John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

He fitted his hands down beside his legs on the edge of the bed, feeling the power in his fingers. He leaned forward over his knees and pushed up slowly. He made his way to the window above the books.

The cardboard windowpane was snug, this time. It wouldn’t let the water in no matter how bad the storm. He ran two fingers over the spine of the Bible.

The ridges on the leather were dry and cracked, but queerly slippery like the petals of an old pressed flower. Inside, it was as though someone had ironed every page, scorching the paper a little and making it brittle. The two names, his grandfather’s and his grandfather’s father’s, had been scribbled in hastily and were almost unreadable. Henry frowned, not so much thinking as waiting for a thought to come. He laid the Bible down gently and went up front again for the ballpoint pen.

When he’d written in the names, with all the dates he could remember, he half-closed the book, then paused and stood for perhaps two minutes staring at the gold on the edges of the pages. He racked his brains for what it was that had slipped his mind, that had come and vanished again in an instant as he wrote, but then, discovering nothing, he put the Bible back where it went and, after another pause, recrossed the room. Standing across the room from the bookshelf he could see the prints his hands left in the smooth skin of dust on the Bible’s cover.

He lowered himself onto the bedside and closed his eyes for a moment. In his mind, or under his eyelids, he could still see the gold tooling on the Bible, and beyond it a pattern of crisscrossed distances. Slowly the lines seemed to form letters, a name in gold. He felt his forehead muscles tightening, and the nerves trembled in the back of his neck. But before he knew what it was he was dreaming, he was awake again, staring at the Bible as before, or almost as before: staring from a new point in time now, perhaps only minutes after the other, perhaps several hours.

(What would he have missed if he’d died, that first time? Had anything happened? Anything at all?)

While he slept, that night, old man Kuzitski’s light blue junk-truck wandered off the road, nudged through the guard rail, and rolled down a sixty-foot embankment. Everything burned but the door, which fell free and lay in a blackberry thicket (the branches still gray and limp this early in the spring), the lettering clear and sharp in the moonlight: S. J. Kuzitski · Fl 6-1191.

George Loomis pulled in a little before noon, on his way back up from Athensville to his place on Crow Mountain. He left the pickup idling by the side of the diner as he always did — George’s truck was a devil to start — and he came in whistling, cheerful as a finch. He slid off his old fatigue cap and slid himself onto the counter stool by the cash register in one single motion, and he banged on the counter-top with his gloved fist and said, “Hey, lady!”

Callie smiled when she saw who it was. “Why, George Loomis!” she said.

He was close to thirty, but he had the face of a boy. He’d had more troubles in his almost thirty years than any other ten men in all the Catskills — he’d gotten one ankle crushed in Korea so that he had to wear a steel brace around one of his iron-toed boots, and people said he’d broken his heart on a Japanese whore so that now he secretly hated women; and when he’d come home, as if that wasn’t enough, he’d found his mother dying and the farm gone back to burdocks and Queen Anne’s lace. But there wasn’t a sign of his troubles on his face, at least not right now.

“You working here now, Callie?” he said.

“Couple three days,” she said.

He shook his head. “You don’t let that old fat bastard push you around, hear? And make sure he pays you cash. Tightest damn man in seven counties.”

“George Loomis, you ought not talk that way,” Callie said soberly. But then she laughed.

“How come you’re out in broad daylight, George?” Henry said.

“Oh, every once in a while I like to remind myself how things look.” Then: “Been to Athensville with a load of grist.”

“Smash your hammermill, George?” Henry said.

“Not me,” he said, very serious. “Damn shovel did it. You care to buy a good shovel, Henry? Assemble it yourself?”

Henry laughed and Callie looked puzzled, as if she got it all right but didn’t see anything funny about it. George said, “You hear about old man Kuzitski?” still smiling.

Henry shook his head.

“Tried to make a new road, I guess. Killed himself all to hell.”

“What are you talking about?” Henry said.

George shrugged. “That’s what they say. Found the pieces down the foot of Putnam’s cliff this morning. I drove by to look, but there’s troopers climbing all over it, and they won’t let you stop.”

Callie stared out the window, perfectly still.

“Christ,” Henry said. “Poor devil.” He shook his head, his chest light.

George said, “Tally ho, junkman.”

“George Loomis, you’re vile,” Callie said, whirling.

He looked at his gloves. “Sorry,” he said, suddenly withdrawn. “I didn’t know you were related to him.”

Henry squinted, one hand on the counter, seeing in his mind, as though it were all a part of one picture, the old man lifting his cup in a toast, George staring at his leather gloves, Callie standing with her jaw set, looking out the window. Beyond the drab hill and the deep blue mountains the sky was the color of old dry shale. He said, “What can I fix you, George.”

He seemed to think about it a moment. Then, slowly, studiously not looking at Callie, he stood up. “I guess I better move on, Henry.” He smiled, but his eyes were still remote. “Hell of a lot to do this afternoon.” He looked down at his gloves again.

When he’d left, Henry took a pill and went into the lean-to room in back and sat down. He could hear Callie fixing herself a hamburger, banging the scraper on the grill as if to smash it. He put his face in his hands, thinking, fighting his own urge to break things — starting, maybe, with her, and then maybe George Loomis. He could hear Jim Millet’s John Deere popping and growling on a hillside a half-mile away, and Modracek’s Farmall whining down on the flats, and the thought of good sensible grown men at their farm work, this year like last year and the year before — and a hundred thousand years before that — calmed him a little. You had to be patient with young people. It was natural for them to be pious, full of noise and sanctimonious gesture, sure of their creeds. The hell with it then. Nevertheless he clenched his fists, furious at their intrusion into the sanctuary of his tiredness, and if anything worthless had lain handy he would have smashed it. After a while he remembered he was out of cut potatoes for french fries and got up.

Callie said, “Maybe I was wrong to snap like that.” It was an apology, not an admission, really, or so it seemed to Henry. The idea that she might actually have been wrong was the farthest thing from her mind.

He compressed his lips. “Not wrong, exactly,” he said. He thought of a great deal he could tell her, a whole lifetime of words, in a way, and he began to get mad again. But beyond the woods the mountains stretched out tier on tier, farther than the eye could see, dark blue fading to lighter and lighter, merging with the sky, three hawks flying above the trees, getting smaller and smaller, and he couldn’t think where to begin.

He said, “He lived alone. Why should anybody pretend to be sorry he’s dead?” His eyes filled with tears all at once.

Callie patted his arm, passing him on her way to the sink. “Well, it’s all for the best, I suppose.”