“Hello.”
“Going somewhere?”
“No. Just looking around.”
“Seeing the city?” He lifted his head to laugh, and she saw the corded strength of his neck. He pointed down the street to the weed-grown flats dwindling off into dump ground and summer fallow. “You must take a stroll in the park,” he said. “Five thousand acres of cool greenery. This is one of the show towns of Dakota. Prosperous! Did you see that magnificent hotel on the corner as you came by? Gilded luxury, every chamber in it, the fulfilled dream of one of Hardanger’s most public-spirited citizens.”
Elsa was a little astonished. She said demurely, “Very imposing. Bath in every room?”
“Some rooms two, so a man and his wife can both be clean same time.”
“Must take a lot of water.”
“Oh, they’ve got water to burn. Gigantic well just outside, clean pure alkali water, no more than seven dead cats in it at any time.”
“You don’t sound as if you liked the hotel much.”
“I love it,” he said. “I love it so much I live there. I love this whole town. Just the spot for an ambitious young man to make his fortune.”
Curiosity uncoiled itself and stretched. She took a peek at the swinging doors behind him. Maybe he wasn’t doing so well in his place. Bowling alley, was it? All she could see was a dark stretch of bar and two dim yellow lamps in wall brackets. Into the bright hot sunlight came the jaded click of pool balls.
“What’re you doing, really?” Bo said.
“Nothing. I thought I might help Uncle Karl in the store.”
“Let’s go have a soda.”
Elsa hesitated, her eyes on the darkly polished bar inside. It looked almost like a saloon, but she knew saloons were prohibited in North Dakota. Her curiosity rose on tiptoe, peering. “Why, that’d be nice,” she said.
Instead of turning into his own place, he took her arm and led her down to the corner. “Why can’t we have it in your place?” she said. “Then you wouldn’t have to pay for it.”
His look was amused. “You want to go in my place?”
“Why not?”
“Naw,” he said, and moved her along. “My place is a billiard hell. It’s a man’s joint. You’d scare away my two customers.”
“But you sell drinks, though, soft drinks?”
“Soft enough. But Joe down here makes better sodas.”
She wondered if he might be running an illegal saloon. That ought, according to what the Reverend Jacobsen had always said, to make him one of the undesirable element. Looking at him again, curiously, she saw only that he looked clean, brown, athletic. She didn’t ever recall seeing a man who looked so clean. Either the respectability she had been brought up in was narrow, or Bo Mason wasn’t one of the bad element. But he drank beer, and told stories that weren’t always quite nice. But so did her uncle, and he was respectable. And so did Helm, and Helm was a woman.
Sitting at the sticky marble slab of counter sipping sodas, they laughed a great deal and gurgled through the newfangled straws. By the time she had left him to go home she had decided that he couldn’t possibly be one of the bad element, in spite of his billiard hell. The bad element were distinguishable by their evil faces, their foul mouths, their desire to trample everything decent and clean underfoot. Bo Mason wasn’t anything like that. He was cleaner than anything. Even while he stood on the sidewalk just before she left he was trimming his nails with his pocket knife. She noticed too how cleanly the blade cut the thick soft nail, and she was enough a farm girl to respect a man who kept his tools sharp. Moreover, he had been all over, worked at a dozen different things, talked easily about Chicago and Milwaukee and Minneapolis, the places that had been golden towers on her horizons for eighteen years.
The thought of what her father might say if he knew she had had a soda with a man who ran a pool hall made her almost laugh aloud. Even if he ran an undercover saloon, blind pigs they called them, it didn’t make any difference. She was a grown woman, and could have sodas with anyone she chose. If she found a saloon-keeper who was clean, and interesting, and pleasant, she would have a soda with him any time she pleased. The sidewalk ended and she jolted herself stepping unexpectedly down.
As she passed Helm’s yard she heard the racket, the shrill, snapping snarl of a dog, Helm’s voice swearing, the sudden yipe of a mongrel hurt. “Now, God damn it, will you lay still?” she heard Helm say. The dog yiped again, and as Elsa stopped at the gate its voice went up in a high wail.
She must be killing it, Elsa thought. She found herself at the side of the house, looked around the corner. In the corner of the fence Helm was kneeling. Her wide stern loomed like the gable of a barn. Then she rose, grabbed a handful of dry grass, stood back. The moment the pressure was off him the dog tucked his tail and hiked. Helm, starting back toward the kitchen, saw Elsa and scowled, red-faced. “Those sonabitching kids!” she said.
The Reverend Jacobsen, Elsa’s mind said, would have told anyone to walk away from language like that. But she stayed where she was. “What was the matter?” she said.
“They’re allus doing something like that,” Helm said. “Tying cans to dogs’ tails, or tying cats’ tails together and throwing them over a clothesline, or catching frogs and blowing them so full of air they can’t swim. I catch any of them I’ll lay into ‘em, I don’t care who they are.”
“What did they do?” Elsa said.
“First time I ever see this one,” Helm said. “It’s a dirty damn trick, even on a cur dog. They fed this mutt a ball of string, wrapped up in meat or something, I guess, and before he knows it he’s trailing yards of it out behind, and ever‘body stepping on it fit to pull his guts out. Ain’t that a dirty trick, now?”
Elsa tried to keep her eyes up. She felt the slow red coming into her face. She ought to have gone right on by, then she wouldn’t have got trapped like this. Helm, watching her with shining eyes, began to smile.
“Why honey, I believe that shocked you!”
“I ... think it’s an awful dirty trick,” Elsa said.
“I forgot you was a lady,” Helm said. “I didn’t aim to shock you. First minute I talked to you I knew you was a lady, a natural-born lady, not one of these dames with studhorse airs. I wouldn’t want to shock you any time. But I couldn’t let that hound run around that way, could I?”
“No,” Elsa said. “I think ... you’re very kind ...” She escaped, feeling almost as if she were going to cry, because Helm was kind, that was a kindhearted thing to do, and all the bad language and vulgarity that went with it couldn’t make it any less kind. She went about getting lunch feeling as if a bed were unmade in her mind.
Not all the people she met were as hard to assimilate as Helm and Bo Mason. Most of them she met at Helm’s house, and most of them were commonplace enough. Gus Sprague, a little bandy-legged carpenter, was ordinary and pleasant; so was his wife, as little and henlike and bandy-legged as Gus. And the elevator man, Bill Conzett, was nice too. Bill’s belt cut so low under his pendant stomach that small boys were always following him around waiting for his pants to fall off. There was a little group of Norwegians who sometimes came around, but they stuck together and were more pious than the rest, a little more like Indian Falls. Karl was the only Norske who seemed to have left the old country completely behind.
None of those people was disturbingly new. But Jud Chain and Eva Alsop were.
Jud Chain was a professional gambler and Bo Mason’s partner. Knowing that before she met him, Elsa expected almost anything—a sinister, pale, diabolic creature with burning night-time eyes was what her anticipation finally resolved itself into. But the man she met one afternoon in Helm’s cluttered parlor was a handsome blond giant, six feet three or four inches tall, abnormally wide in the shoulders. The only part of him that matched her imaginings was his pallor, and even that was not the evil midnight thing she had expected. She shook his hand in confusion, this beautifully groomed, sleek, white-handed gentleman. His s
mile was friendly, his eyes gentle, his manners impeccable. When he moved around bringing her a cup of coffee or pulling up a chair so that they could talk more comfortably, he moved with easy grace, and when he bent over to listen to something she was saying she smelled the bay rum on his pocket handkerchief.
He was, like Bo Mason, fascinating in a way no man in her life had ever been fascinating before. He had travelled around even more than Bo, even to Cuba and South America. He said he had been working with Bo for three years now, and when she said she hadn’t seen him around town his eyes smiled. His work, he explained, kept him up all night sometimes. He was generally asleep in the daytime.
So there he was, her amazed mind said. A card sharp, another, like Bo, from the class of people all the good people of Indian Falls would consider outside the pale. Yet he was handsome, almost as imposing physically as Bo, though more willowy and fragile-looking in spite of his wide shoulders. His hands were immense, flat, slabby, with wide palms and long fingers, the nails trimmed round. She could imagine how deftly he could handle cards. A gambler, a sharper, yet more gentlemanly, deferential, polite, than anybody she had ever met. She spilled coffee on her dress at the thought of herself sitting next to this dangerous man and talking as if she had known him forever. Instantly the bay rum scented handkerchief was out, his languid ease galvanized into careful helpfulness. If she had spilled anything at home, among the men she knew, they would have stared at her with their hands on their knees and done nothing. Jud Chain could make any woman think she was both fragile and charming.
A few days later she met Eva Alsop, and that was another sort of experience. Small, doll-like, blonde, she looked the part of the Bad Woman. Her laugh was too loud, and when she was serious her mouth had a weary and petulant droop. Once in a while she placed her hand on her side, and if anyone caught her doing it she looked up with a wan, brave smile.
To her Jud Chain was as deferential as he was to Elsa, but even Elsa’s inexperience detected a difference, a certain familiarity, a subtle knowingness in the way Eva looked at him, and when Jud rose to go that afternoon, saying he had business to attend to, Elsa saw the wizened petulance on Eva’s mouth—a very red mouth, redder than she had ever seen a mouth before. Jud bent elegantly over her, said something the others could not hear, but Eva’s eyes, as she watched him take his hat and leave, were cold.
Helm talked about her afterward. Eva Milksop, she called her. “She’s a little snivelling cheap slut,” Helm said. “Common as manure, making out she’s the grandest lady you ever seen. Paints her face and bleaches her hair and dolls herself up like Mrs. Astor’s plush horse. She makes my belly ache, her and her pains.”
“Well, maybe she is sick,” Elsa said.
“How would you act if you had a pain?” Helm said. “Would you go around whining and holding your belly and making ever‘body feel like a sonofabitch if he didn’t run right out for the hot water bottle?”
“I guess ...”
“You damn betcha you wouldn’t. You’d try to grin if you had the God-awfulest belly ache in the world. You’re two different kinds of people, honey. Don’t go wasting sympathy on that canary-legged little slut.”
“There must be some good in her,” Elsa said. “Anybody’s got some good in him.”
“There’s about as much good in her as there is in my backside,” Helm said. “And that’s mainly lard. You see her shrivel up and get mean when Jud had to go?”
“Yes. I wondered.”
“I wouldn’t bother even to wonder, honey,” Helm said. “She ain’t worth it.”
“Is she in love with him?”
Stacking the coffee cups, Helen made a prissy face. “If she ever decides to hook up with Jud she’ll decide it when Jud makes a killing. She ain’t going into no nest without a lot of feathers in it.”
“Well,” Elsa said. “Live and learn. I never knew there were so many kinds of people.”
Helm stood with her legs planted, as if she were going to give a lecture. She was. “If you’re the right kind yourself, you’ll find the right kind,” she said. “There’s not many people’ll do anything for you but kick you when you’re down. I aim to save my kicks for the butter-butts and give anybody that’s down a hand instead of a foot.”
“Maybe Eva’s down.”
“She’s one of the butter-butts,” Helm said. “I like the kind of people that don’t play they’re something they ain’t. I’m a sucker, honey. Don’t try to learn anything from me. A fella that’s down on his luck, or some simple guy that the world is kicking around, or somebody that’s straight-out what he is so I don’t have to keep jumping around to know what I’m dealing with, those are my kind of folks. Every hobo that ever hit this town was on my back step in half an hour.” She snorted, folding freshly ironed clothes into a basket. “Jus’ a softy!” she said.
She looked up under her eyebrows, still stooping. “You lonesome for home, honey?”
“Sometimes,” Elsa said. “I miss the kids. They were a pest when I had to take care of them, but I miss them just the same. I miss Pa too, I guess, only he’s married again, and everything.”
“Married a girl a lot younger, didn’t he?”
“My best friend,” Elsa said. She couldn’t even yet mention that without being angry and hurt.
“Yeah,” Helm said. “It’s funny. When you’re a kid something like that can smell like a carcass, and after you get older it don’t seem so bad. You liked your ma a lot, didn’t you?”
“I took care of her a long time,” Elsa said. “That was what made me so mad. I don’t think he ever went to her grave, even. I went just before I left and it was all overgrown with weeds, right when he was going around with Sarah.”
Helm sighed wheezily, stuck a thumb down inside the chafing edge of her corset and wriggled a fold of skin into place. “You’re all right, honey,” she said. “You stick by the things you love. Nobody can hurt you if you stick with what you know is right. They can’t hurt what’s inside you.”
4
“That Bo Mason gets away with murder,” Elsa said. “Why don’t people tell him where to head in at?”
“Oh, that’s just Bo,” Karl said. “If it was anybody else you’d knock his head off.”
“That doesn’t excuse him,” she said. “He was just plain mean to Eva.”
“I guess Eva sort of has it coming,” he said, and steered his way up the stairs to bed.
Elsa tidied up the downstairs, thinking of the way Bo had acted. The way he’d said to Eva, “For God’s sake come down off your high horse and quit acting like the Duchess of Dakota. Can’t you walk without looking like Dan Patch in hobbles?” The way he caught up everything anyone said all evening and turned it back, with a sting in it. The way he had sat, while Helm and Eva and Karl and Jud were playing whist, and bullied her for an hour and a half because she didn’t even know how to play casino. How would she know how to play casino, when her father had never even allowed a deck of cards in the house?
She had seen him that way once before, over at Helm‘s, and she suspected that he was mad about the way his bowling alley was doing. Sometimes he seemed restless and dissatisfied. When he got to thinking about that too long, she supposed, it brought on one of these black and contrary moods. Or maybe it might have been only something someone had said, something he took it into his head to be mad about. He was as vain as a boastful little boy. But that didn’t excuse his going through a whole evening the way he had, smiling as if he had a knife ready to stab somebody, jumping from bald insults to compliments as suave as butter that were more insulting than the insults.
He was a hard man to understand, she thought as she went upstairs with the lamp. You never knew how you’d find him. But why should she worry herself about the way he acted? Let him go on being moody and sardonic and insulting.
Yet she found herself, later, asking people about him—Karl, Helm, even Jud Chain. How could a man be so many contrary things at once? How, for instance, could anyone have grown
up and never even been inside a church? He said he hadn’t. Yet in a good mood he could be so very pleasant and thoughtful. There was a kind of warmth that radiated from him when he wanted to let it. And how had he come to be so good at everything he did? He was the best ball player in town. Helm assured her that he was also the best shot, the best bowler, the best pool player, and one of the two best skaters.
“But where did he come from?” Elsa asked. “What’s he doing out here?”
“He’s from Illinois,” Helm said. “Rock River. His old man wasn’t much good, I guess. Just let his family run loose. I’ve heard him talk about it once or twice, just odds and ends of things.”
That was all Elsa got, odds and ends, scraps that could be pieced together into a skeleton biography. She did not admit to herself, did not even think about, the unusual eagerness she had to reconstruct that biography. She did not say to herself that he was the most masterful, dominating, contradictory, and unusual man she had ever met, but she picked up everything she heard, nevertheless, and she pumped Bo himself when he came over in the evening to sit on the steps and talk.
When Fred Mason came home to Illinois from the war in 1865 he had left an arm somewhere in a field hospital near Vicksburg, and most of his disposition in the Andersonville prison. In the ten years after his arrival he successively married a Pennsylvania Dutch girl of broad dimensions, begot seven children, and became the nucleus and chief yarn-spinner of the livery stable crowd.
For money he depended on his pension and a few scattered odd jobs. Working for anyone else tired him; orders were more than his irascible individualism would stand. “Nobody in my family ever took orders from anybody,” he used to say. “My pap come into this state when she was nothin’ but oak and Indians, and he never took no orders from any man. Neither did his pap, or his pap’s pap. I’m the on‘y one ever did, and I on’y did in the army. And I don’t take no more.”
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 3
