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

will be fine,” Mickelsson said. He thought suddenly, with terrible lust, of Donnie. He glanced at his watch. With his fork poised to plunge into the mashed potatoes, he said, glancing over at Snyder, “You don’t mind?”

“Eat, for heaven’s sakes,” Snyder said. “I’d join you, but since I’ve arranged with my friends—”

Mickelsson ate. After a minute he abruptly put down his fork and asked, “Do you have many thefts here in Susquehanna?”

“Never,” Snyder said. “Literally. Drive up and down your road, you’ll see signs on farmers’ stands telling you how much pumpkins cost, or squash, whatever, and nobody there, just a basket full of money. Nobody steals a nickel. It’s a funny thing, in fact. Tourists come through, from New Jersey and so on. They don’t even steal. Why do you ask?”

Mickelsson cut into his roast beef. After a moment he said, “Somebody broke into my house.”

“You’re kidding!”

Mickelsson shook his head.

“Did you call the police?”

“Well, no—” He shrugged.

Somehow it seemed to him that Snyder knew the whole story, or at least understood why he’d chosen not to call the police.

But Snyder chose to feign innocent indignation, or at any rate so it seemed, at first, to Mickelsson. “You should have called them! How come you didn’t? What did they get away with?” He was angry, his eyes hard-looking, more slanted.

“Nothing, really,” Mickelsson said. “They pretended to steal my liquor and tobacco, but actually they didn’t.” He explained the details—the smell of liquor in the sink and toilet bowl, the bottles in the ditch behind the barn, the cartons of cigarettes in the weeds down by the pond. He’d never found the pipe tobacco.

Charley Snyder studied him as if he couldn’t believe that Mickelsson was telling the truth. The waitress arrived with the salad. Neither of them looked up at her. At last Snyder said, “I’d certainly call the police if I were you. Doesn’t sound healthy at all.”

“Why would they do it, though?” Mickelsson asked. “And who would do it?”

Snyder got out a cigarette, paying such close attention to tamping it and lighting it that there could be no doubt that he was baffled.

“Are you a Mormon?” he suddenly asked.

“No.” He remembered his food and began to eat again.

“Ever write about the Mormons?”

“Never.”

Snyder sucked deeply at his cigarette. Nervously, Mickelsson got out a cigarette of his own. “I don’t say they’re behind it,” Snyder said; “I don’t say anything. For all I know, what you smelled might just be some kind of chemicals. We’ll get that, now and then. But say it was your whiskey. If you or I were to work over a house—looking for something, or whatever we might be doing—and try to lay the blame on kids, by stealing all the liquor and tobacco …”

“We wouldn’t throw them away,” Mickelsson suggested. “Whereas the Mormons—”

“That’s it,” Snyder said. He frowned at some new thought. “On the other hand, if somebody wanted to lay blame on the Mormons—”

“It was pure luck that I found the cigarettes and bottles,” Mickelsson said.

“Maybe,” Snyder said. To Mickelsson, the man looked shifty all at once. He dragged on the cigarette, then quickly blew out smoke. He said, “There’s an alternative theory. It really was kids, and after they’d drunk up a certain amount they got panicky and threw away the rest and hid the bottles.”

“And the cigarettes?”

“Maybe they were afraid to take them home—thought they could hide them and come back and smoke them when it was safe.”

“Maybe,” Mickelsson said.

“Why not?”

“That’s true. Why not?”

“It’s easy to hate the Mormons,” Snyder said. “They’ve got a strange idea of history. Nothing’s more offensive to the ordinary mind.”

“Maybe,” Mickelsson said, half smiling at the odd idea.

“Well, anyway—” Snyder said, and hastily scraped ashes off his cigarette.

The front door opened and several people came in, well-dressed, like Charley Snyder, though none of them quite up to his style. A chinless, otherwise quite pretty woman was the apparent leader. She looked around the room, head lifted, dark coppery hair grandly falling. When she saw Charley Snyder she pointed at him, turning to speak to the others. The whole group floated, smiling, toward the table where Mickelsson and Snyder sat. They might have been schoolteachers on a visit to New York City, or Presbyterian elders coming in for tea after a meeting. Mickelsson went on poking in his food.

“Ah, here are my friends,” Snyder said to Mickelsson, at the same time raising his hand as if imagining they hadn’t yet seen him.

“Oh?” Mickelsson said.

“As I mentioned,” Snyder said, “a lot of Susquehanna is solid middle-class. These people you’ve been getting stories from …” He grinned, then drew the ashtray toward him and meticulously crushed out his cigarette. Then he rose from his seat, moving back the chair with his left hand, and, taking a step toward her, kissed the chinless lady on the cheek. They talked and laughed, the whole crowd of them—six or seven—soon becoming part of it. Tall, distinguished bright-eyed birds with glossy feathers. Mickelsson concentrated on eating, giving them a chance to move on to a table of their own. He was still a little sullen from the two big martinis, and for other reasons too he was hoping he wouldn’t get trapped here. But inevitably Charley Snyder made introductions. Mickelsson rose, with his mouth full, his left hand patting his mouth with his red paper napkin while his right reached out to shake hands with one, then another and another. He did not listen to the names.

A man with a long nose, a black moustache, and a sunken mouth said, “Peter Mickelsson. I heard you’d moved here. Aren’t you the one that wrote—”

Mickelsson endured it all nobly. He adjusted once again his idea of Susquehanna. They were as clever and lively as middle-class people anywhere—teachers, owners of small businesses, dentists. … They were moderate of voice, earnest; one could imagine them at meetings of concerned citizens. They were meeting tonight, it seemed, to discuss once more the long-stymied possible renovation of the decayed stone depot