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

gallows were both gone, the sky softening to wintry gray. He understood that it had been some kind of vision or waking nightmare. Already he had trouble believing he’d really seen it, the whole thing scattering from his mind like the atoms of a dream. On the sidewalks no one looked up at the sky, no one had noticed anything.

Back in Susquehanna, he tried Donnie Matthews’ door again and found her still not at home. He stood thinking for a while, leaning on his cane, then went back down the stairs and, for all the cold, crossed the street to sit on the bench near the traffic light—today there was no one else there, thanks to the weather—and, tucking his leather-gloved hands into the armpits of his overcoat, turtling his mouth and chin inside his scarf, he settled himself to wait. Except for his forehead and ears, the tip of his nose and his feet, he was warm enough. If he got really uncomfortable he could go sit in the Chevy, parked at a meter not thirty feet away, turn on the motor and heater, and wait in comfort at least until the exhaust fumes got him, seeping through the floor. For now, this was his preference. Though Christmas lights—yellow, blue, green, red, white—drooped above Main Street, and there were lights in the stores, a few brave souls shopping, he felt, here on the icy bench, as if the frozen town had been abandoned to him.

He glanced to his left, across the street toward the Acme, at the sound of a child’s crying, and saw the man he’d bought his Jeep from, Charles Lepatofsky, slipping and sliding across the pavement toward him, a large bag of groceries in his arm and mittened right hand, his left hand dragging along his red-faced, bundled-up daughter. Her name was Lily, Mickelsson remembered. It was odd that he should remember it, bad as he was with names. He couldn’t have heard it more than three or four times. If she never spoke—so Lepatofsky had said—it was not because she lacked the throat for it. She was wailing as if her heart would break, large tears coursing down her cheeks. She caught her breath and paused for a moment when she saw Mickelsson, then returned, with renewed conviction, to her sorrow and indignation.

Lepatofsky apologized, nodding to him, “Poor baby hates the cold. But I couldn’t just leave her up at the house.”

“Hard on kids, this weather,” Mickelsson said.

Lily slid her eyes toward him but went on with her heartbroken wailing.

Suddenly he got up from the bench, throwing a little wave to Lepatofsky, and half skated, half ran to the Chevy, where he opened the door, leaned in on one knee, and unfastened the troll-doll from the rear-view mirror. Triumphantly, he carried it back to where Lepatofsky and his daughter were just now climbing into their truck. “This is for you,” he said to Lily, handing her the doll.

She abruptly stopped crying—even Lepatofsky seemed surprised by that—and after an instant’s hesitation took the doll in her two mittened hands.

“Can you say thank you?” Lepatofsky asked, bending toward her, smiling.

She shook her head.

“Lily don’t talk,” he explained, glancing up at Mickelsson.

“I know.” Mickelsson stepped back from the truck, smiling and nodding, exorbitantly pleased with himself, then closed her door.

Lepatofsky waved, bobbing his head and calling “Thank, you!” Then the truck engine roared to life. Mickelsson waved good-bye until the truck was out of sight, then, still smiling, went back to his bench. As he sat down, his heart jumped. Donnie’s light was on.

He had not been prepared for the temper he found her in. She refused absolutely to listen to reason, refused even to let him take her hand to comfort her—much less go to bed with her—and even as he shouted back at her, bellowing like a bull, towering over her, barely in control, he secretly felt the justice of her rage, even the justice of her blaming the whole thing on him. He’d been one of many; her stubborn claim that things stood otherwise was lunacy, an act of mad desperation and reptile cunning; but the fact that there had been others did not mitigate his guilt, any more than did her own claim, earlier, that she was “professional.” Her actions had not been, in the full sense, rational: in her youthful egoism and optimism, she hadn’t really foreseen the consequences. He, an adult, a man of books and relatively wide experience, had no such excuse. If his use of her, his treatment of this living, feeling human being as pure physical object, was representative, not special, he was nonetheless personally to blame for it. Even as he raged at her, his large red fists clenched, pulled tight against his chest lest he hit her with them—telling her, in scorn of her extortionist dreams, that he was poor, maybe the poorest of her clients—his mind wheeled, hunting wildly for a way to pay her off, save both her and the child in her womb. Foetus, he reminded himself; but what he saw in his mind was his even-then-beloved Leslie emerging, all bloody, from Ellen’s womb. “I haven’t even got a fucking salary,” he shouted, “or anyway I won’t have, not long enough to scrape up the two thousand dollars you think you need. Two thousand dollars!” He hit his forehead with the side of his right fist and spun away from her as if knocked almost off his feet by his own blow.

“You do!” she shouted. “What the hell are you saying?”

“I don’t,” he said, and sucked in air, trying to calm himself. “The I.R.S. is garnishing all I earn.”

“Then get it somewhere else,” she said. “What do I care? Fuck it!”

In his mind he saw her standing stiff with rage in the center of the room behind him. She was still in the scratchy-looking pleated bright red wool dress she’d been out shopping in—with her sister, she said. Her coat and scarf were thrown