The Big Rock Candy Mountain (97 page)

“Thanks,” Bruce said. “He was down and out. Maybe it's better the way it is.” He broke his hand away. “Thanks for everything. I've got to run. I ought to be back in a week or so.”

He couldn't stand and listen to George talk about twenty years ago and what the old man had been like then. He had heard it before, from both him and Kristin—the grudging, half-willing admiration they had had for him in spite of their disapproval. There were other compulsions on him. Within an hour of the time Joe Mulder called, while the graduates were still listening to the Commencement Address, he was pushing the Ford down through the traffic toward Northfield, seeing his own frozen face in the windshield and thinking of nothing except drive, cut around that truck, unreel the miles, hit the trunk line west and push it. A body did not keep forever. He was going home to bury the last of his family, straighten out the last tangles that the old man in his desperation had wound himself up in. Straighten out the police, straighten out the funeral arrangements, get the sexton to dig a third grave beside the others in the half-rod of ground known as lot 6, block 37. He was going home again, the next to last time, and there was no doubt where his home was, because part of him was already buried in those two graves and in two days another part—admit it—would be buried in the third.

 

Now the old familiar catalogue of cities, towns, villages, the old perennial bee-line pilgrimage across the great valley hammocked between Appalachians and Rockies, the familiar feel of the throttle's round button under his sole and the green June tumbleweed blowing flat on each side under the speed-whipped wind.

But no quiet in the mind this time, no limericks, no idle speculation to pass the miles, no fine free feeling of space and air. Only the disbelief, like the disbelief he had had going back for Chet's funeral, only the endless prodding and the endless repudiation and the everlasting no. He had not believed in that first death because there had been practically no warning, because he had never met death close, because he had a boy's feeling that nothing of his could die. Now he refused to believe in his father's death because of the manner of it.

How? he said, in God's name how? In one of those rages that sent him berserk? Then why the letters with their increasing hopelessness, why the pitiful sheet of paper showing that he had poured his last forty-seven hundred dollars into a worthless hole in the ground, and his hopes and his life with them?

But plan it? Make up his mind to shoot that woman and then himself? Do it coldly and deliberately? Bo Mason, who believed in tomorrow as he believed in himself, deliberately scheme to commit murder and suicide on a tomorrow? That called for a cold bloodedness, a calculation, he had never possessed.

Revenge? Self-pity? Despair?

If he could once convince himself about how it had happened, he could believe it. He knew it was true, he was on his way to bury his father, but he still couldn't believe that last violence. Somehow he had always thought that violence stopped short of finalities for the old man. It had always been at least part show, for an effect, to compel obedience or bully someone down. There was no point in bullying if you were going to die immediately. There was a desperation in this last act that would probably never be quite credible.

The afternoon waned ahead of him down the long straight road, moving faster than he moved, flattening, sinking, going dusky. Sky and earth were a bowl over a disc, then two planes, the upper lighter than the lower, between which he moved. He turned on his lights and unwrapped the sandwich he had bought the last time he stopped for gas.

This too was familiar, the feel of the car's motion, oil-smell and night-smell, the sweet muffled roar of the motor; the phantasmagoria of half-seen shadows, trees, buildings, outside the running headlights. It was old and familiar and even comfortable, and all he had to do was to keep the hard hot accelerator button under his foot, keep the white center line of the highway just off his left front wheel. The dawn too would be familiar, the slow lightening of the sky until the two planes became again disc and bowl: the windless pale light just barely not darkness, the horses standing in the pastures, the cars cutting along the road with lights still on, the clatter and smoke of the Los Angeles Limited coming behind him, catching him, passing him, the shades down on the dark pullmans, the observation car with windows palely alight, an early-rising passenger on the rear platform watching the vanishing point of steel.

It was all familiar. It seemed to him, yawning, scratchy-eyed, that there was the whole rhythm of his life in it, that all through his remembered life the days had gone under him like miles, that he and his whole family had always been moving on toward something that was hidden beyond where the road bent between the hills. As he shifted to ease his aching back he thought of the old man, always chasing something down a long road, always moving on from something to something else. At the very end, before that fatal morning, he must have looked down his road and seen nothing, no Big Rock Candy Mountain, no lemonade springs, no cigarette trees, no little streams of alcohol, no handout bushes. Nothing. The end, the empty end, nothing to move toward because nothing was there.

He began to see, dimly, why his father had shot himself, and half to believe that he had.

“You can't go down there now,” Joe said. “You haven't had any sleep in two days. Let it wait till morning.”

“I'd better go,” Bruce said. “I don't think I could sleep anyway till I did.” He looked at the clock in the kitchen, and yawned so wide he couldn't see the hands. Joe, watching him from across the table, pulled the corners of his mouth down.

“I feel all right,” Bruce said. “I'd better get it over.” It was only nine-forty. A bath had helped, the clean shirt and underclothes and socks borrowed from Joe had helped. He could stay awake another hour or two. And until he got down to that hotel and got a few things straight he wasn't going to be comfortable.

Beside him on the porcelain top of the kitchen table was yesterday's paper, the front page, with a two-column story and a picture of Elaine Nesbitt holding the leash on a straining bulldog. “S.L. MINING MAN KILLS WOMAN, SELF,” the headline said. He read the story through again, trying to get that “how” straight in his mind, but what the newspaper said didn't help much. Harry Mason, local mining man, had met Elaine Nesbitt in the lobby of the Winston Hotel at nine in the morning. They had quarreled some time previously over mining interests in which both were interested, according to James Dobson, the hotel clerk. They quarreled again in the lobby, and Mrs. Nesbitt, pretty auburn-haired widow, struck Mason with her handbag and ran out toward the side entrance. Mason jerked a gun from his coat pocket and followed. Dobson, trying to grapple with him, was thrown against the desk. He heard the outside door slam, then two shots. When he got to the door Mason was slumped against the radiator with a bullet through his head. He was still breathing, but died within ten minutes. There was a bullet hole through the door, and outside Mrs. Nesbitt lay face down, shot through the heart.

So it was rage, blind berserk fury.

But he read on, and it wasn't so clear. According to Desk Sergeant Walter Hill, Mason had come in three days previously to get a permit to carry a gun. He had mining interests in Nevada, and was accustomed to carry considerable sums on his person. In granting the permit, the sergeant had asked him if he had any criminal record, a routine question, and Mason had said jokingly “Not yet.” At the time he had seemed calm.

“I've just got to go down there,” Bruce said. “It shouldn't take more than an hour or two.”

“Want me to go along?” Joe said.

“You're already mixed up in this enough.”

“That's all right,” Joe said. “I'd be glad to come along, if you want.”

Bruce shook his head, tore the story out of the newspaper and folded it into his pocket.

 

He remembered the hotel, a dark little semi-respectable place on First South. The lighted shelf above the entrance looked dingy, and the door opened hard. There was no one in the lobby except the clerk behind the desk. Bruce's eyes darted past the desk, spotted the hall leading to the side entrance, and the radiator's dull gilt gleaming in the desk light. He locked his insides as if he were trying not to vomit.

“I'm Bruce Mason,” he said to the clerk. “I just got in.”

The clerk had a cast in one eye. The other one jumped, startled, in his pale face. He came out from behind the desk, hurrying. “Oh yeh,” he said. “I'll get Dobson. He was on when ... Just wait here a minute.”

He ran up the stairs two at a time, and Bruce stood still by the desk. In this dingy little lobby, yesterday morning, the thing had been done. He moved toward the side entrance. The carpet down the little hall had been taken up, and he saw the unpainted boards and the splintered tack holes. Against this radiator, within reach of his hand, his father had stood, in what desperate frenzy, and spattered his brains against this wall. He shut his jaw and turned away, and as he turned he saw the bullet-hole in the panel of the door.

Steps were coming, and he went back to the desk. A short man with a bald spot came down and shook his hand. “I been expecting you,” he said. “Your dad left some papers and things. Want to look at them now?”

“I might as well.”

The little man looked at him sidelong. “It's a hell of a thing,” he said. “You seen the papers? You know how it happened?”

“Let it go,” Bruce said. “I've seen the paper.” For all his need to settle the tiniest detail, the facial expression even, of that last furious minute of his father's life, he did not want to talk to the clerk. It had to come without any coloring. But the lobby had told him nothing. The radiator was a radiator, nothing more, and even the stains of his father's blood on it, if there had been any, would not have made this thing any more believable.

“I never had any idea he was feeling that way,” Dobson said as they went upstairs. “Oh, I knew he was having a little trouble about money, and he'd had a spat or two with Elaine, but Jesus ...” He turned down the hall, unlocked the door of a room. “The cops told me to keep it locked,” he said, “but you can go in.”

Bruce stood half in the door. “Would you mind?” he said. “Could I look things over alone?”

“Sure.” Dobson hesitated. “I don't want to push, or anything, but Harry owed me twenty dollars. If he had any insurance or anything I wonder ...”

“I'll fix it up,” Bruce said. “Did he owe anything else, do you know?”

“I know he owed something to O‘Brien, from the Cantwell Hotel. O'Brien came around here trying to collect once or twice. I think he owes some rent here, too.”

“Well, I'll go through things and see what's here,” Bruce said.

“And he owed for a suit of clothes,” Dobson said. “He wasn't hardly cold before that Jew Miller was calling up wanting to know where he was going to get his money.”

“Where is the suit?”

“He was wearing it.”

“All right,” Bruce said. He closed the door and looked around. The bed was made, the closet door open. Inside the closet there was a suit and a pair of black shoes and a bundle of neckties, several of which had apparently never been worn. On the dresser, under a silver shaving mug, was a large envelope addressed to Bruce Mason.

Then he had known he was going to do it. It hadn't been done in a rage. The letters and the worthless stock certificate were not blackmail or begging. As he sat down on the bed with the heavy envelope in his hand he felt as if he were going to be sick.

The envelope contained an insurance policy for five hundred dollars and a receipt book showing that his father had made monthly payments, the last one on June first. Clipped together there were five pawn tickets with pencilled scribblings on the backs. The tickets said overcoat, suitcase, watch, suitcase, suitcase. There was a map with red markings in the corner, showing the location of the Della Mine. There were the three letters that Bruce had written during the last two months, in answer to his father's. His own handwriting looked incongruous and strange to him now, seen as his father had seen it.

And what about the letters? he said. Nothing in them but little bread-and-butter checks and a lot of smug free advice. Take a brace, keep your chin up, you're not licked yet, why not get a job at something, any kind of job, till you get a stake again, instead of waiting and depending on this mine? He held the three letters in his hand hating himself.

The last thing he looked at was a certificate of ownership for the cemetery lot, together with a sexton's receipt and another receipt showing that perpetual care had been bought and paid for.

He sat on the bed weighing the papers in his hands. No note. The letter written on June first was the last. He had known that long before that there wasn't anything left.

The shaving mug on the dresser caught his eye, and he reached to lift it down. The metal was tarnished, one side was dented, the inscription on the side was worn almost away, but he held it up to the light and read it:

That was the final sum, the final outcome, of the skill and talents and strength his father had started with. One dented silver mug, almost thirty years old. One pair of worn shoes, one worn suit, a dozen spotted neckties, a third interest in a worthless mine, a cemetery lot with perpetual care. A few pawn tickets, a few debts, a few papers, an insurance policy to bury him and a cemetery lot to bury him in, that last small resource hoarded jealously even while the larger and hopeful resources were squandered.