Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  His legs were cold already. By the time he got there he’d be frozen half to death. He pushed his hands into his overcoat pockets and remembered he’d brought the book, Attack on Christendom. He drew it out. He tried to read, but the shuffling and bumping of passengers moving down the aisle or settling themselves in the seats nearby distracted him. Worse yet, however hard he concentrated—now on the page, now on the strangers closing in on him, casual, determined, like a dog pack gradually encircling a sheep, his stomach churned with uneasy thoughts of home. At times it was a dull sorrow, at times a feeling of excitement mingled with anxiety, so intense he could hardly catch his breath. Hypocrites, he thought fiercely. It was a word that came more and more often to his mind, or rather, came between his mind and what threatened him: his mother and father living together all these years with no love between them, his father faithful to his mother out of cowardice, or habitual indifference, the way he was faithful to the Lutheran Church. And the neighbors were no better, however highly they thought of themselves. Philistines, brainless conformists. Sick.

  He closed his eyes. None of that was true.

  Now the train started up, so smoothly that, as always, it seemed at first the station that was moving. And still he was unable to read. He couldn’t stop hearing the mumble of the wheels, steady and endless as banjo music, or watching the snow hitting the window to his right and sticking to the pane. He watched the gray buildings of Albany flitting past beyond the snow, then smaller houses with Christmas trees, then hills, luminous in the twilight, then the houses and crossings of small towns. The train stopped often, and passengers got on or got off, the same thing again and again, as in a nightmare: the murmur of voices, the glimpses of waiting or hurrying figures, the woman from the Salvation Army with her bell, the snow beating endlessly at the window. At last, entering the mountains—the train seemingly hanging suspended in darkness, then jolting suddenly, swaying on a curve—the churning in his stomach settled a little. He read for thirty minutes, then dozed and dreamed he was a child riding beside his father on the bobsled, hauling in wood. The dream was pleasant at first, but little by little it changed until at last, looking up at his father, he realized that though he sat erect, his hat seemingly brushing the stars, he was dead. He awakened with a start and for an instant thought the train was falling into some wide, deep gorge. When the brief panic subsided, he pressed his face to the window, raising his hands to the sides of his forehead like blinders, and saw snow and dead-looking trees standing in a desolate lake. He leaned back in his seat, his stomach churning so badly now that he thought he might have to vomit.

  Except for the flickering red globes over the doors, the car was dark. As he looked, the conductor opened the door, letting in the suddenly loud rumble of the wheels, and called, “Utica, twenty minutes.” He came through the car, swaying, light blanking out the lenses of his glasses, and when he reached Willard’s seat he leaned toward him, his face chalk-white, and said again mechanically, “Utica in twenty minutes.” Willard nodded with a jerk, as though he had not registered at first. He thought again, “All I have is two dollars,” and sat rigid, shivering in the cold, his lips pressed together tightly, until he saw the lighted tar paper and asbestos fake-brick shacks at the outskirts of the city. He got up then, reached his suitcase down from the rack, and worked his way to the door. He felt the others watching him, and hurried.

  As he stepped down between the two cars the wind snatched at him as if to tear him away from earth and bear him off into the void, but he caught hold of the cold doorpost and, clinging to it, pressing down the skirt of his overcoat with the side of his suitcase, stepped onto the platform and into the shelter of the building. On the train steps the wind had been fierce, but under the overhang there was a lull. He put down the suitcase and drew a deep breath of the cold, snowy air, and standing not far from the door he looked around the platform and the lighted station. The storm whistled between the wheels of the car, through the metal scaffolding, and around the corner of the building. A mail wagon creaked past him, barely missing the corner of his suitcase, and men moved back and forth, laughing and talking, in snowy coats and hats. Beyond the corner of the station men and women piled suitcases into waiting cars, shouting through the snowy darkness. The big doors behind him swung open and shut continually, and muffled figures darted by covered with snow. An angry voice shouted, “Which car for Batavia?” and he caught a brief glimpse of a bearded, scarred face. Then steam hissed, billowing around the wheels of the train, and the cars began to move. He glimpsed faces in the windows. Then suddenly he was looking at the tracks beyond and covered walks and signal scaffolds and darkness. When the swaying red light of the last car was swallowed up by the night, he turned to go in.

  In the huge vaulted room there was no one he knew. People sat solemn-faced and bored on the pew-like benches, not talking, bundled in their coats and scarves. There was a two- or three-year-old boy in a snowsuit lying asleep beside a fat woman, and for an instant Willard’s chest went light.

  He was thinking of his illegitimate child, whom he’d never seen. He wondered uneasily whether he would see him this time. He looked away. Across the room there was a green metal rack of newspapers. He hurried over to it, running from one painful thought to another—from the child to the Bomb. Willard Freund inclined more and more to believe—though at times he knew it was foolishness—that the stupidity of mankind, and maybe especially the stupidity of American democracy, was going to destroy the world—and soon. Though normally he was shy, not talkative, more times than once he had gotten a little drunk and had talked about it with fraternity brothers at Albany, sitting in the dimly lit lounge with a stack of 45’s on the changer—Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Stan Kenton’s Innovations—a cigarette hanging un-lighted between his lips, head and shoulders thrown forward (image from some movie, Marlon Brando, maybe)—had teased the thought toward probability, half-aware as he spoke that his loss was more personal than he was telling them. His father’s barn was the largest in the county, vaulted above like an airplane hanger, the cowbarn, below, as long and wide as a gymnasium. His father’s hired men moved in and out between cows like factory workers, shifting milking machines, throwing open the chutes that brought down hay, or moving the milkcans on stainless steel wagons to the cooler. He had told his father the girl was pregnant, he intended to marry her. His father had laughed, then looked at him hard, and then, without warning, had slapped his face. “Don’t mix up pussy and business,” he’d said, and Willard Freund had been filled with rage and shame—because it was true, he did not love her, though the sight of the Stop-Off made him ache with desire till Henry Soames’ filthy shanty and diner, once for him a haven against the mechanized, cold-blooded, money-grubbing evil of W. D. Freund and Sons Dairy Farms, had become what it looked like to the casual eye, a seedy, rundown dingle of temptation and witchcraft. Stinging with rage, he’d snatched off the nearest milkcan cover and had thrown the can on its side so the milk came gushing out, thick and steaming. His father had bellowed and backed away a step, afraid of him, and Willard, crying now, had fled from the barn. He might have won, if he’d pushed, exactly as, later, he’d won the right to quit Ag school and become an English major. But he’d gone back to Cornell, had gone on getting letters from her, and, sick with indecision, had done nothing. Though he profoundly hated his father for it, his father was right: The God-spouting, hymn-singing, ne’er-do-well Welsh were not his kind of people. So he was ashamed of himself, yes; shocked at himself. But he talked drunkenly of politicians, kings of self-interest, and businessmen, shallowest, coarsest of men. And as he talked—he who had been all his life so quiet—he had thought, in horror, of his friend or once-friend Henry Soames, eccentric hermit, how Henry would sometimes get carried away and start babbling like a madman or drunkard. People smiled, made a circle in the air beside their heads, said: “Bonkers.” Suddenly, remembering Henry Soames, Willard would stop talking, would pull at his upper lip (that too he’d gotten from Henry), and
would bite his lips together and squint. “Freund, what’s really eating you?” some fraternity brothers would occasionally ask. Though they talked day and night about their sexual conquests, he couldn’t tell them. He’d told at Cornell, when he was there, and it was horrible. I want to be a child again, he thought.

  He read the headlines on the papers in the rack and the lead articles down as far as the fold in the paper, his face squeezed shut, pouting. There was no news. There was never any news, merely the palaver those in power released to the fat, happy masses: a new artificial lake for their motorboats, a new skirt length from the change-mongers. His eyes filled with tears. From somewhere behind him came Christmas music.

  He went into the men’s room and looked in the mirror, then, after thinking about it first, washed his face and parted his hair with his fingers. They could have known what train he’d be on if they’d thought, or if they knew their own son at all; they could have known even that he’d forget to wire ahead. It was all very well to say, “Never mind, no harm done.” None had been done: He could phone from here and wait for them to come in the morning (his father driving king-like through the darkness, holding the big gray Cadillac to the center of the road, and let anybody approaching from the other direction watch out). Or he could hitchhike. No harm. It sounded calm and grown-up. But there was harm. Hypocrites, he thought again, more angrily, more defensively (he knew) than before. All the same. … His father had bought every decent milker from Ben Wolters’ barn, getting them dirt cheap because Ben was hard up, and when they were driving the loaded cattle truck home he’d laughed and said, “That poor devil don’t even know I cleaned him out!” Willard had said, “I do, though, don’t I,” squinting like Roy Rogers. He’d been fourteen then. His father had looked at him and grinned, then looked back at the road. A little farther on he’d said, “It was him or me, Willard.” Willard thought now, six years too late to say it: Never. From the minute the two of you were born it was never you, only him. Then he thought: And me. Nicked in the balls from the beginning.

  And now again (meeting his eyes in the mirror) he was thinking sadly of his own son, nicked too, from before he was born, as though the old man had thought it out before­hand and set it all up. But too late now to worry about the child. Too late to worry about the mother either, not that she needed it. He swallowed and blinked hard, angry that tears had ambushed him. She’d done fine for herself, Callie had. Had somehow talked fat old Henry Soames, bad heart and all, into marrying her—by crying, maybe, or by walking into his bedroom naked, or maybe by telling her father old Henry was the one. He’d never have believed she was capable of it, three years ago; which showed how incredibly innocent he’d been. He’d thought he himself was the calculating one: He’d been tortured, lying in his bed at night, each time he left her, thinking simultaneously how beautifully innocent and good she was and what a bastard he was himself, teasing her on little by little, unable to stop himself, vile but at least knowing he was vile, believing in the goodness that was out of his reach—except that that wasn’t true; all lies; all he ever told himself, he thought, was lies. He’d never known, right to the last minute, whether what he wanted was just to make her or to marry her. She was the third, but the only virgin, the first one there’d been any question about. A question he’d never really answered, in fact, until after he’d heard she was marrying Henry Soames. He’d had to leave for school, which gave him a chance to put off deciding, and pretty soon the thing was decided for him and he saw how lucky he’d been—for once in his life. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Callie Wells had turned calculating. That happened, the minute a girl got pregnant. It was instinct, maybe. But was it possible Callie had been calculating all along? (Norma Denitz had said, “You fool, Willard, she planned the whole thing! She took you because she was chasing a bigger fish. A sick old man with money.” “I don’t believe it,” he’d said; but he did believe it, or anyway believed it for that brief moment Norma had laughed. “Hah! Male ego. If men believed the truth about women it would be the end of cohabitation.” She was wrong about that, though. He knew the truth about Norma Denitz. He meant nothing to her—“a good lay,” she said, “ships smashing in the night.” But he stayed with her. He might even marry her someday, if she got her neuroses straightened out.)

  And yet Henry was no fool. Was his part, too, calculation? Was it possible that Henry himself had set it all up, hiring her at the diner when he didn’t need help—maybe even knowing she was making it with Willard?—keeping her working there late sometimes, watching every minute with his little pig’s eyes, pecker itching, as Norma claimed? He’d gone up to Henry’s place almost every night, once. To work on the jitney or to sit in the lean-to room in back and talk. His mother had distrusted it, had felt, vaguely, disgusted by it, and when Willard understood what she had in mind he was furious. “He’s a good man,” he’d said fiercely. “He wants someone to talk to, and argue with. Nothing but that.” She’d pretended to be convinced, but never again could Willard be thoroughly convinced himself. “No one over thirty is seriously concerned with ideas,” one of his instructors had said. “Ideas are either toys or tools—ways of passing the time, or ways of getting things.” Surely that was a lie.

  It came to him what it was that made his stomach churn as he drew closer to home. He was going back to the land of his innocence, the sunlit garden where all those years he had believed, in spite of everything, in parental love, the goodness and innocent virtue of girls, or at any rate of certain girls, the possibility of unselfish friendship. He was going back knowing it was perhaps all bullshit, and, for all his fear that it might be bullshit, he was going back expecting to find it still there, and holy.

  He decided to hitchhike. He would give the old man no advantage, no chance to speak of how he’d driven half the night through ice and snow et cetera, like a postman, no chance to whine about Willard’s forgetting to wire. Cold as it was, nobody would bother to stop for him but the drunks and fairies. Because hitchhikers could be dangerous, like any stranger. The drunks would stop because they were stupid, the fairies because they had an angle. All right.

  He took a bus to the city limits and waited.

  2

  When Willard woke up the car was warm, moving very slowly. The radio was playing softly, Christmas music by an orchestra. The odd scent was still there, like a funeral. The man was bent forward, gripping the steering wheel with both hands tightly. There was light, curly hair on the backs of his fists. They were passing through a town. The streets were deserted and white, and the snow streaking toward the windshield made it impossible to see from one block to the next. Willard hugged himself, his legs clamped together, and watched streetlamps and dimly lighted store windows loom into sight one after another. From time to time the car floated for an instant, as it seemed, coming onto ice. Wreaths hanging over the middle of the street came into sight overhead and then vanished behind the car roof, unlighted and morose. Here and there there were parked cars along the curb, drifted-in, half-buried. Then they were out in the country again, passing unlighted farms and high, blowing drifts.

  The man said, “Get any sleep?”

  “A little,” he said. He got out his cigarettes and lit one. Reflected in the windshield, he looked like Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney or someone, and the recognition simultaneously pleased and disgusted him. Fake, he thought; sucker. And that too was from some movie. Even his self-hatred was secondhand, cheap show. He blew out smoke and took a deep breath of air but seemed to get none, like Fortunato in the basement.

  “Storm’s getting worse and worse,” the man said.

  “So I see.” He studied the bright red reflection of his cigarette in the windshield, wondering how far they’d come. After a moment he glanced over at the man. He was medium-sized, chubby, well-off-looking. A brown, heavy coat that might be English. Brown hair under the jaunty hat brim; probably bald on top. A flabby, effeminate face. He looked pleased with himself, pleased to be driving an Olds 98, helping some
poor damn hitchhiker home to its mother.

  “Going home for college vacation?” the man said.

  Willard nodded, thinking: No. To visit my bastard son and my former whore. (But he wasn’t. Would dodge them, escape them.) He took another deep breath and closed his eyes, briefly.

  “I thought so,” the man said, pleased. “I’m visiting my daughter. We always spend Christmas together.”

  “That’s nice,” he said, all trace of irony suppressed. He drew on the cigarette and kept the smoke inside for a moment. “A family should keep in touch.”

  The man glanced at him. After a moment, he smiled. “I always visit her at Christmas.”

  Bringing presents, yes. Why, Daddy, how thoughtful of you to remember!

  Sir, your daughter is pregnant. By a bicycle with the seat off. She’s afraid to mention it, for fear you might disapprove. I speak as your friend, sir. It’s only natural that a father would want to be informed. Panic rose in him, or claustrophobia. He remembered swimming in Lake George, driving up, up, up toward air unbelievably far from where it should be.

  “Where are you in school?” the man asked.

  “Albany.”

  The man nodded as though that, too, pleased him, but he said, “I meant, what grade are you in?”

  “I went to Cornell, the first year,” Willard said, “but I transferred.”

  The man thought about it. “I see.”

  “For the better living conditions.”

  To live with a slut, sir. Luckily, your daughter is not a slut. Although she is going to deliver a bicycle. Part Roadmaster.

  “The living conditions are better in Albany, you think?” He was torn between watching the virtually invisible road and squinting at Willard; he twisted his head from one to the other.

  “Much better. Softer, if you know what I mean.” After a minute, he added, “There are two main conditions of living, hard and softer.”