The Big Rock Candy Mountain

  A man came to the door holding a lantern shoulder high. “Gas,” Bo said, and climbed out, shutting the door on the shrouded dummy.

  “You bet,” the man said. He took a five-gallon can and began to fill it at one of the drums. “How many?”

  “She’ll hold five all right.”

  “You bet.” He concentrated on the pour from the drum’s spout. “Just closin’ up. Don’t many people come through this late.”

  Bo grunted, standing by the door to block off the man’s view of the dummy.

  “You’re the third in the last hour,” the man said. “Funny how some nights they come all in a covey and some nights I sit from supper time till eleven and not a one shows up.”

  “The others go on through?”

  “One did. The other’s right here against the wall. Couple fellas in it. Went on over for a cup of coffee.”

  His mind instantly alert and suspicious, Bo dug a couple of silver dollars from his pocket and laid them in the garage man’s hand. Two men, driving a back road at night, parking nose out by a garage wall, didn’t look good. It looked like law, either law or another bootlegger. And a bootlegger wouldn’t leave his car like that. He watched the café across the street, but there was only the shadow of the counter man moving up and down behind the dirty window.

  He took his change, gathered his overcoat around his hips, and slid in. “Come again,” the garage man said. Bo pulled away. The trail climbed steadily, second gear much of it, and many curves, the roadbed deeply washed, exposing the solid rock in places. It was no road to make time on, but he rode the throttle anyway. Whoever was waiting back there was asleep at the switch, there was that to be thankful for.

  But at the top of a long swinging hairpin he looked back and saw the moving lights of a car.

  He swore, clicked off the dash light in order to see better. The road climbed up and up and up, a rocky shelf in the mountain’s side. Sometime soon he should hit the top of the pass and start down, and on the other side it was better, not so steep or crooked. But he had to make the pass first: on this side, with a load on, he was at a disadvantage.

  When he next looked back the lights were out of sight, but at the next bend he saw them burst around a corner, already closer, coming up on him like a house afire. He swore and slid the Essex into low, got a start over a steep pitch, slipped into second and stayed there, gunning it, the speedometer needle trembling around thirty. His arms and shoulders were set like cement. “By God,” he said to the dummy, “if that’s the law they’re going to have a ride.”

  Skidding on a curve, he felt the weight of the car haul him sideways, settle, come back to center. The tires shot gravel like bullets up under the fenders. Then there was a flattening, a dropping, the road ahead tilted flat, tilted down. He shifted and settled himself. It was a horserace now. With one eye on the mirror he counted, waiting for the lights. He was up to thirty-eight when they blazed over the rim, diffused among the pines. That settled it. They hadn’t lost much, if any. And nobody would drive as fast as he was driving without good reason, on that road.

  He felt in his overcoat pocket for a box of roofing nails. “Looks like we’ve got to give these prohis a headache,” he said to the dummy.

  Driving with one hand, he ripped the end out of the box and shook into his palm a heavy weight of nails, big-headed, an inch and a half long. He unbuttoned the sidecurtain all down one side, losing time in doing so, and when he was ready he saw that the lights had gained more.

  “Well, let’s see if you can be slowed down a little!” he said. With a twisting, upward heave he threw the handful of nails back over the car’s top, so that they would land in the center of the road. Another handful, then another, then another, until he had emptied the box and gathered up all the loose nails in his lap. Then he threw the box out the window and started crowding it again.

  “It’ll take a little while,” he told the dummy. “The nails’ll plug their own holes for a while. But pretty soon they start ripping the tube, and then those guys are going to have a nice long walk.”

  “You’re pretty cagey,” the dummy said. “You got out of that better than I thought you would.”

  “Let’s hold the celebrating for a while,” Bo said. “We may have to sow a few more seeds of kindness.”

  The light was still behind them, growing, snuffing out again, seeming not to move very fast, but keeping up, not more than a half mile behind. The road levelled out, and he took the stretch at a run, hitting it up to fifty, pouring his weight recklessly on the throttle. At the slightest beginning of a bend he eased up. The quickest way to get nabbed was to wreck yourself.

  He could see no lights now. The road swung left, then right, and his own lights showed him rounded grassy hills instead of the rocks and pines of the pass. He was getting down. He watched the mirror, waiting for the flash. None came.

  “You must have got ‘em,” the dummy said.

  “Maybe.”

  He kept looking back, but all the way down out of the hills the road behind was black, part of that unknown and unreal world the single lighted reality of the Essex hurtled through. It was all right. Those cookies were sitting on their running board right now cussing. And he hadn’t even hit a bump hard enough to shift the load or break a bottle.

  Still, he had been chased, and the pit of his stomach was even yet a small, pulsating, sensitive hole. He breathed his lungs full and yelled aloud, letting off pressure. After a while he began to sing.

  When he had sung himself normal again he slid down in the seat, pulled the gas lever down, and rested his throttle foot, wiggling it to limber the ankle. “I wonder,” he said to the dummy, “if those prohis were tipped off by our friend Heimie.”

  “He’d have had to work fast.”

  “It doesn’t take long to put in a telephone call,” Bo said. “Only thing is, how would he know what road I was taking, and when I was leaving?”

  “He could have had your house watched,” the dummy said. “And for that matter, remember the lights that followed you down to the fork past Armington? Suppose one of Heimie’s boys was in that, just tailing you to see which road you took? Once you were on this road you couldn’t get off.”

  “By God,” Bo said, “there might be something in that.”

  “But if that’s the way it was,” the dummy said, “those guys in Neihart would have known within a few minutes when you’d be there. Wouldn’t you expect them to be parked across a bridge waiting to stop you?”

  “Yes,” Bo said. “I would. I don’t savvy this business at all. You’d say those guys were chasing us, wouldn’t you?”

  “They weren’t out driving for their health.”

  “No. So they must just have got careless and let me get through and then tried to catch me.”

  He began snapping up the sidecurtain, hearing through the opening the noise of the tires, the flip and pop of pebbles, the swish of running rubber. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to blow a tire himself hitting that road the way he had. A last look behind showed him only the empty face of the dark, and he buttoned himself in.

  He came to a fork and stopped. There were no signs, but the main travelled road led on. The other must cut off to Harlowtown. There was only one thing to do, when he didn’t know the country. He took the main road.

  His watch said a quarter of one. He must be more than half way to Livingston. He might make Billings for breakfast. Or he might, if he found the road good that way, cut down through Yellowstone and angle across Wyoming until he hit the Lincoln Highway. That would put him a long way around Sheridan, just on the chance Heimie’s tip had been worth anything.

  “How about it?” he said. “Want to see Yellowstone Park, baby?”

  “It wouldn’t be open” the dummy reminded him.

  “We could circle around it. There’s a road down the west side. Or there’s one cuts over into Wyoming near the east entrance, around Cody. That’d be better.”

  “Save your plans
till we get past Livingston,” the dummy said. “Once we’re that far we’re past anything Heimie might have had up his sleeve, and then we can really make it a honeymoon.”

  Bo settled back, relaxed into the torpor of driving, the unthinking suspension of mind; became once more the set of faculties in the forehead of the beast, eyes and ears for the road and the motor, hands for the steering. He noticed that they were in a flat of some kind, probably a river valley. Thin willows slid by, the road became wallowed sand. He shifted as a precaution, and a moment later came to a peering stop as the road disappeared and became merely two planks with two-by-four flanges, a skimpy skeleton of a bridge walking a foot above the deep sand of the riverbed. It was hardly wider than a railroad track, but perfectly safe and solid if taken easy. He eased out onto the planks. It was like driving on an extended grease rack.

  The new sensation jogged him, and he sat up. “This is, one way to make a road,” he said to the dummy. “Damn if it isn’t a pretty good idea, long as nobody’s coming the other way.”

  He peered out, trying to see if there was water underneath, but all he could see was dimly luminous white sand and the occasional dark blob of willows. But he stared so persistently, trying to make out what it was he was crossing, that he almost ran into the obstruction in the road.

  His foot slapped on the brake, the Essex halted with its nose almost against the barrier, and in the light he saw the stack of railroad ties three feet high laid across the planks. A trap. He knew it instantly, coldly, furiously, even before he saw the shadows start up from beside the road. Before he heard their shout he had slammed the Essex into reverse and was backing up, tightrope walking the narrow planks, driving blind, by ear, by feel, his breath stilled in his chest and one arm rigid across the wheel, the other ripping the sidecurtain out so that he might lean out and crane, steering by the gleam, the glimmer of his tail light. He felt the tires start up on the low flange of two-by-four and then pinch down again, but his foot on the throttle didn’t relax. The car roared full speed backward into the dark along the car-track road.

  The figures which had leaped from the roadside were running after him. Out of the very periphery of his vision he saw one stumble and go headlong off the runway, and he heard them yelling. The first shot throbbed in his ears, but it didn’t mean anything. All that meant anything was the tight wire of plank unreeling under his left hind wheel. If he could hold her on it, get back to the road, he had a chance yet. They would lose time getting to their car, wherever it was. He could run back to the Harlowtown fork, cut down on that ...

  Lights blazing, he was a beautiful target, but he didn’t dare switch them off. He needed their glow. Pink flashes stabbed the dark, but the running figures were dropping behind, and his blood leaped. Another hundred feet, and he would have outrun them, even in reverse. Then a quick turn, a dash back to the forks ...

  The wheel kicked out of his hand, numbing his locked wrist, and the front wheels were wrenched up and sideways, swerving the car, bucking it up over the flange, dropping it down awkwardly angled across the tracks. There was a heavy crunch from the shifting load, and for a moment the car hung uncertainly, about to go over, before it settled back.

  Before it had quite settled Bo was on the ground, crouching. The Essex sat with its front wheels high, the tires still revolving slowly. The headlights burned like furious eyes up into the black. He heard the pound of feet sodden in the sand, and with no more than a second’s hesitation he turned and ran.

  3

  He came so quietly that she didn’t hear him at all. She simply looked up and he was there, his face blackened with new beard, his overcoat ripped from one pocket halfway to the hem. In the instant when their eyes met it crossed her mind that if he had not been her husband she would have been frightened to death at his face.

  “Bo ... ?”

  He sat down and stared at her. His trousers, she saw, were also ripped, and there were scabbed scratches on hands and wrists. He made a disgusted sound and spread his hands. “Kapoot,” he said. “Gone. Load, car, everything.”

  She said the thing that was instantaneous in her mind. “But they didn’t catch you!”

  His stare was almost contemptuous. “They weren’t after me. They could have had me if they’d half tried.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “It wasn’t the law.”

  “Then who?”

  “Hijackers.”

  He had straightened it out in his mind on the way back. The pieces fitted. First that car tailing him out of Great Falls, seeing which road he went. Then the two waiting in Neihart, letting him go by, closing in behind him. Then the barricade. It was neatly planned, and far enough away from everything so that there was no chance of anyone blundering by and spoiling it.

  “I should have caught on in Neihart,” he said. “That’s where I saw the car parked against the garage.” He rubbed his emory paper jaw, the story coming out past the tips of , his teeth. “I still thought they were law, then. By Christ, I don’t know what was the matter with me. I ought to have my head examined.”

  “But ...” she began, and even that one word of expostulation or lack of understanding made him furious.

  “Does it stand to reason that two cops would sit in a town waiting for me, knowing I was coming in a few minutes, and then go over for a cup of coffee and let me slide right on by? Does that sound like sense?”

  “No,” she said. “I just ...”

  “It isn’t sense,” he said. “Those guys didn’t want me there, either. They just wanted to let me past so I could run down into their little trap. They weren’t taking any chances of me getting away, I’ll say that for them.”

  “But how could they know so well?” Elsa said. “It sounds as if they knew every minute what you were going to do.”

  “They did.”

  “But who could have?”

  “There’s only one son of a bitch in Montana that could have known or guessed that much.”

  “Heimie?”

  “Heimie.”

  “Now what?” she said, watching him steadily. “Are they after you?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it.”

  “What will we do if they are?”

  “I don’t think they are. I think this is Heimie’s little way of inducing me to come in with his crowd.”

  “You won‘t,” she said.

  “I don’t know. If we want to stay in this town we may have to.”

  “Then let’s not stay in this town!” Elsa said. There were tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to see you mixed up with those people. They’re criminals, they’d rob and murder and do anything. You don’t want to go in with them, Bo. You know you don’t.”

  “You’re exactly right,” Bo said. “But what are we going to do?” He stood up impatiently, fingering the gash in his overcoat, his eyes vague and troubled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to figure it out. All I know is that if there’s a good chance to get even with that little silk-shirted bastard I’m going to.”

  “You’ll get yourself killed.”

  “Not if I’m careful.”

  She shivered and half turned. “You didn’t tell me how you got away.”

  “No,” Bo said, his words heavy as iron. “I didn’t tell you and I’m not going to.” The fury in him broke out, and he swung around shouting. “How would I get away? I ran like a God damned jackrabbit. I plowed through sand and tore through brush and walked a thousand miles and hooked a ride on a homesteader’s wagon. How the hell would I get away? Fly?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. It didn’t do to question him when he was sore. Whenever anything went wrong he butted against it like a ram, and the worse it went the more violent and stubborn he got, and though he generally got through, the effort outraged something deep and furious in him. He would never learn to climb over or go around. He had to butt right through, and when he got his head hurt he was untouchable.

  But the car gone, and the whole
load, two or three thousand dollars gone as surely as if they had taken the sum in hundred dollar bills and touched a match to them. It served her right. She had been thinking of that bank balance almost in the same terms Bo had. She had been seeing ultimate security and emancipation in it. It was just as well for her to learn that security was not there, that the whole thing could disappear like mist touched by the sun “I’m going to bed,” Bo said. “If anybody calls or comes around I’m out of town and you don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  Three days later he hunted up Heimie in the Smoke Shop. Heimie, elegant in a lavender silk shirt, pinstripe suit, yellow shoes, had a greeting as mellow as syrup. He led Bo into the back room and sent the counter man for a bottle.

  “You made a quick trip,” he said.

  “What makes you think I’ve been anywhere?” Bo said, and stared at Heimie hard. Heimie shrugged and let it go.

  The bottle came and Heimie poured two shots. “Here’s how,” he said. Bo drank, watching him. It would have been a pleasure to reach. across the table and slap that light secretive smile off Heimie’s mouth, but it wouldn’t do. You had to know when somebody had you, or you’d wash out fast.

  Heimie’s smile deepened. He twirled the whiskey glass slowly. “Thought any more about that proposition?” he said.

  “I’m willing to listen.”

  “Ah,” Heimie said. “That’s what I’ve been wanting to hear. You’re too valuable a man to waste your talents working alone.” Steadily smiling, inviting Bo to make a double meaning out of that if he chose, he leaned his impeccable elbows on the table and dropped his voice. “What is it you want to know, now?”

  “I want to know what the proposition is,” Bo said impatiently. “How do I know whether it’s any good or not?”

  “You want to go on hauling down from the line?”

  “That’s my racket,” Bo said. “I don’t want anything to do with any still, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Beans can handle that all right.” Heimie pursed his lips, thinking. “What would you say to a proposition like this: You haul down to us here, whole loads. You don’t have to fuss around with deliveries or collections or anything. Just whole loads, dump them off and you’re clean. And protected.”