John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

“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.

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.)

After a minute Henry remembered himself and chuckled, “Yes, sir, Willard’s a fine boy, Callie.” He was vaguely conscious that his fingers were drumming on the counter-top as, chuckling uncomfortably again, he glanced about to see that the percolators were clean and the chili put away.

“He really is the kindest person,” Callie said. “I’ve danced with him after the basketball games sometimes. I guess you know he wants to be a race-car driver. I think he could really do it, too. He’s terrific with a car.” Her hands stopped moving and she glanced at Henry’s chest. “But his dad wants him to go to Cornell. To the Ag School.”

Henry cleared his throat. “I think he’s mentioned it.”

He tried to picture methodical, sharp-boned Callie dancing with Willard Freund. Willard was a swan.

(Henry had sighed, helpless, sitting in the back room with Willard the night the boy had told him of his father’s plans. He’d felt old. He hadn’t stopped to think about it, the feeling of having outgrown time and space altogether, falling into the boundless, where all contradictions stood resolved. He had listened as if from infinitely far away, and it had come down to this: That night he had given up hope for Willard, had quit denying the inevitable doom that swallows up all young men’s schemes, and in the selfsame motion of the mind he had gone on hoping. For perhaps it was true that Willard Freund had everything it took to make a driver (Henry was not convinced of it, though even to himself he’d never pinned down his doubt with words; he knew only that the boy had a certain kind of nerve and a hunger to win and the notion — a notion that everyone on earth has, perhaps, at least for a while — that he was born unique, set apart from the rest), but even if it was true that he had what it took, there was no guarantee that he would keep it. Things happened as a boy got older. Speedy Cerota, the man who ran the jeep place down in Athensville, had been lightning once. He’d married a girl that drove in the ladies’ and they’d had three kids as quick as that, and one day Speedy had come in second — bad car, he said — and then fourth, then fifth, and pretty soon, without his ever knowing what had happened, it was over, he couldn’t pass a stoneboat. But as surely as Henry Soames knew that, he knew too that you never knew for sure until it happened. And even if you knew beforehand that what they wanted, the grandiose young, was stupid in the first place and impossible to get in the second, even then you had to back them. If it wasn’t for young people’s foolish hopes it would all have ended with Adam. Henry Soames thought: What could I say?

He was too old for such hopes. Nevertheless, he had rubbed his palms on his legs, that night, brooding. A vague idea of taking his mother’s money out of the bank in Athens-ville for Willard had crossed his mind. It wasn’t doing anything there — molding and drawing interest for him, Henry, who wouldn’t pick it up with a gutter fork. It had never been his any more than it was his father’s. Hers. Let her climb up over her big glassy headstone and spend it. “Remember you’ve got Thompson blood,” she would say, and his father would laugh and say, “Yes, boy, look at the bright side.” And he would feel threatened, nailed down. Sometimes even now he would bite his lip, giving way for a second to his queer old fantasy of some error by Doc Cathey or the midwife, for well as Henry Soames knew who he was, the idea that a man might be somebody else all his life and never be aware of it — live out the wrong doom, grow fat because a man he had nothing to do with by blood had died of fat — had a strange way of filling up his chest. In bed sometimes he would think about it, not making up some new life for himself as he’d done as a child, merely savoring the immense half-possibility.

But it wasn’t money that Willard would need. It was hard to say what it was that Willard needed.

“Well,” Henry heard himself saying, “yes, sir, Willard’s a fine boy, it’s a fact.”

But by now Callie was thinking of other things. Glancing around the room, she asked, “That everything that needs doing?”

He nodded. “I’ll drive you up to your house,” he said. “It’s cold out.”

“No thanks,” she said, her tone so final it startled him. “If you do it tonight you’ll end up doing it every night. It’s only a few steps.”

“Oh, shucks now,” he said. “It’s no trouble, Callie.”

She shook her head, a sort of fierce old-womanish look around her eyes, and pulled on her leather jacket.

Henry studied her, puzzled, but it was clear she wouldn’t change her mind. He shrugged, uneasy, and watched her cross to the door, then pass from the diner’s blue-pink glow into darkness, heading up the hill. Two minutes after she’d disappeared from sight he went to his lean-to room in back. He pulled off his shirt, then stood for a long time looking at the rug, wondering what it all meant.