Nickel Mountain Read Free Page B

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