John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

Willard said, “Is it all right if I leave? I’ve been up most of the night, and I’ve told you all I can.”

“About all, yes,” the man said, only his tone odd, his face as casual as ever. Then he said, “Certainly, certainly.” He made a move to get up but paused, as if intending to hold him only a moment longer, and this merely from curiosity. “How come there was no one at the station to meet you in Utica?”

“I forgot to wire ahead.”

He looked surprised. “Really?”

“I’m absentminded. I do things like that a lot.”

Again the man took the pipe from between his teeth and poked it with the paper clip. He asked abruptly, “Where do you live?”

For an instant he couldn’t remember. He said then, “My dad’s place, you mean? A little ways outside New Carthage. Rockwater Road.”

The man did get up, this time. “Well, I’ll have one of the boys drive you over. It’s not all that far, and we’ve held you up long enough.”

At the desk in front they had his billfold. He glanced in automatically to see that the money was there. It was. Everything else was there too — the bookstore credit card, social security card, Norma’s picture. The credit card was in the wrong plastic window.

He said, surprising himself, feeling his neck going red as he spoke, “You found the money wasn’t stolen?”

The red-headed man looked at him quizzically.

“When you checked the serial numbers, I mean.”

The man laughed, harmlessly foxy. “Everything shipshape.” He put his hand sociably on Willard’s shoulder. “Beware of those headshrinkers’ daughters.”

It wasn’t until he was out in the car, waiting while the trooper checked out from the office, that Willard began to sweat.

NO CREDIT, the sign at Llewellyn’s said; and on the cash register a smaller sign: CASH IS KING. On the radio in the living quarters behind the store there was more Christmas music playing, a chorus this time. Children. He stood at the counter waiting for old man Llewellyn to come limping in. He’d be here pretty soon, he’d heard the bell over the door. He’d still be able to hear that bell when he was a hundred and four and deaf as a post.

The store smelled of malt and oiled wooden floor. The old man stocked everything a Catskills farmer could need — groceries and kitchen utensils and liquor in front; in back coal oil, nails, binder twine, Surge milking-machine parts, sparkplugs, lead and spun-glass pipe, rope, harness leather, three-legged stools; a few odds and ends for tourists, too — fishing rods, salmon eggs, shotguns. Willard Freund’s memories were sharper here even than in his father’s house. It was where they would come after swimming or after they’d bicycled to Slater for a show, he and Junior Rich and Billy Cooper, when they were kids.

He listened absently to the music. Deck the Halls. His mother had said, “We’re so glad we could have snow for you, Willard. Christmas is always so nice when there’s snow.” His father had spent the morning digging out the tractor where it had slipped off the driveway into the lawn and gone in above the tires. “Eleanor, where’s that coffee?” he’d said, and at once her hands had started shaking and her mouth had gone into the tic. The old man was furious that Willard had made it home alone, without any help from him. Willard had been furious in return, and yet, well as he knew what was happening, he had found himself slipping into the old sense of unatoneable guilt, the same crazy guilt he would feel as a child when his father made him work on the farm for nothing, when he might have earned good money in Slater, and his farmwork wasn’t up to the old man’s mark. Nicked in the balls, he’d thought again, and he’d clenched his fists; and when his mother looked grieved he felt guilty for hating his father too. And then after his father had gone, heading out for chores where Willard too should go, his mother had said, “Willard, why don’t you drop in on Henry and Callie? You were always so fond of Henry, before. They’ve got the sweetest little boy.” He’d said, “Mother, I just don’t feel like it. Quit asking.” “I’ve never seen you so upset,” she said. “It’s that accident. You just need to stop thinking about it, Son.”

And so as soon as he could he’d gotten out of there. He’d walked the three miles into town — the macadam thawed now, the weather warm as April, the smell of melting snow an excitement in his chest. And all the way he’d been remembering things — the day he and his father had pulled down the chicken house, hooking onto the corner of it with the log-chain and driving away on the Caterpillar tractor. When the chicken house wall came down, towering over their heads a minute and then smashing to the dirt six feet behind them, dry chicken shit flying, his father had yelled out, “There you go!” He’d been as proud as hell that he’d thought of doing it with the tractor and chain, and Willard had been proud for him. Another time his father had rebuilt an old Case combine, welding on wheels six feet to each side: They were the only people in the county that could combine the fields on the mountainsides, and the whole job, combine included, had only cost two hundred dollars because his father had picked up the stuff from people who didn’t know how to make use of it. When old Fred Covert saw what they’d done with the combine he’d sold them, he could hardly hide his fury. (Maybe it was true that the dead man had really been interested in flowers, had really liked talking to mothers of people who were graduating from the sixth grade.) Out by the big gray barn his father had two young Dobermans on chains. When dark came he would let them loose, and if a stranger came close to that barn they would tear out his windpipe.

He heard the bell over the door clink behind him, and he glanced around his shoulder. Instantly he felt blood rushing into his head. She stood in the doorway, bending over the child, encouraging him to come in. She had a farmer’s red handkerchief tied around her hair and a sheepskin coat much too large for her. Henry’s, he thought. “Come on, Jimmy,” she was saying, and her voice was beautiful and painful to him. He’d forgotten she had that country whine, a voice no more musical than the rasp of a saw but, for all that, shockingly sweet, at least to him. She’d gotten fatter, and in a single motion of his mind he knew her ugly and beautiful. Her legs were winter-raw and muscular, her arms as hard as the arms of a man; her skirt had been washed too many times, and the slip showed gray. He thought fleetingly, absurdly, of hiding. And then her head came up and she was perfectly still, looking at him. As if without knowing she was doing it, she stepped in front of the child.

“Hi,” Willard said.

“Hello, Willard.” Her voice was cool, countryish, polite, and he knew in a surge of panic that she hated him.

He looked at the child peeking from behind her legs. He was beautiful — blond and dirty-faced, in patched and faded jeans that buttoned between the legs. Tears filled Wil-lard’s eyes, blurring his vision so badly he could only make out the outlines of their figures.

He said, “I’m glad to see you, Callie.”

She could hear the catch in his voice; she knew well enough how it was for him, seeing his own son. She said nothing, merely looking at him. Then, amazingly, she smiled. “It’s nice to see you, too, Willard.”

“Candy!” the child said, rather sternly, fists doubled.

Callie laughed, threw Willard a helpless look. Then she bent down to the child again. “Come on, Jimmy,” she said, “Mommy’s in a hurry.”

Then old man Llewellyn was there, shouting at them, red-faced and white-haired as a Millerite prophet. “Beautiful morning! Step right up, there! What’ll it be this beautiful morning? Satisfaction guaranteed!”