The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “Try a loan,” Dubois said. “Ninety days ought to clear it. How about one of the boys over on the exchange?”

  “They wouldn’t lend me a dime.”

  He saw Dubois looking at him queerly. “You really hard up?” Dubois said. “You really scratching bottom?”

  “I’ve been scratching the bottom for three months,” Bo said. “Nothing coming in, everything going out. Whiskey business is gone. I used to be able to depend on that to pull me out of a hole.” He hesitated, realizing that he sounded too broke. “Oh, I’ve got it. I’ve got collateral from here to Winnemucca. It’s the cash that crowds me. Nick Williams owes me four thousand—notes due two months ago. But Nick sells out of Reno and ties himself all up in a gambling boat off Long Beach, and I have to wait till he gets wheeling again.”

  He glanced at Dubois’ face to see how he was taking it. “What makes me the maddest is that God damn Patton in L.A.,” he said. “Did I tell you what that son of a bitch did?”

  “No.”

  “We used to do a lot of business together,” Bo said. “Plenty of times I’ve trusted him for three or four thousand. He kept on running a little booze, beating the liquor taxes. There was money in it, if he was careful. A year ago I sent him down a certified check for twenty-five hundred, to get me some stuff off the boat. I was sick, had a kind of stroke or something. Left me all numb down this side. So I sent him the money and was going after the stuff as soon as I felt a little better. Next I hear they’ve picked up his speedboat, and the grand jury indicts him on a conspiracy charge, and there goes my twenty-five hundred. Patton skips his bond and hits for the Philippines. Not a God damned word out of him since.”

  “Tough,” Dubois said.

  “I hope it’s tough,” Bo said. “Now you want seven hundred.”

  “It isn’t me that wants it,” Dubois said. “I just think we’d be damn fools to let that possibility slide.”

  Bo rose. His legs were tired, and he was filled with abrupt rage at the thought that he didn’t even have a car any more, and would have to walk all the way back up to First South. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know. I don’t know whether I can raise it or not.”

  “If you can‘t,” Dubois said, “why I suppose Clarence and I might scratch it up. I’d rather see us all even, though.”

  “I’ll go take a gander around,” Bo said.

  “I’m going back down in about a week. Want to go along?”

  “Yeah,” Bo said. “I would.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you know.”

  Back in his room, Bo lifted the blind a little, dug in the desk drawer for the bundle of papers, and hunched down to go through them all carefully. Nick Williams’ notes—due not two months ago, but a year and a half ago. If he wasn’t so washed out he’d go down to the coast and take that four thousand out of that tinhorn’s hide. He’d been over a year paying the other fifteen thousand, dribbling it out five hundred at a time so that you could never do anything with it, you never felt that you’d got your money. And then welch on the last four thousand, sell out and beat it. Four thousand. That would put him on his feet again if he could get it.

  Carefully he laid the papers to one side and wrote a letter to Nick putting it up to him strong. But he knew when he sealed the envelope that there wasn’t much chance. The fellow who had signed Williams’ notes, the vice-president of a Las Vegas bank, had blown his brains out six months ago down in Needles. One chance in a thousand that Williams would honor his obligations, and how could you sue a guy living twelve miles off shore beyond the law?

  He laid the letter on the bed and went back to the papers. Cards, addresses scrawled on envelopes, some of which he no longer remembered the significance of; slips for safety deposit boxes he no longer had; receipts for payments in a building and loan association he had been cleaned out of in 1931; a deposit book on a defunct bank. He threw them all in the waste basket, went on. A Nevada fishing license, two years old. A tax receipt for the cottage on Tahoe.

  Picking it up in the fingers of his awkward left hand, he looked at it. He had almost forgotten he owned that place. Two thousand he must have sunk into that, and there was the boat, the motor, his shotgun and deer gun, equipment like stoves and refrigerators and furniture, a lot of it almost new.

  Holding the slippery paper down hard, he scratched a note to a real estate shark in Reno. He would sell the whole place, just as it stood, two-car garage, boat, motor, guns, furniture, for ... He stopped, thinking. How much? Nobody would want to put two thousand into a summer cottage in times like these. Fifteen hundred? He wrote in the figures, putting a long firm bar on the five. Fifteen hundred cash. It was worth a damn sight more. He’d paid a hundred and twenty-five for the boat alone, and that much more for the motor.

  “What I want,” he wrote, “is quick action. At the price I’m asking, you ought to be able to move it in a week. I’m clearing out everything I’ve got a finger in in Nevada, and I’m willing to take a loss.”

  Still holding the opened pen, he pawed through the rest of the papers. Junk. His certificate of stock—only a notarized paper signed by both Wills and Dubois—showing that he had four thousand dollars, a third interest, in the Della Mine in the Loafer Hills district in Nevada. The insurance policy, only five hundred dollars, and he wouldn’t have got that, with his blood pressure where it was, if it hadn’t been for Hammond. The deed to the cemetery lot, and the receipt for the payment for perpetual care. Those he put together and put back into the desk.

  Two possibilities, Williams and the Tahoe place, and only the Tahoe place worth much even as a possibility. If they both came through he’d be set. He should have been riding Nick’s tail every week for the last year and a half. But he just hadn’t felt well enough. He shook his fingers, trying to get a tingle. No dice.

  If neither of them came through, he was in the hole. His diamonds had gone a year ago, when he was raising money to send to Patton. His watch? He took it out and looked at it. Fifteen dollars maybe, at a hock shop. He looked around the room. Suitcases? Maybe fifteen more. Overcoat? He might get five. He had paid ninety six months ago. He took his check book out of his coat and looked at the last stub. A hundred and three dollars left. He might as well close that out. There was no use paying a damned bank a dollar a month on an account like that.

  Anger made him rock in the chair. Twelve hundred shot when the bank blew. The damned bankers sitting behind their mahogany taking your money and losing it for you. But he figured that dead account anyway. Eventually, when the Bank Examiner and the rest of them got through and got theirs, he might get another twenty or thirty percent of that. Forty or fifty altogether.

  Forty or fifty? he said. I ought to get a hundred percent plus interest for all the time they’ve had it!

  But maybe a couple of hundred more from the bank sometime. Next week. Next month. Next year.

  Damn it to hell, he said. By rights he had six thousand dollars, over eight thousand counting what Patton skipped with. Only he didn’t have it, any of it. And what if nothing paid off? Where was he going to raise seven hundred?

  Maybe he ought to try selling out of the Della. It was a corner, it looked good. Somebody might take his four thousand interest off his hands clean.

  And then what? Sit around on his can and eat up the four thousand and then what?

  You didn’t have a chance, not a show. You were sixty-one years old, sick, broke. Everybody you trusted snaked on you, beat it for the Philippines or the twelve-mile limit with your money. The woman you kept in style for two solid years turned iceberg as soon as the money got tight, cold-shouldered you in the lobby, wasn’t in when you came around, even had the God damned gall to stay on in the same hotel and act like you were somebody she’d met once but didn’t quite like.

  By Jesus, it was ... ! Some day, he thought with his eyes narrowing, he’d kill that bitch. Nice as pie as long as he had the dough, and as soon as he slipped a little she was out hustling some other sugar daddy.

  The bit
ch, the dirty blood-sucking gold-digging squaw. Some day he would kill her, so help him.

  But he couldn’t hang onto the rage. It seeped out of him, leaked away, left him sitting slumped and tired, thinking: Sixty-one years old, and sick and broke and alone. Who gives a damn about you now? They were all your friends when you had it. Now where are they? There isn’t a soul cares whether you live or die.

  Bruce, maybe? he said. Bruce had written a couple of times in the year and a half since he left. Maybe he’d got over the way he felt after Sis.... He tightened his muscles, staring hard at the wall, feeling the tears come hot and acid into his eyes. He put his forehead down on his arm and ground his teeth.

  After a minute he raised his head again, thinking of Bruce in Minnesota. He worked after classes and then worked all summer. He might have something, he might be willing to help his old dad when he got in a hole. He had sent money back to Rock River, hadn’t he, long after he’d run away from there. And they’d never done a damn thing for him, not a tenth as much as he’d done for Bruce. He took out another sheet of paper and unscrewed the pen.

  But he found himself writing almost with his breath held back, almost pleadingly, and he hadn’t even the will to tear the letter up and throw it away. He had told Bruce he never wanted to see him again, and he didn‘t, the ungrateful whelp. But he was writing, and he kept on writing, and as he wrote the vision of the Della grew brighter. If they could just get that into production, capitalize and get a smooth organization going. It was a sure thing, a dead immortal cinch, a gold lead as good as anything ever dug up in Nevada. But it took money to get it started, for the mill and everything. He had four thousand in it, and when it got going he’d get it back twenty times. But meantime the whole thing might fizzle for the lack of a few hundred dollars. If Bruce wanted to come in, he’d cut him in share and share alike for whatever he put up. It wasn’t too far-fetched to say that a few hundred now might put him on Easy Street the rest of his life, and he’d be helping his dad at the same time. The main thing was to get that mine going, so he could get back on his feet. He wasn’t feeling too good, that stroke or whatever it was had left his left side numb. He might not live very long, and that was another reason why Bruce ought to get in on this while he could. He’d get the whole third share anyway, in the course of a few years.

  Writing that made him feel better, more optimistic. And he felt better toward Bruce. He was a good enough kid. Bright as a whip. It was Elsa’s death that had put him off that way, made him bitter. He was doing all right now, going to be a good lawyer sometime.

  Ought to send him something, he thought. Some little present, just to show him that his old man still wished him well. He dug the loose change from his pocket, counted the two dollars and forty-five cents in his palm, thought of the hundred and three dollars in the bank, looked in his wallet and found two fives and a two. Maybe he’d better take it easy. He had to eat, himself.

  Then he noticed the pen on the desk. It was a good pen, cost seven fifty when he bought it. He took it up and wrote at the bottom of the letter, “I’m sending you a little present, something you may be able to use in school.” He carried the pen to the wash bowl, squirted the ink in a blue stream against the porcelain, drew the bulb full of water two or three times, wiped it off carefully with toilet paper. It looked practically new. He shined the point clean and rummaged in the closet till he found a shoe box from which he cut strips to make a little carton. When he went down to the desk after stamps he felt better than he had for quite a while, and he straightened his tie at the mirror by the desk before he left the hotel.

  Looking pretty seedy, he thought. Coat all out of press, pants baggy. You got down and forgot to watch your appearance. You’d never get back on your feet looking like a tramp. People had to be able to look at you and see that you were a responsible looking guy. Dubois, with his little thin look, asking if you were really scraping bottom. You couldn’t take chances on things like that. They hurt your reputation.

  In a tavern just off State Street he had a quick beer, standing straight in front of the bar and looking at himself in the mirror. From the tavern he went straight to the shine parlor of Joe Ciardi, his old whiskey outlet.

  “Look,” he said, almost before Joe could say hello. “I need a press job. Got a closet I can sit in?”

  “Sure thing,” Joe said. “Got a date?”

  “I’ve been so damn busy I haven’t had time to wipe my nose,” Bo said. “Just looked in a mirror and saw I looked like a bum.”

  He sat down with a magazine in the curtained closet. After a minute he pulled off his shoes and opened the curtain and beckoned to the colored shine and slid the shoes across the tiles to him. Sitting in his shirt tails, he remembered that he still wore his hat, and took it off. Pretty sloppy. He opened the curtain again and whistled at Joe and sailed the hat toward him. “Might as well shoot the works,” he said.

  Joe, smoothing the trousers on the goose, caught the hat and hooked it over a blocking form. He took the wallet from the hip pocket of the pants and cleaned the side pockets of change. “This for me?” he said.

  “Some of it’s for you if you ever get done,” Bo said.

  “What the hell,” Joe said. “I got to use the goose, not magic. I think you got a date.”

  “I got half a dozen dates. Get busy and don’t talk so much.”

  He was impatient waiting, but he didn’t feel as tired as he had that morning. When he stood in front tying his tie he found himself whistling. There was a spot on the tie, and he fixed it so the vest covered it. The newly-creased trousers were warm on his legs, the coat fitted smoothly across his shoulders again. He looked in the mirror steadily while the shine gave him an unnecessary brush-off, and he tipped the shine a dime.

  Then he cut diagonally across the street to the building which housed Miller and Weinstein, Tailors.

  Louis Miller, sidling, peering near-sightedly, came around the immaculate counter in front of the dressing rooms. Bo gauged exactly the cordiality of his greeting. It was all right. Miller would sell him anything in the store. He ought to. He’d got cash on the nose for enough clothes in the last ten years.

  “Ah,” Louis said. “Mr. Mason. What can I do for you?”

  “Like to look at some of your rolls of burlap,” Bo said.

  “Yes!” Louis Miller said. “Any special color?”

  “I don’t know. Gray. Blue.”

  Miller put his hand up to the door of one glass-fronted case. “You don’t want just anything,” he said.

  “Did you ever know me to want just anything?” Bo said. “I want a suit.”

  The fawning agreement of Miller’s smile warmed him clear down. “Now right back here,” Louis said, “I have something I think you like.”

  When he left at five-thirty, Bo had ordered a ninety-dollar suit, had stood while Louis gave him the old line during the measurements. You are a wise man to have suits tailored to measure. You are a hard man to fit. So big up here.

  And he carried with him to the sidewalk six of Louis’ best ties, telling Louis offhand to put them with the bill. He had felt of his bare head and asked Louis if he had any hats. Louis did not. Bo toyed with the idea of going somewhere else and getting one, but gave it up because he didn’t have a charge account at any haberdasher’s and would have to pay cash. The hat could wait till Joe polished up the old one.

  It was only when he started walking that he remembered he didn’t have anyone to see or anywhere to go except the hotel.

  In the lobby of the Winston, after dinner, he sat smoking a cigar, the first one he had bought for two weeks. His legs were crossed, one glittering shoe swinging slightly. The cigar was sweet and fragrant in his mouth after the sour pipe he had been smoking.

  “You look all spiffed up,” the clerk said. “Isn’t that a new tie?”

  “That’s a new three-dollar tie.”

  “Must have cleaned up.”

  Bo winked. “Killed a Swede,” he said, and lay back on the bac
k of his neck. By now all three of those letters were on the way. One of them was sure to turn up something. A man didn’t have anybody but himself to blame if he let a little hard luck get him down. Keep up the appearance, that was the thing. The world looked like a different place with your shoes shined and your pants pressed.

  The scratching of the dog’s claws made him turn his face toward the door. The bulldog came in, tugging at the leash, his wide chest pushing close to the floor, and then she came, letting the door go behind her and tinkling a little laugh as the dog pulled her off balance. Bo saw her face freeze slightly as she saw him. He remained where he was, sprawling in the chair.

  “Hi, Good-looking,” he said.

  He noticed that she stopped the dog all right when she wanted to. That was another of her God damned poses, that little game of being dragged along helplessly behind the pup, and laughing, and getting herself noticed. Now she hauled the pup short with a curt jerk of the leash and stood looking Bo over.

  “Well, if it isn’t Baby Harry, named after his father’s chest,” she said. “I thought you’d left town.”

  Bo motioned to the next chair. “Sit down.”

  “What for?”

  “Not for anything. Can’t you sit down and pass the time of day?”

  She glanced from him to the clerk, and he could see her wondering what was up. They hadn’t been on speaking terms for ten days, ever since she threw that cheap-john stuff at him and he cussed her out. “I’m a pretty busy woman,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Bo said. “So I’ve heard.”

  As if a hinge had given away, she sat down suddenly on the arm of the other chair. Her eyes were hard. “What do you mean by that?”