John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

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.

“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 last, 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.