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

whatever was at her heels gave the doctor no quarter: her taillights shot away down the mountain road, around sharp, falling corners, under overhanging limbs, then plunged between stone banks and trees and was suddenly out of sight.

5

He was too upset to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he saw again those sudden, blinding lights in the curtain of white flakes, slicing out of nowhere, less like a car than like a speeding UFO, and he felt again that sickening yaw of weightlessness as the Jeep snowplowed sideways, climbing—leaping like a wolf—up the wall of the high, soft snowbank and stones underneath, teetering, tilting far over as if to topple, then righting itself. The other car too had gone sideways up onto the snowbank, rolling part way over onto the door of the driver’s side, sending out an arc of white glitter like spray from a motorboat, roaring like a train as the metal caved in, the headlights aiming down, his own aiming straight, from slightly above, at her windshield. It felt to Mickelsson like the whole spin-out of his life reduced to one timeless instant—his financial ruin, his sick infatuations, his self-destructive smoking and drinking, his professional collapse. …

He stripped to his underwear to lift weights for a while. That often helped, at times like these. Partly it helped his ego; in more concentrated fashion than his work on the house, weight-lifting kept the middle-aged thickness of trunk mostly muscle, burning away the gin fat; kept his arms and thighs toned up, free of undue flab or, worse, plain old-folks’-home weakness. And then too, there was the drug effect, better than any gin or marijuana in the world: sucking in air, swallowing great gulps right to the bottom of the abdomen, bending and, with a loud cry of hap, lifting, holding, and after a quick shift of balance, throwing the press. … The pain came quickly, and then almost as soon, the human morphine that shut it off. Human morphine, hyperventilation, the bestial sense of steadily increasing goon power—what could beat it? He felt he could kick down trees, drag elephants by the tail.

He lay off for a while, puffing, swinging his arms, rolling his shoulders to quiet the muscle spasms. He wiped sweat off his hands, face, and neck with the rag, vigorously rubbed his scalp and the back of his neck, then squatted for perhaps two minutes, closing his eyes. It was a good thing, keeping the old corpse in shape. Tended to encourage non-violence. He’d said once to Ellen’s friend The Comedian, “I’ve got half a mind to break you in half.” “I do believe you have half a mind,” The Comedian had said, blinking slowly, grinning one-sidedly in his panic, “and I see you also have the muscles.” Almost by accident, as if the pipsqueak’s wit were directed at someone else, Mickelsson had laughed.

He stood up again, loosened up the machinery—his whole body was soaking wet—and went back to it. After half an hour more he quit again, this time for good, rolled the weights back into their corner with his foot, then went into the bathroom, rinsed out the sweat rag, and showered. When he finished he found that even now he wasn’t ready to face bed, so he put on his glasses and bathrobe and began wandering through the house barefoot, unconsciously opening and closing his paintbrush- and hammer-calloused hands, looking at objects as if he found them unfamiliar: the brushed steel face and knobs of the tuner and amplifier he never used—he switched them on, then immediately off again—the junk furniture he’d gotten to tide him over; magazines on the coffeetable, not a magazine in the stack that he would actually read without a gun at his head, except maybe The New Yorker for its cartoons, which he’d probably read already, he couldn’t remember. He picked up the top New Yorker on the pile to check but then stopped, seeing again the whitened face behind the windshield sliding past him, crazily listing; and again he wondered, his skin crawling, what could have so frightened her? Where had she been?

With regard to the second question, where she’d been before he’d met her on the road half a mile below his house, the possibilities were not exactly rich. She could have been coming from here, his place, formerly hers, or she could have been coming from somewhere farther up the slope, or (less likely) somewhere beyond, the other side, deeper in the backwater wilderness of ridges, high lakes, and fog-bound valleys.

He’d driven up to the top several times, exploring, back in early September and October, and he’d tried a number of the back roads through valleys suddenly opening out behind, dirt roads descending quickly and recklessly, like spring-fed creeks. He’d seen very little to occupy anyone here on his own mountain, and it was doubtful that she’d come from much farther. A trailer or two, with immense woodpiles and jitneys in the yard, dark mongrel dogs that came out to yip and howl in indignation as you passed; here and there small tarpapered houses in the woods, no electric lights in most of them—places taken over long ago by squatters: shy, wolf-eyed people, watchful and still as bears as your car cruised by; and here and there he’d made out big, empty houses like dried-out gray skulls, houses the local children no doubt told stories about, once-grand, now-crumbling nightmare places, some furniture still left in them, perhaps in summertime the favorite old chair of a rattlesnake. Once, long ago, these high ridges had been farmed.

It was hard to believe that it could have been from higher on the mountain that the doctor had come, but the alternative was even more difficult to deal with, the idea that right here at Mickelsson’s house the doctor had met someone or something that had sent her flying. Again and again as it invaded his thought he dismissed the idea, then found himself pausing to listen. At