Nickel Mountain (29 page)

“Long time since you come up here,” George said.

“Yes it is.”

They looked at the table between them. They'd traded work in the old days—not George and Fred Judkins but Fred Judkins and George's father. Old Man Judkins could remember when George Loomis was no bigger than Henry's boy was now—and exactly as much like an elf or an angel or any other natural thing—crawling around on the floor while his mother worked bread dough right here at this table. Long time, he thought, and nodded. In the corner of the living room that he could see from where he sat, he could make out the shiny arm of an elephantine, old-fashioned couch, a table with a bird cage on it, and a lamp with Tiffany glass.

“How have you been?” George said.

“I still get around,” he said.

Their faces were white, with no light but the flicker of the television. They looked like dead men returned after a long time to an empty house to say some trifling, insignificant thing they'd forgotten to say in time. But they didn't say it. Old Man Judkins relit his pipe, and George Loomis said, “Still living there with your daughter, Jud?”

“No, didn't work out. Got a room over Bill Llewellyn's now. Better all 'round.”

“I bet you miss the old farm, eh?” He lifted his glass and waited, respectful.

Old Man Judkins nodded. “ 'Deed I do.”

George grinned. “You give me about three dollars and you can have this place.” He drank.

“Ain't worth it, George.”

“That's the truth.”

The pipe had gone out again and Old Man Judkins lit another match, but he forgot to hold it over the bowl; he was watching the silent television—a man in a cavalry uniform looking through field glasses at a hill. George looked over too.

The quiet made Old Man Judkins remember something, but for a long time he couldn't think what it was. Then at last it came to him. Steam. The old black steam tractor made no sound at all, sitting there opposite the thrashing machine, headed up. When they threw in the pulley the thrashing machine would begin to move, slowly at first, like something alive just beginning to wake up, the feeders rising and falling in a kind of sawing motion, utterly soundless, and then the team would bring the wagon over, that too almost soundless—the click of harness buckles, the creak of a wheel—and by now the feeders would be moving fast, a kind of whir like a ball on a string, and the crew would start working, a man on the bagger and one on the platform, two more men up on the wagon, pitching, a couple of boys hauling the grain off and bringing up new bags, no sound but from time to time the not-loud shouts of the men telling stories, joking while they worked, and the steady whir and the feeders catching the unthrashed wheat with a
chìg-uff, chig-uff,
chig-uff.

“I ought to come see you sooner,” Old Man Judkins said. “Folks get out of touch.”

“My fault as much as yours,” George said.

Not speculating, on principle, raising no questions, making no suggestions, Old Man Judkins watched the picture on the television, wondered vaguely what was happening, and finished his glass of milk. Out of a clean, cool waterfall came a pack of cigarettes. At last he stood up. “Long time, George,” he said.

“Too long,” George said. He stretched out his hand and the old man took it.

Then Fred Judkins went home.

In his room, sitting down in front of his turned-off coal-oil heater, the window-fan roaring, Old Man Judkins got out his pipe, cleaned it, stoked it. He knew that from time to time he would wonder again why the Goat Lady's cart was up in George's shed; he knew that despite his principles he'd be molested from time to time by doubts. Maybe the answer would come up some time in a conversation, or maybe someone else would stumble onto it, some loudmouth gossip or righteous fool from town, and he would find out. But probably not. No matter.

After a time he said, pointing his pipe at the reflection of himself looking in, dubious, through the nearer window, “Maybe there's such a thing as a heaven and hell. If there is, a man has a right to go where he's contracted for. I wouldn't mind going to hell if I thought I'd earned it. Better than getting a last-minute pardon, as if everything you did was no account, any more than a joke.”

He glanced over his shoulder as if thinking he might have been overheard. The room was empty. “There is no heaven or hell,” he said. “That's a scientific fact, and there's the end of it.”

He set his teeth down firmly on the pipe stem.

7

He lay in bed on his back in the muggy night heat, his hand under his head, smoking without ever touching the cigarette except to change it for a new one, the radio on the commode playing the American Airlines all-night concert, far away and tinny, interrupted once every hour for news, the same news over and over, the same voice:
Albany. Tonight eight counties have been officially declared disaster areas. In his press conference this evening, Governor Harriman said
—

There were flies in the room, the screens all shot. Beside the radio, a stack of paperback books, the loaded ash tray.

George Loomis lay perfectly still, as if tranquil. He was clean-shaven and combed, and the sheet was drawn over his bad foot, the good foot lying in the open, as though in this isolated mountain house he expected some visitor. But his mind was in a turmoil, struggling against thought.

“There are no disasters,” his grandfather had said, “God moves in strange ways.” But his mother was dying, so he'd gotten home from Korea on leave, shocked to find himself moved by her dying. He'd been young then, a romantic. Her face was sunken, and she drooled now, an effect of the stroke, and her ugliness made him see that she had been beautiful once and that he'd loved her. When she died his father said, “What shall we do?” and he had said nothing.
Bury the dead.
When she was embalmed, though, her face filled out and she wasn't as bad as she'd been before, almost beautiful
in the casket with its ridiculous window for the worms to look through.
In carne corruptible incorruptionem
He had not wept or wanted to, even at the graveside, but afterward he had gotten drunk, or rather sick, and had stood on a table at the Silver Slipper intoning Ovid:

Exitus auspicio gravior: nam nupta per herbas. …

For in those days there was still poetry. Still music, too. You would listen all night to the music your friendly American Airlines brought to you for your listening pleasure, and you would be pleased. Yet it was sound, even now; more comforting than silence.
God bless you, friendly American Airlines. Into your hands I commend myself.

Then the memory flushed through him again, his headlights dipping over the crest of the hill as they'd done without harm ten thousand times, the incredible circus cart there in his road, straddling the crown, and again in his mind he hit the brakes with all his might and yanked at the wheel and heard the noise resounding like thunder through the glens. When that memory was over he saw Fred Judkins at his door again, nodding, sucking on the pipe, and after a minute the old man took off his hat. (But too late now to tell anyone, and no doubt too late from the beginning. An accident, one in an infinite chain.)

The American Airlines had chosen
Scheherazade
for him. He tried to listen, or rather he pretended to try to listen, consciously playing an empty role … no emptier, he thought, than others.

He ground out the last of his cigarettes and snapped out the light. In the darkness the music, like the heat, drew nearer, coming from all parts of the room at once. He rolled over on his stomach, the side of his head on his hand now, and closed his eyes. There had been birds circling above the back ravine. He'd been alarmed, seeing them, wondering who else might be seeing. Before that he'd been alarmed by the knock of the Watkins Man. But all this would pass.

(At the Dairy Queen in Slater there had been two young girls, strangers to him. One of them had smiled. She had long hair—both of them had long hair, one blonde, one dark, and they wore no lipstick. They were pretty, poised between child and woman, so pretty his heartbeat had quickened a little, and he'd imagined how they would look in those pictures you could buy in Japan, coarse rope cutting their wrists and breasts and thighs. The instant he thought it, his stomach went sour. They were young, pure: beautiful with innocence, yet corruptible. The one who smiled invited it. She was hungry for it.
Serpentis dente.)

He twisted onto his back suddenly and sat up, soaking in sweat. “Please us,” he whispered. He could feel the memory of the accident coming over him, and he got up to look for a smokable butt in an ash tray, and some bourbon.

8

They'd all heard somehow (this was three nights later) of Nick Blue's prediction. There was no more sign of rain now than there'd been all day: The clouds were piled up like tumbling mountains, blocking out the stars, but the dry breeze still blew, light. If the crickets were still it meant only that all signs fail. They talked though about how Nick Blue had a kind of sense (Nick Blue wasn't there), and about how he'd known three weeks beforehand when the blizzard was coming, the year before last. If he'd said the rain would come tonight, then it was coming. Eight-thirty passed, and then nine-thirty, and the talk went on, more tense now—sharp against the dull moan of the fans—as though they were talking to keep themselves from noticing. Around ten-thirty George Loomis came in, and as he came over to the counter, the brace clumping on the wooden floor, the empty sleeve hanging free, they said, “Well, what you think, George?” “I didn't throw on no raincoat,” he said. “That ought to bring it,” Jim Millet said. George said, “I'll tell you one thing for certain: if it comes it'll hit every farm in this country but mine.” They laughed—howled like wolves—though each of them had said the same thing in one way or another, taking pride in his singular bad luck—and they went back to their talk of Nick Blue and the blizzard two years ago and then to the time when it didn't rain till the middle of September, in 1937. The talk got louder and at eleven-thirty the breeze was still blowing. Then Lou Millet said, “Henry, you old devil.”

Callie looked up. He was standing in the doorway, filling it, able to pass through it all, it seemed, only by a trick of her vision. Jimmy came out from behind his father's right leg and around the counter, and she picked him up and put him on the stool by the cash register. “What are you doing up this time of night?” she said. But she kissed his cheek, holding his head to keep from pulling away.

“Daddy let me,” he said.

“Henry, you ought to be ashamed,” she said. But she dropped it. He was looking out into the darkness, and she knew why he was here. Nick Blue had been wrong, and they'd all believed him, and when the disappointment, embarrassment came, Henry wanted to be here. Because they're neighbors, she thought. All at once she knew how it was going to be when they realized what fools they'd been. She understood for the first time (but wordlessly) Henry's rage: It was not a little thing they'd come here expecting, and not something unduly fine, either (“No chance any more of winning,” Old Man Judkins had said. “They just try and survive”). That much, surely, they had a right to expect. And so they'd come here with high spirits, expecting not salvation but merely rain to recover the corn and a little of the hay; but they were going to see they'd made fools of themselves, that any dignity they thought they had was a word, empty air, and to act on the assumption that they had any rights in this world whatever, even the rights of a spider, to survive, was to turn themselves into circus clowns, creatures stuffed with old rags and straw who absurdly struggled to behave like human beings and who, whether or not they succeeded, were ridiculous. All this Callie knew, not in words but in the lines of Henry's face, and she wanted to leave so she wouldn't have to watch it when it happened.

It was quarter-to-twelve. Emery Jones' hired man lit up, his buck-teeth gleaming, and he said: “Nick said it would come today. That means it's going to be here in fifteen minutes.” He seemed to have no inkling of what a crazy thing it was to say. But they did. Old Man Judkins looked at his empty cup as though he'd just noticed a bug in it, and Jim Millet put his hat on and stood up. Ben Worthington, Jr., laid down the punchkey he was playing with and calmly, thoughtfully, pushed his fist through the board, then drew out his wallet. It was bulging with the money he'd gotten for his wheat and would be needing all this winter. “I'd like to buy that clock,” he said.

“Ben, that's crazy,” Callie said. “Forget it. We'll tell them it was an accident. Please.”

But he shook his head. He threw the coat he had no need for over his shoulder and went to the register. Callie stood helpless a minute, then pulled the square, green check-pad from her belt and leaned on the counter to figure how much it came to, and then Henry was standing at her elbow. “Let it go, Callie,” he said. Then, with a grim laugh, “It's on the house, Ben.”

Ben glared as though it wasn't August he hated after all, but Henry Soames, as if Henry had denied him the vote.

Henry was saying, “The same for all of you. Tonight it's all on me.”

“Some other time, Henry,” Lou Millet said.

But Henry was possessed, dangerous. “I mean it,” he said. “Tonight we're not taking a dime.” He hit his chest three times with his thumb, his face incredibly serious; none of them laughed. “I mean it,” he said again. “Today's my birthday.” He yelled it as though he were angry. “Truth. Callie, give everybody cake.”

“Hear, O Israel,” George Loomis said, “today is the day he takes upon himself. …” But Henry's face was dark red, and George shut up.

“We're going to sing ‘Happy Birthday, Dear Henry',” Henry roared, not smiling at all, forgetting to smile, his fat fists clenched, and Callie was saying in a whisper that cut through Henry's roar, “Henry, stop it!”