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

When he was inside her apartment, the door closed and locked behind him, he shook his overcoat loose and let it fall to the floor, Donnie Matthews staring at him with eyes full of alarm. He stood cocked forward like a maniac, breathing in gasps and rubbing his chest with his clenched right fist.

“Peter, you shouldn’t have run,” she said, “you knew I’d wait for you!”

She wore a white, Greek-looking dress and the amber beads he’d bought for her, no shoes on her small, perfect feet. Her skin shone, lightly perspiring from her recent bath; her hair was still slightly wet. She put her arms around him and pressed the side of her face to his chest, pushing his fist away, taking its place, moving her cheek against him hard, massaging him. “Peter, poor, crazy, crazy Peter,” she murmured. He wrapped his arms around her, clinging for dear life. Her left hand moved to his erection, then unzipped his fly, freeing his straining penis. His heart whammed still harder. Unquestionably, she’d be the death of him. She slid down on his body, sinking to her knees, and took him in her mouth. He straightened up, arching his back, still gasping for breath. When he began to thrust, she rose, lifted the skirt of her dress—she had nothing underneath—and climbed up onto him, helping him in with one hand. Tears ran down his face. How many men’s sperm did that warm cave contain? That was Peter Mickelsson’s community: a thousand dark, writhing lives, unfulfilled, unfulfillable. He came, her legs froze around him, and—this time, anyway—he did not die.

As she put up with other things, she put up with his talk. Lying on his back beside her, early in the morning, after sleeping for hours without moving even a finger, like a dead man—one arm under her head now, the other thrown across his eyes—he told of old Pearson’s visit, then of the visit of the Mormons.

“Strange people,” she said, and opened her eyes for a moment as if thinking something unpleasant.

“Why so?” he asked, then lowered his wrist to his eyes again.

“I don’t know. How can they believe that stuff? I mean, it’s all a lot of bullshit, but with those other religions you can see how people might be taken in, because the weird stuff all happened so long ago. But Joseph Smith! People around here actually knew him—knew what an asshole he was. My own great-great-grandfather had dealings with him, or so my grandfather used to say. Said he was tricky as a snake.”

“You had a grandfather?”

“Most people do. He lived in Lanesboro when there were still Indians around, except the Indians lived in Red Rock. There used to be this Indian that would come into town once a year, or maybe twice, I forget—he didn’t live with the others, in Red Rock, he lived in the woods. He’d go to Mireiders’ Store—it wasn’t Mireiders’ then—and he’d make a big pile of all the things he needed, and he’d find owt how much it came to and then he’d walk back into the woods and he’d come back owt the next day and pay his bill in gold coins. My grandfather had a dream one time, that the Indian dug the coins owt of a bank up by the viaduct. He always meant to go look there and see if the dream was true, but he never got around to it, and when he died he’d never showed anybody where it was.”

“Do you have parents?” Mickelsson asked.

She was silent for a while. At last she said, “The Mormons always play like they’re stupid and sweet, but really they’re mean sons of bitches, or anyway most of ’em are. I guess even the sweet ones have to know what the other ones are doing, and I guess if they put up with it they’re naht so sweet either.”

He smiled, still with his eyes closed, hidden under his arm. “What do they do, these mean ones?”

“Torture people. Harris them.”

“Harass.”

“Well, however you say it.”

“How do you know they harass people?”

“I know, don’t worry.” She spoke petulantly, as if she didn’t know, in fact.

Mickelsson drifted toward sleep for a moment, then drifted back up into consciousness, thinking of the shabby, pitiful Mormons at his door. “They’re a strange people,” he said. “We all work from premises we can’t fully defend, but the Mormons are true, deep-down absurdists.”

“Mmm,” she said; then, after a moment: “What do you mean?”

He turned his face to hers, then rolled over toward her, conscious of how huge he was, in comparison to her—how wasted, gross. No doubt that had to do with his heart’s choice of her: since he paid her, it need not concern him that he was old and fat. He stroked the side of her forehead and cheek with the fingertips of his right hand. She stopped him, holding the hand in hers. “What do you mean, ‘absurdists’?”

“They’re people that know that nothing makes sense, the whole universe is crazy, or so they claim, but they go right on acting as if things make sense.” He drew his hand free of hers and touched her face again. Could it be true, as Ellen claimed, that all women hate to be touched? He said, “The Mormons start with this insane, made-up history—Jesus Christ coming to someplace like Peru, where he meets not only Indians but also white people who look exactly like Charlton Heston playing Moses—and out of this craziness they make a huge, rich church, complete with army and police, or anyway so people will tell you out in Utah; they make a whole new style of architecture, new theory of the universe, new system of family relationships. … It’s an amazing accomplishment, when you think about it. They’ve stepped out of normal time and space, and so far as you can tell, most