Nickel Mountain (26 page)

“I'm sorry you can't stay longer,” she said.

He shrugged as if sadly and said good-night to Henry. At the door Prince opened his eyes but didn't move. George stepped over him.

Outside it was even hotter than inside. The air was lifeless, heavy as dust. She felt faint. “Surely is dry,” she said softly. Something nagged at her thought but refused to come clear.

George Loomis nodded politely. “Keeps on like this it'll burn up all the corn.”

She looked at his face. He had his head bent now, trying to see his watch in the dark of the porch. The tilt of his head made her think of a raven. Beyond the porch, the moonlight made everything it touched unnaturally sharp: the lines of the diner, the garage, the burdocks, Henry's old black Ford up on blocks in the high brittle weeds. The mountains seemed very close, right over your head, stifling. She thought as she had thought before, at the kitchen window, looking out and listening to their talk in the living room,
Something is coming.
Nothing was, she knew. She felt tense, as if walking on a high ledge above dark, fast water. She was sorry for George Loomis, annoyed as she was at his senseless retreat. She should have expected it, of course. Maybe she had.

“Well, sooner or later it's bound to rain,” she said. “It always does.” She laughed.

“Aeyuh,” he said. He was thinking about something else.

“Thanks ever so much for coming by,” she said.

“Don't mention it,” he said, “it's been my pleasure.”

They shook hands, and he went down the steps and limped over the moonlit path to his truck. His hair needed cutting—dark shadow against the bone-white of his ears. Dust rose from the path and hovered like granary sift behind him.

“Good-night, George,” she said.

He half turned, smiling again, nodding, almost bowing.

She thought of her father, then of Henry's father as he stood in the picture they had upstairs, huge and placid, with a cardigan sweater that was buttoned wrong and under his arm an absurdly small violin. With a part of her mind she heard George Loomis's truck start up, saw the lights go on, and saw him backing away. Something flew soundlessly past, between the garage and where she stood. She knew what it was, but she couldn't remember for a moment what it was called.

At last, looking over at the gray-white bench in the garden, she saw the ghost of Simon Bale. He was staring mildly, patiently, at the house. He was bent forward slightly, his knees together, the Bible closed in his lap. One of the bookmark ribbons hung over his knee. When he saw that she was looking at him, he gave a start and reached toward his hat-brim, perhaps about to stand up. But then he vanished, leaving only the shadows of tamaracks on the empty, moonlit bench.

3

It was the next morning, at the crack of dawn, that the Goat Lady—otherwise known as “Mother”—reached New Carthage. You could tell where she was by the smell from a half-mile away, and if your nose wasn't working you could tell by the noise. She had homemade tin-can bells all over her homemade pink and purple cart, fixed on the sides with fencepost staples and baling wire, and her goats bleated like the seven angels of death. She had a shaggy, dun-colored billygoat and a square, black, six-year-old nanny up in front, pulling as though the rig had no wheels, and there were four more nannies behind, dragging along Indian-file on braided binder twine. Alongside the last of the four was a six-months' kid. The four nannies in back were the milkers. One of them had tits so big she'd have stepped on them if the Goat Lady hadn't had them up in a kind of sling made out of some kindly farm-woman's bedsheet. On top of the cart she had a sign like a housetop—which in fact it was, the cart being the Goat Lady's house, the rear wall an old tarpaulin—and on the sign, in lettering that looked like a joke from some children's cartoon book that no child would think funny:
MOTHERS GOTS MILK
.

The Goat Lady sat up in front like a midget stagecoach driver or a burlesque of the fiery charioteer, her legs splayed out like an elderly madam's, her skirt hiked up over her dust-specked, yellow-gray thighs, on her head a dusty black bonnet like an Amish woman's. She had on, despite the muggy heat, every stitch of clothing she owned—a couple of coats, a sweater, three or four dresses, a dark red shawl. She had iron-toed shoes. People that passed her on the highway would run off onto the far shoulder from staring, and when she pulled up onto some farmer's front lawn to eat her dinner or strip out her goats or try to peddle her goat's milk and cheese, women would call in their children from outdoors. She had a face that caught the eye and held it, amazing and revolting, flatly inhuman: yellow teeth like an old sick dog's, eyebrows like a badger's, an enormous wide-bridged nose very much like—a goat's. She looked about sixty but she said she was thirty-six, and no doubt it was true. It was unthinkable that the Goat Lady should lie, as unthinkable as that she should cheat or steal or plan. Most people thought she was part Indian; the Indians said she was a Gypsy. If people took her in, nights, fed her, clothed her, provided her with orange pop or root beer, it was not so much out of charity as out of impotence in the face of her boundless gall. The first place she stopped when she reached New Carthage, the Bill Kelsey place, they called the troopers; but there was nothing the troopers could arrest her for. In her old black purse inside the cart (the troopers said after she'd gone for good), she had three hundred dollars and a gun that was missing a firing pin. People were surprised that the Goat Lady had three hundred dollars, but how she came by her savings was no great mystery. She could no more make change than fly, or if she could she didn't; she would merely pocket whatever you gave her, accepting it as a mother's right, up to and including a twenty-dollar bill, and if you had nerve enough to ask for change she'd merely hold out her money, with magnificent disgust—wadded-up bills and dimes and quarters and three or four brand-new galvanized nails—and you could take whatever you wanted, including the nails. No doubt people gypped her from time to time—and perhaps worse. When a pack of small boys came close to her cart her eyes would awake like a chipmunk's, and she'd begin to squeeze her hands together in an agitated, fierce-looking way. But finally she was ungyppable and untormentable: charmed. She seemed not really to understand the value of whatever money she lost, though she could count when she absolutely had to, and her fear of small boys was manifestly impersonal, like other people's fear of snakes. She had more pack rat than human in her: She collected and jealously guarded her utterly meaningless treasure, and if in the end she lost all she'd saved, she lost it as pack rats lose their bits of bright cloth, old bobby pins, and tinfoil to large, inscrutable movements in space. At the same time, she was herself a large, inscrutable movement—as George Loomis said, though he knew her only by report, he said. She'd started out twenty-four days ago (this she had counted, marking off the days with a nail on the plywood wagon seat) from Erie, Pennsylvania, in quest of a son who'd left home in July to find work where the drought hadn't hit so hard, and who had loyally sent for her at last, telling her to come to a place she had never heard of, didn't know where to find and no longer remembered the name of. (It sounded like
Fair.)
She'd set out in an arbitrary direction, taking the only highway out of town that she knew (so that for her it was not arbitrary), and she'd been helped and hustled along (not even really knowing she was helped or hustled) in a generally north-eastward direction to the heart of the Catskills—through coal country and oil country and timber country—heading on in full confidence, saying only, when people tried in vain to break down the walls of her faith, “It's a small world.” Now she was back in farming country, and she knew—though in fact her son may have been in, say, Blair, Wisconsin—she was getting there.

It was two in the afternoon when she reached the diner. The sun was a white ball of fire, and across from it the moon hung clear as could be. Callie Soames stared at the woman's rig as people had been doing now for twenty-four days, watching the woman pull up to the pumps, bells clattering, as if to gas up her goats, then on second thought turn short and pull her pink and purple wagon over to the door, blocking it neatly, as if by plan. Starlings careened in the baked sky. In the dust below there were sparrows and cow-birds by the hundreds, picking up grain truck spill. The Goat Lady got down and came over to the window and pressed her face to the screen, shielding both sides of her face with hands as gritty as a miner's. Then she came to the door and peered through the screen as she'd peered through the window. Finally she came in. Prince lifted one ear, then drifted back into sleep. There was oat chaff on the woman's hat and shoulders from fields where combines were at work. “Hi,” she said. She stood four-feet-tall, with her big square brown fists on her hips—legs wide apart, mouth widely grinning, her nose like an elbow coming out of her face—so pleased to be here that for a moment Callie was sure the woman was someone she ought to recognize and struggled in her mind to place her.

“Honey,” the woman said, “I was wondering if you happen to sell ice cream.”

“Oh,” Callie said. As if the words hadn't sunk in, she looked over at Henry where he sat in the corner booth picking at a piece of apple pie. (Jimmy was back in the house, taking his nap.) The woman turned, following Callie's glance, and Callie looked back at her quickly. The woman was still smiling. She was fat, in an unhealthy, poor woman's way, especially below the belt. It was possible that she was pregnant.

Henry said very solemnly, like a minister, “We do have ice cream. Yes'm.”

“Why, that's your hubby,” the woman said, delighted—even proud, one would have thought, as if she'd mistaken Callie for one of her own. When she laughed, her mouth seemed to slip right up behind her nose. “He's sure nice and plump!”

Henry scowled.

The goat smell and the stench of her sweat were everywhere, and Callie had to concentrate to keep from being sick.

“Apple pie!” The woman rolled her eyes at Callie, suddenly coy as a schoolgirl. “I ain't et apple pie in years. When I was six years old I was out in the orchid one time where my daddy was picking—my true daddy: he was a deputy sheriff—and you'll never guess!”

Callie waited.

She leaned far toward Callie, leering. “I set down on a bushel crate and wee-weed all over 'em!” She wrung her hands and drew her tan, flat face back and sideways, giggling, and above the motionless, patient-looking layers of clothing the fat, cracked and shiny flesh of her throat rippled. Tears washed down her cheeks and into the curls sticking out in front of her bonnet and then, when she threw her head forward in her ecstasy, rolled down her nose and hung in a great gray drop at the end, like a pearl. Henry leaned his forehead onto the heel of his hand.

“What kind of ice cream did you want?” Callie said.

The woman climbed up on the counter stool, still giggling, turning again, after she was settled, to look over at Henry as before. She got herself into control and looked up at the ice cream flavors sign hungrily, sniffing, wiping the tears from her eyes with the backs of both hands, then went off on a giggling fit worse than the last. “I wish you could of seen his face,” she said. She turned again to giggle at Henry. Again she got herself in control. “I'll have choc'late,” she said. The decision appeared to surprise and please her. Callie turned away.

“Honey,” the woman said behind her, coy again now, “did you ever hear the name of Buddy Blatt?” She was lighting a cigarette.

Callie hesitated, the goat smell and cigarette smell mingling unpleasantly with the ice cream smell in the freezer.

“Buddy Blatt's my boy,” the woman said. “I been looking for him.”

Callie put the scoop back carefully, as though it might blow up in her hand if she jarred it, and covered the freezer again. She slid the dish of ice cream onto the counter-top, along with a napkin and spoon, then remembered to fill a water glass. “I don't think I've heard that name,” she said, and after a minute, “Henry?”

Henry shook his head and looked out the window.

“He sent for me,” she said. She coughed, and smashed out the cigarette almost untouched. She dipped her spoon into the ice cream and lifted her lips away from her teeth, then sucked a little off the spoon and let the rest slide back for the next bite.
“Mmmm!”
she said. She reached down inside her collar and half-scratched, half-rubbed. Callie listened to the fans. No air stirred.

Then for the hundredth time, because like everyone she met they were the kind of people that would understand a mother's feelings, she told her story. Old Man Judkins came in in time to hear the last of it. It was the second time around for him. He'd heard it secondhand from Bill Llewellyn in New Carthage less than an hour ago. But it was only this time, hearing it from her own mouth, that he believed it.

“They all been real kind,” she said. She tucked her chin in and giggled. “Down in Olean the police helped me strip out my goats.”

“The police?” Henry said. It was the first sign he'd shown that he was listening.

“They was a green place right in the middle of the city, it was just as green as anything, with flowers in the middle, and I pulled up there. It was milking time. And the p'lice come over and talked awhile and then helped me.”

Henry looked out the window again, and Old Man Judkins picked his teeth.

“I got the cart fixed up so I can sleep in it, but I ain't had to yet,” she said. “Every night but one I've slept in somebody's house, and the one night I didn't was because down in Endicott they let me sleep in the jail. They been very kind.”

Callie said matter-of-factly, “And you really think you'll find him.” She wondered whether the woman would pay for her ice cream.