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

a doglike whimpering of pleasure that he could have stopped at any moment, as a sick man can stop his moans. The ghosts or devils he’d thought he was rid of stood watching.

At seven o’clock that night, he realized that Mark was going to sleep for a long time. No doubt he’d been hitch-hiking for days; perhaps he had walked for miles. In Mark’s duffle-bag, Mickelsson found objects he did not think he himself could have placed there by imagination: three cakes of yeast, a cardboard box containing riceballs. Surely Mark was really there. Mickelsson took a bath, strenuously thinking. Even when he squinted, his bad eyelid did not move. Outside the bathroom door, he could hear the old woman pottering about, as if waiting for him. It came to him what he must do.

He brushed past her and went to his bedroom to stand peering like a mole into his closet. A musty, dead smell poured out of it. He found a gray, striped suit he hadn’t worn since his last convention, a French-cuffed shirt—he could find no cufflinks, but it would do, no one would notice—a Liberty tie, and in a plastic cleaner’s bag, his scarlet huntsman’s coat. He got an image of dead foxes, then banished it. If the coat had moth holes, she would not notice at first glance. He dressed, surprised at how easily the fly zipped clear to his slimmed-down waist. He slipped the scuffed belt through the loops and buckled it. He admired himself in the mirror, first head-on, then sideways. To tone down the redness of his face he patted a little plaster dust onto his skin like powder, then checked the mirror again. Much better. He darkened his eyebrows with a ballpoint pen, then extended his arms, smiling and bowing. “How do you do?” he said, and bowed. He tried it again. “How do you do?” Rifkin, behind his right shoulder, bared his teeth, disgusted. “You’re faking this, Mickelsson,” he said: “why?” Mickelsson drew out his pipe, stuck it jauntily in his mouth, pulled in his belly and threw out his chest and smiled as if for a snapshot. “Because I’m a coward,” he said. “Why do you think priests wear funny hats?”

Uncertainty flashed through him, but instantly he quashed it. His shoes were lumpy, farmerish, and he had no black shoepolish. But if he carried himself properly, who would notice?

He heard the pump switch on, down in the cellar, and thought of the furnace. He was almost out of wood for the stove, too. What if his son were frozen when he got back? Like a Congressman, an oil magnate, a blood-red UFO, an angel, he floated to the head of the stairs, tugged at his coat, then with ceremonial steps went down.

At the foot of the stairs the old man stood bent forward, clasping his hands, staring out through the glass in the door to the porch.

Mickelsson shook his head and waved both hands. “Go away, devil. How can I help you when I can’t help myself?”

The old man stared on, forlorn. Mickelsson went into the slain livingroom to get Jessie’s gloves in their box. Mark was still asleep, lying on his back now. His face was pale; the hair, carrot-red, fell around his features like a clown-wig. He stirred but did not waken when Mickelsson bent down and kissed his forehead.

In his study closet Mickelsson found an Irish fisherman’s cap with a feather in it, slightly mashed from careless storage, and at the coatrack in the hallway he drew on his black leather gloves and chose a cane, the silver-headed one. Then, with a nod to the figure at the sink—the old woman, heavy as a graveyard angel—he went out, softly floating, dismayed by the direction he must go to escape the fly-bottle.

The sky was full of stars. In the snow just short of the woods, six deer looked down at him. He saluted with his cane, like a general ordering the charge. All deer, bless their hearts, are virgins. He opened the Jeep door to put his cane in, slanting it along a fold in the thick black bear-rug where it would ride; then for a moment, eyes widened to miss nothing, he stood sniffing the breeze. It smelled sweet, and there was a rattling, roaring sound that he recognized after an instant as the waterfall. Thaw was upon them at last. Spring on its way. No applause! He raised both hands.

Carefully, trying not to damage his coat, Mickelsson climbed in, found his key—heaven was with him; it was the first his fingers touched—and switched on the ignition. The motor sputtered, coughed, then roared, jiggling the cab; the universal joint grumbled. No harm; happens on the best of planets. He pulled at his hatbrim and shoved in the clutch.

On the way to town he thought nothing, riding the world. He felt the old woman coming behind him, a blackness across the whole southern sky in the rear-view mirror.

To his surprise and horror, he found when he reached Jessie’s house that the place was all lit up; she was having a party. Darkness rose behind the house, as if he were still in the Endless Mountains. Though he stopped the Jeep at a little space of curb right in front of her house—a space he might have thought, in another mood, had been miraculously saved for him—it seemed to him clear that he’d be a fool to go in. What fantasies one worked up, out there in the country! While he’d indulged himself, holed up like a woodchuck, far from human intercourse and its sweet travail, her life—their lives—had gone on, here in town, inevitably drifting apart from his, as irrevocably distancing as the endless drift of galaxies, and now, now that Mickelsson had found his bearings, he must acknowledge the truth, that it had taken him too long. All right, he thought. He looked down at the grand red coat and the black leather gloves, the knightly