Nickel Mountain (25 page)

All of that came back to her clearly, in the odd vagueness that had captured her mind—those nights in the barn with the milkers chugging and the Preacher straddling a spatter of manure, huge gray moths batting at the whitewash-caked bulbs, the cool sound of pigeons in the mow overhead. She stood in the living room doorway listening as if in a trance to Henry and George Loomis, and when her mind came alive again her heart sank. They were equals, they would be honest with each other; and there was nothing George could do.
(I loved him though,
she thought, giving way again, seeing her father in her mind as before, his eyes cocked up at the sharply protruding hipbone of the cow. She'd been older than her father all her life, and even as she'd struggled to be the boy he wished she was, because the idea of her being his daughter was for both of them unmanageable, she had known the futility of it and had forgiven him. For an instant that seemed timeless but which nevertheless passed, she did not care whether George succeeded or not.)

For an instant she knew with a part of her mind that behind the house, motionless, oblivious to the deadly heat, Simon Bale's ghost sat listening in the dark, solid as granite, hearing all they said and thought and hearing the noise still miles away of something (wind?) bearing vengeance toward them: some change, subtle and terrible. They were caught. She concentrated. It was gone.

2

George Loomis knew well enough that he'd come for nothing. When he looked up at Callie in the doorway—pretty, in a tough-jawed, persecuted-looking way, her face flushed, prepared for wrath—he had a feeling that in Henry's position he might do the same damn thing.

Henry sat unmoving—as still as the enormous old sleeping dog by the door—huge, like the dog, and spent—huge and dark as the centuries-old pile of boulders and shale and crumbling mortar looking down Crow Mountain at the bottom of the shadow-filled glen. (It was a lookout tower from before the Revolutionary War, his grandfather said, and it was built by one of his ancestors, a Loomis. “Nimrod's Tower,” his grandfather said. “So much for the pride of man!” And he, ten years old, had looked up at the tower, baffled between pride and inexplicable shame at the pride he felt—like his grandfather.) Henry Soames' forearm stood straight up, resting on the arm of the davenport, holding the box of gingersnaps, and his arm was so thick (it seemed for that moment) that if the boy were to pass behind it he would vanish from sight as though passing behind a tree. Callie gave George a meaningful look, something she'd learned from TV, he thought, and dropped back into the kitchen, out of sight. There were only two dim bulbs that worked in the gilt, Max Pies Furniture chandelier that hung by a chain from the middle of the ceiling. (That was Callie's work, he knew. Henry would never have chosen the thing.) He could see one of the bulbs reflected in the picture directly across from him, high on the wall over Henry's head, above the clock on the mantel, a brownish picture (a gift from Callie's mother, one of them had told him) of Jesus praying. The Soames' TV was on, over in what Callie called the music corner—radio, record player, television, sagging homemade shelves of records and old
TV Guides
—but the sound was turned off and the picture was flipping. It gave you a feeling of endless falling in space.

He said, “What's eating you, Henry?”

Henry smiled, gloomy. “Oh, I'm all right, George.” He put a gingersnap in his mouth whole and let it dissolve there. “How things with you? Seems like we don't see you much any more.”

George got out his cigarettes with two fingers, slipped one from the pack, and fitted it between his lips. He got out his matches. “Now don't change the subject, Henry.” He looked at the matches, considering, and decided on directness. “You quit eating all the time or you'll kill yourself. You know it.”

The little boy was down on all fours on the rug, running a black and yellow dump truck along the dark outlines of the faded flowers in the pattern. His face was unhealthily red, as his mother's had been. The line he was on led to his father's foot and he ran the truck up over his father's shoe and down again. He looked up at his father, half-smiling, sly. He looked like an elf, the way his bushy blond eyebrows tipped up. Still Henry said nothing.

“How you think Jimmy's going to feel?” George said.

Henry shook his head and let out a little heave of breath. He sat now with his hands limp in his lap, what there was of his lap—three, four inches, then his knees. His shirt was unbuttoned in two places, showing clammy gray skin and curly gray and black hairs. There were sweat rings under his armpits.

“Damn it all, Henry. I came here to talk with you, and I mean for you to talk. I asked you a question.”

Henry looked anxious. He always looked anxious, because of the way the rolls of fat fell away like the wake of a rowboat from his nose, but now he looked more so. He said, “I'm sorry, George, I'm afraid I've forgot what you asked me.

“I said,” George began grimly, hard-jawed—but by now he had forgotten too, and he had to think a minute. “I said, ‘How do you think Jimmy's going to feel when you've killed yourself?' ”

It sounded in his own ears like something out of Loretta Young. As if out of kindness, Henry said, “I don't know, George.”

“Well, you're a damn fool then,” George said, doing his best with a bad start, looking just over Henry's head. “I mean it. Listen. All you do is stop that blame eating all the time.”

Henry studied the floor, politely not eating the ginger-snap he had now in his hand. George listened to the clock. Outside the open window it was very quiet, bright with moonlight. Nothing moved. At last Henry said, “Maybe that's the answer, George.”

“Oh, hell,” George said. He felt the way he had felt long ago when his father would ask him, “Where have you been till this hour, young man?” knowing he had been nowhere, as always, had done nothing, as always, had driven his motorcycle around on the mountain roads in the vague hope that something new might happen, that the world might stand suddenly transfigured, transformed to a movie—a gangster picture, a love picture, anything but the tedious ruin it was, a worn-out country (not worn-out enough to be morbidly interesting), worn-out farmers, a worn-out sixteen-year-old boy partly too shy and partly too righteous (all things foul to his dry-rotted mind) even to look through car windows at lovers. He sometimes believed he had known all his life that he'd end up maimed, a brace on one boot, no arm in one sleeve, and no doubt worse yet to come. Once, lately, it had occurred to him that maybe he'd given up his foot and arm voluntarily, sacrificing up pieces of his body like an old-time Delaware to ward off destructions more terrible. It had seemed an interesting idea at first, but thinking about it an instant later he'd seen it for the paltry ruse it was, mere poetry, and, like all poetry, so irrelevant and boring he wanted to smash things.

He came partly awake. A movement of the drape, then stillness. A line from a tedious movie:
Maybe that's the answer, George.
Not even patronizing: pure filler. Or it was like the chatter at one of his mother's old-fashioned teas.
Exquisite,
they were always saying. Everything was
exquisite.
(He'd buried his mother in the way she'd wanted to be buried, in an iron casket with a window looking in at her now incorruptible face.) Because Henry knew perfectly well he had come because Callie had asked him, and knew there was nothing to talk about, that either he'd work it out alone or he wouldn't, and that all the sympathy on earth wouldn't change it by a hair, because Henry was no moron, after all. He would know without George's being here that George was pulling for him. (No meaning even in that, really: the prejudice of people who by accidents of place and time were friends.) What more? You had friends, and that was useful to remember, and Henry Soames was not a self-pitying fool who'd forget it, and there it was.

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.