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

it before only because its darkness blended in with the black-brick darkness of the building. For an instant, desire leaped in him; but then he thought again of the probable gun, the probable genius of the fat hoarder’s paranoia. It was unlikely that she was there; maybe she’d gone on vacation with his seventy-five dollars. In any case, the chance that she might be there hiding all evening in her apartment with only one dim light on, was not quite worth his life.

He stayed motionless for what seemed to him another twenty minutes, then carefully made his way back to the edge of the roof and the fire escape leading down to the alley. The escape extension creaked loudly as it lowered him the final twelve feet. Was it possible that it had made this much noise before? “Ah, the mind, the mind!” he whispered. Dogs barked sharply, two or three of them, down by the garbage he must pass. He held the cane like a bat and moved confidently toward them. At the first fierce swipe—it fell harmlessly on the lead dog’s shoulder—the dogs fled, yipping in indignation.

Only when Mickelsson was seated in the Jeep, reaching for the emergency brake, preparing to drive home, did it occur to him that the man was, of course—or perhaps had once been, some years ago—a thief. Mickelsson was so frightened he could only sit trembling, so loose of muscle it was as if he’d turned to milk. But even as he sat helpless, sick with the knowledge that he could have been killed, a strange, evil dream came over him. He would watch for the man, and someday when he saw that he was out of his apartment—sitting on the watchers’ bench by the traffic light, perhaps (he had a feeling he’d seen him there)—Mickelsson would hurry up to his apartment window and break in, and his financial troubles would be over. Acid welled into Mickelsson’s throat and he fumbled through his pockets for a Di-Gel. He imagined himself going to the post office—as in fact he would do three days later, not quite intending to—and looking through the Wanted posters, hunting for the fat man’s face.

As he reached the edge of Susquehanna, the night became alarmingly dark. A suicidal deer leaped out in front of him, but Mickelsson, as if he had known it was coming, hit his brakes just in time and missed it. “Bastard,” he whispered, as if the deer were part of the conspiracy.

His mailbox showed up, stark in the flame of his headlights, and he remembered that he hadn’t looked into it in days. He pulled over, opened the metal door, and reached in. There was, as usual, a great pile in it, gray as conch. Bills. Envelopes from collection agencies. He dropped it angrily on the seat beside him and, a minute later, carried it into the kitchen with him, where he threw it on the stove top—the formica counter was crammed with earlier mail and wallpaper rolls—intending not to look at it. But something made him stop and finger through it. There was a small pink envelope with flowers on the back, on the return-address corner one word: Matthews. He tore it open.

Dear “Professor”:

Your fucking check bounced. (Excuse the pun.)

I guess you think that’s pretty funny!!

My Frends will be in touch with you.

D.

He went to the telephone book and found her name. He let the phone ring fourteen times before he quit.

He wrote:

Dear “D”:

I will give you not only seventy-five dollars but my very life. I am deeply and profoundly in love with you.

I told you I have terrible financial troubles, but I have means of dealing with them. Believe me, my love, my precious darling, I will make you happy!

Adoringly,    M.

He tore it up. Never before, except when drunk, had he behaved so stupidly. He wrote a long letter to his ex-wife, then tore it up.

He painted all the next day (a teaching day; he called in sick) and most of the night in the upstairs bedrooms, white on the walls, battleship-gray on the wide-boarded, uneven floors. His muscles ached fiercely, especially his back, forearms, and wrists, but the pain pleased him. He’d never known anyone who could put in longer, harder hours than he could, once he put his mind to it. It was perhaps not much to be proud of, but it was something. His heart tugged. (Whatever does not destroy me makes me stronger.) From time to time, struggling not to think about Donnie, or the thief, or the I.R.S., or his children, he brooded on Finney’s complaint, the one solid thought his mind could get hold of. The portable radio chattered and sang like one of Luther’s small devils in the corner; he listened only when talk of the so-called Presidential race came on.

It was true, of course, that he was a foolish dreamer, as Finney maintained; that something, somewhere, had gone wrong with his fix on reality. He was offering, in his proposed settlement, more than he could honestly expect to earn, never mind the debts or his own new expenses, which he recklessly increased from day to day.

Whether it was a common complaint or unusual he was unable to make out, but something in Finney’s anger made him see that the so-called episodes—to say nothing of the present absurdity of his life—were the least of it. It was clearly true that the world was, at least in very large part, pigshit, Porphyry’s rancid honey. He’d plodded through it, mired to the knees, year on year; yet he’d stubbornly refused to believe it.

He felt something beckoning at the back of his mind. He was rolling shining white paint onto the frames of the old louvred doors in the master bedroom, the whole room around him as white as snow, all except the stark, black windowpanes looking out on what might have been deep space or the center of the earth. It was perhaps the thought of Finney—all those jokes about