The Big Rock Candy Mountain (70 page)

“I've got the car,” he said to Laura. “Want to take a little ride?”

“Fine,” she said. “When's dinner, Mom?”

“About three. I got a chicken, so you'd better get back.”

Laura threw Chet a peculiar pleading look and went into the hall. “Well, goodbye,” Chet said in the parlor. “It's been nice to meet you.”

They stood up and watched him out, and he had a feeling of relief when he and Laura got into the air. “Do they know?” he said.

“No.”

“They seemed to be looking me over pretty sharp.”

“They always do that,” Laura said. “They're so darned afraid I'll start going with somebody they don't like. They just sit and stare at people I bring home.”

The edge in her voice warned him to shut up about her family. Maybe she was ashamed of them. It would make you squirm, all right, to walk along the street with that fat woman and have everybody turn and stare.

“When we get married,” Laura said, “I want to move clean away from Salt Lake.”

“I don't know why not,” Chet said. “It's a dump, far as I'm concerned.” He opened the door of the car for her, and she stopped dead still.

“My goodness!” she said. “What is it, a Lincoln?”

“Cad.”

“Gee!” She admired it as she got in, sat down almost uncomfortably on the leather and looked at the dashboard. “I didn't know you were rich,” she said.

“We're not.”

“But a Cadillacl”

“My old man just likes good cars,” Chet said.

“Well, he must be able to afford them,” Laura said. “What does he do, Chet? You never told me anything about your family.”

Chet sat pumping up the gas tank, his eyes fixed on the radiator cap across the gleaming hood. “He fusses around with mines,” he said. He couldn't have told why he gave that answer. It made the old man sound richer than the Cadillac did.

“Oh,” Laura said. Chet locked the pump and stepped on the starter. The motor purred.

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don't care.”

“Up a canyon?”

“All right.”

She moved over closer to him, and he dropped one hand to squeeze her knee. “Still love me?”

“Um,” she said, and smiled her intimate, inviting, remember-last-night smile.

“You were pretty stingy last night.”

“Was I?”

“You bet your cockeyed hooley you were.”

“Maybe that's the way I am.”

“Maybe that's a pretty lowdown way to be.”

She looked up at him sideways. “Did you suffer?”

“I didn't sleep all night.”

Her laugh rang out, and two girls walking along the sidewalk looked up with envy in their faces. Laura patted his arm. “Poor itty-bitty baby,” she said. “It suffered.”

“But I'm not going to suffer any more,” Chet said. He watched her with excitement mounting in his blood to see if she'd say anything to that. But she only smiled and dug her fingers into his muscle.

They drove up on the east bench and started out toward Big Cottonwood. At Thirty-Third South Chet hesitated, pulled the Cadillac over to the curb. He looked Laura steadily in the eyes. “I want to stop in the drug a minute,” he said.

If she understood she made no sign. But after what had happened last night she ought to understand. She did understand, by the Lord. She was just pretending to be dumb and bashful. Exultation carried him out of the car and up to the door of the drug store. It was only after he got inside that the fear of the baldheaded clerk almost stopped him. He looked at the candy counter for a minute, and then, covering up the unease with a swagger, he went back to the furthest, most intimate corner.

 

It was already three-thirty by the dashboard clock when they came down out of the canyon. Laura, although she sat close, seemed miles away, her face still and her eyes remote. Chet kept stealing looks at her, a little ashamed because he had shown up his own inexperience, a little afraid she was distant because she was disappointed in him. He gnawed his lip.

“Still love me, honey?” he whispered.

Her smile this time was slow and deep, and it thrilled him so that he could hardly sit still. “Ummm,” she said. That was better. He was still shaky from her tears up on the mountainside, from her passionate clinging and her stumbling words. He wouldn't think badly of her, he mustn‘t! He knew it was only because she loved him so much, because she loved him till it choked her to look at him ...

“Me too,” he said, sitting rigidly behind the wheel. His eye lighted on the clock. A quarter to four. Laura had missed her dinner, and he would be late with the car. God damn. Something was always getting in the way. He didn't want to take her home now. It would have been perfect to go somewhere to eat and then go up the canyon again in the evening, with plenty of time and everything dark all around, and the lights winking down the valley.

“I guess you're late to that chicken dinner,” he said.

“I guess so.”

“What'll we do tonight?”

“I don't care. Can you come down?”

“Sure.”

“The folks will be going to meeting at six thirty.”

They were Mormons all right, then. “Don't you go?” he said.

“I haven't gone for a year,” she said. “They think I'm a lost soul.” Her eyes flicked up to his, and she turned her face to lay her cheek against the seat. “I guess I am.”

“I guess you're not.”

“Sometimes I think I could almost die, living at home,” Laura said. “They're both suspicious all the time, and Pa's grouchy, and the kids are always getting into trouble and stealing things. I almost hated to have you meet them. You're so strong and clean and you don't know what all that nagging can mean.”

“It won't be for long,” Chet said. He drove like a lord, weaving the Cadillac through the Sunday afternoon traffic, conscious of his hands and wrists on the wheel. He was glad she liked his hands. Great big old paws, he said. Mentally he flexed one, feeling how it could go almost around a baseball. “You won't have to live in that much longer,” he said.

He turned into State Street and up toward her house. As she got out of the car she hesitated, her brown eyes searching his face. “You do love me, don't you?” she said. “We are engaged.”

“We're married,” Chet said. “All but paying the preacher.”

Secretly she grabbed his hand and bent over to kiss it. She was biting her lips when she looked up. “You're wonderful!” she said breathlessly. “Oh darling, I think you're perfect!”

He watched her run up the sidewalk. Then he swelled his chest and cramped the car around. She was his woman, and she thought he was perfect, and she was wonderful herself. The way she'd hardly made any fuss up there on the mountain, never pretended or made him coax ... Oh sweet patootie, he said, and wished it was six thirty.

That made him think of his father and look at the clock. Twenty minutes past four. He'd be a half hour late. The rest of the way home his mind struggled between the need of inventing excuses for the old man and the need of remembering with wonder how fiercely Laura had met his lovemaking in that pocketed hollow under the maples and the sumac just leafing with high spring. Almost as if she were afraid he'd get up and run, as if she were scared she had to hold him to keep him ...

His father was waiting on the back porch, his watch in his hand, his face like a thundercloud. “Is this your idea of four o‘clock?” he said.

“We ran into some construction,” Chet said. “I'm sorry, Pa. I got home as quick as I could.”

“It isn't quick enough,” his father said. “When I say four I mean four, not twenty minutes to five.”

“It's only four thirty,” Chet said.

“Let's not waste any more time,” Elsa said quietly. “We can still make it down by five.”

She motioned for Chet to go inside, but he remained standing by the porch. He wasn't going to run from the old man's blustering. The hell with him. He watched his father carry the suitcase down the steps and put it in the car, watched his mother settle herself. His father's head bent to look at the dashboard, then jerked up. His hard eyes looked across the lawn at Chet. “I thought you said you were going to Magna.”

“I did.”

“You did like hell,” his father said. “I'm getting sick of your lies. You haven't driven but thirty-three miles, and it's more than that to Magna and back.”

“I don't care how far it is,” Chet said. “That's where we went.”

“And I say that's a lie!”

“Don't call me a liar,” Chet said.

“Why God damn you ... !” His father opened the door and started to get out, but Elsa's hand was on his arm.

“Bo.”

His lips together, his breath snorting through his nose, Bo looked at Chet, standing defiantly by the porch rail. “The next time you want a car to chariot some cheap floozie around,” he said, “don't come to me. This is the last time.”

“That's all right with me,” Chet said. He locked eyes with his father, who swore and jerked the car into reverse. On the way out he backed off the twin strips of red concrete that served as a drive, and gouged up a stretch of lawn. Chet didn't even bother to laugh. He just looked contemptuously until they were out of sight.

On Monday he got his job at Magna, twenty dollars a week and a five dollar bonus to every player when they won a game. “You don't have to do much but play ball,” the man from the smelter said. “Mornings you'll putter around, do whatever the foreman of the bull gang finds for you. Lots of the guys spend half the morning in the can. But we want you to play ball for keeps. You'll go to practice at three every afternoon, and twice a week you'll play. We're making it plenty easy for you so we can walk away with that league this summer.”

It was pretty nifty, Van and Chet agreed. If they won most of their games they would make close to a hundred a month. They were on the gravy boat. Plenty of dough to spend.

Chet was already back-tracking on the marriage business, postponing it in his mind. You couldn't really bank on it, he told Laura. It wouldn't pay to go getting themselves in a hole.

But it was not really money that was making him cautious. It was the sign behind the door in his mind, the sign that said, “Chet Mason isn't nineteen, he's only seventeen.” It was easy to forget that when he was with Laura, but it kept coming back when he lay in bed and thought about things before sleeping.

There was one more week of school, one more game in the high school league. Two days before he was to pitch against L.D.S., Laura came up to school after practice, and she and Chet and Van went over to Mad Maisie's for a root beer. They were sitting there smoking cigarettes just off the edge of the school grounds when Muddy Poole came by. The next day both Chet and Van were dropped from the squad.

That was a blow, no matter how the two tried to swagger it off. It made them celebrities of a kind, got them kidded in the halls, even made them the center of a righteous and indignant group. Muddy ought to have more loyalty to the school than to throw off his first-string battery right before a crucial game. If East lost this one, and West took Granite, then L.D.S. would win the championship. Muddy ought to be able to overlook smoking. What was a cigarette anyway?

All that was pleasant enough, but still Chet was sullen when he went up to the field and sat in the bleachers to watch the game. He didn't even bother to hunt up Van. Obscurely he hoped that something would go wrong, that the team would get in a hole and Muddy would have to come up in the stands and ask him to get in there and save the day. At the end of the second inning he saw his father come down the cement steps and find a seat, and before the end of an inning rise and go out again. Probably he had found out from somebody why Chet wasn't pitching. Now there'd be a big blowup at home.

God damn, Chet said, and sat glumly watching his team pound the L.D.S. pitcher for three runs in the third and two in the fourth. Hench, a little squirt with not half the stuff Chet had, settled down after giving up one run in the first, and had yielded only four hits by the time Chet got disgusted and left.

“It serves you right,” his father said at supper that night. “It serves you damn well right. You had a chance, and you blew it. Maybe it'll teach you something.”

“Rub it in,” Chet said.

“Maybe I need to rub it in. Maybe if it isn't rubbed in it'll run right off your thick hide.”

“Oh, let it drop,” Chet said. “It isn't worth making all this fuss about.”

“It doesn't matter to you, uh?”

Chet raised his eyes. “Not very much.”

“No,” his father said. His voice was acid with contempt. “I guess it wouldn‘t, at that. The only thing that'd matter to you is running around with this flapper of yours every night till one-two o'clock.”

“Don't you call her a flapper!” Chet said.

His father looked at him a moment. “All right, she isn't a flapper. She just doesn't know when to go home to bed. Hasn't she got anybody to tell her she can't stay out all night every night?”

“Oh, all night!”

“Two last night,” his father said. “One-thirty the night before. Three the night before that. You haven't been in before midnight for a week.”

“Oh bushwah.”

“Yes, bushwah. You haven't.”

“Bo,” Elsa said. To Chet she said, “You have been staying out awful late. It's not good for you while you're growing, and you don't get your studying done.”