Free The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner Page B

fair and square.”
    â€œI won forty-eight of something else, though.”
    â€œI never promised.”
    â€œWhat?” Eva said. “What did she promise?”
    â€œI didn’t promise anything.”
    â€œNow you’re welching,” Bo said.
    â€œI’m not either welching. I never promised. Besides, you’re not through yet.”
    â€œWhen I’m through you’ll welch again.”
    â€œWhat I want to know,” Eva said, “is what did she promise?”
    â€œNone of your business,” Bo said bluntly, watching Elsa.
    â€œYou hit the next fifty and I really will promise,” she said. “And when I promise anything I do it.”
    The full upper lids of Bo’s eyes made his face look slitted like a mask, but he was smiling a fixed and concentrated smile. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll remember.”
    Jud hitched himself over until he had his back against a tree. He reached down and unlaced his yellow shoes. “What I hate about being up in the daytime,” he said, “is that you have to wear shoes, and shoes hurt my feet something terrible.” He pulled one off and sighed, reached for the other. Eva squealed affectedly. “Right at the table!” she said. “Put them on again, for Heaven’s sake.”
    Bo’s heavy-lidded eyes changed expression, were veiled with scorn. “I suppose you’ve never seen Jud’s feet.”
    â€œWhere would I have seen his feet?”
    He shrugged. “Since he never wears anything but slippers, hardly, you might have seen them.”
    â€œWell, I don’t go where Jud works,” she said.
    Jud sat looking down the immense length of his legs at his stock inged toes. He wriggled them experimentally. “You talk as if my feet were an everyday attraction,” he said. “Not everybody has thirteen toes. I could make a good living in a sideshow with my feet.”
    â€œThirteen toes!” Elsa said. “Has he?”
    â€œI never bothered to count ‘em,” Bo said. “They look like a couple of cartridge belts.”
    Elegantly relaxed, his face bland and amused, looking more than ever like an actor, Jud continued to wriggle his feet. Elsa watched him, this remote and fastidious impostor who could quite easily, without showing it in the least, change the subject, get Bo and Eva away from their outspoken dislike, make everything smooth and casual again. “Want to see?” Jud said.
    â€œYou can’t scare me,” Elsa said.
    He took off one sock and showed seven toes. The other foot, he said, had only six, though there was a little nubbin that with applications of hair restorer or something might be made to grow. Eva covered her eyes and squealed at him to cover up his awful old feet, he looked like a centipede.
    From back on the grounds, over the faint musical wheezing of the calliope, came the dull boom of a shotgun. Bo looked at his watch. “I’ve got to be getting back,” he said.
    He helped Elsa stow the scattered remains of the lunch in the buggy. Jud put his shoes back on with unhurried deliberation, rose and stretched. Eva consulted her face in a little pocket mirror.
    A man, small, dark, with a red birthmark smearing one side of his face, came through the trees. He passed clusters of picnicking people, looking at them sharply as if in search of someone. Then he saw Jud, and came directly over. Eva put the mirror away and straightened her dress, but the man threw only one brief glance at the others before he led Jud out of earshot. Jud nodded, lifted his head as if musing, nodded again. They laughed together, lighting cigarettes, and stood looking back through the grounds past the colored moving specks of the merry-go-round horses. The little man bent his arm, stuck the hand out at an angle, wriggled it, his bony white hand darting like a snake’s head. Jud nodded, and the little man went away.
    â€œWho was