Free Nickel Mountain by John Gardner

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.
    â€œI love you, Callie.”
    â€œI shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I was out of my mind.”
    â€œI know how you feel, Callie. I only wanted—”
    â€œYou 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.

1
    Callie Wells stood in what was normally the sewing room, just off the parlor. Both doors were closed behind her. She was wearing the old Welsh wedding gown, but she seemed hardly to know it, standing with her hands folded, looking out the window. The room, the weather, the round blue mountains in the distance all seemed to defer to her stillness. The house around her hummed like a hive, but Callie scarcely noticed that either.
    It seemed to her the first chance she’d had to be alone in weeks. Every time she turned around there was something to be fitted for, some decision to make—where to put Uncle Russel and Aunt Kate (who were coming from Cleveland after all), what to do if the rings didn’t come from the place up in Utica in time for the wedding, how to get Aunt Anna to the rehearsal since she flatly refused to ride in Uncle Gordon’s truck. But it couldn’t be weeks, or anyway it couldn’t be more than two, because it was just two weeks and three days ago now that they’d decided.
    Her father had come into the kitchen blinking like an owl, holding up his flannel pajama bottoms with one hand, scowling, cross enough to eat roofing nails, and