The Big Rock Candy Mountain (92 page)

Chet had been too soft, not soft like his mother, but weak. His mother, soft and gentle as she was, had beaten the old man in a way. It was he who ran at the last minute. Because she knew how to renounce without giving up herself, she could win just by being herself in spite of everything. Chet couldn't. There was enough of the old man in him to spoil him, enough of his mother to soften him, not enough of either to save him.

What about you? he said. What have you got? But he knew without asking. He had got enough of the old man's hardness to armor him. He was as hard as his father—harder. The old man could still bluster, but he wasn't what he used to be. He was whipped, and he knew it. His wife had whipped him, without ever meaning to and without realizing it, and his one remaining son was going to whip him further.

It was a curious thing that once he got away from Salt Lake for a day he could see how in a way his mother's life, which had shut her off from everything she wanted to have, had forced her to become what she wanted to be. The older she grew the richer she became in herself, and the older and more affluent the old man became, the more he deteriorated. He lost friends where she gained them, he weakened as she grew stronger, he lowered himself year by year ...

Going home after dark that night, his chilled feet aching with a hard constricting pain, he leaned back in the seat contentedly, thinking of that day, only a month or so away now, when he could pull out for good. The thirty-four dollars he had put away would get him there. Once there, he could make out somehow. There was always some way you could make it, something you could do to live if you wanted to live. You could wash dishes, scrub floors, fire furnaces, wait table, do something. You could renounce everything but the essentials, and the essentials included only a minimum to eat and wear.

He was asleep when they reached Salt Lake, and awoke only when the car pulled up in front of a drugstore on Third South and State while Joe went in for some cigarettes. Bruce stretched, yawned, moved the pile of ducks a little with his aching feet. He looked out at the crowds coming from the movies, swarming into the drug for a snack. The clock on the Sears Roebuck store said ten fifteen. He yawned again.

He shut his mouth so sharply against the yawn that it hurt his jaw. His father was coming down State Street, strolling, and with him was a woman holding the leash on an ugly Boston bull. The pup's wide chest was clothed in a red and blue sweater, and his legs strained as he surged against the thong.

So that, Bruce thought, is what he's been keeping. He watched her. Youngish—early thirties, probably. Hennaed. Small, well-made, mounted on heels four inches high, her legs and ankles the kind of legs and ankles he had seen on dozens of women of her kind, small-boned and rounded, the calf muscles bunching a little as she walked. That was what the old man picked when he wanted a woman. With a quarter of a century of a good woman behind him, he could pick up a sleazy little chippy like that. He watched her pull together the collar of her black fur coat, laughing a little as the dog pulled her off balance. Then he slouched down in the seat for fear his father would glance sideways and recognize him in the parked car.

 

That night he fell into bed after a hot bath, too tired for anger and weary of anger anyway, sick for the time when he could leave. There was his own life to live, and none of it lay here any more.

In the morning he looked into the other bedroom. Either his father had not come home, or was already gone. The kitchen table was still cluttered with dirty dishes, a piece of kippered salmon had been left out of the refrigerator and was curling on a plate, a half bottle of milk stood out. Sourly he washed up before getting his own breakfast, and after breakfast he started sweeping up the other rooms. On the end table in the living room he found the letter left out for him. It was from Minnesota, and it said that no scholarships were available at the mid-year. If he chose to come on, some work could perhaps be found for him, and in view of his record of the past year Doctor Aswell had offered to take him on as an assistant. That would pay two hundred dollars for the semester. Other things would perhaps turn up if he were on the ground.

He rattled the letter and read it again, lifted his head to look out into the bare branches of the hickories. It was not as good as he had hoped for, but it was good enough. In a pinch he could almost live on two hundred for the semester.

Hi de ho! he said. He was loose, he was free. He might even leave a little early and stay with Kristin for a few days before school opened. In a month, at most, he could shed the whole dead weight of the past and start over.

He felt too good to read. His fingers itching to pack, he estimated the cleaning bill he would have to run up in order to leave with his clothes in shape, calculated the date he would have to send the laundry so as to get it back the day before he left. And in the middle of those calculations he thought of his mother's clothes. He hadn't had the heart to go through them and sort them out, lay aside a pile for the Salvation Army, give her better things to her friends. It was stupid to keep them in the closet till the moths destroyed them. That was the sort of sentimental, useless gesture his father might make.

He went to the hall closet and opened the door, but the instant emanation, the something of his mother that emerged, made him pause.. He put out his hand and touched a house dress, neatly starched and pressed, left that to finger the silk of what had once been her best dress. She was in these clothes, somehow. She was in them as she had not been in the body the undertakers wheeled out that night. These were things her taste had selected. Her spirit as well as her body had worn them, and they had in them something of her plainness, something of her simple dignity. It was hard to destroy this too, to give away every fragrant remnant of what she had been.

But there was her fur coat, there were two or three good dresses, some shoes, a good many things that some of her friends would appreciate and use. It was only decent to divide her among people who had liked and respected her. The coat, for instance, could be sent to Laura, who had moved to California.

He rattled the hangers down the rod, frowned, slipped them back one by one, looking. Then he lifted the clothes back to see the hooks on the wall. The fur coat was not there, though he had put it there himself only a couple of weeks ago.

For a second he stood furious and incredulous. He
yanked
the hangers sideways, thumbing through them with shaking hands. The best dress was gone, the black velvet. Two pairs of the best shoes were gone. There was no sign of the quilted bed jacket he had given her on her birthday. And that slut on the corner last night had been wearing a black fur coat, seal with a squirrel collar, and it was only the best things, the new things, that were missing.

The closet swam in a red mist. He was shaking so hard that he had to feel his way out, and when he found a chair and sat down on it he hung onto it with both hands. The red mist lay over the whole room; his sight was bloody with it. In that moment, if his father had been in the room, he would have tried to kill him, and he knew it. Even if he wasn't in the room ...

He jumped up and rummaged through his father's dresser, found the .38 that the old man carried on trips, broke the cylinder and found it loaded in five chambers, the hammer down carefully on the empty sixth. It was a heavy, solid satisfaction to his palm, it was iron and it was murderous.

Putting on his coat, he slipped the gun into the side pocket and went out, and all the way down the hall and stairs and into the hazy brightness of the morning street he moved with his jaw locked like a trap and a singular quietness in his muscles, as if he waited
for something. The red smear of mist was still before his eyes.

 

He started walking up West Temple toward town, heading for the New Grand Hotel where his father sometimes hung out. His hand was in his coat pocket, holding the sag of the gun.

After all these years, he said. After twenty years of hating him!

He noticed that the morning was fine. The smoky air lay over him soft as feathers, the sunlight was diffused and mellow. Trucks were working down the street picking up heaps of leaves still sodden from the rains. His eyes were very sharp: things fixed themselves on his senses. He had a curious feeling that his mind was a steel plate, a mirror, which reflected impressions without absorbing them.

Quick tears stung his eyes as suddenly as if he had had acid flung in his face, and he bent his head, still walking, still with his fingers curled under the weight of the .38.

Ahead of him was the hotel, and he closed his fingers hard around the gun. Now! his mind said. If he's there ... His body was curiously light, a steel framework, as if he were not solid, as if he were invisible, and he did not hear his own steps on the tile floor as he crossed the lobby to the desk.

“I'm looking for my father,” he said to the clerk. “Harry Mason.”

“Yeah,” the clerk said. He stood up and looked up and down the lobby. “He was in here a while ago. Seems to me I saw him just a few minutes back.”

He beckoned a bellhop. “Seen Harry Mason around?”

“Not for a while,” the bellhop said. “He was sittin' over by the windows for a while, talkin' to a woman, and then a couple guys come in. I guess they all went out together.”

“Thanks,” Bruce said. “I'll look somewhere else.”

He went across the open lobby again, and as he turned sideways to avoid a man coming in the door he saw the clerk and bellhop watching him. He took his hand out of his pocket, put it back again because the gun showed through the cloth.

On the street he hesitated, his mind carefully numb to everything except the simple question of where his father might be. As if he were bearing a message, as if he had no personal interest in his father but had to find him for someone else, he went up a block and pushed open the door of the cigar store. Two men were leaning against the counter, but his father was not there. He looked toward the back room, but the door was half closed and he could see nothing. The man behind the counter recognized him and spoke. “Looking for your dad?”

“Yeah.”

“I think he's gone out of town. He was in this morning, said something about going to Nevada to look at a mine.”

“Oh,” Bruce said. An instant sickness, a feeling as if he might faint, made him put his hand on the counter. “Well, thanks,” he said, and turned away.

“Anything wrong?” the clerk said.

“No.”

So it would have to wait. On the sidewalk again, breathing deeply, he felt his body come back to him, heavily, a tired weight of flesh. He took his sweating hand off the gun and rubbed it on his coat, and without much thought of why he went, he turned back toward home.

In the apartment he sat down and looked fixedly at the half-filled bookcase. Somebody would have to take those books back to the library. He imagined the landlord coming in sourly, looking around the place, wondering what to do first in this apartment, what to do with the property of the dead man and his jailed son, picking up a book and seeing the library stamp on it, laying out a stack to send back, looking into the closets, shaking his head at the burdens people laid on him ...

This is the end of that, Bruce said. They will hang a considerable amount of reading when they hang me. He took the gun out and laid it on the table. Beyond him the open closet door yawned, and with petulant haste he got up to slam it shut.

For some time he sat looking at the gun, the blued steel, the brown wooden butt gracefully and powerfully arched. I thank you, he said, for teaching me to shoot. But he felt the closet door behind him, and he broke a cigarette taking it from the pack. Everything material that was left of his mother was in the closet, and he heard it talking to him.

I held no grudge, it said. Why should you? Your father was lonely, lonelier even than you, probably, because he's old and you're young. He had to have a woman to lean on and to reassure him that he was a man, and strong. And the clothes were no good to me, they might as well have been given to someone.

“But my God!” he said aloud. “To that slut!”

You don't know, the closet behind him said. You never met her. Maybe she's good for him, better than I was.

He picked up the gun and went into his bedroom. His suitcases sat open on their chairs. There was all that, the whole life he had planned for himself, the studies he wanted to finish, the career he wanted. Did you blow things like that, blow your mother's faith and pride in you, blow every chance you had to live down your old man's life and make something useful of yourself, just for the pleasure of ridding the earth of him?

He went into his father's room, slowly, and put the gun back in the drawer. He knew he couldn't do it now. He had known it, actually, from the time of that momentary sickness in the cigar store. If he could have done it in a rage it would be done now, but the minute he started thinking about it it was impossible. Back in his own room again he began frantically throwing clothes into the suitcases, dirty ones and clean ones together, shirts and socks and handkerchiefs and pajamas jammed in with shoes and laundry, cramming them in as if he had only minutes to catch a train. He was still cleaning the dresser drawers when he heard the front door open.

 

In the flash of returning rage he wished for the gun. He saw his father in the red haze, framed by the door, and he saw himself shooting him down, felt the hard jumping kick of the gun in his wrist, saw the heavy black-hatted figure stagger and slump, one hand hanging to the jamb ...

He turned and went on with his packing, and from the living room heard his father's voice. “How was the hunting?”

“Fair,” he said without turning. “I got seven.”