Nickel Mountain

1

In December, 1954, Henry Soames would hardly have said his life was just beginning. His heart was bad, business at the Stop-Off had never been worse, he was close to a nervous breakdown.

Sometimes when he was not in a mood to read he would stand at the window and watch the snow. On windy nights the snow hurtled down through the mountain’s darkness and into the blue-white glow of the diner and the pink glitter of the neon sign and away again into the farther darkness and the woods on the other side of the highway. Henry Soames would pull at his lip with his thumb and first finger, vaguely afraid of the storm and vaguely drawn by it. He would imagine shapes in the snow that shot past, mainly his own huge, lumbering shape, but sometimes that of some ominous stranger. Though he stood in the lean-to room behind the diner he could hear the hum of the diner clock, and sometimes he would see in his mind the red and blue hands and, unaware of what he was doing, would try to make out what time it was — twelve, one, quarter-to-three. … At last, he would sink down on the bed and would lie there solid as a mountain, moving only his nose and lips a little, troubled by dreams.

Even when they interrupted his sleep he was always glad when people came, that winter. The diner lights were always on, and people knew he didn’t mind being roused. The Stop-Off was the last place until you got to the outskirts of Slater, and if the weather was bad, the Stop-Off could be a godsend. Henry would call out, “I’ll be right with you,” and he’d pull on his robe and hurry to the counter, blinking, and he’d yell, “Great weather for polar bears,” and he’d laugh, grim, not fully awake, and would slap the man on the shoulder. Generally it would be drunks that came after two — old men with bad teeth, or no teeth, and liver spots and hair that needed cutting. One old man came especially often, a heavy, dignified old Russian, or a Pole perhaps, named Kuzitski. A junk dealer. He drove an old blue Chevy truck with his name and phone number lettered on the door, and he always wore a suit and vest and in winter a great black coat he’d bought for a song, long ago, at the bus depot in New Carthage. His walk was slow and determined, seemingly not the walk of a drunk but that of a man engrossed. He would seat himself very solemnly and would meditate, then remove his hat and place it on the counter, and finally, politely, he would ask for coffee. There would be beads of ice on his moustache. Henry would serve the man his coffee and would serve himself a piece of apple pie and he’d stand behind the counter while the old man poured whiskey into his coffee and drank. Sometimes after Kuzitski’s second cup, Henry would mention his heart.

“They give me a year to live, Mr. Kuzitski,” Henry would say. “I had one heart attack already.” His tone never quite went with the words, but the old man could no doubt see that Henry was a frightened man. “I get dizzy spells,” Henry would say.

Kuzitski would nod sadly, and after a while he would say politely, “Sister of mine had that trouble.”

Henry Soames would shake his head and look out the window at the snow and after a minute he would say, laughing shortly, “Well, we all go sometime.”

Occasionally he would let it go at that. More often he would press further. He probably had no idea how often he’d said it, the very same words, the same high-pitched voice; certainly Mr. Kuzitski had no idea. “It’s a hell of a thing. You just can’t make yourself believe it, that’s the worst of it. They told me, ‘You just lose ninety pounds and you’ll live for another twenty years’; but you think I can do it?” He would shake his head. “It’s a funny damn world.” He would turn and squint out the window a while, trying to think about it, sensing the profundity of it but unable to find the words to express it even to himself. Vague images would come: children, trees, dogs, red brick houses, people he knew. He felt nothing; a heaviness only, a numbness in the chest.

“Nobody ever would marry her,” old Kuzitski would say. “I should have loaded her up in the truck and hauled her away to the dump. Ha ha.”

Henry would eat, glum, and then he would lean on the counter, looking at his huge, hairy-backed hands, and to fill the silence he would say more. He always spoke calmly at first. He would tell about his father, how he’d had the same trouble, and he’d talk about all a man wanted to do that he never got done, never got around to — places he meant to go, things he promised himself he’d see. “Jesus.” Shaking his head.

Henry would begin to pace then, still talking. It seemed to make Mr. Kuzitski uneasy, but Henry had to do it nevertheless. The sound of voices in the diner at three in the morning filled him with a kind of hunger. He would grow excited, gradually, and his words would come faster, and something that rarely showed in him at other times would show in him now: a streak of crazy violence. Like a drunken man, he would clutch his fists against his chest and his voice would get louder and higher in pitch, and sometimes he’d stop pacing to pound the counter or a tabletop, or he’d lift a sugar dispenser and hold it tight in his hand as if thinking of throwing it. Mr. Kuzitski would sit precariously balanced, his widened eyes fixed on the sugar dispenser. Henry must have seen the hopelessness of trying to put what he meant into words, whatever it was, if anything, that he meant. He would check himself, straining to face death bravely, gallantly. But he was a weak man and childish, especially late at night, and all at once he would catch the old man’s arm and would cling to him, not shouting now but hissing at him like a snake. His eyes would bulge, and tears would run down to the stubble on his fat jowl. Kuzitski would look down at the floor and, clinging to the counter, would recoil from Henry’s grasp.

Though it happened again and again that winter, neither of them was ever ready for it. Henry would be shocked and humiliated, and would apologize and curse himself. He would cover his face with his hands, rubbing his eyes like a bear, and sometimes he would lean on the counter and sob, and Kuzitski would rise and would back away toward the door. “I promise you, I’ll mention this to no one,” Kuzitski would say.

“Thank you, I know I can trust you,” Henry would say, crying.

“Not a living soul, no one; I give you my word,” Kuzitski would say, and slowly, ponderously, he would leave. Henry would see the wind snatch fiercely at the old man’s black coat, and he would feel great compassion.

The old man’s promise was sincere: In a general, somewhat foggy way he felt sorry for Henry, and when the taverns closed on a winter night there would be nowhere left to go but home if bad blood between himself and Henry Soames should rule out the Stop-Off. Nevertheless, he forgot to keep his promise, and it came to be understood that Henry Soames was not himself. People began to be unnaturally polite to him and to ask him too often about his health. Little by little, old Kuzitski’s experience became a common one. People talked among themselves about the violent streak in Henry Soames (not that they lacked any trace of compassion: The fact remained that the thing was obscene), and they observed that, looking back, one could see that it hadn’t come up miraculously out of nowhere. Many a time on a warm summer night he’d locked up his diner and got out his old Ford car and roared up Nickel Mountain like a man hell-bent on destroying himself and maybe collapsing the side of the mountain with him. As for Henry himself, he preferred not to think about it. He watched the snow, his car locked in the garage by drifts, and he waited. Then came spring.

2

The girl appeared as if by magic, like a crocus where yesterday there’d been snow.

He had known her mother and father for years and so of course he had known her too, had watched her grow up. When her father came by to prepare the way, saying that Callie might drop by in the morning to ask about a job, the image Henry had summoned up was of Callie at eleven, a horse-faced, gangling, long-footed girl who stood interminably at the counter, not certain what it was she wanted. But now she was sixteen, not a grown-up but not a child either, and she seemed to him, as all young people seemed to him, beautiful and sad. It was only the weather perhaps, the smell that had been in the air all week of wet, gray-brown hillsides coming to life, roots stirring, trees budding someplace to the south.

She was tall, like her father, and she had the same hand-whittled look, the squareness of nose, cheeks, and ears. But the softness of her skin, the slightly affected tilt of her head, and her eyes, all those she’d gotten from her mother. Especially the eyes, Henry thought. They were gray, friendly, and eager, and at the same time calculating; and like her mother’s eyes they made Henry Soames self-conscious.

“What do you want to work in a diner for, Callie?” he said.

“I need experience,” she said. The answer came at once, not as if she’d prepared it beforehand but as if it was something she’d known all her life. “She’s got drive,” he thought, a little uneasy in its presence, “yes, sir.” He stared down at the counter, thinking suddenly of Callie’s mother as she had been at sixteen, and of how his heart had been broken and how he’d been sure there was nothing left to live for.

“Someday I’m going to New York City,” Callie said. Perhaps he looked puzzled. She added quickly, “You can’t get a job in New York City unless you’ve already worked someplace before. A girl in our class at school found that out. I’d hate to tell you what happened to her in New York City.”

“Mmmm,” he said, rubbing his chin. He realized he’d forgotten to shave.

She wasn’t as pretty as her mother had been. Her voice was like a boy’s, so exactly like a boy’s that he had to nod abruptly, puckering his lips to keep from smiling when he noticed it.

She said, suddenly embarrassed, “Actually, I don’t know what happened to her, I only know what they say.”

“Here, here,” Henry said, “no harm done.” He patted her arm, then drew back his hand immediately and chuckled. “You didn’t even mention her name. I like that.”

“It wasn’t anything personal,” she said, looking past him.

“Of course not,” he said. “Of course not.”

A semi went past and Henry watched it climb the long, steep hill, stand as if poised a moment at the top, then dip out of sight. “You’re a fine girl, Callie,” he said. “Your folks must be proud.”

The words were very moving to him. Her mother had been prettier, but Callie was a girl you had to admire, a girl with a heart. He began to feel terribly sorry for her and, vaguely, for himself and all mankind. Her father worked over in Athensville, at the plow factory, a pretty fair job to judge by the car and the paint on the house; but Frank had always had his troubles. He drank, and according to young Willard Freund he sometimes did worse. It looked to be about up with Callie’s parents, and no doubt that was one reason Callie was here. It must be a terrible thing for a girl, Henry thought. A crying shame. He looked at her hands folded on the counter and thought they were like a child’s hands, frank, not cautious or self-conscious like a grown-up’s. Her mother’s hands had been like that once. And yet Callie was sixteen now, a woman. Terrible, he thought. Terrible.

“When you want to start, Callie?”

She lighted up. “Right now, if you can use me.”

“Good,” he said. “Come on in back, I’ll get you one of my aprons.”

He lumbered back into the closet off the lean-to room behind the diner and rummaged through the dresser there. When he turned back to his living room the girl was standing by the door to the diner, unwilling to come any farther in, checked perhaps by the clutter, the wrinkled clothes, old magazines, tools, the mateless sock left, strangely clear-cut, like a welt on a woman’s arm, on the sunlit rug.

“Excuse—” he began.

She said quickly, “I didn’t see where you’d went to,” and laughed awkwardly, as if his disappearance had given her a turn. Once again Henry was touched. When she put on the apron she laughed again, a brief, self-conscious laugh aimed, as it seemed to him, at her own thinness rather than at his fat. The apron went around her twice and came clear down to the tops of her shoes, but Henry said, “You look good enough to eat.”

She glanced at him with an uneasy smile. “I know that line,” she said.

Blood stung his neck and cheeks and he looked away quickly, pulling at his upper lip, baffled.

3

“I’m an old friend of the family,” Henry Soames said to Kuzitski that night. “I’ve known her folks for years.”

“A friend in need is a friend indeed,” Kuzitski said. He smiled vaguely, thinking back. “Old proverbial expression,” he said.

“I went to school with her mother and father,” Henry said. “As a matter of fact, Callie’s mother’s an old flame of mine.” He chuckled. “Name’s Eleanor. I guess she gave me my first broken heart. I was just about Callie’s age at the time. I never really got over it.” He shook his head. “Life’s a funny thing.”

Kuzitski waved his cup very slowly. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast, what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,” he said. He set down the cup. “Pope.” He sat carefully balanced, smiling sadly, deeply satisfied. After a moment he poured more whiskey into his cup.

“Well, it was a long, long time ago,” Henry said.

The old man seemed to consider it, stirring his coffee. At last, having thought it out, he said, “We’re all of us getting on.”

Henry nodded. “That’s the way it goes.”

“Time comes to turn over the plow to a younger hand.” Kuzitski said. He raised the cup solemnly, toasting the future.

“Nobody lasts forever,” Henry said.

“Time waist for no man,” Kuzitski said, nodding. “Ashes to ashes and duss to duss.” He toasted the past.

It was after three, a night deep and still, as if all time and space hung motionless, waiting for a revelation. The old man sat with his cup aloft, miserably smiling, staring with glittering, red-fleshed eyes; then, slowly, he lowered his cup.

Henry laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“It’s a sad, sad thing,” Kuzitski said, blinking and nodding in slow-motion. He looked down into his cup. Empty. “All her life my poor sister Nadia wanted a man and a family. I watched her dry up like old grapes.” He raised his fist and shook it slowly, thoughtfully, at invisible forces above the grill-hood. “A man doesn’t need that sort of thing. Fact is, he doesn’t need anything at all, except when he’s young. When he’s young a man wants something to die for — some war to fight, some kind of religion to burn at the stake for.” He refilled his cup with whiskey, holding the bottle with both hands. “But a man gets over all that. A woman’s different. Woman’s got to have something to live for.” He toasted womanhood, a toast even more grand than the last, on his face the same dazed, miserable smile, then drew the cup very carefully toward his fleshy lower lip. When the cup was empty he set it down and at last, very deliberately, stood up and started for the door.

“That’s true,” Henry said. He felt a mysterious excitement, as though the idea were something he’d drunk. He watched the old man move slowly to his truck, the truck clear and sharp in the starlight, the highway clear and sharp beyond, the woods so clear, dark as they were, that he almost could have counted every needle on the pines. The truck started with a jerk, came straight for the pumps, swerved off and scraped the RETREADS sign, then wandered onto the road.

He found himself scowling at what was left of the pie on his plate, and at last it came to him that it wasn’t what he wanted. He scraped it into the garbage can. A dizzy spell came, and he leaned on the sink, frightened, fumbling for his pills.

4

The girl wasn’t afraid of him as other people were except for some of the drunks. She was quiet at first, her tongue caught between her lips, but quiet because she was concentrating on her work. As she mastered the grill, the menu, the prices, she began to talk a little. When they were cleaning up at the end of the third day she said, “Mr. Soames, do you know a boy named Willard Freund?”

He wiped his brow with the back of his damp arm, the counter rag clutched in his fist. “Sure,” he said. “He stops by now and again. He built that car of his in my garage.” Her hands moved smoothly from the towel-rack to the rinsed cups in the wire web beside the sink. He grinned.

She closed one eye as she wiped the cup in her hand. “He’s sort of nice. In a way I feel really sorry for him because he’s so nice.”

Henry leaned on the counter, looking out at the darkness, thinking about it. For some reason his mind wandered to the time Callie’s father had stolen the rounds from the schoolmaster’s chair — Henry Soames’ father’s chair. Frank Wells had had that smell on his breath even then, but in those days Callie’s mother hadn’t noticed the smell, or had thought of it as something she’d get around to when the time came. She’d had all her mind on Frank’s lean hips and the way he slouched through doors. When Henry Soames’ father’s chair gave out and the old man was weeping like an obscene old woman on the floor, Callie’s mother had said, “Why, isn’t Frank Wells the horridest person, Fats?” Frank had grinned, hearing it, but Henry Soames, sweet little Fats, hadn’t understood, of course; he’d choked with disgust because his own father was flopping on the floor with his hairy belly showing, like a pregnant walrus, and couldn’t get up. But Callie’s mother had married Frank in the end. (And hunchbacked old Doc Cathey, diabolical, right in his judgment as usual, had said, “Henry, my boy, human beings are animals, just the same as a dog or a cow. You better accept it.” And old Doc Cathey, old even then, had winked and laid his cold-fish hand on Henry’s neck.)

After a minute Henry remembered himself and chuckled, “Yes, sir, Willard’s a fine boy, Callie.” He was vaguely conscious that his fingers were drumming on the counter-top as, chuckling uncomfortably again, he glanced about to see that the percolators were clean and the chili put away.

“He really is the kindest person,” Callie said. “I’ve danced with him after the basketball games sometimes. I guess you know he wants to be a race-car driver. I think he could really do it, too. He’s terrific with a car.” Her hands stopped moving and she glanced at Henry’s chest. “But his dad wants him to go to Cornell. To the Ag School.”

Henry cleared his throat. “I think he’s mentioned it.”

He tried to picture methodical, sharp-boned Callie dancing with Willard Freund. Willard was a swan.

(Henry had sighed, helpless, sitting in the back room with Willard the night the boy had told him of his father’s plans. He’d felt old. He hadn’t stopped to think about it, the feeling of having outgrown time and space altogether, falling into the boundless, where all contradictions stood resolved. He had listened as if from infinitely far away, and it had come down to this: That night he had given up hope for Willard, had quit denying the inevitable doom that swallows up all young men’s schemes, and in the selfsame motion of the mind he had gone on hoping. For perhaps it was true that Willard Freund had everything it took to make a driver (Henry was not convinced of it, though even to himself he’d never pinned down his doubt with words; he knew only that the boy had a certain kind of nerve and a hunger to win and the notion — a notion that everyone on earth has, perhaps, at least for a while — that he was born unique, set apart from the rest), but even if it was true that he had what it took, there was no guarantee that he would keep it. Things happened as a boy got older. Speedy Cerota, the man who ran the jeep place down in Athensville, had been lightning once. He’d married a girl that drove in the ladies’ and they’d had three kids as quick as that, and one day Speedy had come in second — bad car, he said — and then fourth, then fifth, and pretty soon, without his ever knowing what had happened, it was over, he couldn’t pass a stoneboat. But as surely as Henry Soames knew that, he knew too that you never knew for sure until it happened. And even if you knew beforehand that what they wanted, the grandiose young, was stupid in the first place and impossible to get in the second, even then you had to back them. If it wasn’t for young people’s foolish hopes it would all have ended with Adam. Henry Soames thought: What could I say?

He was too old for such hopes. Nevertheless, he had rubbed his palms on his legs, that night, brooding. A vague idea of taking his mother’s money out of the bank in Athens-ville for Willard had crossed his mind. It wasn’t doing anything there — molding and drawing interest for him, Henry, who wouldn’t pick it up with a gutter fork. It had never been his any more than it was his father’s. Hers. Let her climb up over her big glassy headstone and spend it. “Remember you’ve got Thompson blood,” she would say, and his father would laugh and say, “Yes, boy, look at the bright side.” And he would feel threatened, nailed down. Sometimes even now he would bite his lip, giving way for a second to his queer old fantasy of some error by Doc Cathey or the midwife, for well as Henry Soames knew who he was, the idea that a man might be somebody else all his life and never be aware of it — live out the wrong doom, grow fat because a man he had nothing to do with by blood had died of fat — had a strange way of filling up his chest. In bed sometimes he would think about it, not making up some new life for himself as he’d done as a child, merely savoring the immense half-possibility.

But it wasn’t money that Willard would need. It was hard to say what it was that Willard needed.

“Well,” Henry heard himself saying, “yes, sir, Willard’s a fine boy, it’s a fact.”

But by now Callie was thinking of other things. Glancing around the room, she asked, “That everything that needs doing?”

He nodded. “I’ll drive you up to your house,” he said. “It’s cold out.”

“No thanks,” she said, her tone so final it startled him. “If you do it tonight you’ll end up doing it every night. It’s only a few steps.”

“Oh, shucks now,” he said. “It’s no trouble, Callie.”

She shook her head, a sort of fierce old-womanish look around her eyes, and pulled on her leather jacket.

Henry studied her, puzzled, but it was clear she wouldn’t change her mind. He shrugged, uneasy, and watched her cross to the door, then pass from the diner’s blue-pink glow into darkness, heading up the hill. Two minutes after she’d disappeared from sight he went to his lean-to room in back. He pulled off his shirt, then stood for a long time looking at the rug, wondering what it all meant.

5

As always, it was hard to put himself to bed. It had become a ritual with him, this waiting between the peeling-away of the sweat-soaked shirt from chest, belly, arms, and the unbuckling of his wide leather belt. And partly necessity, of course. His health. Doc Cathey had chortled, “You lose ninety pounds, Henry Soames, or you’re a goner. Like your old man before you. You’ll sit up in bed some one of these mornings and you’ll turn white with the effort of it, and click.” Doc had snapped his fingers, brown, bony fingers that wouldn’t go fat if you fed ’em on mashed potatoes for a month. And his voice had been aloof, amused, as though he’d gotten his JP and MD jobs mixed up. Doc sometimes did that, people said, laughing about it while Henry dished up their orders. That had been before Henry went in for his checkup; otherwise maybe he mightn’t have noticed Doc’s manner. Doc would talk to an old offender, they said, in his kindly-family-doctor voice and to an expectant mother with his high and mighty sneer. And he, Henry Soames, had paid a dollar to be told what he’d known for most of his life, right down to the click, and ten for pills, and four dollars more for the little brown bottle that ruined his appetite all right but made his belly ache like he had the worms and his eyes go yellow in the mirror. A man didn’t owe his flesh to his doctor; he could still choose his own way out. Three dollars’ worth of pharmacist’s bilge poured down the sink was maybe thirty bellyaches avoided. Old Man Soames had used whiskey for the pain, and whiskey — that and the little white pills — would be good enough for Henry.

He sat still on the edge of the bed, breathing deeply. There was a little wind outside. On the hill just beyond the lean-to window the scraggly pines were swaying and creaking. Between the pines there were maples, lower than the pines, and below the maples, weeds. As always on windy nights, there was no sign of the low-crawling fog. He sometimes missed it a little when it didn’t come. Because it brought customers, maybe. “A man gets to feeling weird,” one of the truckers had told him once. “Ten miles of sharp turns stabbing out at you from the mist, cliffs as gray as the fog itself to tell you you’re still on the road, and now and then a shadowy tree or a headlight, dead looking, everything in sight, dead. And lonely as hell. Brother.” He’d shivered, hunching his shoulders in for warmth and sucking down the coffee Henry served him on the house. From the wide front window of the diner Henry would see the fog, just after sunset, sliding down the hill like an animal; and then again sometimes the fog would just appear out of nowhere, ruminating. It would lose itself here in this pocket between two hills, and then in the morning sun it would shrink up into itself and vanish, leaving the trees, wet and the highway as hard and blue as the curved blade of a knife. The lines of the hills north and south of Henry’s Stop-Off would be sharper then, and the barns that belonged to Callie’s father would stand out like tombstones after thaw.

But tonight was a perfect night for truckers; it was foolishness to sit here hoping, if he was. Which he wasn’t. He’d had one heart attack already, and he’d never known it at the time. It took all his effort to keep his mind off that. When a man’s heart stopped, the whole machine ought to shudder, lights ought to flash in the head, the blood should roar: But his heart was scarred, and he hadn’t the faintest idea when it had happened, as if some hand had flicked a switch off, then on again, letting the machine freewheel for an instant and then dig in as before. He might have died without ever knowing he was dying — a year, a year-and-a-half ago maybe, and all that had happened since might have been nothing.

A truck was coming up 98 now, but he wouldn’t pull in even though the neon was on, as it always was, and one of the three lights in the diner. He’d want to push on, no doubt, to please his boss or his union or the people at Morse Chain. But maybe a drunk would stop, seeing the light burning away in there like an altar lamp. The semi was speeding-up on the quarter-mile level run in front of the Stop-Off for the hill a little ways north — the hill that would rise and suddenly break, pushing your heart up out of your chest, to drive three miles down banked curves into New Carthage. The truck was rolling now, maybe up around fifty, depending on the load. The grind of gears came, meaning he was halfway up the hill, and the new engine scream pulling down to a low, pained roar; another shift, to low, to low-low, the pounding throb — far away, though — and then the purr at the peak of the hill and the purr rising, pulling back against the thrust, strangling itself on the downgrade. All a mile away now, from the sound of it; so faint that you couldn’t know how much of it you heard and how much was only a tingle in your skin.

Maybe he should get out the Ford, he thought. But no. He was tired, and he was in no mood, these days, for rattleassing over the hills, thanks to this tightness in his chest. A bad sign, no doubt. He’d have to draw up his will, as Doc Cathey had told him.

Outside it was quiet now, except for the light breeze. He could smell rain. It would be a good idea to check the cardboard in the window; easier than getting up after he was in bed, when the rain, if it should come, would be batting down and seeping over his dusty windowsill and onto his neatly stacked books — down over the pitiful leather-bound Bible that had belonged to his father and had his father’s and his father’s father’s names penned into it under “Deaths,” between the Old and New Testaments. No other names; no wives, no children. The Bible had ridges across its back like the ridges on one of his mother’s people’s lawbooks, which was funny, when you thought of it, because a lawbook was what it had been for his father. And that too was funny, because now it had a fermented, museum smell from the rain that always seeped onto the books no matter how careful you were with the window beforehand.

Beside the old Bible he could see his father’s anemic-looking schoolbooks and, on the shelf below, National Geographics, Shakespeare, an old almanac with notes in the margin, written in his father’s childish hand. These books, too, had the musty smell, and something more complicated: a burnt-out, un-lived-in smell like — he had to think a moment — a hotel room. A sudden, unexpected feeling of guilt bloomed inside him, pushing up through his neck. He knew what it was for an instant, but then he had lost it again. He concentrated his gaze on the books, but whatever it was that had come to him was gone.

“Damn rotten shame,” he said aloud, vaguely.

His father had been a dairyman first, Henry remembered his mother’s saying, and he’d failed at it, no doubt because of the pain of hauling his weight like a twelve-foot cross from cow to cow. After that the poor devil had sold apples from his orchard, and then, or perhaps before that, he’d raised sheep, painted roadsigns, clerked in the feedstore in Athensville. Nothing had worked. In spite of his tonnage, he had been a sentimental dreamer, as Henry’s mother had put it. “Should’ve been a monk.”—Making sure her little Henry would not trudge in his father’s footsteps. One job after another would cave in under his father, and she, who came from a fair-off family, lawyers mostly, would give him just barely enough of her money to set him up in the new project which, sure as day, would fail. He was as simple and harmless all his life as a great, fat girl. It was the floundering harmlessness, no doubt, that Henry’s mother had hated in him. And so she’d driven him to schoolteaching at last. Because, she had said, he’d been through high school and couldn’t do anything but read books. “You don’t need capital for teaching school. Maybe it’ll make a man of you,” she’d said. And so Henry’s father had suffered the final indignity, plopped sweating in front of people like Frank Wells, enduring their pranks as a woman would, with his own son in the classroom, and in between times teaching them multiplication and poetry and Scripture. Which explained why Henry’s mother’s name had not been put in the Bible under “Deaths.” It was hard to say why his grandmother’s name wasn’t there. Maybe his father’s womanishness had become, at last, a hatred of women in general, or at any rate a refusal to admit that they lived and died. His last delusion: that here at least, between the Old and New Testaments, a man stood on his own. (But Doc Cathey had said once, pushing his crooked knuckles down in his coat’s side pockets and shaking his head, “Solid as stone your daddy was. Solid as stone.”)

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.

6

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.”

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.

7

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?”

Hastily, a little clumsily, the man bought a pack of Camels, threw out one last grin, and left.

“Stop by again next time you’re passing,” Henry shouted, leaning over the counter. But the poor devil was hurrying toward his idling truck, turning up his collar against the shout. The cab door slammed and the truck clanked off up the hill, the stainless steel glinting in the moonlight.

Henry bit his lip. The man had been afraid of him — like all the others, except Callie, maybe, or some old, old friend, or a drunk. That was what had sent him into his big-man act and finally pushed him out the door. People shied from you when you tried to get to them, talk of a wife’s sickness, a jackknifed truck, hoping to make them feel at home. And if they didn’t shy away right off, it was worse. He thought of old Kuzitski, how he, Henry, had ranted and raved at the poor old devil when it was all Kuzitski could do to keep upright, and then others, too, when Kuzitski hadn’t proved enough. He would laugh too loudly and maybe even get really excited and pound the counter, and sweat would shine on his forearms where the sleeves were rolled tight, and all on account of the weather or the weight-limit laws, the general stupidity of things. And then by God they would shy! — would run like somebody’d tried to rape them, and maybe not come back. Or if they came, they came back to stare one more time at all that fat or now, maybe, to flirt with Callie. Hell of a place for a girl like that, here where all she saw was truckers or drunks.

(“And what do you think he does sittin’ up in his room all night?” Willard Freund had heard the man at the feedstore say. And the man had answered himself, “Why, he boozes, man! You ever seen him drive?”

And Willard had said, looking down and cracking his knuckles, “I know it’s a stupid damn lie, Henry. I just thought you’d want to know what they’re saying.”)

Drunk. Maybe they were right. Not drunk from whiskey, but drunk from something else, maybe. Drunk from the huge, stupid Love of Man that moved through his mind on its heels, empty and meaningless as fog, a Love of Man that came down in the end to wanting the whole damn world to itself, an empty diner, sticky places on the counter stools, bolts and old wrenches, sheer pins, cotter-keys, baling wire up to your knees on the floor of the garage. Drunk with muscle and fat and padding around in circles in a grease-stinking lean-to behind a trucker’s diner. So he pounded the counter about the weather or where he’d have gone if he’d ever lit out, or he rattle-assed through the mountains in his ’39 Ford.

On a clear night you could make it to the top of Nickel Mountain and back, teetering in the square black Ford, the walls pinning you in like the sides of an upended coffin, bumping down gravel and macadam roads and over the warped planks of narrow bridges that rocked when you hit and echoed brrrack! through the hills and glens. The trees would slide into the headlight beams and the wind whipping through the open window made you feel like Jesus H. Christ charioting to heaven. Nickel Mountain! That was where the real hills were, even when you stayed on the highway. And when you came whamming down around a corner, letting her coast free as a hawk, you’d suddenly see the river hundreds of feet below, on your left. Even by daylight it was beautiful: flat, blue shale ledges, the black river, misty fields, and the cluttered, peeling brick houses of Putnam Settlement. But at night, with the ledges outlined in icy blue like glass, rippling panes of moonlight on the water — Christ! A trucker had gone off that spot once, poor devil. Bad brakes, probably. That was the funeral that had been up in Utica. It was a long time ago now. Ten years? Well, the man had chosen beautiful scenery for it. Beautiful. That was the big mistake in Henry Soames’ father’s life: to sit, waiting for it, in his bed. She’d done a job on him, all right.

He ran his hands over his chest and sides. He was still staring at the door as if to hurl angry apologies at the trucker’s blackened tailpipe. Callie stood leaning on the cutting board, her hands on her hips, looking at him. When he glanced at her, she asked, “Did that man really have a wife, Mr. Soames?”

He nodded. “Diabetes. All she can eat is Jello.” He turned heavily and put the dirty cup and spoon in the sink.

“He’s got a nerve, then, I’d say.”

Henry scowled, seeing her again with her hand on her cocked hip, smiling, playing with sex the way little boys play with flares along the railroad tracks — and seeing, too, the trucker, with a wife home dying, but for all that there he stood grinning at Callie like a sly old bull — and seeing himself, Henry Soames, reaching out like a fruit to pat the man’s shoulder. “I’m getting to be a damned old woman,” he said. He pulled at his upper lip.

She didn’t dispute it. “Well, you’re a nice old woman,” she said, not smiling. She sounded tired. She turned to look out vacantly at the darkness. He found he couldn’t make out her features distinctly. Eyes burning out like the rest of him, he thought. A sharp, brief pain came into his chest then vanished, a little like a mouse peeking out of his hole then ducking back. He heard her words again in his mind, a nice old woman, and he was touched. Touched and depressed. He leaned on the front of the sink and waited for his breathing to calm. He was always waiting, these days. For customers, for the grill to heat, for night, for morning and the tuning-up of the blasted little gray and white speckled birds outside his window. How long? he wondered. Another tentative pain. He cleared his throat.

8

It was four nights after the trucker came that Henry found out exactly how touchy his situation was. A Saturday. George Loomis came in drunk as a lord and said, “Henry Soames, you old somvabitch, I come to take the place of the late Kuzitski.”

Callie knew as well as Henry that that was merely George Loomis’s way, that the speech was as much an apology as anything else, however ugly; the only kind of apology George Loomis knew how to make. Or if she didn’t know, she was a fool. But she spun around when he said it and glared at him.

“What a horrible thing to say!” she said.

“Yes’m,” he said.

She said, “You’re drunk. You ought to get home to bed.”

“Now, Callie,” Henry said.

“Drink’s very wicked,” George said, nodding. “ ’S the devil’s helper. Ought to be ashamed. Come sit’n my lap here tell me ’bout Demon Drink.” He lunged over the counter suddenly, snatching at her hand, but Callie dodged him. Her face went white and she said in dead earnest, “I’ll break your brains for you, George Loomis, that’s what I’ll do.”

George sat down again, smiling as if sadly, leaning on his hand. “She’s given her heart to another,” he said, looking at Henry. He turned back to Callie, drawing himself erect. “He’s a son of a whore, Miss Wells,” he said. “I say it for your own good. He’ll get drunk every night and he’ll beat you with a stick.”

She looked as though she really would hit him — her fists clenched, her cheek muscles taut — and Henry went over to get between them.

“George, let me get you some coffee,” he said. He got out a cup and saucer.

“Don’t mean no harm,” George said. “Just trying to do the Christian thing.”

Henry nodded solemnly, filling the cup.

“Callie’s lovely girl,” George said. “Girl with real spirit. Admire her very much.”

Henry said, “Have some coffee.”

“Deeply devoted to Callie Wells. Seriously considering marriage. But at the moment—” He paused, his face gray. “At the moment, sorry to say — very sick.”

Henry’s eyes widened and he waved at Callie. “Get a pan,” he said.

She jumped, then ran to the sink for the chili pan and brought it over. George vomited. When he was through, they got him into the lean-to room in back and stretched him out on a blanket on the rug. He fell asleep at once. Henry kneeled beside him, patting his shoulder as he would a child’s, shaking his head.

“Why do people do things like that?” Callie said. She stood in the doorway, her head leaning back on the frame and her eyes narrowed. The white of her blouse stood out sharply against the pale red neon glow on the diner window behind her.

“That’s what love does to a man,” Henry said, meaning it as a joke but getting the tone wrong. He got up. He knew well enough that love was not George’s trouble. If somebody else had been there instead of Callie it would have been somebody else that George admired very much. Callie said, “Pah.”

He seated himself on the edge of the bed feeling old as the world. George Loomis looked dead, lying on the floor with the steel brace on his boot sticking out below the bottom edge of the cover. He looked as if he’d fallen there from a great height. Callie’s face was drawn to a half-wince as though she could barely stand the smell.

A kind of excitement began to rise in Henry Soames’ stomach. It was important, all at once, that Callie understand the confused and complicated emotions he’d never been able to find words for even to himself. He pulled at his right hand with his left and rocked toward her a little. “George Loomis is a fine boy,” he said. Then, in confusion, “And Wil-lard’s a fine boy, too. And you’re a fine girl, Callie.” She watched with her head drawn back a little, eyebrows lowered. And then suddenly he was babbling, telling her — and though it enraged him, he couldn’t stop — about how his mother had hated his father, about old man Kuzitski’s sister, about darkness and the sound of rain in his childhood. The words came out every which way, jumbled poetry that almost took wing but then pulled down into garble and grunt, and he got to his feet and went to her and closed his hands on her arms, hissing at her, his eyes full of tears, until, abruptly, her eyes wide, she pulled away. They stood still as two trees, hardly breathing.

“I’m sorry,” he moaned, covering his face with his clenched fists.

She didn’t move or speak for a long while. Then she said, keeping her distance, “You’d better get some sleep, Henry.”

He went back to the bed, careful not to step on George, and sat down again, as miserable as he’d ever been in his life. “I meant,” he said after a deep breath, “that people—” He let it trail off.

She stood silent, watching him as if from far away. Then she said, “Here, I’ll help you off with your shoes.”

“Don’t trouble,” he said, grieved at having made her feel she was partly to blame, or grieved because he’d made a fool of himself and had left her no way to get free from him except by a gesture of charity, the kind of gift one gives to cripples. But she ignored him and came to kneel between him and the inert George Loomis. Her collar was low, open, and he could see the slight blue-white curve of her breasts. When she glanced up and saw that he was looking at her a paleness came to her cheeks and she raised one hand instinctively to her collar. He shifted his gaze to his own huge belly and said nothing, pushed to the final humiliation.

She sat back on her heels and said, “Is that better?”

He nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You mustn’t let me keep you this late again. I can’t tell you—”

“It’s all right,” she said. Her lips formed an angry pout, but the anger seemed to have nothing much to do with him. It was as though she too, at sixteen, was growing old.

He seemed to stare at her for several minutes, meeting her eyes, but then he realized she was gone. For a moment he wasn’t quite sure she’d been here at all. In his mind he saw, all at once, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wells eyeing a nervous, stoop-shouldered trucker who wanted to marry their daughter. And he could see the glee of old man Cathey, when the service was over, kissing the bride — a dear-old-family-doctor, not a JP kiss. Henry pulled off his shirt, then sat in nothing but his trousers, trying to rearrange the words and gestures into something that would express his huge, jumbled thoughts. He clenched his fists, struggling to keep her from kneeling in front of him again in his memory. But the memory changed for the worse. In his dreams that night the Soames in his blood rose again and again like a gray-black monster out of a midnight ocean: He dreamed of himself in bed with her, misusing her again and again violently and in ungodly ways. Then, disgusted with himself, his chest burning, he found himself half-sitting on his bed with sunlight in his room and the sound of birds. George Loomis sat against the wall across from him, his eyes tight shut, both his hands clinging to his head. He opened his eyes for an instant, then snapped them shut again.

“People are no damn good,” George said.

Henry could hear the churchbell ringing very faintly, far away, at the New Carthage Salem Baptist Church.

“Oh, well,” he said, shrugging, sagging where he stood. He thought about it, or thought about things in general, then sighed and nodded. “Ah, well,” he said.

9

Willard Freund had found out about some fool contest, first prize a thousand dollars. By God he knew as much as anybody, he said, about customizing cars. He had to read Henry the contest rules in the magazine, and he had to show him the drawings he’d done this afternoon. They went to the lean-to room in back, and Henry sat down on the side of his bed and closed his eyes, listening to Willard read. Willard read slowly, like a man reading nothing but headlines or a lawyer stressing the importance of every phrase. When Henry would look at him, frowning a little, trying not to seem too skeptical, Willard would lean over the table farther, reading more slowly and insistently than before. It went on and on, stipulation on stipulation, and Henry’s mind wandered to when he’d been Willard Freund’s age. Old hollyhocks and the yellow brick houses of Putnam Settlement, over by the mountain, rose rectangular and dull in Henry’s mind. People he’d known a long time ago came back to him, and people who’d been younger then, still full of life. There was his father, huge and motionless as a boulder down in the bottom of a gorge, and Doc Cathey, parchment-skinned, grinning, swinging his serpentine walking stick, squinting over his cheekbones. There was Callie’s mother, soft and white and bosomy in those days, and Willard’s father, sly and casual, drawing out the faults of a holstein while arithmetic clicked behind his fat-lidded eyes. They’d had great hopes in those days. There were important things to do.

“Damn it, Henry, it’s a natural,” Willard said. “Christ, they’ve ruled out all the real competition. No pros, no relatives of GM or Fisher or anybody that counts! And look!” He spread out his drawings and Henry got up and went over to the chair across from Willard. He adjusted his glasses and drew the nearest of the drawings to him. A needle-nosed, wing-fendered car, high in back, tortuously drawn on yellow paper.

“I thought you wanted to drive, Willard,” Henry said.

“Hell’s bells, I could drive to the moon and back on a thousand dollars.” He jabbed at the paper with one squared, big-boned finger. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Willard,” he said. “God knows I don’t know much about designing cars.”

“What do you think, though?” He was squinting, his cheek muscles tensed, watching Henry’s face.

Henry looked down at the paper again, first through his glasses, then over them, and Willard got out a cigarette and lit it.

Henry said, “It’s a fine-looking car all right.” Then: “There is one thing, maybe. It doesn’t look—” He couldn’t find the way to say it. He tried to shrug it off, back down and merely praise the car, but Willard pressed him and, finally, feeling like a fool, he let it come out: “It doesn’t look like you.”

“It what?” Willard said, half-standing up.

“I told you I—”

“Well what in hell is it supposed to mean?” He couldn’t decide whether to be mad or puzzled. “Look, maybe it’s really crap or something, and maybe I didn’t draw it so pretty, but it is supposed to be a car, I wasn’t trying to make a picture of my goddamn face.”

Henry pulled hard at his lip, trying to think, and his seriousness, if nothing else, made Willard calm himself and wait. “Put it this way,” Henry said. “It doesn’t look like anybody, it just looks like a picture of a car. Take old Kuzitski’s truck. It looked like Kuzitski, you know what I mean?”

He shook his head, cross.

“Well, take Burk’s secondhand Cadillac, then. Would you have a car like that?”

It was useless, of course. The more he argued the less Willard saw it. Henry flipped through the magazine, pointing to cars and their drivers — and the truth was, the more he pointed the less Henry Soames saw it himself. He sat with his chair close to Willard’s now, his arm around Willard Freund’s shoulders, and though smoking was sure to kill him, Doc Cathey said, he smoked his pipe, for Willard smoked cigarettes like a trucker, one after another.

He quit at last. “Maybe it’s nonsense,” he said. “I guess it is.” And he tried to talk merely about how the air would flow, where the weight would sit — things he knew for sure he knew nothing about.

When they talked about Willard’s father and farming and old Kuzitski’s accident — all this later that night — Willard smoked less and Henry quit. The boy crossed his knees and leaned back in his chair across the room from Henry just as Willard’s father always had, or had when Henry had known him. They seldom met now. And yet even at moments like this Willard Freund did not quite seem at ease.

“Sorry, Willard,” Henry said as Willard left, a little after one-thirty.

Willard smiled, cocking his head, looking off over Henry’s shoulder. “Don’t matter,” he said. “I guess the whole thing’s a pretty dumb idea.”

“I never said that,” Henry said seriously.

“No. Well, we’ll see.” He winked, pulled down his sweatshirt a little, and went out.

Afterward Henry lay in his bed going over and over it in his mind. He was sure he was right, even if sometimes looking at pictures in magazines he couldn’t seem to see it. The only real question was whether or not it was important, whether or not it had anything to do, really, with designing a car. As he lay thinking, or brooding rather, his mind all at once called up the image of George Loomis’s house, and for some reason Henry was shocked. A gaunt old brick house among tamaracks, the round-topped windows always dark except for the eerie flicker thrown by the television he kept in the kitchen. There were maybe fifteen, sixteen rooms, and George Loomis hardly set foot in more than three or four. But maybe that was different, he thought. A hand-me-down might be something else again. Give George a choice of the kind of house he’d live in, and sure as day. … But then he knew it wasn’t true. A man did things to the world but also the world did things to him, and that was the house all right. If something or somebody didn’t interfere, that would be George Loomis.

He lay looking up at the ceiling for a long time, thinking.

10

Two nights later Willard came again. He came in around ten, while Callie and Henry were cleaning up.

“How’s it going, boy?” Henry said, serving him coffee and the blueberry pie he always ordered when there was some.

Willard sipped the coffee, looking over the rim at Callie, and then he said, “Bad. But there’s a reason now. I figured out what you meant.”

Henry frowned, not getting it at first.

“Cars and people,” Willard explained. “What you said. It’s the craziest goddamn thing!”

In a flash the old excitement was pounding inside him, and nothing he could do to stop it. He held back, struggled hard against himself like a lion converted to Christianity, but, even as his mind held back, his body pushed toward Willard. In his clumsy excitement he bumped Willard’s coffee and spilled it, and he didn’t take time to wipe it up, he was telling the boy — in sentences labored and slow at first, then faster and faster — about the fire he, Willard, had inside him, how somehow he had to get hold of it — the fire of the artist. The words were making no real sense, Henry knew as he said them, but the pitch at least — the pitch, by now, of a Pentecostal sermon — that and the big hands slapping the counter might partly make sense crash through. Willard Freund was leaning toward him, squinting as if to see better into Henry’s thoughts, but leaning wrong somehow — or so it seemed to Henry — maybe faking, or maybe partly faking, conscious of himself leaning forward. Callie was coming closer too, looking troubled. The muscles beside her mouth were tight. But Henry concentrated on the boy.

“Anything you make,” he was saying, gripping Willard’s arm, “anything you make at all has got to be finding out what you want to make. I mean, finding out what you are. Maybe you’ll draw cars or maybe you’ll drive them, either way it’s the same thing, you do what you do because of everything you ever did, or in spite of all you ever did — I don’t know. I mean, it’s love, it’s like every kind of love you ever felt and the sum total of every love you ever felt. It’s what poor old Kuzitski used to say: It’s finding something to be crucified for. That’s what a man has to have. I mean it. Crucifixion.” His voice cracked — stupid, sentimental, Soames voice — and Willard Freund jerked back and laughed. Callie too seemed repelled by it, but she reached out to touch their arms, Henry Soames’ and Willard’s. Then she drew her hands back, for Henry was blundering on.

But was he saying anything at all? he wondered. All so hopelessly confused. And yet he knew. He couldn’t do it and maybe never could have, but he knew. He was a fat, blubbering Holy Jesus, or anyway one half of him was, loving hell out of truckers and drunks and Willards and Callies — ready to be nailed for them. Eager. More heart than he knew how to spend.

It came to him that he had to tell of the bitch in Utica.

Mess.

He’d met her in the hallway of that cracking brown-papered hotel. He’d gone to Utica for a funeral, a trucker had killed himself — Ron, or Don — he’d forgotten the name — a trucker anyway; truckers were truckers. His semi had slid off 98, down in the hills, and had somersaulted to the shale banks of the river, then into the water. Henry had liked the man and had been afraid there’d be no one at the funeral. He’d been wrong, of course. The pews of the tiny white church were packed — old men, old women, children — and below the altar with its glinting, gold-embroidered cloth and fourteen candles and thin-necked statues the closed casket was buried under flowers and wide ribbons. Henry had sat in the last pew and had sobbed. And then in the hall of the Irishman’s hotel where he was staying he had met this idiot woman — though that wasn’t true, quite; in spite of the eyelashes and the lipstick that lied about the shape of her lips, she hadn’t laughed when he’d told her why he was in town. They’d walked along down the hall without speaking, earlier in the evening that was, going in the same direction, and they’d ended up at the same little tavern for supper. He’d been off his head, probably, with the funeral, and she’d been drunk as a fish when they went to her room, or she’d pretended to be. And there, with only a candle burning, throwing huge shadows on the heat-buckled brown-paper wall, they had talked about loneliness and devotion and God knew what, and he had held her in his fat arms trying to tell her of the bursting piece of sentimental stupidity inside him that had longed for something or other all his life. Her hands playing on his back had been warm, vaguely like the big drops of rain that came in August. He’d told her by God he would marry her — he didn’t even know her name — and she’d laughed her head off, not even drawing back, still rubbing against him, working him up. And at last in a kind of terror he had struck out at the damn drunken idiot, the stupid animal love in her raw hands and lips. What he had done, exactly, was hard to remember, or how she’d taken it. He’d hit her in the face when the climax came, that much he would never forget. That and the dry summer heat and the fact that now sometimes sitting in just his trousers, waiting, he could hear her moaning on his bed. The sound was distinct: so clear that he sometimes thought, in a moment of panic, that he’d lost his mind.

Callie’s hand was reaching once more toward Henry Soames’ wrist, but he ranted on, trying to tell the story to Willard Freund, but trying to tell it without details, without particular people, a story somebody’s father’s father had told — a story that, stripped of details, was absolute pointlessness. He stopped himself and, once more, caught Willard’s arm.

“I’m sorry, Willard,” he whispered frantically. “I’m a blubbering old man. I’m sorry.”

Callie cried, “Stop it, Henry. For God’s sake, please shut up!”

The room went silent. Henry felt the corners of his mouth twitching. The girl blanched as if nauseated, then turned on her heel and ran into the lean-to room behind the grill. She slammed the door behind her.

After a long moment, Willard held out a cigarette to Henry. Henry took it, his fingers trembling, and lighted it from Willard’s match. He listened to the hum of the electric clock. “I’m sorry,” he said again, calmly this time, so ashamed he couldn’t look at the boy.

Willard laughed — he-he-he — like a Negro. “Man, you do get carried away,” he said.

Again there was a silence between them, longer this time. Willard seemed on the point of speaking once, then shook his head and turned away to walk over to the window in front and look out at the highway. No sound came from the room behind the grill. At last Willard said, “Old man, I came here to tell you something.”

Henry waited, and Willard came over and leaned on the counter, his arms stiff, hands far apart. “I leave for school tomorrow,” he said. Then: “Ag School.”

Shame came again, mushrooming inside him as he realized that all his rant had been not only foolish but worse, unwanted. It surprised him that Willard had not told him sooner, and for a minute he was furious. But that passed. It wasn’t Willard’s fault, God knew. He asked feebly, “It’s settled, then?” He watched Willard’s eyes, but he found himself listening for a sound from the lean-to room behind.

Willard stared at his cigarette, then shrugged. “Guess it is,” he said. “I don’t really start till the summer session, but my old man swung this job for me, if I can start right now …”

“You told Callie?” Henry said.

“I mean to tell her tonight.”

“Will you need money?”

Willard blushed. Like father like son, Henry thought. A friend as close as Henry was ought to have a right, surely, to offer money. But he was more sorry for the boy than bitter. Like father like son, he thought again. A terrible shame. He jerked his head in the direction of the door into the lean-to room in back, and after a minute Willard went in.

Henry turned off the grill, though it was early, and gently scraped the grease into the trough, listening. He heard them talking quietly, and he could hardly stand the sadness of it, the doom of hope. It was a good thing to be old and past that, rolling steadily downward to the grave. In his mind he could see her clinging to him, crying maybe, and confused with the picture was another of her reaching, on tiptoe, for a plate on the top shelf, her head back and her breasts high. They might have done each other good, Callie and Willard. Good kids, he thought, half in sorrow, half in thanksgiving. Fine, fine kids. He laid the scraper down quietly on the tray beside the grill — his fingers were still trembling, he noticed — and he pulled on his brown wool sweater. His belly pinched behind the wheel, he drove out onto 98, heading south. In his rear-view mirror he saw the light in the back room go off. He felt a moment’s unrest, like a parent. But he said to himself then, Sensible. Now drunks wouldn’t interrupt their parting. Still, Henry was puzzled and a little frightened, though he could not admit what it was exactly that frightened him. He shifted to high.

By the time he reached Nickel Mountain he was calm. The air was clean here, with cool wisps of fog in the hollows. The brilliance of the night, the shocking perfection of the stars, the trees, the rocks, made dawn seem far away. As he curved above the river, he rode the brake gently, oppressed by an odd notion that he was somehow not on the usual road. Then came an even stranger idea, almost a conviction, the old fantasy with a new face. Somehow, emerging from a draught of winter wind, he found himself not little Fats and not Henry Soames but someone who had been cold and dead for a long time — his father, perhaps, or someone whose life Henry Soames had lived hundreds of years ago. He was making it up, of course, and he knew it; but he let himself believe it nevertheless, or let himself toy with it; and it grew on him. At the top of the mountain he parked the Ford and leaned back in his seat, waiting for the pleasure of the delusion to pass.

When he returned to the Stop-Off, Willard and Callie were gone. Henry undressed for bed and, without realizing he was doing it, snapped off the neon light. Catching himself an instant later, he turned the light on again, shaking his head. From his lean-to window he could see the fog wallowing down through the trees, stretching out thick, fleshless arms like the tentacles of some cavern beast, or like the white arms of a blind man. After a little more than an hour he pounded the dottle from his carved black pipe for the last time and lay down.

11

When Callie Wells came in, the following morning, Henry saw almost at once that she was as cheerful as ever — more cheerful than usual if anything. She talked of Willard as she always had, of what a fine driver he would be, of how clever he was, how kind, how terribly thoughtful. And so Henry saw that Willard had lied. He hadn’t told her and hadn’t intended to.

Henry said nothing.

The following day the cheerfulness was gone, and all the rest of the week was a grim business. The weather maybe. The wind had turned wintry, and for two days it snowed. Still neither of them said a word. On Monday she was in good spirits again, and it wasn’t long before she told him what he could easily have guessed, that she’d gotten a letter from Willard. His job was going fine. He’d be home toward the middle of August. He sent his best to Henry. She worked him out of things to do that week, finishing up every chore he gave her in half the time it should have taken and driving him pretty near to his wits’ end. She would hum to herself from morning to night, sometimes the same song hour after hour, and he thanked God he’d had the jukebox taken out three years ago.

And then, some while later — a month, maybe — another change came: She worked harder than ever, but not singing now, not laughing with truckers, never speaking except when she was spoken to; and finally it dawned on him that Callie was afraid she was pregnant. Her fear turned into near certainty — it was easy to see, though she still said nothing about it to him. She vacillated between stony silence and intense, nervous chatter, and she began to ask pointed questions about the Freunds. As for Henry, the suspicion that Callie was pregnant touched him deeply and gave her in his eyes a kind of holiness. He began to worry constantly that she would overdo or that she would fall. He began to walk, himself, like a man on ice.

June ended; haywagons stopped rolling by, and the farmers, up and down the road turned to cultivating corn. The pines took their richer summer color, and the maples and beeches were so full of leaves that the woods across from the Stop-Off were dark as an apple bin. July came, and farmers began to combine oats. The silence in which he and Callie worked had become a settled matter now, as if something they’d consciously agreed on. And yet, in spite of the silence, it seemed to Henry that he and the girl were closer than they had been before. Perhaps she guessed that he knew and shared her fear — surely she must have guessed — but if she did she did not tell him. He studied her eyes, her hands, her ankles, watching the signs, and at night he couldn’t sleep for worry and the pain in his chest. Because sleep came later and later, he began to oversleep sometimes. When he awakened, in the middle of the morning, he would find the door of his room closed and he would hear the clatter of dishes and the small-boy banter of truckers in the diner. When he went in to help her, Callie would snap, “You need your rest, Henry,” and would turn away, too busy to waste more words. Tears would smart in his eyes. He would insist — these days, it seemed to him, Callie ought hardly to lift a napkin — and she would give in without ever asking the obvious question, Why are you doing this? She’d begun to show a little now, and those who watched their comedy — his solicitude, her indignation — drew the obvious conclusions (but this neither one of them would know until later). At night, just before she left, she would come to his room to dust or straighten his chairs, irritably, then stand near the table in the middle of the room, sharing his dull, trivial thoughts, wondering with him, but wordlessly, whether or not the rain would come or, after it came, whether it would stop in time. Henry, alone with her in his room, learned to hug his arms to his sides as though the slightest movement might drive away a mist that protected them both, covered, on his side, sagging flesh, lumbering absurdities of soul, and covered, on her side — well, nothing, of course. Youth. Unhappiness. Her stony Baptist guilt and, maybe, terror.

One afternoon (it was the end of July; a hot, muggy day) Henry said, “I sure don’t know what I’ll do around here without you, Callie. When you go and get married this place here’s gonna fall down around my ears.”

She smiled, false, then covered her face and cried, and it hit him that Willard Freund was not coming back.

“Now here, here,” he said, going to her, patting her shoulder. “Callie old girl, you been working too hard. You just take this afternoon off.”

“Get away,” she said, pushing at his arm. “Damn you, please. Just this once, leave me alone!”

Henry backed off, scratching the back of his hand. He went back into his room.

12

“All right, then,” he said to himself. “All right, then.”

He’d sent her home early, a little before eight, and had turned out the neon and the diner lights and closed the lean-to door behind him. The only suit he had was the black one his father had left, but it fit as though it had been made for him. (He was getting heavy, by Jesus. He’d never have believed he could fill the old man’s suit.) He found the old brown fedora on the shelf, and that fit too, nearly. It rested on his ears. When he inspected himself in the mirror he found he looked very good. Big as the world, but good. Serious, anyway; imposing. That was what he was after. He locked the back-room door behind him, because of the dark formality in his chest — he hadn’t locked that door for maybe fifteen years — and went out to his car. The night was as hot and muggy as the day had been; not a breath of air, not so much as a cricket stirring. He took one of the little white pills and started the motor.

Crow Mountain was dark as a tomb. All the way up to George Loomis’s place there wasn’t a car but Henry’s on the road. He pulled up in the driveway and sat a moment to calm himself and go over what he meant to say one last time; then he got out. The house was dark and he felt an instant’s panic: He hadn’t been prepared for the possibility that George might be away. But then he saw he’d made a mistake. There was the usual blue-white flicker in the kitchen. He knocked.

“Well, Jesus please us,” George said, stepping back from the door. “Who in hell died?”

Henry took off his hat. “Do you mind if I come in, George?”

George held his hand up. “Let me think a minute. Yes, I do. I do mind. You’ve taken up selling Bibles on the side.”

“Now, George,” Henry said.

“Well, shit,” George said, “come on in, then. But don’t tell me why you’re dressed up like that. Either you been to church or you been courting, and whichever it is, I think I might get sick.”

“Now, damn it, George,” Henry said.

“Oh, hush up and sit down. It’s good to see you. I’ll see if I still got some whiskey.” He started past the television, paused a moment to watch one of the cowboys shoot the other one, then went on to the cupboard under the sink. “Just a little bourbon left,” he called back.

“That’s fine,” Henry said. He could use it.

George talked about television programs while he fixed the drink and brought it over to the metal table. Henry was missing a great deal, George said, refusing to give in to the electronic revolution. He ran on for maybe five minutes or more, Henry merely nodding helplessly, playing with the hat on the table in front of him, missing half of what George said because of the noise from the machine. At last Henry said feebly (it was hardly going exactly as he’d planned), “Could we turn the television off, George, so we could hear?”

“What the hell? Sit in the dark?”

“Maybe the room lights still work,” Henry said. He laughed.

George considered it, then got up and went over to the switch by the door. The lights went on, and George seemed surprised and pleased. He turned off the television. “Ok,” he said then, “what are you selling.”

“I want you to marry Callie Wells,” Henry said. He had not meant to make it quite so blunt, and he felt himself reddening.

George stared, then looked over at the television as though maybe that had said it. He came over and sat down. “You’re willing to pay me, I suppose?” he said, lifting his glass to drink.

It seemed to Henry a natural question, though he hadn’t expected it would come up so quickly. He said, “I’ll write you a check right now for a thousand dollars.”

George choked, set down his glass, and got up to go to the sink. “You crazy old goat,” he began, but another choking fit hit him. The cords of his neck pumped, and it looked as if he might retch. Henry watched, wide-eyed, the checkbook in his fist. “You crazy old goat,” George Loomis roared, “you think I’d marry some girl I hardly know for a thousand dollars? Or ten thousand? Or a thousand million? Look, I don’t love her. I don’t even like her. She stinks. You know that? The word of God!”

“George, that’s not true. You said yourself—”

“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.