The Big Rock Candy Mountain

  “Your fast one is pretty fast,” his father said. “You’re no Walter Johnson, but you can burn one in. But it doesn’t hop as much as you think.”

  “I can’t get a good toehold without spikes. It was hopping yesterday.”

  “Forget the alibis,” his father said, watching him steadily. “What I’m telling you I’m telling you for your own good. You might make a ball player. You’ve got the build and you’ve got an arm. But it’s awful easy to think you’re Christy Mathewson when you’re only some little busher. You’ll never make a class-A league till you buckle down to throwing baseballs at a knothole in a barn. You’re wild as a steer.”

  “Well, I’ll practice up and pitch me a no-hitter with no walks next time,” Chet said. He grinned, but his father did not grin back.

  “And forget to be so proud of what the papers say,” his father said. “You’d have got knocked out of the box yesterday if those kids didn’t all step in the bucket. They’re scared of a fast ball. Throw ‘em up that way to a hitter and he’ll lose your ball for you.”

  “You just think they step in the bucket. That’s a heavy-hitting outfit.”

  “I know they step in the bucket,” his father said, “because I was there. I was sitting right beside Bill Talbot. One or two heavy hitters who weren’t scared of a fast one. and you’d have had half a dozen runs scored against you, with all those walks. You got to remember one thing about a fast ball. If a guy even meets it it’s likely to go for two or three bases.”

  “Yeah,” Chet said, a little sullenly. The old man could never say anything without sounding as if he was daring you to contradict him. Well, maybe he knew a lot of baseball and maybe he didn’t.

  He tossed the ball up and caught it, wishing the old man would go on inside or somewhere and get this catechism over, when the other thought cut into his mind like a car cutting into a stream of traffic. Chet Mason, it said, is not nineteen. He’s only seventeen. But just the same in two or three years he may be playing in the big leagues, and this morning, now, he is engaged to a woman twenty-one years old. This is not, he said, any punk kid you’re dishing up free advice to. It‘s’ about time you got next to that notion.

  But it was funny about the old man being at the game yesterday.

  “Pa,” he said, “can I have the car for a couple hours this afternoon?”

  “What for?”

  “Van and I have got a line on summer jobs at the Magna smelter. They put you on the bull gang or something, but what you really do is play ball for them. We have to get out and see a guy about it.”

  That about the smelter job was true enough, but it was not true that he and Van had to see anyone. The smelter man was coming up to school to interview four or five team members on Monday. Chet’s lips had gone over the lie smoothly, but he felt sullen and defensive under his father’s eyes. He hated to be made to explain.

  “What’s the matter with the streetcar?”

  “You can’t take a streetcar to Magna.”

  “You can’t take the car either,” his father said. “I need it myself.”

  “But Jeez, I want that job, Pa!”

  He felt aggrieved, as if his father were keeping him from a real appointment. His mother, out on the back porch and listening, looked at his father.

  “Why not?” she said. “If it’s a chance to play ball ...”

  “Maybe we can all drive out,” Bo said.

  Chet opened his mouth, shut it, fished up another excuse. “But I have to pick up Van, and we may have to hunt all over Magna for this fella. We haven’t got a regular appointment, he just said come out any time and see him.” He shot a look at his father’s suspicious face. “I know you,” he said. “If you had to wait around for me ten minutes you’d be sore as a boil.”

  His mother laughed. “That touched you, Papa,” she said.

  His father was staring at him somberly. “If I let you have it,” he said, “I want it understood that you don’t go over forty and that you’re back here by four o‘clock. I’ve got a delivery to make.”

  “Okay,” Chet said.

  “Remember now,” his father said, and went inside.

  “Good gosh,” Chet said to his mother. “You’d think that car was made of solid gold. Other guys can get their dads’ cars when they need them.”

  “You’re getting it,” she reminded him. “It’s Van more than anything that makes Pa careful. He thinks Van is wild. Is he?”

  “No,” Chet said. “He’s all right.”

  “He looks like a kind of girl-chaser. You don’t want to get mixed up that way.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  His mother smiled. “You don’t have to bite my head off. You didn’t get enough sleep last night. Can’t you try to get in earlier?”

  “I couldn‘t,” he said. “We were with Van and his girl and we had to wait for them for an hour.”

  “What’d you do after the game?”

  “Just went out to Saltair and fooled around.” “That’s one thing that made Pa grumpy,” Elsa said. “He went to the game and thought you were real good, and he was expecting to talk it all over with you last night. And then you didn’t come home. He was proud of you yesterday, Chet.”

  “He sure doesn’t act like it.”

  “That’s just his way,” she said. “He’s been around a lot more than you have, and he knows what it takes to be a good ball player, and how a boy can be ruined by getting off to the wrong kind of start. He thinks if you’d quit smoking and train more you’d make something big out of baseball.”

  “Well,” Chet said. “If this smelter job pans out I can get some experience this summer, anyway.”

  He went down to the drug store and bought the Telegram and the Deseret News, read their accounts of the game, clipped them both carefully, along with the one from the Tribune, and brought his scrap book up to date. At one o‘clock, before the family were more than half through dinner, he got the keys and drove out of the garage. But he didn’t head either for Van’s house or for Magna. He headed for South State Street and Laura.

  She met him at the door, and her smile so clearly asked him to remember last night that he slipped into the hall and took her in his arms. She leaned back and put her finger on her lips. “Come in and meet the folks,” she said aloud.

  He had never been in her house, only in the hall at night. It was not, he saw now, a very good house. Neither it nor her family looked prosperous. Her father looked him over pretty sharply, put out a big rough workman’s hand, and sat back. Her mother was excessively fat, almost as broad as she was tall, and fully as thick as she was broad. Her mouth disappeared in great buttery cheeks. The two kids in the kitchen were her brother Jim, about twelve, and her sister Connie, eight. It seemed funny that Laura should be so grown up and still have brothers and sisters as little as that.

  “Chet’s the fellow that pitched the three-hitter yesterday,” Laura said. Her father raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I saw what Bill Talbot said about you,” Laura said.

  “Oh well,” Chet said. “You can’t believe all that stuff. I just had a lucky day. I walked so many guys that a few solid hits would’ve sunk me.”

  He waited for a denial of this from any of the Bettertons, but none came. “Going to play ball this summer?” Laura’s father asked.

  “I’m talking to a fellow on Monday about a job at Magna, playing in the Copper League.”

  “I thought you’d be working at Saltair,” Laura said.

  “Not if this other job turns up.”

  “Would it pay more?”

  “Quite a bit more, I think,” Chet said. “I’ll know Monday.”

  He was getting uncomfortable. He kept stealing looks at Mrs. Betterton, the fattest woman he had ever seen. The parlor seemed warm. His eye flicked around looking for ashtrays as he thought of lighting a cigarette. There weren’t any ashtrays. Mormons, he supposed. He had never thought to ask Laura.

  “I’ve got the car,” he
said to Laura. “Want to take a little ride?”

  “Fine,” she said. “When’s dinner, Mom?”

  “About three. I got a chicken, so you’d better get back.”

  Laura threw Chet a peculiar pleading look and went into the hall. “Well, goodbye,” Chet said in the parlor. “It’s been nice to meet you.”

  They stood up and watched him out, and he had a feeling of relief when he and Laura got into the air. “Do they know?” he said.

  “No.”

  “They seemed to be looking me over pretty sharp.”

  “They always do that,” Laura said. “They’re so darned afraid I’ll start going with somebody they don’t like. They just sit and stare at people I bring home.”

  The edge in her voice warned him to shut up about her family. Maybe she was ashamed of them. It would make you squirm, all right, to walk along the street with that fat woman and have everybody turn and stare.

  “When we get married,” Laura said, “I want to move clean away from Salt Lake.”

  “I don’t know why not,” Chet said. “It’s a dump, far as I’m concerned.” He opened the door of the car for her, and she stopped dead still.

  “My goodness!” she said. “What is it, a Lincoln?”

  “Cad.”

  “Gee!” She admired it as she got in, sat down almost uncomfortably on the leather and looked at the dashboard. “I didn’t know you were rich,” she said.

  “We’re not.”

  “But a Cadillacl”

  “My old man just likes good cars,” Chet said.

  “Well, he must be able to afford them,” Laura said. “What does he do, Chet? You never told me anything about your family.”

  Chet sat pumping up the gas tank, his eyes fixed on the radiator cap across the gleaming hood. “He fusses around with mines,” he said. He couldn’t have told why he gave that answer. It made the old man sound richer than the Cadillac did.

  “Oh,” Laura said. Chet locked the pump and stepped on the starter. The motor purred.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Up a canyon?”

  “All right.”

  She moved over closer to him, and he dropped one hand to squeeze her knee. “Still love me?”

  “Um,” she said, and smiled her intimate, inviting, remember-last-night smile.

  “You were pretty stingy last night.”

  “Was I?”

  “You bet your cockeyed hooley you were.”

  “Maybe that’s the way I am.”

  “Maybe that’s a pretty lowdown way to be.”

  She looked up at him sideways. “Did you suffer?”

  “I didn’t sleep all night.”

  Her laugh rang out, and two girls walking along the sidewalk looked up with envy in their faces. Laura patted his arm. “Poor itty-bitty baby,” she said. “It suffered.”

  “But I’m not going to suffer any more,” Chet said. He watched her with excitement mounting in his blood to see if she’d say anything to that. But she only smiled and dug her fingers into his muscle.

  They drove up on the east bench and started out toward Big Cottonwood. At Thirty-Third South Chet hesitated, pulled the Cadillac over to the curb. He looked Laura steadily in the eyes. “I want to stop in the drug a minute,” he said.

  If she understood she made no sign. But after what had happened last night she ought to understand. She did understand, by the Lord. She was just pretending to be dumb and bashful. Exultation carried him out of the car and up to the door of the drug store. It was only after he got inside that the fear of the baldheaded clerk almost stopped him. He looked at the candy counter for a minute, and then, covering up the unease with a swagger, he went back to the furthest, most intimate corner.

  It was already three-thirty by the dashboard clock when they came down out of the canyon. Laura, although she sat close, seemed miles away, her face still and her eyes remote. Chet kept stealing looks at her, a little ashamed because he had shown up his own inexperience, a little afraid she was distant because she was disappointed in him. He gnawed his lip.

  “Still love me, honey?” he whispered.

  Her smile this time was slow and deep, and it thrilled him so that he could hardly sit still. “Ummm,” she said. That was better. He was still shaky from her tears up on the mountainside, from her passionate clinging and her stumbling words. He wouldn’t think badly of her, he mustn‘t! He knew it was only because she loved him so much, because she loved him till it choked her to look at him ...

  “Me too,” he said, sitting rigidly behind the wheel. His eye lighted on the clock. A quarter to four. Laura had missed her dinner, and he would be late with the car. God damn. Something was always getting in the way. He didn’t want to take her home now. It would have been perfect to go somewhere to eat and then go up the canyon again in the evening, with plenty of time and everything dark all around, and the lights winking down the valley.

  “I guess you’re late to that chicken dinner,” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  “What’ll we do tonight?”

  “I don’t care. Can you come down?”

  “Sure.”

  “The folks will be going to meeting at six thirty.”

  They were Mormons all right, then. “Don’t you go?” he said.

  “I haven’t gone for a year,” she said. “They think I’m a lost soul.” Her eyes flicked up to his, and she turned her face to lay her cheek against the seat. “I guess I am.”

  “I guess you’re not.”

  “Sometimes I think I could almost die, living at home,” Laura said. “They’re both suspicious all the time, and Pa’s grouchy, and the kids are always getting into trouble and stealing things. I almost hated to have you meet them. You’re so strong and clean and you don’t know what all that nagging can mean.”

  “It won’t be for long,” Chet said. He drove like a lord, weaving the Cadillac through the Sunday afternoon traffic, conscious of his hands and wrists on the wheel. He was glad she liked his hands. Great big old paws, he said. Mentally he flexed one, feeling how it could go almost around a baseball. “You won’t have to live in that much longer,” he said.

  He turned into State Street and up toward her house. As she got out of the car she hesitated, her brown eyes searching his face. “You do love me, don’t you?” she said. “We are engaged.”

  “We’re married,” Chet said. “All but paying the preacher.”

  Secretly she grabbed his hand and bent over to kiss it. She was biting her lips when she looked up. “You’re wonderful!” she said breathlessly. “Oh darling, I think you’re perfect!”

  He watched her run up the sidewalk. Then he swelled his chest and cramped the car around. She was his woman, and she thought he was perfect, and she was wonderful herself. The way she’d hardly made any fuss up there on the mountain, never pretended or made him coax ... Oh sweet patootie, he said, and wished it was six thirty.

  That made him think of his father and look at the clock. Twenty minutes past four. He’d be a half hour late. The rest of the way home his mind struggled between the need of inventing excuses for the old man and the need of remembering with wonder how fiercely Laura had met his lovemaking in that pocketed hollow under the maples and the sumac just leafing with high spring. Almost as if she were afraid he’d get up and run, as if she were scared she had to hold him to keep him ...

  His father was waiting on the back porch, his watch in his hand, his face like a thundercloud. “Is this your idea of four o‘clock?” he said.

  “We ran into some construction,” Chet said. “I’m sorry, Pa. I got home as quick as I could.”

  “It isn’t quick enough,” his father said. “When I say four I mean four, not twenty minutes to five.”

  “It’s only four thirty,” Chet said.

  “Let’s not waste any more time,” Elsa said quietly. “We can still make it down by five.”

  She motioned for Chet to go insi
de, but he remained standing by the porch. He wasn’t going to run from the old man’s blustering. The hell with him. He watched his father carry the suitcase down the steps and put it in the car, watched his mother settle herself. His father’s head bent to look at the dashboard, then jerked up. His hard eyes looked across the lawn at Chet. “I thought you said you were going to Magna.”

  “I did.”

  “You did like hell,” his father said. “I’m getting sick of your lies. You haven’t driven but thirty-three miles, and it’s more than that to Magna and back.”

  “I don’t care how far it is,” Chet said. “That’s where we went.”

  “And I say that’s a lie!”

  “Don’t call me a liar,” Chet said.

  “Why God damn you ... !” His father opened the door and started to get out, but Elsa’s hand was on his arm.

  “Bo.”

  His lips together, his breath snorting through his nose, Bo looked at Chet, standing defiantly by the porch rail. “The next time you want a car to chariot some cheap floozie around,” he said, “don’t come to me. This is the last time.”

  “That’s all right with me,” Chet said. He locked eyes with his father, who swore and jerked the car into reverse. On the way out he backed off the twin strips of red concrete that served as a drive, and gouged up a stretch of lawn. Chet didn’t even bother to laugh. He just looked contemptuously until they were out of sight.

  4

  On Monday he got his job at Magna, twenty dollars a week and a five dollar bonus to every player when they won a game. “You don’t have to do much but play ball,” the man from the smelter said. “Mornings you’ll putter around, do whatever the foreman of the bull gang finds for you. Lots of the guys spend half the morning in the can. But we want you to play ball for keeps. You’ll go to practice at three every afternoon, and twice a week you’ll play. We’re making it plenty easy for you so we can walk away with that league this summer.”

  It was pretty nifty, Van and Chet agreed. If they won most of their games they would make close to a hundred a month. They were on the gravy boat. Plenty of dough to spend.