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

“I’m sure,” Mickelsson said. The man who’d just left them stood grinning, jabbing his long, thick finger into a black man’s chest. Apparently he and the black man were friends.

Jessica said, “Come, meet the Bryants. You’ll like them.”

Mickelsson had liked them a good deal, perhaps simply because Jessica liked them, or perhaps because that night Phil Bryant, in his melodious, down-cellar voice, had chosen to argue with Geoffrey Tillson about whales; and for all his scorn of Tillson, Mickelsson had liked Jessica Stark even more than before for the way she’d tried to help poor Tillson save face.

“But heck,” Tillson said, his smile wildly twitching, “how can anyone come out against women’s perfume? Never mind protein for the Japanese people—” He twisted his silver-bearded head toward Mickelsson and winked, then quickly, when Mickelsson gave him no response, poked his face back into Bryant’s. When Tillson shook his finger, the cloth of his suitcoat pulled against the hump on his back as if the hump were stone. “Sentimentality will be the ruin of our civilization,” he said, grinning crazily, as if afraid to let anyone know he really meant it, though his voice insisted. “You weep over the whales—big, intelligent mammals. Who weeps for the thousands and thousands of cows out there dying in Wyoming and Oklahoma to make Burger King Whoppers? Granted, steers may be comparatively stupid—but down with intellectual snobbery! They’re feeling creatures! Did you ever watch a cow with her calf?”

“It’s true, Peter,” Jessica said, seeing Mickelsson’s look.

Ruth, Tillson’s wife, cried out sharply, “We’re vegetarians, you know.” Only when she spoke did Mickelsson notice that she was present—round-backed, big-bosomed, arrow-faced. Her shiny eyes seemed all anguish.

“Then you shouldn’t approve of eating whales,” Phil Bryant said reasonably. He stood comfortably erect, like the former army captain he was, and he smiled as if he took them all for fellow officers.

“We don’t! Do we, Geoffrey?”

“But perfume! That’s the issue!” Tillson raved.

“Oh, come on, Geoffrey,” Jessica said, and laughed. Light seemed to gather around her.

Mickelsson backed off, briefly catching Phil Bryant’s eye, then winking at Jessica as he turned to find other conversation.

“He’s not a bit crazy,” she’d said later. “He’s self-conscious, so he puts on a show. I imagine we all sound fiercer than we are, at times.” She gave him a sidelong glance.

Poor woman, Mickelsson thought now, almost prayerful. Fall coolness had come to the mountain, and he was down on one knee, putting a log in the livingroom stove. He would sleep on the livingroom couch again tonight, the bedrooms upstairs newly painted or in disorder, stripped down and waiting for his brush.

God grant her someone worthy of her beauty, he thought. Someone full of energy in bed, someone like his own …

Everybody’s own, he corrected himself, and reached into his right-side pocket for a Di-Gel.

He put away the poker, closed the door of the stove, crossed to switch off the livingroom light, the last still burning, then stood a moment thinking, unconsciously rubbing his sore shoulders and arms. Now the sky was beginning to gray. If it weren’t for the mountains, he might already be looking at sunrise. How peaceful it was, he thought, then realized he was mistaken. The house was full of noises and unnamable trouble. A wind had come up, a wash of sound just wintry enough to make things whisper and creak, much like voices. Something alive and almost certainly large ran startled through the cellar, knocking something from its place, a dull clunk, then fleeing. Then, somewhere across the valley or maybe up on the mountain behind the house, he heard gunshots, two in quick succession, then a third. He had a feeling there had been other gunshots earlier. He listened hard, almost not breathing, but except for the sounds of the house stirring, he heard nothing more.

He got a crystal-clear mental image of the fire escape leading to the girl’s window.

He went over to the couch, lay down and pulled the afghan over him. When he was almost asleep, free-falling through space, hearing faraway angry shouts, he was jerked back to wakefulness by a roar of motorcycles on the road out front, or maybe in the rough field beyond—four or five of them, from the sound of it, crackling and whining like chain-saws digging in. Kids, he thought, annoyed as an old man. Of their own accord, his fists clenched and his back bent painfully. Rattlesnakes, housebreakers, animals in the cellar, big-chested big-cocked devils on dirt bikes …

He closed his eyes, praying that he be spared bad dreams.

PART TWO

1

“But isn’t it true,” Blassenheim said, his hand still in the air, lest anyone get the idea of interrupting him, “that Aristotle’s just as much a fascist as Plato was, it’s just their manners are different?” Michael Nugent slid his eyes toward the ceiling in despair. Blassenheim continued, registering Nugent’s comment but not persuaded that he’d made any mistake, “Like in Nicomachean Ethics, where he tells us that ‘courage’ is the mean between ‘foolhardiness’ and ‘cowardice,’ what’s his authority but his own aristocratic style—I mean, button-down collars, like ‘Let’s not make a scene, my dear fellow’—shit like that. I mean, what he’s always saying is ‘Be reasonable.’ Just like my mother.” The class laughed, all but Nugent, who dramatically clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes shut. Blassenheim looked around, pleased (on the whole), moving just his eyes, and remembered to lower his hand, then hurried on. “How do we know it’s correct to be reasonable except that Aristotle says so? Look at the berserkers—you know, those Viking guys. They took this drug or something and when they went into battle they were crazy people, and maybe they’d get killed—lot of times they didn’t, people were too scared—but either way the Vikings trashed all Europe. Or look at those guys in Vietnam that would throw themselves on a grenade to save their buddies—that wasn’t reasonable, or even if it was, it