Nickel Mountain

by John Gardner

  The man laughed and nodded, then seemed to think about this, too, his head inclined to one side, face screwed up as if he’d bitten his tongue. Willard said, “What line are you in, exactly?”

  “Actually,” the man said, “I’m in flowers.” After a second he explained, “J. E. Jones’ Flowers, in Utica. You may have heard of it. Jones has been dead for years. I bought the business. My name’s Taylor. Actually, most people call me Jones.” He laughed. “I have a bank account under the name of Jones and another one under my other name. For personal checks. Saves confusion.”

  “How about that,” Willard said. He added without thinking, meaning nothing, “I have two names too.”

  “Oh?” The man was squinting at him again, suspicious.

  But he was remembering Norma Denitz’s father. A psychoanalyst. He had curly brown hair parted down the middle, droopy eyes, a face as soft and pale as ass, fingers obscenely warm. He talked about patients, some man who’d put lye in his wife’s douche bag, knowing (for certain reasons, Norma’s father said) that she would never actually use it. He sat with a double martini in his pink, soft hand, wearing even in his own living room his obscene brown suit and vest, bow tie. Norma’s stepmother was wearing a shiny white dress cut so low you could see her ample and only virtues whenever she bent over. She was forty-eight, but she’d had her face lifted. They believed in The New Morality, but when Norma had stood up and stretched, holding the martini out to the side, as if for a toast, signaling him to come up with her—screw right under their noses—he could feel their anger like electric shock reverberating through the room, smile as they might. Hypocrites. He said abruptly:

  “I imagine it takes a sharp man to make it with flowers.”

  “Well,” the man said tentatively, “you have to be cut out for it, that’s true.”

  The snowfall was as heavy as ever. The hills and trees blocked the wind and the snow dumped down as if from a giant shovel.

  “That’s not what I mean. You have to know exactly what to buy, otherwise the whole mess would rot. You have to have enough but not too much, and then you have to talk people into taking it.”

  “Well, yes,” the man said. “But actually—”

  “And then, too, you’ve got to act interested in people. They graduate from grammar school and you’ve got to act like it’s really something, or Uncle Elmer dies and you’ve got to look sad, or some girl gets married—”

  The man was looking hard at him, the car nosing toward the guard rail. He said, “I am interested in people. As I say, some people are cut out for it and some aren’t. It takes all kinds.”

  “Oh sure, sure,” Willard said. He lit a new cigarette from the old one. “It’s a kick to talk to people sometimes—gives the ego a boost. But day after day, the same old. …” He stopped, looking at the guard rail in alarm. The man jerked the wheel and the car slid for a second, then straightened out again. It gave them both a scare, and for a while they were quiet. The radio played on, tinny, mechanically sentimental. The man sat back farther in his seat, driving still more slowly. They came to a town. There were no lights except, here and there, the snow-filtered light of a Christmas tree or an outline of colored lights around a porch. The big car moved through the town quickly, riding down the center of the deserted street. They jounced over a railroad crossing, then came into the open again, the highway a tunnel between snowplow drifts.

  (It was right around Christmas the baby had come, three years ago. He’d been home, even had a vacation job at the Purina place; but he’d only stayed two days. After he’d gotten back to school, he’d gotten drunk and told them the whole thing, at the dorm. As soon as it was out he saw what he’d done. She was just some country slut to them, and what he’d done was of no importance. Only his misery was important. They turned it over and over, like a dead turtle, some of them laughing, some of them sympathizing, some sitting glum and embarrassed at his talking too much. After that he could hardly stand meeting them in the dorm halls. But it was all right. He’d transferred, and he’d never repeated his idiot mistake. He knew them now, all their talk about girls they’d laid, all their jabber about what buddies they’d always be.)

  At last Willard said, “This must be a pretty heavy season for you. How come you can take off and visit your daughter?”

  “Oh, I’ve got assistants,” the man said.

  “You trust them?”

  Again the man was looking at him, ignoring the road. He was beginning to be alarmed. “Certainly,” he said.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Willard said. He could feel the nausea creeping back. “Crime does not pay. The easiest way to get ahead is to be honest. And we all want to get ahead, of course. Especially at Christmas.”

  The man didn’t answer, and after half-a-mile Willard asked, his stomach churning badly now, “You do want to get ahead, don’t you, Mr. Jones?”

  A second too late, having stopped to think about it first, the man laughed. “It takes all kinds,” he said. “That’s America.”

  Willard Freund scrunched down in the seat, pushing his hands down into his pockets. The book was gone. He’d left it on the train. The smoke from the cigarette made him want to sneeze and burned his eyes like sulphur. Then suddenly, in a cloud of snow ahead of them, there were yellow lights. The man was squinting through the windshield, but he didn’t seem to be seeing. Snowplow, Willard thought. The danger is not where you think, Mr. Jones. I’m not going to knife you like a Commie rat, you’re going to get flattened against a mountain by a snowplow. That’s America. But even as he thought it, he was shouting, “Look out!” The man jerked the wheel in terror. The car slid sideways and the plowblade came flying down toward them like a wolf’s-head. The inside of the car was full of rushing light. He threw his hands up, trying to protect his head as they went into the collision.

  3

  He woke up lying on his back on the highway, some kind of blanket thrown over him. The car stood on one corner, wheels up, leaning against the snowbank, one headlight shooting up into the sky, every detail of the car unnaturally sharp under the blinding headlights of the plow. The radio was still playing. All around the car there were bits of glass, glittering like diamonds. In his head there was a steady mumble, like the mumble of the train wheels, and a suggestion of voices. Six feet away from him, in the middle of the road, a man in thick goggles and a cap that hid all but his goggles and chin was bending over a body, looking at papers from a wallet. Willard closed his eyes again, concentrating on the hardness of the ice beneath him, the pleasant cold coming through his clothes, the sharp wet-wool smell of the blanket. He could feel snowflakes landing on his eyebrows and lashes. He couldn’t remember having felt delicate sensations with such force since his early childhood: It was as if his body had grown very large, as large as the night, and calm. He could still hear the murmuring voices. They were more insistent now, carrying intelligible words and phrases, stubbornly assaulting his pleasant calm as if from somewhere outside it. At last, realizing what really he had known for some time—that there were people standing over him—he opened his eyes again. His vision was not as clear this time as it had been before. Dust of snow blew along the road, rising out of the road like fire, obscuring the figures of the two men. There was another car now, bright lights facing the lights of the snowplow, closing him in. The men were troopers. One of them was bending down to him, more like a machine than like a man, no feature showing but the flat impersonal mouth and the courthouse chin. “This one’s waking up,” he said. His voice was metallic, like the voice of Superman on the radio. He said, “Are you hurt?”

  “I think I’m all right,” he said. “A little headache.” When he sat up the headache was suddenly ferocious, and his stomach was full of a flat gray pain. He thought of lying down again but decided not to. He leaned on his arms.

  “Take your time,” the trooper said.

  The body on the road was wrapped in a thick gray cover. He was dead, then. It’s too bad, he thought. She’s going to have a pai
nful delivery. The front wheel’s turned sideways, and there are always the pedals. He stopped himself, frightened.

  The trooper said, “You knew him?” His sheepskin glove pointed.

  Willard nodded, then shook his head. “He was giving me a lift. He said his name was Taylor.”

  “Where’d he pick you up?”

  “Utica. I was coming home from school. I came to Utica by train.”

  Behind the goggles he was taking it down, maybe to write up later, inside his warm car. “Where were you heading?”

  “New Carthage. That’s where my parents live.” He thought of asking how far they’d gotten.

  The trooper said, “Can you make it to the car?”

  He got up, the trooper helping him, and found that his legs still worked. Inside the car it was so hot he could hardly breathe, or so it seemed at first. The radio was going. The two troopers stood outside the door, talking, and then after a while they carried something past the window and put it in the trunk. They got into the car and the one who was driving lifted the radio receiver. “We’re bringing back the body,” he said. “No point sending them out in this.” Then he nosed the car around between the snowbanks to head back the way he’d come. The snowplow came behind him. Willard closed his eyes and instantly the plow was bearing down on them again, the lights swift and blinding. In the front seat, one of the troopers said something and the other one laughed.

  The State Police Post was a converted farmhouse, set back from the road, with sheds like chicken houses behind, for the cars. (Most of this he saw later, after the sun had come up and the storm was over: white drifts stretching away toward the mountains and mounded up on the shed roofs and the branches of trees, so bright you could only glance at it. Icicles hung from the eaves of the shed and beside the window where he stood, the remains of some earlier storm. The world was hushed and beautiful, and also terrible in its emptiness, that morning; but that was later. While it was still dark he saw only the room where they put him to wait.) The room was dim, vaguely like the waiting room of a smalltown dentist’s office at night. A desk, a calendar, a couple of lamps, nothing much more. Over the window on the outside there was a kind of grate—not bars, exactly, more like a heavy-duty cyclone fence. Beyond the closed door he could hear them talking from time to time, now and then a voice on the radio, the click of a typewriter. He lay on the cool green leather couch sometimes dozing, sometimes listening. He went through the conversation with the florist, the storm, the accident again and again, as though his mind could not get free of it. There was a doctor coming to check him, they said. That was strange. He’d have thought they’d have taken him directly to a hospital somewhere, if they thought there might really be anything wrong. But no use thinking. For the moment he was caught in the enormous web of their inscrutable efficiency. Police system hung in the air all around him, neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely systematic: The radio in the next room barked and sputtered from time to time—the whole state on a party line, the sheafs of papers in the shabby gray files available in seconds to a trooper sitting at Niagara. Still he was seeing the snowplow bearing down on them, the body in the road, the troopers’ muffled figures passing the car window, carrying something. One of them came in and asked him if he wanted coffee—his face not unfriendly (weak-chinned, dull-eyed) but as impersonal as the goggled faces on the highway—and after a long time he brought it to him in a thick, cheap restaurant cup. “I lost my billfold,” Willard said. The man looked at him for what seemed two full seconds, and for the first time Willard wondered how he could have lost the billfold from his hip pocket, with his overcoat on over it. He said, “Am I being held for something?” The man said, “I guess they want a doctor to look you over.”

  It was hours later (the sky light now and the wind finished) that the doctor came. With him there was a huge, red-headed man with tiny, somewhat slanted eyes, wearing an overcoat. The red-headed man sat down at the desk and smoked a coal-black pipe while the doctor thumped Willard’s chest and pressed his fingers into his abdomen. The two of them left ten minutes later, hardly having said three words, and twenty minutes after that the red-headed man came back. He sat down and heaved one foot up on the desk. “So you’re a student,” he said. When he smiled his eyes and teeth made him look like a fox. He relit the pipe.

  Willard nodded.

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” the man said.

  “I guess that’s right.”

  He shook his head, blowing smoke past the pipe bowl, picking up a sheaf of papers. “It must be because of your falling against him. His body was a kind of cushion. It wouldn’t be so surprising if you’d been asleep.”

  Willard looked at him, but he was reading, paying no attention. “What do you mean?”

  “Surprising you didn’t get killed,” he said. “When you’re asleep your body’s relaxed.” He turned the page. He said then, “Strange neither of you saw it.”

  He nodded. “It’s like I told the man who’s here at night,” he began. His blood went cold. He’d told the other one he was asleep when it happened.

  The red-headed man was poking at his pipe with an unbent paper clip, scowling into the dark of the bowl as if paying no attention to what Willard was saying. But he said, “The sergeant with the crew cut?” He looked up to catch Willard’s frightened nod. He too nodded, immensely satisfied with himself. “That’s Tom Widdley.” He stuffed the pipe again and got it going, and for a long time he just sat smoking, looking with pleasure at the smoke as it went up.

  Willard said, “Is it all right if I leave? I’ve been up most of the night, and I’ve told you all I can.”

  “About all, yes,” the man said, only his tone odd, his face as casual as ever. Then he said, “Certainly, certainly.” He made a move to get up but paused, as if intending to hold him only a moment longer, and this merely from curiosity. “How come there was no one at the station to meet you in Utica?”

  “I forgot to wire ahead.”

  He looked surprised. “Really?”

  “I’m absentminded. I do things like that a lot.”

  Again the man took the pipe from between his teeth and poked it with the paper clip. He asked abruptly, “Where do you live?”

  For an instant he couldn’t remember. He said then, “My dad’s place, you mean? A little ways outside New Carthage. Rockwater Road.”

  The man did get up, this time. “Well, I’ll have one of the boys drive you over. It’s not all that far, and we’ve held you up long enough.”

  At the desk in front they had his billfold. He glanced in automatically to see that the money was there. It was. Everything else was there too—the bookstore credit card, social security card, Norma’s picture. The credit card was in the wrong plastic window.

  He said, surprising himself, feeling his neck going red as he spoke, “You found the money wasn’t stolen?”

  The red-headed man looked at him quizzically.

  “When you checked the serial numbers, I mean.”

  The man laughed, harmlessly foxy. “Everything shipshape.” He put his hand sociably on Willard’s shoulder. “Beware of those headshrinkers’ daughters.”

  It wasn’t until he was out in the car, waiting while the trooper checked out from the office, that Willard began to sweat.

  4

  NO CREDIT, the sign at Llewellyn’s said; and on the cash register a smaller sign: CASH IS KING. On the radio in the living quarters behind the store there was more Christmas music playing, a chorus this time. Children. He stood at the counter waiting for old man Llewellyn to come limping in. He’d be here pretty soon, he’d heard the bell over the door. He’d still be able to hear that bell when he was a hundred and four and deaf as a post.

  The store smelled of malt and oiled wooden floor. The old man stocked everything a Catskills farmer could need—groceries and kitchen utensils and liquor in front; in back coal oil, nails, binder twine, Surge milking-machine parts, sparkplugs, lead and spun-glass pipe, rope, harness leather, three-legge
d stools; a few odds and ends for tourists, too—fishing rods, salmon eggs, shotguns. Willard Freund’s memories were sharper here even than in his father’s house. It was where they would come after swimming or after they’d bicycled to Slater for a show, he and Junior Rich and Billy Cooper, when they were kids.

  He listened absently to the music. Deck the Halls. His mother had said, “We’re so glad we could have snow for you, Willard. Christmas is always so nice when there’s snow.” His father had spent the morning digging out the tractor where it had slipped off the driveway into the lawn and gone in above the tires. “Eleanor, where’s that coffee?” he’d said, and at once her hands had started shaking and her mouth had gone into the tic. The old man was furious that Willard had made it home alone, without any help from him. Willard had been furious in return, and yet, well as he knew what was happening, he had found himself slipping into the old sense of unatoneable guilt, the same crazy guilt he would feel as a child when his father made him work on the farm for nothing, when he might have earned good money in Slater, and his farmwork wasn’t up to the old man’s mark. Nicked in the balls, he’d thought again, and he’d clenched his fists; and when his mother looked grieved he felt guilty for hating his father too. And then after his father had gone, heading out for chores where Willard too should go, his mother had said, “Willard, why don’t you drop in on Henry and Callie? You were always so fond of Henry, before. They’ve got the sweetest little boy.” He’d said, “Mother, I just don’t feel like it. Quit asking.” “I’ve never seen you so upset,” she said. “It’s that accident. You just need to stop thinking about it, Son.”

  And so as soon as he could he’d gotten out of there. He’d walked the three miles into town—the macadam thawed now, the weather warm as April, the smell of melting snow an excitement in his chest. And all the way he’d been remembering things—the day he and his father had pulled down the chicken house, hooking onto the corner of it with the log-chain and driving away on the Caterpillar tractor. When the chicken house wall came down, towering over their heads a minute and then smashing to the dirt six feet behind them, dry chicken shit flying, his father had yelled out, “There you go!” He’d been as proud as hell that he’d thought of doing it with the tractor and chain, and Willard had been proud for him. Another time his father had rebuilt an old Case combine, welding on wheels six feet to each side: They were the only people in the county that could combine the fields on the mountainsides, and the whole job, combine included, had only cost two hundred dollars because his father had picked up the stuff from people who didn’t know how to make use of it. When old Fred Covert saw what they’d done with the combine he’d sold them, he could hardly hide his fury. (Maybe it was true that the dead man had really been interested in flowers, had really liked talking to mothers of people who were graduating from the sixth grade.) Out by the big gray barn his father had two young Dobermans on chains. When dark came he would let them loose, and if a stranger came close to that barn they would tear out his windpipe.