Nickel Mountain

1

It wasn’t until he was already aboard and looking around him in the twilight of the coach that Willard Freund realized he’d forgotten to wire ahead to tell them which train he’d be on. The ticket had taken almost all the money he’d had, all but two dollars. If he had to spend the night in Utica it would have to be on one of the wooden benches at the station. But there was nothing he could do about it now. He took a seat near the rear of the half-empty car and settled himself for the trip. A red-headed old Welshman in a thin, threadbare coat with the collar turned up watched him with dim, angry eyes from across the aisle. One of the two middle-aged women talking about the blizzard and the lateness of the train, a few seats ahead of him, craned her neck around the side, like a chicken, to look at him. He pretended to stare through her.

His legs were cold already. By the time he got there he’d be frozen half to death. He pushed his hands into his overcoat pockets and remembered he’d brought the book, Attack on Christendom. He drew it out. He tried to read, but the shuffling and bumping of passengers moving down the aisle or settling themselves in the seats nearby distracted him. Worse yet, however hard he concentrated — now on the page, now on the strangers closing in on him, casual, determined, like a dog pack gradually encircling a sheep, his stomach churned with uneasy thoughts of home. At times it was a dull sorrow, at times a feeling of excitement mingled with anxiety, so intense he could hardly catch his breath. Hypocrites, he thought fiercely. It was a word that came more and more often to his mind, or rather, came between his mind and what threatened him: his mother and father living together all these years with no love between them, his father faithful to his mother out of cowardice, or habitual indifference, the way he was faithful to the Lutheran Church. And the neighbors were no better, however highly they thought of themselves. Philistines, brainless conformists. Sick.

He closed his eyes. None of that was true.

Now the train started up, so smoothly that, as always, it seemed at first the station that was moving. And still he was unable to read. He couldn’t stop hearing the mumble of the wheels, steady and endless as banjo music, or watching the snow hitting the window to his right and sticking to the pane. He watched the gray buildings of Albany flitting past beyond the snow, then smaller houses with Christmas trees, then hills, luminous in the twilight, then the houses and crossings of small towns. The train stopped often, and passengers got on or got off, the same thing again and again, as in a nightmare: the murmur of voices, the glimpses of waiting or hurrying figures, the woman from the Salvation Army with her bell, the snow beating endlessly at the window. At last, entering the mountains — the train seemingly hanging suspended in darkness, then jolting suddenly, swaying on a curve — the churning in his stomach settled a little. He read for thirty minutes, then dozed and dreamed he was a child riding beside his father on the bobsled, hauling in wood. The dream was pleasant at first, but little by little it changed until at last, looking up at his father, he realized that though he sat erect, his hat seemingly brushing the stars, he was dead. He awakened with a start and for an instant thought the train was falling into some wide, deep gorge. When the brief panic subsided, he pressed his face to the window, raising his hands to the sides of his forehead like blinders, and saw snow and dead-looking trees standing in a desolate lake. He leaned back in his seat, his stomach churning so badly now that he thought he might have to vomit.

Except for the flickering red globes over the doors, the car was dark. As he looked, the conductor opened the door, letting in the suddenly loud rumble of the wheels, and called, “Utica, twenty minutes.” He came through the car, swaying, light blanking out the lenses of his glasses, and when he reached Willard’s seat he leaned toward him, his face chalk-white, and said again mechanically, “Utica in twenty minutes.” Willard nodded with a jerk, as though he had not registered at first. He thought again, “All I have is two dollars,” and sat rigid, shivering in the cold, his lips pressed together tightly, until he saw the lighted tar paper and asbestos fake-brick shacks at the outskirts of the city. He got up then, reached his suitcase down from the rack, and worked his way to the door. He felt the others watching him, and hurried.

As he stepped down between the two cars the wind snatched at him as if to tear him away from earth and bear him off into the void, but he caught hold of the cold doorpost and, clinging to it, pressing down the skirt of his overcoat with the side of his suitcase, stepped onto the platform and into the shelter of the building. On the train steps the wind had been fierce, but under the overhang there was a lull. He put down the suitcase and drew a deep breath of the cold, snowy air, and standing not far from the door he looked around the platform and the lighted station. The storm whistled between the wheels of the car, through the metal scaffolding, and around the corner of the building. A mail wagon creaked past him, barely missing the corner of his suitcase, and men moved back and forth, laughing and talking, in snowy coats and hats. Beyond the corner of the station men and women piled suitcases into waiting cars, shouting through the snowy darkness. The big doors behind him swung open and shut continually, and muffled figures darted by covered with snow. An angry voice shouted, “Which car for Batavia?” and he caught a brief glimpse of a bearded, scarred face. Then steam hissed, billowing around the wheels of the train, and the cars began to move. He glimpsed faces in the windows. Then suddenly he was looking at the tracks beyond and covered walks and signal scaffolds and darkness. When the swaying red light of the last car was swallowed up by the night, he turned to go in.

In the huge vaulted room there was no one he knew. People sat solemn-faced and bored on the pew-like benches, not talking, bundled in their coats and scarves. There was a two- or three-year-old boy in a snowsuit lying asleep beside a fat woman, and for an instant Willard’s chest went light.

He was thinking of his illegitimate child, whom he’d never seen. He wondered uneasily whether he would see him this time. He looked away. Across the room there was a green metal rack of newspapers. He hurried over to it, running from one painful thought to another — from the child to the Bomb. Willard Freund inclined more and more to believe — though at times he knew it was foolishness — that the stupidity of mankind, and maybe especially the stupidity of American democracy, was going to destroy the world — and soon. Though normally he was shy, not talkative, more times than once he had gotten a little drunk and had talked about it with fraternity brothers at Albany, sitting in the dimly lit lounge with a stack of 45’s on the changer — Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Stan Kenton’s Innovations—a cigarette hanging un-lighted between his lips, head and shoulders thrown forward (image from some movie, Marlon Brando, maybe) — had teased the thought toward probability, half-aware as he spoke that his loss was more personal than he was telling them. His father’s barn was the largest in the county, vaulted above like an airplane hanger, the cowbarn, below, as long and wide as a gymnasium. His father’s hired men moved in and out between cows like factory workers, shifting milking machines, throwing open the chutes that brought down hay, or moving the milkcans on stainless steel wagons to the cooler. He had told his father the girl was pregnant, he intended to marry her. His father had laughed, then looked at him hard, and then, without warning, had slapped his face. “Don’t mix up pussy and business,” he’d said, and Willard Freund had been filled with rage and shame — because it was true, he did not love her, though the sight of the Stop-Off made him ache with desire till Henry Soames’ filthy shanty and diner, once for him a haven against the mechanized, cold-blooded, money-grubbing evil of W. D. Freund and Sons Dairy Farms, had become what it looked like to the casual eye, a seedy, rundown dingle of temptation and witchcraft. Stinging with rage, he’d snatched off the nearest milkcan cover and had thrown the can on its side so the milk came gushing out, thick and steaming. His father had bellowed and backed away a step, afraid of him, and Willard, crying now, had fled from the barn. He might have won, if he’d pushed, exactly as, later, he’d won the right to quit Ag school and become an English major. But he’d gone back to Cornell, had gone on getting letters from her, and, sick with indecision, had done nothing. Though he profoundly hated his father for it, his father was right: The God-spouting, hymn-singing, ne’er-do-well Welsh were not his kind of people. So he was ashamed of himself, yes; shocked at himself. But he talked drunkenly of politicians, kings of self-interest, and businessmen, shallowest, coarsest of men. And as he talked — he who had been all his life so quiet — he had thought, in horror, of his friend or once-friend Henry Soames, eccentric hermit, how Henry would sometimes get carried away and start babbling like a madman or drunkard. People smiled, made a circle in the air beside their heads, said: “Bonkers.” Suddenly, remembering Henry Soames, Willard would stop talking, would pull at his upper lip (that too he’d gotten from Henry), and would bite his lips together and squint. “Freund, what’s really eating you?” some fraternity brothers would occasionally ask. Though they talked day and night about their sexual conquests, he couldn’t tell them. He’d told at Cornell, when he was there, and it was horrible. I want to be a child again, he thought.

He read the headlines on the papers in the rack and the lead articles down as far as the fold in the paper, his face squeezed shut, pouting. There was no news. There was never any news, merely the palaver those in power released to the fat, happy masses: a new artificial lake for their motorboats, a new skirt length from the change-mongers. His eyes filled with tears. From somewhere behind him came Christmas music.

He went into the men’s room and looked in the mirror, then, after thinking about it first, washed his face and parted his hair with his fingers. They could have known what train he’d be on if they’d thought, or if they knew their own son at all; they could have known even that he’d forget to wire ahead. It was all very well to say, “Never mind, no harm done.” None had been done: He could phone from here and wait for them to come in the morning (his father driving king-like through the darkness, holding the big gray Cadillac to the center of the road, and let anybody approaching from the other direction watch out). Or he could hitchhike. No harm. It sounded calm and grown-up. But there was harm. Hypocrites, he thought again, more angrily, more defensively (he knew) than before. All the same. … His father had bought every decent milker from Ben Wolters’ barn, getting them dirt cheap because Ben was hard up, and when they were driving the loaded cattle truck home he’d laughed and said, “That poor devil don’t even know I cleaned him out!” Willard had said, “I do, though, don’t I,” squinting like Roy Rogers. He’d been fourteen then. His father had looked at him and grinned, then looked back at the road. A little farther on he’d said, “It was him or me, Willard.” Willard thought now, six years too late to say it: Never. From the minute the two of you were born it was never you, only him. Then he thought: And me. Nicked in the balls from the beginning.

And now again (meeting his eyes in the mirror) he was thinking sadly of his own son, nicked too, from before he was born, as though the old man had thought it out beforehand and set it all up. But too late now to worry about the child. Too late to worry about the mother either, not that she needed it. He swallowed and blinked hard, angry that tears had ambushed him. She’d done fine for herself, Callie had. Had somehow talked fat old Henry Soames, bad heart and all, into marrying her — by crying, maybe, or by walking into his bedroom naked, or maybe by telling her father old Henry was the one. He’d never have believed she was capable of it, three years ago; which showed how incredibly innocent he’d been. He’d thought he himself was the calculating one: He’d been tortured, lying in his bed at night, each time he left her, thinking simultaneously how beautifully innocent and good she was and what a bastard he was himself, teasing her on little by little, unable to stop himself, vile but at least knowing he was vile, believing in the goodness that was out of his reach — except that that wasn’t true; all lies; all he ever told himself, he thought, was lies. He’d never known, right to the last minute, whether what he wanted was just to make her or to marry her. She was the third, but the only virgin, the first one there’d been any question about. A question he’d never really answered, in fact, until after he’d heard she was marrying Henry Soames. He’d had to leave for school, which gave him a chance to put off deciding, and pretty soon the thing was decided for him and he saw how lucky he’d been — for once in his life. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Callie Wells had turned calculating. That happened, the minute a girl got pregnant. It was instinct, maybe. But was it possible Callie had been calculating all along? (Norma Denitz had said, “You fool, Willard, she planned the whole thing! She took you because she was chasing a bigger fish. A sick old man with money.” “I don’t believe it,” he’d said; but he did believe it, or anyway believed it for that brief moment Norma had laughed. “Hah! Male ego. If men believed the truth about women it would be the end of cohabitation.” She was wrong about that, though. He knew the truth about Norma Denitz. He meant nothing to her—“a good lay,” she said, “ships smashing in the night.” But he stayed with her. He might even marry her someday, if she got her neuroses straightened out.)

And yet Henry was no fool. Was his part, too, calculation? Was it possible that Henry himself had set it all up, hiring her at the diner when he didn’t need help — maybe even knowing she was making it with Willard? — keeping her working there late sometimes, watching every minute with his little pig’s eyes, pecker itching, as Norma claimed? He’d gone up to Henry’s place almost every night, once. To work on the jitney or to sit in the lean-to room in back and talk. His mother had distrusted it, had felt, vaguely, disgusted by it, and when Willard understood what she had in mind he was furious. “He’s a good man,” he’d said fiercely. “He wants someone to talk to, and argue with. Nothing but that.” She’d pretended to be convinced, but never again could Willard be thoroughly convinced himself. “No one over thirty is seriously concerned with ideas,” one of his instructors had said. “Ideas are either toys or tools — ways of passing the time, or ways of getting things.” Surely that was a lie.

It came to him what it was that made his stomach churn as he drew closer to home. He was going back to the land of his innocence, the sunlit garden where all those years he had believed, in spite of everything, in parental love, the goodness and innocent virtue of girls, or at any rate of certain girls, the possibility of unselfish friendship. He was going back knowing it was perhaps all bullshit, and, for all his fear that it might be bullshit, he was going back expecting to find it still there, and holy.

He decided to hitchhike. He would give the old man no advantage, no chance to speak of how he’d driven half the night through ice and snow et cetera, like a postman, no chance to whine about Willard’s forgetting to wire. Cold as it was, nobody would bother to stop for him but the drunks and fairies. Because hitchhikers could be dangerous, like any stranger. The drunks would stop because they were stupid, the fairies because they had an angle. All right.

He took a bus to the city limits and waited.

2

When Willard woke up the car was warm, moving very slowly. The radio was playing softly, Christmas music by an orchestra. The odd scent was still there, like a funeral. The man was bent forward, gripping the steering wheel with both hands tightly. There was light, curly hair on the backs of his fists. They were passing through a town. The streets were deserted and white, and the snow streaking toward the windshield made it impossible to see from one block to the next. Willard hugged himself, his legs clamped together, and watched streetlamps and dimly lighted store windows loom into sight one after another. From time to time the car floated for an instant, as it seemed, coming onto ice. Wreaths hanging over the middle of the street came into sight overhead and then vanished behind the car roof, unlighted and morose. Here and there there were parked cars along the curb, drifted-in, half-buried. Then they were out in the country again, passing unlighted farms and high, blowing drifts.

The man said, “Get any sleep?”

“A little,” he said. He got out his cigarettes and lit one. Reflected in the windshield, he looked like Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney or someone, and the recognition simultaneously pleased and disgusted him. Fake, he thought; sucker. And that too was from some movie. Even his self-hatred was secondhand, cheap show. He blew out smoke and took a deep breath of air but seemed to get none, like Fortunato in the basement.

“Storm’s getting worse and worse,” the man said.

“So I see.” He studied the bright red reflection of his cigarette in the windshield, wondering how far they’d come. After a moment he glanced over at the man. He was medium-sized, chubby, well-off-looking. A brown, heavy coat that might be English. Brown hair under the jaunty hat brim; probably bald on top. A flabby, effeminate face. He looked pleased with himself, pleased to be driving an Olds 98, helping some poor damn hitchhiker home to its mother.

“Going home for college vacation?” the man said.

Willard nodded, thinking: No. To visit my bastard son and my former whore. (But he wasn’t. Would dodge them, escape them.) He took another deep breath and closed his eyes, briefly.

“I thought so,” the man said, pleased. “I’m visiting my daughter. We always spend Christmas together.”

“That’s nice,” he said, all trace of irony suppressed. He drew on the cigarette and kept the smoke inside for a moment. “A family should keep in touch.”

The man glanced at him. After a moment, he smiled. “I always visit her at Christmas.”

Bringing presents, yes. Why, Daddy, how thoughtful of you to remember!

Sir, your daughter is pregnant. By a bicycle with the seat off. She’s afraid to mention it, for fear you might disapprove. I speak as your friend, sir. It’s only natural that a father would want to be informed. Panic rose in him, or claustrophobia. He remembered swimming in Lake George, driving up, up, up toward air unbelievably far from where it should be.

“Where are you in school?” the man asked.

“Albany.”

The man nodded as though that, too, pleased him, but he said, “I meant, what grade are you in?”

“I went to Cornell, the first year,” Willard said, “but I transferred.”

The man thought about it. “I see.”

“For the better living conditions.”

To live with a slut, sir. Luckily, your daughter is not a slut. Although she is going to deliver a bicycle. Part Roadmaster.

“The living conditions are better in Albany, you think?” He was torn between watching the virtually invisible road and squinting at Willard; he twisted his head from one to the other.

“Much better. Softer, if you know what I mean.” After a minute, he added, “There are two main conditions of living, hard and softer.”

The man laughed and nodded, then seemed to think about this, too, his head inclined to one side, face screwed up as if he’d bitten his tongue. Willard said, “What line are you in, exactly?”

“Actually,” the man said, “I’m in flowers.” After a second he explained, “J. E. Jones’ Flowers, in Utica. You may have heard of it. Jones has been dead for years. I bought the business. My name’s Taylor. Actually, most people call me Jones.” He laughed. “I have a bank account under the name of Jones and another one under my other name. For personal checks. Saves confusion.”

“How about that,” Willard said. He added without thinking, meaning nothing, “I have two names too.”

“Oh?” The man was squinting at him again, suspicious.

But he was remembering Norma Denitz’s father. A psychoanalyst. He had curly brown hair parted down the middle, droopy eyes, a face as soft and pale as ass, fingers obscenely warm. He talked about patients, some man who’d put lye in his wife’s douche bag, knowing (for certain reasons, Norma’s father said) that she would never actually use it. He sat with a double martini in his pink, soft hand, wearing even in his own living room his obscene brown suit and vest, bow tie. Norma’s stepmother was wearing a shiny white dress cut so low you could see her ample and only virtues whenever she bent over. She was forty-eight, but she’d had her face lifted. They believed in The New Morality, but when Norma had stood up and stretched, holding the martini out to the side, as if for a toast, signaling him to come up with her — screw right under their noses — he could feel their anger like electric shock reverberating through the room, smile as they might. Hypocrites. He said abruptly:

“I imagine it takes a sharp man to make it with flowers.”

“Well,” the man said tentatively, “you have to be cut out for it, that’s true.”

The snowfall was as heavy as ever. The hills and trees blocked the wind and the snow dumped down as if from a giant shovel.

“That’s not what I mean. You have to know exactly what to buy, otherwise the whole mess would rot. You have to have enough but not too much, and then you have to talk people into taking it.”

“Well, yes,” the man said. “But actually—”

“And then, too, you’ve got to act interested in people. They graduate from grammar school and you’ve got to act like it’s really something, or Uncle Elmer dies and you’ve got to look sad, or some girl gets married—”

The man was looking hard at him, the car nosing toward the guard rail. He said, “I am interested in people. As I say, some people are cut out for it and some aren’t. It takes all kinds.”

“Oh sure, sure,” Willard said. He lit a new cigarette from the old one. “It’s a kick to talk to people sometimes — gives the ego a boost. But day after day, the same old. …” He stopped, looking at the guard rail in alarm. The man jerked the wheel and the car slid for a second, then straightened out again. It gave them both a scare, and for a while they were quiet. The radio played on, tinny, mechanically sentimental. The man sat back farther in his seat, driving still more slowly. They came to a town. There were no lights except, here and there, the snow-filtered light of a Christmas tree or an outline of colored lights around a porch. The big car moved through the town quickly, riding down the center of the deserted street. They jounced over a railroad crossing, then came into the open again, the highway a tunnel between snowplow drifts.

(It was right around Christmas the baby had come, three years ago. He’d been home, even had a vacation job at the Purina place; but he’d only stayed two days. After he’d gotten back to school, he’d gotten drunk and told them the whole thing, at the dorm. As soon as it was out he saw what he’d done. She was just some country slut to them, and what he’d done was of no importance. Only his misery was important. They turned it over and over, like a dead turtle, some of them laughing, some of them sympathizing, some sitting glum and embarrassed at his talking too much. After that he could hardly stand meeting them in the dorm halls. But it was all right. He’d transferred, and he’d never repeated his idiot mistake. He knew them now, all their talk about girls they’d laid, all their jabber about what buddies they’d always be.)

At last Willard said, “This must be a pretty heavy season for you. How come you can take off and visit your daughter?”

“Oh, I’ve got assistants,” the man said.

“You trust them?”

Again the man was looking at him, ignoring the road. He was beginning to be alarmed. “Certainly,” he said.

“Maybe you’re right,” Willard said. He could feel the nausea creeping back. “Crime does not pay. The easiest way to get ahead is to be honest. And we all want to get ahead, of course. Especially at Christmas.”

The man didn’t answer, and after half-a-mile Willard asked, his stomach churning badly now, “You do want to get ahead, don’t you, Mr. Jones?”

A second too late, having stopped to think about it first, the man laughed. “It takes all kinds,” he said. “That’s America.”

Willard Freund scrunched down in the seat, pushing his hands down into his pockets. The book was gone. He’d left it on the train. The smoke from the cigarette made him want to sneeze and burned his eyes like sulphur. Then suddenly, in a cloud of snow ahead of them, there were yellow lights. The man was squinting through the windshield, but he didn’t seem to be seeing. Snowplow, Willard thought. The danger is not where you think, Mr. Jones. I’m not going to knife you like a Commie rat, you’re going to get flattened against a mountain by a snowplow. That’s America. But even as he thought it, he was shouting, “Look out!” The man jerked the wheel in terror. The car slid sideways and the plowblade came flying down toward them like a wolf’s-head. The inside of the car was full of rushing light. He threw his hands up, trying to protect his head as they went into the collision.

3

He woke up lying on his back on the highway, some kind of blanket thrown over him. The car stood on one corner, wheels up, leaning against the snowbank, one headlight shooting up into the sky, every detail of the car unnaturally sharp under the blinding headlights of the plow. The radio was still playing. All around the car there were bits of glass, glittering like diamonds. In his head there was a steady mumble, like the mumble of the train wheels, and a suggestion of voices. Six feet away from him, in the middle of the road, a man in thick goggles and a cap that hid all but his goggles and chin was bending over a body, looking at papers from a wallet. Willard closed his eyes again, concentrating on the hardness of the ice beneath him, the pleasant cold coming through his clothes, the sharp wet-wool smell of the blanket. He could feel snowflakes landing on his eyebrows and lashes. He couldn’t remember having felt delicate sensations with such force since his early childhood: It was as if his body had grown very large, as large as the night, and calm. He could still hear the murmuring voices. They were more insistent now, carrying intelligible words and phrases, stubbornly assaulting his pleasant calm as if from somewhere outside it. At last, realizing what really he had known for some time — that there were people standing over him — he opened his eyes again. His vision was not as clear this time as it had been before. Dust of snow blew along the road, rising out of the road like fire, obscuring the figures of the two men. There was another car now, bright lights facing the lights of the snowplow, closing him in. The men were troopers. One of them was bending down to him, more like a machine than like a man, no feature showing but the flat impersonal mouth and the courthouse chin. “This one’s waking up,” he said. His voice was metallic, like the voice of Superman on the radio. He said, “Are you hurt?”

“I think I’m all right,” he said. “A little headache.” When he sat up the headache was suddenly ferocious, and his stomach was full of a flat gray pain. He thought of lying down again but decided not to. He leaned on his arms.

“Take your time,” the trooper said.

The body on the road was wrapped in a thick gray cover. He was dead, then. It’s too bad, he thought. She’s going to have a painful delivery. The front wheel’s turned sideways, and there are always the pedals. He stopped himself, frightened.

The trooper said, “You knew him?” His sheepskin glove pointed.

Willard nodded, then shook his head. “He was giving me a lift. He said his name was Taylor.”

“Where’d he pick you up?”

“Utica. I was coming home from school. I came to Utica by train.”

Behind the goggles he was taking it down, maybe to write up later, inside his warm car. “Where were you heading?”

“New Carthage. That’s where my parents live.” He thought of asking how far they’d gotten.

The trooper said, “Can you make it to the car?”

He got up, the trooper helping him, and found that his legs still worked. Inside the car it was so hot he could hardly breathe, or so it seemed at first. The radio was going. The two troopers stood outside the door, talking, and then after a while they carried something past the window and put it in the trunk. They got into the car and the one who was driving lifted the radio receiver. “We’re bringing back the body,” he said. “No point sending them out in this.” Then he nosed the car around between the snowbanks to head back the way he’d come. The snowplow came behind him. Willard closed his eyes and instantly the plow was bearing down on them again, the lights swift and blinding. In the front seat, one of the troopers said something and the other one laughed.

The State Police Post was a converted farmhouse, set back from the road, with sheds like chicken houses behind, for the cars. (Most of this he saw later, after the sun had come up and the storm was over: white drifts stretching away toward the mountains and mounded up on the shed roofs and the branches of trees, so bright you could only glance at it. Icicles hung from the eaves of the shed and beside the window where he stood, the remains of some earlier storm. The world was hushed and beautiful, and also terrible in its emptiness, that morning; but that was later. While it was still dark he saw only the room where they put him to wait.) The room was dim, vaguely like the waiting room of a smalltown dentist’s office at night. A desk, a calendar, a couple of lamps, nothing much more. Over the window on the outside there was a kind of grate — not bars, exactly, more like a heavy-duty cyclone fence. Beyond the closed door he could hear them talking from time to time, now and then a voice on the radio, the click of a typewriter. He lay on the cool green leather couch sometimes dozing, sometimes listening. He went through the conversation with the florist, the storm, the accident again and again, as though his mind could not get free of it. There was a doctor coming to check him, they said. That was strange. He’d have thought they’d have taken him directly to a hospital somewhere, if they thought there might really be anything wrong. But no use thinking. For the moment he was caught in the enormous web of their inscrutable efficiency. Police system hung in the air all around him, neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely systematic: The radio in the next room barked and sputtered from time to time — the whole state on a party line, the sheafs of papers in the shabby gray files available in seconds to a trooper sitting at Niagara. Still he was seeing the snowplow bearing down on them, the body in the road, the troopers’ muffled figures passing the car window, carrying something. One of them came in and asked him if he wanted coffee — his face not unfriendly (weak-chinned, dull-eyed) but as impersonal as the goggled faces on the highway — and after a long time he brought it to him in a thick, cheap restaurant cup. “I lost my billfold,” Willard said. The man looked at him for what seemed two full seconds, and for the first time Willard wondered how he could have lost the billfold from his hip pocket, with his overcoat on over it. He said, “Am I being held for something?” The man said, “I guess they want a doctor to look you over.”

It was hours later (the sky light now and the wind finished) that the doctor came. With him there was a huge, red-headed man with tiny, somewhat slanted eyes, wearing an overcoat. The red-headed man sat down at the desk and smoked a coal-black pipe while the doctor thumped Willard’s chest and pressed his fingers into his abdomen. The two of them left ten minutes later, hardly having said three words, and twenty minutes after that the red-headed man came back. He sat down and heaved one foot up on the desk. “So you’re a student,” he said. When he smiled his eyes and teeth made him look like a fox. He relit the pipe.

Willard nodded.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” the man said.

“I guess that’s right.”

He shook his head, blowing smoke past the pipe bowl, picking up a sheaf of papers. “It must be because of your falling against him. His body was a kind of cushion. It wouldn’t be so surprising if you’d been asleep.”

Willard looked at him, but he was reading, paying no attention. “What do you mean?”

“Surprising you didn’t get killed,” he said. “When you’re asleep your body’s relaxed.” He turned the page. He said then, “Strange neither of you saw it.”

He nodded. “It’s like I told the man who’s here at night,” he began. His blood went cold. He’d told the other one he was asleep when it happened.

The red-headed man was poking at his pipe with an unbent paper clip, scowling into the dark of the bowl as if paying no attention to what Willard was saying. But he said, “The sergeant with the crew cut?” He looked up to catch Willard’s frightened nod. He too nodded, immensely satisfied with himself. “That’s Tom Widdley.” He stuffed the pipe again and got it going, and for a long time he just sat smoking, looking with pleasure at the smoke as it went up.

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

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

“I forgot to wire ahead.”

He looked surprised. “Really?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The red-headed man looked at him quizzically.

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

“Hi,” Willard said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Callie and the child disappeared behind the middle grocery shelf.

“Pack of Old Golds,” he said. “Regular.” His knees were shaky.

When he went out on the porch he saw Henry Soames sitting in his car, the flesh sagging from around his eyes, his skin unhealthy gray. He was huge and old as the mountains, and as patient. Their eyes met, but Henry Soames showed no sign of recognition, merely looked puzzled, reminded of something.

We were friends, Willard thought. We used to talk half the night sometimes. I worked on my goddam jitney in your garage.

He thought of the red-headed policeman, smiling, pretending to listen to nothing he said, and a chill went down his back. He thought of waving, as if noticing Henry only now. But it was too late. He went down the steps and walked across the road, opening the cigarettes as he walked. He could feel the old man’s puzzled eyes on him, watching.

Shit passing in the night, he thought. He lit a cigarette, and it tasted worse than most.

Then, behind him, Henry called, “Willard?”

He froze, scared sick, his knees shaky. As soon as he was able, he dropped the cigarette and turned around. Henry was half out of the car, grinning, calling “Willard, you devil!” Callie and James were on Llewellyn’s porch, watching like small, gentle statues from a church.

With more self-control than he’d have thought he could muster, Willard raised his arm and waved and then, without thinking, smiled at them. And then — who knows why? — he turned his back and began to run, ashamed of doing it even as he did it but also full of crazy joy. They’d forgiven him. Of course! Why shouldn’t they? Wouldn’t even he — even Norma, in fact — have done the same? He kept running, bringing his feet down hard on the road’s packed-tight snow. When he was over the hill and around the bend, protected from Henry Soames’ eyes by trees, he slowed down to a walk and thought, still smiling, “How absurd, all these years! A foolish nightmare, a sad, shoddy dream out of Plato’s cave!” The day was bright, surprisingly warm, and the three-mile walk ahead of him seemed nothing. He crossed the bridge, hardly noticing, hurrying. “I was insane,” he thought, startled. “It’s as simple as that! I must remember, from now on. Whatever happens, I must remember.” It came to him that he’d promised his mother he’d pick up something if he stopped at Llewellyn’s. Was it baking soda?

And now, behind him, he heard Henry Soames’ car coming noisily after him. They’d insist on giving him a ride, of course. There was no escape, nowhere to hide — if he ran for the woods they’d see him and think he was crazy. Willard laughed, blushing till his cheeks were like a girl’s, then turned and flung up his arms in submission. The Ford came beside him, clanking and growling like the hound of heaven.

“Willard, you old son-of-a-gun,” said Henry Soames.