Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  Henry shook his head.

  “Tried to make a new road, I guess. Killed himself all to hell.”

  “What are you talking about?” Henry said.

  George shrugged. “That’s what they say. Found the pieces down the foot of Putnam’s cliff this morning. I drove by to look, but there’s troopers climbing all over it, and they won’t let you stop.”

  Callie stared out the window, perfectly still.

  “Christ,” Henry said. “Poor devil.” He shook his head, his chest light.

  George said, “Tally ho, junkman.”

  “George Loomis, you’re vile,” Callie said, whirling.

  He looked at his gloves. “Sorry,” he said, suddenly withdrawn. “I didn’t know you were related to him.”

  Henry squinted, one hand on the counter, seeing in his mind, as though it were all a part of one picture, the old man lifting his cup in a toast, George staring at his leather gloves, Callie standing with her jaw set, looking out the window. Beyond the drab hill and the deep blue mountains the sky was the color of old dry shale. He said, “What can I fix you, George.”

  He seemed to think about it a moment. Then, slowly, studiously not looking at Callie, he stood up. “I guess I better move on, Henry.” He smiled, but his eyes were still remote. “Hell of a lot to do this afternoon.” He looked down at his gloves again.

  When he’d left, Henry took a pill and went into the lean-to room in back and sat down. He could hear Callie fixing herself a hamburger, banging the scraper on the grill as if to smash it. He put his face in his hands, thinking, fighting his own urge to break things—starting, maybe, with her, and then maybe George Loomis. He could hear Jim Millet’s John Deere popping and growling on a hillside a half-mile away, and Modracek’s Farmall whining down on the flats, and the thought of good sensible grown men at their farm work, this year like last year and the year before—and a hundred thousand years before that—calmed him a little. You had to be patient with young people. It was natural for them to be pious, full of noise and sanctimonious gesture, sure of their creeds. The hell with it then. Nevertheless he clenched his fists, furious at their intrusion into the sanctuary of his tiredness, and if anything worthless had lain handy he would have smashed it. After a while he remembered he was out of cut potatoes for french fries and got up.

  Callie said, “Maybe I was wrong to snap like that.” It was an apology, not an admission, really, or so it seemed to Henry. The idea that she might actually have been wrong was the farthest thing from her mind.

  He compressed his lips. “Not wrong, exactly,” he said. He thought of a great deal he could tell her, a whole lifetime of words, in a way, and he began to get mad again. But beyond the woods the mountains stretched out tier on tier, farther than the eye could see, dark blue fading to lighter and lighter, merging with the sky, three hawks flying above the trees, getting smaller and smaller, and he couldn’t think where to begin.

  He said, “He lived alone. Why should anybody pretend to be sorry he’s dead?” His eyes filled with tears all at once.

  Callie patted his arm, passing him on her way to the sink. “Well, it’s all for the best, I suppose.”

  It was then that he exploded. “Shit,” he bellowed, and he hit the counter so hard the metal napkin dispensers tipped over and a mustard pot fell to the floor and splattered.

  She stared, frightened. “All I meant—” she began.

  But Henry stormed out to his car.

  7

  Henry Soames’ feelings about having a girl here working for him were mixed, to say the least. He’d run the Stop-Off alone for so long, summer and winter, never closing even on Christmas from one year to the next except when he went out for an hour or so for a drive or to pick up something in town, that the place had become an extension of himself. The work in the diner or out at the pumps was as natural to him as walking or breathing, and to hand over jobs to somebody else was like cutting off fingers. It might have been different if business were heavier now than it had been before; but business never changed much here—it picked up a little from July to September, when the tourists passed through (only a few of them ever came in: people too low on gas to make it to the bigger, shinier stations farther on)—but even when business hit its peak he could handle it himself. When he’d hired Callie it had never entered his mind to wonder if he needed her; but he thought about it constantly now. He wondered how long she’d be likely to stay, how much he’d let himself in for. Keeping her busy, hard worker that she was, meant that he himself had, really, nothing to do. And that was the least of it. He’d spent a good deal of his time, in the old days, sitting at the counter reading the paper or talking with some farmer about the weather. He couldn’t have Callie doing that—not at ninety cents an hour. She wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. So he made up jobs for her, jobs he’d put off year after year not only because they were unimportant but because in fact he didn’t want them done: painting the gas pumps, tearing the yellowed old signs off the diner windows, oiling the floor, planting flowers. The character of the place began to change, and it made him uneasy: He felt like a man away from home—felt, in some way he could not quite pin down, false, like a man belligerently arguing for something he didn’t believe in. Worse yet, he had to make up jobs for himself. He couldn’t very well just sit there letting Callie do all the work. So he cleaned the garage that had looked like a dog’s nest for fifteen years—sorted the bolts and put them in boxes, hung up his tools (he found seven Phillips screwdrivers he’d forgotten he had), replaced the cardboard in the windows, swept and washed the floor till you could have eaten off it. People began to comment on how nice the place looked, and business improved. That is, people he didn’t know or like began to come in and bother him with questions about the Indians or complaints about what he didn’t have on the menu. Above all, Henry regretted the loss of solitude. All his life, or all his adult life anyway, he’d thought of himself as a lonely man; but he learned the truth about himself now. If it pleased him when people came by to talk—some farmer he’d known for twenty-five years, or old Kuzitski, or Willard Freund—it also pleased him to be able to be by himself sometimes, to stretch out for a nap in the middle of the day or take off his shoes in the back room and sit with a magazine. He did it sometimes even now, but it wasn’t the same when you had to make an announcement about it and throw in some kind of excuse.

  On the other hand, he liked her, and at times it was very good to have her around. She made him positively glow, now and then. She treated him like a kindly old uncle she’d known all her life, telling him about baby-sitting with the Dart kids or her work for Mrs. Gilhooley when the thrashers came; talking about her parents, school, the time she’d gone to Albany with her cousin Bill, how much she’d saved so far for her escape to New York. In fact, sometimes he loved her like a daughter. Once when he was sitting on the customers’ side of the counter reading Scorchy Smith she came up in front of him and picked off his steel-rimmed glasses and said, “You ought to get different glasses, Mr. Soames. You look like a Russian spy.” “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” he said crossly. She smiled, and when she put the glasses back on him her touch was so gentle he felt for an instant as if time had stopped and all the sadness on earth was pure illusion.

  But even the fondness he felt for her, when he wasn’t resenting the changes she’d made in the Stop-Off and himself, was complicated. Henry Soames knew enough of life to know that, after the first warmth, Callie’s friendliness would cool. People were like that, that was all. And though he dreaded the cooling off and halfheartedly fought it by keeping out of her way sometimes, he was resigned. Callie Wells surprised him, though. She talked more and more freely with him as the days passed. Sometimes the corners of her mouth would tuck in as though with disgust, but she laughed with him sometimes, too, and they—he and she—began to understand little signs like the clearing of a throat or pursed lips intended to suppress a smile or, again, slight irritation. She seemed for the most part not to mi
nd, or rather to forgive, the weak, sentimental Soames in his blood. It came to him full force one night when he was serving a trucker.

  He was a little blond man with nervous eyes and a wide nose and a way of holding his cigarette between his thumb and middle finger. When Henry brought his coffee, the trucker said, “How’s business, Slim?”

  “Can’t complain,” Henry said rather loudly. “You?” With nothing to do but watch the man drink his coffee, Henry stood grinning behind the counter waiting for conversation.

  “Can’t complain,” the man said, looking off down the counter.

  Henry remembered what the man had said last time he’d come in, and, thinking vaguely of himself, George Loomis, old man Kuzitski, Henry leaned forward and asked, his voice low, “How’s the wife?”

  The man glanced at Callie bending over to restock the gum and candy counter. “Oh, not bad, not bad,” he said. “About the same.” He settled his teeth down over his tongue, grinning, still watching Callie.

  Henry planted his elbows on the counter and shook his head. “I sure hope things’ll work out for you.” He reached out and touched the man’s shoulder, then drew his hand back, shaking his head again.

  “No, no, everything’s dandy, thanks.” The man rubbed his shoulder as if Henry had stung it, and he got up. He tilted his head in Callie’s direction and said very softly, “Branching out, Slim?”

  At first the question seemed to make no sense. But the trucker winked—Callie was standing now with one hand on her hip—and Henry understood. He blushed, then chuckled, angry. “Hell, no,” he said, “Callie works here in front.”

  The trucker strolled over to the candy counter and smiled, his head cocked. “Buy you sumpm, honey?”

  She liked it all right. Henry couldn’t very well miss that. But she said, “No, I work here. Thanks kindly, though.” There was a kind of grim loyalty in her tone that didn’t go with the smile and the flush of pleasure in her cheeks. Henry was puzzled at first, then pleased.

  The man went on staring at her, grinning; but she wasn’t used to truckers yet, and much as she wanted to play his game—as it seemed to Henry, at any rate—she couldn’t, and her pleasure changed to something else. A kind of tightening came around her eyes, and the smile became fake. “Did you want something?” she said.

  He went on grinning, but now it was the trucker who was embarrassed. Henry went to him and said heartily, “Finest selection of candy bars in New York State. Everything fresh this week. Something for the kids?”

  Hastily, a little clumsily, the man bought a pack of Camels, threw out one last grin, and left.

  “Stop by again next time you’re passing,” Henry shouted, leaning over the counter. But the poor devil was hurrying toward his idling truck, turning up his collar against the shout. The cab door slammed and the truck clanked off up the hill, the stainless steel glinting in the moonlight.

  Henry bit his lip. The man had been afraid of him—like all the others, except Callie, maybe, or some old, old friend, or a drunk. That was what had sent him into his big-man act and finally pushed him out the door. People shied from you when you tried to get to them, talk of a wife’s sickness, a jackknifed truck, hoping to make them feel at home. And if they didn’t shy away right off, it was worse. He thought of old Kuzitski, how he, Henry, had ranted and raved at the poor old devil when it was all Kuzitski could do to keep upright, and then others, too, when Kuzitski hadn’t proved enough. He would laugh too loudly and maybe even get really excited and pound the counter, and sweat would shine on his forearms where the sleeves were rolled tight, and all on account of the weather or the weight-limit laws, the general stupidity of things. And then by God they would shy!—would run like somebody’d tried to rape them, and maybe not come back. Or if they came, they came back to stare one more time at all that fat or now, maybe, to flirt with Callie. Hell of a place for a girl like that, here where all she saw was truckers or drunks.

  (“And what do you think he does sittin’ up in his room all night?” Willard Freund had heard the man at the feedstore say. And the man had answered himself, “Why, he boozes, man! You ever seen him drive?”

  And Willard had said, looking down and cracking his knuckles, “I know it’s a stupid damn lie, Henry. I just thought you’d want to know what they’re saying.”)

  Drunk. Maybe they were right. Not drunk from whiskey, but drunk from something else, maybe. Drunk from the huge, stupid Love of Man that moved through his mind on its heels, empty and meaningless as fog, a Love of Man that came down in the end to wanting the whole damn world to itself, an empty diner, sticky places on the counter stools, bolts and old wrenches, sheer pins, cotter-keys, baling wire up to your knees on the floor of the garage. Drunk with muscle and fat and padding around in circles in a grease-stinking lean-to behind a trucker’s diner. So he pounded the counter about the weather or where he’d have gone if he’d ever lit out, or he rattle-assed through the mountains in his ’39 Ford.

  On a clear night you could make it to the top of Nickel Mountain and back, teetering in the square black Ford, the walls pinning you in like the sides of an upended coffin, bumping down gravel and macadam roads and over the warped planks of narrow bridges that rocked when you hit and echoed brrrack! through the hills and glens. The trees would slide into the headlight beams and the wind whipping through the open window made you feel like Jesus H. Christ charioting to heaven. Nickel Mountain! That was where the real hills were, even when you stayed on the highway. And when you came whamming down around a corner, letting her coast free as a hawk, you’d suddenly see the river hundreds of feet below, on your left. Even by daylight it was beautiful: flat, blue shale ledges, the black river, misty fields, and the cluttered, peeling brick houses of Putnam Settlement. But at night, with the ledges outlined in icy blue like glass, rippling panes of moonlight on the water—Christ! A trucker had gone off that spot once, poor devil. Bad brakes, probably. That was the funeral that had been up in Utica. It was a long time ago now. Ten years? Well, the man had chosen beautiful scenery for it. Beautiful. That was the big mistake in Henry Soames’ father’s life: to sit, waiting for it, in his bed. She’d done a job on him, all right.

  He ran his hands over his chest and sides. He was still staring at the door as if to hurl angry apologies at the trucker’s blackened tailpipe. Callie stood leaning on the cutting board, her hands on her hips, looking at him. When he glanced at her, she asked, “Did that man really have a wife, Mr. Soames?”

  He nodded. “Diabetes. All she can eat is Jello.” He turned heavily and put the dirty cup and spoon in the sink.

  “He’s got a nerve, then, I’d say.”

  Henry scowled, seeing her again with her hand on her cocked hip, smiling, playing with sex the way little boys play with flares along the railroad tracks—and seeing, too, the trucker, with a wife home dying, but for all that there he stood grinning at Callie like a sly old bull—and seeing himself, Henry Soames, reaching out like a fruit to pat the man’s shoulder. “I’m getting to be a damned old woman,” he said. He pulled at his upper lip.

  She didn’t dispute it. “Well, you’re a nice old woman,” she said, not smiling. She sounded tired. She turned to look out vacantly at the darkness. He found he couldn’t make out her features distinctly. Eyes burning out like the rest of him, he thought. A sharp, brief pain came into his chest then vanished, a little like a mouse peeking out of his hole then ducking back. He heard her words again in his mind, a nice old woman, and he was touched. Touched and depressed. He leaned on the front of the sink and waited for his breathing to calm. He was always waiting, these days. For customers, for the grill to heat, for night, for morning and the tuning-up of the blasted little gray and white speckled birds outside his window. How long? he wondered. Another tentative pain. He cleared his throat.

  8

  It was four nights after the trucker came that Henry found out exactly how touchy his situation was. A Saturday. George Loomis came in drunk as a lord and said, “Henry Soames, you old so
mvabitch, I come to take the place of the late Kuzitski.”

  Callie knew as well as Henry that that was merely George Loomis’s way, that the speech was as much an apology as anything else, however ugly; the only kind of apology George Loomis knew how to make. Or if she didn’t know, she was a fool. But she spun around when he said it and glared at him.

  “What a horrible thing to say!” she said.

  “Yes’m,” he said.

  She said, “You’re drunk. You ought to get home to bed.”

  “Now, Callie,” Henry said.

  “Drink’s very wicked,” George said, nodding. “ ’S the devil’s helper. Ought to be ashamed. Come sit’n my lap here tell me ’bout Demon Drink.” He lunged over the counter suddenly, snatching at her hand, but Callie dodged him. Her face went white and she said in dead earnest, “I’ll break your brains for you, George Loomis, that’s what I’ll do.”

  George sat down again, smiling as if sadly, leaning on his hand. “She’s given her heart to another,” he said, looking at Henry. He turned back to Callie, drawing himself erect. “He’s a son of a whore, Miss Wells,” he said. “I say it for your own good. He’ll get drunk every night and he’ll beat you with a stick.”

  She looked as though she really would hit him—her fists clenched, her cheek muscles taut—and Henry went over to get between them.

  “George, let me get you some coffee,” he said. He got out a cup and saucer.

  “Don’t mean no harm,” George said. “Just trying to do the Christian thing.”

  Henry nodded solemnly, filling the cup.

  “Callie’s lovely girl,” George said. “Girl with real spirit. Admire her very much.”

  Henry said, “Have some coffee.”

  “Deeply devoted to Callie Wells. Seriously considering marriage. But at the moment—” He paused, his face gray. “At the moment, sorry to say—very sick.”