Nickel Mountain (27 page)

The Goat Lady smiled, her upper lip vanishing again, her few teeth jagged and yellow in her black mouth. “It's a small world,” she said. Perhaps the question made her nervous, or perhaps it merely reminded her of her business. She got down off the stool and gave a grotesquely formal little bow, smiling again. “I surely appreciate your kindness.” Then, to Henry: “It's been real nice talking to you.”

Henry turned, covering his mouth with his hand, studying her. At last he nodded. He said, “Good luck.” It was as if for him she was gone already.

Callie stood at the door with Old Man Judkins, watching her climb up into her seat and start up the goats.
She didn't pay,
she realized at last. The cart was halfway up the hill by now, the clank of the bells far away enough to be pleasant.

Old Man Judkins said solemnly, tipping his head to one side, “It's like a pilgrimage. A mother in search of her son.” He pulled at his ear.

Callie said, “I better go see if Jimmy's awake from his nap.”

4

That was the last Henry Soames ever saw of the Goat Lady, though it wasn't by any means the last he heard. She was gone from the county the following day: some people said she'd moved on north; some said they'd seen her heading east, toward the resorts where the Jews were. Wherever she'd gone, she'd gone completely; it was as if she'd been swallowed up by a mountain, like any other gnome. Lou Millet wondered if maybe she hadn't run into foul play, and they speculated on that for a time; but after a week certain word came, by way of a letter George Loomis said he'd gotten from a relative, that she'd been given money by the Methodist Church in Remsen.

For a week more people swapped stories about her when they came to the diner. But gradually the talk died out.

Henry Soames was the first. He would go whole days without saying a word about the Goat Lady or anything else to anyone, even Callie. Often he wouldn't bother to get up in the morning. Doc Cathey would find him propped up on six pillows, in his undershirt, his eyes shut behind the steel-rimmed glasses, and his hair, what there was left of it, pasted to his scalp with sweat. If his mouth was closed and he wasn't snoring, it was hard to tell at first glance if he was living or dead. On the spindly table between his bed and the glass-knobbed dresser he had a red plastic glass of water and his little white pills. Beside him on the bed he had Oreo cookies.

“Are you
trying
to die?” Doc Cathey said. (Despite the weather he wore the black suit he always wore, his neck and head rising out of his collar like a brown, withered stalk.)

“No,” Henry said. He was grumpy as a bear these days. It was pretty near worth your hide to ask him the time, Doc Cathey said. Henry said, “Something's wrong, that's all. I'm all right. Just leave me alone.”

Doc said, staring fiercely down into the clutter of his medical bag, “My advice to you is, see a psychiatrist.” He'd said it twenty times before, after Callie's mother had nagged him into believing that was the only hope, and once he'd shoved a pamphlet at Henry about mental illness; but mostly Doc kept off the subject for fear of starting an attack.

“I know what's wrong with me,” Henry said. “I just need to work it out.”

Callie said another time, unnaturally sweet, putting her hand on Henry's forehead, “Doc says it might be something chemical, Henry. He says there might be some pill you could take.”

“No,” Henry said. He sat forward to say it, as if trying to drive it through Callie's skull by physical force, and she looked at the curtains and drew her hand away.

It wasn't that he wanted to be contrary or that his sickness had made him a different man—irascible and spiteful—and certainly, despite their settled opinion, it wasn't that he was afraid of hospitals, doctors, pills—or afraid, even, of whatever more severe treatments the pills might give way to. He didn't like hospitals, true enough, but he would do more for the sake of his wife and son than any of them guessed. It was one of the few things he knew about himself for certain. He'd be willing to shoot himself for them if he had to. But this was something else. Neither was it that he didn't believe what Doc Cathey said. It was probably true that something went wrong with your chemistry and if you took some pill you'd be able to work the thing out calmly, the problem still there but not white-hot in your mind: manageable. But true or not, he had to do it his own way. He couldn't explain it because there
was
no explanation. About this, though, he was wrong. George Loomis could explain it.

Henry was sitting in the chair he had out by the gas pumps islands for hot summer nights, and George was sitting down on the curb of the island, smoking cigarettes, as always, one after another. There were rainclouds in the sky and the leaves had their backs turned and the wind was coming from the south gently, but the thermometer stood at ninety-four and they knew there would be no rain. Callie was leaning on the ethyl pump watching the drab, quiet sunset, not seeming to listen to their talk. The dog lay across the doorway to the diner, asleep.

Henry said:

“I keep seeing it over and over, George. I see it clearer even than it was, slowed down, like a movie. I see that look on his face, and me moving toward him, shouting at him, and it seems to me I have a choice, whether to keep on shouting or not, and I choose, I keep shouting, and then all at once he falls.” The muscles in Henry's face were all out of control, and again, as before, his arm was rising uncontrollably to hide his eyes and he was twisting away a little in his chair to block the vision that stood before him closing out the hard reality of highway, trees, blue mountains in the distance. But George Loomis was looking at the asphalt, not noticing his face.

Henry said:

“I hear his head crack, George. And then I see him lying there jerking like a chicken. Jimmy didn't see it, I don't think, but
I
saw it. I sit up in bed and try to think of something else, but right away it comes back, the whole thing over again. You double up against it and go through all the movements as if your whole body was thinking it, and you see that choice coming and you can't change it, and then there's that movement of his feet toward the stairs, no way to stop it under heaven, like the movement of a train.” He felt tense all over, as if for a long time now he'd been holding his breath. “It's like drowning,” he said. “I feel as if anybody comes into the room it will be just too much, I feel like I need to be somewhere out in the middle of a field, in the dark.” He was quiet a moment, sweating big drops. Suddenly he said: “We're riding in the car on a narrow road and it comes to me in a sort of daydream I could reach out and slam my head against the truck we're meeting, or I could reach out my hand, and then all at once there it is again, Simon Bale and me at the top of the stairs, and I'm shouting at him, and my hands tighten up on the steering wheel—it's like a wound in your soul.” Again the memory was upon him, and he clamped his eyes shut, concentrating on thinking nothing, but it was useless and he waited for the memory to be over. When he opened his eyes again George was looking at him, distant. Henry fumbled for the cheese crackers he'd brought with him, somewhere down under his chair.

George Loomis said, “You need some kind of a pill.”

“Hell!” It came out like the bellow of a bull. “I
know
I need a pill.”

Still Callie pretended to be paying no attention, vaguely watching the sparrows on the highway, but she stiffened, making the others be still. Jimmy came around the corner of the diner on his tricycle, red-faced, vrooming the motor quietly. He glanced at them shyly, as if conscious of the dividing line between himself and them, then looked back at his handlebars. He came over toward the gas island and at the last moment veered away and headed back where he'd come from. Where the asphalt ended the dirt was cracked in small squares and as hard as cement.

“But pills are beneath your dignity,” George said.

“No,” Henry said, quietly this time, not expecting them to believe it, not asking even George Loomis to understand how he felt. Callie looked at the birds.

But George said, “Yes, they are.” He was nodding to himself as if he not only saw how it was but partly agreed. “The trouble with taking a pill is, you might feel better. That would be the worst thing could happen. You wouldn't be human any more.”

“Crap!” Callie said fiercely.

It was the first time Henry had ever heard her say it, and when he looked up, he saw that her lips were shaking.

George reached over, not even looking up, and put his hand on her shoe. “No, wait,” he said. “It's true. He says he made a choice, the choice to go on yelling, which makes him to blame for Simon Bale's dying. But he knows that's only word games. He didn't know Simon would fall downstairs, and even if he did, it's one time in a thousand you kill yourself that way. It was an accident, Henry was the accidental instrument, a pawn, a robot labeled
Property of Chance.
That's intolerable, a man should be more than that; and that's what Henry's suffering from—not guilt. However painful it may be, in fact even if it kills him, horror's the only dignity he's got.”

“That's stupid,” Callie said vehemently. But Henry saw she'd understood.

“Right,” George said. He looked at her, expressionless, and for a long moment they watched each other. Callie looked away first. She scowled at the woods across the road (the starlings were settling in the trees now) and she fiddled with her belt buckle, tightening it. She said:

“Why do men think they
have
to have dignity?”

“A word, an empty word,” George agreed.

Henry said: “Why can't we just be like the Goat Lady?” He laughed.

He wasn't prepared for the way it shocked George. Callie looked disgusted, but George Loomis blushed dark red. Henry looked down, away from George, at once. After a minute he said, “I didn't know you even saw her, George.”

“I didn't,” George said. “I only heard about her.”

Callie too saw that something was wrong. She said, “I'd better get Jimmy inside. It'll be dark soon.” She left them quickly.

Henry and George sat there by the island for another ten minutes, but neither of them said a word. After-chores customers began to arrive. In the gray of dusk the figures of Henry and George grew less substantial, it seemed to Callie, watching from the diner. At last Henry pushed up out of his chair slowly and came in.

5

They came to the diner night after night when the chores were done, and sometimes they talked about the drought and the heat, sometimes they merely sat, quiet, preoccupied-looking, like men listening for something in the back of their minds: some voice out of dried-up hills, a sound of water moving down under the ground. Sometimes they played cards; other times they did nothing at all. Ben Worthington, Jr., would stand by the counter drinking his beer and studying the punchboard for hours at a time, as if the whole secret of the universe lay under one of those dots. Once as Callie was passing him with a tray he caught her arm and said, as if continuing an old conversation, “There's got to be a way to figure it.” He pointed at the punchboard with the top of his bottle. “There's a way to figure everything.”

Callie pulled away. “You tell me when you figure it out,” she said.

Old Man Judkins said, “All the same, I can tell you where the clock is.”

“The hell,” Ben Worthington, Jr., said.

Old Man Judkins tipped his head back, so he could look through his glasses, and pointed at one of the dots without a moment's hesitation. It was as if he could see through the paper.

“Here's what,” Ben said. “I'll give you five-to-one the clock ain't there.”

Judkins shook his head. “No, sir. You pay for the punch and the clock's half yours, half mine, because I showed you where it is.”

Ben looked at him, and slowly he reached in his pocket for change and paid for the punch. The clock wasn't there. Old Man Judkins stood with his head back, holding his old straw hat in his hand, looking surprised, and when he was sure the clock was really not there he shrugged. “Hunch was wrong,” he said.

Days went by and it still didn't rain, and all of them grew more edgy. Old Man Judkins said, as though Callie Soames had not lived in farm country all her life (and yet she listened, remembering hand-loaded wagons of hay, thrashing crews, wheat standing on the hillsides in shocks): “It never changes. They bring in all them new machines, put all them chemicals into the ground, get dairies with a hundred cows, but they still got to wait on the land. Progress, they say. But th' earth don't know about progress. No rain, that means no corn and no hay, no feed in the winter. The old days, they might have trucked it in, but not now. Fifty cows was a real big barn in the old days, and two men could clean the gutters in half an hour. Now they got gutter cleaners—seven thousand dollars they cost, and you got to pay for it month by month, summer or winter, whether or not you got hay in the barn, because banks don't care about hay. We used to make it, in the old days, no matter how long the rain held off. But the way things are now, you can't compete without gutter cleaners and diesel tractors, combines, balers, crimpers, blowers, grain silos, motor-run unloading machines, hammermills, sorters, all the rest. Lou Millet bought that farm of his for four thousand dollars, house included. You know how deep he's in right now? A hundred thousand. Fact. Can't even sell it.”

She shook her head.

“No chance any more of winning,” he said. “They just try and survive.” Old Man Judkins looked at her with his head cocked; then down at his hands. They were gnarled and liver-spotted and scarred, and she remembered suddenly what Jim Millet had said, the day of George Loomis's accident: “The goddamn cylinder was going around and around. You could see slivers of bone—I never see nothin' like it—red with blood and then redder in half-a-second, and the blade chewing away.”