Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  “Christ in a crock,” Bill Kelsey said, “what’s all that?”

  “National Geographics,” he said, grinning. “Whole file of them. The rolls in the corner are maps. Thirty-seven in all. Engraved.” There were various other magazines too—Linn’s Weekly Stamp News, Texas Gun Collector, American Rifleman.

  “What in hell do you use them for?” Kelsey was amazed. Impressed, too, but mostly amazed. He stood tipped forward, looking, his thumbs hooked inside the bib of his overalls.

  George had said ironically, closing the door again, “Use them for? Sometimes I go in and touch them,” and he winked. But it was true. It was the richest pleasure in his life, just picking them up, knowing they were his, safe from the destroyers who cut the woodcuts from great old editions like his illustrated Goethe, or saw down hand-crafted Kentucky pistols and weld on modern sights. In the pearwood breakfront he’d found at the Goodwill at Oneonta he had nine original Hohner mouth harps, in wooden cases as solemn and elegant as coffins. They’d cost plenty, once. Every stroke of the infinitely elaborate design was cut in by hand by some nearsighted old German silversmith, dead now for more than a century.

  “Man, you’ll collect anything!” Bill Kelsey said.

  George nodded, serious.

  Bill Kelsey cocked his head, looking down at the newel post, saying, “I wonder if a person could get anything for that junk in my attic.”

  “Could be,” George had said, excitement in his chest. “Why don’t we take a look sometime?”)

  He set down the spoon with finality. “It must have been kids,” he said.

  Henry opened his hands. Nobody knew.

  It was a warm night, for May. He drove slowly, as always, his left foot riding the slack in the clutch, the ankle stiff in its metal brace. Fog lay white as snow in the valley bottom, the trees at the sides of the valley dark and gloomy. Here away from the lights of Henry’s house, no lights in sight but the stars and the moon and the flickering headlights of his own truck, the night seemed less dim than it had before. If he wanted to, he could drive with his headlights turned off. Might have to if that wire was to jiggle any looser. He ought to have fixed it weeks ago, but he’d put it off. He put off more and more, these days. The accident was eight, nine months ago now; according to Doc Cathey he was as fit as he was ever going to be, the remaining left arm grown unnaturally muscular, the wrist conspicuously larger now that it took the whole beating of stripping out the cows. He could do pretty much what he’d done before, if he wanted to. It just took him longer. But he’d lost his drive, the whole thing had made him older. He’d skipped the cultipacking this year—the disking had left the ground level enough, and the rain was pretty good, the ground would likely hold in enough moisture to get by. Lou Millet was putting in the soybeans for him—labor Lou owed him from two years ago—that would take care of seven acres, and the soil bank would take care of ten more. The alfalfa took care of itself. If the sky fell in he could live all right on the disability pension from the army. So he let things slide. He’d get up in the morning and milk the cows and clean up the barn, and after that he’d work for a couple of hours at the plowing, already so far behind schedule it didn’t much matter. (Corn knee high by the Fourth of July. He’d be lucky if he had the stuff planted.) Around noon he’d come in and quit till five-o’clock chore-time, spend his time pasting stamps in, or silver-polishing the two ceremonial Scottish swords (he’d gotten them both for seventy dollars), or just sitting in front of the television, half-asleep. Plowing had been a pleasure once—the smell of new-turned sillion, the blue-black sheen of the cut earth rolling off straight as an arrow, dark under the pines at the top of the hill, the ginger-water jug showing dull silver in the burdocks under the trees, the plowed ground richer and warmer where the sunlight struck. He’d be conscious of both the past and the future—riding sidesaddle on the tractor seat, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the plow: He would remember intensely, as if still inside them, other springs, plowing with that same F-20 or riding the gas tank while his father plowed, rear end growling as if running on chains and the air sad-sweet with the scent of new buds and pinesap running and new-turned ground, and in the same flow of intense sensation he would see his crop growing and ripening, field corn towering over your head, the stalks oozing sweeter than honey when the blade bit through. Even after he’d come back from Korea, one foot smashed and his breathing bad from the mess-up in his chest, the plowing was good, he could handle it. But now it was changed. He plowed one-handed now, fighting the steering wheel left-handed, jerked off balance whenever the front wheels climbed over a rock, his right hand no longer there to anchor him; and when he saw a big rock coming at him he could no longer raise the plow on the run but had to throw in the clutch with his gimpy foot, reach back for the lever, and drive no-handed for a minute. More often than not, it seemed to him, he saw the rock coming in under too late, and before he could shove in the clutch he was hearing the crack of steel like a rifle shot and the point was gone, half the moldboard with it, and the plow was skidding along, one wheel in the air, like a crippled duck. One of these days, as sure as anything, he’d break the one fist he had left, hitting the tractor tire in his rage. The accident had left him hard-up as hell (let alone the way his picking things up was beginning to cost him), yet he’d seen no choice but to get a new plow, a trip-spring rubber-tired son-of-a-bitch the F-20 wasn’t horse enough to pull, which meant getting the big DC. They’d pretty near laughed in his face at the bank. But they’d loaned him the money, finally. Because the house was worth plenty, never mind the land. (“Business is business,” the man had said. He poked his moustache with his pen, feeling guilty. George Loomis had said, “Sometimes,” sarcastically, meaning that sometimes it was more, a way of staying alive; but he hadn’t bothered to explain what he meant, had merely signed where the man made the X with his ball-point pen.) If he ever did get the corn in the ground he’d need a new outfit to get it up into the silo. It was the fucking antique corn binder that had taken off his arm. (A long time ago, it seemed by now. A different life.)

  It would be something, he thought then, walking into your house one night and finding a couple of nuts there, standing in the kitchen with big lead pipes, or pistols.

  He turned up the dirt road that wound up Crow Mountain to his house. The lights were all off at the Shaffer place. Walt’s jeep was parked by the mailbox as usual, under the limbs of the beech tree, in case it should rain. The green and white plastic lawn furniture sat as always in the bare dirt yard among metal toy trucks and plastic blocks and pieces of dolls. The thought of their oldest girl, Mary Jean, passed briefly through his mind. He would see her bringing in eggs in a wire basket sometimes as he was driving past. She would wave, and he would wave back. She looked Polish, like her mother. Light brown hair, thick ankles. Somebody’d told him she had a cedar chest full of things for her marriage. Be too late pretty soon. She was getting close to her thirties now.

  At Sylvester’s there were no lights in front but the flicker of the television. Sylvester would be sitting with his shoes off and no shirt on, his wife ironing in the barren back room. The kids would be sitting around more or less naked, invisible as the overstuffed chairs they sat in in the darkened room, or invisible except for their eyes and their dirty underwear. That was the last house for more than two miles, as the road went—the last house on this side of the mountain except for his own and the Ritchie place, abandoned now for ten years and gone to ruin.

  The headlights jiggled out and he leaned forward. They came on again.

  Then he remembered the man he’d met down in Slater, at Bittner’s. He couldn’t say at first why the trifling memory made him uneasy, or why he should happen to remember it at all—except, maybe, that the man’s disappearing somehow fit with the general uneasiness he’d been feeling ever since that car full of kids had come barreling straight at him.

  Bittner had been sitting ritched back on two legs of his red wooden chair, squarely facing his open fron
t door, a little ways back from it, where he could look out into the street. George had been in town for a couple of errands at Salway’s, and he’d decided to drop by the old man’s shop on the chance he had stumbled onto something he didn’t know the worth of. When he went in the old man said, “Odd do,” as usual, lifting his eyebrows, looking over his glasses, and George nodded, standing in the doorway a moment, getting his eyes adjusted to the darkness and clutter—rickety tables, fairgrounds-glass vases, clocks, feather dusters, crocks, baskets, chairs, firedogs, scuttles, bird cages, pictures in ornately machine-carved broken frames, maple spindles, chests of drawers, hundreds of dusty, disintegrating books (The Ladies’ Repository—Volume 24, Ideal Suggestion, Elsie Venner). He started along the nearer wall of bookshelves, not reading the titles or even looking at particular books, gazing vaguely, like a hunter taking in acres at once, waiting for a good binding to separate itself from the surrounding trash. When he was halfway down the aisle, Bittner said, “Here’s the man you should talk to. He must have a spinning wheel or two.” He turned and saw that the old man was not talking to him but to another man, standing in the darkest part of the room, reaching down into one of the bins of odds and ends. The man looked around, not slowly, but somehow too cautiously, and George knew the man was blind. “How do you do?” the man said. He had dark glasses on and a touring cap. In one hand he held a pair of carved ivory chopsticks, in the other, his cane. George nodded, realizing only later that a nod did no good.

  Bittner said, “George is a collector. I don’t know what-all he’s got.”

  “You don’t say,” the man said. He wasn’t from the Catskills. Vermont, maybe.

  “He’s got old records, magazines, stamps, I don’t know what-all.”

  “I’m not really much of a collector,” George said.

  Bittner said, waving, “Boot-jacks, arrowheads, antique furniture, picture frames, china, paperweights—”

  Again, thoughtfully, the blind man said, “You don’t say.” He came toward him down the aisle, smiling vaguely, moving the cane almost casually back and forth across the aisle like a witching rod. When he was within three feet of George he knew it, and held out his hand. “My name’s Glore,” he said. They shook hands. “George Loomis,” George said. The man’s skin was pale and flaccid, as if he’d spent years in the darkest corners of junk stores. “Do you really collect antique paperweights?” he said.

  George said, “I’ve got a few. Nothing valuable.” After a moment he added, “A couple of them were family things, and I happened to run across some more that looked good with them. I don’t really collect.”

  Bittner laughed scornfully, behind him. “What he means is, he ain’t letting anything go. Regular miser. He-he-he!”

  The blind man’s interest was sharper now. He inclined his head very slightly, his left hand groping out toward the bookshelf. He said, “I’d be interested to see your things some time.”

  “Anytime you say,” George said, not as heartily as he might have. He liked nothing better than showing off his things, but Bittner was right, he was a miser.

  The blind man said, “Where do you live?”

  George told him, and the man listened carefully, as if taking it down in his mind. When he had it, he said, “You expect to be home this afternoon?”

  “I expect so,” George said.

  That was the last he’d seen of the man. When he’d asked Bittner about him, later, Bittner said he didn’t know who the man was. “Glore,” George said, and Bittner remembered that that was the name he’d said, yes, but that was all he knew. He’d come into town in an old Lincoln, Bittner remembered then. A young black-headed fellow driving for him. They’d come and they’d gone. “That’s business,” Bittner said. George had nodded, thinking.

  He wondered now, for the first time, if Glore had really been blind. He put the thought out of his mind at once, sensibly, but he still felt jumpy. He carried the idea of the murder on Nickel Mountain like a weight on his chest, that and the teasing contrast of Callie and Henry waving in the warmth of the yellow porchlight, behind him, ahead of him a carload of teen-agers burning toward him, brainless and deadly.

  He’d come to his own driveway now. He could look down to his left and see the whole valley, the willows and the creek cutting through the middle, and directly below him the gleaming rails of the New York Central tracks curving onto the trestle. He let go of the wheel to grab the gearshift and shift down to second, then caught hold of the wheel again. He pulled up past the overgrown lawn in front—his headlights sweeping across the weeds and treetrunks—and turned sharply at the fence and backed into the shed. When he switched the ignition off the stillness dropped around him like a trap. He’d noticed the same thing once before, tonight, when he’d first come out of the Soames’ house onto the porch. Callie had noticed it too and had said, “It’s quiet tonight. Must be rain coming.”

  The headlights—staring ahead and a little upward, because of the pitch of the shed’s dirt floor—made the weeds around the hand-crank gas pump look pocked-gray as old bone. Every line of the American-wire fence stood out, unnaturally distinct, like the chipping sign on the pump: Warning. Contains Lead. Far beyond the fence the headlights eerily lighted just the top of the gambrel peak of the haybarn roof.

  He turned out the lights, got out of the truck, and slammed the door behind him. It was then he knew, with a certainty that made him go cold as ice, that somebody was watching from the house.

  He knew that very possibly it was nothing but nerves. Even probably. The story of the murder, the car swerving at him, the odd encounter (as it seemed to him now) two weeks ago at Bittner’s—all that together might naturally give you the jitters. But he didn’t for one minute believe it to be nerves. There was somebody there. He knew it as surely as he’d known it that night when they started up the quiet-looking valley in Korea: It was as though a sense keener than the ordinary five had caught some unmistakable signal. He’d kept on walking, that night, cautious, but not giving in to the feeling that there were rifles trained on him; and then suddenly, crazily, he was staring into lights, and McBrearty was falling back against him, dead already, and he felt the hit, and the next minute he was coughing blood and couldn’t breathe and knew for certain he was dying, thinking (he would never forget): Now I’ll find out if this horseshit about heaven’s really true. But he’d lived, and now he was no kid anymore, he knew what he couldn’t have imagined then: If they wanted to kill him, they could do it—he was mortal. Everything on earth was destructible, old books, guns, clocks, even book-holders of bronze.

  He stood out of sight against the wall of the shed and tried to make his mind work. The truck smelled of gas and heated belts and alcohol in the radiator. The motor was clicking. He could smell the dirt floor of the shed and the lighter, delicately acrid scent of molding burlap. I meant to patch the bags, he thought. It must’ve slipped my mind. He had to get calm. The obvious thing to do, he knew the next instant, was climb into the truck again and get out of there; go get help. It would take him ten minutes to get to Sylvester’s and call up the sheriff, ten minutes more for the sheriff and his men to get to Sylvester’s, another ten minutes to get back. And then they could go in; it was what they were paid for. By that time maybe whoever was there might be gone.—Gone, if they were thieves, with maybe fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of his things.—And if they were kids?

  He saw them again, far more sharply than he’d seen them at the time, leering out at him as the car roared past. What if they were to set fire to the house? His heart was beating so hard it ached, and he pressed his fist to his chest, unable to breathe. He could no more get rid of the ache than the image in his head, fire churning behind the round-arched windows of all three stories, the burning furniture not even visible in all that hell, flames licking the balustered porch, crawling out the eaves to the great carved dentils, then walls falling down like a landslide inside the brick shell, the fire going suddenly white. He’d seen ordinary houses burn. It would
be something.

  He got hold of himself. The house stood silent and severe as ever; inside, no sign of movement. For an instant he was certain there was a figure at the middle living room window, but the next instant he no longer knew for sure. Then he remembered the rifle in the woodshed.

  He’d left it there—on the cloth-draped cherry dresser he was storing there—months ago, at the time of the bobcat scare. Somebody had found tracks by his cowbarn door, and he’d called the troopers and the troopers had said they were bobcat. The word got around quickly, and pretty soon bobcats were showing up everywhere—flitting across a mountain road just in front of a car, prowling in the bushes beside some outhouse, standing stock-still on a moonlit, snowy lawn. Sylvester’s wife had been scared, and when George Loomis had seen she couldn’t be kidded out of it he’d told her he’d bring her the rifle. He’d gotten it out and cleaned it up and loaded some bullets and thrown them in a paper sack, and he’d taken it out to the woodshed to loan Sylvester when he came for the milk. When Sylvester got there, the cat had been shot already, the other side of Athensville, so he didn’t take it. (“There may be more,” George had said. Sylvester had grinned. “ ‘Ere’s always more,” he said. “ ‘Ose old woods is somethin’ else.”)

  The driveway was white in the moonlight, but he hopped across it fast, gimp foot swinging, and dived into the weeds on the far side. Nothing happened. He lay perfectly still with his forearm pushing into the soft, gritty earth, the damp weeds touching his face rotten-smelling and sappy-smelling at the same time, and he waited. Then he started crawling, circling three-quarters of the way around the house to get to the woodshed without crossing an open space. When he got to the walnut tree at the edge of where the garden had been last year—grown up in weeds now, the same as the rest—he stopped again and raised his head to look up at the house. Still no sign. He thought: What if it really is all just nerves? The minute he allowed himself to ask the question, he knew, secretly, the truth: There was no one there. If he weren’t crazy he’d stand up right now and walk on into the house. But he was. Or he was gutless, more like: The very thought of standing up made his legs go weak.