“Please. Not now.”
“Don’t forget you’ve got to be a sport. No welching.”
“I won’t welch,” she said. Whatever happened she wouldn’t welch now. That was the thing he disliked Eva so for. She wasn’t a sport.
His low laugh stirred in her hair. “Ninety-seven more,” he said.
The rest of the way to the buggy she was silent, wondering how she could ever do it. Ninety-seven kisses, not in fun, not the kisses of a boy in a game, but the kisses of a man seven or eight or nine years older than she was, who had been all over and maybe had a past. And a saloon-keeper, a lawbreaker, really.
Briefly, as Jud’s flaring match lighted a carriage lamp and the buggy emerged in the dim glow, she was reminded of the one admirer she had ever had, middle-aged mousy old Henry Mossman, who ran the hardware store in Indian Falls and who last spring had proposed to her at a picnic. He had sandy mustaches like a haycock, and he seemed always to smell of shoe-blacking, and he was meek, apologetic, at once gentle and ridiculous. He had proposed to her in the buggy as they drove home through the firefly-streaked darkness. The situation now was close enough to that other that she had a moment of dizziness, almost as if she were dreaming, as if she had been carried in a circle and washed up in a place and time where she had been before. But there weren‘t, she reminded herself, any fireflies here. And there was nothing meek or apologetic about Bo Mason. Imagine Henry Mossman working it so you had to kiss him a hundred times!
“What’re you laughing at?” Bo said.
“I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“Nothing you’d care about.”
“I care about anything you care about.”
“Well, you wouldn’t care about this.”
Jud came around and lighted the other lamp. Bo brought in the horses and hitched up. “Want me to drive?” Jud said.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
The wheels crackled through leaves and twigs as they turned into the road, leaving the calliope still wheezing and the little colored horses of the merry-go-round still rising and falling in the torchlight glare of the shore. Then hard road, the beat of trotting hoofs, the yellow blur of the carriage lamps coasting alongside, the flow of cold air around the unequal silhouettes of Jud and Eva, and the snugness as Bo tucked the buffalo robe around her feet. His arm went around her shoulders and she did not move.
She saw the shadow of Jud put an arm around the shadow of Eva, and heard the murmur of low words. Eva must be over her peeve. That was good. It would be a shame to ride all that way home mad. It would be ...
Bo leaned close and kissed her, holding it a long time. She heard Eva’s clothes rustle as she turned in the front seat to look back, but she did not even have the impulse to free herself. Instead she leaned back further in the seat and smiled into the misty sky. “Two,” she said, so softly that the front seat couldn’t hear.
A long time later, when her hands were cold and her feet chilled and her lips bruised with Bo’s kisses, the buggy stopped and she saw the gable of Karl’s house. She had given up her attempt to keep count and hold him to the letter of her bargain. He might have kissed her a hundred or five hundred times.
No one made a move. Eva, muffled against Jud, squealed once in a stage whisper. Murmured words and a giggle came back, then a breathless, hushed squeak. Bo kissed her again, and when he let her go she saw his teeth in the misty dark.
“Don‘t!” Eva said from the front seat, and her shadow squirmed as if trying to get away.
“Why not?” Jud said, quite loud.
“Because you tickle.”
“Isn’t anybody getting off here?” Jud said.
“I hate to,” said Elsa, and did not move. She looked at Bo, tried to make out his eyes. She pecked him with a swift kiss, pressed him back when he started to rise and help her out. “I’ll just hop out and run,” she said, whispering close into his ear. “It was a beautiful day.” She pressed his hands, gathered her skirts, and jumped from the tire to the ground, half falling. When she popped up again she was right beside Jud, and caught his sudden movement. Eva huddled in her coat. She said goodnight to them and ran indoors.
There was much to think about in bed, many excitements, the memory of Bo’s kisses, the eagerness and frankness of his admiration when he stopped laughing beside the automobile and said, “God, your eyes are blue!” He must like her, he must like her a lot. He wasn’t the sort of person to pretend anything, and everything that had happened all day had said as plainly as it could be said that he was in love with her. That was a delicious thing to sleep with, a thought that could be hugged. But there was the other thought, the troublesome one, and the complete clarity with which she had seen what she had seen gave her a minute of sacred solemnity. Where was she going, and what kind of people was she going with? Because there wasn’t any doubt: when she straightened up suddenly beside Jud after jumping from the buggy he had just been pulling his hand out from under Eva’s dress.
6
“It isn’t any of my business,” Karl said. “I just got this letter from Nels. Or maybe it is my business. I don’t know. I just thought I’d come and talk to you.”
“What’s the matter, is he scared I’ll abduct his daughter?” Bo said.
“I don’t know that he’s scared of anything special. He just wants to know who you are and what you intend to do. He’s pretty pious. I suppose he just wants to make sure of you.”
“How’d he ever hear about me in the first place?”
“Probably she wrote home,” Karl said. A man going out of the poolhall slapped Karl on the back, and he turned around and grinned and nodded. “In a way I’m responsible for her,” he said to Bo. “Just how serious is this, anyway?”
He watched Bo take out his knife and begin carefully paring his nails. The heavy-lidded eyes were somber and the dark face expressionless. Then he looked straight up at Karl. “Why, if you come down to that,” he said, “I guess it’s pretty serious.”
“You mean you’re going to marry her?”
“I haven’t asked her,” Bo said.
“But you’re going to.”
“I guess maybe I am,” Bo said, “if I ever get up the nerve.”
“I can imagine how scared you are,” Karl said. “She thinks you’re a little tin god on wheels.”
Bo lifted his eyes again, and Karl felt the glance like something heavy, like a pressure. “You sound as if she was making a mistake to think that,” Bo said. “If she does.”
Karl waved his hands helplessly. He didn’t want to get into this. Nels ought to have written to Elsa, or to Bo himself, if he wanted to know so much. He put a man in a bad position. “She’s an awful nice kid,” he said.
“I never denied that.”
“But she’s just a kid,” Karl said. “That’s the only thing that bothers me. She’s never been anywhere before, she don’t know much. She’s just a nice good-looking kid that some careless guy could take advantage of pretty easy.”
“Thanks,” Bo said, eyeing him. “Thanks very much.”
“I never said you were taking advantage of her,” Karl said. “I just said she didn’t have any experience, she’s got no way of judging people because all the people she ever saw were Norske farmers with their feet in a furrow.”
“Just what is it you’ve got against me as her husband?” Bo said.
“I didn’t say I had anything against you!” Karl said. His voice rose complainingly. “Herregud, I’ve been your friend for six years, haven’t I? Only she isn’t nineteen yet. She shouldn’t be rushed.”
“I haven’t been rushing her,” Bo said. “I’ve been making myself stay away from her for a week.” His eyes were still cold, uncomfortably steady on Karl’s face. “Spill it,” he said.
“Oh hell,” Karl said. He jingled the change in his pocket and looked toward the door. A wind blew scraps of paper and gray dust past the windows. “How am I going to tell Nels what you do, for one thing?” he said. “
I can’t just write and say, ‘Bo’s a good guy that runs a blind pig here in town.’ Nels won’t like it.” He shook his head. “He might even try to stop it,” he said.
“How would he stop it?”
“He might make her come home.”
“I bet you any amount of money,” Bo said, “that she wouldn’t go. She ran away from him once, didn’t she? He’s got a hell of a lot of business trying to run her now.”
“Do you want to take her in to live in a room in that hotel?” Karl said. “Can you see her as the wife of a guy that runs a pig? She’s just the wrong kind for you, Bo. She’s cut out to have a nice house and a bunch of kids and make somebody a good wife. Your kind of life would break her heart in a year.”
“Suppose I told you I’m selling the joint.”
“You are?”
“I might.”
“Then what would you do?”
“I’ve been looking over a hotel in Grand Forks,” Bo said. “If that’s any of your business.”
Karl wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t want you to get sore at me,” he said. “If I was doing the marrying I’d just as soon marry you. But I don’t know that Elsa should, by God if I do. You’re a rambler. You might both wish you hadn’t.”
Bo had finished paring his nails. He shut the knife with a snick and put it in his pocket. “You’re an old busybody,” he said. “Why don’t you go back and tend to your store?”
Karl shrugged and pushed himself away from the bar. “Give me a beer first.”
While Bo got out a bottle and glass Karl watched him. He was a nice guy. He was a hell of a nice guy. But what kind of a life would it be for that innocent of an Elsa, tagging him around from one thing to another? Bo wasn’t a sticker. He chased rainbows too much. “You really gone on her?” he said. “You going to become a reformed character and settle down and be an alderman?”
Bo scraped the foam from Karl’s glass with an ivory stick and dropped the bottle in a box under the bar. A man across the room was pulling the handle of the slot machine. “I told him,” somebody back by the pool tables said loudly, “that I’d cut it for fodder before I’d pay any such cut to a thrashing crew ...”
“Look,” Bo said. “How many times do I have to tell you? I want to marry her. I’m not pretending to be something I’m not, but I’m not saying I’m going on here sitting on my tail in this little joint, either. If she wants to marry me on those terms, whose business is it but hers and mine? Write her old man and tell him anything you please. I’ll write him myself if you want. I’m not trying to pull any fast ones. Sure she’s a nice girl. She’s so nice I can’t believe it, considering the way she was brought up. She’s a peach. She deserves a lot, I know it. I want to try to give it to her.”
“Yeah,” Karl said. “Well, nobody could ask for more than that. I wasn’t trying to break it up, you understand. It was just that I got this letter ...”
He stopped. Bo was looking past him toward the man by the slot machine against the far wall. Moving swiftly, he raised the board and stepped out from behind the bar. He was almost at the man’s shoulder before the other heard him, and turned. He was a tall, loosely-built man, a bum or an itinerant laborer with a ragged elbow in his coat. He turned and squawked almost in the same instant, and then Bo collared him.
Elsa looked up from the letter with puckered brows, looked unhappily out the window. It was a gray, unpleasant day, and the wind blew, rattling the window frame. The tight-lipped, strained face of her mother looked at her from the German silver frame of the daguerreotype. She felt miserable and discontented, and she hadn’t seen Bo for days. Hardanger, her uncle’s house, the people she knew here, were a foreign land and a foreign people. She had cut herself off from home, and now there was no real home here.
Her eyes went back to the letter. Sarah, Kristin wrote, was pretty hard to get along with sometimes. She was funny. One minute she’d be apologetic, and let Erling run all over her, and act as if she were a stray that had been let in, and the next she’d be snappish, trying to run the whole place. And she agreed with Pa that something should be done about Elsa, before she flew off the handle and married some good for nothing. Who was Bo Mason, anyway? Pa seemed to be worried about him. Was he nice? Where had she met him?
Elsa stood up. Let him think what he pleased. He would think the worst, because that was the way he was, but that didn’t bother her. She knew Bo a lot better than he did, and if she chose to marry him—and were asked—she would. And what right had Sarah to talk! Marrying a man twice as old as she was, and then presuming to dictate the marriages of other people!
Angrily the girl threw on her coat and went outside. Until five in the afternoon she walked as fast as her legs would carry her, out through flattened weedy fields, across strips of summer fallow, over the corner of the dump-ground among wheels of old buggies, pieces of scrap iron, papers, tin cans rusted and plugged with bullet holes from the target-shooting of boys, the bones of a cow gnawed by dogs or coyotes. The slough confronted her, a saucer of stagnant water rimmed with tules, with mudhens floating close to shore and a wary flock of canvasbacks swimming out in the open water. She walked clear around it, feeling through her coat the coming of deep fall; the going away of warmth from the earth was like some loss of warmth and energy in herself.
And Kristin, wanting to get away from home too, asking if there wasn’t someone in Hardanger who needed a girl—Kristin who couldn’t bake, couldn’t clean house without leaving the corners full of dust puppies and the wallpaper smeared where her broom had brushed down cobwebs. Indian Falls, the place she had called home and still unconsciously thought of as home, must be as bad as she had thought it when she left, if Kris wanted to leave too. But the sister she wanted to come to was lonesome in a strange and barren town.
Her feet kicked in flat brown reeds, sank in muck, squashed through wet hummocks of meadow, found dry ground again. How long would she go on living in someone else’s house, eating someone else’s bread, with never anything to call her own except the clothes she wore and the thoughts she thought? It would be nice, she thought irrationally, to take piano lessons. But there wasn’t a piano in any house open to her. There wasn’t anything she could do, no way she could use her time to improve herself, except by reading, and even finding books was difficult.
She kicked a pebble down the ruts worn by the dump wagons. What’s the matter with you? she said, and impatience put length in her strides again. Mooning around like a calf, wishing you were somewhere else, or somebody else, and wanting things you can’t have.
But I know what I want, she said. I want a place of my own where I can sit down and everything there is mine and everything I do means something.
And you want Bo in it, she said.
Well what if I do? she answered.
Her feet found plank sidewalk under them. She was on the prairie end of Main Street. At the confectionery she hesitated. An ice cream soda might be nice. But the wind whipping around the corner changed her mind. A cup of coffee at home would be better. She hurried faster. The fogged sun had gone completely, and the wind had a bite.
It was too bad, she thought as she neared the bowling alley, that Bo didn’t run a place women could go to. She would have liked to drop in sometimes. She would like to right now, and see why he hadn’t been over. But then he would think she was chasing him. With her head down against the wind she went past his door.
She was a half dozen steps past when she heard the uproar inside, and Bo’s voice, saying, “All right. I’ll just fix you so you won’t be tempted again.”
She shrank back into her uncle’s doorway just as the swinging doors of the poolhall burst open and Bo, holding a man by the front of his coat, pushed him through and backed him to the edge of the sidewalk. Though the stranger was almost as big as Bo, he looked beaten. There was a ragged hole in the elbow of his coat. The crowd that had poured out after them stood in a cluster on the sidewalk. Elsa saw Karl, still in his store apron and his black sateen cuff
protectors. “Now,” Bo said, “how many times did you slug that machine?”
The man’s quick eyes shifted from Bo to the crowd and back. He wet his lips. “I’ll make it good, mister,” he said. His hand fumbled in his pocket.
“How many times?”
“Just once.” The tramp’s hands quit fumbling, came up to lie lightly on Bo’s wrist. “That guy was right close. He c’n tell you. I only did it once. I was hongry and needed a cup-a coffee.”
“Why didn’t you ask for a cup of coffee?”
“I didn’t think you’d hand it out, mister. Honest to God, I’ll make it good.”
He almost babbled, his eyes on Bo’s heavy dark face. It was so changed a face from his usual one that Elsa felt her stomach draw in. Bo kept his left hand rigid in the man’s coat, teetering him on the eighteen-inch drop-off into the street. “Well, turn about’s fair play. That’s right, isn’t it? Even-Stephen,” Bo said softly. “That’s all I’m going to slug you, see? Only once.”
The crowd snickered, then someone grunted, a startled sound, as Bo’s right fist smashed up. The tramp toppled backward into the street and lay where he fell, with a smear of blood on his mouth and his hat ten feet away from him in the dust.
Bo swung to go back inside, pushing through the men whose eyes still fed on the man lying in the street. Then he saw Elsa, flattened against her uncle’s door. His expression changed, the hard, tough look left his face, and he took two steps toward her, but before he could come any further she turned and ran.
She did not look back, but she heard the windy whoosh! of the swinging doors as someone went through then, and the voice of someone in the crowd. “Jee-suss!” the voice said. “I’ll just slug you once, he says, and then he socks him. Turn about’s fair play, he says ...”
Elsa, hurrying home with her stomach sick and her mind hot with outrage, saw nothing. Her mind was too full of the image of the fear-stricken face of the tramp and the abrupt stillness of his body in the street and the smear of blood on his mouth. He had been hit when he was begging for mercy, when he was making no attempt to resist, when he was offering to make good whatever it was he had done. Any man with a bit of pity in him would have let him go.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 8
