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

Back in the Jeep, heading for Helen Street, only a few blocks from where Mickelsson had formerly had his apartment (already he was moving under dark, heavy trees, heavy even in winter, though the leaves were off now and at times, through the still, black limbs, he could see stars), he wondered why the young people at the house where Randy lived—or had once lived, they claimed—had not wanted him to know the boy’s whereabouts. He knew his propensity for finding patterns where there were none; all the same, the pot-smell was sharp in his memory, as were those guarded, sullen looks. Though his suspicion embarrassed him—he could not help noticing its racist tinge—he allowed a kind of daydream to play through his mind, a scenario so vivid in its particulars that he couldn’t be sure whether he was imagining or actually seeing things, as his grandfather had sometimes seen things, and as perhaps he himself, in the case of the ghosts, had seen things. He saw the house full of late-night visitors, an assortment of shabby druggies, and saw Randy Wilson as a timid part of the pretty black girl’s gang. Perhaps, as in that People’s Temple business, she was their spiritual leader and protector, a kind of high priestess, and the men around her, possibly the pregnant white girl as well, were her sexual thralls. As soon as he suggested the idea to himself, he had a strong hunch that it was right. Then Randy had met Nugent, Mickelsson speculated, and, drawn more and more into his healing influence, had tried to back away from what went on at the house. The young man who’d ridden with Mickelsson and dropped the hint as to where Randy might be found was another defector, then, or half-defector: guilty, restless, tentatively exploring the possibility of flight. Suddenly Mickelsson knew, he thought, why the people at the house had been so reticent. The bicycle accident had been no accident at all: one of them had tried to kill the boy. If Mickelsson should find Randy Wilson, and the boy should talk …

He drove more slowly, hardly breathing. Should he phone the police? Might the gang not go to the hospital and finish their work? But what could he tell the police, in fact? What did he actually know?

Then something that had been nagging at the back of his mind burst into his mental field of vision: the old, well-kept car that had appeared in his brief daydream of the accident had been parked down the street from his Jeep when he’d come out of the hospital.

He clenched the steeringwheel as tightly as his neurotic weakness would allow, and tried to think.

Was it possible? Maybe he’d imagined it; or maybe he’d seen the car there before he’d gone in and had unconsciously registered it and had supplied it when his fantasy of the accident needed an image.

“Insane,” he whispered, not quite meaning it, simply playing, philosopher-like, with the patent weirdness, increasing degeneration, of his mental processes. Here he was, deducing reality from intermingled dreams and actualities—“more or less fantastic gloss”—incapable of guessing which was which, yet weighing the results as if he’d gotten them in a clean, bright laboratory.

He shuddered and pushed the whole mess to the back of his mind. He’d arrived at his destination, the modest, fake-Tudor home of Samuel Danytz, Department of Sociology. The man with thick fingers. He parked the Jeep and sat for a moment, trying to decide what he intended to do, his right hand resting idly on the bear-rug covering the shotgun. When he remembered that the gun was there he drew his hand back. He got out of the Jeep almost without a sound.

The front lawn had been fixed up as a kind of Japanese garden, no doubt more as an alternative to lawn-mowing than as a tribute to Zen Buddhism. The snow had stopped falling some time ago, and the sky was bright, but the lawn around the Danytz house lay in the heavy shade of blue spruce trees. He had meant to ring the doorbell, but he found himself looking around somewhat furtively, noticing that there were no dogs out tonight, and not a soul on the white, softly carpeted sidewalks. He moved quickly for all his feebleness, crouching down, toward a lighted window, thinking vaguely of some character in a novel he’d read long ago—Russian, perhaps; anyway, something obsessive and morose and no doubt philosophical, or meant to be; otherwise he wouldn’t have read it. He thought of the night he’d spied on the fat man, and his stomach knotted. To distract himself, bring himself back to the business at hand, he glanced down at his wrist to check the time, then remembered that he’d given away his watch. Crazy thing to do! Even crazier, he saw that in his left hand he held a pack of cigarettes, in his right a pack of matches. He’d actually been about to light a cigarette, give himself away, as if on purpose!

He pocketed the cigarettes and matches, then raised up slowly to peek in through the window. A pretty young girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, was standing in front of a brown, textured couch, playing with a cat—dangling a shoelace, getting the cat to bat at it. Papers and books, probably the girl’s homework, lay on the couch, and above the couch hung two paintings, amateur and awful but obviously treasured, expensively framed. One was of a naked woman with a fat blue mouth and one hand over her crotch; the other was of wedge-shaped mountains with palaces or monasteries on their tops. The girl laughed as the cat leaped up, batting with both black paws. The cat was apparently part-Siamese—blue-eyed, lean and elegant, delicately muscled under sleek black, yellow and white fur. The girl jerked her head back, long blond hair swinging, and Mickelsson thought, with sharp pain, of his daughter. This girl was not