“Well, you let me know,” Bo said. “When you get things moving, call me up.”
“I’m asking you in right now,” Heimie said. “There’s a beautiful chance to get rid of this Scotch of yours in Helena. Bill could move it like water down a drain.”
Bo let his eye drift over the others as he reached out a cigar. Underwood was sitting up. Holmes had his glass to his lips, watching Heimie over the rim. McGovern was slouched against a barrel, watching.
“I couldn’t come in with this load,” Bo said. “I’ve got this promised. Suppose I think it over and let you know next week.”
The point of Heimie’s widow’s peak moved down, then back, and he shrugged. “There’s such a thing as waiting too long.”
“I guess I’ll have to take that chance,” Bo said. “I can’t go back on the promises I’ve already made.”
For a moment they looked at each other, then Heimie shrugged again. With his overcoat thrown around his shoulders like a cape he followed Bo up the stairs and into the dark hall. The cold pushed in in a solid, moving mass as Heimie shot the bolt and opened the front door.
“There’s one thing I want to know before I do anything,” Bo said. ”That’s about this Underwood cookie.”
“What about him?”
“He’s a stool.”
He could not see Heimie’s face, but Heimie’s low laugh filled the hall. “He knows which side his bread is buttered on,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about him.”
“Far as I’m concerned,” Bo said, “a stool pigeon is like a clay pigeon. He can fly any way he’s pushed.”
“I said don’t worry,” Heimie said. “I’ve got enough on that bruiser to make him be a good dog.”
“Yeah,” Bo said. “Well, long as you’re sure.”
“If that was what bothered you, why don’t you come in now and get on the gravy boat?”
In the dark Bo stood for a minute silent. “I’ll have to see you about that next week,” he said. “And I’ll have to have the dough for these three now. I need it.”
Without a word Heimie shut the door, snapped on a little blue light, and counted out the money. He laughed. “Anything you ask for you get,” he said. “That’s the way this new outfit works.”
“That’s a good start,” Bo said. “Well, see you next week.”
“You going to be in town all week?”
“Yeah,” Bo said. “I’ll be around.”
“I’ll call you if anything hot comes up.”
“Okay.”
He went out down the rubbishy path, the night very dark, with a chilly, searching wind. His eyes were narrowed and his blood hot with rage. Come in with us little shyster crooks or get run out of business. Come in and be our errand boy, driving a truck in our transfer business. Take all the chances for little piddling wages and we’ll bail you out of the hoosegow when you get caught! Wasn’t it a dandy! Why, the dirty little pimping son of a bitch ...
But it would pay to be careful. It would pay to be careful as hell. Underwood had been planted there to scare him, but if he didn’t scare then Underwood might be used for other things. It was complicated and dangerous, and by the time he pulled into the garage he had decided not to leave the next morning as he had planned. It wasn’t too far-fetched to believe that Heimie might try to stool him off. That might happen either at home or on the road, but he had to take that chance. He’d better lie low for a day and slip out when the coast looked clear.
2
From the back door Bo looked out across the yard, across the alley to the back hedge of a house on the next street, up to the corner where the street light had just come on, dim and popping in the November dusk. There was no one in sight; the fresh and slightly smoky air made him anxious to start. He had already been lying around the house too long, just because of Heimie and his gang of two-by-four toughs. The car was loaded, the Wyoming plate installed, the dummy in the front seat.
He went back into the kitchen and picked up his overcoat. “Guess I’ll be going,” he said. Elsa dried her hands and left the sink to call the boys in from the front room.
They came out, Chet tossing his new football. “Goodbye, Pa,” they said, like parrots. Bo looked at them, Chet husky, stringy with muscle, the younger one thin, puny actually, with staring hungry eyes and spindly legs.
“So long, kids,” he said. “You mind your mother now, while I’m gone.”
As they stood looking at him he had a feeling that they were a thousand miles away, unreachable; they were strangers who studied him, critically and without affection. He reached back into his hip pocket and got the wallet. “Brucie, you didn’t get anything to match Chet’s football. What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” Bruce said. A wavering grin split his face and he threw a quick, triumphant look at Chet. “A Boy Scout hat, maybe.”
“You aren’t old enough to be a scout,” Chet said.
“Well, I can wear a scout hat, can’t I?”
“How much this hat cost?” Bo said.
“I don’t know.”
“Here,” Bo said, and laid a five dollar bill in Elsa’s hand. “Get him his hat. That’ll make everything even.”
He stooped and kissed both boys, and under his hands their slight bodies were stiff and unemotional. Obscurely baffled, he roughed their hair once, put his arm around Elsa, and led her to the door. He kissed her long and hard, the boys watching. “I’ll be about a week,” he said. “Don’t worry, now. All I have to do is unload and turn right around and come back. I’ll be hightailing it all the way.”
“Goodbye,” she said. “Please be careful.”
He squeezed her arm and ducked out under the trellis, and she followed to close the garage doors after him. As he drove out the alley he saw her standing with her hand on the door, watching after him, and the picture struck him as somehow pathetic. These trips were pretty hard on her.
And that was the last he thought about his family. He let them slide out of his mind, concentrated on getting out of town, covering ground. If Heimie had posted any prohis on the road they’d be tired of it and gone by now, after a day and a half. Just the same, he wouldn’t go down the good road to Helena and Three Forks. He’d cut over the Little Belt Mountains and hit Livingston that way. It was a bad road to run with a load on, but it was shorter.
“How about it?” he said to the dark dummy at his side. “Want to take a little trip through the mountains?” He nudged her, and she tilted stiffly against the side. “Okay,” he said. “You don’t have to be scared of me, chicken.”
Out of town, past street lamps and houses, the road clear now and deserted, planing into whiteness under the lights, the weeds brittle in the passing glare along the roadside, the country ahead and aside and behind all dark and lost and only the ribbon of glare-lighted road slipping visible into invisible, real into unreal. The driver of an automobile on a lonely road is a set of perceptions mounted in the forehead of a mechanical monster. The air that comes through the sidecurtains is the air of another planet, the only real world is the narrow cabin from which he sees unreal shapes writhe by, fences and trees and bridge rails, the mouths of culverts jammed with tumbleweed, the snaky road with its parallel-and-then-unparallel lines, the ruts of rainy drivers still unerased and serpentining between the even boundaries of the grade. Those flashes of the unreal world become before long completely absorbing ; the eye clings to them, is filled and satisfied by them; the brain asks no other business than to see. A car approaches with glaring lights, and the world broadens momentarily into an alley of pasture and creek bottom and three sleeping horses behind a three-strand fence, and then dark again, the headlights fingering the unknown sides of the world as it slips by. I see, said he, the elephant is very like a wall, like a board fence, like a man with a flashlight in an immense dark barn, like a moving picture reel unwinding too fast, catching fire, going black again. I see, said he, the elephant. I see ...
The Essex rides heavily, rolling with the dips like a l
aden barge. The speedometer shows, on this stretch of fairly smooth grade, forty miles an hour. The ammeter, with the lights on, reads minus five. In the cold night the motor sounds sweet, sounds contented and purring. And the eyes sit above the wheeling car, immensely lofty and percipient, watching the irregular unravelling of the road. The hands are loose on the wheel, the body relaxed. The lights of a car a good distance behind glint in the cop-spotting rear-view mirror, and the hand reaches up to turn the mirror sideways.
A hundred and seventy-five miles to Livingston by this road, fifty less than by Helena, but a steep pull over Kings Hill Pass and a bad road down the other side. Seven o‘clock when he started: budget eight hours to Livingston. With luck he might better it.
The streets of Belt, a few men on the sidewalk before a poolhall, their breath white under the arc light; a block of stores, square false fronts, then shacks, weeds, sweet clover fields, the town dump, the highway again. Little towns were all alike. You could be dropped into any one of them anywhere and swear you’d lived there one time or another.
As he swung into the little village of Armington, the lights from the car behind glinted again in the mirror, and a tiny, watchful alertness awakened in his mind. The outskirts, the dump, the foot pressing down harder on the round button of the accelerator, and the eyes watchful in the readjusted mirror. Then the brakes, the hard shuddering stop, the craning from the dark cabin to see which of the two forks, and the swing to the right, leaving the hard high-crowned road. Now the perceptive apparatus mounted in the forehead of the beast tightened and quickened, because those lights behind might mean a chase, and a chase on this unmarked trail was dangerous. There was every chance that when you came to a bridge there would be a plank out, or the bridge itself gone, or that the approach on either side might have a chuckhole hell-deep that would drop your heavy breakable load like a jug into a quarry, snap your brittle and overloaded springs, break an axle. The speedometer now, even with the lights behind to drive him on, read only twenty-five.
He watched the mirror, saw the lights break into the open around a hill, saw them move on past the. forks and on down the main highway. His breath came easier, and he eased up on the throttle. False alarm.
No more towns now till Neihart, up in the mountains forty miles or so, and beyond Neihart nothing till White Sulphur. He crossed a creek, and after ten minutes crossed it again. A hundred yards further on he recrossed it on a wobbly log bridge. The road tilted under the lights. He was starting to climb. On his left he saw a hill blacker than the sky. He shifted his weight in the seat and took a new grip on the wheel.
“Wouldn’t be so bad,” he said to the silent dummy, “if there was any way of knowing what’s up ahead of where your lights hit. Keeps you on a strain all the time. Or are you interested?”
“Sure,” the dummy said. “Get it off your chest.”
“It’s the worst part of this business,” Bo said. “You have to make time, and you’re always having to do it on roads that’ll break your neck if you go over twenty. Still you got to do thirty or thirty-five on them. You can’t stop anywhere and take a snooze because somebody might come snooping around. Sometimes you have to drive thirty hours at a stretch, and every damn mile of it full of bends and chuckholes and narrow bridges and mud. It’s the roads that make this business tough. Give me good roads and I’d make two thousand a month without turning a hair.”
“You don’t say,” said the dummy.
Bo’s foot smacked on the brake pedal, the loaded tonneau surged up behind him, the dummy lurched sideways. He shifted, crawled through a wash, flattened out again, reached out to straighten the tipped dummy.
“I’ve learned a hell of a lot about automobiles since I got into this, though,” he said conversationally. “One time I broke an axle in Wolf Creek Canyon above Helena, and I had to cache the load in the sagebrush and tear down the rear end and walk back to where I could telephone for a new ax, and then I had to put her in and reload. And I only lost seven hours altogether.”
“You’re good,” the dummy said. “Why don’t you post these things up on a billboard?”
“The hell with you. Another time I broke a spring leaf and didn’t know it till it slipped in against the brake drum and locked me tighter than a clam. And over by Havre I blew a gasket and had to pull the head in the middle of the night by the light of a candle and a box of safety matches.”
“My word!” the dummy said.
Bo, leaning over the wheel, peering into the unreal darkness ahead, trying to jump his vision ahead of the lights, anticipate the curves, guess the bumps, his foot tender yet insistent on the throttle-head, saw his own face dimly reflected in the windshield, and thumbed his nose at it.
“You’re a pretty smart girl,” he said to the dummy. “But you don’t know how much I’ve made in the last six months, just by being able to get over roads better than most, and patch up a car better than most, and stay awake longer than most.”
“I couldn’t begin to guess,” the dummy said. “A million?”
“Just give me time,” Bo said. “Give me a little more time.”
“Well, how much have you made?”
His eyes and his mechanical hands and feet still busy, Bo let his mind turn into an adding machine. Sixteen loads, and he must have averaged five or six hundred dollars profit a load. That was around eight thousand, and expenses and breakage and a little fixing of a deputy or two would knock off about fifteen hundred. Say sixty-five hundred, and he owned this car and this load, and here was thirty cases of Scotch all arranged for at seventy-five a case. He’d come back from Omaha with a cold two thousand in his jeans, and his bank balance of cash was already over four thousand.
“It’s better than picking gooseberries at a dime a quart,” he said. “If they leave me alone for a year I’ll be in the money good and plenty.”
“I wish I’d ever meet them after they got into the money instead of when they’re just going to get in,” the dummy said. “Every guy I meet is right on the edge of making a killing. I’m jinxed, I guess.”
“Stick around,” Bo said. “Stick around a year.”
“Uh-huh,” the dummy said. “And what about Heimie Hellman and his little band of Boy Scouts? Are you going to play ball with that outfit?”
With a wrench of the elbows Bo pulled the Essex around a hook in the road. His headlights, bursting into space, touched a steep wall with small black spruces toe-nailed into it, and his nose, joining his perceptive faculties for the first time, sniffed at the balsamy smell. He was in the pass. The motor labored. He shifted into second and gave it a good goose before shifting back.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what about that bunch. They can make trouble if they try.”
“But you don’t think they’ll try,” said the dummy. “You’ll say ‘Boys, you’re going to make me uncomfortable if you try any squeeze plays,’ and then they’ll back away and say, ‘Beg pardon, we wouldn’t want to put you out.’ ”
“Yeah, like hell,” Bo said.
“Well, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Bo said. “If I buck ‘em, they stool me off, and if I try stooling them off to protect myself I run into a lot of cops and prosecutors Heimie and his gang own.”
“And if you play ball with them,” the dummy said, “you don’t get anything but wages out of it, and you’re all tied in with a bunch of pimps and strongarm men.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Suppose you take a nap. I can think of people I’d rather talk to.”
“And if you try to buck them,” the dummy said, “you haven’t got enough customers without using Heimie’s outlets, even if you could keep out of the law’s way.”
“I guess I could get customers,” Bo said. “I guess good straight stuff at a fair price would take Heimie’s customers away from his watered-down Scotch and rotgut moon.”
“And some guy like Underwood might take you away from the bosom of your family, too,” the dummy said. “Those
guys wouldn’t stop at murder. How long would you last? You make me laugh. You and your big money. You know what I think?”
“I don’t know that I care,” he said.
“I think they’ve got you,” the dummy said. “I think this is your last trip on your own.”
“Oh, shut up!” he said. “I’ll be running whiskey when you’re back in some department store window showing off your legs.”
“You’ll be running it for Heimie,” she said. “You and your big ideas of being your own boss. Bushwah. You’ll be taking orders from that pimp in the embroidered shirts.”
“Shut up!” he said again, and for a half hour he drove in silence, sullenly, his mind edging up to the problem, finding a wall, blowing up in anger, edging up again at a different point. But it was all wall. His eyes strained out through the windshield, splashed and pebbled now with muddy water from a wash he had forded. The world unrolled in steep blackness beyond the fleeting glow of the lights, and the beam picked up an occasional timbered or rocky slope, a bank rose perpendicularly on his right and the road narrowed to two rocky ruts that apparently ended dead against the mountain. I see, said he, the elephant is very like a wall. I see, I see...
If you could only know what was on the other side of the light’s beam, if you could see far enough ahead to take the strain off, you could make two thousand a month without turning a hair. His mind crept out toward the wall again, and he jerked it away. Through the slits in the sidecurtains came the strong smell of pines, and the Essex labored on the grade.
Entering Neihart, up in the pine woods, he eased up on the throttle, looking for a garage where he might get gas, a café where he could wash away the fuzzy feeling in his head with a cup of coffee. There was only one garage, with two gas drums on wooden supports and another drum marked “Oil.” As he pulled in he caught the reflection from the headlights of a car parked against the side, facing out. He swung a little to bring his lights on it. Empty.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 47
