John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

Simon studied George exactly as the troopers had looked, a few minutes ago, at Simon.

George ignored him at first. He got out his cigarettes and shook one out on the counter, put the crumpled pack away in his jeans again, and got out his matches. When Simon continued to stare, George turned irritably and said, “Come on off it now, Simon. We’re all friends here. No point you sitting there spreading the crap about God and all his legions.” He lit the cigarette.

“Now I mean it, leave him alone, George,” Henry said.

“Why? Does Simon Bale leave people alone? Simon Bale, I bring you Good News.” He drew on the cigarette and blew a huge cloud of smoke at the ceiling. Simon looked up at it. “Simon—” He leaned toward him. “There is no God. You got that? Absolute truth, and people that say there’s a God only do it for one of two reasons — because they’re fools or because they’re vicious. Clap your hands twice if you understand.”

Callie’s mother was looking outraged again: It was as if she’d explode any minute. It might have seemed funny to Henry another time, but right now he was sorry for her; she was in the right. He said, “George, shut up. Have a little consideration.”

“Why?” He looked up, and he saw Henry nod toward Callie’s mother, and he looked down again in disgust and swung around toward the counter and scowled at his coffee. “Hell,” he said, “Ellie knows I’m kidding.”

“God forgive you for your blaspheming,” Simon said softly, as if absentmindedly, watching the smoke go up from George’s cigarette.

Suddenly, after thinking about it first, George Loomis hit the counter with his fist and said, “Shit! If you don’t have to listen to the truth from me, I don’t have to listen to your crackpot drivel. Now shut your goddamn teeth.”

Henry caught his breath.

Callie’s mother said, “He’s kidding, he says. You’re truly a card, George.”

Two men came in behind George and Simon. They were laughing as they came through the door, and they seemed not to notice that anything was wrong as they glanced at the four of them and walked past them to the booth at the end. Ellie went over to them, her lips drawn taut. “Just like summer out,” one of them said. She smiled grimly.

“What I want to know,” George said quietly, “is how come you put up with all this crap from him.” He looked up at Henry, then down again. “I’ll tell you why you do. It’s because you think he’s a moron. If you thought he had the same brains as anybody else you’d try to talk sense into him, but you don’t. Or her,” he said still more softly, jerking his thumb toward Ellie, over by the customers. He dropped almost to a whisper. “She’s as cracked as Simon, and you know it damn well, with all her hymn singing an’ carrying on. And if she’s better than Simon it’s only because she’s worse. He goes around trying to save people in his crackpot way; she believes they’re all damned, and she figures, ‘Ah, screw ’em.’” She came around to the grill and he shut up.

“What’s the matter with you, George,” Henry said. “I never saw you like this. You must’ve been mad already before you got here. There’s nothing here could get you as worked-up as that.”

“The hell,” he said. “Nobody ever says anything because he believes it, is that it? If I come out against burning Jews it’s because I’ve got gallstones.”

“Simon’s no Nazi,” Henry said.

George thought about it, his shoulders hunched, head slung forward. He said, not turning toward Simon, “You know what the Jews say about Jesus, Simon? They say he was a fraud. There’s a word for him, they say. Megalomaniac. He may have said lots of good things, I don’t know, but when a plain ordinary human being thinks he’s God, the fact is he’s a nut. That’s what the Jews say. Or do you think maybe he was just pretending — for the good of mankind, because philosophy goes over better if you salt it with superstition?”

Simon said nothing, watching the smoke.

“You say he was a human being, George,” Henry said.

“Sure. And Simon would burn me too. But were you there? Do you really know?” He remembered his coffee and drank it down at once, hot as it was.

“That’s nothing to do with it. Nobody knows.” He was going to say more, but George said:

“That’s right. And yet a man that’ll burn you over something nobody in all this world knows and most people think is a whole lot of crap—”

“Yet you’d do the same on the opposite side! What’s the difference?”

“You’re right, yes I would.” He pushed his cup away. “I’d burn up all the holy bigots on earth, all the death-wishers that ever lived, if you can call it living. There’s not one in a million of ’em that’s honest. Not one! You think anybody in this world’s so stupid he can honestly believe in the man with the beard in the sky? What does it mean? Heretic fires and Jew fires and scientist fires, noble wars against conveniently rich pagans. Pah!”

Simon Bale said, “The desire of the wicked shall perish. Thus saith the Lord.”

“And I say, ‘Pah,’ ” George said.

Callie came in the back door with Jimmy and started over to the booth to the right of the door with him, to give him his supper. She looked over at George, then kept on walking, holding Jimmy’s hand. Her mother went over to her and they started to talk in low voices, never looking in the direction of the counter. Jimmy peeked around behind his grandmother’s back. George went on ranting, his voice low and brimming with disgust, but Henry could listen with only half his mind. He wanted to concentrate on the argument — there was something important that wasn’t getting said, he couldn’t just yet say what, though he knew it was there — but more customers had come in now: a family, people on a trip of some kind, the man stocky and tired-looking, wearing sunglasses, a blue short-sleeved shirt; the woman fat and blonde, a light green dress with white circles on it, brown and white shoes; the little boy (seven or eight) in jeans and a T-shirt and a New York Yankees baseball cap. Henry filled water glasses and went over to them. “Evening,” he said. (George was saying behind him: “Religion’s strictly a gimmick people use to get power over other people. You want to know who says ‘God’ more often than a minister? A politician. Fact.”)

“Beautiful country you got here,” the man said. He had reddish hair, almost all of it gone from the top of his head, and where he was bald he had freckles.

“Yes, sir,” Henry said. “Best country I ever saw.” They laughed, even if the joke was not very clear. “Only country I ever saw. Ha, ha,” he added, too late. They laughed again.

“Hope you’ve got cooking like your scenery,” the woman said, “I’m famished.”

Henry said, wide-eyed, faintly excited as he always was when he became the spokesman for all the region, “I never heard of anybody leaving the Catskills hungry!”

They laughed joyfully; he could have reached out for their hands. The boy said: “You got hamburgers?”

“House specialty,” Henry said. They laughed.

George Loomis was saying: “If I was your kid and I took up smoking, would you whip me for it, Simon? Is it a sin, smoking? It gives you cancer, yes, everybody knows that — though on the other hand it can sometimes save you a nervous breakdown — but is it a sin?”

Simon said, “I will praise the Lord with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, and in the congregation.”

“Fuck the congregation’s bloody cunt,” George Loomis said. He stuck out his lower lip and chin, like a child gone insane.

Henry left the tourists looking over the menu, because the woman was one that would take a long time, he knew the type. When he got back to the counter the truckers were ready to pay up. Callie’s mother was sitting across from Callie and Jimmy, and they were leaning toward each other like gossips. Jimmy was watching George, paying no attention to his supper. One of the truckers said, “Boy they really go at it, eh, Slim?”