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

He was thinking all this while, Please, please, please!—pouring the thought out as if it were his life. He turned around to look at Lawler. The man’s eyes were wide, astonished, but there was something else on his face, too: terrible despair. Then, as when one’s ears pop on an airplane, Mickelsson heard the real world’s sounds again. Someone was knocking loudly at the door.

Now Lawler was on his feet, fumbling in one of his suitcoat pockets, hurrying to seize the doorknob. He had the dusty handkerchief over his mouth and nose, almost black now, so that he looked like a fat Jesse James. The room was full of hovering dirt, bits of paper; the phone was ringing, and in his left hand, the hand that seized the doorknob, Lawler had a noose of piano wire.

He threw open the door and cried out joyfully, “Come in! Come in!”

The scream was like the scream of the rat in the stove. Lawler froze, the piano wire forgotten in his hand, and the same instant, nothing in his mind, Mickelsson hurled the pick-axe and charged in behind it. Lawler jerked his head around like a man cruelly wronged, and the pick-axe hit him squarely in the forehead, flatside, so that it didn’t cut in. Lawler took a dazed step as if to escape that violent football rush—he’d now forgotten the pistol too—but Mickelsson moved swiftly and, hitting with his head, slammed him against the doorpost so hard that Lawler’s breath went out of him. He was unconscious even before he fell. The scream went on, and Mickelsson would register later that it came from the child in the doorway, Lepatofsky’s daughter. Lepatofsky stood behind her, squarely braced and still. Mickelsson hardly noticed; all he was clearly aware of was his sharply outlined, red-tinted hands around Lawler’s throat, squeezing to get hold of the man’s life. Mickelsson gasped, like Lawler, for breath. Then something happened. He felt no pain, only darkness rushing in at him from every direction. He felt himself falling. It seemed a long fall, and everything was dark, growing darker.

8

He lay on his back on the kitchen floor, someone hunkering beside him. The face and shape began to clear, come into focus.

“Hello, Prafessor,” Tim Booker said, beaming. “I see you’ve been fixin things up a bit.” He had on a red wool stocking cap. His ears stuck out.

Now Mickelsson saw Lepatofsky too, standing beyond Tim, and Lepatofsky’s daughter with her hand in her father’s hand. “Lucky thing we dropped by when we did,” Lepatofsky said. “You know Dr. Benton, here?”

Mickelsson rolled his head to the left and saw an old man tall as a crane in a baggy beige suit. The man smiled and nodded.

“What happened?” Mickelsson asked. The weakness of his voice surprised him, and he couldn’t seem fully to open his left eye. He noticed that his shirt had been unbuttoned and his belt unbuckled. His hands were mittened into paws with gauze and tape. Now he became aware of one more person in the room, over leaning on the sink; the policeman Tacky Tinklepaugh.

“Well,” Dr. Benton said, “nothing too serious, I hope. We won’t really know for a day or two. Seems you had a little touch of heart trouble—likely nothing that won’t be fixed with bed-rest and a few small changes of habit. All that drinking and smoking, not eating right … You may be a bit foggy-minded for a while. …”

“It was the strangest thing,” Lepatofsky said, grinning. One eye was opened extra wide. “My little Lily never talked before. We was driving by the howse and all at once she yells out, ‘Stahp! Stahp!’ I ding near drove right off the road, that’s how supprised I was. Lucky thing we did stahp!”

“And you?” Mickelsson asked Tim feebly. He had to concentrate. Odd dreams kept edging in. It seemed to him that the black dog was in the room.

Tim said, grinning, “They gave me a call when you keeled over.”

“Think you can sit up?” Dr. Benton asked, rather loudly, as if he’d asked it twice now.

Mickelsson tried to push up with his arms, but he was as weak as a baby and his bandaged hands throbbed. Tim and Dr. Benton bent down to help.

“By Gahd, it was just like a miracle,” Lepatofsky said. “We must’ve drove by here fifty times before, but this time she yells ‘Stahp!’ ”

“There are no miracles,” Tinklepaugh growled. “Just luck.” Tinklepaugh’s face was dark red, more ravaged than a week ago—or two; whatever it was—as if years had passed. He seemed, as always, angry about something, saving up for his day of vengeance. The sagging flesh hung as motionless as papier-mâché.

With the help of Tim and Dr. Benton, Mickelsson made it to his feet. He let them lead him to the hallway and the stairs. The cat was still there. All three of them looked at it, but Tim’s pressure on Mickelsson’s arm remained firm, and they climbed past it. “Don’t think about it,” Tim said. “Cat had a cancer anyway. That’s what made ’im so mean—good cat, before. The doc had me owt here six months ago trying to shoot him. Tough old bastard!”

Since his own bedroom was ruined, they put him in the makeshift guest bedroom, a boxspring and mattress made up as a bed, no light but a table-lamp set on the floor. Mickelsson lay on his back, fuzzy-headed, waiting for things to clear. The lamp threw the shadows of those around him toward the ceiling. Lepatofsky’s daughter kneeled beside the bed and gazed, faintly smiling, showing her dimple, at a point just to the left of Mickelsson’s left ear. Tim leaned on the doorframe, arms folded, and Lepatofsky looked out the window. It was almost dark. While Dr. Benton took Mickelsson’s pulse, Tinklepaugh checked the closet as if expecting to find more murderers. Downstairs, the phone was ringing. Lepatofsky said, “I’ll get it,” and left the room. Experimentally, Lepatofsky’s daughter put her hand, very lightly, on Mickelsson’s