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

could tell. He remembered hearing somewhere, from Jessica Stark, perhaps, that there were Mennonites up in the mountains. A mosquito landed on his neck and he slapped it.

Now a strange sound came from the river—at first impossible to identify, then the next instant so obviously what it was that Mickelsson could hardly believe it had eluded him. They were singing. The bearded young man poked Mickelsson’s arm with the back of his hand and, when Mickelsson looked down, held something toward him—a bottle, he thought at first, but when he somewhat tentatively accepted the offer, feeling a quick little flush of distress, the bottle turned into binoculars. “Oh. Oh, thank you,” Mickelsson said, still startled by the magical transformation, and raised the binoculars to press them against the lenses of his glasses. At first he could see nothing but a colorful blur. He moved the binoculars from side to side and up and down until large, gawky shapes swung into view, disappeared, then appeared again. He realized for the first time that some of the Mormons were wearing white robelike things, sleeveless. He looked for several seconds. Some of the people looked eighty or more, standing there in the ice-cold water with their mouths open, grimly enduring. Their mouths and eyes were like pits. Fogwisps hovered over the water around them. Then he remembered that the binoculars were on loan and gave them back.

“Is that robes they’re wearing?” Mickelsson whispered.

“That’s that underwear they gaht,” the man said.

His wife shot a look at him to hush him.

Ah yes, Mickelsson thought. He’d once spent a week at the University of Utah. Someone there had told him about the underwear they wore, with religious writing on it. According to whoever it was that had told him, they never took it off.

He’d never in his life heard music so unearthly. Perhaps it was the shale of the mountainsides, or the breath of cold fog on the river; whatever the reason, the music, by the time it reached Mickelsson, seemed nothing that human voices could conceivably produce. If stones were to sing, taking their own natural harmonies, or if the restless spirits of dead animals were to cry out, this might be their sound.

Whispering again, Mickelsson asked, “Do you know what they’re singing?”

“I’m naht real sher,” the man whispered back. “It don’t sownd like country and western.” He laughed. In spite of herself, the woman beyond him laughed too.

That night, when Mickelsson was trying to get to sleep, he found the image in his mind—all those Mormons in the river—depressing. The water was still and red, glowing; in the span of sky between the lighted-up mountaintops and bellies of clouds, birds arced slowly back and forth, shrilly crying. He didn’t need Dr. Rifkin to explain why he was gloomy.

He remembered that one night when he was a boy of eight or nine, heavy, dark-haired strangers—hairy all over, males and females—had come to the swimming-hole where he and his cousins often went after chores, a place they’d always thought of as strictly their own, though in fact it had been on railroad property. The strangers were loud, the kind of people his mother called “coarse,” always grabbing each other, splashing water, screaming, throwing pebbles. They had beer with them. Though he himself hadn’t seen it, his cousin Erik had whispered into his ear that one of the males had stuck his thing up into one of the females, underwater—she’d helped him, pulling her suit out of the way. From above you’d have thought they were just horsing around, maybe fighting.

When he finally did get to sleep that night, Mickelsson had bad dreams. In the spillway from the pond at the Bauer place, he found a drowned child. Its pale blue eyes were weighted like a doll’s, closing and opening as the head moved back and forth.

All the next day he was depressed, morbid. He tried to read a book, The New Nietzsche. The title should have warned him. “The,” as if there were one, and “New,” as if … Toward evening he washed his mountain of dirty dishes, some of them with mould on them, and mechanically went over the floors with a broom. Once the phone rang, Edie Bryant, whose husband was in English, inviting Mickelsson to a party. “I’ll see,” he said, and put his hand on his forehead, closing his eyes. I’ll see. I’ll see. He seemed to have lost the ability to tell the truth.

3

Nevertheless—all caution blasted to the moon—he was pleased when the signing of papers in the Montrose lawyer’s office went smoothly, and the house became his. He could call back later only a few moments of the ritual, mainly Dr. Bauer smiling and talking, one arm cocked forward in the shade of her enormously wide hat, the pale hand twisted like a cripple’s, signing the papers left-handed. She’d come dressed in a suit, as if the ceremony were a serious matter, but for all the formality of her dress—midnight blue, heightening the effect of her bread-dough pallor—she chatted pleasantly. Except for Mickelsson, they were all old friends: the ancient, coughing, chain-smoking lawyer with his thick-lensed glasses, white hair in his ears, gnarled, palsied hands; the fat, blond, chinless, large-bosomed secretary who brought them coffee and showed pictures of her children to Dr. Bauer; Tim’s boss, Charley Snyder (Tim wasn’t there), whom Mickelsson mistook at first for the Susquehanna banker (he realized later that Snyder was younger, and talked and dressed more like a man of the world, sporty and natty, quick to grin; he was probably good at golf, probably had a farm somewhere with riding horses); and of course Dr. Bauer, at once gigantic and inconspicuous, shy as a wren.

Throughout the whole business, Mickelsson’s mind was mostly elsewhere. He’d felt twenty emotions at once, in the beginning, listening to their banter. The lawyer, a Mr. Cook, sat behind an extremely large, cluttered desk elevated on a kind of dais, as if the desk had been intended for use