John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

He lit the match, surprised that it worked, since the matchbook cover was soft from the dampness inside his shirt pocket, and raised the match to his cigarette, thinking about cancer. When he’d put the matches away he said, “It’d be easier if you were stupider. Even stupider than you are, I mean.” And now he really did feel a twinge of anger, at nothing specific.

Henry smiled and for a second he was himself again, not working automatically like an old man playing checkers at the GLF.

George said, “I’d be very serious. Grim, you know what I mean? I’d get a glint in my eye, and I’d say—” He became still grimmer, theatrically. “Listen, Henry Soames, you’re feeling guilty, right? You’re saying it was your fault he fell, you might as well killed him outright, and it was wrong. Well, listen, I’ve been through all that myself. Truth. Over in Korea I used to think, ‘Some poor bastard comes at me, he no more wants this war than I do, they took his name from some crumby file and that made him a soljer and here we are.’ But I’ll tell you something. One day there was a Korean sergeant — South Korean, one of ours — tore off the fender from one of our staff cars with his jeep. That afternoon — this is the truth, now — that afternoon a couple of Korean lieutenants and this sergeant drive off with a shovel in the back of their jeep, and when they come back to the base, no sergeant. That’s what they think of human beings. Maybe they’re right and maybe they’re wrong, but when one of them comes after you, you shoot.

“Now you take Simon Bale. Screw, I’d say—” He remembered that the boy was there, but Jimmy didn’t seem to have heard it. He sat leaning his head from side to side, forming motor sounds with his lips, barely letting them out, vrooming the motor as he pushed the toy truck up his legs to his knees and over them and down in a rush to the rug once more to careen along the labyrinth of roads to the higher mountains, the elephantine legs of his father. (That was how Henry had driven in the old days, George remembered — before he’d married Callie.) Henry ran his forearm across the stubbly underside of his chin. The gingersnap that had been in his hand was gone. George leaned forward.

“I’d say, full of righteousness — because I would be right and you would be wrong—‘Simon Bale was the same as one of them Koreans, not civilized. You took him in out of the cold when his house burned and he scared your kid with his talk about the devil and you yelled at him, and out of his own stupidity he fell down the fucking stairs. You ought to have buried him like a cat and forgot it!’ And there we’d be: I’d have you.”

Henry smiled, only his lips, his eyes unfocused. “And what would I say to that if I was smart?” He spoke with his mouth full, and George puffed at the cigarette a minute, uncomfortable and yet half-enjoying the senseless game.

“You’d wipe your forehead and say, ‘Sure is hot.’ He made his voice high and thin, mimicking Henry’s.

Henry nodded, pleased.

George said, “I’d say, ‘Pay attention, damn it. It wasn’t your fault. Face up to it. It’s just the way things came out.’ ‘Oh, it was my fault all right,’ you’d say. ‘Well all right, your fault then,’ I’d say, ‘but you couldn’t help it.’ ‘Oh, I know I couldn’t help it,’ you’d say.”

There was no movement out in the kitchen. Callie would be standing by the sink, listening, hopeless, feeling betrayed — not by George Loomis, exactly. Or by the open door, pressing her forehead to the screen. Betrayed merely by the nature of things, or the nature of men. He looked up at the clock. Five-to-twelve. Henry sat looking out the window, his head tilted, the gingersnap box standing upright in his hand like something up a tree. His nose and mouth and eyes were small in that wide, shiny face. His hair looked thinned by age, like the mohair on an old, old couch, or the hair of a dog with mange.

George said, “You’d say, ‘Now you listen a while.’ You’d tell me, ‘I’d been waiting to kill him a long time — him or somebody or something. People don’t know what they’ve got inside them. Except that Simon Bale did, or he wouldn’t have gone around handing out pamphlets and preaching doom. All right. I’d been waiting all my life like a loaded gun and he’d been waiting to drive me to it, and neither of us is to blame for that; a lion’s a lion and a cow’s a cow. But people aren’t only animals. When it’s over, a man gets to judge. After he’s found out, he can say Yes to it, or No. He can say Yes, it was right —no matter who it happened to or where or when — or No, it was wrong.’ And you’d sit there like a grieved hippopotamus.” He realized abruptly where the queer play was taking him and leaned forward farther, feeling sweat prickle on his back as he shifted position. “At last it would hit me, and I’d say: ‘You think you’re God!’ And you’d say, ‘Yes.’ I’d be stopped. Cold. What can you say to a man that’s decided to be God?” His voice cracked. He laughed suddenly, furious.

Henry squinted, thinking about it, or put off by that laugh. Callie stood now in the doorway to his right, the yellow kitchen walls shiny behind her, making her face very dark. Jimmy stood watching the television picture flip. He stood perfectly still now, spent. His face too was dark red, the eyebrows white.

“It would have taken me longer to say,” Henry said. He smiled to show he meant it as a compliment. He was as far away as ever.

George ground out his cigarette in the ash tray from Watkins Glen on the table beside him. “What I can’t understand is how a man with ideas as crazy as that can just set there, chewing away like a cow.”

“Why, they’re your ideas, George,” Henry said.

It startled him. “That’s not true,” he said. He looked at Callie and saw that she too believed it. “Well, shit!” he said. He hit the chair arm with his fist. “They’re not! That just isn’t true!”

The clock began striking, a whir of gears, then twelve sharp, tinny notes. To Callie the strokes of the clock sounded like a voice, bored and scornful. After the last stroke the whir of gears stopped with a click and the room was unnaturally hushed. She waited, but George said nothing more. He went into a new, even queerer act, and Callie suddenly knew as she watched him precisely what George was going to be like when he was old. He cocked his head as if straining for the exactly right word, drew back the corners of his mouth and raised his hand, half-closed as if around an invisible rock. He held that position for a moment, tensely, then smiled, grim, with his head tipped as if to duck something; then, as if realizing there were no words for what he wanted to say, he lowered his hand again, letting the invisible rock roll out between his thumb and index finger. She knew (standing remote as the clock) that there was something he’d been trying to say, something that both she and Henry had missed. And she knew with equal certainty that he had no intention of hunting for a way of saying it now. They’d demanded of him already more than was decent. He was standing up, smiling, shaking his head, saying he had to leave.

“I’m sorry you can’t stay longer,” she said.

He shrugged as if sadly and said good-night to Henry. At the door Prince opened his eyes but didn’t move. George stepped over him.

Outside it was even hotter than inside. The air was lifeless, heavy as dust. She felt faint. “Surely is dry,” she said softly. Something nagged at her thought but refused to come clear.

George Loomis nodded politely. “Keeps on like this it’ll burn up all the corn.”

She looked at his face. He had his head bent now, trying to see his watch in the dark of the porch. The tilt of his head made her think of a raven. Beyond the porch, the moonlight made everything it touched unnaturally sharp: the lines of the diner, the garage, the burdocks, Henry’s old black Ford up on blocks in the high brittle weeds. The mountains seemed very close, right over your head, stifling. She thought as she had thought before, at the kitchen window, looking out and listening to their talk in the living room, Something is coming. Nothing was, she knew. She felt tense, as if walking on a high ledge above dark, fast water. She was sorry for George Loomis, annoyed as she was at his senseless retreat. She should have expected it, of course. Maybe she had.