The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  Frank backed away further. “You been over to the hospital?” he said. His voice was a squawk. “What the hell do you come around me for?”

  “You don’t want to do business, uh?”

  “All right, take it,” Frank said. “Take your nine cases and get out of here.”

  “Now you’re talking sense,” Bo said. He held out the bag, but Frank put his hands behind him. “Put it on the table,” he said. He stood back while Bo carried the sacks outside. “I’m not sticking my nose in the car you’re driving, even,” he said.

  Bo worked swiftly in the late gray light. The seat took three flat cases neatly, and three more on top of those brought the load level with the sides. The keg, heavy and clumsy, he wrestled into the footspace in front of the back seat, and one of the three remaining cases he wedged beside the keg, padding it with a blanket. The last two he put in front, one in the seat and one on the floor. Then he covered the whole load with blankets and threw the gasoline can on top.

  Frank was still standing back. “You count out the money,” he said. “I’m not touching it till the wife bakes it in the oven.”

  “Okay,” Bo said. “Strike a light.”

  Selby lighted a candle, and very carefully and contemptuously Bo counted out the stacks of dollars and the roll of bills. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” Selby said. “Dump ‘em back in the bag.”

  The last thing Bo saw, as he backed out of the alley, Frank was carrying the sack before him as if it might explode. He would probably bake the glove he had touched the bag with, too. Bo laughed. As he bumped across the intersection of alley and street he whistled. The springs hit bottom on the slightest jar. No batting over burnouts on the way back. That was another reason for not starting back now. He’d need daylight to find the road and keep on it.

  He slept that night at the livery stable, where he found two men taking care of a whole barnful of stock belonging to people in the hospital. They didn’t want him at first. He loosened them up by going back to the car and breaking out a bottle of bourbon. After that they let him drive into the grain shed and make himself a bed of hay beside the car. When he lay down in his clothes, the fur coat wrapped around him under the blankets, he heard their voices loud through the partition, heard the stamp and blow of horses and the knocking of a cow’s horns against the stanchions. The hay he had piled on the floor rustled under his weight, and sometime during the night he heard a dog sniffing under the shed door. The thought of food for tomorrow crossed his mind, but he let it drift. There was some bread left, and a wing of chicken, and if he got an early start he’d be back in Whitemud by early afternoon. Everything was jake. The bottle to the stablemen was a good investment. Keep them from getting too curious.

  It was barely daylight when he woke. There was a yellow-spoked wheel directly in front of his eyes, and he lay wondering for a minute. His shoulders and hips were stiff and his feet cold. The wheel revolved a little, stopped, went around a little the other way, and he blinked his eyes clear and saw the car, the crack of light under the shed door.

  He stood up, stamped his feet, swung his arms. A look into the Ford showed him the load untouched. In the other room he heard the stablemen snoring. Driven by ravenous hunger, he went through the partition door and into the stable. There were a half dozen milk pails on a bench. Four cows, in improvised stanchions, swung their heads to look at him. He hunted up a stool, tipped straw out of a pail, and sat down to the nearest one. The quart of milk he drew down was foamy and warm and slightly sickening, and it spilled on his coat as he tipped the pail to drink, but it laid the devil in his stomach. He drank it all, resting between gulps.

  The stablemen were still asleep when he went through to the shed. There was the question of warm water for the Ford. He turned the radiator petcock and went out in back with a pail. The pump was there, a wide smooth icicle hanging like a white tongue from its mouth. The pump complained stiffly, but finally brought up water, and with the bucket in his hand he went in and started a fire in the sheetiron stove. When he came in with a second pail one of the stablemen was sitting up. His face was contracted and his eyes bloodshot. He looked incuriously at Bo for a few minutes and lay down again with his face to the wall. The other one snored on. They were still in their bunks when Bo poured the hot water into the rust-smelling gullet of the Ford and bent to crank.

  At eight o‘clock he was headed out of town, following his own solitary tracks of yesterday. There was not a soul anywhere about except for a woman who pulled back her front curtains to look as he went by.

  It was not as clear as it had been the day before. The sun, straight ahead of him for the first two miles, before the north road switched off, was pale behind a thin screen of mist. Occasional snake-trails of snow moved in the road, wriggled a few yards, and died. Inside the side-curtains it did not seem cold.

  As he drove, Bo was juggling figures. Sometimes, having difficulty keeping them straight in his head, he took his hands off the wheel and drew them in the palm of his mitt. The case to Doc O‘Malley would bring him sixty-five; the keg, at three dollars a quart, would be another two hundred and forty. That was his original investment, right there. The whole eight cases of bourbon were gravy. At four dollars a bottle—and there were ninety-six bottles, or ninety-five since he’d given one to the stablemen—and four times ninety-five was.... He figured on his mitt, one eye on the road. Three hundred and eighty, all clear profit. Not so bad, he said to the Ford, not so bad. He remembered the time only a couple of weeks ago when he had nearly lost his mind because his ducks had spoiled. That all seemed very childish and primitive, something out of the backwoods. One good break, and he was past all that scrabbling for a living.

  He ate the fragments left in the lunch box and threw the box out the window. There were no tracks on the straight road except his own. The sun, on his right now, was barely visible through the mist. He took a firmer grip on the wheel and pulled the gas lever down a notch. It might snow, and he needed those tracks. Ahead of him the erratic wind lifted a trail of dry snow across the road.

  His feet, unprotected now by a folded blanket, felt the cold first. When he stamped them he realized that they had been getting colder all the time. In one way cold was good. There wouldn’t be much snow if the temperature dropped. But the road ahead was now crawling with lifting ropes of drift. He swore. Wind was just as bad, worse. It would cover his tracks in an hour if it blew. The sky was grayer now, too, the whole world darkening over the white waste. He dropped the gas lever another. notch.

  Where the road turned off to Cree he stopped, hesitating between choices. He ought to stop somewhere and get warm, have a cup of coffee, before tackling the last fifty miles. But there might be no one left at Cree. His own place would be like an icehouse, and the kerosene stove wouldn’t do more than warm his hands. The only place he was sure of was Ole‘s, and Ole wouldn’t be tickled to death to see him. He jammed his foot hard on the low pedal. Ole would see him anyway..

  Rather than risk losing his way he followed his own tracks, going carefully across the roadless, flat and stopping in Ole’s yard. The wind blew smoke down to the ground, making him turn his head. The barometer must be clear to the bottom, if smoke wouldn’t rise.

  Ole didn’t answer his first knock, and he put his shoulder against the door. Locked. He pounded again, listened. “Coom in,” the Swede‘s,voice said.

  “The door’s locked!” Bo yelled.

  He waited, leaning his weight impatiently against the homemade door. In a minute the latch clicked and Ole, still in his orange-banded sweater, backed away to let him come in. The minute he looked at the Swede’s face a slow, climbing rage tightened in Bo’s stomach and chest. Ole’s face was drawn and sick, his eyes glittering like blue ice, his mouth chapped and stained in the corners.

  “What’s the matter?” Bo said sharply. “You sick?”

  “Ay don’t feel gude,” Ole said. “Ay ant felt gude for couple days.”

  “Well for Christ sake why didn
’t you come into Chinook with me yesterday?”

  Ole didn’t answer, and Bo stood with his hands spread over the stove, watching the drawn face. He was sick all right. He was sick as a horse. His hands shook, and when he stooped to sit down in the bunk he had to reach back and ease himself down. So now, Bo said, I suppose I’ve got this big ox on my hands with the Ford already so loaded she hits bottom on every bump!

  “You were a damn fool to stay out here alone in the first place,” he said.

  Ole shook with a heavy chill, grabbed his hands together and held them to still their trembling, but said nothing.

  “Got any coffee?”

  Ole’s eyes lifted to the stove. Bo took the top off the pot, saw that there was a good pint of black liquid inside, and shoved it onto the hot part of the stove. While he waited for it to boil he went out and got a bottle of bourbon. “Where’s your corkscrew?” he said.

  “Ay an’t got vun.”

  “Oh for ... !” Angrily Bo pawed through the half dozen knives and forks and spoons on the cupboard shelf. Nothing, not even a paring knife. He tipped the bottle neck down and gave the bottom a stiff, flat-palmed smack, hitting it so hard that pain jolted up his wrist. You had to hit it just right to jar the cork loose, and it was a damn fool stunt anyway. He had seen a man cut his hand half off trying it. But if this big dumb Ole didn’t have a corkscrew there was nothing else to do. He jolted the bottle again, savagely. On the fifth try he caught it right. The cork started a quarter of an inch, and he got the blade of his knife under it and lifted carefully till it came out.

  He poured a tin cup a third full and handed it to Ole. “This is supposed to be medicine,” he said. “See what it does for you.”

  He had a swig himself out of the bottle, corked it and stuck it in the pocket of his coat. The coffee pot was steaming, rocking a little on the stove.

  “Got a cup or anything you haven’t used lately?” Bo said. Ole’s mouth opened helplessly, he wrinkled his forehead, looking at the cupboard.

  “Well, what the hell,” Bo said. He found a saucepan and poured coffee into it for himself, filled the Swede’s cup. “Drink that damn quick,” he said. “We got to get out of here.”

  His own coffee was black and bitter, with grounds floating in it, but he drank it in gulps, scalding hot. In ten minutes he had the bundled Swede outside with a quilt around him. The two cases of whiskey in the front seat had to be shifted to the back. That was bad, because they were loose and might bounce and break, but there was nothing else he could do. He boosted Ole inside and tucked the quilt in, went inside to snatch two blankets off the bunk, dumped the coffee pot into the fire and kicked the draft shut, and closed the door.

  There was a definite wind now, a creeping, close-to-the-ground wind that he could feel as a steady pressure from the northwest. The drifting didn’t seem to be much worse. The snow was packed, and only the top dust blew. But it was cold. It was cold as all billy hell. And if it hadn’t been for this jinx Swede he’d be almost to Gadke’s by now. As he climbed in he looked with distaste at Ole’s muffled face. A guy that big ought to be all man.

  Ole was definitely a jinx. At the first coulee head, still within sight of his shack, they had to run through a shallow swale drifted a foot deep on one side. Bo took it charging, but something under the snow, burnout or badger hole, rocked them with a solid, bouncing shock, and the Ford hit bottom and died in the drift. The inside filled with the smell of whiskey.

  “God damn!” Bo said. He yanked the sidecurtain loose, ripping one of the eyelets, and swarmed over the side. God knew how many bottles were busted. There wasn’t even time to look now. That wind was too dangerous. Hard pebbles stung his face, and he looked up to see that they were not drift, but snow.

  Shovelling like a dynamo, he cleared the wheels and threw the shovel inside. “Can you drive?” he said to Ole.

  Ole shook his head. “You’re going to anyway,” Bo said. “Shove over here.” He showed Ole how to let the brake off and push down on the low pedal, feeding gas at the same time. “When I say go, let her have it,” he said.

  He braced himself against the body, said “Go!” and heaved forward. The Swede jammed on the pedal, forgot to feed gas, and killed the engine.

  “Gas!” Bo yelled. “Give it the gas!”

  Ole dropped his hands from the wheel and leaned away. His face was pitiful, as if he were going to cry. Bo took a deep breath and swallowed his rage, cranked, braced himself again. “Now take it easy,” he said. “When I say go, let her in slow and give her plenty of gas.”

  This time the Swede gave her too much, and went roaring and spinning up the coulee side, out of control, scared to death and with his foot frozen to the gear pedal, so that Bo, encumbered with his heavy coat, had to sprint alongside and jump on the running board to yank on the hand brake. He was breathing hard when he climbed in, and his mind was red hot. The air inside the curtains was so thick with spilled whiskey it was almost intoxicating.

  By the time they reached Gadke’s the tracks were drifted half full, only the top edges clear, and the gray sky was spitting snow as hard as hail against the windshield. The wind increased steadily, pushing against the bellied sidecurtains, pouring in the V-shaped hole where Bo had torn the eyelet. And it was getting colder. He could feel it getting colder by the quarter-hour, feel it in his bones and in his mind. This was going to be a regular old he-blizzard, and he was still forty miles from home. At the horse pasture gate he stopped long enough to fit the radiator blanket on, thanking his stars he had had sense enough to make it.

  There was no worrying about the trail now. The best he could do was to follow his yesterday’s tracks, hoping to God they held out. His jaw clenched on him automatically as he drove, and at intervals he sat back and loosened it. Then the tense concentration of trying to see ahead through the drift and the murky white darkness crept into his muscles again, until he came to and forcibly relaxed once more. Ole sat beside him, humped in the quilt.

  They passed through the horse pasture faster than Bo had been able to go coming out. The not-quite-covered tracks did that for them, at least. But at the far gate of the pasture Bo stood outside the Ford, his eyes slitted against the drift, and wondered whether to stay with the tracks, off the road, or try to pick up the trail. He hadn’t been far off that time. If he started straight out from the gate he ought to hit his tracks again within a half mile. It was taking chances, but there wasn’t much time. The wind by now was a positive force, a thing you fought against. Drift and falling snow were indistinguishable, the air was thick with stinging pebbles, the visibility hardly fifty feet. It was so cold that his eyes stung and watered, his nose leaked. When he wiped it with the back of his mitt he felt the slick ice on the leather.

  He piled in beside the Swede. “How do you feel?” he said. “Okay?”

  Ole nodded, and they started again. Bo was driving partly by sight, partly by feel now. The wind was from the northwest. He wanted to go almost exactly northeast. If he kept the wind square against the left sidecurtains, kept them stiff and strained as a sail, he couldn’t go far wrong. The minute they flapped or slackened he was circling. Either that or the wind was shifting. But you didn’t think about that.

  Ahead of him was a whirling blur of light, the whole world driving, moving, blowing under his wheels. It was like driving on fast water, except when bumps or holes or burnouts bounced them clear down to the axle. Bo squinted, peering, his stiff hands clenched on the wheel. There were almost-effaced tracks ahead. He’d hit it, right on the nose. But the tracks turned off left, and the slack in the sidecurtains when he started to follow them stopped him. He had almost followed his own tracks the wrong way. That would have been a nice one. He backed and started in the other direction.

  He knew he was off the road. The feel of the tires told him that. But as long as he kept the wind there, he’d eventually run into the graded road paralleling the south bench. He’d get her in, by the gods, if he had to drive the last twenty miles by ear. />
  The tires hit the road again. He could feel it, smooth and hard and sunken, though his eyes showed him no difference. Within five minutes the ruts were gone. He swung into the wind, feeling for them like a blind man, his body tense, one with the body of the car. And in the moment when he turned, feeling, the wind burst furiously against the sidecurtain and tore it loose, and he was blinded and muffled in cloth and icy isinglass.

  Cursing, he stepped on the pedals and fought the frantic flapping thing out of his face. The eyelets were all ripped now, and there was no fastening it down. Wind and snow drove into the hole, hammering his eyes shut, peppering his face. His fury ripped out of him in shouted swearing as he twisted, trying to fasten the curtain somehow. The Swede was a hindrance to his movements, and he shoved him over in the seat with one fierce hunch of the shoulder. Eventually he had to grope in the back seat and find one of Ole’s blankets, poke it up over the metal bar along the top, pull it down through, and sit on both ends. It wasn’t as good as the curtain, and it made the car almost as dark as night, but it kept that paralyzing wind out of his face while he drove.

  The thing became a nightmare. He sat within the dark cabin of the car, his numb feet ready to jump on the pedals, his mitt slipping up and down the smooth wheel to feed or retard gas, his eyes glued on the flowing, dirty-gray-white world ahead. In an hour he was on and off the road a dozen times.

  The strain and cold stiffened his legs and arms, but the excitement got into him, too. He turned to look at Ole, only his long nose and white eyebrows showing above the quilt, and in the steady motor-sounding and wind-sounding and snow-pebble-sounding silence of the car he opened his mouth and yelled.