Nickel Mountain

John Gardner

Those fifteen people in New York City might be right in the end, but you had to act, and beyond that you had to assert that they were wrong, wrong for all time, whatever the truth might be. And it was the same even if you only thought you saw an old man being stabbed: You ran to the center of the illusion and you jumped the illusory man with the knife, and if it was empty, sunlit sidewalk you hit, too bad, you had to put up with the laughter, and nevertheless do it again the next time and gain and again. So Simon. It wasn't true that the world was about to end or that sinners were going to torment, but all the same he was right to go out with his crackpot pamphlets: Henry Soames would try to persuade him, but he wasn't going to stop him--except in the diner, because the diner, at least, was still his own.

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 the last, very deliberately, stood up and started for the door.

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.

She never spoke of loving him but sometimes when they locked up the restaurant together she would hold his hand, or when he sat holding Jimmy, reading to him, she would pat the bald spot on his head. And so like a man half-asleep he thought about marriage, which was the same thing as love or magic or anything else he could think of (he could no more distinguish between what was happening from day to day between Callie and himself and what happened between himself and his son than he could tell the difference, except in degrees, between those and the way the restaurant changed him and he, in turn, the restaurant), and he knew, not in words, that it was true, as Emmet Slocum had said once, that people sometimes killed themselves because of the weather but nevertheless they killed themselves by choice.

He felt the way he had felt long ago when his father would ask him, Where have you been till this hour, young man? knowing he had been nowhere, as always, had done nothing as always, had driven his motorcycle around on the mountain roads in the vague hope that something new might happen, that the world might stand suddenly transfigured, transformed to a movie--a gangster picture, a love picture, anything but the tedious ruin it was, a worn-out country (not worn-out enough to be morbidly interesting), worn-out farmers, a worn-out sixteen-year-old boy partly too shy and partly too righteous (all things foul to his dry-rotted mind) even to look through car windows at lovers.

Now they got gutter cleaners--seven thousand dollars they cost, and you got to pay for it month by month, summer or winter, whether or not you got hay in the barn, because banks don' t care about hay. We used to make it, in the old days, no matter how long the rain held off. But the way things are now, you can't compete without gutter cleaners and diesel tractors, combines, balers, crimpers, blowers, grain silos, motor-run unloading machines, hammermills, sorters, all the rest. Lou Millet bought that farm of his for four thousand dollars, house included. You know how deep he's in right now? A hundred thousand. Fact. Can't even sell it.

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 second hand, cheap show. He blew out smoke and took a deep breath of air but seemed to get none, like Fortunato in the basement.

Really, there's only forgiveness. That's all there is. In the long gaping stretch of time, there is only forgiveness. It's natural, it's the way of things, a nature more deeply seated than all the rage and anger and hatred we think runs the world. Forgiveness is the old law, the true law of Nature. So says John Gardner in Nickel Mountain.