Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  The troopers looked at each other, and at last the younger one shook his head. “Well, thanks for your time,” he said. He looked over at the older one again, and they both stood up. The older one put two dimes on the counter, and then they walked over to the door. The older one said, nodding toward Simon but looking at Henry, “He’ll be here if we need him?”

  After a second, Henry nodded.

  Simon said all at once, earnestly, “I’m sorry.”

  They looked at him as one might look at a sideshow freak—mildly curious, mildly embarrassed. The younger one smiled at Henry and shook his head; then they went out to their car. Henry and George watched them pull away. When they were out of sight, over the crest of the hill to the south, Henry wiped his forehead on his sleeve. Callie’s mother blew her nose on a paper napkin and went over, sniffing, to refill the matchbook box by the cash register. “I don’t know what came over me,” she said.

  “Now, just don’t you think about it,” Henry said.

  George Loomis slid onto the stool beside Simon and bent down to look into his eyes. “What does the devil look like, exactly, Simon?” he asked.

  “Now that’s enough, George,” Henry said.

  8

  Henry had not defended Simon Bale in order to win his love or praise; nothing of the kind. But he was shocked to find how little it meant to Simon. When he said, as he was getting George Loomis his coffee, “Don’t you worry, Simon, we won’t let them go after you that way again,” Simon merely waved, his face falling into that idiot’s smile, and said, “Oh, no importance.” His hands were folded and quiet now. Henry said, “No importance if they put you in jail?” “Ah, well,” Simon said. He looked up at the ceiling.

  George Loomis said, “If you think it’s God’s will that you’re sitting here, mister, you’re mistaken. God and the devil are out watching the sparrow, and all you got to look to is that man right there.” He pointed at Henry.

  Simon studied George exactly as the troopers had looked, a few minutes ago, at Simon.

  George ignored him at first. He got out his cigarettes and shook one out on the counter, put the crumpled pack away in his jeans again, and got out his matches. When Simon continued to stare, George turned irritably and said, “Come on off it now, Simon. We’re all friends here. No point you sitting there spreading the crap about God and all his legions.” He lit the cigarette.

  “Now I mean it, leave him alone, George,” Henry said.

  “Why? Does Simon Bale leave people alone? Simon Bale, I bring you Good News.” He drew on the cigarette and blew a huge cloud of smoke at the ceiling. Simon looked up at it. “Simon—” He leaned toward him. “There is no God. You got that? Absolute truth, and people that say there’s a God only do it for one of two reasons—because they’re fools or because they’re vicious. Clap your hands twice if you understand.”

  Callie’s mother was looking outraged again: It was as if she’d explode any minute. It might have seemed funny to Henry another time, but right now he was sorry for her; she was in the right. He said, “George, shut up. Have a little consideration.”

  “Why?” He looked up, and he saw Henry nod toward Callie’s mother, and he looked down again in disgust and swung around toward the counter and scowled at his coffee. “Hell,” he said, “Ellie knows I’m kidding.”

  “God forgive you for your blaspheming,” Simon said softly, as if absentmindedly, watching the smoke go up from George’s cigarette.

  Suddenly, after thinking about it first, George Loomis hit the counter with his fist and said, “Shit! If you don’t have to listen to the truth from me, I don’t have to listen to your crackpot drivel. Now shut your goddamn teeth.”

  Henry caught his breath.

  Callie’s mother said, “He’s kidding, he says. You’re truly a card, George.”

  Two men came in behind George and Simon. They were laughing as they came through the door, and they seemed not to notice that anything was wrong as they glanced at the four of them and walked past them to the booth at the end. Ellie went over to them, her lips drawn taut. “Just like summer out,” one of them said. She smiled grimly.

  “What I want to know,” George said quietly, “is how come you put up with all this crap from him.” He looked up at Henry, then down again. “I’ll tell you why you do. It’s because you think he’s a moron. If you thought he had the same brains as anybody else you’d try to talk sense into him, but you don’t. Or her,” he said still more softly, jerking his thumb toward Ellie, over by the customers. He dropped almost to a whisper. “She’s as cracked as Simon, and you know it damn well, with all her hymn singing an’ carrying on. And if she’s better than Simon it’s only because she’s worse. He goes around trying to save people in his crackpot way; she believes they’re all damned, and she figures, ‘Ah, screw ’em.’” She came around to the grill and he shut up.

  “What’s the matter with you, George,” Henry said. “I never saw you like this. You must’ve been mad already before you got here. There’s nothing here could get you as worked-up as that.”

  “The hell,” he said. “Nobody ever says anything because he believes it, is that it? If I come out against burning Jews it’s because I’ve got gallstones.”

  “Simon’s no Nazi,” Henry said.

  George thought about it, his shoulders hunched, head slung forward. He said, not turning toward Simon, “You know what the Jews say about Jesus, Simon? They say he was a fraud. There’s a word for him, they say. Megalomaniac. He may have said lots of good things, I don’t know, but when a plain ordinary human being thinks he’s God, the fact is he’s a nut. That’s what the Jews say. Or do you think maybe he was just pretending—for the good of mankind, because philosophy goes over better if you salt it with superstition?”

  Simon said nothing, watching the smoke.

  “You say he was a human being, George,” Henry said.

  “Sure. And Simon would burn me too. But were you there? Do you really know?” He remembered his coffee and drank it down at once, hot as it was.

  “That’s nothing to do with it. Nobody knows.” He was going to say more, but George said:

  “That’s right. And yet a man that’ll burn you over something nobody in all this world knows and most people think is a whole lot of crap—”

  “Yet you’d do the same on the opposite side! What’s the difference?”

  “You’re right, yes I would.” He pushed his cup away. “I’d burn up all the holy bigots on earth, all the death-wishers that ever lived, if you can call it living. There’s not one in a million of ’em that’s honest. Not one! You think anybody in this world’s so stupid he can honestly believe in the man with the beard in the sky? What does it mean? Heretic fires and Jew fires and scientist fires, noble wars against conveniently rich pagans. Pah!”

  Simon Bale said, “The desire of the wicked shall perish. Thus saith the Lord.”

  “And I say, ‘Pah,’ ” George said.

  Callie came in the back door with Jimmy and started over to the booth to the right of the door with him, to give him his supper. She looked over at George, then kept on walking, holding Jimmy’s hand. Her mother went over to her and they started to talk in low voices, never looking in the direction of the counter. Jimmy peeked around behind his grandmother’s back. George went on ranting, his voice low and brimming with disgust, but Henry could listen with only half his mind. He wanted to concentrate on the argument—there was something important that wasn’t getting said, he couldn’t just yet say what, though he knew it was there—but more customers had come in now: a family, people on a trip of some kind, the man stocky and tired-looking, wearing sunglasses, a blue short-sleeved shirt; the woman fat and blonde, a light green dress with white circles on it, brown and white shoes; the little boy (seven or eight) in jeans and a T-shirt and a New York Yankees baseball cap. Henry filled water glasses and went over to them. “Evening,” he said. (George was saying behind him: “Religion’s strictly a gimmick people use to get power over ot
her people. You want to know who says ‘God’ more often than a minister? A politician. Fact.”)

  “Beautiful country you got here,” the man said. He had reddish hair, almost all of it gone from the top of his head, and where he was bald he had freckles.

  “Yes, sir,” Henry said. “Best country I ever saw.” They laughed, even if the joke was not very clear. “Only country I ever saw. Ha, ha,” he added, too late. They laughed again.

  “Hope you’ve got cooking like your scenery,” the woman said, “I’m famished.”

  Henry said, wide-eyed, faintly excited as he always was when he became the spokesman for all the region, “I never heard of anybody leaving the Catskills hungry!”

  They laughed joyfully; he could have reached out for their hands. The boy said: “You got hamburgers?”

  “House specialty,” Henry said. They laughed.

  George Loomis was saying: “If I was your kid and I took up smoking, would you whip me for it, Simon? Is it a sin, smoking? It gives you cancer, yes, everybody knows that—though on the other hand it can sometimes save you a nervous breakdown—but is it a sin?”

  Simon said, “I will praise the Lord with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, and in the congregation.”

  “Fuck the congregation’s bloody cunt,” George Loomis said. He stuck out his lower lip and chin, like a child gone insane.

  Henry left the tourists looking over the menu, because the woman was one that would take a long time, he knew the type. When he got back to the counter the truckers were ready to pay up. Callie’s mother was sitting across from Callie and Jimmy, and they were leaning toward each other like gossips. Jimmy was watching George, paying no attention to his supper. One of the truckers said, “Boy they really go at it, eh, Slim?”

  Henry shook his head, smiling (but he felt frustrated, cross. There were things that weren’t getting said. He wanted to make them shut up and think a minute, talk sense). He rang up the truckers’ checks.

  “Henry,” George shouted over to him, “I ask you man to man if it’s not a fact that there isn’t any devil and there isn’t any God, and even if there is, a man who doesn’t believe in God lives a better life than a man who does. Now I want you to tell me the truth.” Henry started to answer, but George said: “A man that thinks he’s righteous is deadly, you know it. He takes credit for things he’s got nothing to do with—accidents like his living where he happens to live and knowing exactly the people he knows. He thinks he’s Jesus H. Christ and it makes him arrogant.”

  But the family in the booth was ready now. “Some other time,” Henry said. He went over to the family in the booth.

  The man said, “I guess I’ll try that beef sandwich, Slim.”

  Henry got out his checkpad.

  By the time Henry had their orders ready, more people had come. It was the busy time, and he saw there was no hope now of his getting back to the argument. Callie and Jimmy had finished eating, and Callie left Jimmy sitting in the corner with a couple of toy trucks while she and her mother helped Henry keep up. George and Simon, the next time Henry got back to them, were gulping down food, still arguing—or rather, George still arguing, Simon still sitting tense and silent for long stretches, then suddenly breaking in angrily with some long quotation from the Bible. Then Doc Cathey was there, standing with his hands in his suitcoat pockets and his glasses down his nose, picking his teeth with his tongue and looking mad as the devil. He said, “You sound like a Commie, George.” “Damn right I do,” George said. “Fine, that’s the spirit,” Doc Cathey said. “You turn over half your farm to Simon Bale and I’ll believe you. But till then I’ll tell you right out it’s nothing but lies.” They were shouting, all three of them now, Simon saying, “Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil.” But nobody especially noticed the shouting. The diner was full now—four truckers laughing loudly about a story of another trucker in Pennsylvania who’d fixed a cop that was tailing him too close, Jim Millet telling about a fellow he’d fixed a tire for last night on 99, Nick Blue and Walt Forrest’s hired man talking about the new houses going up this side of New Carthage, two men in business suits, salesmen maybe, talking about how some Chevy place gave away free flowers every time a lady bought a new Corvette. It was a time of day Henry normally liked, the supper hour when the whole room began to hum and the walls when you put your fingertips on them shivered like the top of the piano when somebody was playing it. He would sink down into that bustle the way he would sink down into warm river water, and he would be sorry for people who weren’t caught up, as he was, in the buzzing, blooming confusion. But tonight he was eager for the time to be over. There were a hundred things he wanted to say, and every few minutes he would glance over where George and Simon and Doc Cathey were, to see if they were still there. (Doc Cathey was saying: “All Reds are liars. That’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of fact. You take a man that’s spent years breeding coonhounds. You tell that man he’s got to pass his hounds around among people that don’t know a hound from a cow, and that man will cave your head in, and rightly so.”)

  Callie said, “Henry, why don’t you break them up?”

  “How can I?” Henry said.

  She said, “They’re bothering the others. I mean it. They’re yelling like a bunch of drunkards.”

  But then Callie’s mother came and told him the dishwasher had quit, and he had to hand over his counter checks to Callie and go fix it. It was the usual trouble, the belt underneath, and as usual it took him half an hour to get it fixed. When he got back, Doc Cathey was gone. Most of the others were gone, too; there were only six people left, four of them people who’d been there before he went in to the dishwasher, two of them truckers who’d just come in. George was saying, letting smoke out with the words, “I can’t talk to you. You’re cracked.” Simon sat with his shoulders pulled in like a man wrapped tightly in rope, his fists under his chin. It was dusk outside, almost dark. George got up and paid his check, and Henry walked over to the door with him.

  George said, “What in hell did you bring him here for? Boy, I just can’t make you out.”

  “He didn’t have anywheres to go,” Henry said.

  “Crap.” He pushed open the screen a crack and spat. “You bring home every rattler you find in the weeds?”

  “I don’t shoot at everything that moves on the theory it might be a rattler.”

  George Loomis looked out at the road. “I guess that makes you Jesus, don’t it.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, George,” Henry said.

  George nodded, then shook his head.

  “Don’t go away mad, George,” Henry said. He gave a little laugh.

  “Let me ask you just one thing,” he said. “Does it make you feel righteous, taking him in out of the cold like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The hell you don’t.”

  Henry held fire a second, then he let go. “It’s a question nobody in his right mind would bother to answer,” he said. “You, now, you can feel righteous all right, but anybody else it’s a dirty word. If I feel righteous for taking him in I’m a bastard, and if I don’t I’m a fool, because there’s no reason for taking him in except to give myself the thrill of righteousness, according to you.”

  George said, smiling but hissing it at him, “And why did you take him in?”

  “Get out,” Henry said. “I mean it. Get out of here.”

  George put his hat on.

  “He’s the devil,” Simon Bale said, right at Henry’s elbow. “The devil is in him.” Bale’s eyes were fire. Henry looked furiously past him. “May the devil have no power in this house,” Simon said. He was in deadly earnest.

  Henry said, “Damn you, Simon, shut up before—”

  “You tell ’im, Lord,” George said. He left.

  9

  Henry Soames was less and less sure, as the days passed, why it was he’d taken on the role of friend and protector to Simon Bale. His mother-in-law appeared day after day
, saying nothing, butting in on his affairs and condemning him for his own mismanagement only by her presence. Because of the way he’d let the thing drag on, Callie scarcely spoke to him now from morning to night. Once when Doc Cathey came in and made some stupid remark (Henry could no longer remember it) and Henry had blown up at him, Callie had said with quiet rage, “Are you satisfied? Henry, when are you going to have had enough?” On Sunday morning, the second week of his stay, Simon Bale went out on his calls, and Henry was so angry he felt sick—angry at something he couldn’t even name: not the people who would be thinking, He comes from Henry’s place, glides down from his cool tranquility to our poor ordinary mortal domain where you earn your keep by the sweat of your fucking brow; not angry at Simon, exactly, either, whose materialization on some country porch carried, inevitably, the sanction Henry had never given and whose preaching was, insidiously, the word from Henry Soames; not angry, even, at himself, because what he had done was beyond stupidity or wisdom, it was what it was, pure and simple, old clothes on a clothesline, neither bad nor good, merely there, the inevitable and inexorable law of Henry’s constitution. Seeing Simon slumped down again, accused and no more able to answer than a fat, stupid sheep could answer his butcher, Henry would do it all again, this time knowing even as he did it the complete absurdity of what he did; and seeing the woman’s blistered, naked body in the morgue, in the gloom and the inexhaustible stench of the hospital’s bowels, he’d react to even that as he’d done before, would raise her up at his own incredibly excessive expense, and would feel the same useless irrelevant remorse at having done what it was impossible for him not to do, and, as before, he’d no doubt by the very necessity of his nature keep the thing as secret as he could, revealing it only in the form of cryptic red entries in his books.

  So that if Henry had no reasons for having taken Simon in, he nevertheless accepted the fact that he’d done it and couldn’t get out of it now, come hell or high water—and they would. George Loomis and Doc Cathey still came in from time to time, but between them and Henry there was a coolness now that none of them could dispel. Ironically—as Henry saw—George Loomis’s anger was partly at what Henry was doing to himself, letting Simon Bale take over his house, pervert his natural feeling for justice to a sick kind of pity, turn his diner into a beggar’s banquet, rob him of all he had ever saved, all he had every right to call his own. And partly, of course, George’s anger was the effect of just and reasonable envy. The two of them had been close once, and it was unforgivable that Simon should have Henry’s ear, should be free to talk nonsense without fear of contradiction or reproach, and George Loomis not. What right had Simon Bale to dawdle in Henry Soames’ garden or dispossess him of his bench? But he was there, apparently settled there more or less permanently; he showed no sign of going down again to the Grant Hotel. Thinking about that gulf yawning wider and wider between himself and George, Henry Soames would clench his fists in anger. He would rather have George to talk to, late at night; there was no question about that. George was brighter, even if he was sometimes irascible and overbearing; and he’d been around longer—though by now Simon Bale seemed to have been here, not only inside Henry’s house but inside his skin, forever. And George was not, like Simon, a bore. They would fight far into the night, in the old days, battling over nothing at all with splendid thrusts and sallies and glorious alarums, never knowing for sure who was winning or who was losing and not caring much, since nobody ever really lost in those airy wars. But it was different now. Though they still talked, they talked as if from opposite ends of an expanding universe: because one of them no longer talked with his own voice or defended what he could honestly consider his own kingdom.