Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  Henry’s eyes widened and he waved at Callie. “Get a pan,” he said.

  She jumped, then ran to the sink for the chili pan and brought it over. George vomited. When he was through, they got him into the lean-to room in back and stretched him out on a blanket on the rug. He fell asleep at once. Henry kneeled beside him, patting his shoulder as he would a child’s, shaking his head.

  “Why do people do things like that?” Callie said. She stood in the doorway, her head leaning back on the frame and her eyes narrowed. The white of her blouse stood out sharply against the pale red neon glow on the diner window behind her.

  “That’s what love does to a man,” Henry said, meaning it as a joke but getting the tone wrong. He got up. He knew well enough that love was not George’s trouble. If somebody else had been there instead of Callie it would have been somebody else that George admired very much. Callie said, “Pah.”

  He seated himself on the edge of the bed feeling old as the world. George Loomis looked dead, lying on the floor with the steel brace on his boot sticking out below the bottom edge of the cover. He looked as if he’d fallen there from a great height. Callie’s face was drawn to a half-wince as though she could barely stand the smell.

  A kind of excitement began to rise in Henry Soames’ stomach. It was important, all at once, that Callie understand the confused and complicated emotions he’d never been able to find words for even to himself. He pulled at his right hand with his left and rocked toward her a little. “George Loomis is a fine boy,” he said. Then, in confusion, “And Wil-lard’s a fine boy, too. And you’re a fine girl, Callie.” She watched with her head drawn back a little, eyebrows lowered. And then suddenly he was babbling, telling her—and though it enraged him, he couldn’t stop—about how his mother had hated his father, about old man Kuzitski’s sister, about darkness and the sound of rain in his childhood. The words came out every which way, jumbled poetry that almost took wing but then pulled down into garble and grunt, and he got to his feet and went to her and closed his hands on her arms, hissing at her, his eyes full of tears, until, abruptly, her eyes wide, she pulled away. They stood still as two trees, hardly breathing.

  “I’m sorry,” he moaned, covering his face with his clenched fists.

  She didn’t move or speak for a long while. Then she said, keeping her distance, “You’d better get some sleep, Henry.”

  He went back to the bed, careful not to step on George, and sat down again, as miserable as he’d ever been in his life. “I meant,” he said after a deep breath, “that people—” He let it trail off.

  She stood silent, watching him as if from far away. Then she said, “Here, I’ll help you off with your shoes.”

  “Don’t trouble,” he said, grieved at having made her feel she was partly to blame, or grieved because he’d made a fool of himself and had left her no way to get free from him except by a gesture of charity, the kind of gift one gives to cripples. But she ignored him and came to kneel between him and the inert George Loomis. Her collar was low, open, and he could see the slight blue-white curve of her breasts. When she glanced up and saw that he was looking at her a paleness came to her cheeks and she raised one hand instinctively to her collar. He shifted his gaze to his own huge belly and said nothing, pushed to the final humiliation.

  She sat back on her heels and said, “Is that better?”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You mustn’t let me keep you this late again. I can’t tell you—”

  “It’s all right,” she said. Her lips formed an angry pout, but the anger seemed to have nothing much to do with him. It was as though she too, at sixteen, was growing old.

  He seemed to stare at her for several minutes, meeting her eyes, but then he realized she was gone. For a moment he wasn’t quite sure she’d been here at all. In his mind he saw, all at once, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wells eyeing a nervous, stoop-shouldered trucker who wanted to marry their daughter. And he could see the glee of old man Cathey, when the service was over, kissing the bride—a dear-old-family-doctor, not a JP kiss. Henry pulled off his shirt, then sat in nothing but his trousers, trying to rearrange the words and gestures into something that would express his huge, jumbled thoughts. He clenched his fists, struggling to keep her from kneeling in front of him again in his memory. But the memory changed for the worse. In his dreams that night the Soames in his blood rose again and again like a gray-black monster out of a midnight ocean: He dreamed of himself in bed with her, misusing her again and again violently and in ungodly ways. Then, disgusted with himself, his chest burning, he found himself half-sitting on his bed with sunlight in his room and the sound of birds. George Loomis sat against the wall across from him, his eyes tight shut, both his hands clinging to his head. He opened his eyes for an instant, then snapped them shut again.

  “People are no damn good,” George said.

  Henry could hear the churchbell ringing very faintly, far away, at the New Carthage Salem Baptist Church.

  “Oh, well,” he said, shrugging, sagging where he stood. He thought about it, or thought about things in general, then sighed and nodded. “Ah, well,” he said.

  9

  Willard Freund had found out about some fool contest, first prize a thousand dollars. By God he knew as much as anybody, he said, about customizing cars. He had to read Henry the contest rules in the magazine, and he had to show him the drawings he’d done this afternoon. They went to the lean-to room in back, and Henry sat down on the side of his bed and closed his eyes, listening to Willard read. Willard read slowly, like a man reading nothing but headlines or a lawyer stressing the importance of every phrase. When Henry would look at him, frowning a little, trying not to seem too skeptical, Willard would lean over the table farther, reading more slowly and insistently than before. It went on and on, stipulation on stipulation, and Henry’s mind wandered to when he’d been Willard Freund’s age. Old hollyhocks and the yellow brick houses of Putnam Settlement, over by the mountain, rose rectangular and dull in Henry’s mind. People he’d known a long time ago came back to him, and people who’d been younger then, still full of life. There was his father, huge and motionless as a boulder down in the bottom of a gorge, and Doc Cathey, parchment-skinned, grinning, swinging his serpentine walking stick, squinting over his cheekbones. There was Callie’s mother, soft and white and bosomy in those days, and Willard’s father, sly and casual, drawing out the faults of a holstein while arithmetic clicked behind his fat-lidded eyes. They’d had great hopes in those days. There were important things to do.

  “Damn it, Henry, it’s a natural,” Willard said. “Christ, they’ve ruled out all the real competition. No pros, no relatives of GM or Fisher or anybody that counts! And look!” He spread out his drawings and Henry got up and went over to the chair across from Willard. He adjusted his glasses and drew the nearest of the drawings to him. A needle-nosed, wing-fendered car, high in back, tortuously drawn on yellow paper.

  “I thought you wanted to drive, Willard,” Henry said.

  “Hell’s bells, I could drive to the moon and back on a thousand dollars.” He jabbed at the paper with one squared, big-boned finger. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Willard,” he said. “God knows I don’t know much about designing cars.”

  “What do you think, though?” He was squinting, his cheek muscles tensed, watching Henry’s face.

  Henry looked down at the paper again, first through his glasses, then over them, and Willard got out a cigarette and lit it.

  Henry said, “It’s a fine-looking car all right.” Then: “There is one thing, maybe. It doesn’t look—” He couldn’t find the way to say it. He tried to shrug it off, back down and merely praise the car, but Willard pressed him and, finally, feeling like a fool, he let it come out: “It doesn’t look like you.”

  “It what?” Willard said, half-standing up.

  “I told you I—”

  “Well what in hell is it supposed to mean?” He couldn’t decide whether to be
mad or puzzled. “Look, maybe it’s really crap or something, and maybe I didn’t draw it so pretty, but it is supposed to be a car, I wasn’t trying to make a picture of my goddamn face.”

  Henry pulled hard at his lip, trying to think, and his seriousness, if nothing else, made Willard calm himself and wait. “Put it this way,” Henry said. “It doesn’t look like anybody, it just looks like a picture of a car. Take old Kuzitski’s truck. It looked like Kuzitski, you know what I mean?”

  He shook his head, cross.

  “Well, take Burk’s secondhand Cadillac, then. Would you have a car like that?”

  It was useless, of course. The more he argued the less Willard saw it. Henry flipped through the magazine, pointing to cars and their drivers—and the truth was, the more he pointed the less Henry Soames saw it himself. He sat with his chair close to Willard’s now, his arm around Willard Freund’s shoulders, and though smoking was sure to kill him, Doc Cathey said, he smoked his pipe, for Willard smoked cigarettes like a trucker, one after another.

  He quit at last. “Maybe it’s nonsense,” he said. “I guess it is.” And he tried to talk merely about how the air would flow, where the weight would sit—things he knew for sure he knew nothing about.

  When they talked about Willard’s father and farming and old Kuzitski’s accident—all this later that night—Willard smoked less and Henry quit. The boy crossed his knees and leaned back in his chair across the room from Henry just as Willard’s father always had, or had when Henry had known him. They seldom met now. And yet even at moments like this Willard Freund did not quite seem at ease.

  “Sorry, Willard,” Henry said as Willard left, a little after one-thirty.

  Willard smiled, cocking his head, looking off over Henry’s shoulder. “Don’t matter,” he said. “I guess the whole thing’s a pretty dumb idea.”

  “I never said that,” Henry said seriously.

  “No. Well, we’ll see.” He winked, pulled down his sweatshirt a little, and went out.

  Afterward Henry lay in his bed going over and over it in his mind. He was sure he was right, even if sometimes looking at pictures in magazines he couldn’t seem to see it. The only real question was whether or not it was important, whether or not it had anything to do, really, with designing a car. As he lay thinking, or brooding rather, his mind all at once called up the image of George Loomis’s house, and for some reason Henry was shocked. A gaunt old brick house among tamaracks, the round-topped windows always dark except for the eerie flicker thrown by the television he kept in the kitchen. There were maybe fifteen, sixteen rooms, and George Loomis hardly set foot in more than three or four. But maybe that was different, he thought. A hand-me-down might be something else again. Give George a choice of the kind of house he’d live in, and sure as day. … But then he knew it wasn’t true. A man did things to the world but also the world did things to him, and that was the house all right. If something or somebody didn’t interfere, that would be George Loomis.

  He lay looking up at the ceiling for a long time, thinking.

  10

  Two nights later Willard came again. He came in around ten, while Callie and Henry were cleaning up.

  “How’s it going, boy?” Henry said, serving him coffee and the blueberry pie he always ordered when there was some.

  Willard sipped the coffee, looking over the rim at Callie, and then he said, “Bad. But there’s a reason now. I figured out what you meant.”

  Henry frowned, not getting it at first.

  “Cars and people,” Willard explained. “What you said. It’s the craziest goddamn thing!”

  In a flash the old excitement was pounding inside him, and nothing he could do to stop it. He held back, struggled hard against himself like a lion converted to Christianity, but, even as his mind held back, his body pushed toward Willard. In his clumsy excitement he bumped Willard’s coffee and spilled it, and he didn’t take time to wipe it up, he was telling the boy—in sentences labored and slow at first, then faster and faster—about the fire he, Willard, had inside him, how somehow he had to get hold of it—the fire of the artist. The words were making no real sense, Henry knew as he said them, but the pitch at least—the pitch, by now, of a Pentecostal sermon—that and the big hands slapping the counter might partly make sense crash through. Willard Freund was leaning toward him, squinting as if to see better into Henry’s thoughts, but leaning wrong somehow—or so it seemed to Henry—maybe faking, or maybe partly faking, conscious of himself leaning forward. Callie was coming closer too, looking troubled. The muscles beside her mouth were tight. But Henry concentrated on the boy.

  “Anything you make,” he was saying, gripping Willard’s arm, “anything you make at all has got to be finding out what you want to make. I mean, finding out what you are. Maybe you’ll draw cars or maybe you’ll drive them, either way it’s the same thing, you do what you do because of everything you ever did, or in spite of all you ever did—I don’t know. I mean, it’s love, it’s like every kind of love you ever felt and the sum total of every love you ever felt. It’s what poor old Kuzitski used to say: It’s finding something to be crucified for. That’s what a man has to have. I mean it. Crucifixion.” His voice cracked—stupid, sentimental, Soames voice—and Willard Freund jerked back and laughed. Callie too seemed repelled by it, but she reached out to touch their arms, Henry Soames’ and Willard’s. Then she drew her hands back, for Henry was blundering on.

  But was he saying anything at all? he wondered. All so hopelessly confused. And yet he knew. He couldn’t do it and maybe never could have, but he knew. He was a fat, blubbering Holy Jesus, or anyway one half of him was, loving hell out of truckers and drunks and Willards and Callies—ready to be nailed for them. Eager. More heart than he knew how to spend.

  It came to him that he had to tell of the bitch in Utica.

  Mess.

  He’d met her in the hallway of that cracking brown-papered hotel. He’d gone to Utica for a funeral, a trucker had killed himself—Ron, or Don—he’d forgotten the name—a trucker anyway; truckers were truckers. His semi had slid off 98, down in the hills, and had somersaulted to the shale banks of the river, then into the water. Henry had liked the man and had been afraid there’d be no one at the funeral. He’d been wrong, of course. The pews of the tiny white church were packed—old men, old women, children—and below the altar with its glinting, gold-embroidered cloth and fourteen candles and thin-necked statues the closed casket was buried under flowers and wide ribbons. Henry had sat in the last pew and had sobbed. And then in the hall of the Irishman’s hotel where he was staying he had met this idiot woman—though that wasn’t true, quite; in spite of the eyelashes and the lipstick that lied about the shape of her lips, she hadn’t laughed when he’d told her why he was in town. They’d walked along down the hall without speaking, earlier in the evening that was, going in the same direction, and they’d ended up at the same little tavern for supper. He’d been off his head, probably, with the funeral, and she’d been drunk as a fish when they went to her room, or she’d pretended to be. And there, with only a candle burning, throwing huge shadows on the heat-buckled brown-paper wall, they had talked about loneliness and devotion and God knew what, and he had held her in his fat arms trying to tell her of the bursting piece of sentimental stupidity inside him that had longed for something or other all his life. Her hands playing on his back had been warm, vaguely like the big drops of rain that came in August. He’d told her by God he would marry her—he didn’t even know her name—and she’d laughed her head off, not even drawing back, still rubbing against him, working him up. And at last in a kind of terror he had struck out at the damn drunken idiot, the stupid animal love in her raw hands and lips. What he had done, ex­actly, was hard to remember, or how she’d taken it. He’d hit her in the face when the climax came, that much he would never forget. That and the dry summer heat and the fact that now sometimes sitting in just his trousers, waiting, he could hear her moaning on his bed. The sound was distinct:
so clear that he sometimes thought, in a moment of panic, that he’d lost his mind.

  Callie’s hand was reaching once more toward Henry Soames’ wrist, but he ranted on, trying to tell the story to Willard Freund, but trying to tell it without details, without particular people, a story somebody’s father’s father had told—a story that, stripped of details, was absolute pointlessness. He stopped himself and, once more, caught Willard’s arm.

  “I’m sorry, Willard,” he whispered frantically. “I’m a blubbering old man. I’m sorry.”

  Callie cried, “Stop it, Henry. For God’s sake, please shut up!”

  The room went silent. Henry felt the corners of his mouth twitching. The girl blanched as if nauseated, then turned on her heel and ran into the lean-to room behind the grill. She slammed the door behind her.

  After a long moment, Willard held out a cigarette to Henry. Henry took it, his fingers trembling, and lighted it from Willard’s match. He listened to the hum of the electric clock. “I’m sorry,” he said again, calmly this time, so ashamed he couldn’t look at the boy.

  Willard laughed—he-he-he—like a Negro. “Man, you do get carried away,” he said.

  Again there was a silence between them, longer this time. Willard seemed on the point of speaking once, then shook his head and turned away to walk over to the window in front and look out at the highway. No sound came from the room behind the grill. At last Willard said, “Old man, I came here to tell you something.”

  Henry waited, and Willard came over and leaned on the counter, his arms stiff, hands far apart. “I leave for school tomorrow,” he said. Then: “Ag School.”

  Shame came again, mushrooming inside him as he realized that all his rant had been not only foolish but worse, unwanted. It surprised him that Willard had not told him sooner, and for a minute he was furious. But that passed. It wasn’t Willard’s fault, God knew. He asked feebly, “It’s settled, then?” He watched Willard’s eyes, but he found himself listening for a sound from the lean-to room behind.