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

guess winter’s right around the corner.” The smell in the air had been the only evidence of it. Not a leaf had turned, and nights were often so warm he had to sleep with the windows open.

“Up there where you are,” Tim said, “they’ll be drifts ten foot deep, and that’s if the winter’s a light one!” He made it sound like praise, as if Mickelsson had done something masterful in choosing such a troublesome place to get to. “I hope you’ve gaht something to plow your driveway owt!”

Mickelsson had looked at him thoughtfully, half smiling because Tim was infectiously smiling; but he was feeling anxious. Heaven knew he couldn’t afford a truck and snowplow! What were they these days—five, six thousand dollars used? For a moment the very thought of having to lie to the bank for more money made it hard for him to breathe. (He thought of Finney, Rifkin, his wife and children. He, a man with his name in Who’s Who, walked around even now in shoes with holes in them; all his collars and cuffs were frayed. Sometimes students, usually young women, would point it out to him and laugh.) He said, though in fact the idea had only now occurred to him, “I’ve been thinking of trading the Chevy for a Jeep, if I can find one that’s not too expensive.” He glanced at Tim.

“Might be a good idea,” Tim said. “In fact I might know of one, if you’re interested.” He shook his head and laughed. “It’s naht much, but I’m pretty sure the feller’d sell ’er cheap. Fahrmer I know down in South Gibson, cousin of my wife’s. It’s only gaht forty thousand miles on it—but tell the truth they’re mostly in granny-gear, pulling loaded stone-boats over new-plowed ground.” He laughed again.

“You think it would run? I’d hate to lay out—”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure it would run OK. He’s taken pretty good care of it, if you don’t mind a wired-up tailgate and a couple of windows that won’t roll down. You know these fahrmers.” Again he laughed, clapping his hands as if he’d told an extremely funny joke. Though the laugh seemed as open and innocent as a boy’s, Mickelsson, still half smiling, eyed him narrowly.

After an instant Mickelsson asked, “You’re sure it’s not haunted or anything?”

Abruptly, each for his own reasons, both of them laughed, and Tim reached out to put his hand on Mickelsson’s upper arm, the gesture of an athlete, winner to loser. “Isn’t that something?” he said. “You hear the story about the feller who stayed there all night and it turned his hair white?”

“Not me,” Mickelsson said. “Nobody tells me anything.” But he felt good now, relieved and cleansed, the whole thing behind them.

And so he’d driven down, following Tim’s directions, to the farm outside South Gibson, where Tim’s wife’s cousin Charles Lepatofsky had the Jeep. Lepatofsky was a smiling, chatty man, fat and short, with oversized nose and hands, thick curly hair peeking out at his collar and matted on his arms, almost hiding his tattoos. He had his four- or five-year-old daughter with him, a silent, shyly smiling red-head, something wrong about her eyes—maybe just a dreamer. Lepatofsky automatically put her up on his shoulders, not asking if she wanted him to, hardly even glancing at the child in fact. Automatically she put her hands around his forehead, carefully not covering his eyes, and they started across the neatly mowed back yard toward the weeds beyond. Mickelsson walked with them through brittle, high grass and ragweed down a lane thick with raspberry and elderberry bushes, past a shaggy pony and two brown horses, part of an old tractor and an upside-down truck, up a hill to a sagging, paintless barn with its door wedged shut by a locust post. Without taking his daughter from his shoulders, the man tugged hard at the post, veins standing out on his forehead and wrists.

“Are you your daddy’s pal?” Mickelsson asked, holding one finger to the girl’s face, close to the chin. She did not look at him.

“Lily don’t talk much,” Lepatofsky said.

Now he had the brace-post unwedged. After Lepatofsky got the door open, Mickelsson cautiously stepped in and then stood—shocked, to say the least—simply looking.

“There she be,” Lepatofsky said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Mickelsson said, slowly nodding.

From the looks of it, the Jeep hadn’t been driven in years. It was moored by cobwebs heavy as ropes and weighed down by mounds of pigeon droppings, so mud-stained and weed-specked it looked as if it had been sunk in some marsh and, long afterward, salvaged. One back tire was flat, and one side panel had been banged in in three places, as if a crazed ram had come after it.

“Ain’t much, is it,” the man said, and smiled, then winked. “But you gotta admit the price is right.” He wore his sleeves rolled up, a crushed pack of cigarettes under one of them, on both arms large tattoos.

“You think it still runs?” Mickelsson asked. He couldn’t tell whether he was delighted by the thing or horrified. It would be a shocker, down on the university parking lot, if he could get it that far. (He imagined Jessica Stark or some handsome young-lady graduate student climbing into it, heading, in Mickelsson’s company, to some party.) On the other hand—perhaps because of its oversized tires, or because it stood all alone in the rotting, empty barn, wide bars of dusty light draped over it—it looked like the largest, most hard-worked, somehow most serious Jeep he’d ever seen. It was a 1973 Wagoneer, Lepatofsky told him. A snowplow came with it (he had it in the “grodge”) and it also came equipped—Lepatofsky said it as if he thought it very special—with a brand-new chrome-covered trailer hitch. “Tell you what we’ll do,” Lepatofsky said. “Lily and me will pump up the tire and we’ll drive you owt for a ride.” He winked at his daughter. For the first time, the little girl looked thoughtfully at