Nickel Mountain
John Gardner
For Joan
Contents
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II
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III
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VI
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VII
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VIII
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A Biography of John Gardner
I
1
In December, 1954, Henry Soames would hardly have said his life was just beginning. His heart was bad, business at the Stop-Off had never been worse, he was close to a nervous breakdown.
Sometimes when he was not in a mood to read he would stand at the window and watch the snow. On windy nights the snow hurtled down through the mountain’s darkness and into the blue-white glow of the diner and the pink glitter of the neon sign and away again into the farther darkness and the woods on the other side of the highway. Henry Soames would pull at his lip with his thumb and first finger, vaguely afraid of the storm and vaguely drawn by it. He would imagine shapes in the snow that shot past, mainly his own huge, lumbering shape, but sometimes that of some ominous stranger. Though he stood in the lean-to room behind the diner he could hear the hum of the diner clock, and sometimes he would see in his mind the red and blue hands and, unaware of what he was doing, would try to make out what time it was—twelve, one, quarter-to-three. … At last, he would sink down on the bed and would lie there solid as a mountain, moving only his nose and lips a little, troubled by dreams.
Even when they interrupted his sleep he was always glad when people came, that winter. The diner lights were always on, and people knew he didn’t mind being roused. The Stop-Off was the last place until you got to the outskirts of Slater, and if the weather was bad, the Stop-Off could be a godsend. Henry would call out, “I’ll be right with you,” and he’d pull on his robe and hurry to the counter, blinking, and he’d yell, “Great weather for polar bears,” and he’d laugh, grim, not fully awake, and would slap the man on the shoulder. Generally it would be drunks that came after two—old men with bad teeth, or no teeth, and liver spots and hair that needed cutting. One old man came especially often, a heavy, dignified old Russian, or a Pole perhaps, named Kuzitski. A junk dealer. He drove an old blue Chevy truck with his name and phone number lettered on the door, and he always wore a suit and vest and in winter a great black coat he’d bought for a song, long ago, at the bus depot in New Carthage. His walk was slow and determined, seemingly not the walk of a drunk but that of a man engrossed. He would seat himself very solemnly and would meditate, then remove his hat and place it on the counter, and finally, politely, he would ask for coffee. There would be beads of ice on his moustache. Henry would serve the man his coffee and would serve himself a piece of apple pie and he’d stand behind the counter while the old man poured whiskey into his coffee and drank. Sometimes after Kuzitski’s second cup, Henry would mention his heart.
“They give me a year to live, Mr. Kuzitski,” Henry would say. “I had one heart attack already.” His tone never quite went with the words, but the old man could no doubt see that Henry was a frightened man. “I get dizzy spells,” Henry would say.
Kuzitski would nod sadly, and after a while he would say politely, “Sister of mine had that trouble.”
Henry Soames would shake his head and look out the window at the snow and after a minute he would say, laughing shortly, “Well, we all go sometime.”
Occasionally he would let it go at that. More often he would press further. He probably had no idea how often he’d said it, the very same words, the same high-pitched voice; certainly Mr. Kuzitski had no idea. “It’s a hell of a thing. You just can’t make yourself believe it, that’s the worst of it. They told me, ‘You just lose ninety pounds and you’ll live for another twenty years’; but you think I can do it?” He would shake his head. “It’s a funny damn world.” He would turn and squint out the window a while, trying to think about it, sensing the profundity of it but unable to find the words to express it even to himself. Vague images would come: children, trees, dogs, red brick houses, people he knew. He felt nothing; a heaviness only, a numbness in the chest.
“Nobody ever would marry her,” old Kuzitski would say. “I should have loaded her up in the truck and hauled her away to the dump. Ha ha.”
Henry would eat, glum, and then he would lean on the counter, looking at his huge, hairy-backed hands, and to fill the silence he would say more. He always spoke calmly at first. He would tell about his father, how he’d had the same trouble, and he’d talk about all a man wanted to do that he never got done, never got around to—places he meant to go, things he promised himself he’d see. “Jesus.” Shaking his head.
Henry would begin to pace then, still talking. It seemed to make Mr. Kuzitski uneasy, but Henry had to do it nevertheless. The sound of voices in the diner at three in the morning filled him with a kind of hunger. He would grow excited, gradually, and his words would come faster, and something that rarely showed in him at other times would show in him now: a streak of crazy violence. Like a drunken man, he would clutch his fists against his chest and his voice would get louder and higher in pitch, and sometimes he’d stop pacing to pound the counter or a tabletop, or he’d lift a sugar dispenser and hold it tight in his hand as if thinking of throwing it. Mr. Kuzitski would sit precariously balanced, his widened eyes fixed on the sugar dispenser. Henry must have seen the hopelessness of trying to put what he meant into words, whatever it was, if anything, that he meant. He would check himself, straining to face death bravely, gallantly. But he was a weak man and childish, especially late at night, and all at once he would catch the old man’s arm and would cling to him, not shouting now but hissing at him like a snake. His eyes would bulge, and tears would run down to the stubble on his fat jowl. Kuzitski would look down at the floor and, clinging to the counter, would recoil from Henry’s grasp.
Though it happened again and again that winter, neither of them was ever ready for it. Henry would be shocked and humiliated, and would apologize and curse himself. He would cover his face with his hands, rubbing his eyes like a bear, and sometimes he would lean on the counter and sob, and Kuzitski would rise and would back away toward the door. “I promise you, I’ll mention this to no one,” Kuzitski would say.
“Thank you, I know I can trust you,” Henry would say, crying.
“Not a living soul, no one; I give you my word,” Kuzitski would say, and slowly, ponderously, he would leave. Henry would see the wind snatch fiercely at the old man’s black coat, and he would feel great compassion.
The old man’s promise was sincere: In a general, somewhat foggy way he felt sorry for Henry, and when the taverns closed on a winter night there would be nowhere left to go but home if bad blood between himself and Henry Soames should rule out the Stop-Off. Nevertheless, he forgot to keep his promise, and it came to be understood t
hat Henry Soames was not himself. People began to be unnaturally polite to him and to ask him too often about his health. Little by little, old Kuzitski’s experience became a common one. People talked among themselves about the violent streak in Henry Soames (not that they lacked any trace of compassion: The fact remained that the thing was obscene), and they observed that, looking back, one could see that it hadn’t come up miraculously out of nowhere. Many a time on a warm summer night he’d locked up his diner and got out his old Ford car and roared up Nickel Mountain like a man hell-bent on destroying himself and maybe collapsing the side of the mountain with him. As for Henry himself, he preferred not to think about it. He watched the snow, his car locked in the garage by drifts, and he waited. Then came spring.
2
The girl appeared as if by magic, like a crocus where yesterday there’d been snow.
He had known her mother and father for years and so of course he had known her too, had watched her grow up. When her father came by to prepare the way, saying that Callie might drop by in the morning to ask about a job, the image Henry had summoned up was of Callie at eleven, a horse-faced, gangling, long-footed girl who stood interminably at the counter, not certain what it was she wanted. But now she was sixteen, not a grown-up but not a child either, and she seemed to him, as all young people seemed to him, beautiful and sad. It was only the weather perhaps, the smell that had been in the air all week of wet, gray-brown hillsides coming to life, roots stirring, trees budding someplace to the south.
She was tall, like her father, and she had the same hand-whittled look, the squareness of nose, cheeks, and ears. But the softness of her skin, the slightly affected tilt of her head, and her eyes, all those she’d gotten from her mother. Especially the eyes, Henry thought. They were gray, friendly, and eager, and at the same time calculating; and like her mother’s eyes they made Henry Soames self-conscious.
“What do you want to work in a diner for, Callie?” he said.
“I need experience,” she said. The answer came at once, not as if she’d prepared it beforehand but as if it was something she’d known all her life. “She’s got drive,” he thought, a little uneasy in its presence, “yes, sir.” He stared down at the counter, thinking suddenly of Callie’s mother as she had been at sixteen, and of how his heart had been broken and how he’d been sure there was nothing left to live for.
“Someday I’m going to New York City,” Callie said. Perhaps he looked puzzled. She added quickly, “You can’t get a job in New York City unless you’ve already worked someplace before. A girl in our class at school found that out. I’d hate to tell you what happened to her in New York City.”
“Mmmm,” he said, rubbing his chin. He realized he’d forgotten to shave.
She wasn’t as pretty as her mother had been. Her voice was like a boy’s, so exactly like a boy’s that he had to nod abruptly, puckering his lips to keep from smiling when he noticed it.
She said, suddenly embarrassed, “Actually, I don’t know what happened to her, I only know what they say.”
“Here, here,” Henry said, “no harm done.” He patted her arm, then drew back his hand immediately and chuckled. “You didn’t even mention her name. I like that.”
“It wasn’t anything personal,” she said, looking past him.
“Of course not,” he said. “Of course not.”
A semi went past and Henry watched it climb the long, steep hill, stand as if poised a moment at the top, then dip out of sight. “You’re a fine girl, Callie,” he said. “Your folks must be proud.”
The words were very moving to him. Her mother had been prettier, but Callie was a girl you had to admire, a girl with a heart. He began to feel terribly sorry for her and, vaguely, for himself and all mankind. Her father worked over in Athensville, at the plow factory, a pretty fair job to judge by the car and the paint on the house; but Frank had always had his troubles. He drank, and according to young Willard Freund he sometimes did worse. It looked to be about up with Callie’s parents, and no doubt that was one reason Callie was here. It must be a terrible thing for a girl, Henry thought. A crying shame. He looked at her hands folded on the counter and thought they were like a child’s hands, frank, not cautious or self-conscious like a grown-up’s. Her mother’s hands had been like that once. And yet Callie was sixteen now, a woman. Terrible, he thought. Terrible.
“When you want to start, Callie?”
She lighted up. “Right now, if you can use me.”
“Good,” he said. “Come on in back, I’ll get you one of my aprons.”
He lumbered back into the closet off the lean-to room behind the diner and rummaged through the dresser there. When he turned back to his living room the girl was standing by the door to the diner, unwilling to come any farther in, checked perhaps by the clutter, the wrinkled clothes, old magazines, tools, the mateless sock left, strangely clear-cut, like a welt on a woman’s arm, on the sunlit rug.
“Excuse—” he began.
She said quickly, “I didn’t see where you’d went to,” and laughed awkwardly, as if his disappearance had given her a turn. Once again Henry was touched. When she put on the apron she laughed again, a brief, self-conscious laugh aimed, as it seemed to him, at her own thinness rather than at his fat. The apron went around her twice and came clear down to the tops of her shoes, but Henry said, “You look good enough to eat.”
She glanced at him with an uneasy smile. “I know that line,” she said.
Blood stung his neck and cheeks and he looked away quickly, pulling at his upper lip, baffled.
3
“I’m an old friend of the family,” Henry Soames said to Kuzitski that night. “I’ve known her folks for years.”
“A friend in need is a friend indeed,” Kuzitski said. He smiled vaguely, thinking back. “Old proverbial expression,” he said.
“I went to school with her mother and father,” Henry said. “As a matter of fact, Callie’s mother’s an old flame of mine.” He chuckled. “Name’s Eleanor. I guess she gave me my first broken heart. I was just about Callie’s age at the time. I never really got over it.” He shook his head. “Life’s a funny thing.”
Kuzitski waved his cup very slowly. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast, what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,” he said. He set down the cup. “Pope.” He sat carefully balanced, smiling sadly, deeply satisfied. After a moment he poured more whiskey into his cup.
“Well, it was a long, long time ago,” Henry said.
The old man seemed to consider it, stirring his coffee. At last, having thought it out, he said, “We’re all of us getting on.”
Henry nodded. “That’s the way it goes.”
“Time comes to turn over the plow to a younger hand.” Kuzitski said. He raised the cup solemnly, toasting the future.
“Nobody lasts forever,” Henry said.
“Time waist for no man,” Kuzitski said, nodding. “Ashes to ashes and duss to duss.” He toasted the past.
It was after three, a night deep and still, as if all time and space hung motionless, waiting for a revelation. The old man sat with his cup aloft, miserably smiling, staring with glittering, red-fleshed eyes; then, slowly, he lowered his cup.
Henry laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder.
“It’s a sad, sad thing,” Kuzitski said, blinking and nodding in slow-motion. He looked down into his cup. Empty. “All her life my poor sister Nadia wanted a man and a family. I watched her dry up like old grapes.” He raised his fist and shook it slowly, thoughtfully, at invisible forces above the grill-hood. “A man doesn’t need that sort of thing. Fact is, he doesn’t need anything at all, except when he’s young. When he’s young a man wants something to die for—some war to fight, some kind of religion to burn at the stake for.” He refilled his cup with whiskey, holding the bottle with both hands. “But a man gets over all that. A woman’s different. Woman’s got to have something to live for.” He toasted womanhood, a toast even more grand than the la
st, on his face the same dazed, miserable smile, then drew the cup very carefully toward his fleshy lower lip. When the cup was empty he set it down and at last, very deliberately, stood up and started for the door.
“That’s true,” Henry said. He felt a mysterious excitement, as though the idea were something he’d drunk. He watched the old man move slowly to his truck, the truck clear and sharp in the starlight, the highway clear and sharp beyond, the woods so clear, dark as they were, that he almost could have counted every needle on the pines. The truck started with a jerk, came straight for the pumps, swerved off and scraped the RETREADS sign, then wandered onto the road.
He found himself scowling at what was left of the pie on his plate, and at last it came to him that it wasn’t what he wanted. He scraped it into the garbage can. A dizzy spell came, and he leaned on the sink, frightened, fumbling for his pills.
4
The girl wasn’t afraid of him as other people were except for some of the drunks. She was quiet at first, her tongue caught between her lips, but quiet because she was concentrating on her work. As she mastered the grill, the menu, the prices, she began to talk a little. When they were cleaning up at the end of the third day she said, “Mr. Soames, do you know a boy named Willard Freund?”
He wiped his brow with the back of his damp arm, the counter rag clutched in his fist. “Sure,” he said. “He stops by now and again. He built that car of his in my garage.” Her hands moved smoothly from the towel-rack to the rinsed cups in the wire web beside the sink. He grinned.
She closed one eye as she wiped the cup in her hand. “He’s sort of nice. In a way I feel really sorry for him because he’s so nice.”
Henry leaned on the counter, looking out at the darkness, thinking about it. For some reason his mind wandered to the time Callie’s father had stolen the rounds from the schoolmaster’s chair—Henry Soames’ father’s chair. Frank Wells had had that smell on his breath even then, but in those days Callie’s mother hadn’t noticed the smell, or had thought of it as something she’d get around to when the time came. She’d had all her mind on Frank’s lean hips and the way he slouched through doors. When Henry Soames’ father’s chair gave out and the old man was weeping like an obscene old woman on the floor, Callie’s mother had said, “Why, isn’t Frank Wells the horridest person, Fats?” Frank had grinned, hearing it, but Henry Soames, sweet little Fats, hadn’t understood, of course; he’d choked with disgust because his own father was flopping on the floor with his hairy belly showing, like a pregnant walrus, and couldn’t get up. But Callie’s mother had married Frank in the end. (And hunchbacked old Doc Cathey, diabolical, right in his judgment as usual, had said, “Henry, my boy, human beings are animals, just the same as a dog or a cow. You better accept it.” And old Doc Cathey, old even then, had winked and laid his cold-fish hand on Henry’s neck.)