John Gardner - Nickel Mountain

It was then that he exploded. “Shit,” he bellowed, and he hit the counter so hard the metal napkin dispensers tipped over and a mustard pot fell to the floor and splattered.

She stared, frightened. “All I meant—” she began.

But Henry stormed out to his car.

Henry Soames’ feelings about having a girl here working for him were mixed, to say the least. He’d run the Stop-Off alone for so long, summer and winter, never closing even on Christmas from one year to the next except when he went out for an hour or so for a drive or to pick up something in town, that the place had become an extension of himself. The work in the diner or out at the pumps was as natural to him as walking or breathing, and to hand over jobs to somebody else was like cutting off fingers. It might have been different if business were heavier now than it had been before; but business never changed much here — it picked up a little from July to September, when the tourists passed through (only a few of them ever came in: people too low on gas to make it to the bigger, shinier stations farther on) — but even when business hit its peak he could handle it himself. When he’d hired Callie it had never entered his mind to wonder if he needed her; but he thought about it constantly now. He wondered how long she’d be likely to stay, how much he’d let himself in for. Keeping her busy, hard worker that she was, meant that he himself had, really, nothing to do. And that was the least of it. He’d spent a good deal of his time, in the old days, sitting at the counter reading the paper or talking with some farmer about the weather. He couldn’t have Callie doing that — not at ninety cents an hour. She wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. So he made up jobs for her, jobs he’d put off year after year not only because they were unimportant but because in fact he didn’t want them done: painting the gas pumps, tearing the yellowed old signs off the diner windows, oiling the floor, planting flowers. The character of the place began to change, and it made him uneasy: He felt like a man away from home — felt, in some way he could not quite pin down, false, like a man belligerently arguing for something he didn’t believe in. Worse yet, he had to make up jobs for himself. He couldn’t very well just sit there letting Callie do all the work. So he cleaned the garage that had looked like a dog’s nest for fifteen years — sorted the bolts and put them in boxes, hung up his tools (he found seven Phillips screwdrivers he’d forgotten he had), replaced the cardboard in the windows, swept and washed the floor till you could have eaten off it. People began to comment on how nice the place looked, and business improved. That is, people he didn’t know or like began to come in and bother him with questions about the Indians or complaints about what he didn’t have on the menu. Above all, Henry regretted the loss of solitude. All his life, or all his adult life anyway, he’d thought of himself as a lonely man; but he learned the truth about himself now. If it pleased him when people came by to talk — some farmer he’d known for twenty-five years, or old Kuzitski, or Willard Freund — it also pleased him to be able to be by himself sometimes, to stretch out for a nap in the middle of the day or take off his shoes in the back room and sit with a magazine. He did it sometimes even now, but it wasn’t the same when you had to make an announcement about it and throw in some kind of excuse.

On the other hand, he liked her, and at times it was very good to have her around. She made him positively glow, now and then. She treated him like a kindly old uncle she’d known all her life, telling him about baby-sitting with the Dart kids or her work for Mrs. Gilhooley when the thrashers came; talking about her parents, school, the time she’d gone to Albany with her cousin Bill, how much she’d saved so far for her escape to New York. In fact, sometimes he loved her like a daughter. Once when he was sitting on the customers’ side of the counter reading Scorchy Smith she came up in front of him and picked off his steel-rimmed glasses and said, “You ought to get different glasses, Mr. Soames. You look like a Russian spy.” “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” he said crossly. She smiled, and when she put the glasses back on him her touch was so gentle he felt for an instant as if time had stopped and all the sadness on earth was pure illusion.

But even the fondness he felt for her, when he wasn’t resenting the changes she’d made in the Stop-Off and himself, was complicated. Henry Soames knew enough of life to know that, after the first warmth, Callie’s friendliness would cool. People were like that, that was all. And though he dreaded the cooling off and halfheartedly fought it by keeping out of her way sometimes, he was resigned. Callie Wells surprised him, though. She talked more and more freely with him as the days passed. Sometimes the corners of her mouth would tuck in as though with disgust, but she laughed with him sometimes, too, and they — he and she — began to understand little signs like the clearing of a throat or pursed lips intended to suppress a smile or, again, slight irritation. She seemed for the most part not to mind, or rather to forgive, the weak, sentimental Soames in his blood. It came to him full force one night when he was serving a trucker.

He was a little blond man with nervous eyes and a wide nose and a way of holding his cigarette between his thumb and middle finger. When Henry brought his coffee, the trucker said, “How’s business, Slim?”

“Can’t complain,” Henry said rather loudly. “You?” With nothing to do but watch the man drink his coffee, Henry stood grinning behind the counter waiting for conversation.

“Can’t complain,” the man said, looking off down the counter.

Henry remembered what the man had said last time he’d come in, and, thinking vaguely of himself, George Loomis, old man Kuzitski, Henry leaned forward and asked, his voice low, “How’s the wife?”

The man glanced at Callie bending over to restock the gum and candy counter. “Oh, not bad, not bad,” he said. “About the same.” He settled his teeth down over his tongue, grinning, still watching Callie.

Henry planted his elbows on the counter and shook his head. “I sure hope things’ll work out for you.” He reached out and touched the man’s shoulder, then drew his hand back, shaking his head again.

“No, no, everything’s dandy, thanks.” The man rubbed his shoulder as if Henry had stung it, and he got up. He tilted his head in Callie’s direction and said very softly, “Branching out, Slim?”

At first the question seemed to make no sense. But the trucker winked — Callie was standing now with one hand on her hip — and Henry understood. He blushed, then chuckled, angry. “Hell, no,” he said, “Callie works here in front.”

The trucker strolled over to the candy counter and smiled, his head cocked. “Buy you sumpm, honey?”

She liked it all right. Henry couldn’t very well miss that. But she said, “No, I work here. Thanks kindly, though.” There was a kind of grim loyalty in her tone that didn’t go with the smile and the flush of pleasure in her cheeks. Henry was puzzled at first, then pleased.

The man went on staring at her, grinning; but she wasn’t used to truckers yet, and much as she wanted to play his game — as it seemed to Henry, at any rate — she couldn’t, and her pleasure changed to something else. A kind of tightening came around her eyes, and the smile became fake. “Did you want something?” she said.

He went on grinning, but now it was the trucker who was embarrassed. Henry went to him and said heartily, “Finest selection of candy bars in New York State. Everything fresh this week. Something for the kids?”