by John Gardner
After a minute Henry remembered himself and chuckled, “Yes, sir, Willard’s a fine boy, Callie.” He was vaguely conscious that his fingers were drumming on the counter-top as, chuckling uncomfortably again, he glanced about to see that the percolators were clean and the chili put away.
“He really is the kindest person,” Callie said. “I’ve danced with him after the basketball games sometimes. I guess you know he wants to be a race-car driver. I think he could really do it, too. He’s terrific with a car.” Her hands stopped moving and she glanced at Henry’s chest. “But his dad wants him to go to Cornell. To the Ag School.”
Henry cleared his throat. “I think he’s mentioned it.”
He tried to picture methodical, sharp-boned Callie dancing with Willard Freund. Willard was a swan.
(Henry had sighed, helpless, sitting in the back room with Willard the night the boy had told him of his father’s plans. He’d felt old. He hadn’t stopped to think about it, the feeling of having outgrown time and space altogether, falling into the boundless, where all contradictions stood resolved. He had listened as if from infinitely far away, and it had come down to this: That night he had given up hope for Willard, had quit denying the inevitable doom that swallows up all young men’s schemes, and in the selfsame motion of the mind he had gone on hoping. For perhaps it was true that Willard Freund had everything it took to make a driver (Henry was not convinced of it, though even to himself he’d never pinned down his doubt with words; he knew only that the boy had a certain kind of nerve and a hunger to win and the notion—a notion that everyone on earth has, perhaps, at least for a while—that he was born unique, set apart from the rest), but even if it was true that he had what it took, there was no guarantee that he would keep it. Things happened as a boy got older. Speedy Cerota, the man who ran the jeep place down in Athensville, had been lightning once. He’d married a girl that drove in the ladies’ and they’d had three kids as quick as that, and one day Speedy had come in second—bad car, he said—and then fourth, then fifth, and pretty soon, without his ever knowing what had happened, it was over, he couldn’t pass a stoneboat. But as surely as Henry Soames knew that, he knew too that you never knew for sure until it happened. And even if you knew beforehand that what they wanted, the grandiose young, was stupid in the first place and impossible to get in the second, even then you had to back them. If it wasn’t for young people’s foolish hopes it would all have ended with Adam. Henry Soames thought: What could I say?
He was too old for such hopes. Nevertheless, he had rubbed his palms on his legs, that night, brooding. A vague idea of taking his mother’s money out of the bank in Athens-ville for Willard had crossed his mind. It wasn’t doing anything there—molding and drawing interest for him, Henry, who wouldn’t pick it up with a gutter fork. It had never been his any more than it was his father’s. Hers. Let her climb up over her big glassy headstone and spend it. “Remember you’ve got Thompson blood,” she would say, and his father would laugh and say, “Yes, boy, look at the bright side.” And he would feel threatened, nailed down. Sometimes even now he would bite his lip, giving way for a second to his queer old fantasy of some error by Doc Cathey or the midwife, for well as Henry Soames knew who he was, the idea that a man might be somebody else all his life and never be aware of it—live out the wrong doom, grow fat because a man he had nothing to do with by blood had died of fat—had a strange way of filling up his chest. In bed sometimes he would think about it, not making up some new life for himself as he’d done as a child, merely savoring the immense half-possibility.
But it wasn’t money that Willard would need. It was hard to say what it was that Willard needed.
“Well,” Henry heard himself saying, “yes, sir, Willard’s a fine boy, it’s a fact.”
But by now Callie was thinking of other things. Glancing around the room, she asked, “That everything that needs doing?”
He nodded. “I’ll drive you up to your house,” he said. “It’s cold out.”
“No thanks,” she said, her tone so final it startled him. “If you do it tonight you’ll end up doing it every night. It’s only a few steps.”
“Oh, shucks now,” he said. “It’s no trouble, Callie.”
She shook her head, a sort of fierce old-womanish look around her eyes, and pulled on her leather jacket.
Henry studied her, puzzled, but it was clear she wouldn’t change her mind. He shrugged, uneasy, and watched her cross to the door, then pass from the diner’s blue-pink glow into darkness, heading up the hill. Two minutes after she’d disappeared from sight he went to his lean-to room in back. He pulled off his shirt, then stood for a long time looking at the rug, wondering what it all meant.
5
As always, it was hard to put himself to bed. It had become a ritual with him, this waiting between the peeling-away of the sweat-soaked shirt from chest, belly, arms, and the unbuckling of his wide leather belt. And partly necessity, of course. His health. Doc Cathey had chortled, “You lose ninety pounds, Henry Soames, or you’re a goner. Like your old man before you. You’ll sit up in bed some one of these mornings and you’ll turn white with the effort of it, and click.” Doc had snapped his fingers, brown, bony fingers that wouldn’t go fat if you fed ’em on mashed potatoes for a month. And his voice had been aloof, amused, as though he’d gotten his JP and MD jobs mixed up. Doc sometimes did that, people said, laughing about it while Henry dished up their orders. That had been before Henry went in for his checkup; otherwise maybe he mightn’t have noticed Doc’s manner. Doc would talk to an old offender, they said, in his kindly-family-doctor voice and to an expectant mother with his high and mighty sneer. And he, Henry Soames, had paid a dollar to be told what he’d known for most of his life, right down to the click, and ten for pills, and four dollars more for the little brown bottle that ruined his appetite all right but made his belly ache like he had the worms and his eyes go yellow in the mirror. A man didn’t owe his flesh to his doctor; he could still choose his own way out. Three dollars’ worth of pharmacist’s bilge poured down the sink was maybe thirty bellyaches avoided. Old Man Soames had used whiskey for the pain, and whiskey—that and the little white pills—would be good enough for Henry.
He sat still on the edge of the bed, breathing deeply. There was a little wind outside. On the hill just beyond the lean-to window the scraggly pines were swaying and creaking. Between the pines there were maples, lower than the pines, and below the maples, weeds. As always on windy nights, there was no sign of the low-crawling fog. He sometimes missed it a little when it didn’t come. Because it brought customers, maybe. “A man gets to feeling weird,” one of the truckers had told him once. “Ten miles of sharp turns stabbing out at you from the mist, cliffs as gray as the fog itself to tell you you’re still on the road, and now and then a shadowy tree or a headlight, dead looking, everything in sight, dead. And lonely as hell. Brother.” He’d shivered, hunching his shoulders in for warmth and sucking down the coffee Henry served him on the house. From the wide front window of the diner Henry would see the fog, just after sunset, sliding down the hill like an animal; and then again sometimes the fog would just appear out of nowhere, ruminating. It would lose itself here in this pocket between two hills, and then in the morning sun it would shrink up into itself and vanish, leaving the trees, wet and the highway as hard and blue as the curved blade of a knife. The lines of the hills north and south of Henry’s Stop-Off would be sharper then, and the barns that belonged to Callie’s father would stand out like tombstones after thaw.
But tonight was a perfect night for truckers; it was foolishness to sit here hoping, if he was. Which he wasn’t. He’d had one heart attack already, and he’d never known it at the time. It took all his effort to keep his mind off that. When a man’s heart stopped, the whole machine ought to shudder, lights ought to flash in the head, the blood should roar: But his heart was scarred, and he hadn’t the faintest idea when it had happened, as if some hand had flicked a switch off, then on again,
letting the machine freewheel for an instant and then dig in as before. He might have died without ever knowing he was dying—a year, a year-and-a-half ago maybe, and all that had happened since might have been nothing.
A truck was coming up 98 now, but he wouldn’t pull in even though the neon was on, as it always was, and one of the three lights in the diner. He’d want to push on, no doubt, to please his boss or his union or the people at Morse Chain. But maybe a drunk would stop, seeing the light burning away in there like an altar lamp. The semi was speeding-up on the quarter-mile level run in front of the Stop-Off for the hill a little ways north—the hill that would rise and suddenly break, pushing your heart up out of your chest, to drive three miles down banked curves into New Carthage. The truck was rolling now, maybe up around fifty, depending on the load. The grind of gears came, meaning he was halfway up the hill, and the new engine scream pulling down to a low, pained roar; another shift, to low, to low-low, the pounding throb—far away, though—and then the purr at the peak of the hill and the purr rising, pulling back against the thrust, strangling itself on the downgrade. All a mile away now, from the sound of it; so faint that you couldn’t know how much of it you heard and how much was only a tingle in your skin.
Maybe he should get out the Ford, he thought. But no. He was tired, and he was in no mood, these days, for rattleassing over the hills, thanks to this tightness in his chest. A bad sign, no doubt. He’d have to draw up his will, as Doc Cathey had told him.
Outside it was quiet now, except for the light breeze. He could smell rain. It would be a good idea to check the cardboard in the window; easier than getting up after he was in bed, when the rain, if it should come, would be batting down and seeping over his dusty windowsill and onto his neatly stacked books—down over the pitiful leather-bound Bible that had belonged to his father and had his father’s and his father’s father’s names penned into it under “Deaths,” between the Old and New Testaments. No other names; no wives, no children. The Bible had ridges across its back like the ridges on one of his mother’s people’s lawbooks, which was funny, when you thought of it, because a lawbook was what it had been for his father. And that too was funny, because now it had a fermented, museum smell from the rain that always seeped onto the books no matter how careful you were with the window beforehand.
Beside the old Bible he could see his father’s anemic-looking schoolbooks and, on the shelf below, National Geographics, Shakespeare, an old almanac with notes in the margin, written in his father’s childish hand. These books, too, had the musty smell, and something more complicated: a burnt-out, un-lived-in smell like—he had to think a moment—a hotel room. A sudden, unexpected feeling of guilt bloomed inside him, pushing up through his neck. He knew what it was for an instant, but then he had lost it again. He concentrated his gaze on the books, but whatever it was that had come to him was gone.
“Damn rotten shame,” he said aloud, vaguely.
His father had been a dairyman first, Henry remembered his mother’s saying, and he’d failed at it, no doubt because of the pain of hauling his weight like a twelve-foot cross from cow to cow. After that the poor devil had sold apples from his orchard, and then, or perhaps before that, he’d raised sheep, painted roadsigns, clerked in the feedstore in Athensville. Nothing had worked. In spite of his tonnage, he had been a sentimental dreamer, as Henry’s mother had put it. “Should’ve been a monk.”—Making sure her little Henry would not trudge in his father’s footsteps. One job after another would cave in under his father, and she, who came from a fair-off family, lawyers mostly, would give him just barely enough of her money to set him up in the new project which, sure as day, would fail. He was as simple and harmless all his life as a great, fat girl. It was the floundering harmlessness, no doubt, that Henry’s mother had hated in him. And so she’d driven him to schoolteaching at last. Because, she had said, he’d been through high school and couldn’t do anything but read books. “You don’t need capital for teaching school. Maybe it’ll make a man of you,” she’d said. And so Henry’s father had suffered the final indignity, plopped sweating in front of people like Frank Wells, enduring their pranks as a woman would, with his own son in the classroom, and in between times teaching them multiplication and poetry and Scripture. Which explained why Henry’s mother’s name had not been put in the Bible under “Deaths.” It was hard to say why his grandmother’s name wasn’t there. Maybe his father’s womanishness had become, at last, a hatred of women in general, or at any rate a refusal to admit that they lived and died. His last delusion: that here at least, between the Old and New Testaments, a man stood on his own. (But Doc Cathey had said once, pushing his crooked knuckles down in his coat’s side pockets and shaking his head, “Solid as stone your daddy was. Solid as stone.”)
He fitted his hands down beside his legs on the edge of the bed, feeling the power in his fingers. He leaned forward over his knees and pushed up slowly. He made his way to the window above the books.
The cardboard windowpane was snug, this time. It wouldn’t let the water in no matter how bad the storm. He ran two fingers over the spine of the Bible.
The ridges on the leather were dry and cracked, but queerly slippery like the petals of an old pressed flower. Inside, it was as though someone had ironed every page, scorching the paper a little and making it brittle. The two names, his grandfather’s and his grandfather’s father’s, had been scribbled in hastily and were almost unreadable. Henry frowned, not so much thinking as waiting for a thought to come. He laid the Bible down gently and went up front again for the ballpoint pen.
When he’d written in the names, with all the dates he could remember, he half-closed the book, then paused and stood for perhaps two minutes staring at the gold on the edges of the pages. He racked his brains for what it was that had slipped his mind, that had come and vanished again in an instant as he wrote, but then, discovering nothing, he put the Bible back where it went and, after another pause, recrossed the room. Standing across the room from the bookshelf he could see the prints his hands left in the smooth skin of dust on the Bible’s cover.
He lowered himself onto the bedside and closed his eyes for a moment. In his mind, or under his eyelids, he could still see the gold tooling on the Bible, and beyond it a pattern of crisscrossed distances. Slowly the lines seemed to form letters, a name in gold. He felt his forehead muscles tightening, and the nerves trembled in the back of his neck. But before he knew what it was he was dreaming, he was awake again, staring at the Bible as before, or almost as before: staring from a new point in time now, perhaps only minutes after the other, perhaps several hours.
(What would he have missed if he’d died, that first time? Had anything happened? Anything at all?)
While he slept, that night, old man Kuzitski’s light blue junk-truck wandered off the road, nudged through the guard rail, and rolled down a sixty-foot embankment. Everything burned but the door, which fell free and lay in a blackberry thicket (the branches still gray and limp this early in the spring), the lettering clear and sharp in the moonlight: S. J. Kuzitski · Fl 6-1191.
6
George Loomis pulled in a little before noon, on his way back up from Athensville to his place on Crow Mountain. He left the pickup idling by the side of the diner as he always did—George’s truck was a devil to start—and he came in whistling, cheerful as a finch. He slid off his old fatigue cap and slid himself onto the counter stool by the cash register in one single motion, and he banged on the counter-top with his gloved fist and said, “Hey, lady!”
Callie smiled when she saw who it was. “Why, George Loomis!” she said.
He was close to thirty, but he had the face of a boy. He’d had more troubles in his almost thirty years than any other ten men in all the Catskills—he’d gotten one ankle crushed in Korea so that he had to wear a steel brace around one of his iron-toed boots, and people said he’d broken his heart on a Japanese whore so that now he secretly hated women; and when he’d come home, as if that wasn�
��t enough, he’d found his mother dying and the farm gone back to burdocks and Queen Anne’s lace. But there wasn’t a sign of his troubles on his face, at least not right now.
“You working here now, Callie?” he said.
“Couple three days,” she said.
He shook his head. “You don’t let that old fat bastard push you around, hear? And make sure he pays you cash. Tightest damn man in seven counties.”
“George Loomis, you ought not talk that way,” Callie said soberly. But then she laughed.
“How come you’re out in broad daylight, George?” Henry said.
“Oh, every once in a while I like to remind myself how things look.” Then: “Been to Athensville with a load of grist.”
“Smash your hammermill, George?” Henry said.
“Not me,” he said, very serious. “Damn shovel did it. You care to buy a good shovel, Henry? Assemble it yourself?”
Henry laughed and Callie looked puzzled, as if she got it all right but didn’t see anything funny about it. George said, “You hear about old man Kuzitski?” still smiling.