“Don’t apologize,” Bruce said. “A guy half his size knocked him down.”
“Knocked him kicking,” the cashier agreed. “Hung a shiner on him big as a plate. Course he’s younger than the old man, and in better shape. Couple shills grabbed O‘Brien and took him down cellar, but Pete’s a pretty good friend of O’Brien’s. I imagine they just opened the door and turned him loose in the Alley.”
“Yeah,” Bruce said. He looked out through the grilled window at the milling people, men with straw hats on the backs of their heads, coats over their arms; dealers in long eyeshades bending, reaching, leaning back to let their mouths go loose on the interminable chants. Right over in front of the slot machines, right in the middle of the crowd, with a couple of hundred people around, the Big Shot had been knocked silly by a little bantam who came to his shoulder. It was funny. It made him want to laugh right out loud.
But he didn’t laugh right but loud. He was ashamed and furious, and he hated the apologetic cashier who really wanted to laugh, who was outside it and could laugh, but who didn’t quite dare laugh in the face of the boss’s son.
“You think he went back up to the lake?”
“I don’t know,” the cashier said. “He left here with a towel over his eye. I supposed he was going to a doc. If I had that eye I sure wouldn’t be around at work for a day or two.”
“I suppose I’d better get on back and see how he’s doing,” Bruce said. He nodded to the cashier and let himself out.
In the hot bright street the traffic was thick. Cars coated with dust from the desert nosed into the curb to let out women in bloomers and wrinkled blouses and men in creased plus-fours. But the traffic and the blare of horns and the heat and the hot tourists and the light blazing up from the sidewalk were out beyond Bruce, beyond arm’s length, and between them and his eyes was the image he had had ever since he stepped out of the office, the image of his father, summer jacket, stickpin, heavy dark face, Big Shot air, going down kicking under O‘Brien’s fist, and the surprised look on his face, the purpling skin, the expression of heavy struggling impotence and rage and consternation. It was not a pretty image; it made him crawl. In spite of the heat, he walked very fast back to the doctor’s office.
His mother was not in the waiting room. He peeked through the door and saw her sitting in a muslin gown, one shoulder bare, with her breast pressed against a little window in the wall. She turned her head at his step, and smiled at him, making a little face.
“How’s it going?” he said.
“All right. I’ll be through in about ten minutes.”
“I’ll wait outside here.”
Lips smiling, eyes puckered, she made her deprecatory face again. “I’m a nuisance.”
“You’re terrible,” he said. “I don’t see how I stand you.”
He went out and sat down, tried to read a magazine, put it down to stare at the white wall. His father’s humiliation was as raw in his mind as if he himself had been knocked down. He found himself hating O‘Brien. A damned little hard-eyed chiseler, a borderline gangster, a brainless tough guy. Yet the old man had probably earned what he got. He couldn’t fire anybody without insulting him. He’d sit at home and worry about the monte game and work himself into a fury, and probably snoop around when O’Brien was on shift, and make his suspicions perfectly plain, and then finally he would take out all his dissatisfaction on O‘Brien, make him the goat. You could hardly blame the dealer for getting sore.
So maybe this is better than bootlegging, he said. So this is legal and no cops knock on your door late at night. But you play around with the same cheap people, the same flashy men with big rolls, the same cheap squaws. You get yourself into a situation where somebody swings on you or takes a shot at you in the alley, and when you get up off the floor with your eye pickled and the crowd gaping at you you haven’t even got a sense of outraged virtue to lean on. All you’ve got is the officious sympathy of flunkeys who will dust off your clothes and get a towel for your eye and laugh after you’re gone, and you know they’re laughing because anybody likes to see a big shot taken for a ride.
He got up from the chair and looked in the door again. His mother sat patiently, her forehead against the wall, her mutilated breast exposed to the healing eye of the window.
God damn, he said miserably.
On the way to the lake she lay back in the seat with her eyes closed, her face paper-white and pinheads of perspiration on her upper lip. The smell of ozone clung in her hair. Bruce drove fast, looking at her now and again, afraid that she had fainted, but when he said, “You feel all right, Mom?” she opened her eyes and smiled and said, “Sure, I’m all right. I just feel a little weak is all.”
“You go to bed when we get back, and stay there.”
Her only reply was a mild, withdrawn smile, as if the effort of moving her lips were almost too great, and in a kind of terror he started up the long, swinging grade. The smell of ozone that clung to her was like the odor of disease, and looking at her he felt that with that mild smile on her face and her eyes closed she was contemplating the battleground of her own body, warring cells going crazy, multiplying, proliferating, spreading and crowding out the healthy cells, leaving her less and less of herself. A body completely replaced itself in seven years, but that was done to pattern, according to a plan. This was something else, an insane crowding of formless hostility, a barbarian invasion, blotting out the order and the form and the identity, transforming it into a shapeless thing that was not his mother at all, but an unidentified colony of cells, func tionless and organless and hopeless. For one blasted moment he stared at her in panic, almost expecting her to bulge and puff and swell, lose her features, change into a grotesque horror before his eyes.
She sat with closed eyes, her lips together, breathing quickly but softly through her nose. The crowsfeet of laughter were not gone even in repose from the corners of her eyes.
The new LaSalle was in the garage when they pulled up under the pines. The good mountain smell came down across the cove, and the lake wrinkled under the wind. Stepping down to help his mother from the car, Bruce set his foot on one of the white stones with which his father had lined the drive, and he swore under his breath. “Feel all right, or do you want to rest a minute?” he said.
“I’m all right.” She stepped out and stood straight. “It never lasts very long.” She looked along the curve of bright lake shore where the slant sun glittered off the water and glanced on the red-brown trunks of the trees flanking the house. “It would be pretty hard not to feel all right up here,” she said. “It was hot in town, that was all.”
“Bed for you anyway,” he said, and steered her up the steps. He was hoping that the old man would be off in bed or somewhere. But the first thing he saw as they stepped into the living room was his father, sitting in the big chair by the window, a white pad over one eye and his other eye glaring at them, bloodshot and furious. He said nothing when they came in, but jerked in his chair.
“Bo!” Elsa said. She broke from Bruce’s hand and crossed the room, laid a hand on Bo’s head above the bandage. He flinched irritably away. “What happened?” she said.
“Isn’t it clear enough what happened?” he said. “I got a black eye.”
“Oh.” She stood for a moment, steadying herself by a chair back. “Have you been to a doctor? Have you had it fixed?”
“Did you think I patched this thing on myself?”
“Come on,” Bruce said, and took her arm again. “You’re feeling pretty rocky yourself. You go and lie down.”
But she held back. “Bo,” she said. “Who?”
He jerked around in the chair again and his one visible eye glared out the window. His teeth were bitten together, almost chattering. Here we go, Bruce thought almost wearily. He’s been humiliated and now he’s mad, and he’ll take it out on anybody within reach. He pulled at his mother’s arm.
“You’re supposed to lie down.”
“But your dad is hurt,” she s
aid. “Let me be a minute.”
“Go and lie down!” Bruce said, suddenly furious. His mother looked at him, glanced at Bo, frowned as if a pain had hit her, and went silently into the bedroom. Bruce, turning from watching her go, found his father’s bloodshot eye fixed hard on him.
“What in Christ’s biting you?” his father said.
“She’s sick,” Bruce said. “She just had a treatment and I thought she was going to faint all the way home. She’s in no shape to doctor anybody, or even talk to anybody.”
His father glared a moment longer, then turned away with a grunt.
“If there’s anything you need done to your eye,” Bruce said, “I’ll do it.”
His father didn’t bother to answer.
For almost a week the old man sat around the cottage reading the papers, figuring, sprawling back in the chair while Elsa fixed poultices for the injured eye. By the third day the soreness was gone, but the flesh from his cheekbone to his nose was swollen and purple, with a streak of dull yellow along the upper eyelid. Every time he looked in a mirror he swore, and when he got up on the fourth morning and. found that the other eye had developed sympathetic purple and yellow streaks he was untouchable for hours. He got the idea that sunlight was good for it, and sat in the yard with his face tilted back, but if a delivery truck came into the drive, or walkers passed along the lake front, he turned his head away, or raised a newspaper in front of his face, or went inside.
Bruce was cynically amused. “He looks like one of those obscene colored baboons,” he said. “A sensitive baboon who can’t stand his own looks.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
Bruce shrugged.
“You don’t feel a bit sorry for him, do you?” she said.
“I guess not.”
She shook her head, and her voice was almost pleading. “There’s nothing shameful about being knocked down by a person half your age.”
“And half your size,” he said.
“O‘Brien used to be a prize fighter,” she said, “and your dad is pretty close to sixty years old, did you realize that?”
“I can’t help it,” Bruce said. “If he’s sixty he ought to be the sort of person of sixty that you just don’t hit in the eye.”
She shook her head, her mouth sad. “You’re hard. I guess I don’t understand how you can be that hard.”
He knew he ought to stop. He was hurting her, and he didn’t want to. But he kept on anyway. “Maybe I’m getting even,” he said. “Maybe I remember once when he broke my collarbone knocking me over the woodbox, and once when he rubbed my nose in my own mess.”
She was looking at him startled, close to tears. “I knew you remembered that,” she said. “You never forget anything, do you? You never make allowances for hot temper or anything.”
“Forget it,” Bruce said. “I don’t really hold that against him. I just get sick and tired of all his airs and his self pity.”
“Sometime you’ll learn,” she said. She turned away and began pushing the carpet sweeper over the rug, talking straight ahead of her, not at him. “Some day you’ll learn that you can’t have people exactly the way you want them and that a little understanding is all you need to make most people seem halfway decent. What you don’t understand is that your dad is ashamed to death.”
“What you don’t understand,” Bruce said, “is that I’m ashamed too.”
She turned, and their eyes met for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “Of course. So am I. But I’m more sad than ashamed. I know your father better than you do, and I know that just one thing, one little disgrace like that, is about all that’s needed now to make an old man of him. He isn’t young any more. Everything goes down from here. I don’t think it ever occurred to him before that he wasn’t just as young and just as strong as he ever was.”
“What that means,” Bruce said, “is that he’ll come to you all the more to be babied.”
He knew he ought to be slapped, but his mother merely looked at him with her eyes clouded. Then she turned again and took up the handle of the cleaner. “I babied you too,” she said. “I couldn’t have lived with you if I hadn’t.”
On Sunday a long convertible pulled up in the drive and the Frenchman, Laurent, slid his fat stomach from behind the wheel. Bruce, down on the shore sawing’ up driftwood, saw him waddle up on the porch and go in, and he deliberately stayed away until Laurent was gone. Then he took the bucksaw up to the garage, got a bottle of beer from the icebox, and came through the living room to the front porch with it. His mother and father were talking in the living room. “Yes,” his father said, “but they’ve got to honor their notes. If they don‘t, we can collect from whoever signs them. That part of it’s all right.”
“Wouldn’t they think there was something wrong if you both ...”
“We’ve got the books. We can prove it to them, can’t we? We’ve been making money.”
“I should be getting dinner,” she said, as Bruce went through the front door. “You hungry, Bruce?”
“Not so hungry I can’t wait a while. I’ll wait out here.”
From the porch he watched the lake between sips of beer. A speedboat cut across the cove leaving an emerald and white wake, and after three or four minutes the waves began to slap on the beach. It was a good place, a quiet place, a lovely place—but he was already getting a little restless. Doing nothing all summer was a little wearing. He should have got a job. Still, it was the middle of August now. In another month he’d be threading the Ford into the sun’s eye across the desert.
So you’re capable of staying in one place two months and a half before you get jumpy, he said. You’re the guy who was looking for a home. He shifted himself comfortably and let it go. The hell with a home. You had to get out and do something, not just vegetate and sail and saw wood.
His parents were still talking inside; it was an hour before his mother called him to dinner. The old man, sitting at the dining room table, had a pencil and paper and was figuring. He figured until he had to move to make way for a plate.
“No,” he said. “I’d be a sucker to get out just when things are rolling smooth.”
“What’s up?” Bruce said. “Are we planning to move?”
“Laurent’s got an offer for his third interest,” his mother said. “Some gamblers from Denver want to buy in.”
“Doesn’t he want to sell?”
“He isn’t sure. Pa got talking with him and figured that he might sell if Laurent didn’t want to.”
“I thought the place was making money.”
His father’s face across the table was heavy and thoughtful. The discolored flesh around his eye made him look as if he were wearing a mask. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m damned if I do. It’s made money so far, but there’s no telling what it’ll do in winter. It’s bound to fall off.”
“What would you do if you sold?”
“How do I know?” his father said irritably. “I could find something, I guess.”
Out of the corner of his eye Bruce caught his mother’s glance, and bent to his food. Her look and the expression on the old man’s face were equally clear. The club was getting him down. He’d been scared of it from the beginning, it was too big a gamble, he wasn’t up to gathering the gold off the Big Rock Candy Mountain once he got there. It weighed him down, it worried him, the excitement it gave him was tinged with fear. He was riding a tiger, and he knew he wasn’t the man to do it. It was a sure thing the old man wanted, not a gamble.
But that, Bruce said to himself, wasn’t the biggest reason why the old man was toying with this chance to get out while he was still ahead. As much as anything else, it was that eye, the humiliation of going back after. ten days of hiding and having the dealers and shills and steady customers look at him sideways. It was the fear he had of coming back a soiled big shot.
Like Chet, Bruce said. Just exactly like Chet. He’d blow this money-making club in a minute to save his pride, only he’d nev
er admit why he was doing it. After working up—or down—to something like this all his life he’d sell out just because a little tinhorn hit him in the eye.
“How much has the place made in the last six months?” he said.
“It’s only been running four,” his father said. “I don’t know exactly. We put in fifteen thousand apiece. These Denver guys are offering eighteen for a third interest. It’s worth more than that. I expect I’m ahead about eight thousand in four months, if I could sell my third for twenty thousand.”
“Rate of twenty-five thousand a year for each of you,” Bruce said. “You can’t gripe at that, except when you come to pay your income tax.”
His father laughed. “Income tax!” he said.
“Have you ever paid an income tax?”
“No,” his father said, “and I don’t intend to.”
“Some day they’ll haul you off to the pen for three. years.”
“They’ve got to catch me first,” his father said.
Bruce buttered his roll and laid his knife down. “I’ll bet there isn’t a family like ours in the United States,” he said. “You’ve never paid an income tax. Did either of you ever vote?”
“I never did,” his mother said. “Isn’t that awful? I never knew enough about it to make the effort.”
“I guess I voted once,” Bo said. “Back in Dakota. How long ago? Twenty-five years? Nearer thirty, I guess.”
“Ever serve on a jury?”
“No.”
“There we are,” Bruce said. “Two of us have never voted, and the other one voted once, thirty years ago. We never lived in any house in the United States for more than a year at a time. Since I was born we’ve lived in two nations, ten states, fifty different houses. Sooner or later we’re going to have to take out naturalization papers.”
“And now we might move right out of here,” his mother said, “just about the time we get the cottage finished up. Wouldn’t that be typical? Let’s not sell this place, Bo, even if you do sell out of the club.”
“This is headquarters,” Bo said. “I’ve paid taxes on this already. That ought to make us permanent residents.”
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 64
