Nickel Mountain (7 page)

“I said myself what?”

“You said you were thinking of marrying her.”

His eyebrows lowered, and suddenly he wasn't partly joking any more. He looked scared. “Now, wait a minute,” he said. He looked at his hands, saw they were empty, then came over quickly to the drink on the table. He said when he'd swallowed, “Since the day I was born, Henry Soames, I never said—”

“Yes, you did,” Henry said. “That night when you came to my place drunk you said to her—to
her,
George—”

“Jesus God,” George said.

“You did, George.” He added, inspired, “There were witnesses, too.”

George Loomis bit his lip, staring. Abruptly, he got up and went over to the cupboard below the sink. The bourbon bottle was empty now. He dropped it in the wood-box beside the stove and opened the cabinet to the left of the sink—full of antique china and real cut glass—then closed it again and went over to the cabinet on the right. At last he came back to the table and sat down. He leaned his forehead on his hands.

Henry said, “She's a fine girl, George. It's the truth. She'd make you a good wife. Inside a month she'd have this place of yours—” He caught himself too late.

“Christ, don't I know it,” he said. He shook his head like a man driving out a nightmare. Then he said, “What else happened that night, Henry?”

Henry frowned, puzzled.

“I mean, what did I say exactly? And did I—” He waved vaguely.

“You said you admired her and you were thinking of marriage.”

“I remember that, yeah. But did I—?” He wet his lips, then said quickly, “Well, I noticed that Callie these last few weeks—that is, there are signs—you know what I mean.”

Henry's heart ticked rapidly, and for an instant the temptation seemed irresistible. But he said, knowing the moment he said it that he was beaten now, “No, not that. That was somebody else.”

George let out his breath as though he'd been holding it half-an-hour.

Henry said, “It's not true that she stinks, George. It's a lie and you know it.”

George smiled, watching him, sly.

“I'll give you fifteen hundred dollars,” Henry said. “That's as high as I'll go.”

“I don't love her, Henry,” George said. “And Callie don't love me either, near as I can tell. I seen on television how they act when they love you.”

“Well you can
learn
to love her. She's a good, hardworking, honest girl, and she's a sweet girl, too. When she touches you she can be gentler than—I don't know what.”

George still sat watching him, more sly than ever. “Why don't
you
marry her, Henry?”

“Listen, a man that can't learn to love Callie Wells can't learn to love anybody. You ready to admit you can't love any woman at all? You ready to admit you want to die all alone in this godforsaken museum and be found sometime two years later?”

George said, “Why not you, Henry?”

He clenched his fist. “I'm twenty-five years older than she is, that's why. And fat and ugly to boot.”

“But you love her,” George said, grinning like a cat.

“Love her, hell! I'll be dead inside a year. Doc Cathey said so.”

“But you love her,” George said, dead serious all at once.

It suddenly came to Henry that that was true. “Maybe so,” he said. He drank. The next instant Henry felt faint, then violently sick, some sudden incredible explosion of, maybe, indigestion, and George jumped up and came around to him.

When he woke up he was in George Loomis's bed and Doc Cathey was over by the window. When Henry moved his hand Doc Cathey whirled and pointed at him. “Lie still, you damn fool,” he shouted. “You stay like you are or I'll cave in the side of your head.”

13

He didn't know and didn't ask whose idea it was that Callie move in to look after him. She hung a curtain across the corner of his room behind the diner and put a cot there for herself, and she fed him and looked after him as if she were his slave, or maybe his mother. If he moaned in the middle of the night, bothered by dreams, or if he woke up suddenly and stirred in his bed, she'd be there in a minute with one of the six different pill bottles. He did whatever she told him to do, not because Doc Cathey had told him to on pain of death but because he liked to, at least for now. During the day she'd come in to see him from time to time, to bring him the paper or see how he was or make sure he didn't try crossing to the toilet by himself. He felt strong as an ox, and secretly he suspected it was all some kind of plot; but he had no objections. At the end of a week Doc Cathey let him up again, and at the end of two weeks he was doing as much as he'd ever done, except at mealtimes. He had to lose weight, Doc Cathey said, and Callie could see through walls. Then one day Callie took down the curtain and folded up the cot, and that night, when the diner was straightened up, she went home.

Henry Soames felt more lonely than he could remember ever having felt in his life. He sat in his room sunk in despair, and then, wanting no intrusions on his grief, he turned out every light in the place, then sat for a full two hours on the side of his bed, dressed in the old black suit, brooding. Though the room was dark he could make out the lines of the chairs, the tables, the books distinctly. Outside the room he could hear the faint creaking of the pines. Misty rain was muttering on the gravel driveway and the lean-to roof. He breathed slowly.

“I'm sorry,” he thought, thinking of his father and mother, the injustice he'd done them, his presumption that he knew anything at all about their life.

A truck was roaring past, building up speed for the hill. Henry listened, feeling his muscles tighten, then grow limp once more. Useless, he thought. He wouldn't sleep tonight, not unless he knocked himself out, which perhaps he could do by sitting out in the diner with the fluorescent glaring on the page of some dull old book from his father's shelf. He slid one foot along the side of the bed, hunting for his slippers, but he didn't get up. There was a sound then, the rattle of a sudden gust, or perhaps a knock. When the knock came again he recognized it, pushed himself up from the bed, and called, “Come on in. I'll be right with you.”

“Don't get up,” Callie said. She was wet, and she was breathing hard; she'd been running. When she reached the door of his room she stopped and leaned on the doorpost. She said nothing for a moment, catching her wind. Then: “I'm sorry to bother you. I saw your lights were all off, and I thought—”

Henry looked down.

She came into the room and stood by the window. She rubbed the back of a book with her thumb, making the binding gleam, but her eyes did not seem focused on the book. Henry watched the self-conscious movements of her hands. He would hurry her home before her parents woke to worry, he thought.

“You want to sit down, Callie?”

She'd left the door of the diner open, and he could feel cool air sweeping across his chest and back. The rain had stopped now. She went on rubbing the book, looking at nothing.

“What is it, Callie?” he said.

Then suddenly she came to him and pressed her wet head against his chest, her fingers digging into his fat. Her back under his hands shook with her sobbing. As always, only his hands could communicate. “He's a good boy, Callie, and you love him,” he was whispering hurriedly, senselessly now, as though the weighted heat in his chest could be pushed off by words. He'd said these words before with her wet hair against his shirt; but no, that was wrong. Never. And yet she was looking up now as he'd known she would, saying, “No, I don't. I didn't. Stop talking, Mr. Soames. Please. I hate you when you talk. I can't help it, I truly hate you. I'm sorry.” Her face was close, and she hissed it at him, every word increasing the heat in his chest. He thought, if only she could get away someplace, to rest and straighten things out in her mind. He had money, after all; all the money she would need.

She said, “When I saw your light was off I was certain something had happened to you. I couldn't stand it, you've been like a father to me, almost like—” She broke off. His hands stopped moving on her back. After a long time she said, “Mr. Soames, have I led you to believe—?” She drew back, looking at him, frightened.

“It's all right, Callie,” he said. “It's nothing, nothing.” His lips were trembling, stretching out like a sad clown's, and he remembered that with his glasses on he looked like a Russian spy. She pressed close to him again, clinging to him as if in horror. “Oh, boy,” she whispered. And then, as if on second thought, “Oh, Holy God.” The burning in his chest was like fingernails cutting into his skin, blocking out the light and the candle flame and the blistered, dirty, brown-paper shine of the old hotel room walls. Her hands had gone limp with the pain, he remembered all at once, and yet even while she sobbed she had reached for his hand. It came to him now why she'd laughed.

“I love you, Callie.”

“I shouldn't have come,” she said. “I was out of my mind.”

“I know how you feel, Callie. I only wanted—”

“You don't know how I feel at all. Let me think.”

14

The fog had pounced suddenly, from nowhere. Henry sat for five or six minutes at the end of his driveway, just off the macadam, his arms resting over the steering wheel. The girl, wrapped in an old army blanket, sat hugging her knees, breathing deeply, like a child. Her face, framed by the window, was gray as lead. The Ford's headlights seemed to bore only a few inches into the fog. Gray, airy arms moved over the hood and seemed, sometimes, to be lifting the car, turning it so that Henry wouldn't know where the highway lay. A drunk was knocking at the front door of the Stop-Off, shouting, “Henry, hey, Henry, git up!” Henry kept from turning his head. Somewhere off in the hills to his right a semi whined. Someone he knew, probably, driving against a deadline. A yellow glow appeared on the hill, moved closer, then changed abruptly to a gray-black shadow shooting past to vanish, swallowed up by the fog. The trucker would kill himself, letting her roll that way. Poor bastard. Poor, stupid, vicious, fat bastard. Breathing shallowly to cut down the burning, Henry nudged the Ford out onto 98, heading south—but not for the hills and Nickel Mountain this time—driving into the fog. He'd have to raise Frank Wells and his wife, and get Doc Cathey after that—or no, get Doc in the morning, perhaps; not as a medic for once, thank God. All quickly, before the click.

There would be time, though. Might have years left yet. A whole new life. No sense driving with the window open, all the same. Made breathing harder. Be realistic.

He was tired, soaked with sweat inside the great black suit.

(Nickel Mountain. That was where the real hills were, and the river, cool, deep with echoes of spring water dripping into it and sliding from its banks!)

Callie's head came to rest against his shoulder, and her hair had a young, clean smell. (He must have been teasing me, he thought.
Surely
he was.) Her head on his shoulder was pleasantly heavy; heavy enough, almost, to crush bone.

II

THE WEDDING

1

Callie Wells stood in what was normally the sewing room, just off the parlor. Both doors were closed behind her. She was wearing the old Welsh wedding gown, but she seemed hardly to know it, standing with her hands folded, looking out the window. The room, the weather, the round blue mountains in the distance all seemed to defer to her stillness. The house around her hummed like a hive, but Callie scarcely noticed that either.

It seemed to her the first chance she'd had to be alone in weeks. Every time she turned around there was something to be fitted for, some decision to make—where to put Uncle Russel and Aunt Kate (who were coming from Cleveland after all), what to do if the rings didn't come from the place up in Utica in time for the wedding, how to get Aunt Anna to the rehearsal since she flatly refused to ride in Uncle Gordon's truck. But it couldn't be weeks, or anyway it couldn't be more than two, because it was just two weeks and three days ago now that they'd decided.

Her father had come into the kitchen blinking like an owl, holding up his flannel pajama bottoms with one hand, scowling, cross enough to eat roofing nails, and Henry had said formally, holding her hand, “Mr. Wells, I'd like your permission to marry your daughter.” Callie had glanced up at him sideways and had seen again, as if it were a new discovery, how much she truly admired him, comical as he might seem to some, and she'd felt awe that he should be going through all this for her. He was painfully embarrassed, and scared as well, though he was older than her father. He was feeling, no doubt, as ridiculous as he looked—a great fat creature in steel-rimmed glasses, his ears pressed flat to his head as though he'd spent his whole life in a tight-fitting cap.

Her father said, “At two A.M. in the morning? You crazy?”

“I'm serious, Frank,” Henry said. All the house and the surrounding night seemed to echo his earnestness.
He's serious.

She'd broken in quickly, holding Henry's hand more tightly, “Daddy, I'm going to have a child.”

His face went white, then red. He was angrier than she'd ever seen him, angry enough to murder Henry (but Henry could break her father in half as easily as Prince snapped hambones between his teeth). Her father began swearing but she broke in again, “Not by Henry, Daddy. By somebody else.” He just stared at her then, and then at Henry. Then he pulled out the chair from the kitchen table and sat down. His stubbly cheeks were hollow and there were shadows between his ribs. He chewed his lip and wrung his hands, tears washing down his nose and whiskers. After a minute he called her mother, and she came in at once—she'd been standing just behind the door—her plump white hands catching the bathrobe together.