Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

for the moment.) It must suffice, for the moment, that, reading in the paper of a house for sale—“Country living, 10 acres …” or “Cottage, 2 bedrooms, trout stream, outbuildings”—he felt an urge, almost irresistible, to go look. Whatever the meaning of the compulsion, it kept him moving, kept him just ahead of the shadow at his back, despair.

It also kept his smouldering anger fed. Who would believe the desperation and shamelessness of humanity! He saw so-called farmhouses in the middle of town, chopped-up rooms, shoddy plastering, panelling made of paper, light fixtures too tawdry for the grungiest motel; went out to see something described as “small ranch, top condition,” and found a trailer. He saw dry-rot, termites, flood-wrecks, asphalt front yards (“tennis courts”); pleasant little cottages on two hundred acres of swamp (ninety thousand); a decaying stone house on an island, no road or telephone. … Maybe it was the not quite predictable nature of the certain outrage that kept his interest up. Or maybe his half-unconscious awareness that wrath was good for him. “Repression is a dangerous habit,” Dr. Rifkin said. “Go ahead! Get mad at me!” He said it repeatedly, as if imitating someone who had greatly impressed him, back in Texas. He did not seem to notice his patient’s heavy sigh.

Then when Mickelsson had nearly given up, had blown up at almost the last of his realtors, he came upon the Bauer place. (It was late afternoon. He couldn’t be sure what day it was. According to the days-of-the-week window on his Japanese watch it was .) He approached the place not directly, through the town of Susquehanna, but by a mountainous back route, one that looked relatively easy on the map, though in the driving it proved otherwise.

Perhaps it was the light, some special, seemingly magical tint that he remembered from somewhere long ago; or perhaps it was the way the dappled sunlight flickered on the road or in the glowing-green maple leaves above, some centuries-old neurological trigger, hypnotic, probably dangerous to epileptics. He’d been driving for something like an hour and a half on the high-crowned, pot-holed asphalt roads that wound as if aimlessly through the Pennsylvania mountains—steeply banked curves where the road looped smoothly back on itself like the flightpath of a hawk, sudden dips and rises, short sunlit stretches shaving valley floors—then gentler curves, the roadway following a creekbed for a time, passing small settlements where nothing seemed alive: large, decaying houses and collapsing barns, lawns held in by stone-locked retaining walls and shaded by great, dark sugar maples; passing old graveyards and white wooden churches, crossing stone bridges, skirting small lakes where there were dingy, crooked cottages, trailers, butane tanks, drunkenly listing, bone-gray docks; passing, on higher ground, small, paintless houses with handmade signs nailed to trees in front: NIGHT WALKERS; RABBITS FOR SALE; LOCUST POSTS, $1.00. Increasingly it seemed to him a part of the world time had forgotten, or rather—despite the visible decay—had spared. It stirred in him memories, at first only a general mood—exhilaration, a sense of rejuvenated options—and then, all at once, a specific moment: running naked, as a boy, in his father’s overgrown apple orchard, given over, by the time of his memory, to cows—running naked, his clothes and glasses hidden in the shadow of a tree, imagining as he ran the nakedness of his tall older cousin Mary Ann, or some naked female stranger from beyond the marsh. He remembered the astonishing smoothness of cowpaths; then he remembered vividly the glorious sensation, impossible to explain or justify to unfortunates who’d never been granted it, of stepping barefoot (walking now) into a day-old cowplop, sun-warmed cow manure squeezing up between the toes. Strange that it should come back so clearly now—ironically dragging with it (thesis-antithesis) an image of his grandfather in his dark, plain suit, sitting stiffly upright at his desk in the manse, books laid out in front of him, dusty late-afternoon sunlight slanting in, his steel-rimmed spectacles insensibly cutting red wounds into the sides of his peculiar, leftward-aiming nose. (He’d been the dullest man on earth, except for one oddity. In his seventieth year he’d developed second sight.) Nothing in these mountains was the same, really, as the broad, green farm and outdoorsman country—or the stiff, trim villages with their obscurely Vikingish shutters and gables—where Mickelsson had grown up in Wisconsin. Yet here under the changeable sky, moving through pockets of sudden warmth, then sudden cold, he felt himself hovering on the brink of something, as if the stubborn will by means of which he’d survived his troubles were at last getting ready to pay off.

He drove on, plunging between walls of damp shale into the darkness of suddenly sloping woods, the chill of another bright swirl of fog, then up onto a high, clear overgrown meadow where there were lilacs, a solitary chimney, low stone walls that had once been bounded by orchards or pastures. Light, then shadow, flashed on his windshield and glasses.

“If I were you I’d try Pennsylvania,” Tom Garret’s wife had told him weeks ago. It seemed to him incredible now that he’d dismissed her advice out of hand. But she was a strange woman—creepy, in fact: shy and furtive as a mouse; large, gypsy-black eyes. She was said to be “intuitive,” almost psychic. (Mickelsson had his doubts.) At parties she would hide in the corner of the room, hugging herself inside her shawl. “It’s the most beautiful country in the world—but very queer, people say.” She slid her eyes toward the others, making certain she wasn’t overheard, then put her hand on his arm—a bony, small-fingered hand that made him think of a rat’s. “Full of witches and heaven knows what.” She smiled. “That’s where I see you, Peter. Really!” “I’m sure you do,” he’d said, edging away. Not the least of her oddities was the smell that came from her, something faintly like wet, burnt wood.

Now the road dropped sharply, like a twisting waterfall—so he would