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

While Mickelsson waited, his hand on his pipe, moving slowly around the Jeep, studying the rust and the blistered whitish-yellow paint, the plastic, red-haired troll-doll hanging from the rear-view, mirror (the Jeep also had side mirrors, one of them broken), Lepatofsky, with the child still on his shoulders, went back to the house for an old tire-pump. It took him half an hour, sweating like a horse, the girl pressing her palms against her knees beside him, to get the tire up high enough to run on. At last, leaning the pump in the doorway and taking his daughter’s hand, he said, “OK, hop in!” When he’d gotten into the driver’s seat and settled Lily in his lap, he looked over at Mickelsson, waiting. Mickelsson looked at the dirt on his own seat, a quarter-inch thick, thought of wiping it off with his handkerchief, then sighed, grimaced, and, taking the pipe from his mouth for a moment, climbed in. Perhaps for Mickelsson’s benefit, Lily reached up and tapped the troll-doll, making it swing. She smiled to herself.

The motor roared to life at the second turn of the ignition key—it had been driven more recently than Mickelsson had thought, apparently—and Lepatofsky, twisting around to look out the back window, backed the Jeep, coughing and bucking, out of the barn. “It needs to warm up,” he said, and winked. The engine did settle down, after a minute, though not to the point of hitting on all of its cylinders. He drove straight down to a shallow, reedy swamp, shifted to low-low and four-wheel drive, and started through it. Water oozed up onto Mickelsson’s shoes, making him lift his feet and glance at Lepatofsky. The daughter smiled. Mickelsson sat rigid and unbalanced, hanging on with both hands, feeling slightly injured by the child’s amusement and thinking how it would feel to have to walk, with the child smiling at him from Lepatofsky’s shoulders, through all that muck to dry land. Just outside his window a ratlike thing—a muskrat or small beaver—paddled away in alarm, its eyes rolled back.

To Mickelsson’s amazement, the Jeep inched on through the water and reeds and at last climbed to solid ground. Lepatofsky shifted out of low-low and grinned.

“Jesus,” Mickelsson said, and slowly lowered his feet.

“You telling me,” Lepatofsky said, and laughed with relief, winking at his daughter. The whole side of his face moved, as if the wink were a tic.

For all his talk about the price being right, he hadn’t yet mentioned one. Now, when Mickelsson asked him about it, he said, “Seven hundred, firm.”

“I see,” Mickelsson said. Then, after a moment, “That’s fair, I guess.” He studied his pipe. “I’d been thinking of trying a used-car lot, maybe, where I could trade in the Chevy. …”

“That’s up to you, a course,” Lepatofsky said. “I can tell you right now you won’t get a Jeep like this at a used-car lot, with a snowplow and everything. Not for seven hundred. If I was you I’d just keep that Chevy for a spare. The plow alone’s worth seven hundred.”

He gave that same argument again and again, mostly in the very same words, as they drove around. They rode up a logging trail, up and down steep banks, once up and over a partly fallen stone wall. “It’s built high,” Lepatofsky said. “You won’t get hung up, that’s one thing.” To Mickelsson’s slight annoyance later, they didn’t think to try it on the road. Lily reached up, from time to time, to reposition the troll-doll.

“OK,” Mickelsson said at last, his heart anxious but his expression grim, “I’ll take it.”

Slowly, dreamily, not making a sound, the child clapped her hands.

The first time Mickelsson drove the Jeep, after it was his own, two tires blew out and he discovered that, though it was terrific at negotiating swamps and stone walls, it had a maximum road-speed of sixty miles an hour downhill. According to his careful, neat figures, it got nine miles to the gallon. (Fear leaped up in him. He would be ruined!) Nevertheless, he retired the Chevy to his own empty barn—not as empty as Lepatofsky’s; there were dried-out, twenty-year-old bales of hay, coils of rope, lengths of pipe and scattered, rusted farm-machinery parts—and, partly for style’s sake, partly to get the old vehicle in condition for the difficult haul when snowtime came, Mickelsson cleaned up the Jeep and made it his regular means of transportation back and forth from school. “Hey, wow!” students would say when he pulled into his parking slot, and sometimes they’d come over to look at it. Witlessly, shyly, the red-haired troll-doll, still swinging on its short, rusty chain, would grin. He must remember to take that doll back to Lepatofsky’s daughter, he reminded himself now and again. But he kept forgetting.

The university was thirty-five miles—more than an hour’s drive—from the house on the mountain. He liked that, the distance between his two worlds. He could clear out his head, driving to school in the beat-up Jeep. (He’d left the Peugeot in Providence with his wife.) It was late September, no sign yet that the leaves would soon be turning, but when he set out, mornings, the house and mountain would be surrounded by fog, so that he had to poke slowly, carefully down into the valley, across the iron bridge, and up to the highway heading north out of the mountains into New York State. Sitting high above ordinary drivers, fists closed tight on the steeringwheel, shoulders thrown back and chin thrown forward, like a king fallen on hard times, he could think at leisure about his classes and appointments, remind himself of letters he had to write (he was badly behind, the desk at his office deeply buried), and make mental lists of books he must pick up at the library. He’d thought from time to time of installing an FM radio in the Jeep, but so far he hadn’t done so, and it seemed to him increasingly unlikely that he would.