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

He glanced into the woods at the side of the road as if expecting something. There was nothing, of course. Treetrunks, a tangle of bare branches, a few gray leaves. The light had a dead look. They passed a tar-paper shack with the windows broken out, the driveway grown up in weeds. The climb was steep now. He shifted down.

“It’s funny,” she said, “how much land there is in this country … that nobody lives on.”

“It’s desolate, all right,” he said. He glanced at her. “It bothers you?”

She thought it over. “Of course.” She stole a glance at him.

He slowed, passing John Pearson’s place. Though he’d still had his dairy just a year ago, one would have thought the barns had stood abandoned much longer, the old gray silo tipping precariously away from the cowbarn, the doors hanging partly off the track like half-knocked-out teeth. The house was asbestos-shingled and dark, patched layer on layer, surrounded by rusting bits of machinery, an old wringer washing-machine, small outbuildings. The front yard was fenced, and in one corner four sheep with black faces stood watching the Jeep pass. Where they went for shelter he could not guess, unless the open, rusted cellar door gave the answer. It was a queer idea, obscurely depressing, the thought of sheep muffling around in an old man’s cellar. Behind the house, neatly stacked across the space of half an acre, stood cord on cord of wood.

On the next mailbox he read, in black paint, Dudak. He said, “Spragues’ should be the next place up.”

She nodded. She sat turned partly sideways, her right arm reaching as if casually toward the dashboard, the hand resting there with fingers spread wide. Whether she was afraid he would drive into a ditch or afraid of something else was not clear, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it were the country itself that troubled her. Now the mountain was wooded on both sides of them, and there was snow on the ground, glittering ice on the branches overhead. The road switchbacked sharply to the left, over a stone bridge spanning a deeply gouged creek, a fall that made the heart gasp, then climbed more steeply for a minute or two, then levelled off. He saw a mailbox in the distance, cocked back from the road like a pistol hammer, and as they drew nearer he made out an opening between trees, a two-rut lane that, except for the mailbox, he probably wouldn’t have noticed. There were car tracks. He stopped the Jeep at the entrance to the lane and sat for a moment looking in.

“Peter,” Jessica said, then didn’t finish.

He could see no house, at first; then, as if by magic, out of the fallow gray of trees and brush the drab gray rectangle of the house emerged, the windows unlighted, no smoke coming out of the chimney. Not far from the house, leaning heavily to one side, sat a fat, gray car, perhaps a Pontiac or Oldsmobile, a relic of, at the latest, the 1960s. It was certainly not that car that had left the tracks. On the left side it had no tires. Now he began to make out smaller buildings, all as gray as the house—something that might be a garage or chickencoop, something that might contain pigs or a shaggy old pony. In high weeds at the side of the house there were butane tanks. Mickelsson leaned forward, looking up through the windshield, searching all around, and confirmed the suspicion that had come over him: no phone line, no electricity.

“Are you sure there’s someone living here?” Jessica asked.

“I guess we’ll find out,” he said. He shifted into low and four-wheel drive, and the Jeep nosed slowly in.

They saw when they came up beside it that the house was, like his own much grander house, a T-frame: behind the two-story front part, curtain-less, paintless, plain as a box, a porched back part ran out, reaching deeper into the woods. The whole house was up on blocks—trash lay underneath, and more trash in great, rotting mounds toward the rear—and the rear extension was crooked, bulged outward, the back wall fallen among corncobs like a square nose sniffing.

“All out,” Mickelsson said, and opened his door. Jessica nodded, compressed her lips, and opened the door on her side. Dogs began to bark, noisy and frightening as a volley of shots, but when Mickelsson looked around for the source of the racket he saw at once that the dogs, leaping up at the chicken-wire wall of a lean-to shack, could not get at them. Something lay at their feet. He looked away.

“It’s all right,” he said, meeting Jessica at the front of the Jeep and taking her elbow.

She nodded, watching the ground, stepping carefully, the dogs barking more and more wildly, snapping at the air, as the two of them moved toward the porch. Mickelsson kept his eye on the paintless door as they approached it, but in his mind he continued to see those leaping, rolling-eyed, half-starved hounds, and on the dirt floor by the dogs’ feet … whatever it was … a head of some kind, a horse or cow, perhaps; he didn’t much care to know which.

“This is a crappy idea,” Jessica said softly as he brought up his fist to knock.

He did not allow himself to think about it, but brought his knuckles down hard, three times, against the wood.

The man who opened the door was shrivelled and bent forward like a monkey, maybe five feet tall, not a quarter-inch anywhere on his large, lead-gray face unwrinkled. He might be fifty, or he might be a hundred. He had a wrinkled, spit-stained cigarette in his hand, pinched between two arthritically swollen fingers, and smoke came out of his nose and mouth as if his meagre, dried-out insides contained smouldering rags. He wore a thick, filthy sweater full of holes and snags, and over it a tattered denim frock, white-seamed with age. His