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

board creaked, to the closet in the study, where he groped in the darkness until his hand found the silver-headed cane. Then, with the cane gripped like a bat, he switched on the study lights.

It was like a scene from some junky movie: books torn from the shelves, papers and manila folders everywhere. He could hardly believe he hadn’t sensed the condition of the room as he crept in; but of course that was not what he’d been watching for: every sense had been tuned for one thing, the dangerous intruder. He began to breathe normally—somehow he knew, the minute he saw the mess, that whoever had come was now gone.

And of course he was right. They’d looked for whatever they were looking for behind the couch cushions, in the bedrooms, everywhere. He touched nothing, intending to call the police—merely stood looking at the jumble, room after room. Then, with the telephone receiver in his hand, he began to think clearly. The police would know—like everyone else in Susquehanna, no doubt—where he’d been, and why his visitors had felt free to take their time. He saw again the crowded bar—men, women, and children, even dogs and, no doubt, cats, though he’d seen none. Nowhere in town could he have stood out more plainly, except possibly in one of the churches. The realization was comforting, in a way: it was not necessary to believe that Tim or Donnie had purposely set him up. Someone had seen what was happening at Tim’s table, had seen the professor go out onto the street with Donnie. …

He hung up the receiver, frowning, the call unmade, and began a more systematic, more intelligent search of the house. Nothing was missing—not his typewriter, not the stereo—nothing, so far at least, but three cartons of Merit cigarettes and all his pipe tobacco.

“Kids!” he said aloud, and almost laughed. He knew, suddenly—or so he imagined—what they’d been looking for. He was a professor, one of those strange outsiders you read about. They’d been looking for dope! Now he did laugh, self-consciously, oddly like an actor—so he thought even as the laugh poured out. He thought of their mad dream as they tore books from his shelves, their hope that one of the books would prove hollow, full of Quaaludes, or coke, or marijuana. On impulse he went to check the refrigerator. Sure enough, all his beer was gone. He went to the livingroom and opened the closet, below the stereo, where he kept his whiskey. Wiped out.

“Paltry!” he said aloud, raising his right fist at the lighted windows onto the porch.

All his body was charged with imperatorial scorn (the light in the sky was reddish yellow now, and the roar of the waterfall across the road was like a rumble in his brain), but, for all the acting, a part of him drew back. He remembered faintly, not in words, something odd about the bathroom, where he’d gone earlier to relieve himself. Now, in front of the toilet, bending close to the bowl, not quite sure what he was after, he got a scent of alcohol. The kitchen sink smelled the same, but more noticeably of beer. He went out, on a wordless hunch, to check the garbage cans. Nothing; but the hunch was stronger in him now. He walked to the cluttered, overgrown ditch behind the barn across the road. He stood with his head bowed, hands behind his back, looking down at new bottles glinting in the red morning sun. He made no careful count, but he was sure. They were here, all those bottles that had been stolen from him. He moved down, as if someone had suggested it to him, toward the burdock patch between the barn and the pond and waterfall, and began to bend down the burdock stalks with his right foot. Within fifteen minutes he’d found the three cartons of Merits.

There were more things to think about than he could possibly deal with, tired as he was. Someone had torn his house apart and had tried to make it look like the work of kids. He began to feel uneasy again about Tim and Donnie.

The worst part was humdrum. He needed a drink, and they’d poured out all he had.

He walked back up to the house, the world around him like a blurry old movie. He remembered mornings in Heidelberg. Drunk and hungering for a drink at 6 a.m. The grass gave gently under his feet as he crossed the yard. Birds warbled fiercely all around him.

There was no reason to think they’d had anything to do with it, Tim and Donnie. The bar had been packed. Who could know what crazies had been watching him through the gloom? Yet it was true that if he were a native here he might know. They all might know. He thought again of calling the police.

He was still thinking of calling the police when he lay down on the couch in the livingroom for a moment to think, maybe grant himself a few minutes’ sleep. When he awakened—from a series of dreams about Donnie—it was late afternoon.

9

“Hi, Pete! Finney here!” The line sputtered and crackled in protest. In his mind Mickelsson saw the bloated, lead-gray face, here and there suffused with a dark red blush, and the gray, swollen paw, also blush-splotched, with rings on the fingers and tiny curling hairs, the hand fatly clamped as if for dear life around the shiny black receiver.

“Hello, Finney.”

“Listen, we’ve talked with the lawyers of the lady—ehhh, thank you, Shirley, no, I’ll get back to him—we’ve talked with the lawyers of the lady, nothing fancy, just boilerplate, and I figured I better touch base with you, sort of see if you still got your socks on.”

Mickelsson waited. He was in the middle of the third page of the blockbuster book he was determined to write. The study around him was only partly straightened up. He had no time for fooling with housecleaning: his mind was wheeling,