The Big Rock Candy Mountain (85 page)

“How much has the place made in the last six months?” he said.

“It's only been running four,” his father said. “I don't know exactly. We put in fifteen thousand apiece. These Denver guys are offering eighteen for a third interest. It's worth more than that. I expect I'm ahead about eight thousand in four months, if I could sell my third for twenty thousand.”

“Rate of twenty-five thousand a year for each of you,” Bruce said. “You can't gripe at that, except when you come to pay your income tax.”

His father laughed. “Income tax!” he said.

“Have you ever paid an income tax?”

“No,” his father said, “and I don't intend to.”

“Some day they'll haul you off to the pen for three. years.”

“They've got to catch me first,” his father said.

Bruce buttered his roll and laid his knife down. “I'll bet there isn't a family like ours in the United States,” he said. “You've never paid an income tax. Did either of you ever vote?”

“I never did,” his mother said. “Isn't that awful? I never knew enough about it to make the effort.”

“I guess I voted once,” Bo said. “Back in Dakota. How long ago? Twenty-five years? Nearer thirty, I guess.”

“Ever serve on a jury?”

“No.”

“There we are,” Bruce said. “Two of us have never voted, and the other one voted once, thirty years ago. We never lived in any house in the United States for more than a year at a time. Since I was born we've lived in two nations, ten states, fifty different houses. Sooner or later we're going to have to take out naturalization papers.”

“And now we might move right out of here,” his mother said, “just about the time we get the cottage finished up. Wouldn't that be typical? Let's not sell this place, Bo, even if you do sell out of the club.”

“This is headquarters,” Bo said. “I've paid taxes on this already. That ought to make us permanent residents.”

“Do you think you will sell out of the club?” Bruce said.

“If I got a good enough offer I might. I've got a feeling this whole racket is going to be a flash in the pan.”

Bruce laughed. “Here we go round the prickly pear,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

His mother rose to clear the table for dessert, and he saw her wince. “What's the matter?” he said.

“Oh, my darned hip!”

“What's the matter with your hip?”

“I don't know. Rheumatiz, I guess. I must be getting old.”

She made her special face and limped like an old crone into the kitchen. Across the table Bruce's eyes met his father‘s, and he saw the question there that he knew must be in his own. And the fear.

Thereafter he had two things to watch, one working in his father and one in his mother. His father's problem he did not worry about. It made no great difference to him whether the old man sold the club or not, except as it might affect his mother. But his mother's condition was another thing. Once he had noticed that she was hiding a pain, he couldn't seem to look up without catching her wincing or favoring one side—the same right side always. Her appetite was like a bird‘s, and she got out of breath easily.

“Maybe it's the altitude,” he said. “Maybe this is too high for you.”

“Oh, it isn't anything. I'm getting old and rickety, that's all.”

But he watched her, and he saw that now in the afternoon she lay down for a rest, something she had never done as far back as he could remember. And when the old man powdered up his discolored cheek and went into town he heard her ask him to bring out some sleeping pills. The fear that made him sensitive to her least gesture of weariness or pain made him pretend with her. He kidded her about her rheumatiz, told her that all she needed was a little exercise, like a nice dip in the lake. When she took him up he was horrified and wouldn't let her. The lake was getting too cold. Finally he compromised on a mild walk, but when they came back she was out of breath, weak, her mouth set in a hard line. They had walked less than a mile.

“Your hip?” he said.

“I guess I'm not much good any more.”

“You're going in and see the doctor.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks,” she said. “It's nothing but a little stitch. Prab ably I've got an abscessed tooth or something.”

“It wouldn't do any harm to find out.”

“All right,” she said. “If it will make you feel better I'll go, next time I go in.”

She lay down and rested for an hour while he sat in the sun and whittled aimlessly. At five-thirty his father came back. “Well,” Bruce said. “Sell the gold mine?”

His father hesitated on the step as if debating whether to sit down and talk or go inside. “I can make a deal, I think, if I want to. Where's your mother?”

“Lying down.”

“Sick?” His father's face turned sideways to look at him with a fixed, almost vacant expression.

“Her hip's hurting her.”

The old man chewed his lip and took off his hat. His hair, Bruce noticed, was getting thin, and he was almost white above the ears. “What the devil you suppose that is?” he said. “It just seemed to come on all of a sudden.”

“I know what I'm scared it is,” Bruce said.

His father's eyes wandered away. He tapped his hat against his trouser leg. His lips moved slightly, and he blinked his eyes.

“I'm taking her in to the doctor tomorrow,” Bruce said. “There just isn't any point in not finding out.”

“Yeah,” his father said. He flapped the hat against his leg. “Yeah. Well....” He went up the steps and into the house. Bruce followed him, almost as if he were guarding his mother, keeping people who were worrying about selling gambling houses from bothering her with their problems.

She was still, apparently, lying down. They went together down the little hall between the partitions and looked in the door of her bedroom. She lay face downward on the bed, and as they looked they could see her body writhe.

“Mom!” Bruce said. He jumped to the bed and knelt, his arm over her shoulder. “Mom, for God's sake!”

Her shoulder stiffened. For a moment she kept her face in the pillow. Then she turned it and smiled, and he saw that her cheeks were wet. “I'm a baby,” she said.

Bruce looked at his father, irresolute at the foot of the bed. The old man wet his lips and came closer. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe you ought to take a couple aspirin.”

She smiled again, and as she shifted on the bed the smile froze whitely against her teeth. “I've taken ... six,” she said.

“Damn it,” Bruce said wildly. “Why didn't you call me?”

“I couldn't seem to ... make much noise.”

Without saying goodbye or where he was going, Bruce went out of the bedroom, walking fast, running as he hit the back steps. The Ford,was blocked into the garage by the LaSalle, so he took the LaSalle. As he roared out the drive he saw his father run to the front door to look after him. At the paved highway he didn't even bother to wonder which way he was going to turn. He just turned. There were cottages, stores, little centers for groceries and boats and fishing tackle, in both directions on that side. He let the LaSalle out, and was startled at how fast it leaped under him, how smoothly it ran, with hardly a sound except an eager low humming. His foot was almost to the floor when he saw the first store, and he rode the brakes through the loose gravel of the turn-out. A man came running out of the service station with a pail in his hand, as if he were going to a fire.

Bruce leaned out the window and shouted. “Know of a doctor close around here?”

“Might try the C.C.C. Camp,” the man said. “Know where it is?”

“No.”

“Go right on. Exactly seven tenths of a mile, I measured it. There's a sign ...”

He took his foot off the running board and Bruce slammed the car into second. The gravel spattered. Bruce's hand went onto the horn and stayed there as he swung around a party of girls parked at the roadside with a flat tire. They started to flag him down, and stood with upraised arms and opened mouths as he roared by. At exactly seven tenths of a mile a road wriggled off into the timber, and he tramped on the brakes and careened in. Back in the timber a half mile he came to four long low barracks, one of them with a flagpole in front. A man in army uniform was sitting at a desk inside.

“Is there a doctor here?” Bruce said.

“Not right now,” the officer said. “He went into Carson this afternoon. Ought to be back by now.”

“Damn!” Bruce said. He was panting as if he had run all the way from the cottage. “You haven't got any morphine or anything here, have you?”

“The doctor'd have to give you that,” the officer said. He rose from behind the desk.. “What's the matter?”

“My mother's in a hell of a pain,” Bruce said. He looked at the officer and saw that the officer thought he was out of his head. It wasn't worth explaining. “Could you ask the doctor to come over when he gets back, if he comes in the next hour?”

The officer nodded, then lifted his hand and made a motion of shooting a revolver at the door. “Here he is now,” he said.

Bruce was at the car door before it could open. “Can you come over and look at my mother?” he said. “She's had cancer—carcinoma—had an operation for it. Now she's got awful pains in her hip. I don't know what they are. She's been taking x-ray treatments ...”

“Wait a minute,” the doctor said. He was in army uniform like the man in the headquarters building. “I'll get my bag.”

He stepped out and walked with what_seemed callous slowness into the building. In five minutes he came out, closing his black bag. “You lead,” he said. “I'll follow along.”

“I can take you and bring you back.”

“No thanks. I'll drive my own.”

To the officer, standing before the building, he said, “Tell that lousy cook to keep my dinner warm, Harry.”

She was still in pain when they got back. Bo Mason sat at the head of the bed holding her hand, looking helpless and clumsy. He got up when the doctor came in, and stumbled against the chair. The doctor set his bag where Bo had been.

“Hello,” he said to the woman on the bed. “Having a little pain, eh?”

To Bruce he said, “Can you put a tablespoon in a pan of water and boil it a couple minutes?”

Bruce went out, and his father followed him. “Where'd you find him?” he said.

“C.C.C. Camp.”

“Couldn't you get anybody better than that? He's probably some horse doctor.”

“I don't give a damn,” Bruce said. “He can give her a shot of something. I was just looking for somebody quick, and he was the quickest.” He filled a pan with water and threw a spoon into it. Leaving it on the burner, he went back into the bedroom. The doctor had his mother bare to the waist and was pressing with his finger tips under her arm, feeling down the scarred side, over the bulge of her hip bone. Bruce turned away. But when the doctor had covered her again, without comment, and gone into the kitchen to sterilize a needle, and came back with a hypodermic full of brownish liquid, he watched, because that was what he had got the doctor for. The needle stabbed in, a slight bump of liquid swelled under the skin.

“That will fix you for a while,” the doctor said. “You'll sleep a good while, probably. Then you'd better go in and see somebody in town.”

She nodded. “If she wakes up,” the doctor said to Bruce, “give her some orange juice or broth or milk, anything. If she doesn't wake up for a long time don't worry.”

He pulled the quilt across her. “I wouldn't even bother to undress,” he said. “You're getting sleepy already.”

“I can feel it in my tongue.”

“You'll feel it all over in a minute,” he said. He went out and held the door open for Bruce and his father, shut it quietly.

“How long since her operation?”

“A year and a half,” Bruce said.

“Umm.”

“What is it?” Bo Mason said. “What could be giving her pains like that way down in her hip? She's awful hard to hurt. I never saw her cry for pain in my life before....”

His voice was almost babbling. The skin of his face was slack. The doctor shrugged and shook his head.

“You'd better get her in to a specialist,” he said. “I wouldn't want to say, but my guess would be that it's a secondary growth. When that stuff gets so far along it breaks off and the bloodstream carries it around. You say she's been short of breath?”

“For the last month or so,” Bruce said.

“Sounds like lungs too. Probably she'll have to be tapped.”

“Has she got' a chance?” Bo said.

The doctor looked at him a moment. “I doubt it,” he said.

 

She slept until past noon the next day, and when she finally awoke, fuzzy-tongued and drowsy-eyed, she had apparently been dreaming. Her mouth was drooping and sad. That evening she asked Bo if they could go back to Salt Lake.

“Salt Lake?” he said. “What for?”

“I want to,” she said.

“I don't know why you'd want to go back to that smoky hole for the winter when we could go to L.A. or somewhere.”

“Bo,” she said. “Couldn't we? Even if you don't sell your share in the club, couldn't we?” She took his hand and held it, watching his face. “That's where Chet is,” she said, and Bruce saw that it shamed her to have to tell him. She was going to die and they all knew it. The next morning, his face gray and haggard, Bo went down and without a word to anyone closed the deal for his share of the club.