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

he saw, to his perplexity, that it was 5 a.m. He put away the shotgun, then opened the refrigerator, hungry for something no refrigerator contained. The house was cold and still around him, comfortingly beautiful despite his soul’s disquiet. Even if he lost it to the I.R.S., he thought, the house might heal him yet—simply the fact that he’d saved it from ruin, the fact that, against all evidence, things could occasionally be saved. He got out milk for the cat. As he bent down to pour the milk into the bowl, the cat warily eyeing him, the phone rang, making Mickelsson jump. He finished pouring the milk, then turned, set down the milk-carton, wiped his hands on his pantlegs, and at last walked over and lifted the telephone receiver to his ear.

“Hello?”

No one spoke. After a moment he said again, “Hello?”

There was still no voice at the other end. After three or four seconds he asked, “Mark? Is that you?”

He waited, thought of asking if it were Jessie, then asked instead, crossly, “Hello?”

Silence. Now for some season he was sure that it was Jessie. In his mind he saw her face with painful clarity, interested, gentle, the very emblem of aristocratic beauty. He remembered how she’d leaned forward, distressed, talking to old man Sprague up at his house higher on the mountain. Mickelsson hadn’t told her yet, he remembered, that the old people’s house had burned. “Jessie?” he almost said. Was it possible that she knew that it had been Mickelsson outside the door, that night at Tillson’s office? He clenched the receiver more tightly, pressing it against his ear.

“Hello?” he asked one more time, reserved, then listened. It was his wife, it came to him—his poor, wrecked Ellen. But then, once again, he was unsure. At last, deliberately, without haste, he hung up.

Should he call Jessie, just in case? But he did not really believe it had been Jessie. He stood frowning, undecided, for a long time, then for some reason, reaching no decision, found himself moving into the livingroom, crossing to the couch, thoughtfully sitting down, moving the palps of his fingers again and again over his bristly chin, listening to the scritch. After a while he eased his shoes off, raised his feet onto the couch, and lay back, closing his eyes.

He slept for hours, then awakened with a start to discover that the world outside his windows was red, as if burning.

“Sunrise!” he told himself—or was it sunset? He made himself calm. What had he thought it was, Christ’s Return in Glory? Some nuclear accident his son had encouraged to have its in-due-course-inevitable day?

He closed his eyes again, thinking, Yes, it must be sunset; he’d slept another whole day away. He found himself praying for Mark’s safety, wherever he might be—perfunctorily reminding himself even as he prayed that he no longer believed in prayer. Then, as if guiltily, as if for fear of sinfully elevating one love over other loves, or fear that some halfwit supernatural power might misunderstand and save his son but kill his daughter—out of superstitious dread, in other words (so he told himself, but could no more prevent the superstitious act, however lightly he might take it with his rational part, than he could command the Red Sea or make the sun stand still)—he prayed for Leslie; then, because he loved her even now, prayed for Ellen and, because he did not, for The Comedian; then for Jessie; then for Tillson and Tillson’s wife. … The list went on and on, endlessly unfolding—as irrevocable, now that he’d said the first word, as the outrush of worlds, the immense holy gasp and wail that formed Time and Space.

Dreaming, he saw himself with a top-hat, his eyes made up to seem slanted like the Buddha’s, in his hand a magic wand with which he tapped a small, glitter-spattered table like The Incredible Dr. Flint’s. Gilt exploded outward with the first light tap, a lovely, bedazzling puff of gold. He laughed, and the audience laughed with him, delighted, a soft murmur swelling through the shadowy auditorium from end to end, rising and falling away like the breathing of the sea. He winked, signalling more fun to come, and tapped twice, more loudly, then found himself violently hitting the table with a stick. More shining dustclouds of gilt flashed outward.

He awakened to a thunderous pounding and sat upright.

He thought instantly of his son, then knew it couldn’t be that: if something had happened to Mark, he would hear by phone. Someone shouted something, out on the front porch, and the pounding began again. Mickelsson threw his heavy legs over the side, rubbed his forehead with the heels of both hands to awaken himself, then got up, loose-kneed, groped his way through the livingroom’s darkness to the kitchen, switched the light on in the hallway, and made his way down the entry-hall. “I’m coming,” he called when the pounding came again, “hold your horses!” When he opened the front door, two young Mormons stood there, black-coated, their faces white skulls. Behind them, stars and snowlight made the night like a weird dream of day.

“What the Devil—?” Mickelsson said. He closed the door part way.

They were the same two Mormons who had visited him before, but he saw at once that they weren’t here this time on missionary work.

“Professor, we’d like to use your telephone if we could,” the dark-haired one said very softly, obsequious, bending toward him, almost bowing.

Mickelsson stood holding the door against them, looking them up and down. Their faces were as blank as the faces of lizards. “Has something happened? What time is it?”

The blond one poked his head toward him, nose bulbous, eyes slightly widened, “We found a body,” he said. “Up there on the mountain.” He pointed, first toward the road, then, correcting himself, straight up through Mickelsson’s rafters into the woods beyond. “Your place was the quickest to get to, so we came down crosslots.” Mickelsson noticed only now that