The Big Rock Candy Mountain Read Online Free Page B

his wife can both be clean same time.”
    â€œMust take a lot of water.”
    â€œOh, they’ve got water to burn. Gigantic well just outside, clean pure alkali water, no more than seven dead cats in it at any time.”
    â€œYou don’t sound as if you liked the hotel much.”
    â€œI love it,” he said. “I love it so much I live there. I love this whole town. Just the spot for an ambitious young man to make his fortune.”
    Curiosity uncoiled itself and stretched. She took a peek at the swinging doors behind him. Maybe he wasn’t doing so well in his place. Bowling alley, was it? All she could see was a dark stretch of bar and two dim yellow lamps in wall brackets. Into the bright hot sunlight came the jaded click of pool balls.
    â€œWhat’re you doing, really?” Bo said.
    â€œNothing. I thought I might help Uncle Karl in the store.”
    â€œLet’s go have a soda.”
    Elsa hesitated, her eyes on the darkly polished bar inside. It looked almost like a saloon, but she knew saloons were prohibited in North Dakota. Her curiosity rose on tiptoe, peering. “Why, that’d be nice,” she said.
    Instead of turning into his own place, he took her arm and led her down to the corner. “Why can’t we have it in your place?” she said. “Then you wouldn’t have to pay for it.”
    His look was amused. “You want to go in my place?”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œNaw,” he said, and moved her along. “My place is a billiard hell. It’s a man’s joint. You’d scare away my two customers.”
    â€œBut you sell drinks, though, soft drinks?”
    â€œSoft enough. But Joe down here makes better sodas.”
    She wondered if he might be running an illegal saloon. That ought, according to what the Reverend Jacobsen had always said, to make him one of the undesirable element. Looking at him again, curiously, she saw only that he looked clean, brown, athletic. She didn’t ever recall seeing a man who looked so clean. Either the respectability she had been brought up in was narrow, or Bo Mason wasn’t one of the bad element. But he drank beer, and told stories that weren’t always quite nice. But so did her uncle, and he was respectable. And so did Helm, and Helm was a woman.
    Sitting at the sticky marble slab of counter sipping sodas, they laughed a great deal and gurgled through the newfangled straws. By the time she had left him to go home she had decided that he couldn’t possibly be one of the bad element, in spite of his billiard hell. The bad element were distinguishable by their evil faces, their foul mouths, their desire to trample everything decent and clean underfoot. Bo Mason wasn’t anything like that. He was cleaner than anything. Even while he stood on the sidewalk just before she left he was trimming his nails with his pocket knife. She noticed too how cleanly the blade cut the thick soft nail, and she was enough a farm girl to respect a man who kept his tools sharp. Moreover, he had been all over, worked at a dozen different things, talked easily about Chicago and Milwaukee and Minneapolis, the places that had been golden towers on her horizons for eighteen years.
    The thought of what her father might say if he knew she had had a soda with a man who ran a pool hall made her almost laugh aloud. Even if he ran an undercover saloon, blind pigs they called them, it didn’t make any difference. She was a grown woman, and could have sodas with anyone she chose. If she found a saloon-keeper who was clean, and interesting, and pleasant, she would have a soda with him any time she pleased. The sidewalk ended and she jolted herself stepping unexpectedly down.
    As she passed Helm’s yard she heard the racket, the shrill, snapping snarl of a dog, Helm’s voice swearing, the sudden yipe of a mongrel hurt. “Now, God damn it, will you lay still?” she heard Helm say. The dog yiped