The Big Rock Candy Mountain (65 page)

He poked his head through the tent flap. A man on a horse was outside, and as the horse moved, its feet splashed in the sodden grass. “What's the matter?” Bo said, wide awake now, his mind stiff with the prospect of the law.

“Ditch has busted loose,” the man said. “There's already two inches of water running through here. You better pack up and get out or your car'll bog down.” In the gray light he kicked his horse closer. “With that trailer, you might have trouble,” he said. “I can get you a team after while if ...”

His nostrils pinched in, dilated once. Bo, sitting up to get shoes on, saw his attention wander. That God damned smell ...

“Thanks,” he said. “We'll get out of here right now.” He shouted to the boys and shook Elsa. As the rider turned away, looking back over his shoulder, Bo said, “How's the road to Ashton?”

“‘Sall right. Might be some snow up high, but the road's open.”

“Thanks,” Bo said again. He swung on Elsa the minute he let the tent flap fall. “Hustle!” he said. “We've got to get out of here damn fast.”

“Ashton?” Elsa said, still only half awake. “Isn't that back up in Idaho?”

“Yeah.”

“But ...”

“Let it go!” Bo hissed. “That damn snooper smelled us, see? We've got to move.”

He set his feet down and felt cold water as high as his ankles. The thought of the slippery lawn, the soaked topsoil, under the heavy wheels of the overloaded Hudson made him want to knock somebody down. The Hudson was no good in mud anyway. Too much power, too much weight. A lighter car would walk right through mud that would mire this elephant ...

In ten minutes they were packed, the tent and beds and blankets thrown in hastily, any which way, on the load. Bo slid in and stepped on the starter.

“You get out and be ready to push,” he said to Chet and Bruce. Elsa climbed out too, and the three braced themselves in water that flowed in a silvery sheet over the whole lawn. It had been almost fifteen minutes since the rider had left. He would have had time to get a cop and come back, if he was the kind that would turn you in. Five minutes more might be too many to delay. They had to make it out the first time or they were sunk.

A gravelled driveway circled the park, fifty or sixty feet to their left. If they could make that ...,Bo leaned out the window. “Push like the devil,” he said. “Now!” He let out the clutch and felt the Hudson strain, roll.,At the first sign of spinning he eased up, feeding only enough gas to keep the car moving. He heard one of the boys yell and fall down, but he kept easing it, inching it, heavy and lumbering, toward the drive. Ten feet, fifteen, three car lengths. It was like driving a loaded wagon over thin ice. The minute the wheels started to spin in mud instead of on grass, they would be in to the hubs.

The lawn sloped slightly downward, a barely perceptible dip, and, then upward again to the drive. He would have to run for it. He stepped down on the throttle, felt the clumsy car spin and swerve, but gain momentum. As long as it was downhill it was all right. But he had to gun it up that slope. In fury he stamped down on the accelerator and went roaring, throwing mud and water, skidding and whipping back into line, his hind wheels digging in and his speed slowing, slowing, until he barely crept for all the noise of the motor and threshing of the wheels. His front wheels made the gravel, he swung left to ease the hill, and his hind wheels spun, dug, found something solid and pushed him two feet, spun again. Elsa and the boys came panting, threw themselves against the fenders, and gradually, painfully, inch by inch, the car crept up on hard surface until one wheel caught. Elsa jumped aside to avoid the trailer. Bruce was flat on his face in the mud, his upraised forehead spattered. Chet trotted triumphantly alongside.

Bo started again before they were half into the car. “Keep your eye peeled,” he said over his shoulder. “If you see any cars behind us, you tell me.”

“If he believed that Ashton business we may be all right,” he said to Elsa, “but if he didn't we may have to run for it.”

She looked at him with her mouth set, turned her head and looked at the boys, muddy and wet, crowding their faces against the spattered back window. They didn't look scared, they weren't bothered by what might happen. They were only excited. She sighed.

“There's a car!” Bruce said. Chet crowded him aside to see better, and they fought for the window.

“Nope,” Chet said. “It's turned off again.”

They clung precariously balancing on their knees while Bo drove fast down the straight road to Pocatello. On smooth stretches he took it up to sixty, and gravel spanged under the fenders, the tires whined on little curves, the trailer behind wove from side to side, the car rocked with a monumental, dangerous weight on the punished springs.

“Whoopee!” Chet yelled. He grabbed for the top brace to steady himself. Bruce, a little white around the eyes, yelled in echo, and they both screeched hysterically, drunk with excitement and speed, until Bo turned and yelled at them to shut up.

“Sit down,” Elsa said quietly. “I don't think there's anybody coming now.” She looked back a long time. The road was clear as far as she could see, and a white curtain of dust blew eastward to meet the sun. “You can slow down,” she said to Bo. “I'm sure it's all right.”

Bo let the Hudson back down to forty, looked once at her, and pressed his lips together. “That could have been bad,” he said. “Scare you?”

“Yes.”

So that, her mind was saying, is the end of any pretense that this is a picnic trip. Now at least we aren't trying to fool ourselves any more.

It was a day when, having started wrong, they could not do anything right. After the first hundred miles, which they made before breakfast because Bo would not stop until he was clear of possible pursuit, they made bad time. At breakfast Bruce cut himself deeply with the butcher knife, and in his surprise and pain swore furiously out loud, and Bo slapped him end over end. An hour after they had started again it clouded over and began to rain, a slow, insistent, misty drizzle. At three o‘clock, after a cold lunch huddled in the car, they were descending a dugway into a river valley. A yellow delivery truck was coming up the grade toward them, hogging the road. Bo rode the horn, pulled the Hudson as far over toward the edge as he dared, and bent, swearing, to peer through the streaming windshield. At the last minute the truck saw them, swerved, skidded, slewed around, and shot by in second gear, and at the instant the soft clay shoulder of the bank began to give under the Hudson's rear wheels. Bo swung in and stepped on the throttle, but the weight of the car bore them down, the trailer slipped half over the edge and pulled at them, and in the end they stuck there, two wheels over the edge and the Hudson balanced precariously on its universal housing like a balancing rock.

Very carefully they climbed out the upper side into the rain. Bo's jaw was set, his whole face smouldering. He went to the edge and looked down, walked rapidly up to the next curve and looked back. When he came back to Elsa he was already shooting out orders. “Chet, you run on over to that farm, see, over there on the river. See if they've got a team to pull us out of here. Bruce, you go up to the curve and watch for cars. The minute you see one, wave and yell.” To Elsa he said, “There's a sheepshed or something right below us. We can maybe camp there tonight, but first we got to get this damn load off and ditch it.”

He was lifting a sack out of the upper side, and Elsa moved to help him. He went plowing down the slope with the sack, and even before she could get another out of the wedged load he was back. His energy was enormous. Put him in a tight spot, she thought, let him get into a place where something serious might happen, and he didn't even waste time swearing. An intense and terrible concentration came upon him. He was driven, furious, violent, but his violence got things done. In twenty minutes he cleaned out the car and cached the sacks in the sagebrush, and in another twenty he had the trailer emptied, had unhooked the coupling, and pulled the trailer by hand up onto the road. No cars or wagons had showed up. Bruce still stood huddled under a blanket at the upper curve.

“You and Bruce go down and start a fire if you can,” Bo said. “I'll wait and see if Chet had any luck.”

So she took blankets and quilts and went through the rain to the shed. It was open on one side, and the floor was paved with dry and trampled sheep dung, but the roof was decently sound. With damp paper and a loose board she got a fire going and hung the blankets around to dry out. Bruce stood chattering and shivering beside the little blaze, and the sight of his misery epitomized so completely her own disillusion and discomfort that she laughed.

“Well,” she said. “How do you like touring?”

They looked at each other. Bruce's solemn face cracked, grinned, and they stood giggling at each other. When Chet and Bo came in to report that the farmer was gone for the day and no one had come by on the road, they were sitting half dressed drying out their clothes and eating a chocolate bar and laughing as if at some uproarious joke.

 

Late in the afternoon a passing wagon pulled the car off the edge, and that night, in the persistent rain, Bo lugged the sacks one by one over to the sheepshed and reloaded. Early the next afternoon they rolled around the base of Ensign Peak and looked upon the city of the Saints.

“Gee,” Bruce said, standing up to see better. “This is a big town.”

“Isn't it nice?” Elsa said. “It's like all the towns through here, so green and nice.”

Bo stirred and sat up behind the wheel, filling his eyes with wide streets, gutters running with clean mountain water, trees in long rows down the parkways. “This is something like,” he said. “There ought to be plenty doing in a town this size.”

They coasted slowly through the traffic, swung eastward up a broad avenue leading to the mountains that went up sheer from the edge of the city. A gas station attendant told them there was camping in any of the canyons, and following his directions they climbed a long hill to a ledge under the steep bare peaks, from which they could look back on the city like a green forest below them, and beyond that the white salt flats and the cobalt water of Great Salt Lake far to the west.

“Quite a town,” Bo said. “There'd be some point living in a town like this. This makes Great Falls look pretty dumpy.”

“Onward and upward,” Elsa said. “Excelsior!” As long as they had lived together they had lived in little towns, with only that one bad year in Seattle to break the pattern, and as long as they had lived together he had hated the little burgs. He wanted to get into the big time. The few months he had spent in Chicago, a cocky youngster from the sticks in the incredible
metropolis,
had been a scented memory all these years. The very name of a big city lighted a fire in him. “Why don't we move on down?” she said. She said it as a joke, to twit him about the way he itched for somewhere else, but the serious stare he turned on her said that he did not think it was so funny, or even so impossible.

In the next three days she could see the idea working in him, see the progress from speculation to conviction to enthusiasm. Everything he saw and did in the city fed that fire. The three names which Heimie had given him, a shine-parlor operator, a head bellhop, and a brakeman on the D. and R.G.W., were all names that meant solid business. There was a whiskey famine. A reform administration, an active city prohibition force called the Purity Squad, and a consistent record of prosecutions and convictions for bootlegging had steered the whiskey supply to other points. The shine parlor man thought he could use four cases. The bellhop could definitely use two cases immediately, and probably more tomorrow. The brakeman could dispose of three cases as soon as they could be delivered. And all three had their fingers on the places which were good outlets for whiskey. That night Bo loaded the car with the five cases he had definitely sold, and after dark buried the rest of the load deep under the oak brush. Then he took the whiskey and his family to town, treated the four of them to a show and a sticky ice cream orgy in a confectionery store, and drove them home all singing under an incredible round moon that tipped the valley with light like an underwater forest. In his pocket was a roll of three hundred and seventy-five dollars.

In the next two days his brakemen outlet got busy, and before he was through moved twelve cases. The bellhop and the shine
^p
arlor man moved another four between them. None of them had even blinked at his asking price of eighty dollars a case. On the fourth day, by dropping the price five dollars a case, Bo unloaded all he had left on the brakeman and the bellhop and was clean.

“My God!” he said to Elsa. “Look at the bead on that.” He sat in the tent on a folding stool and spread the money on the bed, smoothed every bill out, separated them into piles of fives and tens and twenties. He got out an envelope and began to figure—his old game. She had seen him, when other figuring palled, sit for three hours computing the ultimate fate of a hundred dollars left in the bank to bear interest at four percent computed semi-annually for a hundred years. He had once even bought a copy of Coffin's
Interest Tables
just for the fun of looking up things like that.

Now he stopped figuring to count out five hundred and sixty dollars, the cost of Heimie's sixteen cases, and laid it aside. Heimie's profit on that was twenty-two fifty a case. He multiplied it neatly, laid out another three hundred and fifty. That left him fourteen hundred and forty-five as his own share. He counted it to make sure, bundled up Heimie's roll and put a rubber band around it, figured again. His own net profit was nine hundred and fifty-five dollars.