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

going through a box of clothes his ex-wife had sent down to him in one of her fits of housecleaning frenzy or residual tenderness, Mickelsson had come across the full-length scarlet hunting coat he’d worn when his last so-called episode was upon him, a coat they’d bought long ago on Portobello Road, when they’d passed through London on the way home from that grim year in Heidelberg. He’d felt a brief jolt of fear, holding the coat up to look at it, and he remembered how he’d bawled, clinging to Rifkin in his dimly lit office, shamelessly clutching the cotton of Rifkin’s shirt, bellowing like a bull in the slaughterhouse, while Rifkin, as if absent-mindedly, patted the red coat’s shoulder, his eyes shifting from Mickelsson’s face to the nurse who was preparing his shot. Poor humanity had need of its Rifkins, mock all it might. He’d considered throwing the coat away, but then its wrinkles and the dangling brass button at the collar had distracted him, made him forget his fear and remember instead how Mark and Leslie had run eagerly from shop to shop, streetcart to streetcart, or had pressed up close, timidly holding hands, to look up, mouths open, at street musicians. In the end, he’d taken the scarlet coat to the cleaners, along with other things in need of cleaning and trifling repairs. He must remember to get over to Montrose and pick them up. Anyway, he must get himself a Pennsylvania lawyer, the I.R.S. man had told him. Old Cook would be sufficient. How much big-city cunning did it require to acknowledge that one’s client’s case was hopeless?

It would not do, he understood, to think too hard about what it meant, this fixing of the house; yet he couldn’t help toying with the idea he’d suggested to his phantom physician, that it was magic, not madness—if there was really any difference. Perhaps in a way he was doubling back into his childhood, as if playing with the idea of starting over. The first time he’d run a plane down a yellow pine board, watching the shaving curl up past his fists, he’d remembered with a clarity astonishing to him how his father had looked at thirty, his sleeves rolled up tight to his pink, freckled arms, his jaw thrown forward, lower teeth clenched around upper teeth. Sometimes his father would sing as he worked: “In a cavern, in a canyon, excay-vay-ting for a mine …” Mickelsson’s uncle Edgar would move around, expressionless and straight-backed as a gorilla, as if sunk into his own grim meditation, but sometimes he would glance over in the direction of the barn or wellhouse where Mickelsson’s father worked and sang, and one could see that Mickelsson’s uncle was listening. Another time, when Mickelsson was working on his plumbing, fixing a leak under the bathtub, he got a sudden, wonderfully sharp image of his father down in the well with a trouble-light, his legs spraddled wide, shoes wedged into the wet stone walls on either side. He’d had the farts, Mickelsson remembered, and they’d all joked about it, especially his father: “If anybody’d dropped a match I’d’ve been blowed to Kingdom Come!” he said. It was true that, up at the top of the well, where Mickelsson, a small boy, lay on his belly fearfully looking down, the smell was horrendous. His father’s red hair, just under the trouble-light, glittered and gleamed like new copper.

Still another time, prodded by an old rotten clothespin he’d just picked up from the cellar floor, Mickelsson saw his mother at the clothes-line behind the house, reaching up, her mouth full of clothespins, to hang trousers, pair after pair, by the cuffs. Her hair, with the sun in it, was the color of Ellen’s before Ellen had begun to dye hers black. Straw-yellow. His mother’s stockings were rolled at the knees.

All that Thursday and Friday—his days for “research,” as he’d told Tillson—he worked at plastering the new diningroom. It was indeed research, in a way (which was not to deny that he’d been less than forthright with Tillson). Dreams, memories, insights drifted into his head unbidden. He saw his sister in her coffin, dead of polio at nine. He remembered his uncle pouring gasoline over the pigpen, four dead sows inside—what it was they’d died of Mickelsson had now no idea. The corpses had been pushed together in a pile and old truck tires placed around them. Then his uncle had stood back and had thrown a match. There was a roaring explosion and a cloud of fire rushed outward and upward, almost to where Mickelsson stood holding his uncle’s scabrous hand. Cousins squealed and ran back a few steps—Billy, Erik, Jeanette, Mary Ann—and from the center of the fire came a crackling, hissing sound, a rumble like a voice, and a thousand thousand sparks went flying up. His uncle’s eyes, watching the fire, were a startling, glassy red.

When the plastering was finished, dark gray where he’d worked most recently, lighter, finally white, where he’d worked earlier, Mickelsson sat down on the rickety chair exactly in the middle of the room—it made him think of some play by Samuel Beckett that Ellen had taken him to—and with childish satisfaction looked over what he’d done. He went to the kitchen to get himself a beer, then came back and sat down to look again. Of all the repairs he’d made so far, it was the plastering that pleased him most. When the thought of his son came to him—still missing, no word—Mickelsson suddenly got up, turned off the lights, and left the room. He stood beside the telephone in the kitchen, his right elbow on the wall, his hand on his forehead, going over in his mind again and again the numbers that would ring his ex-wife’s telephone. At last he admitted to himself that he was afraid to call her and went back through the livingroom to his study, where he sat down at his desk and