bottom and three sleeping horses behind a three-strand fence, and then dark again, the headlights fingering the unknown sides of the world as it slips by. I see, said he, the elephant is very like a wall, like a board fence, like a man with a flashlight in an immense dark barn, like a moving picture reel unwinding too fast, catching fire, going black again. I see, said he, the elephant. I see ...

The Essex rides heavily, rolling with the dips like a laden barge. The speedometer shows, on this stretch of fairly smooth grade, forty miles an hour. The ammeter, with the lights on, reads minus five. In the cold night the motor sounds sweet, sounds contented and purring. And the eyes sit above the wheeling car, immensely lofty and percipient, watching the irregular unravelling of the road. The hands are loose on the wheel, the body relaxed. The lights of a car a good distance behind glint in the cop-spotting rear-view mirror, and the hand reaches up to turn the mirror sideways.

A hundred and seventy-five miles to Livingston by this road, fifty less than by Helena, but a steep pull over Kings Hill Pass and a bad road down the other side. Seven o‘clock when he started: budget eight hours to Livingston. With luck he might better it.

The streets of Belt, a few men on the sidewalk before a poolhall, their breath white under the arc light; a block of stores, square false fronts, then shacks, weeds, sweet clover fields, the town dump, the highway again. Little towns were all alike. You could be dropped into any one of them anywhere and swear you'd lived there one time or another.

As he swung into the little village of Armington, the lights from the car behind glinted again in the mirror, and a tiny, watchful alertness awakened in his mind. The outskirts, the dump, the foot pressing down harder on the round button of the accelerator, and the eyes watchful in the readjusted mirror. Then the brakes, the hard shuddering stop, the craning from the dark cabin to see which of the two forks, and the swing to the right, leaving the hard high-crowned road. Now the perceptive apparatus mounted in the forehead of the beast tightened and quickened, because those lights behind might mean a chase, and a chase on this unmarked trail was dangerous. There was every chance that when you came to a bridge there would be a plank out, or the bridge itself gone, or that the approach on either side might have a chuckhole hell-deep that would drop your heavy breakable load like a jug into a quarry, snap your brittle and overloaded springs, break an axle. The speedometer now, even with the lights behind to drive him on, read only twenty-five.

He watched the mirror, saw the lights break into the open around a hill, saw them move on past the. forks and on down the main highway. His breath came easier, and he eased up on the throttle. False alarm.

No more towns now till Neihart, up in the mountains forty miles or so, and beyond Neihart nothing till White Sulphur. He crossed a creek, and after ten minutes crossed it again. A hundred yards further on he recrossed it on a wobbly log bridge. The road tilted under the lights. He was starting to climb. On his left he saw a hill blacker than the sky. He shifted his weight in the seat and took a new grip on the wheel.

“Wouldn't be so bad,” he said to the silent dummy, “if there was any way of knowing what's up ahead of where your lights hit. Keeps you on a strain all the time. Or are you interested?”

“Sure,” the dummy said. “Get it off your chest.”

“It's the worst part of this business,” Bo said. “You have to make time, and you're always having to do it on roads that'll break your neck if you go over twenty. Still you got to do thirty or thirty-five on them. You can't stop anywhere and take a snooze because somebody might come snooping around. Sometimes you have to drive thirty hours at a stretch, and every damn mile of it full of bends and chuckholes and narrow bridges and mud. It's the roads that make this business tough. Give me good roads and I'd make two thousand a month without turning a hair.”

“You don't say,” said the dummy.

Bo's foot smacked on the brake pedal, the loaded tonneau surged up behind him, the dummy lurched sideways. He shifted, crawled through a wash, flattened out again, reached out to straighten the tipped dummy.

“I've learned a hell of a lot about automobiles since I got into this, though,” he said conversationally. “One time I broke an axle in Wolf Creek Canyon above Helena, and I had to cache the load in the sagebrush and tear down the rear end and walk back to where I could telephone for a new ax, and then I had to put her in and reload. And I only lost seven hours altogether.”

“You're good,” the dummy said. “Why don't you post these things up on a billboard?”

“The hell with you. Another time I broke a spring leaf and didn't know it till it slipped in against the brake drum and locked me tighter than a clam. And over by Havre I blew a gasket and had to pull the head in the middle of the night by the light of a candle and a box of safety matches.”

“My word!” the dummy said.

Bo, leaning over the wheel, peering into the unreal darkness ahead, trying to jump his vision ahead of the lights, anticipate the curves, guess the bumps, his foot tender yet insistent on the throttle-head, saw his own face dimly reflected in the windshield, and thumbed his nose at it.

“You're a pretty smart girl,” he said to the dummy. “But you don't know how much I've made in the last six months, just by being able to get over roads better than most, and patch up a car better than most, and stay awake longer than most.”

“I couldn't begin to guess,” the dummy said. “A million?”

“Just give me time,” Bo said. “Give me a little more time.”

“Well, how much have you made?”

His eyes and his mechanical hands and feet still busy, Bo let his mind turn into an adding machine. Sixteen loads, and he must have averaged five or six hundred dollars profit a load. That was around eight thousand, and expenses and breakage and a little fixing of a deputy or two would knock off about fifteen hundred. Say sixty-five hundred, and he owned this car and this load, and here was thirty cases of Scotch all arranged for at seventy-five a case. He'd come back from Omaha with a cold two thousand in his jeans, and his bank balance of cash was already over four thousand.

“It's better than picking gooseberries at a dime a quart,” he said. “If they leave me alone for a year I'll be in the money good and plenty.”

“I wish I'd ever meet them after they got into the money instead of when they're just going to get in,” the dummy said. “Every guy I meet is right on the edge of making a killing. I'm jinxed, I guess.”

“Stick around,” Bo said. “Stick around a year.”

“Uh-huh,” the dummy said. “And what about Heimie Hellman and his little band of Boy Scouts? Are you going to play ball with that outfit?”

With a wrench of the elbows Bo pulled the Essex around a hook in the road. His headlights, bursting into space, touched a steep wall with small black spruces
toe
-nailed into it, and his nose, joining his perceptive faculties for the first time, sniffed at the balsamy smell. He was in the pass. The motor labored. He shifted into second and gave it a good goose before shifting back.

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't know what about that bunch. They can make trouble if they try.”

“But you don't think they'll try,” said the dummy. “You'll say ‘Boys, you're going to make me uncomfortable if you try any squeeze plays,' and then they'll back away and say, ‘Beg pardon, we wouldn't want to put you out.' ”

“Yeah, like hell,” Bo said.

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” Bo said. “If I buck ‘em, they stool me off, and if I try stooling them off to protect myself I run into a lot of cops and prosecutors Heimie and his gang own.”

“And if you play ball with them,” the dummy said, “you don't get anything but wages out of it, and you're all tied in with a bunch of pimps and strongarm men.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Suppose you take a nap. I can think of people I'd rather talk to.”

“And if you try to buck them,” the dummy said, “you haven't got enough customers without using Heimie's outlets, even if you could keep out of the law's way.”

“I guess I could get customers,” Bo said. “I guess good straight stuff at a fair price would take Heimie's customers away from his watered-down Scotch and rotgut moon.”

“And some guy like Underwood might take you away from the bosom of your family, too,” the dummy said. “Those guys wouldn't stop at murder. How long would you last? You make me laugh. You and your big money. You know what I think?”

“I don't know that I care,” he said.

“I think they've got you,” the dummy said. “I think this is your last trip on your own.”

“Oh, shut up!” he said. “I'll be running whiskey when you're back in some department store window showing off your legs.”

“You'll be running it for Heimie,” she said. “You and your big ideas of being your own boss. Bushwah. You'll be taking orders from that pimp in the embroidered shirts.”

“Shut up!” he said again, and for a half hour he drove in silence, sullenly, his mind edging up to the problem, finding a wall, blowing up in anger, edging up again at a different point. But it was all wall. His eyes strained out through the windshield, splashed and pebbled now with muddy water from a wash he had forded. The world unrolled in steep blackness beyond the fleeting glow of the lights, and the beam picked up an occasional timbered or rocky slope, a bank rose perpendicularly on his right and the road narrowed to two rocky ruts that apparently ended dead against the mountain. I see, said he, the elephant is very like a wall. I see, I see...

If you could only know what was on the other side of the light's beam, if you could see far enough ahead to take the strain off, you could make two thousand a month without turning a hair. His mind crept out toward the wall again, and he jerked it away. Through the slits in the sidecurtains came the strong smell of pines, and the Essex labored on the grade.

 

Entering Neihart, up in the pine woods, he eased up on the throttle, looking for a garage where he might get gas, a café where he could wash away the fuzzy feeling in his head with a cup of coffee. There was only one garage, with two gas drums on wooden supports and another drum marked “Oil.” As he pulled in he caught the reflection from the headlights of a car parked against the side, facing out. He swung a little to bring his lights on it. Empty.

A man came to the door holding a lantern shoulder high. “Gas,” Bo said, and climbed out, shutting the door on the shrouded dummy.

“You bet,” the man said. He took a five-gallon can and began to fill it at one of the drums. “How many?”

“She'll hold five all right.”

“You bet.” He concentrated on the pour from the drum's spout. “Just closin' up. Don't many people come through this late.”

Bo grunted, standing by the door to block off the man's view of the dummy.

“You're the third in the last hour,” the man said. “Funny how some nights they come all in a covey and some nights I sit from supper time till eleven and not a one shows up.”

“The others go on through?”

“One did. The other's right here against the wall. Couple fellas in it. Went on over for a cup of coffee.”

His mind instantly alert and suspicious, Bo dug a couple of silver dollars from his pocket and laid them in the garage man's hand. Two men, driving a back road at night, parking nose out by a garage wall, didn't look good. It looked like law, either law or another bootlegger. And a bootlegger wouldn't leave his car like that. He watched the café across the street, but there was only the shadow of the counter man moving up and down behind the dirty window.

He took his change, gathered his overcoat around his hips, and slid in. “Come again,” the garage man said. Bo pulled away. The trail climbed steadily, second gear much of it, and many curves, the roadbed deeply washed, exposing the solid rock in places. It was no road to make time on, but he rode the throttle anyway. Whoever was waiting back there was asleep at the switch, there was that to be thankful for.

But at the top of a long swinging hairpin he looked back and saw the moving lights of a car.

He swore, clicked off the dash light in order to see better. The road climbed up and up and up, a rocky shelf in the mountain's side. Sometime soon he should hit the top of the pass and start down, and on the other side it was better, not so steep or crooked. But he had to make the pass first: on this side, with a load on, he was at a disadvantage.