Nickel Mountain (23 page)

As for Doc Cathey, he came and went like a shadow no longer of any great significance. Sometimes in the past he had been for Henry an older and wiser spirit, someone to lean on, likely to come up with outrageous opinions but nevertheless sure to come up with opinions that, one way or another, would be of use. But he had nothing whatever to say, now. If he approved Henry's course he gave no sign. He would laugh sometimes, as if at nothing, but he left in his wake nothing solid to catch hold of, only the nameless turbulence of his indefinite, violent moods.

Most of the time Simon Bale would sit there in the sun, watching Jimmy play, telling him stories, or sleeping. At other times they would find Simon crying in his room. Both the sitting and the familiar grief, by now an old friend to Simon, were disgusting to Henry, and he would be tempted to lash out at the man with all the thunder of his indignation. He didn't, though, and in fact couldn't, because the fact was that Simon had every right to his grief, and it was his grief that lay both behind his dawdling, day after day, and his mourning alone in his room.

But idleness and crying weren't enough for him. He went further: He began to appear in the diner with his pamphlets (he was shaving again now; that much could be said; but on the other hand he'd given up taking off his suit when he went to sleep). He would
get
into conversation with the customers, smiling his idiotic smile or standing there with his mouth hanging open, rolling his eyes, craning his dirty, wrinkled neck.

Callie said, “Henry,
do
something!”

And so Henry said, “Simon, this is a diner. You go do your preaching somewheres else.”

“The Lord's work—” Simon said, lifting his eyebrows.

“Not while they eat,” Henry said. “Go someplace else.”

Simon did not like it. He had no natural feeling for ordinary requirements of Nature. But he accepted it. After that Simon would meet them at the door as they were leaving, and he would press his pamphlets on them and writhe along with them as they went to their cars, Simon smiling and hissing about Kingdom Come. Callie compressed her lips and said nothing, and Henry, despairing, pretended not to see. George Loomis said once, coming into the diner, jerking his thumb toward the gas pumps where Simon ministered, “You know what that bastard's telling them? He's telling them they're going to hell. You ought to trade him in on a goat or something.” Henry clenched his jaw and tried to think, then at last went over to the door and pushed it open and stuck his head out. “Simon!” he said.

Simon looked up, his head far forward, like a buzzard's, his tie hanging outside the front of his suitcoat. At last he came over.

“I don't mean just the diner,” he said, “I mean noplace in my sight. Leave the customers alone. You hear?”

“God forgive you,” Simon Bale said.

Henry clenched his jaw tighter yet and pulled his head in and let the door slam shut behind him. He started back toward the counter, then on second thought turned and ducked down to peer darkly through the glass. Simon was heading straight back to the people he'd been talking to, but he didn't disobey—at least not yet. The car started up and swerved out onto the highway and escaped.

“Damn it, Henry,” George Loomis said, “that man's crazy.”

“Maybe so,” Henry said. “How can I say?”

But he was thinking: Those fifteen people in New York City might be right in the end, but you had to act, and beyond that you had to assert that they were wrong, wrong for all time, whatever the truth might be. And it was the same even if you only
thought
you saw an old man being stabbed: You ran to the center of the illusion and you jumped the illusory man with the knife, and if it was empty, sunlit sidewalk you hit, too bad, you had to put up with the laughter, and nevertheless do it again the next time and again and again. So Simon. It wasn't true that the world was about to end or that sinners were going to torment, but all the same he was right to go out with his crackpot pamphlets: Henry Soames would try to persuade him, but he wasn't going to stop him—except in the diner, because the diner, at least, was still his own.

And yet he felt no quiet. The truth was that there was something Henry was afraid of, something as undefined in his mind as the substance of his child's nightmares, but real, for all its ghostliness: some possibility that became increasingly troublesome. He thought of the money he still hadn't said one word about to Callie or to Simon either, though the woman was buried now, with no one at the graveside at all, and he felt sick for a minute, but that fear was different, because Callie's finding out was inevitable, the only question was whether he could somehow cover the loss, make it back again or anyway make some of it back so the shock to her wouldn't be so great when it came. What troubled him was something else. He remembered something very strange, though this wasn't what was the matter either, though somehow it seemed related:

One night almost a year ago he'd been sleeping on the floor in Jimmy's room (he couldn't remember why anymore; maybe he'd just fallen asleep there, or maybe they'd had company that night and the beds were in use; it didn't matter). Jimmy was asleep on the floor beside him. Jimmy had moved, or had said something, and Henry had sat up and opened his eyes without quite waking up. He'd thought there was some kind of animal in the room, and, thinking of Jimmy (vaguely identifying the voice, perhaps), he'd lunged at the animal, and it had run, the legs moving fast—a kind of blur, very much the way a rabbit would run—out into the hallway where the light was on, and Henry had caught it and lifted it up with a shout and then he'd come wide awake and he was holding Jimmy by the waist and Jimmy was screaming. Henry had calmed him almost at once, and Jimmy had seemed never to remember it, but for Henry the memory of that night was like a wound that would never heal. He would wonder, again and again, later, at odd moments when it all rose up in his mind more real than the diner or the dim-lit kitchen around him, what would have happened if he hadn't awakened just that instant. And he couldn't answer it. Then something else: He began to wonder if it had ever happened at all. There was no way of finding out.

Then one afternoon the troopers called. Callie answered the phone. She came running into the diner, carrying Jimmy (he had to be with someone constantly, these days; Simon's attentions had spoiled him). As soon as she was inside the door, she called, “Henry, that was the troopers. They think they may have found who set the fire.”

Henry went cold. He hadn't realized until this moment how far his trust was removed from his rational judgment. “Who did it?” he said.

“They think it was a couple of kids,” she said. She hiked Jimmy up a little, getting a better hold on him. “They don't know, you understand, they just
think.
Two teen-agers. The troopers are on their way up here with them now. They want them to see Simon face to face.”

Henry thought:
Thank God he didn't do it!
But carefully he cut God from what he said. “Then he didn't do it.”

“It's not sure, but they think not.”

Then: “Where is he? I'll go tell him the news.”

“I don't know,” Henry said. “In back, I guess.”

She left, still carrying Jimmy.

Henry's legs went weak. He went over to the corner booth and sat down. He leaned his forehead on his fists and breathed deeply, and it was as if all his stomach had turned to jelly. He was still there when Callie came back, walking slowly, Jimmy walking beside her. Henry looked up. “What did he say?”

For what seemed half-a-minute she didn't answer. At last she said with a despairing look, “If they did it, he forgives them.”

“The boys?” Henry waited.

She said, “Love thine enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you. Thus saith Simon Bale.”

Henry snorted. “He'll change his mind when he sees them.”

She shook her head. “I don't think so.”

“The fire killed his wife,” Henry said.

“It won't make any difference,” she said. “I'm telling you, Henry. He's strange, really
strange.”

Her prediction turned out to be right, but Simon's behavior was, as Simon would have said, of no importance. The law was still the law.

10

The nightmares were nothing to worry about, Doc Cathey said. All children had occasional spells of that sort, some children longer spells than others; in any case, he'd grow out of them. He made them a list of foods they shouldn't give him within two hours of bedtime, and he warned them of scolding him too severely. Aside from that, there was nothing to do but wait. There was no question of there being any deep psychological disturbance, he said. He was sunny-dispositioned, placid, in a word, healthy.

They were relieved. Nevertheless it was a terrible moment when that scream would come, jerking them out of their sleep like a wire. It happened every two, three nights, sometimes twice in a single night. Henry would bound to Jimmy's bedside and scoop him up and say, “What's the matter? Bad dream?” They would never get out of him what it was he was dreaming about. It was hard enough to get the most ordinary information out of a two-year-old. Jimmy could talk well enough when he wanted to—in long, fairly complicated sentences, his eyes large and watchful, scrutinizing Henry's face for the first sign that the sentence had gone wrong. But it wasn't easy to make him advance information. He preferred to copy sentences he'd heard (in the morning they'd hear him practicing for half an hour at a time in his room, new expressions, new tones of voice). So what it was he was dreaming they never learned. Perhaps he forgot it all instantly, the minute he awakened. That was Henry's theory, because often Jimmy would go back to sleep at once, the minute Henry scooped him up, and sometimes he'd be asleep again even when Henry reached his bedside. At the end of the second week the spell seemed to be over. He went five nights in a row without crying out (it was Callie who kept track), and they began to breathe more easily.

They had another reason, too, for beginning to feel hopeful. On the Monday night a month and three days after Simon's first coming, Simon packed himself a lunch and drove down the mountain to the Grant Hotel. Henry and Callie had no idea when or how he'd gotten in touch with the man who owned the place to tell him he was coming back; in fact, until Simon got home, at seven-thirty the following morning, they had no idea where he'd gone. He left again the next night, and Henry said to Callie's mother, when they were standing in the diner with nothing to do (it was ten-thirty, always the slackest time of day), “Well, Ellie, Simon's started working again. He'll be on his feet in no time now. We'll soon see the last of him.”

“I imagine Callie's pleased about that,” she said. Henry smiled at her restraint. But she could not help adding, “I wonder how they feel about it at the Grant.”

And when George Loomis came in that night, Henry said, “Well, he's gone back down to work, George. Must mean it won't be much longer.”

“Maybe,” George said.

Henry laughed at George's skepticism. He went on chuckling, wiping off the counter; but something unpleasant began to nag at the back of his mind, and he could neither shake it nor make out what it was.

Again, Wednesday night, Simon went down to the hotel.

Doc Cathey said, “He's a different man when he's working. And you're a different man too, I'll say that.”

“Different how?” Henry said. “Simon, I mean.”

Doc Cathey shrugged, then tipped his head and thought about it, chewing the inside of his cheek. “Oh, tougher, I guess. More sure what he's about. I've noticed it before. You take a man that's different from everybody else around him and when he's holding down a job he'll do things he'd never even think of some other time.”

Henry considered it. “It may be,” he said. “I hadn't noticed it. Maybe so. I'm glad to see him pulling his life back together, just the same. You have to hand it to him, man fifty-four years old that's gone through what Simon has.”

Doc Cathey went on chewing his cheek. Henry went over to clean the booth where Nick Blue had had his supper, and as he stacked the dishes he began to whistle under his breath. But it wasn't good spirits pure and simple.

Again on Thursday night Simon Bale went down to the Grant. He returned at seven-thirty the next morning, and Callie fixed him toast and eggs. When he'd eaten he went into his room and shaved with his electric razor, then took off all but his dirty underwear and went to bed. He got up around two in the afternoon and went out to sit in the garden, reading his Bible. (It had rained that morning. The garden was muddy and the bench soaking wet, but Simon seemed not to notice.) Jimmy wandered around looking for him, as soon as he discovered that Simon wasn't in bed, and finally, smiling, shaking her head at the thought of the mess she would have to clean up when the mud got him, Callie led him out the back door. He ran-slid along between the glittering lettuce and beets to the rose bushes and between the bushes to the bench where Simon sat. Callie smiled again, thinking how hard they'd all been on Simon, after all: However crazy he might be, some ways, there was something good in him or Jimmy wouldn't hang on him that way. After that she called into the diner to Henry to ask him if he'd remembered to bring in the mail, and when he said no, he was sorry, he'd forgotten, she went around to the mailbox out in front. There was nothing much—something from Farmers' Insurance, one of those Occupant circulars, the monthly statement from the bank. She opened the statement, without much interest, as she started back to the house.

He saw the canceled check to Wiegerts' lying alone in the middle of the kitchen table, and his breath went out of him. He got the bottle of pills in the pocket of his shirt. Callie wasn't in the house, and she wasn't in the diner either.
I'm sorry,
he thought.
It was all I could do.
But that was no good and he didn't want it. He'd done it and he would take whatever fury or grief was coming, because though it was all he could do he'd nevertheless chosen to do it, and it was as though the act were not his fate's but his own. It came to him then where she would be, out on the highway crying and walking off her rage or, no, fear—that sensation like falling through endless space, the feeling she'd learned from sixteen years of living through the battles of her mother and father. He thought of driving out to hunt for her, but then he couldn't make out whether he ought to or not: Maybe she was better off getting through it on her own. She knew he was not her father, or anyway that his foolishness was a different kind of foolishness (except that he was not going to admit for a minute that what he had done was foolishness, finally, and maybe Callie would make out even that, he didn't know). He decided to see if she was back in half-an-hour, and if not, to
go
look for her.