Read Online Nickel Mountain by John Gardner - Free Book Online Page A

She’d make you a good wife. Inside a month she’d have this place of yours—” He caught himself too late.
    â€œChrist, 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.
    â€œI mean, what did I say exactly? And did I—” He waved vaguely.
    â€œYou said you admired her and you were thinking of marriage.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI’ll give you fifteen hundred dollars,” Henry said. “That’s as high as I’ll go.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWell 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?”
    â€œListen, 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.”
    â€œBut you love her,” George said, grinning like a cat.
    â€œLove her, hell! I’ll be dead inside a year. Doc Cathey said so.”
    â€œBut 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