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

“Well, Professor,” the banker said, drawing his hand back across the desk and standing up the rest of the way, “welcome to Seskehenna.”

“Thank you,” Mickelsson said, also standing up, towering above the man, mentally noting the local pronunciation. He toyed with his hat, his smile locked firmly in place.

“Any time we can be of service,” the banker said, hanging his fingers from the top of his vest, “just drop by.”

“I will.” He backed toward the door, grinning and bowing. “Gratitude is hatred in a mask.” F. Nietzsche. “Gratitude to a fellow mortal is excrement.” Luther.

“Anybody told you the history of that house?” the banker asked, smiling. When Mickelsson looked blank, pausing in his retreat, his eyebrows raised with exaggerated interest, the banker continued, “Lot of legends about that old house. I’m not up on ’em, myself—if there’s two things on earth I can never remember it’s history and jokes. But you should talk to the neighbors. You’ll find it interesting, I’m sure.”

“I’ll do that,” Mickelsson said. “Well, thanks for everything. It’s been a pleasure to do business with you!” He smiled again, bowing one last time, and, after an instant’s hesitation, put his hat on, setting it in place with both hands, then cocking it.

The banker smiled a touch too thoughtfully, as if Mickelsson, leaving, had gotten some small detail wrong, had perhaps started with the incorrect foot, or had failed to put his chair back exactly where he’d found it. One sensed, all the same, that the banker would do everything he could to make things easy. Small-town solidarity. Yes-siree-bob. They needed each other. Outside the unwashed glass front door with its black and silver lettering, around behind the pillar where his new friend the silver-haired banker couldn’t see him, Mickelsson hunched his shoulders and lit a cigarette. He glanced once at the bench-loungers sizing him up from across the street—four men, two women; they might have been sitting there, observing events around the town’s one traffic light, for years. Mickelsson sent them a stiff little salute. No one seemed to notice. Then he moved hurriedly, perhaps a little furtively, to the real-estate office next door.

The salesman was a young man of thirty or so, named Tim Booker, a grinning country boy with a face shaped like an apple, thinning brown hair, big farmboy muscles. Wherever the sun had touched him he was coppery brown. He dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket, yellow T-shirt (FISHER STOVES, it said), blue jeans, scuffed brown leather boots. From the moment he’d met him Mickelsson had been hard put not to like him. He seemed obviously honest, blessed with the heartiness and dependable gentleness Mickelsson had associated since childhood with dairy farmers—people like his father, whose survival, not to mention their peace of mind, depended on a gift for dealing patiently with big stupid animals inclined to push fences down, hide in the woods at calving time, grow moody around strangers, occasionally butt or kick. He’d of course been predisposed to like the young man. Tim had been his first real introduction to the character of the people who’d be his neighbors if he managed to get the Bauer place. From the outset the signs had been promising. Even Tim’s accent was a pleasure, or anyway interesting, a sort of key to the place—a set of clues, if Mickelsson could figure them out, to the ungraspable phantom meaning he’d felt up at the house. The secret of wholeness, perhaps, if he was lucky. His cracked-up life’s second chance.

Though he’d seen the world—had been a paramedic in Vietnam, he said—Tim had, in purer form than any of the others Mickelsson had talked to, what Mickelsson was coming to recognize as the standard old-time voice of Susquehanna: the flat, sweet yokel sound of rural New York State, richly shaped r’s designed to make up for all the lost r’s of New England (“car” was cah-urr, by some magic compressed to one syllable), and overlaid on that, the Scots’ short ow sound and bitten-off t’s, the accent that distinguished the northern tier of Pennsylvania, as in (Tim slapping the pockets of his jeans) “If I can find my dahrn keys I’ll drive you owt.”

After Mickelsson’s experience with the real-estate people of Binghamton, Tim’s directness was like ozone. “She’ll come down,” he’d said, ritching back happily on his chair. “She needs to get moved owt of it, and you’re the best chance she’s gaht.” He laughed, lifting his dimpled chin. “I’d say a fair price for both of you’d be fifty thowsand dahllers.”

Mickelsson leaned forward, startled. Her asking price was seventy. “You think so?”

“Well,” Tim said, smiling more widely, throwing his arms out, “it can’t hurt to ask.” Grinning head tipped, arms reaching wide, he was a startling, happy-child parody of the crucifixion.

As they’d driven up to the farmstead that first time, Tim had talked about his life and pleasures as if no one could help but find them interesting—as indeed Peter Mickelsson did, listening to Tim with a touch of envy, wondering with momentary morbid excitement whether he too ought to have a motorcycle. (He’d had one long ago, in his farmboy and college days; an Indian.) Tim had a blond Harley-Davidson, he said; a hog, fully equipped; more lights than a 747. He didn’t ride it much, mostly just pahlished it. Mickelsson grinned and nodded, sucking at his recalcitrant pipe. Though Tim had never had much to do with boats—he couldn’t swim, he said—he’d just bought a hardly used trimaran. All these lakes hereabouts, just laying there, it seemed sort of un-American not to pollute them. He lightly hit the steeringwheel as he laughed, head tossed sideways. He also owned a camper in which he’d taken trips to places as far away as Arizona, camping his way across the country with his wife and child. Whether the child was a boy or girl Mickelsson never learned. Tim spoke of him or her as “the