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

the window, looking out, dabbing at her mouth with the pitifully wrinkled, gray hankie. She looked lost, befuddled. He could get no trace of anger from her now.

“Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.

She seemed not to hear.

His heart ticking rapidly, causing a light pain, he moved closer to look at her face. She was not the kind of ghost one could see through. No one, if he had come in and seen her standing there, would have believed she was a ghost, though somehow it was clear that she did not belong here in ordinary reality. Sometimes she whispered something, talking to herself—nothing Mickelsson could make sense of. After the hours of music, he was strongly conscious of the silence. He felt then, suddenly, a physical shock, a blow as if from inside that gave him, instantly, a splitting headache; and now, as if something had prevented it from getting through before, filtering it somehow, he felt the anger. He wouldn’t have believed that one could live, not have a stroke, walking around in such a rage.

“Why are you here?” he asked. He pressed the heel of his right hand against the pain in his forehead.

Apparently he did not exist for her. Perhaps nothing existed as solidly as her emotion. He was tempted to reach out and touch her, not with his hand but with the record he held in it, which he’d been preparing to put on the changer—but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. At last, abruptly, on rubbery legs, he turned and walked back to the stereo, put the record on, flicked the switch, then walked heavily back—touching the walls, the furniture, the doorway—into the kitchen. It was nearly dark now, late twilight, black clouds moving swiftly across the valley. More snow was predicted. He went into the bathroom to find aspirin. Beethoven wailed and crashed behind him like ice-and-snow mountains falling in, meaningless noise, oddly off rhythm, he thought, hardly more ordered than the vacuum-cleaner noise, until it came to him that part of the sound was not from the record player but from outside, somewhere in the woods above his house: gunshots, three in quick succession, then after a moment a fourth. John Pearson hunting, no doubt. Expressing himself, like Beethoven? What did one hunt—except one’s own soul—at twilight, in deeply drifted woods?

He forgot about Tillson’s party, or rather chose not to remember it. The roads were clear, a single snow-packed lane between eight-foot-high banks, when, three nights later, he drove the Chevy down to Susquehanna for groceries. Those he’d gotten before had spoiled, left out on the counter. The town’s Christmas decorations had been up for weeks now—green, red, yellow, white and blue, reflected in the slush and the steely ice below, and on the dented metal of cars and high-bodied pickups with hydraulic plows. The lights and the tinny Christmas music coming from a second-story loudspeaker (Donnie’s window was dark) flooded him with unwelcome sentimental emotion. He had to sit for five minutes in the Jeep, regaining control. At last, conspicuous, as if every window were intently watching him, he walked across the street to the Acme to get what he needed. Everyone was talking about the murders—the fat man was only one. An old woman who lived in a trailer had been killed by her daughter, stabbed seven times, and a taxi driver had been found on Airport Road, north of Binghamton, shot in the head execution-style. Without a word the check-out girl gave Mickelsson his bounced check. It was all right; he’d cashed a check for a hundred dollars just that morning at the bank. Though he’d again weakened and sent money to Ellen, it would probably clear. Donnie’s absence was in one way, anyhow, a great burden lifted off. When he’d set the grocery bags on the seat beside him and was about to head back home, he abruptly changed his mind, got out again, slammed the door, and walked up the street toward Owen Thomas’s.

A man who looked like a Montana cowboy in winter came toward him with one hand raised, clenched to a fist inside its leather glove—perhaps a warning, perhaps a greeting. Mickelsson stopped in his tracks. The man had a wide hat much like Mickelsson’s, a big sheepskin coat, jeans, and heavy black boots. “Hay, Prafessor!” Though it was night, he wore dark glasses.

Yet Mickelsson’s heart calmed. The voice was Tim’s. “Hello!” Mickelsson said. “Long time no see!”

“Just tryin to keep owt of the way of killers,” Tim said and laughed, gently slapping Mickelsson’s shoulder.

“That’s something, isn’t it?” Mickelsson said, and felt his expression twist strangely. He remembered someone’s saying that Tim was homosexual. It seemed utterly improbable, but what could anyone know about anything? He thought of the motorcyclists Tim rode with and had a brief nightmare vision of the whole pack of them as killer homosexuals. He stopped himself in disgust. “It’s scary, the way the world’s going.” He covered his mouth with his hand.

“Isn’t that the dahrn truth!” Tim said, and laughed. “That’s something, though, that fat man. Sitting up there all this time with all that stash, useless to him as a waterproof ear on a prairie dog!”

“Ah?” Mickelsson said. The part about the fat man’s loot had not been in the paper.

“That’s what the murderers were after all right,” Tim said, happily grinning.

Murderers. Mickelsson’s heart jumped. “They took something, then, you think?”

“I guess the cops don’t know that, yet. Leave it to Tacky Tinklepaugh, they’ll never know. But I guess they gaht the Sheriff’s Department in on it now, and there’s a chance it’ll go right to the F.B.I. Possible the man robbed a bank, while back.”

“I suppose they don’t know who killed him—who the murderers were?”

“Naht yet,” Tim said. “Course everybody really knows. But what can you do?” Tim’s smile drew back on one side, ironic.

He wondered if his eyes, staring into Tim’s, showed his fright. He still had no control of his mouth, and