Nickel Mountain (16 page)

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.

The ground was mucky, this side of the house. It squeezed between his fingers when he leaned on his hand, and it clogged the brace on his ankle, making his foot as heavy as it would be in a cast. His sweater was damp and redolent of wood from the dew he'd come through, and his pantlegs were as soaked as if he'd fallen in the pasture brook. He reached the brick wall and got up, pressing close to it, and in five seconds he was in the woodshed, leaning against the tool-bench, getting his breath.

When he jerked the door open (“Ridiculous? Jesus!” he would tell them all later), plunging in with the rifle leveled, the kitchen was empty. The door to the living room stood open, as always, and he knew before he reached it that there was no one there. There was no one in the dining room, the library, the pantry, or the downstairs bedroom—he went through each room, turning on the lights—and no one on either the front or back stairs, no one on either the second floor or the third. There was nothing, no one in the house but himself and his things.

And now, rational at last, he recognized with terrible clarity the hollowness of his life. He saw, as if it had burned itself into his mind, the image of Callie, Henry, the baby, and the dog, grouped in the warm yellow light of the porch. If Henry Soames had crept through wet grass and mud that way to protect what was his, it would have meant something. Even if it had been all delusion, the mock heroics of a helmeted clown, it would have counted.

“Fool!” he whispered, humiliated and hot from head to foot with anger, meeting his eyes in the mirror, ready to cry.

The rifle crooked in his arm was heavy, and he glanced down at it. It was old as the hills—a 45–70 Springfield from 1873, an officer's model, according to the chart in
Shotgun News
—yet there was still blue on the barrel, beautiful and cool against the mellow brown of the walnut stock. It was a rare thing to find one that old that still had the blue. Most people wouldn't notice or think it was important, but, just the same, it was a rare find; a thing that should be preserved. And then he thought, feeling a flurry of excitement, as though he were about to discover something:
1 was never more scared in my life. My God. Right from the first minute, I thought I'd had it.
He went back into the kitchen to hunt up a polishing rag and some whiskey. He figured he'd earned it.

V

THE DEVIL

1

Simon Bale was a Jehovah's Witness. He would appear one Sunday morning in the dead of winter, early, standing on your porch, smiling foolishly and breathing out steam, his head tipped and drawn back a little, like a cowardly dog's, even his knees slightly bent, his Bible carefully out of sight inside his ragged winter coat, and his son Bradley would be standing behind him, as timid as his father but subtly different from his father—not so perfectly hiding his readiness to shift from fawning to the kind of unholy fury that was going to be his whole character later—and neither Simon Bale nor his son would seem a particularly serious threat—especially on a bright December morning with a smell of January thaw in the wind and churchbells ringing far in the distance, the blue-white mountains falling away like Time. All it took to get rid of the two was the closing of a door.

Until his fifty-fourth year, Simon Bale worked as a night clerk at the Grant Hotel in Slater. It was a four-storey, blackish red-brick building as square as a box, flat, stale, manifestly unprofitable, stained with rust from the eaves that hadn't held in their water for longer than anyone in Slater could remember. The lobby was the size of an ordinary country parlor, a faded and threadbare rug on the floor like the rugs you find in the Sunday school rooms of country churches, the pattern no longer distinguishable, vaguely floral. On the rug stood an old, sprung davenport, a couple of squarish armchairs from the forties, a rickety checker table over against the wall, piled high now with magazines, a television in the corner. Old men lived there, and a couple of women whose business Simon quietly and patiently endured. It was not a proof of remarkable broad-mindedness in Simon, that quiet endurance of what he himself called harlotry, and no proof that he was a hypocrite, either. Their wickedness was one with the general corruption of the times, one of many signs that the end was at hand. They would burn for eternity, it went without saying, but so would most of the rest of mankind—for pride, for covetousness, for forgetting the Sabbath, for believing the devil to be dead. Confronted by evils so overwhelming, a man could only look to the state of his own soul and, on Sunday mornings, go out on his futile, stubbornly persistent rounds, giving the warning—to whole families, if possible; to the husband alone, if only the husband would listen; or to only the wife; or to the child alone in the yard.

He kept leaflets on his desk, tucked inconspicuously beside the register. No one ever took one. Sometimes when the spirit moved him—when he glimpsed in the eyes of some guest a flicker of humanity answerable to his own—Simon would timidly press one of the leaflets into the hand reaching out for keys. He would even sometimes venture a joke, though humor was perilous: “Here are your keys,” he would say, smiling horribly, like a man with some disease of the nervous system. When there was no work to do he would read, never any book but one. He would run his square, black fingertip along under the words and would move his lips, not merely because he was an ignorant man or only half-literate but also because he read with intense concentration. He read the
Daily News
in the same way, systematically, beginning with the front page and moving to the back, column by column, skipping nothing, even when he came to the advertisements or the two comics the
Daily News
carried,
Major Hoople
and
Scorchy Smith.
How much he understood of what he read, and in what queer mystical fashion he understood, God only knows. Since he never read the page four continuation of a front-page story until he happened to come to it in his methodical, column-by-column way, it seems unlikely that he read with intense curiosity. Nevertheless, he read his paper every day for some forty years, which is proof, at least, of the regularity of his habits, no mean virtue. His mouth would sometimes snap shut or twitch as he read—his obsequious smile had by this time become a nervous tic—and it seems very likely it twitched because Simon was angry, or, anyway, impatient. (One thinks of the way George Loomis used to read, twenty years younger than Simon was but more like Simon than either of them would have cared to admit. He too—late at night, in his big, lonely house—read column by column, except that he never bothered about the continuations or the advertisements or, above all, the comics—except for Scorchy Smith's half-naked women—and all the time he read (his left leg balanced on his right knee, the paper on the leg, the thumb of his left and only hand flickering nervously at his cigarette) he would wince, outraged by all that hit his eye from the machinations of Democrats and Russians to the stupidity of typesetters. Compare, on the other hand, Henry Soames, reading when he had no customers to talk to at the Stop-Off. He would lay his paper out on a table—a cup of black coffee on the top left corner of the paper, tacking it down because of the breeze from the fan on the shelf in the corner—and he would spread his arms out to left and right to lean on the table as he bent his huge bulk toward the news, and he would glance over all the headlines, moving his up-tilted head like a man hunting for the piece he needed for a jigsaw puzzle, and he'd work out in his mind what he wanted to look into first. Then he'd start, and he'd go straight to the continuation, and sometimes he'd smile or he'd murmur “Hmm,” and sometimes he'd call, “Callie, listen to this!” and would read to her aloud (which Callie Soames hated). If world events were upsetting or baffling, he'd mention the trouble to every man that came into the diner or stopped for gas, and his premise, deeper than judgment, something in his blood by now, was that somehow even the most outrageous behavior of Russians or Democrats or the Farm Bureau must make some kind of reasonable, human sense. He'd work that sense out, eventually, finding good even in the most unthinkable points of view (very often by logic that only Henry and God could fathom, and frequently only God), and from then on Henry would be nearly as moved by pronouncements made from that point of view, however Henry might disagree, as a country woman would be by her “Search for Tomorrow” on TV. “You're a damn fool,” George Loomis would say. “You forget the whole secret of human progress, pure meanness.” “I don't believe there is such a thing as pure meanness,” Henry would say, “or pure anything else.” “Well you got to have faith in something,” George would say. As for old Doc Cathey (hunchbacked, sly, infernally testy), he never read the papers at all. He never read anything, in fact, and profoundly distrusted any man who did.)