Nickel Mountain (3 page)

But tonight was a perfect night for truckers; it was foolishness to sit here hoping, if he was. Which he wasn't. He'd had one heart attack already, and he'd never known it at the time. It took all his effort to keep his mind off that. When a man's heart stopped, the whole machine ought to shudder, lights ought to flash in the head, the blood should roar: But his heart was scarred, and he hadn't the faintest idea when it had happened, as if some hand had flicked a switch off, then on again, letting the machine freewheel for an instant and then dig in as before. He might have died without ever knowing he was dying—a year, a year-and-a-half ago maybe, and all that had happened since might have been nothing.

A truck was coming up 98 now, but he wouldn't pull in even though the neon was on, as it always was, and one of the three lights in the diner. He'd want to push on, no doubt, to please his boss or his union or the people at Morse Chain. But maybe a drunk would stop, seeing the light burning away in there like an altar lamp. The semi was speeding-up on the quarter-mile level run in front of the Stop-Off for the hill a little ways north—the hill that would rise and suddenly break, pushing your heart up out of your chest, to drive three miles down banked curves into New Carthage. The truck was rolling now, maybe up around fifty, depending on the load. The grind of gears came, meaning he was halfway up the hill, and the new engine scream pulling down to a low, pained roar; another shift, to low, to low-low, the pounding throb—far away, though—and then the purr at the peak of the hill and the purr rising, pulling back against the thrust, strangling itself on the downgrade. All a mile away now, from the sound of it; so faint that you couldn't know how much of it you heard and how much was only a tingle in your skin.

Maybe he should get out the Ford, he thought. But no. He was tired, and he was in no mood, these days, for rattleassing over the hills, thanks to this tightness in his chest. A bad sign, no doubt. He'd have to draw up his will, as Doc Cathey had told him.

Outside it was quiet now, except for the light breeze. He could smell rain. It would be a good idea to check the cardboard in the window; easier than getting up after he was in bed, when the rain, if it should come, would be batting down and seeping over his dusty windowsill and onto his neatly stacked books—down over the pitiful leather-bound Bible that had belonged to his father and had
his
father's and his father's father's names penned into it under “Deaths,” between the Old and New Testaments. No other names; no wives, no children. The Bible had ridges across its back like the ridges on one of his mother's people's lawbooks, which was funny, when you thought of it, because a lawbook was what it had been for his father. And that too was funny, because now it had a fermented, museum smell from the rain that always seeped onto the books no matter how careful you were with the window beforehand.

Beside the old Bible he could see his father's anemic-looking schoolbooks and, on the shelf below,
National Geographics,
Shakespeare, an old almanac with notes in the margin, written in his father's childish hand. These books, too, had the musty smell, and something more complicated: a burnt-out, un-lived-in smell like—he had to think a moment—a hotel room. A sudden, unexpected feeling of guilt bloomed inside him, pushing up through his neck. He knew what it was for an instant, but then he had lost it again. He concentrated his gaze on the books, but whatever it was that had come to him was gone.

“Damn rotten shame,” he said aloud, vaguely.

His father had been a dairyman first, Henry remembered his mother's saying, and he'd failed at it, no doubt because of the pain of hauling his weight like a twelve-foot cross from cow to cow. After that the poor devil had sold apples from his orchard, and then, or perhaps before that, he'd raised sheep, painted roadsigns, clerked in the feedstore in Athensville. Nothing had worked. In spite of his tonnage, he had been a sentimental dreamer, as Henry's mother had put it. “Should've been a monk.”—Making sure her little Henry would not trudge in his father's footsteps. One job after another would cave in under his father, and she, who came from a fair-off family, lawyers mostly, would give him just barely enough of her money to set him up in the new project which, sure as day, would fail. He was as simple and harmless all his life as a great, fat girl. It was the floundering harmlessness, no doubt, that Henry's mother had hated in him. And so she'd driven him to schoolteaching at last. Because, she had said, he'd been through high school and couldn't do anything
but
read books. “You don't need capital for teaching school. Maybe it'll make a man of you,” she'd said. And so Henry's father had suffered the final indignity, plopped sweating in front of people like Frank Wells, enduring their pranks as a woman would, with his own son in the classroom, and in between times teaching them multiplication and poetry and Scripture. Which explained why Henry's mother's name had not been put in the Bible under “Deaths.” It was hard to say why his grandmother's name wasn't there. Maybe his father's womanishness had become, at last, a hatred of women in general, or at any rate a refusal to admit that they lived and died. His last delusion: that here at least, between the Old and New Testaments, a man stood on his own. (But Doc Cathey had said once, pushing his crooked knuckles down in his coat's side pockets and shaking his head, “Solid as stone your daddy was. Solid as stone.”)

He fitted his hands down beside his legs on the edge of the bed, feeling the power in his fingers. He leaned forward over his knees and pushed up slowly. He made his way to the window above the books.

The cardboard windowpane was snug, this time. It wouldn't let the water in no matter how bad the storm. He ran two fingers over the spine of the Bible.

The ridges on the leather were dry and cracked, but queerly slippery like the petals of an old pressed flower. Inside, it was as though someone had ironed every page, scorching the paper a little and making it brittle. The two names, his grandfather's and his grandfather's father's, had been scribbled in hastily and were almost unreadable. Henry frowned, not so much thinking as waiting for a thought to come. He laid the Bible down gently and went up front again for the ballpoint pen.

When he'd written in the names, with all the dates he could remember, he half-closed the book, then paused and stood for perhaps two minutes staring at the gold on the edges of the pages. He racked his brains for what it was that had slipped his mind, that had come and vanished again in an instant as he wrote, but then, discovering nothing, he put the Bible back where it went and, after another pause, recrossed the room. Standing across the room from the bookshelf he could see the prints his hands left in the smooth skin of dust on the Bible's cover.

He lowered himself onto the bedside and closed his eyes for a moment. In his mind, or under his eyelids, he could still see the gold tooling on the Bible, and beyond it a pattern of crisscrossed distances. Slowly the lines seemed to form letters, a name in gold. He felt his forehead muscles tightening, and the nerves trembled in the back of his neck. But before he knew what it was he was dreaming, he was awake again, staring at the Bible as before, or almost as before: staring from a new point in time now, perhaps only minutes after the other, perhaps several hours.

(What would he have missed if he'd died, that first time? Had anything happened? Anything at all?)

While he slept, that night, old man Kuzitski's light blue junk-truck wandered off the road, nudged through the guard rail, and rolled down a sixty-foot embankment. Everything burned but the door, which fell free and lay in a blackberry thicket (the branches still gray and limp this early in the spring), the lettering clear and sharp in the moonlight:
S. J.
Kuzitski · Fl 6-1191.

6

George Loomis pulled in a little before noon, on his way back up from Athensville to his place on Crow Mountain. He left the pickup idling by the side of the diner as he always did—George's truck was a devil to start—and he came in whistling, cheerful as a finch. He slid off his old fatigue cap and slid himself onto the counter stool by the cash register in one single motion, and he banged on the counter-top with his gloved fist and said, “Hey, lady!”

Callie smiled when she saw who it was. “Why, George Loomis!” she said.

He was close to thirty, but he had the face of a boy. He'd had more troubles in his almost thirty years than any other ten men in all the Catskills—he'd gotten one ankle crushed in Korea so that he had to wear a steel brace around one of his iron-toed boots, and people said he'd broken his heart on a Japanese whore so that now he secretly hated women; and when he'd come home, as if that wasn't enough, he'd found his mother dying and the farm gone back to burdocks and Queen Anne's lace. But there wasn't a sign of his troubles on his face, at least not right now.

“You working here now, Callie?” he said.

“Couple three days,” she said.

He shook his head. “You don't let that old fat bastard push you around, hear? And make sure he pays you cash. Tightest damn man in seven counties.”

“George Loomis, you ought not talk that way,” Callie said soberly. But then she laughed.

“How come you're out in broad daylight, George?” Henry said.

“Oh, every once in a while I like to remind myself how things look.” Then: “Been to Athensville with a load of grist.”

“Smash your hammermill, George?” Henry said.

“Not me,” he said, very serious. “Damn shovel did it. You care to buy a good shovel, Henry? Assemble it yourself?”

Henry laughed and Callie looked puzzled, as if she got it all right but didn't see anything funny about it. George said, “You hear about old man Kuzitski?” still smiling.

Henry shook his head.

“Tried to make a new road, I guess. Killed himself all to hell.”

“What are you talking about?” Henry said.

George shrugged. “That's what they say. Found the pieces down the foot of Putnam's cliff this morning. I drove by to look, but there's troopers climbing all over it, and they won't let you stop.”

Callie stared out the window, perfectly still.

“Christ,” Henry said. “Poor devil.” He shook his head, his chest light.

George said, “Tally ho, junkman.”

“George Loomis, you're
vile,”
Callie said, whirling.

He looked at his gloves. “Sorry,” he said, suddenly withdrawn. “I didn't know you were related to him.”

Henry squinted, one hand on the counter, seeing in his mind, as though it were all a part of one picture, the old man lifting his cup in a toast, George staring at his leather gloves, Callie standing with her jaw set, looking out the window. Beyond the drab hill and the deep blue mountains the sky was the color of old dry shale. He said, “What can I fix you, George.”

He seemed to think about it a moment. Then, slowly, studiously not looking at Callie, he stood up. “I guess I better move on, Henry.” He smiled, but his eyes were still remote. “Hell of a lot to do this afternoon.” He looked down at his gloves again.

When he'd left, Henry took a pill and went into the lean-to room in back and sat down. He could hear Callie fixing herself a hamburger, banging the scraper on the grill as if to smash it. He put his face in his hands, thinking, fighting his own urge to break things—starting, maybe, with her, and then maybe George Loomis. He could hear Jim Millet's John Deere popping and growling on a hillside a half-mile away, and Modracek's Farmall whining down on the flats, and the thought of good sensible grown men at their farm work, this year like last year and the year before—and a hundred thousand years before that—calmed him a little. You had to be patient with young people. It was natural for them to be pious, full of noise and sanctimonious gesture, sure of their creeds. The hell with it then. Nevertheless he clenched his fists, furious at their intrusion into the sanctuary of his tiredness, and if anything worthless had lain handy he would have smashed it. After a while he remembered he was out of cut potatoes for french fries and got up.

Callie said, “Maybe I was wrong to snap like that.” It was an apology, not an admission, really, or so it seemed to Henry. The idea that she might actually have been wrong was the farthest thing from her mind.

He compressed his lips. “Not wrong, exactly,” he said. He thought of a great deal he could tell her, a whole lifetime of words, in a way, and he began to get mad again. But beyond the woods the mountains stretched out tier on tier, farther than the eye could see, dark blue fading to lighter and lighter, merging with the sky, three hawks flying above the trees, getting smaller and smaller, and he couldn't think where to begin.

He said, “He lived alone. Why should anybody pretend to be sorry he's dead?” His eyes filled with tears all at once.

Callie patted his arm, passing him on her way to the sink. “Well, it's all for the best, I suppose.”

It was then that he exploded. “Shit,” he bellowed, and he hit the counter so hard the metal napkin dispensers tipped over and a mustard pot fell to the floor and splattered.

She stared, frightened. “All I meant—” she began.

But Henry stormed out to his car.

7

Henry Soames' feelings about having a girl here working for him were mixed, to say the least. He'd run the Stop-Off alone for so long, summer and winter, never closing even on Christmas from one year to the next except when he went out for an hour or so for a drive or to pick up something in town, that the place had become an extension of himself. The work in the diner or out at the pumps was as natural to him as walking or breathing, and to hand over jobs to somebody else was like cutting off fingers. It might have been different if business were heavier now than it had been before; but business never changed much here—it picked up a little from July to September, when the tourists passed through (only a few of them ever came in: people too low on gas to make it to the bigger, shinier stations farther on)—but even when business hit its peak he could handle it himself. When he'd hired Callie it had never entered his mind to wonder if he needed her; but he thought about it constantly now. He wondered how long she'd be likely to stay, how much he'd let himself in for. Keeping her busy, hard worker that she was, meant that he himself had, really, nothing to do. And that was the least of it. He'd spent a good deal of his time, in the old days, sitting at the counter reading the paper or talking with some farmer about the weather. He couldn't have Callie doing that—not at ninety cents an hour. She wouldn't have wanted it anyway. So he made up jobs for her, jobs he'd put off year after year not only because they were unimportant but because in fact he didn't want them done: painting the gas pumps, tearing the yellowed old signs off the diner windows, oiling the floor, planting flowers. The character of the place began to change, and it made him uneasy: He felt like a man away from home—felt, in some way he could not quite pin down, false, like a man belligerently arguing for something he didn't believe in. Worse yet, he had to make up jobs for himself. He couldn't very well just sit there letting Callie do all the work. So he cleaned the garage that had looked like a dog's nest for fifteen years—sorted the bolts and put them in boxes, hung up his tools (he found seven Phillips screwdrivers he'd forgotten he had), replaced the cardboard in the windows, swept and washed the floor till you could have eaten off it. People began to comment on how nice the place looked, and business improved. That is, people he didn't know or like began to come in and bother him with questions about the Indians or complaints about what he didn't have on the menu. Above all, Henry regretted the loss of solitude. All his life, or all his adult life anyway, he'd thought of himself as a lonely man; but he learned the truth about himself now. If it pleased him when people came by to talk—some farmer he'd known for twenty-five years, or old Kuzitski, or Willard Freund—it also pleased him to be able to be by himself sometimes, to stretch out for a nap in the middle of the day or take off his shoes in the back room and sit with a magazine. He did it sometimes even now, but it wasn't the same when you had to make an announcement about it and throw in some kind of excuse.