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

over the back of the overstuffed chair, and on the cushion and on the carpet in front of the chair, cheaply wrapped Christmas presents spilled out of paper shopping bags. On her forehead she’d put some kind of skin-colored putty—except that it wasn’t the color of her skin—trying to hide pimples. If her pregnancy showed, it was not in her belly but in the dullness of her hair, the dark blue shadows under her eyes.

“Somewhere else,” he sneered. He thought of Jessie and angrily batted the thought from his mind. Something down in the street caught his attention, though at the moment he wasn’t quite conscious of what it was that he was seeing. An old gray car, perhaps from the late fifties or early sixties, had pulled up beside the curb in front of Thomas’s Hardware. The car-door opened, and after a minute, slowly, with great difficulty, the fat man from the apartment downstairs squeezed himself out, closed the door behind him, and went around the front of the car to the sidewalk, out of Mickelsson’s view. He did not have on, today, the police hat but instead a gray, long-out-of-fashion fedora. Mickelsson leaned forward and was able to see him again, standing at the parking meter now, putting a coin in. Then the man turned and, moving tentatively—no doubt because of the near-blindness Mickelsson had noticed down in the hallway that day—again passed out of Mickelsson’s view, entering Thomas’s store. The man’s apartment, it occurred to him, would be empty.

Mickelsson closed his eyes, shocked by the thought that had come to him. He heard Donnie’s abuse blazing like fire behind him, but he registered not a word of it, his mind replaying with a feeling of great dread the movements of the man he’d just seen getting out of the car, directly below him, closing the car-door, the top of his hat moving toward the car for a moment as, presumably, he looked in, maybe checking to see that he hadn’t left his keys; then the hat, the wide shoulders of the coat, the long, dark scarf moving around the front of the car toward the curb. …

He turned to her, breaking in on her crackling stream of dragon-fire. “Suppose I could get you money somewhere,” he said, jerking up both hands to silence her. “How much would it take to convince you to have the baby, put it up for adoption?”

“Fuck you,” she snapped. “It’s my goddamn life!” Then she stopped herself, seeing something in his look, and she seemed visibly to shrink, becoming cunning all at once, then relaxing her face, beginning to dissemble. “It would take more than you could ever get, believe me,” she said.

“How much?” he asked, and moved a step toward her.

She looked away from his eyes, afraid of him, saw her cigarettes on the chair beside the bedroom door, and abruptly went for one. Her hands shook as she picked at the pack and at last drew one out. Her eyes fled here and there, looking for matches.

Mickelsson took a pack from his pocket, opened them, and moved closer to her, lighting one and holding it toward her, at arm’s length. She leaned toward the light, afraid to meet his eyes, poked the end of the cigarette into the flame and sucked hard, then sharply drew back.

“You’re crazy,” she said, letting out smoke and holding the cigarette away from her in a gesture queerly elegant, touching.

“There’s a place in Binghamton,” he said, dropping the matchbook back into his pocket. “For five thousand dollars they’ll handle everything—all perfectly legal. I checked. How much more would you require, for yourself?” He listened to the odd note of pompousness that had entered his speech, as if it were someone else that was saying these things.

“I’m afraid,” she said. “Can’t you fucking understand that? I’m scared to fucking death.”

He waited until she looked at him, then said, “But for money—for enough money …” The foetus would be better off dead; what chance did it have? Anyway, there was no justice or decency under heaven. They’d all be better off dead—he, Donnie, Jessie. … He pulled back from the thought in revulsion.

“I don’t know,” she said, and snapped her head around sideways, away from him, then dragged, shaking, at the cigarette. “Ten thousand dahllars?” She laughed, brittle as glass, edging toward hysteria.

“OK,” he said, and nodded. “We’ll see.” He felt himself absolutely still, like Gibraltar, and at the same time felt himself rushing toward some dark shore.

Again she looked at him, really scared now, thinking twenty things at once—thinking, among other things, that maybe she hadn’t asked for enough. “What are you going to do?” she asked. She raised her hand as if to stop him as he pushed by, heading for the door, then changed her mind. “Hay,” she said, dancing along beside him, “hay, where are you going?”

“Tell you later,” he said.

As he tried to pull her door closed behind him, she held it against him, looking out at him through the eight-inch-wide opening, white as a ghost. “Pete, where are you going?” She whispered it, as if she knew.

“When I knock,” he said quietly, “open the door for me. Otherwise I’ll break it off its hinges.” Macho, macho. Self-hatred stoked the fire of his anger higher. This time when he pulled at the door, she did not resist. It slammed shut.

He had a momentary impression, as he stood leaning on the silver-headed cane, his head near the fat man’s door, that there was someone inside. It seemed unlikely in the extreme. Mickelsson had no very clear idea how long he’d stood arguing with Donnie, quizzing her—bullying her—between the time he’d seen the fat man get out of his car and now. But logic suggested (and for all the frantic rush of his heartbeat, his mind seemed to be working with unusual clarity) that since the man had put money in the meter before entering Thomas’s, he couldn’t possibly, in this brief span of